Historically Speaking 9/11 at 10 By BG John S. Brown U.S. retired

ost of us can remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard of the attacks of 9/11. Not a few of us had friends and colleagues who per- ished in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon Mor a field in Pennsylvania. The moment is indelible in personal memory and was a historical marker of things to come. Most obviously, it launched an expansive global war on terrorism and associated operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. These operations have already inspired credible accounts, a few of which I cite below. Less visible but also important, 9/11 had significant implications for the Army as an institu- tion. I would like to comment on four: consolidating the transformation to a -based digitized expedi- tionary Army, radically deepening “joint-ness,” re- defining responsibilities for operations other than war and operationalizing the reserve components. AP/Jim Collins Dennis Steele/ARMY Magazine

September 2011 I ARMY 97 Ground crews load an Abrams onto a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. The aircraft delivered the Army’s main battle tank to an Operation Iraqi Freedom air base in northern Iraq.

tarting at least as early as 1989, five chiefs of staff and their colleagues strove in ap- ostolic succession to trans- form the Army from Cold SWar paradigms. The changed interna- tional situation required strategic mo- Keith Reed Air Force/MSgt. U.S. bility rather than forward deployment, and the digitized “In- Training, infrastructure improvements and preposition- formation Age” was dawning. Taking massive “peace ing were critical, as were greatly increased numbers of dividend” cuts in Europe, the Army preserved most of its modern roll-on/roll-off ships and the recently introduced force structure in the United States. These forces, which it C-17. The C-17-facilitated airborne landing in Northern sought to render more strategically mobile through preposi- Iraq was spectacular, but more to our point were the C-17- tioned equipment, improved sealift and airlift, improved landed and -supported miniature armored task forces that base operations and infrastructure, and rendered heavy units supported light forces in the north, west and south. When no one else has any, a little modern ar- mor goes a long way. Javelin missiles and ever-improving attack helicopters further strengthened the light forces. The poster child for forces of interme- diate weight, the Stryker brigade, was not quite ready for the first days of OIF. The first deployed shortly there- after. Stryker have been a success ever since. The Stryker brigade took digitization with it when it arrived, but at the time of 9/11 we had only one brigade, a few headquarters, and some bits and pieces prepared and trained to employ such technologies as Blue Force Tracking

U.S. Army/SPC Clinton Tarzia U.S. (BTF), net-centric exchanges of informa- of 20th Infantry, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry (Stryker Brigade Combat tion, digital reach-back, unmanned aer- Team) conduct route reconnaissance, a presence patrol, a civilian assessment and com- ial vehicles (UAV) and so on. Most digi- bat operations, contributing to the stability of the city of Samarra, Iraq, in December 2003. tal equipment was appliqué on vintage vehicles. A dozen years of spiral devel- lighter and light units more lethal. By 9/11 the first three of opment through advanced war-fighter experiments and these initiatives, honed by the accelerating deployments of other creative enterprises had shown the Army “what right the 1990s, were well-advanced. Indeed, the Army partici- looked like” with respect to digitized equipment, doctrine, pants in the first phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) organization and training. Visions of equipping the entire were about the same units from about the same posts as Army in this fashion were largely hallucinatory, however. It those of Operation Desert Shield, but arguably built up in a would take a lot of money, and money was short. After 9/11, third of the time with an order of magnitude less confusion. and after the launch of OIF in particular, money was no longer a problem. Supplementals soon expanded base bud- BG John S. Brown, USA Ret., was chief of military history at gets by as much as two-thirds. Pruning transformation vi- the U.S. Army Center of Military History from December sions to emphasize aspects relevant to Afghanistan and Iraq, 1998 to October 2005. He commanded the 2nd , 66th the Chief of Staff upgraded units as they deployed. BFT kits Armor, in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War and returned on vehicles exploded from 1,200 to 55,000. Global position- to Kuwait as of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Di- ing systems (GPS), UAVs, satellite communications, digital vision, in 1995. He has a doctorate in history from Indiana equipment and off-the-shelf equipment procured through University. His book, Kevlar Legions: A History of Army the Rapid Fielding Initiative became ubiquitous. Transformation 1989–2005, is forthcoming. Like a good supply sergeant, on September 30, the Army

98 ARMY I September 2011 more autonomously in the conventional phase of OIF than they had during Operation Desert Storm, largely because of advantages conferred by digitization. They became even more independent as operations progressed. As each brigade combat team deployed in turn, it adopted the latest modular posture and was “hosed down” with the latest equipment. Efficient transoceanic unit rotations progressed on a scale larger than ever before, supplanting reliance on individual replacements extant since 1907. Joint-ness, being “purple,” has long been a professed aspi- ration of all the services. The networking capabilities enabled by digitization were discussed above. Prior to the introduc-

