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PRINCE SULTAN AIR BASE, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 16 — An F-15C fighter rips the bone-dry air as it roars down the runway, heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles pointing from its wingtips.

A SUCCESSION of American technological wizardry quickly follows: an RC-135 “Rivet Joint” reconnaissance plane, for intercepting enemy communications; EA-6B jets, for jamming enemy radars and radios; F-16CJs, which specialize in destroying enemy antiaircraft installations, and, finally, a big tanker aircraft that refuels the “package” of aircraft in midair.

Here on the fringe of the Arabian Desert’s forbidding Empty Quarter, this aerial armada, mobilized to patrol the skies of southern Iraq, is emblematic of the U.S. military — which now stands astride the globe more dominant than any armed force since the legions of the Roman Empire.

Four times over the past 12 years — in Iraq, in Haiti, in Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan — U.S. forces have dispatched enemy forces in a matter of weeks. Today, on the eve of a possible new war against Iraq, those forces are exponentially more lethal, and their commanders, who have known little but victory over their careers, are confident almost to the point of cockiness.

‘GLOBAL REACH, GLOBAL POWER’

“At no time in the history of modern warfare has a force been as well-trained, well-equipped and highly motivated as our Air Force is today,” Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, said last month. Indeed, one of the Air Force’s slogans is “Global Reach, Global Power.”

That reach, say military commanders and other experts, may also prove to be an Achilles’ heel: The more capable the U.S. military has become, the more it has been asked to do, and now strains are beginning to show. As the Bush administration prepares for war with Iraq, it is also sustaining peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, protecting South Korea from a newly aggressive North Korea and pursuing a war against terrorism that stretches from Afghanistan and the Caucasus to the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.

This is a period characterized by what seems like continuous warfare, likened by military analyst Ralph Peters to the Thirty Years War that decimated Western Europe in the 17th century, and the effects are beginning to tell on the military’s manpower, on its budget, on the nation’s treasury, and on a conflict of priorities — between the need to fight today’s wars and the pursuit of means to dominate tomorrow’s.

These tensions are partly the legacy of the nation’s response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but they will not dissipate any time soon: They are implicit in the administration’s new national security strategy. That 33-page document, issued in September, commits the nation both to maintaining U.S. military hegemony and to attacking rogue or terrorist states before they can threaten the United States.

If the United States does attack Iraq, it would be the first preemptive strike this nation has ever launched.

"My airframes are cracking. We are doing too much with what we’ve got."
— LT. COL. MATT MOLLOY
F-15 squadron commander

Here at Prince Sultan Air Base, the headquarters of U.S. air operations in the Middle East, there are two different — but not mutually exclusive — points of view on the state of the U.S. military.

One warm winter afternoon, Brig. Gen. Dale C. Waters, commander of Air Force operations here, drove his big GMC Yukon SUV past F-15 and F-16 fighter jets lined up on the tarmac and said, “Yeah, I’d say there’s a high level of confidence.”

Back at Air Force headquarters on the base, Lt. Col. Matt Molloy, an animated young F-15 squadron commander, noted that his men and women flew out of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Iceland and the United States — nine countries — last year alone.“We need to put this thing to the north to rest,” he said, pointing in the direction of Iraq. “My airframes are cracking. We are doing too much with what we’ve got. A tour of the military, from the sands of Saudi Arabia to the waters of the Mediterranean, and from the halls of Congress to the think tanks of national security strategists and academics, shows the sources and extent of U.S. military might — and the limitations on it.

‘WE’RE DIGITAL NOW’

The USS Harry S. Truman, cutting a wide swath through the eastern Mediterranean, is a 97,000-ton, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier whose deck is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. But to get an idea of how far the U.S. military has come since the Persian Gulf War, follow Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem into the ship’s cavelike Strike Intelligence Analysis Center.

In 1991, the Navy carried out airborne photo reconnaissance with “wet” film, which was flown off the ship in canisters for development and interpretation. Days passed before the intelligence could be put to use. But the day of the canister is done. “We’re digital now,” Stufflebeem said as he walked across the strike center, which was chockablock with computers and other information systems. One wall was dominated by a screen displaying real-time black-and-white video images from an unmanned Predator drone over Afghanistan.

