A soldier stares at the display and with a flick of his wrist, a cross-hair magically snaps to the center of the straight lines that define a squat building surrounded by rugged terrain. The enhanced image is being supplied by a drone aircraft, and the cursor is supplied by a combination of the drone, some number of satellites, and software run on the computer in the other room near his terminal in Arizona.
The soldier takes his job seriously; he knows full well the consequences of his next action. Green lights everywhere tell him to push the button and not to think about the possibility of civilians. He has a job to do.
On the eve of the Iraq invasion, Donald Rumsfeld makes some last minute cuts to enlisted personnel going in hot. Having fired or retired anyone who told him otherwise, he has complete faith in the astounding technological superiority on land, sea, air, and space of US weapons systems, and of the superior training of US troops.
With total air superiority, there would be no question marks for establishing supply lines and bases. A well-advertised military display named Shock and Awe would precede boots on the ground, and the message would be clear: capitulate or instantly die. The population of Iraq didn't need any coddling, or coaxing, or reassuring. They only need to sit back and stay out of the way, and enjoy their new freedom. Not freedom in the self-determination way, or freedom to hold their own elections, or economic freedom, but freedom to do whatever was dictated to them.
The eventual failure of that approach became an exercise in learning the same lessons all over again. It didn't matter what level of technology was used; antique artillery shells and electric garage door openers work just fine when trying to attrit enemy forces on home soil. There is no end of tour date for fighters defending their land, and there was no shortage of unemployed Iraqi men to see things that way.
As bad as it got for US forces, it could have turned out much worse. The degree to which Iraq used our own technology against us is unknown to me, but we would know it if it was extensive. Some of this gets a bit technical, but I want to be very clear on what kind of hell we could face using today's technology.
When they did use them, Iraqi insurgents used fairly crude detectors and detonators for their IED's. By most accounts, the majority of IED's were manually detonated by an observer with a cell phone or even with very low tech signaling devices such as garage door openers.
The US military awarded billions in contracts to counter the IED, and this led to the development of special armor, and even special vehicles. Probably the most common defense, though, was fairly simple jamming equipment. Humvee's would drive around with these things turned on in the hope that they would trigger a premature detonation, or block a coded cell signal from triggering an IED at a deadly point.
Knowing a little about electronics, I used to cringe at the thought that it would only be a matter of time before IED's would start to have triggers that keyed off the jammers themselves. Riding around with a jammer would then attract IED detonations, and only these jammers would. Normal traffic could drive right by them to no effect.
It gets much worse.
It takes sound about one thousandth of a second to travel one foot. If you arranged a bunch of small, cheap microphones evenly spaced on a sphere that was 1 foot in diameter, it would take 1/1000th of a second for a sound to pass by any furthest-separated pairs of microphones. In the world of digital electronics, those microphones could be sampled 10 million times a second, and the samples processed by a $6.00 DSP chip to get within 1-arcsecond of determining the direction of a particular sound. Another $6.00 chip can be taught to recognise the tell-tale whup whup of a helicopter.
A 50-calibre machine gun mounted on a servo controlled by the direction finding and sound discriminating circuit could by placed on rooftops to stand in for a person to thwart close-air support. Instead of a helicopter, maybe it listens for small arms fire. It would be a lethal weapons system that does not flinch, duck, or stop firing until the sound it listens for, stops. Advancing troops would have to keep their weapons silent as they potentially became sitting ducks for insurgents firing from windows behind the autonomous weapons. Remember, these things would be cheap.
As for that unmanned drone being controlled in Arizona, it too is susceptible. Using a video camera and a spectrum analyzer, recordings can be made of the various moves the drone performed. Over time, the sequence of commands that make it turn left, or fire a missile can be learned. Even if not learned, the presence of a drone could be detected early just by listening for the tell-tale codes. Technology can cut both ways.
There is a bit of irony that what really turned the tide in Iraq was us sitting down with the insurgents and asking them what would make them stop shooting at us. It took 6 years to find out they just wanted jobs and some dignity.
Hopefully, that lesson scales. So far, with Obama, it seems to. Israel has projected a desire for the US to help it go in hot against Iran, but Obama has pretty much avoided even language to that effect. That's good, because taking out Iran's nuclear program is not a matter of a few surgical strikes. It would leave the knowledge in place, and the country highly inflamed - not a very good combination.
China has been having fun shooting down their own satellites. They use kinetic weapons to do it. Kinetic weapons sound fancy, but it just means a dumb weight travelling fast and hitting something. Throw a rock at a satellite, and the rock will win. The echelons of our weapons systems in a theatre of combat, not to mention command and control, are almost hopelessly dependent on satellites. This is why Rumsfeld shit a brick when China took out one of their satellites. It took a rocket scientist to hit the satellite, but it didn't take one to realize it could have been one of our satellites that was the target. You have to figure that in the not-too-distant future, the early stages of a war between major powers will see each side taking out the satellites of the other.
If a new plan to invade Iraq were drawn up today, it might look something like this: large numbers of troops would move in and quickly wall off sections of strategic cities. All traffic would be controlled through checkpoints, and this would greatly limit the flow of weapons and information.
Then what?
Then you would have an immobile population living in walled enclaves that you would have to provide for. It would result in attrition of a different sort. Hopefully we have learned that objectives have to be clear, and they have to be realistic because there is only so much time before bad shit happens to our side. Imposing democracy is not an objective, it is just a bad idea. If you have to look for a reason to go to war, then you don't need to be going.
I don't know what the strategy in Afghanistan will be, but the generals have already stated that the goal, whatever that is, cannot be reached through force alone. If it expands into Pakistan, and there will be plenty of opportunity for that, and it ends up pissing off 180 million Pakistanis, then that war could end up being fought with technology from the mid 1940's.
We say we don't fight based on body count, but we do. We sure as hell do.
Thank you to all the brave soldiers. It would be nice if someday the US was not at war.