After the Tank

Richard J. Newman
U.S. News & World Report
September 18, 2000

FORT KNOX, KY.--Loudspeakers blare "TNT" by the heavy-metal band AC/DC as the Army's big guns come together in an orchestra of destruction. The huge 155-millimeter shells from howitzers dig craters in the distant hillside. Wire-guided missiles from Bradley fighting vehicles smash into old tank carcasses. Rockets from Apache helicopters strafe the brush.

Short of war, the combined arms live-fire exercise here is the best show there is of the Army's might and machismo. And nothing so embodies that muscle as the Army's heavy-metal showpiece, the M1A2 Abrams tank. As four of them repeatedly launch 75-pound high-explosive rounds into their targets, the air quakes with the concussion from the blasts. A grandstand 50 yards away rattles with each eruption. When the show is over, an armor officer boasts to the crowd that "with equipment such as the M1A2, the United States Army dominates land warfare."

If it can get to the battle. The reality is that the 70-ton Abrams, despite a storied past, is simply too big and heavy to transport quickly to the kinds of conflicts the Pentagon foresees over the next several decades. This is forcing the Army to rethink how it fights and to design new, nimble battlefield systems that planners hope can take the place of heavy-armor behemoths. "The M1 is fading out," declares Maj. Gen. James Dubik, director of a series of reforms the Army calls "Transformation."

The biggest overhaul of Army tactics in decades comes at an awkward time, however. The Army already is beset by turbulence caused by personnel shortfalls, training cutbacks, and a large menu of missions. In fact, the Army is planning big cuts in its training organizations in 2001 to fulfill a promise Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, made a year ago--to plug all the staffing holes in the combat units. The training cutbacks could prompt further disputes over the state of military readiness between Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush and Democratic contender Al Gore.

Vulnerable? Many soldiers, while recognizing the demands of peacekeeping and other modern missions, fear that moving away from the tank could leave them vulnerable in a shooting war. "We jump in this big iron beast and we're invincible," says 1st Sgt. Donald Norman, assistant commandant at the NCO Academy at Fort Knox. "Now, I'm not necessarily the baddest guy on the block. I'm concerned." Army leaders anticipate months of such anxiety. The changes, says a senior Army official, "are like a family going through a divorce. It has all those emotional connotations."

The Army's turmoil, however, may be a template for the rest of the military. Defense experts have increasingly been pressuring the Pentagon to shed Cold War-era weapons in favor of new high-tech sensors to find and track enemy forces, long-range "smart" munitions to kill them from afar, and even space weapons. Bush has added to the debate, saying he would "skip a generation of technology" in reshaping the military for the future. Gore, according to advisers, agrees that the military needs to accelerate innovation but feels that axing current weapons would be too rash.

Many defense experts agree with Bush. They advocate replacing manned fighter jets with unmanned ones, for instance, and building small, stealthy missile ships instead of huge aircraft carriers. "If you think the Army is having a hard time getting away from tanks," says Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century, a conservative think tank, "just think of the Air Force giving up manned combat jets."

The tank's huge footprint has been a gnawing concern of Army strategists for over a decade. The Abrams was designed in the 1970s to outgun Soviet tanks on the plains of central Europe. On NATO's eastern flanks, autobahns and bridges were strengthened to make sure the monster machines could get to the fight quickly. Not so in the rest of the world. Even during the Gulf War, when U.S. ground forces killed upwards of 1,000 Iraqi tanks while losing just 18 of their own, war planners had concerns. "Had we been forced to go to Baghdad, many of the bridges and causeways would not have been able to handle our tanks," says Maj. Gen. B. B. Bell, chief of the Armor Center at Fort Knox. Now, improvements in armor-penetrating bullets by the Russians and others could force the Army to add even more armor--and weight--to the Abrams. "We could add armor till it weighs 100 tons and sinks to the center of the earth," quips Bell.