‘We can send this information into the cockpit [of a fighter jet in flight] and say, ‘Here’s the coordinates; go strike this target.’’
— REAR ADM. JOHN D. STUFFLEBEEM
Commander, USS Harry S. Truman battle group

Today, every ship in the Truman’s battle group, commanded by Stufflebeem, is linked to the other — and to the world beyond — by satellite-uplinked data networks. The carrier’s strike aircraft and reconnaissance planes beam pictures back to the ship, where they are immediately interpreted by eight “point droppers” — eight sailors whose jobs didn’t exist 12 years ago. Sitting in the semidarkness of the ship’s analysis center, they consult constantly with intelligence analysts back in the United States, sometimes using a secure chat room set up for that purpose. Then they determine coordinates for targets.

Stufflebeem walked to the “precision targeting” workstation to tap a computer screen displaying the image of a tank. “We can send this information into the cockpit [of a fighter jet in flight] and say, ‘Here’s the coordinates; go strike this target.’ ” The process, from sensor to shooter, has been compressed to hours — and, in some cases, minutes.

TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

This ability — to add velocity to data — is the most dramatic improvement in the U.S. military over the past decade, the one that underlies overwhelming advances in the speed and accuracy with which those forces can bring ordnance to bear.

Many military analysts and historians believe that U.S. precision-strike capabilities, first seen in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, represent the third “revolution in military affairs” of the 20th century, during which emerging technologies and new war-fighting concepts changed the nature of war.

‘High-quality intelligence is the American 21st-century version of mass.’
— LT. GEN. MICHAEL V. HAYDEN
National Security Agency

The first took place between 1917 and 1939, with the combination of internal combustion engines, improved aircraft design, radio and radar; it produced the German blitzkrieg, carrier aviation and strategic aerial bombardment. The second came at the end of World War II, with the advent of nuclear weapons. The third is all about precision strikes, information dominance and near-real-time targeting as the U.S. military leads to the way from Industrial Age warfare to Information Age operations.

There was a time when mass on the battlefield meant military strength. But now, with 24-hour battlefield surveillance and instantaneous targeting, mass on the battlefield is a liability, because it makes forces easier to track and target.

“High-quality intelligence is the American 21st-century version of mass,” said Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency. “With it, we have replaced mass on the battlefield with knowledge and precision.”

In Afghanistan at the end of 2001, the fusion of precision weapons and information dominance produced a new war-fighting concept in which small numbers of Special Operations soldiers on the ground used laser pointers and Global Positioning System receivers to designate targets for attack by bombers and fighters. That war will also be remembered for the U.S. military’s first use in combat of an armed, unmanned aerial vehicle: a Predator drone equipped to fire laser-guided Hellfire missiles at targets its own sensors had identified. In that case, sensor and shooter had become one and the same.
In any war against Iraq, U.S. military planners would be expanding on the lessons learned in Afghanistan.

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

If they do attack Iraq, U.S. commanders would have an unprecedented view of the battlefield, provided by a network of spy satellites at 400 miles in space, Global Hawk reconnaissance drones loitering at 65,000 feet, manned JSTARS aircraft with moving-target indicator radar at 40,000 feet and Predator drones with video, infrared and radar sensors at 20,000 feet, all feeding data back to command centers and, in some cases, directly to combat aircraft.

In 1991, such real-time intelligence wouldn’t have mattered much: During the Gulf War, more than 90 percent of the bombs dropped were “dumb” bombs, unguided, and they often fell hundreds of feet from their targets. Now, using the same aircraft, U.S. pilots will be dropping either laser-guided bombs or the Pentagon’s new smart bomb of choice, the satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. Unlike laser-guided munitions, JDAMs cannot be blinded by weather or the dust of the battlefield.

With this new precision-strike capability, a single aircraft carrier’s complement of 50 fighter jets can hit more targets in one night than hundreds of aircraft did on the opening night of the Gulf War — and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has deployed five carriers to the Persian Gulf region. Along with that capability, the military has significantly upgraded several key weapons systems.

