USA: FUTURE WAR
October 2002 1850 00:00
Music
Williams: This is America at its most powerful. 00:19
Music
Williams: Deep in Nevadas desert its Firepower Day - a chance for the US Air force to show off its overwhelming ability to blow things up. 00:24
Music
Williams: Junior generals are invited, but the real target is the American public, here to seek assurance they can still be protected. For while their military has the hardware to win conventional cold war-style battles, on September 11th that was no longer enough. 00:47
Cebrowski: On 911, the contract with America that was held with the Department of Defence was 01:04
shredded and is now in the process of being rewritten. 01:09
Williams: And just how that contract should be rewritten has sparked one of the greatest battles the US military has ever fought a battle for its own future. 01:15
Williams: In the Virginian countryside is the home of a man the White House has appointed to imagine Americas future wars. 01:41
A decorated Vietnam veteran, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski has a daunting brief change the lumbering U.S. army into a fighting force flexible enough to win conventional battles, but also defeat unconventional new enemies. Its called transformation, and since 911 his mission has had new urgency.
01:50
Cebrowski: The objective is a sustained competitive advantage in a changing world. 02:14
Williams: So without transformation, is the army heading for obsolescence?Cebrowski: Without transformation, certainly. Because national security and certainly the military enterprise is a fully two-sided game. The United States right now is the big kid on the block. Everyone else studies us, everyone else designs against us, 02:18
everyone else designs against us. So to the extent that America stays the same its military force is ultimately doomed. 02:44
Music
Williams: Admiral Cebrowski enjoys the backing of the President, but there are influential forces arrayed against him. Decades of wars have bred a powerful defence industry that resists anything that may threaten the cash flow. 02:58
Williams: To fight the Cold War the military spent billions and billions of dollars buying bigger and bigger weapons from private defence contractors. These defence contractors guaranteed continued political support by spreading the manufacture of these weapons across dozens of congressional districts. This lucrative coalition of military, industry and politicians is called the iron triangle. And it is the iron triangle which is today battling to stop the true transformation of the U.S. military. 03:19
Williams: On Capitol Hill Republican Senator James Inhofe is on his way to a critical gathering of the U.S. Senate. Top of the agenda to push through plans to spend 13-billion U.S. dollars building a new gun -- 03:55
indeed the worlds biggest gun. 04:11
Music
Williams: The weapon is a massive 40-tonne self-propelled canon called Crusader -- so large it takes Americas biggest cargo plane to deliver just one to the battlefield. 04:18
Promo Reporter: a single howitzer can drop nearly a tonne and a half of steel on a target at the same time Willaims: Like many defence contractors the Crusader maker has ensured political support by planning to build the gun in lot of congressional seats across the country 04:35
Promo Reporter: Initially formed with two army leads and two industry team mates, the team has grown to include nearly 45 industry and governmental subcontractors Williams: And it all comes carefully wrapped in patriotism. 04:50
Promo Reporter: Crusader gives our soldier the capability to win future wars and ensure a safer America for everyone.
