STATEMENT BY
DR. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
BEFORE THE
HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ON OPERATION IRAQI
FREEDOM:
A FIRST BLUSH ASSESSMENT
OCTOBER 21, 2003
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it
is a great honor to have the opportunity to
appear before you today to assess the war to
topple Saddam Hussein and the lessons that
can be derived from the recent conflict for
future strategic planning, transformation
and force structure.
These prepared remarks offer a first-blush
assessment of the coalition campaign against
Saddam Hussein's regime that began on March
19, 2003, and was declared completed by
President George W. Bush on May 1, 2003.
Given the lack of comprehensive data on
coalition operations and the tentative
nature of much of the data thus far made
public, many of the "lessons" or
implications that follow must be regarded as
preliminary. I cannot emphasize enough how
important a thorough independent assessment
of the conflict is, similar to the Gulf War
Air Power Survey commissioned by the US Air
Force after Operation Desert Storm.
Moreover, any assessment of Operation Iraqi
Freedom should focus on how the experience
of this war will influence future military
competitions. The following are among the
war's potential implications for US military
planners:
Strategic Implications
The United States Is in the Regime-Change
Business
If there ever was any doubt that the United
States is in the regime-change business, the
Second Gulf War should dispel it. Since the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States
has, directly or indirectly, deposed the
regime of a foreign state roughly once every
three years. But those who practice regime
change incur certain responsibilities as
well as moral and political consequences.
The United States must stabilize Iraq, lest
it incur a significant setback in its
efforts to make progress in the war against
hostile Islamic regimes and radical Islamic
terrorist movements. Success, however, will
likely involve a protracted occupation of
Islamic states (i.e., Afghanistan and Iraq)
and exact substantial human and material
costs. This means the US military's
preference to do what it does best-defeat
enemy forces in the field and then quickly
depart-must be overcome. The practice of
crafting quick exit strategies must yield to
a willingness to develop a comprehensive
strategy for winning both the war and the
postconflict period that follows. In short,
the American military-the Army, in
particular-must create a significant
capability for conducting stability
operations.
Divergence, Not Convergence
Although it comes as no surprise to most
military observers, Operation Iraqi Freedom
again demonstrated the wide-and
expanding-gap between the US and all the
world's other militaries in conventional
operations. The implications for those who
consider themselves actual or potential
enemies of the United States are clear: they
must avoid taking on the American military
in conventional war. Rather, they must move
to the extremes along the spectrum of
conflict. For rogue states such as Iran and
North Korea, this means acquiring nuclear
weapons or pursuing more ambiguous forms of
aggression through support of terrorist
organizations. A third option is to develop
anti-access and area-denial capabilities.
The Anti-Access Challenge Is Real and
Growing
Operation Iraqi Freedom provided a clear
lesson for what has been a growing trend:
denying
US
access to overseas bases. Moreover, the Bush
Administration's increased emphasis on
preventive strike and preventive war could
make it even more difficult to secure
forward base access. Foreign governments
would be more likely to grant access in
response to an act of aggression than when
the United States is contemplating
initiating military operations. This fact
highlights the need for the United States to
develop and field military forces capable of
conducting large-scale power-projection
operations independent of access to forward
bases.
Precision Warfare Comes of Age
The Second Gulf War found coalition forces
in the position of trying to protect the
people of
Iraq
and the nation's infrastructure from the
regime in
Baghdad.
In recent years the United States has waged
war against regimes, not nations.
Consequently, the US military had the
mission of defeating the enemy regime
without alienating the population, so as to
facilitate postwar reconstruction and
stability operations. Key to achieving this
objective was limiting noncombatant
casualties and damage to the target state's
infrastructure. To do this, the US-led
coalition had to strike with discrimination
and move with great speed. Advanced
intelligence, reconnaissance and
surveillance capabilities proved critical to
identifying military targets. The widespread
use of precision guided munitions (PGMs)
enabled discriminate strikes, minimizing the
loss of noncombatant lives and sparing much
of Iraq's economic infrastructure.
Compressing the Engagement Cycle
Time is becoming an increasingly precious
asset on the modern battlefield. To offset
the remarkable accuracy of PGMs, adversaries
can become mobile, compressing the time US
forces have between identifying and striking
a target. The US military's ability to
compress the engagement cycle during
Operation Iraqi Freedom represents an
important step forward in the transition to
a new age of precision warfare.
Precision Strike
The Second Gulf War witnessed the widespread
use of precision bombardment on an
unsurpassed scale and intensity. Of great
importance was the fact that these munitions
enabled the US military to wage a campaign
that was both ferocious and discriminate.
Joint
Integration
The close integration of precision air
strikes and ground combat operations-known
in military parlance as "joint"
operations-proved essential to another
critical element of the campaign: the need
for ground forces to move quickly to seize
Iraq before Saddam could destroy it. Air and
ground forces, which had fought essentially
separate wars in Operation Desert Storm in
1991, were integrated to a higher degree
than ever before.
Friendly
Fire
The maturing of precision warfare may reduce
substantially the percentage of casualties
inflicted by friendly forces upon one
another. Preliminary data show that US
forces made progress in the ability to
minimize mistakenly attacking each other, a
phenomenon known as "friendly fire" or
"blue-on-blue" engagements. During Operation
Desert Storm, 25.6 percent of those killed
in action died as a result of blue-on-blue
engagements, versus only 6.5 percent during
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The Battle over the Lessons of Iraq
The battle for
Iraq
is over. The battle among the Services for
pride of place and budget share has begun.
