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How Technology Failed in Iraq
synthespian writes "US troops in Iraq were supposed to have a clear superiority in the battlefield because of sensors and networking devices such as aircraft- and satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat detectors, as well as image and communications eavesdroppers. On April 3, 2003, the task to take over a key Euphrates River bridge about 30 kilometers southwest of Baghdad turned into a bloody hell as 'between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. (...) "'We got nothing until they slammed into us"''(...). Read more about this story and the troubles and challenges the US military is experiencing in networking troops from Technology Review."
They seem to base a lot of things around the idea that units are always connected.
But the problem came about because tey cannot always be, that while in motion or at great distances they pretty much lost the network meant to make tem most effective.
They need to figure out how to better keep intact the lines of communication, but also how to operate more effictively in a disconnected mode, and make the most of connectivity when it is degraded (seems like if they had email links up some primitive but useful data could have been transmitted to them as well - like an OGRE style text map of the area with enemy uints marked!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is no substitute for adequate/superior manpower, that is, quantity is in some cases - including this one - more important than any amount of silicon packed by the armed forces. At least, IMO
A blog like any other.
They gave a great example at the end of the article about a time when the connectivty model really worked, with great coordinating from a number of units including ground and air led to the very quick destruction of a convoy in Afganistan just because a pilot saw lights flashing out the window on a plane.
One of the things they nated was that Afgan special forces units were independant nodes just wired together - and that connection was maintained by an "Ubergeek" of the group. So perhaps what they needed in Iraq was a few more UberGeeks in units to ensure the maximum transmission flow possible for the situation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There was a time when five to ten *thousand* Iraqi soldiers massed together to defend something? They had tanks and artillery and an honst-to-god opposition force? Where were the American press and their "embedded reporters" when this happened? All we ever saw of the invasion over here was M1 tanks driving to Baghdad on cruise control!
0 1 - just my two bits
I must have missed something in the story (I just scanned it), but where does it list what eventually happened? That would seem to be a notable omission.
How many Iraqi troops were killed/captured/ran away vs. US losses? It couldn't have been a major defeat for the American forces.
The article reads like a puff piece that is designed to encourage more expenditure on surveillance.
Forget being able to spot 30 tanks and 70 APCs. I'm sure they were well hidden.. ..*cough*..
Amongst all that sand and stuff...
I'm sure many nations would just be happy if they got some Friend or Foe recognition technology. Then maybe they'd stop bombing allied troops.
Aswell.. a device that would show them the difference between the home of a family of 6 and a rebel/freedom-fighter safe house might be handy.
You might find this article interesting
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The Romans and British were able to rule large empires with relatively small forces because they were able to move forces around quickly to trouble spots.
This relied on their various subjects not being able to get together and coordinate simultaneous uprisings.
That's not true any more.
The subjects of the American empire can coordinate their resistance worldwide.
The US versus one of the five largest armies in the world? (and larger than France's or Germany's, FWIW). You can say lots of things about the occupation, or the coming elections, or your ideal of humanitarian aid. In terms of civialian an miltary deaths this was the most bloodless war every fought between two of the largest armies (I won't say top armies, numbers != strength).
It is neat to highlight where we did our worst, but the fact is we kicked ass. I'm too old (the recruiter thanked me for my time post 9-11) but my brother was called up from national guard and my younger fraternity brothers did time in "the sandbox" Rummy is wrong on points ("lighter and faster" still aint as good as "morer and heavier") but I read the damned article and the idea that we didn't have perfect information is both valid and shit. That happens, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
Any marketing department would be fired if they merely didn't lose. Winning means pushing the boundaries.
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
It may be overconfidence more then anything else. These guys went to war thinking they were going to fight a conventional war and the citizens would throw roses on them. It never occured to them they were invading a country and that the populace might object.
Think of it. We have soldiers fighting iraqis so we can make them obey Allawi instead of somebody else. That does not seem right to me. If the people of sadr city don't want to be ruled by Allawi and instead want to follow Muqtada why should we care? Better yet why should we kill them just to make them obey allawi?