Williams: To the man with his eye on the future though Crusader is a Cold War relic that should be cancelled no matter how many jobs are lost. 05:11
Cebrowski: This is not to say that the Crusader is not perhaps more efficient than the systems it would replace. But in the new strategic context it is simply devalued. 05:20
Every dollar spent on Crusader is a dollar that needs to be spent somewhere else. And to the extent you spend more money on that you delay and make more difficult what has to come next. 05:33
Music
Williams: And what comes next is here. Deep in Californias Mojave Desert at a tightly controlled testing facility is Cebrowskis secret weapon a rare glimpse of the future thats already reality. 06:11
Predator B is an unmanned robotic spy plane thats about as high-tech as it gets its also the lynchpin of Cebrowskis plan to transform the military. 06:34
Cassidy: Predators have become a real irritant to the bad guys. They sit up there and they dwell -- nobody knows theyre up there. Somebody moves, 06:48
you can see them, you can follow them, you can identify them. Somebody can make a decision about what to do about it. 06:58
Williams: Up close Predator gives the eerie impression it has a mind of its own in reality it is a remote-controlled killer. From ten thousand feet through clouds this spy place can make out a human face. 07:08
Williams: Using a camera in the aircrafts nose, Predator is flown by a pilot from this control room. Via satellite he can even fly one of these drones from the other side of the world. 07:37
Williams: The U.S. Air Force cant get enough of them it already has eighty, and two have been circling over Afghanistan 24 hours a day since fighting started. Now Predators been given a deadly modification - hellfire antitank missiles - seen here for the first time on an internal air force video. 07:53
Promo Reporter: When urgent or fleeting targets such as scud missiles or columns of troops are located, they require immediate attention 08:19
Williams: The Predator is central to what Admiral Cebrowski calls a network centric battlefield -- a new type of war machine that America hopes will maintain its military supremacy forever. 08:26
Cebrowski: The issue is not weapons reach, the issue is sensor reach. 08:40
We can put a weapon on Mars if we wanted to, but can we sense the target, the right target at the right time to do that. The whole world knows that if we can see a target we can kill it. 08:41
Music
Williams: Yet as 911 so tragically showed, America has a new enemy fighting by new rules. 09:07
It was to bypass Cebrowksis sensors and deliberately avoid Americas military supremacy that drove Al-Qaeda to fly planes into buildings. 09:18
Wilson: Instead of targeting the military which, terrorists in the past have done and guerrillas do, they now target the civilian population. They have targeted our society and our civilian infrastructure. 09:31
It makes it very clear that our government and our military can no longer protect us. 09:43
Williams: Gary GI Wilson is a retired Marine colonel who served in Somalia, the Gulf and undercover in Colombia. Based on his tough field experience, he predicted 23 years ago that there would be a 911. It would be the first shot in a new type of conflict and he gave it a name -- fourth generation warfare. 09:48
Wilson: The fourth-generation adversary looks at their enemy holistically. Hell go after the economy, hell go after it politically, and hell go after it socially, and of course when necessary he probably will attack the military -- but when all these targets are so soft and so vulnerable why bother. 10:12
Wilson: So its a different kind of environment that were seeing developing and large conventional forces, okay, are not well suited for that kind of adversary. 10:29
Williams: Wilson fought for years to have Washingtons defence decision-makers listen. Was he heard? 10:39
Wilson: No. Williams: Why not? Wilson: Well first of all it didnt contribute to the money flow, alright, to be quite frank about it, 10:45
Music
Williams: But in a chilling twist it seems instead Al-Qaeda studied Wilsons work and used it against America. 10:55
In February an al-Qaeda internet site quoted from Wilsons 1989 paper when it confirmed that Osama bin Laden had adopted Fourth Generation Warfare as his military doctrine. 11:05
Fourth-generation warfare the experts said is a new type of war not limited to destroying military targets but will include societies the distinction between war and peace will vanish the time has come for Islamic movements to internalise the rules of fourth-generation warfare .. Wars will be small scale against an enemy who like a ghost will appear and disappear. 11:20
Wilson: What makes this dramatically different is weve got an adversary at work that is focusing on ideas and people and has recognised that we have become addicted to technology and theyre taking advantage of it. 11:49
Williams: GI Wilson isnt the only one urging a military rethink.Spinney: You have no idea how surprised I am this thing as well as it does in wind like this 12:07
Williams: When not sailing the Chesapeake Bay Chuck Spinney works in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. For twenty years hes been one of Washingtons most respected strategic theorists, but hes also an outspoken maverick who warns the defence industry has too much power over Washingtons politicians. 12:16
Spinney: Absolutely and that is the scary thing about this whole is that our system 12:40
is focused inward on its own internal dynamics, when it should be focused outward on the changing nature in the world.Williams: Okay, what role is it playing in stopping true transformation, the human led transformation?