This report offers some preliminary
observations on these issues.
Persistent Surveillance: UAVs and SOF
The
US
military's unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
continued to grow in importance, and their
role seems certain to expand in the future.
However, if and when enemy air defense
systems become more formidable and the
anti-access threat matures, the US military
will likely require a significant number of
stealthy, extended-range UAVs to maintain
the kind of persistent surveillance it found
so valuable in Operation Iraqi Freedom. On
the basis of early reports, it appears that
special operations forces (SOF) played an
important role in enabling the persistent
surveillance that made it so difficult for
Iraqi forces to move without being detected
and engaged. The role of SOF may increase if
the anti-access/area-denial threat precludes
the rapid movement of ground forces into a
threatened region.
Bombers
Bombers have performed impressively in all
major recent US military operations, and the
Second Gulf War proved no exception.
Operation Iraqi Freedom saw bombers
accounting for less than 3 percent of the
strike sorties, but dropping approximately
28 percent of all munitions. The Air Force
was able to orbit bombers overhead to
provide on-call precision firepower.
Operating this way assumes an environment in
which enemy air defenses have been
neutralized. While this proved to be the
case in
Afghanistan
and Iraq, it may not always hold true. As
the anti-access threat grows, the need for
extended-range, stealthy strike platforms-be
they bombers or Unmanned Combat Aerial
Vehicles (UCAVs) -seems certain to increase.
Tankers
Just as the difficulties in securing forward
base access increased the US military's
reliance on bombers, the need to operate
short-range tactical aircraft at more
distant bases increased the need for tanker
aircraft to extend their range. The
tanker-to-total-sortie ratio in the Second
Gulf War was double that of Operation Desert
Storm. The Air Force's tanker fleet,
however, is showing its age. Clearly, the
tanker fleet must be modernized. The
argument is only made stronger by the Air
Force's expanding emphasis on short-range
strike aircraft. Yet tanker modernization
has not achieved the necessary priority in
the Service's budget.
Ground Forces: Conventional and Stability
Operations
Operation Iraqi Freedom was undertaken with
just one heavy Army division, and it is
difficult to imagine what prospective
adversary would seek to challenge US
supremacy in armored warfare. One clear
lesson that has emerged from the coalition
operation in Iraq is that stability
operations are likely to prove more
challenging for the US military than the war
itself. Given the number and scale of
stability operations in which the Army is
involved, the protracted nature of these
operations, and the Service's other
commitments, the support of allied forces
will likely prove more crucial in this
decade than in the last.
Tactical Aircraft
The maturation of the US military's
precision strike capabilities threatens to
make tactical strike aircraft a victim of
their own success. Over the past twelve
years, the US military's aggressive fielding
of PGMs, and the modification of nearly
every strike aircraft to employ them, have
greatly enhanced the strike force's
effectiveness. Thus, while Operation Desert
Storm employed some 1,600 American tactical
strike aircraft, Operation Iraqi Freedom
required less than half that number. The
reduced reliance on tactical aircraft can
also be attributed to the difficulty in
obtaining access to forward air bases. Yet
more than 2,000 new tactical strike aircraft
are scheduled to be procured, with the
overwhelming majority requiring fixed,
forward-base access.
Meeting Tomorrow's Challenges
Familiar Threats
Genuine transformation of militaries
transcends merely becoming more effective in
the existing warfare regime; rather, it
entails progress toward competing
effectively in an emerging warfare regime
that promises to be quite different from
previous experience. Yet the remarkable
US-led coalition campaign in the Second Gulf
War was essentially waged against an Iraqi
force whose composition would have been
familiar to the German Army that introduced
blitzkrieg to the world more than sixty
years ago. Indeed, the Iraqi military might
not have been a match for the Wehrmacht
circa 1940, let alone the American military
of 2003.
Emerging Challenges
A measure of just how far the US military
has yet to go in terms of transforming to
meet emerging threats can be seen in the
changing face of conflict. The proliferation
of ballistic and cruise missile technology
will eventually enable even small states to
hold at risk the forward air bases and the
major ports used to resupply US troops. US
power-projection forces increasingly run the
risk of confronting adversaries with
land-based military forces such as missiles
and aircraft and coastal forces such as
advanced antiship mines, submarines and
small combatants (perhaps masquerading as
commercial vessels) equipped with very
lethal high-speed antiship cruise missiles.
Americans are all too aware of the threat of
catastrophic terrorism to the homeland.
Access to space is becoming ubiquitous. How
will the US military deny an enemy access to
space capabilities in the event of crisis or
conflict? Nuclear weapons are proliferating.
How might a collapsing state's weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) be secured before it
falls into the wrong hands? The United
States has the world's most advanced
information infrastructure and, by some
accounts, apparently one of the most
vulnerable. How will it be defended?
Operation Iraqi Freedom offers few clues as
to how to prepare for these emerging
challenges.
Recent conflicts like the Second Gulf War
offer some tantalizing hints about where the
US
military could be headed along its
transformation path. Yet the war in
Iraq
appears more reflective of old threats than
new challenges. Remarkable as the recent
developments in US military capabilities
have been, they do not suffice to dominate
the very different kinds of threats that are
emerging. Despite its recent successes, the
Pentagon's motto must be, "You ain't seen
nothing yet."
Thank you for your attention. I welcome the
opportunity to answer any questions you may
have.