Roadblocks. During last year's war against Yugoslavia, Army planners discovered that moving tanks from Albania into Kosovo would have required four heavy engineering battalions working for four months to reinforce a dozen bridges along the route. "It would have totally telegraphed what we intended to do," says Bell. And even if that could be done, a force of Abrams tanks--each weighing the equivalent of 28 Chevy Suburbans--requires so much fuel and other support that an attack on supply lines could paralyze it. Other options weren't good either. The Army considered sending the elite 82d Airborne Division into Kosovo. The paratroopers could have arrived within days. But armed with little more than rifles, they might have been overwhelmed by Serbian armor before relief arrived.

In between ponderous, powerhouse units and nimble but lightly armed infantrymen, the Army found it had little that could get to the theater quickly with enough bang to make a difference. It could have combined light and heavy units, but the Army's big, division-size fighting structures make that too cumbersome. Instead, such quandaries have led the Army to revamp battle-tested armored warfare tactics that date to Lt. Gen. George Patton's sweep across Europe in 1944 and 1945. So last spring at Fort Lewis, Wash., the soldiers of the 3rd Brigade, 2d Infantry Division, turned in all 75 of their Abrams tanks. Lt. Col. Dana Pittard's battalion honored the event with a ceremony. Family members came, and the troops stood in formation as the tanks rumbled past one by one. When the last two tanks drove by, the soldiers saluted. "There was a lot of emotion," says Pittard. "As a tanker, you live and breathe armored warfare."

The brigade then got a raft of "surrogate" vehicles borrowed from Canada and elsewhere. Next year, those will be replaced by an "interim armored vehicle," or IAV, a light and lean version of a tank. The Army plans to convert as many as eight of its 32 combat brigades to such medium-weight units in the next five to 10 years--and then transition to an even more radical design its scientists are just beginning to work on.

The IAV will weigh less than 20 tons. Unlike an Abrams, it will fit on a C-130 cargo plane--the Pentagon's most plentiful transporter. That's necessary if the Army is to reach its new goal of being able to ship a full brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours. But the IAV will also come with a big vulnerability: It may not be able to withstand the blast of weapons as small as a rocket-propelled grenade. For tank crews, that is an alarming development. Tankers today feel so secure in the belly of the beast that their motto is "death before dismount."

That may change to "hide or die." In one Army war game simulating a battle against Yugoslavia, a new "medium weight" force was pulverized by enemy artillery and by ambushes in the rugged Balkan terrain. "Loss ratios were pathetic," says an Army officer involved with the tests. For every enemy vehicle killed, the United States lost one of its own. "We prefer 10 to 1, and even much greater," says the officer.

One of the jobs of the soldiers at Fort Lewis is to figure out how to overcome those disadvantages. "When we ask about doctrine, the general will look me in the eye and say, 'We haven't answered that question yet,' " says Lt. Benjamin Hauser, who leads one of the 3rd Brigade's scout platoons. " 'That's why we're sending you out in the woods. To figure it out.' " The solicitousness of their leaders gives troops some confidence that the new reforms might work. Unlike other experiments of the past decade--in which the Army issued soldiers digital helmets, backpack computers, and other gizmos that haven't panned out--"this seems different," says another platoon leader. "There's just a feel . . . that this is going somewhere."

Face to face. It will probably be a bumpy road, though--especially for the career tankers who have to adjust to life on the hoof. The introductory course for many of the converts is a mock Third World village at Fort Lewis, called "Asgard." As a squad of four former tankers walks into the hamlet to do some "combat interviewing"--the Army's new term for gathering information from locals--resentful "villagers" show them none of the deference a crew atop a tank is accustomed to receiving. One young tough with tattoos and a muscle shirt chats up two of the GIs--and then tries to snatch the night-vision goggles off one of their utility belts. A merchant offers another troop a glass of rancid juice. The soldier swallows it, fearful that turning it down might be an insult. "I've never seen anything like this," says Sgt. Bill Stanford at a briefing after the exercise. "Usually as a tanker you just pull security on the outside of a town."