Spinney: Well, its basically preventing it. Its a giant block because theyre essentially trying to protect the gravy-train. 12:43
Williams: So whats the answer? Well, it could look something like this group of marines training in urban warfare. 13:04
Small highly skilled units able to take out a hidden terror cell possibly even in a friendly country. 13:15
No one is saying America will not need conventional weapons or even a large standing army, but they are urging the military to learn the lessons of Vietnam and Somalia end their addiction to high-tech and heavy weapons and learn more about the enemy.
Wilson: Weve relied an awful lot on high-tech platforms. Weve substituted technological solutions for operational solutions and we need to look at focusing on human intelligence versus a lot of this high-tech stuff were doing.
13:42
Promo Reporter: a multi-sensor command and control aircraft will be the hub of a command 13:56
Williams: Its a direct challenge to the type of transformation now embraced by the White House. 14:01
Cebrowski: No one can act without information. No one. And to put a Special Forces platoon in a place and deprive them of information is folly. So this is exactly the point. 14:11
To provide that information, actionable information, requires very sophisticated, highly technical networked censor structure, and that is the heart of our nations technological focus. 14:30
Spinney: All you have to do is listen to the people who are talking about network-centric warfare and youll never hear the word people. Theyre basically talking about some sort of machine, and machines dont fight war people do and they use their minds. Our adversaries are smart. Theyre going to work out the limitations of these sensors and lever them against us. 14:14:48
Williams: In the bush around the Quantico Marine training camp a platoon drills in how to take a bunker. 15:09
Their audience is a group of new officer recruits.
Sergeant: We just want you to get up, and in the most direct manner, quickly move into a 360° defensive perimeter.Men: Yes, staff sergeant. 15:31
Williams: But to the mavericks this is instead where true transformation should start -- new leaders given new ideas on how to fight a new enemy. And after years of being ignored, the mavericks ideas it seems are being heard. 15:39
In September President Bush launched a new national defence strategy. Using much of the mavericks language 15:56
it stresses the need for better intelligence on elusive complex targets. But despite the rhetoric, the game in Washington is still all about money, and power. Smarter soldiers dont win votes, more weapons do.Congress is yet to have its say on Bushs new doctrine - and if the fate of the old Cold War cannon, the Crusader, is anything to go by 16:04
Transforming the military will be tough fight.
Inhofe: Theres been a lot of talk about Crusader. Crusader is a system of the future, it is a system that will correct a deficiency we have right now. 16:29
Williams: For Inhofe, and the reformers who oppose him, the critical moment has arrived. During this sitting the senate will decide whether or not to support the building of the Crusader. 16:37
Inhofe: We in this chamber have to make a determination -- are we willing to send our troops into combat with inferior equipment. And Id say that is unacceptable, so lets look at where we are today. 16:47
Williams: To some its an absurd outcome congress agrees to cancel the original Crusader, but to build a smaller gun with the same 13-billion dollars going to the same number of jobs. 16:59
For the Senators its jobs back home; for the reformers its a sign of just how much Washington must change for the military to be truly transformed.