STEALTH AND SMARTS

The Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missiles — which would likely be used against Iraq as they were in 1991, to target the enemy’s most heavily defended air defenses without risking pilots — now have GPS satellite receivers, which can be programmed with coordinates more rapidly and allow the missiles to fly regardless of anomalies in terrain.

The Army’s Apache Longbow helicopter gunships have vastly improved radars that can detect and identify 128 targets on a battlefield five miles away; they will fire new radar-guided Hellfire missiles that can lock onto and track moving targets, much like an air-to-air missile. The initial “A” version of the Apache starred in the Gulf War, but the Army calculates that the Longbow model is 400 percent more lethal and 720 percent more able to survive combat.

The centerpiece of the Air Force’s campaign is expected to be an array of bombers, beginning with the bat-winged, radar-evading B-2, which flew its first combat missions in 1999, over Kosovo. Each B-2 can carry 16 JDAMs, and each JDAM can be programmed with coordinates to hit a different target. They will undoubtedly be joined by B-52 bombers, which can carry 18 JDAMs, and B-1 bombers, which can carry 24.

These are only the most dramatic of dozens of upgrades in equipment ranging from night-vision goggles to targeting pods that enable aircraft to drop smart bombs from 40,000 feet.“During the Gulf War, we were at the beginning of a technological revolution,” said Capt. Michael Groothousen, a veteran fighter pilot who is now skipper of the Truman. “Since then, it’s come on like gangbusters.”

The success of that revolution accounts for so much besides the military’s sheer strength: its confidence, its professionalism, the better-educated men and women in the ranks — and the number of those men and women.

At the end of World War II, there were 12 million troops on active duty. Today, with the nation’s population doubled in size, there are just 1.4 million. Even since the Gulf War, the military has shrunk by about one-third. The force waging the current continuous campaign is surprisingly small.

‘DO MORE WITH LESS’

Capt. John Rhone has a commanding view of the United States’ military might. He is a weapons control officer in an AWACS command-and-control aircraft. He is also tired. In the Air Force seven and a half years, he is now in his seventh rotation through Prince Sultan Air Base. “I think I’m ready for a break,” he said. Rhone is not alone.

President Bush came into office criticizing the Clinton administration for overburdening the military with unending “nation-building” exercises and questioning whether the country could sustain its peacekeeping commitments. The terrorist attacks on the United States altered everything. Since Sept. 11, 2001, active-duty personnel and reservists have been deployed around the world at an extraordinary pace.

With 250,000 service members overseas even before the massive buildup began in the Persian Gulf region for a possible war with Iraq, the strains of a soaring “operations tempo” are starting to show across their military — on the men and women who fill out its ranks, on their families, and on the machines they operate. The nature of those strains suggests that they may become acute not in any war against Iraq — an enemy the military remains highly confident of defeating — but in a more indefinite future.

‘You’ve still got Afghanistan going. You’ve got Iraq out there. I just worry about our ability to keep going.’
— SGT. MAJ. FRED WHEELER
senior enlisted Marine, USS Harry S. Truman

Units find themselves hardly back from one deployment before heading out for their next. One company in the Army’s 94th Engineer Battalion was deployed to Kosovo from May to November, when it returned to its base in Germany. It has now been ordered to leave for Kuwait by the middle of this month. That unit’s quick turnaround isn’t unusual. “You got people coming home from the Gulf and going back to the Gulf,” said Sgt. Maj. Fred Wheeler, a Washington, D.C., native who is the senior enlisted Marine aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. “You’ve still got Afghanistan going. You’ve got Iraq out there. I just worry about our ability to keep going.”

The biggest change in the Air Force over the past 12 years, said Lt. Col. Michael Krueger, commander of the KC-135 tanker squadron at Prince Sultan, is that the service is doing more than it used to, but has 40 percent fewer people on active duty to do it with. “Taskings haven’t gone down; they’ve gone up,” Krueger said, sitting in the operations group offices. “We’re being forced to do more with less.”

