Ten additional F-117As were on their way to drop bombs on targets in downtown Baghdad. In the first twenty-four hours of the war, a total of forty-two stealth fighters, which accounted for only 2.5 percent of the U.S. airpower used in the campaign, destroyed 31 percent of Iraqi targets. This was technology in action, and it gave the United States not only a tactical advantage but a psychological one as well. Stealth was like a silver bullet. It had allowed U.S. fighter jets to sneak into Iraqi airspace, destroy the country’s air defense system, and leave without a loss. Still, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared, “The great showdown has begun! The mother of all battles is under way.”
The U.S. air campaign against Baghdad devastated Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party military infrastructure. Between the laser-guided bombs, the infrared night-bombing equipment, and the stealth fighter aircraft, the Iraqi air force never had a chance to engage. In retaliation, the Iraqis launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but almost immediately, a U.S. Patriot missile shot down an Iraqi Scud missile, making the Patriot the first antimissile ballistic missile fired in combat. The Pentagon promoted the Patriot as having near-perfect performance. But in classified communications a different story was unfolding. There were twenty-seven Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, and each battery was shooting nearly ten missiles at each incoming Iraqi Scud. At first the numbers did not make any sense, certainly not to U.S. Army vice chief of staff General Gordon R. Sullivan. How could it take ten U.S. Patriot antimissile missiles to shoot a single Iraqi Scud out of the sky? A classified investigation revealed that because of poor-quality engineering, the Iraqi Scuds were breaking apart in their terminal phase, shattering into multiple pieces as they headed back down to earth. These multiple fragments were confusing Patriot missiles into thinking that each piece was an additional warhead. Shoddy workmanship had inadvertently created a poor man’s version of the highly sophisticated MIRV—multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle—the deceptive penetration aid originally dreamed of by the Jason scientists thirty years before.
For the U.S. military, the Gulf War was an opportunity to demonstrate what its system of systems was capable of. While the stealth fighter aircraft received most of the attention, as far as high technology was concerned, there were other DARPA systems flying over Iraq that were equally revolutionary, just not as visible or as sleek. Drones played a prominent role in the system of systems, largely unreported. Remotely piloted vehicles, small and large, collected mapping information that helped steer Tomahawks to their targets. Some 522 drone sorties were flown, totaling 1,641 hours, many of them based on DARPA technology going back to the Vietnam War. Equipped with infrared sensors, the drones’ cameras easily located ground troops and vehicles hidden behind sand berms or covered in camouflage. The drones relayed back the information, which was then used to take out the targets. In one instance, a group of Iraqi soldiers stepped out from a hiding place and waved the white flag of surrender at the eye of a television camera attached to a drone that was hovering nearby. This became the first time in history that a group of enemy soldiers was recorded surrendering to a machine.
Another DARPA technology workhorse was the four-engine Boeing 707-300 lumbering 42,000 feet above the battlefield. This was DARPA’s JSTARS, or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, a command, control, and communication center flying overhead in racetrack formation, managing much of the action going on down below. JSTARS, run jointly by the Air Force and the Army, involved aircraft equipped with a forty-foot-long canoe-shaped radar dome mounted under the front of the fuselage. Inside the dome, a radar antenna the height of a two-story house was able to send precise target information to Army ground stations below. The radar could detect, locate, and track vehicles moving deep behind enemy lines, making JSTARS the first and only airborne platform in operation that could maintain “real time surveillance over a corps-sized area of the battlefield.” The system software on board JSTARS was so complex it required almost 600,000 lines of code, roughly three times more than any other C3 system previously developed by the U.S. military. Sixteen years earlier, DARPA had begun developing this system of systems concept with Assault Breaker. Now it was in play in the war theater.
JSTARS was like an all-seeing commander in the sky. It could “see” some 19,305 square miles of terrain below, and it could detect moving targets 200 to 250 miles away. It could “see” in darkness and bad weather, including clouds and sandstorms. Two of these prototype JSTARS were flown in the Gulf War, providing what DARPA historical literature describes as a “real-time tactical view of the battlefield never seen before in the history of warfare.” When, on February 1, a ten-mile-long column of Iraqi armored tanks headed into Saudi Arabia, JSTARS saw it and sent coalition aircraft to destroy the column. As bombing continued from the air, sorties passed the forty thousand mark—ten thousand more missions than the U.S. Army Air Force flew against Japan in the last fourteen months of World War II. The Pentagon began releasing mind-numbing statistics on what its system of systems had destroyed: 1,300 of Iraq’s 4,280 tanks, 1,100 of Iraq’s 3,110 artillery pieces, and 800 of Iraq’s 2,870 armored tanks.