Finally everything I have read about Allawi seems to indicate that he a pretty brutal guy. Maybe not as bad as Saddam but definately has the makings of a mini Saddam.
evil is as evil does
It seems to me that in the US they really love their technology. Only, well, technology can only do so much. And sometiomes technology bites you on the ass. Look at the fiasco the technology caused in the last presidential elections... whereas putting an X on a piece of paper is nice simple and, with the proper measures, secure. The US military have the same problem. They lost the Vietnam war partly owing to the over reliance on helicopters yet somehow failed to learn anything.
I wonder if it's something to do with the feeling that people cannot be relied upon, and that you can rely on technology? But IYAM you must rely on people before you are able to rely on the tech.
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1. Troop levels. Most of the military observers belive that more troops would have done a better job. Estimates on the ideal number of troops range from 200.000-400.000.
2. Taking Bagdad fast.Yes I know that bypassing some of Saddams forces was intentional. But when they captured Bagdad they stood there with what? A couple thousand soldiers and some tanks/APCs/trucks? And without a plan.. People I have talked to say it took several weeks before troopl levels in Baghdad reached the level they needed to control the central ares in Baghdad.
3. Armor on the 5 ton truck. Non-existant. Say no more. Allready in 1995 Russia discovered that chechnyan "rebells" attacked their underarmed and unarmored supply vehicles with small arms fire and IEDs. This forced the Russians to use up to 60% of their forces for protection/guarding/convoys etc.
4. Armor on APC's and HUMMVEEs. How many of the humvees had some form of armor/extra splinter protection? 15? How long did it take before they started to improve this? 8 months? And what about the M-113; uppgrade program going on for the last ten year and still some without the scheduled armor upgrade?
5. Availability of "bullet-proof" vests. I don't know much about this one. But the litle that I have heard about old flak vests doesn't exactly put the upper managment in a very positive light.
6. Disbanding the Iraqi army. 250.000 young males without a job. Riots in Baghdad.
7. Lack of guarding the Iraqi barracks, storages and weapon sites/dumps. Yes Iraqis do have an extensive weapon culture with AK's, grenades and maybe an RPG stacked under the bed "just in case". But few people store 200 pound bombs in their homes for future IED-use so they must get it from somewhere!
8. Mass-arrests in autumn 2003. Probably prisoning a lot of innocent people. Alienating suporters.
9. Abu Graib torture scandal. A nice mix of contarctors and the CIA. Enough said.
10. Scaling down troop levels in February 2004 and strategy of moving out of many small cities/villages into larger camps.
11. Leaving some areas, effectivly handing them over to the insurgents and making them no go zones.
12. So far, failure to train enough Iraqi troops of high enough quality.
The strange thing is that;
a. To some extent I find it hard to blame the Army/Marines on some of the above mentioned points as no one told them about the need to fight the kind of war they know are fighting.
b. Many of the points are related to non-existant political planning.
c. All the issues are related to #1. Troop levels. With more troops many of them would not have been a problem. So Rumsfeld should resign IMHO.
Yes, I know I'm only some 5 Karma Star Armchair General in front of a PC and it's easy to critize but still...
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
It didn't work in Nam.
"Its only high-tech so I can sell it to you."
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I now this is somewhat offtopic.
But while some people do at least try to count the civilian victims of te latest Iraq war (here),
I never heard any estimates on the number of Iraq military victims.
Does anyone now of any estimates?
Sound familiar?
BBC Analysis: How Yugoslavia hid its tanks.
Remember all that sensor tech we were told was flying around? Remember all the bombardment? Remember the Brit groundtroops' shock when all that intact Serb armor rolled out after ceasefire? Nobody was feeling good about that. We had figured by that point the troops would be relatively unopposed had they gone in firing. We were very wrong.
Believing the corporate and political hype on the new gear is a big problem. Huge sums of cash and careers ride on it, so we aren't getting good information about it at the voting level or the shooting level. Successes and mere premises get paraded, while failures get "classified" for "national security" reasons. Like Rummy classifying all further testing of the 'missle shield' after the early attempts weren't working too well.
I don't have a problem with developing and applying this stuff, but it's got to work on the level of the blood and guts of my neighbors in uniform, and real home safety. It's not. We need a much more open view of our investments for exactly the national security reason that our current porkbarrels are hiding it under.