Wilson: We can continue to acquisition things, okay, but the end result may be that we have all these things, okay, but we end up so vulnerable and so threatened that we may not survive much as a nation. 1 7:24
Music
Williams: As Iraq may show, there is still a need for a strong conventional force. But some feel Americas ready use of military might to solve its problems will just create more enemies. 17:44
Spinney: We can always just bring in B-2s and just start carpet-bombing, but over time what youre going to see is increasing strategic isolation. 17:59
More people could essentially start saying, hey weve got to put a stop to these people, and we could find ourselves in a very unenviable position in the world. 18:08
Williams: Its an ironic outcome -- at the very time America is the worlds only superpower the nature of conflict is changing and if its military fails to change with it, then all the bombs in the world wont stop another 911 or win the fourth-generation war. 18:19
Music Reporter: Evan Williams
Camera: Geoffrey Lye
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Producer: Dugald Maudsley
October 2002 1850 00:00
Music
Williams: This is America at its most powerful. 00:19
Music
Williams: Deep in Nevadas desert its Firepower Day - a chance for the US Air force to show off its overwhelming ability to blow things up. 00:24
Music
Williams: Junior generals are invited, but the real target is the American public, here to seek assurance they can still be protected. For while their military has the hardware to win conventional cold war-style battles, on September 11th that was no longer enough. 00:47
Cebrowski: On 911, the contract with America that was held with the Department of Defence was 01:04
shredded and is now in the process of being rewritten. 01:09
Williams: And just how that contract should be rewritten has sparked one of the greatest battles the US military has ever fought a battle for its own future. 01:15
Williams: In the Virginian countryside is the home of a man the White House has appointed to imagine Americas future wars. 01:41
A decorated Vietnam veteran, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski has a daunting brief change the lumbering U.S. army into a fighting force flexible enough to win conventional battles, but also defeat unconventional new enemies. Its called transformation, and since 911 his mission has had new urgency.
01:50
Cebrowski: The objective is a sustained competitive advantage in a changing world. 02:14
Williams: So without transformation, is the army heading for obsolescence?Cebrowski: Without transformation, certainly. Because national security and certainly the military enterprise is a fully two-sided game. The United States right now is the big kid on the block. Everyone else studies us, everyone else designs against us, 02:18
everyone else designs against us. So to the extent that America stays the same its military force is ultimately doomed. 02:44
Music
Williams: Admiral Cebrowski enjoys the backing of the President, but there are influential forces arrayed against him. Decades of wars have bred a powerful defence industry that resists anything that may threaten the cash flow. 02:58
Williams: To fight the Cold War the military spent billions and billions of dollars buying bigger and bigger weapons from private defence contractors. These defence contractors guaranteed continued political support by spreading the manufacture of these weapons across dozens of congressional districts. This lucrative coalition of military, industry and politicians is called the iron triangle. And it is the iron triangle which is today battling to stop the true transformation of the U.S. military. 03:19
Williams: On Capitol Hill Republican Senator James Inhofe is on his way to a critical gathering of the U.S. Senate. Top of the agenda to push through plans to spend 13-billion U.S. dollars building a new gun -- 03:55
indeed the worlds biggest gun. 04:11
Music
Williams: The weapon is a massive 40-tonne self-propelled canon called Crusader -- so large it takes Americas biggest cargo plane to deliver just one to the battlefield. 04:18
Promo Reporter: a single howitzer can drop nearly a tonne and a half of steel on a target at the same time Willaims: Like many defence contractors the Crusader maker has ensured political support by planning to build the gun in lot of congressional seats across the country 04:35
Promo Reporter: Initially formed with two army leads and two industry team mates, the team has grown to include nearly 45 industry and governmental subcontractors Williams: And it all comes carefully wrapped in patriotism. 04:50
Promo Reporter: Crusader gives our soldier the capability to win future wars and ensure a safer America for everyone.