RELIANCE ON RESERVISTS

The Pentagon has relied on tens of thousands of reservists to prosecute the war on terrorism, conduct new homeland security missions in the United States and, now, prepare for war with Iraq. There are now more than 150,000 reservists and National Guard members mobilized, more than at any time since Sept. 11.

A surge of patriotism has kept morale, recruiting and retention high since the attacks on New York and Washington. But defense officials fear that the open-ended nature of the war on terrorism and a possible lengthy occupation of Iraq could deplete the ranks of the all-volunteer active-duty force and break the reserve system.

Rumsfeld recently told the House Armed Services Committee that there is no evidence that recruiting and retention are suffering. But committee leaders, who have long championed increasing the size of the active-duty force, seemed far from convinced. Rep. John M. McHugh (R-N.Y.) told Rumsfeld that he did not believe the current size of the military was “sufficient and sustainable” and urged the defense secretary to go out and talk to deployed reservists, as McHugh had recently done in Europe.“To a person, every one of these Guard and reserve individuals were questioning their willingness to re-up, and were questioning the sustainability of the call-ups that they have all experienced,” McHugh said. “Every single one, multiple call-ups in the past several years.”

‘We’re running back-to-back marathons. The airplanes may not be able to take it, and more importantly, the people may not.’
— CAPT. SCOVILL CURRIN

The consequences of a decline in retention rates could be disastrous for the all-volunteer force. Defense officials say the United States has the world’s most professional military. About half of all enlisted personnel now reenlist, up from 10 percent during the draft years, which ended in 1973.

It is also the best-educated. Ninety-five percent of enlisted personnel had high school diplomas in 2000, up from 80 percent in 1974. Forty-three percent of officers had advanced degrees, up from 25 percent.

It is also an older military, and increasingly a married military. That’s why no single factor breeds disharmony at home faster than repeated overseas deployments.“I can barely remember what it was like before Sept. 11,” said Capt. Scovill Currin, 27, a tanker pilot from Charleston, S.C., deployed at Prince Sultan. “We’re running back-to-back marathons. The airplanes may not be able to take it, and more importantly, the people may not.”And Currin is younger than many of the airplanes he flies.

AGING FLEET

The average age of Air Force tankers is now more than 37 years. All told, the average age of the Air Force’s 6,300 aircraft is 22 years, twice that of the U.S. airline industry. It reflects deep cuts in military procurement in the 1990s. The fleet’s average age is projected to hit 30 years by 2015, even with new planes, such as the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter and the Joint Strike Fighter.

The rate at which these aging planes are capable of flying war-related missions — their “readiness” — has dropped 25 percent over the past five years. The cost per flying hour, over the same time, jumped 45 percent.

Aviation accident rates are also up. Rates of major mishaps — those defined as causing death or permanent disability or more than $1 million in aircraft damage — generally have risen in all the services in recent years.

The Air Force recorded 35 major accidents in 2002, including the highest number of helicopter mishaps in 33 years. An official Air Force safety study noted that the service flew 200,000 more flight hours in fiscal 2002 than the previous year. The study posed the question of whether that pace was “pushing the envelope.”

The Army and Marine Corps posted the biggest increases in such accidents, with the Army rate more than doubling, from 1.03 major mishaps per 100,000 flying hours in 2001 to 2.58 in 2002, and the Marine rate almost tripling, from 1.40 to 4.01. A study of the causes of Navy and Marine accidents blamed, among other things, inexperience among air crews and increasing “cannibalization” of planes for parts. On the Harry S. Truman, pilots said their planes have the parts they need. But they said the Navy has kept them whole by removing the engines and other major components from aircraft back in the United States that should be used to train new pilots. The result, they say, is that pilots are arriving on the carrier with less training than they did in the past.

With the military on a constant war footing, everyone who is adequately trained is being used. As Lt. Trevor Estes, an EA-6B pilot from Poland Springs, Maine, put it: “There are no guys [waiting] on the beach,” as Navy pilots refer to dry land.