The Army has decided, however, that rigorous intelligence can be a more powerful weapon than a fleet of tanks. Under conventional doctrine, armored units seize and occupy huge swaths of terrain, to prevent sneak attacks by enemy forces they may not be aware of. Physically controlling so much ground requires huge attacking forces, and support units that could be four to five times as large.

With better intelligence, the Army believes it can spread its forces out more, attack enemy tank-killing units before they can get off the first shot, and dramatically reduce the "tail" required to fuel and support the combat forces. Instead of sweeping through all of Kosovo, for instance, computer models show that an intelligence-rich unit could have concentrated its forces on a number of key areas--its own supply lines, a couple of airfields, one or two major cities, and places where the Serbs were massing their forces. "We're not as worried about the terrain in between anymore because we know what's there," says a senior Army officer.

But such thorough intelligence has been an elusive holy grail for centuries. Cagey armies have always found ways to hide, camouflage themselves, and otherwise fool their opponents. During the Kosovo war, for instance, the Serbs tricked NATO's air forces into bombing dozens of phony tanks. But Army leaders now believe that a heavy emphasis on ground soldiers gathering information, along with advanced new technology, will produce the kind of intelligence breakthrough that will allow it to move beyond the tank.

In the 3rd Brigade, for instance, the Army converted an entire battalion of 400 troops from an armored shock force to an intelligence unit. That amounts to nearly five times the complement of scouts in a conventional brigade. Their mission will be to sneak close to the enemy and relay back digital pictures and computer reports of troop layouts. Other intelligence sources, such as satellites and "unmanned aerial vehicles" circling over enemy positions, will help fill out a "common battlefield picture." The master map, showing the location of all known enemy and friendly forces, will be updated continually and broadcast to commanders at all levels.

Information will be such a crucial weapon that the high ground may be reserved not for combat forces but for computer technicians. Under a concept commanders at Fort Lewis call "maneuvering the network," the goal of the brigade's movement will be not to gain the best fighting positions but to position the brigade's command-and-control vehicles, radio relay platforms, and other computer processing equipment in the best spot for transmitting and receiving. It's a daunting concept. "Cisco [the computer-networking company] has told us, no company in the world is trying to set up this kind of Internet," says Col. Tony Coroalles, chief of staff for Transformation.

The Army is also testing some novel fighting techniques. Since before the Civil War, American troops have followed the doctrine of "movement to contact"--seeking out the enemy and fighting wherever they find him. The new brigades will have to fight smarter. "We will make contact," says Maj. Jody Petery, executive officer of the 3rd Brigade's scout squadron, "but by means other than stumbling into them and being fired upon."

Since the new fighting vehicle will be at a disadvantage against enemy tanks, it will have to fight from a distance, or with the virtue of surprise. That's where the brigade's superior information becomes a killer app. Intelligence will help the unit set up ambushes, where it can slam opposing vehicles like the Russian T-72 tank in the side, to avoid a head-on confrontation. Or it will send targeting data to missile or rocket batteries hidden several miles behind the front lines. "You don't want to stand up and fight a conventional war," says David Estes, deputy director of the Mounted Maneuver Battlespace Lab at Fort Knox.

What works? For now, the Army's innovations may be the equivalent of the first clunky European tanks that creaked across World War I battlefields. It wasn't until World War II that Germany developed the blitzkrieg doctrine--including tanks, airplanes, infantrymen, and other warriors fighting together--that helped its outnumbered force roll up the French Army. But many experts deride the reforms as marginal changes that might improve the Army's image but not its performance. "It sounds like this thing isn't supposed to fight, it's just supposed to get to Albania in four days," says Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Instead of just one kind of brigade, Krepinevich believes the Army should emulate the German approach and experiment with a number of different forces: one designed for urban warfare, another for attacking enemy forces deep behind front lines, and perhaps a third operating without access to logistics bases, which are increasingly vulnerable to enemy missiles.