And what really scares the bejeesus out of me is these idiots are making national policy decisions as if the gear works. They pad the numbers and then believe it. I want to see real conservatism at the top. This faith crap is killing people.
The big difference between that conflict and the present one is a major player other than the US is in the region and has a whole lot of nukes.
Seastead this.
Assuming everyone had working satellite phones, and perhaps that was how they were getting email, it seems to me that throwing more people at it could be at least a temporary solution. Simply call up or send an email "Approaching 3 degrees north by 73 west, please advise" might elicit a human reply "20 tanks and 60 vehicles within 5 miles, may be transport. At your current speed, you will intercept them in 30 minutes, they are 4 miles north by northwest of you."
Farther in the future, a computer should be able to extrapolate that information from the satellite images and transform it into plain text that the troops can then download by logging in to a website or something, or perhaps vector graphics and low resolution images could supply them with the information they need. All they need to know is the enemy's position relative to theirs. While this might sound like some sort of tank game from the mid 80's, based on the article it would seem that this rudimentary level if information would have been invaluable to them.
This whole thing reminds me of the book Human Error. Tight coupling (C depends on B, which depends on A, so objective Z will fail to be met if any of the previous 25 points fail) meant that the otherwise available information was unavailable to the people who needed it the most. A looser system, like the one used in Afgahnastan would have worked in a wider range of situations. The methods of communication were flexible rather than fixed, and could therefore be used in a wider range of situations.
Hopefully the next generation of military technology will fail gracefully. That is, still be usable even when bandwidth is low.
I also have to wonder about what will happen, as it always does, when the current cutting edge technology is commonly available. Okay, it's not likely anyone else will have satellites any time soon, but when our enemies can track our movements quickly and easily, share information amongst themselves and have their own un-manned vehicles, what strategic advantage will we have? Once you reach the point of dimishing returns (just how detailed a map can you download if you have broadband in your tank? How detailed does it need to be? Can it have real time satellite images? etc.) what happens to our advantage?
It's probably got more to do with nationalism then religion. The vietnamese fought like hell too and they weren't muslims.
The problem is that there have been a lot of racist books written about arabs and muslims (I am not saying this is one I haven't read it). The problem gets multiplied when influential people read those books base foreign policy on them.
One of the major reasons this administration didn't forsee this insugency is that the neocons all based their opinions about how the iraqis would act by reading "The Arab Mind" which is racist book. It depicts Arabs as automatons who aonly understand force, shame and humiliation. It pretty much depicts Arabs as less then human insect like beings who have no nuance of emotion or intellect. Not surprisingly it was written by a Jew.
evil is as evil does
"Human contact is highly effective at finishing war."
An intelligent proposal, and one supported by historical precedent, like the impromptu Christmas truces of 1914 between the German and British troops--this almost stopped the war right then and there. Word of the truces spread rapidly along the front, terrifying generals on both sides. It is possible that only the stern intervention of their respective high commands--threats, artillery barrages (often accompanied by profuse apologies from the originating side,) and fresh, troops from other sectors--"saved" the war from an early end.
Maybe what saves us from war is that those who fight them come to hate the fighting more than the enemy. In this state of exhausted perplexion, it again becomes possible to look upon the enemy as a human being.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Iran and North Korea are moving their nuke programs at full speed. In fact, both have sped up when we first invaded Iraq (but that could have more to do with getting information from the pakastani minister).
EU is trying to get Iran to stop, but considering that Russia is helping Iran out with supplies, they are not likely to do much. Israel will almost certainly have no choice but to go in and do the job themselves with our bunker busters. When they do, the middle east will go crazy.
Apparently, Libya never made any progress and had given up nukes during Clinton's time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yup - and when the other side fights to win, that's so "dirty" that it calls for the removal of Geneva Convention rights.
Fighting to win against America is illegal.
Give Ahmed some credit!
He told the president and the pentagon that invading Iraq would be so easy that no plan would be necessary (provided, of course) that Ahmed be made president of the "new Iraq"!
Just enter
"ahmed chalabi" "richard perle"
into Google and be enlightened.