Keeping soldiers, sailors and airmen happy and machines working and safe costs money — lots of it. And although military spending, excluding homeland defense, already dwarfs all other discretionary spending in the federal budget, a debate over how that money will be spent, and whether it will be enough, is already taking shape on Capitol Hill. But the budget is not the critical document that will shape the future of the U.S. military, or the pressures on it. That place is reserved for the Bush administration’s new National Security Strategy.

A FORCE WITHOUT RIVAL

Issued in September, that 33-page document lays out an ambitious agenda that carries enormous implications for the nation’s foreign policy — and gives a central role to the U.S. military.

The first item on that agenda is that the United States will move beyond decades of trying to deter and contain its enemies. Instead, it embraced a doctrine of preemptive military attack, meaning it will attack terrorist and rogue states before they can threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction.

The second is that the United States will do what it takes to maintain its position as a military without rival. “Our forces,” it says, “will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”

This agenda is causing anxiety on both the left and the right.
Harvard University foreign policy expert Stanley Hoffmann recently wrote in the liberal magazine American Prospect that “the Bush doctrine ... amounts to a doctrine of global domination” that also is “breathtakingly unrealistic.”

In the American Conservative, Boston University political scientist Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, worried about a new “militarization of foreign policy.” The Bush administration, he wrote, regards the use of force not as a last resort, but as the nation’s “most effective instrument of statecraft.” In summary, he warned, “The Bush administration’s grand strategy reeks of hubris.”

‘DANGEROUS PRIDE’

A few officers are beginning to worry that traces of a dangerous pride may also be showing in the military.

In contrast to the Vietnam-haunted officers who commanded during the Gulf War, said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division back then, today’s top brass have known mainly success over the past 12 years. (Many of them regard the October 1993 firefight in Somalia, during which 18 soldiers were killed, as an anomalous episode caused by civilian leaders pushing the Army into a misbegotten mission.) But that pride may lure the military into thinking it can take on more missions than it can carry.

The administration has been notably close-mouthed about the likely cost of an invasion and occupation of Iraq. One expert, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon, estimates that occupying Iraq — and holding together its three disparate parts — could require from 100,000 to 250,000 troops in the first year. Assuming that only 15 percent to 25 percent of that force is American, O’Hanlon recently told the House Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon’s contribution would be 15,000 to 60,000 troops.

That is one to three divisions — in an Army that has only 10 active-duty divisions.

That would come on top of a continuing, open-ended U.S. presence in Afghanistan, which is keeping 8,000 U.S. troops busy and costing $1 billion a month.

The Army simply isn’t large enough to carry that load, retired Gen. Frederick Kroesen worried in a recent series of essays in the magazine of the Association of the United States Army. And he predicted that if the administration doesn’t prepare better for the tasks facing the military, “we will see a return to the Vietnam deterioration” — almost the gravest charge short of treason that an officer of his era can make.

MIGHT VS. DIPLOMACY

Aside from questions of manpower and material, the military’s power raises questions about the United States’ place in the world.

The National Security Strategy would be unthinkable without the U.S. military as it exists right now, with its unprecedented combination of a professional military wielding unique weaponry. One of the fears among military experts is that as this force becomes more precise, the threshold for using it will become lower and lower. The hazards go beyond bombing the wrong target because of faulty intelligence, as in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

The Pentagon is now so superior militarily that it really does not like to fight alongside its allies — it feels they slow U.S. forces down. Yet the United States still needs allies, said retired Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “for forward basing, niche capabilities we find valuable, and to take care of the peacekeeping” that follows each war.

If the United States keeps pursuing military hegemony, Krepinevich and others fear, it will alienate its allies and become weaker in the long run.

And what of the reaction among those who aren’t U.S. allies — not so much would-be competitors, such as China and Russia, but such rogue states Iraq, Iran and North Korea?

Former defense secretary William J. Perry, who for his work at the Pentagon in the late 1970s is arguably the intellectual father of today’s high-tech military, remains bullish on the United States’ unparalleled military strength and precision-strike capability.

But he acknowledges that U.S. military dominance has also probably pushed those rogue states to develop nuclear weapons sooner than they otherwise might have — because they know they can no longer compete with the United States on the conventional battlefield.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company


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