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Never before has a nation dominated the conventional battlefield the
way the United States has during the past two years in Afghanistan
and Iraq. But with U.S. troops now embroiled in unconventional
warfare against insurgents in Iraq, skeptics are saying that
America's high-tech advantage is no longer decisive. Yet Pentagon
planners are placing a multibillion-dollar bet that the critics are
wrong. In this program, NOVA, in collaboration with the reporting
staff of
The New York Times, probes the rapidly evolving science of
war.
NOVA was given unprecedented access to top military officials and
defense contractors to tell the story of how "smart" weapons became
"brilliant"—accurate to within two meters of their target. The
program also reveals the inside story of how those "brilliant"
weapons worked yet ultimately failed to prevent a guerrilla war.
The program's producer investigates the laboratories of American
weapon designers, witnessing their scramble to create systems built
to counter threats from terrorists and guerrillas. Among the
ingenious new products: weapons that automatically detect and return
sniper fire within milliseconds, and robots that disarm the hundreds
of handmade roadside bombs targeting Allied soldiers.
NOVA also goes deep inside the Pentagon, where the Combating
Terrorism Technology Task Force meets. A working group of
intelligence agencies and counterterrorism experts hastily convened
in the aftermath of September 11th, this task force has a mandate to
fast-track technologies that can immediately help the war on terror.
Dr. Ron Sega, a former astronaut, oversees $60 billion of the
Pentagon's annual research budget. He briefs NOVA on the group's
strategy and activities.
As remarkable as these new weapon systems are, their real value may
come from a transformed military culture, as NOVA learns from Adm.
Arthur Cebrowski, head of the Pentagon's Office of Force
Transformation. Cebrowski is a celebrated proponent of
network-centric warfare, a new doctrine that enables commanders and
soldiers to cut through the notorious "fog of war" by sharing all
possible information about a conflict in real time—then using
that information to overwhelm the enemy. (To hear Cebrowski tell it,
see
Transforming Warfare.) Among the intelligence-gathering organizations making this
possible is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—also
visited by NOVA—which assembles surveillance from satellites,
unmanned aerial vehicles, and other sources to create multilayered
maps for almost any point on Earth.
Despite the remarkable scale of this technological effort, its
ultimate value in the war on terror is called into question by one
of America's most respected historians and military strategists,
Major General Robert Scales, Jr. Former Commandant of the Army War
College and coauthor (with Williamson Murray) of the book
The Iraq War (Read an
excerpt.) Scales tells
NOVA that "intelligence is not just about collecting and processing
great amounts of information, it is about understanding the enemy as
he is. Without political knowledge—immersion in the language,
culture, and history of the region—data gathered by
technological means may only reinforce preconceived, erroneous,
sometimes disastrous notions."
NOVA examines how some of these preconceived notions may have been
evident in Millennium Challenge 2002, an elaborate war-game
simulation designed to test this new military doctrine in advance of
the invasion of Iraq. The "enemy" commander for the simulation,
retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, describes
how he was able to use unconventional tactics to challenge U.S.
tactics—even to sink U.S. ships—despite the high-tech
war machine arrayed against him. Van Riper claims it was a lesson
that was ignored in the rush to implement this new way of fighting
wars. (Hear more on this topic from
Van Riper.)
Are critics right to charge that the United States is in danger of
another Vietnam-style debacle? Or are Pentagon insiders correct in
insisting that America knows its enemy better than ever and is well
on the road to defeating it? "Battle Plan Under Fire" gives
necessary background to frame a smart answer.
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