Williams: To the man with his eye on the future though Crusader is a Cold War relic that should be cancelled no matter how many jobs are lost. 05:11
Cebrowski: This is not to say that the Crusader is not perhaps more efficient than the systems it would replace. But in the new strategic context it is simply devalued. 05:20
Every dollar spent on Crusader is a dollar that needs to be spent somewhere else. And to the extent you spend more money on that you delay and make more difficult what has to come next. 05:33
Music
Williams: And what comes next is here. Deep in Californias Mojave Desert at a tightly controlled testing facility is Cebrowskis secret weapon a rare glimpse of the future thats already reality. 06:11
Predator B is an unmanned robotic spy plane thats about as high-tech as it gets its also the lynchpin of Cebrowskis plan to transform the military. 06:34
Cassidy: Predators have become a real irritant to the bad guys. They sit up there and they dwell -- nobody knows theyre up there. Somebody moves, 06:48
you can see them, you can follow them, you can identify them. Somebody can make a decision about what to do about it. 06:58
Williams: Up close Predator gives the eerie impression it has a mind of its own in reality it is a remote-controlled killer. From ten thousand feet through clouds this spy place can make out a human face. 07:08
Williams: Using a camera in the aircrafts nose, Predator is flown by a pilot from this control room. Via satellite he can even fly one of these drones from the other side of the world. 07:37
Williams: The U.S. Air Force cant get enough of them it already has eighty, and two have been circling over Afghanistan 24 hours a day since fighting started. Now Predators been given a deadly modification - hellfire antitank missiles - seen here for the first time on an internal air force video. 07:53
Promo Reporter: When urgent or fleeting targets such as scud missiles or columns of troops are located, they require immediate attention 08:19
Williams: The Predator is central to what Admiral Cebrowski calls a network centric battlefield -- a new type of war machine that America hopes will maintain its military supremacy forever. 08:26
Cebrowski: The issue is not weapons reach, the issue is sensor reach. 08:40
We can put a weapon on Mars if we wanted to, but can we sense the target, the right target at the right time to do that. The whole world knows that if we can see a target we can kill it. 08:41
Music
Williams: Yet as 911 so tragically showed, America has a new enemy fighting by new rules. 09:07
It was to bypass Cebrowksis sensors and deliberately avoid Americas military supremacy that drove Al-Qaeda to fly planes into buildings. 09:18
Wilson: Instead of targeting the military which, terrorists in the past have done and guerrillas do, they now target the civilian population. They have targeted our society and our civilian infrastructure. 09:31
It makes it very clear that our government and our military can no longer protect us. 09:43
Williams: Gary GI Wilson is a retired Marine colonel who served in Somalia, the Gulf and undercover in Colombia. Based on his tough field experience, he predicted 23 years ago that there would be a 911. It would be the first shot in a new type of conflict and he gave it a name -- fourth generation warfare. 09:48
Wilson: The fourth-generation adversary looks at their enemy holistically. Hell go after the economy, hell go after it politically, and hell go after it socially, and of course when necessary he probably will attack the military -- but when all these targets are so soft and so vulnerable why bother. 10:12
Wilson: So its a different kind of environment that were seeing developing and large conventional forces, okay, are not well suited for that kind of adversary. 10:29
Williams: Wilson fought for years to have Washingtons defence decision-makers listen. Was he heard? 10:39
Wilson: No. Williams: Why not? Wilson: Well first of all it didnt contribute to the money flow, alright, to be quite frank about it, 10:45
Music
Williams: But in a chilling twist it seems instead Al-Qaeda studied Wilsons work and used it against America. 10:55
In February an al-Qaeda internet site quoted from Wilsons 1989 paper when it confirmed that Osama bin Laden had adopted Fourth Generation Warfare as his military doctrine. 11:05
Fourth-generation warfare the experts said is a new type of war not limited to destroying military targets but will include societies the distinction between war and peace will vanish the time has come for Islamic movements to internalise the rules of fourth-generation warfare .. Wars will be small scale against an enemy who like a ghost will appear and disappear. 11:20
Wilson: What makes this dramatically different is weve got an adversary at work that is focusing on ideas and people and has recognised that we have become addicted to technology and theyre taking advantage of it. 11:49
Williams: GI Wilson isnt the only one urging a military rethink.Spinney: You have no idea how surprised I am this thing as well as it does in wind like this 12:07
Williams: When not sailing the Chesapeake Bay Chuck Spinney works in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. For twenty years hes been one of Washingtons most respected strategic theorists, but hes also an outspoken maverick who warns the defence industry has too much power over Washingtons politicians. 12:16
Spinney: Absolutely and that is the scary thing about this whole is that our system 12:40
is focused inward on its own internal dynamics, when it should be focused outward on the changing nature in the world.Williams: Okay, what role is it playing in stopping true transformation, the human led transformation?