For another "dynamic duo", enter
"richard perle" "conrad black"
just for amusement, this time.
Isn't al Zaqawai Jordanian?
If thats true then it means your grandfather's post is more vindicated. The point is that now the enemies of the enemies of the US are now becoming the friends of the enemies of the US. And it gets worse if thats these forces are not localized to Iraq. It means they are uniting on a regional if not global scale.
With enough warning, the US forces will be able to concentrate troops in a location to defeat the enemy. How? Military flash mobs -- a message goes out to small units to meet at a certain GPS coordinate at a certain time. In the case of needing heavy armor, the lead time would have to be even longer due to the limited numbers of Abrams available. But in the short term, the gap can be filled with ground-attack craft such as rotary-wing aircraft and A-10 Thunderbolt II's.
The idea is to distribute decision making, such as what ocurred in Afghanistan, and to Keep It Simple, by using robust technologies such as email and web browsers.
The big problem that the troops encountered in Iraq was outrunning the capabilities of the microwave-based communications systems. They even outran line-of-sight communications.
One solution to that would be to plant "trees" in the desert. The idea would be to air-drop large numbers of communications relays that would have a spike on the bottom. When it hits the ground, the spike keeps it upright, and the batteries run it for a couple of days. The "trees" form a resiliant packet-driven communications mesh much like the internet.
Chip H.
While in the US Army in (then) West Germany, I was rather humbled by how often the West Germans, British and even the Dutch would beat us during joint field exercises. They tended I think to understand that technology was neat, but no magic bullet. Too much American equipment is sold by vendors that way overstate capabilities. So thermal imaging gear that works pretty well during a clear still night in the Arizona desert is absolutely useless during typically drizzly European weather. Substitute sand/dust/whatever for "drizzly" and you get the idea.
That's the whole point. The technology failed, but our troops were able to overcome the failure(s) thanks to superior training and equipment. However, if they had been fighting a better opponent, there probably would have been more serious consequences.
Now that we invaded a country and we have made their lives FAR worse than it was under sadaam, they are switching to Al Qaida. A lot of damage has been done.
FAR worse? WTF are you babbling about you ignorant piece of shit?
They are FREE in case you hadn't noticed dumbass. They can go out and buy satellite dishes and not have to worry about hiding them. They can use the internet, they can run their own blogs, they can even call Saddam Hussein a mother fucker rather than just thinking it to themselves. They have far more income now than they did under Sadaam (except those who are too fucking lazy or stupid to find something to do except bitch about how good they had it when Sadaam was in power, those fools are still dirt poor and always will be since everything that happens in their little world is always someone else's fault and that someone else is usually a Jew to boot.) How the fuck is that worse off?
You sound like one of those goddamned liberal dipshits who go on and on about how Foxnews is so biased yet you want to believe all the other news outlets who don't report anything but the bad shit coming out of Iraq since it supports your opinion that we shouldn't have invaded in the first place.
Too bad your dumb ass doesn't live in a dictatorship. Might cure your ignorance although that isn't guaranteed. Look at the Iraqis. Some of them are stupid enough to think they had it better under Sadaam, but that's because they were his bully boys keeping the rest of the population in line. Now that the Lion of Bagdad isn't so high-and-fucking-mighty anymore all his former bullies have found out that they are just uneducated, ignorant, non-employable, scumbag thugs with no future since all that they ever knew how to do was drink alcohol, steal from people, beat the shit out of people and intimidate people for Sadaam in exchange for chump change.
All the people that Sadaam's bullies oppressed know how much better their lives are. They have hope. They have opportunity. They have the freedom to choose. They can make something of themselves.
All Sadaam's bullies have no hope since the only thing they ever had going for them sits locked up in a cage awaiting trial for his crimes.
Hell, 1000 years after the Fall of the Western Empire, Greeks in Byzantium still called themselves "Romans".
That's because they were Romans, in the same sense that anyone in the empire during the reign of, say, Marcus Aurelius, was a Roman (as distinct from a resident of the city proper).
The Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire may have spoken Greek, but it was still the same uninterrupted political & social entity. The Roman empire did not fall until the mid-15th century.