U.S. Air Force/MSgt. Andy Dunaway Air Force/MSgt. U.S. tion of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and other GPS- An al Qaeda torture compound and prison in Zenbaraniyah, Iraq, guided munitions in the late 1990s, close air support was is destroyed after being hit with six guided bomb unit-38 Joint Di- hard to make work. The precision-guided munitions that did rect Attack Munitions from a B-1B Lancer in March 2008. exist were expensive, best used on “high value targets.” The prosaic targets tankers and infantrymen were likely to en- was ready to quickly spend the money that came its way. As gage rated “dumb” bombs, called dumb for a reason. Train- a result of digitization, soldiers knew where they were, knew ing could reduce air-ground anxieties, but ground comman- where their buddies were and shared a common view of the ders were often unwilling to take chances and instead battlefield with respect to the enemy. directed pilots to the far side of the fire-support coordination Command nets morphed from spending two-thirds of line. JDAMs and GPS radically increased the precision and their airtime trying to figure out where their own people reduced the cost of munitions intended for targets of modest were to concentrating on plans and execution. import. In Afghanistan, a handful of soldiers trained on the technology turned the war around for the Northern Alliance. he Army entertained the notion of a brigade- In Operation Cobra II, were so confident in joint based force in the transformational delibera- capabilities they were willing to launch with minimal force in tions of the 1990s. Brigades were already as a “rolling start,” relying on joint attacks to even the odds until lethal and geographically dispersed as the divi- the rest of the ground forces caught up. The elaborate set- sions of yore. Trimming away fixed , piece preparations of Desert Storm were set aside in the ex- Tcorps and division overheads could economize on force, pectation that true joint-ness multiplied the capabilities of all pushing assets forward rather than holding them in reserve. services involved. Legitimate debate attended this concept, but rotational de- The digitized expeditionary Army convincingly swept mands to, and operational demands in, Afghanistan and conventional opponents from the battlefield but drew criti- Iraq cut it short. Having committed to unit manning and cism in its handling of subsequent insurgencies. Most of the unit rotation to maintain the morale and effectiveness of the difficulties can be explained by the small forces deployed to volunteer force, the Army needed modular units nimble control such large and restive populations, but there were or- enough to rotate efficiently. With no likely peer or near- ganizational lapses as well. The Fiscal Year 1987 National De- peer adversary, arguments for massing combat support and combat service support at division and became moot. Divisions and corps became command, control and communica- tions nodes which were to be built up in a latticework to conduct operations. Modular combat, combat support and combat service brigades were attached to this latticework as required. Brigade combat teams had already performed

SPC Jerome DeFrank, assistant com- munications NCO, Headquarters and Headquarters , 42nd Infantry Division, programs the unit’s Blue Force Tracker, a navigational and communications system used by coalition forces, in Tikrit, Iraq, in 2005. U.S. Army U.S.

100 ARMY I September 2011 fense Authorization Act established the Assistant Secretary of in and out of theater. The roles and missions are essentially Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict the same; only the timing of the force generation cycle is and the United States Special Operations Command (USSO- different. sign up with an expectation of deploy- COM). The latter was a worldwide joint command in its own ment and generally deploy. The reserve components have right, with a budget independent of the services. The re- become an operational force, not a deep strategic reserve. design tended to remove the Army—and the Marine Corps—from primacy with respect to envisioning and exe- eptember 11 was a watershed. It launched several cuting low intensity conflict (LIC). wars and had significant implications for the Thinking at the time held that the overwhelming majority Army as an institution. It radically accelerated the of the “grunt work” in LIC would be done by friendly locals Army’s transformation into a brigade-based, digi- and that small cadres of highly capable personnel would be tized expeditionary force. Subsequent operations sufficient to support them—and to execute specialized “ki- Sled to ever-increasing joint-ness, reemphasis upon low inten- netic” missions as well. The Army was happy enough to di- sity conflict, and making the reserve components opera- minish its attention to operations other than war, although tional. We now have an Army that is different from what we unconventional scenarios duly appeared in its force-sizing had before the attacks occurred. Change, however, is neither deliberations throughout the 1990s. Conventional units re- perfect nor permanent. The Army we have today suits our configured for LIC as an exception to their primary missions. current circumstances, largely associated with the aftermath Operations in the 1990s led us to suspect—and those in of 9/11. In time circumstances will change. We must have the Afghanistan convinced us—that the locals would not always foresight to adapt as they do. There are watersheds in our fu- be friendly or reliable. Traditional LIC had consisted of coun- ture as well as in our past. ( terguerrilla, population and resources control, and nation building. Responsibilities in these regards dwarfed anything USSOCOM could hope to achieve and, after some introspec- Recommended Reading: tion, the Army migrated back into LIC as a primary mission. Adams, Thomas K., The Army After Next: The First Post- LIC can be manpower-intensive, and rotations to Iraq industrial Army (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University and Afghanistan became especially so. The reserve compo- Press, 2008) nents stepped up to the plate to sustain our all-volunteer Army through this crisis of numbers. For some time the Briscoe, Charles H., et al., Weapon of Choice: ARSOF in Army Reserve and National Guard had been a strategic Afghanistan (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies hedge against the “big one,” providing frameworks for Institute Press, 2004) further mobilization. Units mobilized for operations had Brown, John S., Kevlar Legions: A History of Army been largely complementary, specialists who filled needs Transformation 1989–2005 (Washington D.C.: Center of the active component did not have—or did not have in suf- Military History, forthcoming) ficient quantity. Now reserve component combat, combat Donnelly, William M., Transforming an Army at War: support and combat service support units routinely rotate Designing the Modular Force, 1991–2005 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2007) Fontenot, Gregory, et al., On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005) Gordon, Michael R., and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 2006) Reardon, Mark J., and Jeffery A. Charlston, From Trans- formation to Combat: The First Stryker Brigade at War (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2007) Stewart, Richard W., Operation Enduring Freedom: The United States Army in Afghanistan, October 2001–March 2002 (Washington D.C.: Center of Military History, 2004) Wright, Donald P., and Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in U.S. Army/SGT Russell Gilchrest U.S. Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regi- Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute Press, ment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, patrol with 2008) Afghan soldiers to check conditions in the village of Yawez in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, in 2010.

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