Relying for survival on information--instead of big guns and thick armor--also causes severe heartburn for a lot of soldiers. The new brigade "is undergunned and not survivable," complains one colonel, echoing the concern among armor troops. "This is a static outfit incapable of concentrating significant combat power." For one thing, "we're counting more on information than we have any right to," says retired Col. Rick Sinnreich, who played an enemy commander in the Army's showcase war game last spring. To fool the Army's intelligence experts, Sinnreich flooded the friendly force's sensors with information, almost all of it false. The U.S. Army still won--but only because its forces were able to hop rapidly around the massive battle zone on a "joint tilt rotorcraft," a kind of heliplane that hasn't been designed yet.

Daunting technical challenges aren't the only obstacles. Marine Corps experiments have shown that to destroy targets rapidly, low-ranking troops must have the authority to launch devastating weapons. But in Kosovo, fears of causing civilian casualties forced decisions higher up the chain, not lower down. Pilots, for instance, often had to get the approval of their commanders to bomb vehicles they thought were tanks or artillery pieces. "We will probably have to give captains and sergeants the ability to do targeting that in Kosovo the generals were doing," says Col. Gary Anderson, chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Va. "The sociology of working through this is going to be as challenging as the technology."

And of course, a new Army won't come cheap. Leaders in other services have already objected to the estimated $ 70 billion cost of the Army's reforms over the next 10 to 20 years. Unless Congress and a new administration pump up the Pentagon's budget, that bill will soon collide with other high-profile programs such as the F-22 combat jet, the Joint Strike Fighter, and the Navy's new aircraft carrier.

Army leaders are nonplused. "This brigade combat team would have no difficulty going against an up-armored enemy in the right terrain," insists Dubik, the Transformation director. "I'd take it to Korea and dare a mechanized force to attack it. I'd use the [scout] battalion and the antitank units to set up ambushes so that armor would not have a chance." The same goes for Kosovo, he says.

Open desert, like the ground the Army fought on in the Gulf War, would be a tougher environment, since it has fewer terrain features to take advantage of. Army analysis shows that a medium-weight force would have been a more effective screen against Iraq's armored columns in 1990 than the 82d Airborne, which for several tense weeks was all that stood between the Iraqi Army and Saudi Arabia. But the new units would take heavy casualties in combat. The risk that the Army may yet have to fight a booming, Cold War-style battle is why it plans to maintain a shrinking number of armored units--which it calls "legacy forces"--until 2031.

"Miracle" weapons. The Army hopes that by the time it has built six to eight new medium-weight brigades, a brand-new, high-tech combat machine will begin to make the tank unnecessary. The "future combat system" is meant to combine the best features of an Abrams--survivability against most weapons, and heavy firepower--with the slim design and maneuverability of the interim combat vehicle. But instead of concentrating all of that on one chassis, the future combat system will probably be a network of several vehicles. A flying spy drone may gather targeting data, then transfer it to an unmanned rocket or missile launcher. A human controller may be in a third vehicle, somewhere behind the front lines, to OK all weapons launches.

Earlier this year, the Army moved up the due date of the still-theoretical system from 2025 to 2012. That would require research and development contracts to be signed by 2003--a record-setting pace by Pentagon standards. But the technological barriers are enormous, as is the attendant skepticism by veteran troopers.

Protecting combat vehicles against the kinds of armor-penetrating weapons expected in a decade will require revolutionary breakthroughs in armor technology. One concept is "active armor" that will sense when a round is fired its way, then send out sheets of flak to deflect the weapon--all within two seconds. The Army may also experiment with ceramics and other high-tech materials. But for now, physics stands in the way. Even if a 20-ton minitank were impervious to a high-speed penetrator, the impact alone could send the vehicle tumbling 500 yards downrange. "The focus of this effort is a nonexistent miracle platform, with miracle weapons that we may never see," gripes one Army officer. Which shows that before the Army defeats its next enemy, it must win over its own troops.