Spinney: Well, its basically preventing it. Its a giant block because theyre essentially trying to protect the gravy-train. 12:43
Williams: So whats the answer? Well, it could look something like this group of marines training in urban warfare. 13:04
Small highly skilled units able to take out a hidden terror cell possibly even in a friendly country. 13:15
No one is saying America will not need conventional weapons or even a large standing army, but they are urging the military to learn the lessons of Vietnam and Somalia end their addiction to high-tech and heavy weapons and learn more about the enemy.
Wilson: Weve relied an awful lot on high-tech platforms. Weve substituted technological solutions for operational solutions and we need to look at focusing on human intelligence versus a lot of this high-tech stuff were doing.
13:42
Promo Reporter: a multi-sensor command and control aircraft will be the hub of a command 13:56
Williams: Its a direct challenge to the type of transformation now embraced by the White House. 14:01
Cebrowski: No one can act without information. No one. And to put a Special Forces platoon in a place and deprive them of information is folly. So this is exactly the point. 14:11
To provide that information, actionable information, requires very sophisticated, highly technical networked censor structure, and that is the heart of our nations technological focus. 14:30
Spinney: All you have to do is listen to the people who are talking about network-centric warfare and youll never hear the word people. Theyre basically talking about some sort of machine, and machines dont fight war people do and they use their minds. Our adversaries are smart. Theyre going to work out the limitations of these sensors and lever them against us. 14:14:48
Williams: In the bush around the Quantico Marine training camp a platoon drills in how to take a bunker. 15:09
Their audience is a group of new officer recruits.
Sergeant: We just want you to get up, and in the most direct manner, quickly move into a 360° defensive perimeter.Men: Yes, staff sergeant. 15:31
Williams: But to the mavericks this is instead where true transformation should start -- new leaders given new ideas on how to fight a new enemy. And after years of being ignored, the mavericks ideas it seems are being heard. 15:39
In September President Bush launched a new national defence strategy. Using much of the mavericks language 15:56
it stresses the need for better intelligence on elusive complex targets. But despite the rhetoric, the game in Washington is still all about money, and power. Smarter soldiers dont win votes, more weapons do.Congress is yet to have its say on Bushs new doctrine - and if the fate of the old Cold War cannon, the Crusader, is anything to go by 16:04
Transforming the military will be tough fight.
Inhofe: Theres been a lot of talk about Crusader. Crusader is a system of the future, it is a system that will correct a deficiency we have right now. 16:29
Williams: For Inhofe, and the reformers who oppose him, the critical moment has arrived. During this sitting the senate will decide whether or not to support the building of the Crusader. 16:37
Inhofe: We in this chamber have to make a determination -- are we willing to send our troops into combat with inferior equipment. And Id say that is unacceptable, so lets look at where we are today. 16:47
Williams: To some its an absurd outcome congress agrees to cancel the original Crusader, but to build a smaller gun with the same 13-billion dollars going to the same number of jobs. 16:59
For the Senators its jobs back home; for the reformers its a sign of just how much Washington must change for the military to be truly transformed.
Wilson: We can continue to acquisition things, okay, but the end result may be that we have all these things, okay, but we end up so vulnerable and so threatened that we may not survive much as a nation. 1 7:24
Music
Williams: As Iraq may show, there is still a need for a strong conventional force. But some feel Americas ready use of military might to solve its problems will just create more enemies. 17:44
Spinney: We can always just bring in B-2s and just start carpet-bombing, but over time what youre going to see is increasing strategic isolation. 17:59
More people could essentially start saying, hey weve got to put a stop to these people, and we could find ourselves in a very unenviable position in the world. 18:08
Williams: Its an ironic outcome -- at the very time America is the worlds only superpower the nature of conflict is changing and if its military fails to change with it, then all the bombs in the world wont stop another 911 or win the fourth-generation war. 18:19
Music Reporter: Evan Williams
Camera: Geoffrey Lye
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Producer: Dugald Maudsley