Column 273
Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D
Byte Mag
April 2003
(Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D., is a science-fiction writer and Byte.com's senior contributing editor. Contact him at jerryp@jerrypournelle.com. Visit Jerry's Chaos Manor at www.jerrypournelle.com.)
The newest system at Chaos Manor is built from the Intel D875PBZ motherboard and an Intel 3 GHz\800 MHz Front Side Bus Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading technology. The Intel code name for the 875 chipset is Canterwood. That sounds like a heck of a machine, and it is: You're going to love it. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, as I write this, Saddam International Airport just outside Baghdad has become Baghdad International, and U.S. forward elements have entered Baghdad and surrounded the Ministry of Information. In two weeks, with fewer than 100 casualties, the Anglo-American Alliance has conquered more territory with fewer losses than any army in history. The Moslem conquest of non-Arab lands began when Caliph Omar defeated the Persian General Rustam at Qadisayyah (Kadisiyah) southwest of Baghdad. The great Mosque of Ali, where the Shi'ite religion is centered and many Iranians hope to be buried is in Karbala. Mesopotamia was the high water mark of the Roman Empire, and the grave of several Roman armies. It is one of the most fought over places on Earth. And all of it fell in days to the Anglo-American Alliance, with fewer than a hundred casualties to the mile.
This has been the first war in real time. I don't mean just that it was reported in real time, I mean that all other wars have been turn-based. In the past, armies moved, then the general assessed what they had done, and orders were sent. Armies that could operate inside the decision cycle of the enemy, as the Wehrmacht did during the collapse of France in 1940, were generally victorious; and sometimes generals tried to lead from the front and operate in real time, but they were never aware of where all their forces were, or what was going on a few miles away.
This war was fought in real time¯but only for the U.S. The Iraqi forces were fighting a turn-based war, and they didn't get many turns. Most of their troops had no choice but to hold in place and hope for the best. The war flowed around them, and soon they were irrelevant. If they came out to fight¯and some did, with considerable courage¯they came out piecemeal, and they were defeated without imposing significant casualties on the Anglo-American Alliance.
The PC Revolution War
This was truly the PC Revolution war, made possible by the technological capability to pack sufficient communications power into small platforms that could be taken to the battlefield, and which needed so little power that in many cases they could be man-carried. Back home we saw parts of the war in real time; but in the headquarters in Qatar, the general staff saw nearly all of it.
In the past, if you wanted support from your best analysts you had to take them with you. Not this time: intelligence, weather, logistics, all those experts could be a long way from the front, and many didn't have to be in the theater at all. In World War II, the US Army Air Force needed weather plotters¯my friend and science fiction writer colleague Fred Pohl was one of them¯in air bases not all that far from the front. These people had to be protected and supplied. Not today. Today much of that expertise is in the Pentagon, or in Langley, and can go home at nights.
The effect is to multiply the expertise available in the field, and do it without decreasing the tooth to tail ratio of the field army. Most armies have far more tail than teeth. The Alliance forces do too, but much of the tail is a long way from the battlefield.
Now the generals can know where their troops are, as well as where the enemy is, while the enemy is cut off from command. This means that battles are fought at our initiative, which in turn means that every enemy unit fights alone against enormous strength. In military parlance that is known as being defeated in detail.
Even the weapons know where they are and where the enemy is hiding. Most of the soldiers know where they are, in relation to other units and to the enemy. In a few tragic instances the technology wasn't properly applied, and some of our units wandered into enemy lines, themselves to be defeated in detail; but there was far less of that than there usually is in a fluid war of maneuver.
Thor
Years ago when I was still an aerospace professional I described (I won't say "invented" because it was never built) a weapons system I code named "Thor," to suggest calling down blows from heaven. Thor was a series of orbiting tungsten telephone poles: that is, about 20 feet long by a foot or so in diameter, solid except for a small area where a ball could be moved to change the center of gravity, and some electronics could be housed. Guidance was given by shifting the center of gravity, and by using tiny vanes. At command, a bundle of these could be de-orbited, and guided to strike an enemy: a bridge, a ship, a tank, a bunker. Since the closing speed would be in the order of 10,000 feet per second, no warhead would be needed. Kinetic energy alone would be more than enough to kill most targets. We estimated accuracy as about 2 meter CEP (Circular Error of Probability: the circle within which half the shots will fall).
