Maginot thinking
Toolbox
By KENDALL WILD The Rutland Herald - Published: July 1, 2009
A chilling article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine paints a grim picture of shortcomings in this country's military leadership. By inference it goes some way toward illustrating why we are still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the summer of 2002 the Pentagon undertook a large exercise of war games. It was called "Millennium Challenge 2002" and put U.S. forces against a nation in the Persian Gulf, unnamed, but obviously Iran in disguise. Those opposing forces were led by a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Marine Corps, and what he did thwarted the U.S. effort in all directions.
U.S. aircraft can be armed with missiles that detect radiation, so they can zero in on radar signals and smash the installations and arms that are assembled. But the Marine general kept his radar turned off and moved his missiles around so they couldn't be located and destroyed. That way, he could intercept aircraft that were bringing supplies to U.S. forces already on "enemy" ground.
In addition, he launched a surprise attack on the Navy ships offshore, with anti-ship cruise missiles and small suicide boats armed with explosives. More than half the ships were put out of action or sunk. If it had been real, the disaster would have been as bad as Pearl Harbor, or worse.
So did the Pentagon leaders concede that conventional methods of operation would not work, and bring the Marine general and others into conference to discuss what should be changed? No, they called for the games to be started all over again, made someone else the leader of the "enemy" and ordered him to leave his radar on and not to move his missiles. The results, they felt, were much more satisfactory.
Now what competent military thinking would undertake an operation firm in the belief that the foe would act in a way that would be easy to overcome? That attitude is eerily reminiscent of the attitude of the French military between World War I and World War II. Some will recall that the French built a massive set of fortifications all along the French-German frontier. It ran from the Belgian frontier to the border with Switzerland, and was called the Maginot Line, named after the person who conceived the idea.
The line took little cognizance of the possibility of outflanking, though the example of the German thrust through Belgium at the start of World War I was fresh in people's minds. So the German panzers came crashing through Belgium and the Ardennes, totally outflanking the Maginot Line, which in the end was overcome with relative ease as the Germans spread across northern France.
The Foreign Affairs article implies that there's a threat of the same thing to the U.S. in modern terms. It is entitled "The Pentagon's Wasting Assets," and the author is Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., who is president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The anti-ship cruise missiles can skim just above the surface of the water at such a speed that they are hard to deflect in relatively narrow places like the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. In addition, there is a new kind of sea mine that is much more difficult to offset than previous examples.
The author also takes up changes in the Far East, where China is developing a system that could confront U.S. naval forces as far away as Guam. He talks of how irregular forces require a different approach of combat than the conventional methods. Cyberspace is another area where new defense attitudes need to be addressed, he says.
The author gives the Pentagon credit for having started to eliminate some units that would be unsuitable to modern operations. But he says much more imagination and innovation is needed, pointing out that it took a decade to gear up fully for the Cold War, so efforts should begin quickly on a similar gearing up to meet today's threats.
Foreign Affairs is a periodical published by the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed by the various authors are not always agreeable, but they carry a great weight of authority.
That retired Marine general who wreaked such havoc during the 2002 war games was named Paul Van Riper. He may not be available for consultation, but the Pentagon's top brass should start paying attention to people like him.
Kendall Wild is a retired editor of the Herald.
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