That was years ago. Now, with GPS, CEP's are even smaller. Clearly any fixed target is vulnerable to something like Thor; but in fact orbital systems don't seem to be needed. In the Second Gulf War the British and perhaps the US have deployed large guided bombs with the "warhead" space filled with concrete. The notion is to prevent collateral damage in urban areas. All that's needed is sufficient accuracy: 500 pounds of concrete at terminal velocity will do a pretty good job on any vehicle and most buildings!
The Bandwidth War
The real time war has been a matter of bandwidth. The war eats all the bandwidth available, but there's a lot of it now. DSP¯Digital Signal Processing¯chips make real time image processing possible. Images can be sent back to command centers, back even to the Pentagon. And enough bandwidth makes it possible to do things no army could ever do before.
An example was the raid to rescue Pfc. Jessica Lynch. Most of the commanders of the various assets needed to conduct that effort never met in person, and certainly weren't in the same room when the operation was planned. They didn't have to be. This was a complex mission, with many contingencies to worry about. A large diversion involving a battalion of marines was needed to distract the enemy. Special Forces and air operations were needed. Medical units were required. There were even mortuary and graves registration units to bring back remains found at the enemy site. And all this was planned and carried out within a day of confirmation of the initial intelligence on where Pfc. Lynch was being held.
It was a war of bandwidth at home, too, with images shown in real time, and the 104th Chairborne Brigade of Retired Generals was free to make its critiques and complaints. How much of that was deliberate disinformation¯one suspects that at least some of those senior retired officers knew full well that our troops weren't in trouble and the war was going well¯is another story.
But perhaps none of it was disinformation. The Computer Revolution changed everything, including our models of war; and retired generals are not always the first people to understand such things.
Models of War
One casualty of this war are the classical Lanchester equations for computing relative strengths of military forces and predicting the outcomes of battles. These equations were used through most of the twentieth century to build models of military combat and war games, adding to the centuries-old maxim that the minimum ratio of attacker to defender is 3 to 1 (assuming a defender in place, and both sides having something like equal competence.) The Lanchester equations aren't perfect or anything like it, but they have been pretty effective tools for war plan evaluations.
One derivative of the Lanchester equations was that the effective correlation of forces varied as their square: That is, if you have 3:1 superiority, you have 9 times the military effectiveness of the enemy, and when the battle is over that will be the approximate ratio of loser to winner casualties. Clearly there must be adjustments for discrepancies in quality of force, but given anything like similar equipment and training, the squares of the numbers engaged give a rough estimate of the correlation of forces.
The war in Iraq makes a shambles of this: We have far fewer forces than the enemy, but the power ratio is enormous. We have fewer than 100 casualties. The Iraqi casualties are far higher¯certainly in the tens of thousands, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. The area now under Alliance control is huge. The ratio of forces to space is irrelevant. It is a new era in warfare, and an entirely new set of equations will be needed to build meaningful war games.
We find ourselves remembering another old maxim: "It never matters to a wolf how many the sheep be." Sometimes qualitative discrepancies make numbers irrelevant.
Note that in this war aircraft losses have been less than one tenth of one percent per sortie. One admiral noted that the aircraft losses were less than we would predict from a comparable number of training sorties. And we have lost more troops to accidents than to friendly fire, and more to our own weapons than to those of the enemy.
We simply have no tools for analysis of this new kind of war. They will have to be developed. Fortunately, the computers that make this kind of war possible will give us the analytical tools.
And a warning:
The computer revolution is not the exclusive property of the United States. We remain in a technological war. When Possony and I wrote The Strategy of Technology back in 1969, we included this passage: "There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed 'logistic strategy.' Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure...A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
We referred then to the Cold War; but the technological war continues, and the cost of high technology is falling to commodity prices. The next time we fight, we may face an enemy with as much bandwidth as we have.
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