Next came the ground war, which began on Sunday, February 24, at 4:00 a.m. Saudi time. Saddam Hussein delivered a radio broadcast telling his troops to kill “with all your might.” The decisive battle that ended the Gulf War two days later would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting, the last great tank battle of the twentieth century. But unlike so many of history’s great tank battles, which were named after the cities in which they were fought, the Battle of 73 Easting was named after a GPS coordinate, or gridline.
On February 25, eight hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks lined up on Iraq’s southern border with Saudi Arabia, and the following morning, the initial attack against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard Tawakalna tank division began with an assault by the Second Armored Cavalry Division. Spearheading the attack were three troops: Ghost, Eagle, and Iron. The Second Armored Cavalry Division had been stationed in Grafenwoehr, Germany, and had trained on DARPA’s SIMNET simulators before deploying to the Persian Gulf. The M1 Abrams tanks that Jack Thorpe and his DARPA team had driven around at Fort Knox had since been outfitted with a powerful new weapons system: night vision thermal imaging.
On the day of the battle that ended the Gulf War, there had been terrible weather all morning. After a night of rain, the flat, trackless desert remained encumbered by thick fog and clouds. Around 3:30 p.m. the sun briefly emerged, but then a sandstorm kicked in. Between the bad weather and the thick black smoke moving across the desert from the burning Kuwaiti oil fields, visibility was reduced to nil. The gunners in the Iraqi Tawakalna tank division were blind. Not so the Second Armored Cavalry. Equipped with thermal imaging systems, the M1A1 tanks made it possible for U.S. soldiers to see in the dark. Night vision was a science DARPA had been advancing since 1961, when ARPA wrote the first handbook on the subject, the Handbook of Military Infrared Technology. Infrared vision was developed in Vietnam to help soldiers see through dense jungle canopies. Now it was being used in the desert.
“We had thermal imagery,” says Major Douglas Macgregor, who saw action in the Battle of 73 Easting as commander of Cougar Squadron, and “the Iraqis did not. Yes, our firepower was extremely accurate, pinpoint accurate, but we could see what we were firing at and they could not.” When the Second Armored Cavalry’s Eagle Troop launched its attack around 4:10 p.m., it caught the Iraqi Republican Guard unawares. In less than half an hour, Eagle Troop destroyed twenty-eight T-72 Iraqi tanks, sixteen armored personnel carriers, and thirty-nine trucks, with no losses of its own. “The battle took twenty-three minutes to win,” retired four-star general Paul Gorman told Congress. “The U.S. alone enjoyed the advantage of satellite navigation and imagery, and of thermal-imaging fire control.”
The Iraqi army was overpowered. Iraqi soldiers started to give up and abandon their posts en masse. During a vast exodus of Iraqi troops from Kuwait City, JSTARS pinpoi
nted thousands of fleeing vehicles for coalition attack aircraft to bomb. The stark photographs of destroyed vehicles along Iraq’s Highway 80 provided a striking visual image of how a system of systems worked. Between JSTARS, stealth aircraft, GPS satellite navigation, bomber aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and night vision, the United States and its technological firepower wrought mega-death. Between 1,500 and 2,000 charred and abandoned vehicles were left littering the road, including Iraqi tanks, Mercedes-Benz sedans, stolen Kuwaiti fire trucks, and minivans. There were charred bodies and loose flip-flops, suitcases, and fruit crates. Some of the victims had been flash-heated to death in crawling and stretching motions, like the famous bodies from Pompeii. The international press called the four-lane stretch of highway between Iraq and Kuwait the “Highway of Death.”
Concerned about the negative narrative unfolding in the press, Colin Powell met with General Schwarzkopf to discuss the matter.
“The television coverage,” said Powell, is “starting to make us look as if we engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Schwarzkopf told him.
Powell asked General Schwarzkopf what he wanted to do.
“One more day should do it,” Schwarzkopf said, indicating he was authorizing one more day of bombing.
Late the following day, on February 27, President George H. W. Bush declared “suspension of offense combat” in the Persian Gulf and laid out conditions for a permanent cease-fire with Iraq. The Gulf War had lasted one month and twelve days.
One week after the cease-fire, back in Washington, D.C., DARPA director Victor Reis met with General Gordon Sullivan, vice chief of staff of the Army, for lunch. General Sullivan had formerly served as the deputy commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox and was a fan of SIMNET. To this lunch General Sullivan carried with him a copy of the Stars and Stripes newspaper. Pointing to a headline, “Ghost Troops Battle at the 73 Easting,” General Sullivan asked Reis if DARPA could put the Battle of 73 Easting in reverse simulation, as a training tool. Reis said he would see what he could do.
Reis brought the idea to Neale Cosby at the IDA SIMNET Center. “I told Vic it was a great idea,” Colonel Cosby recalled in 2014. “I said, we can do it and we should do it.” Reverse simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting, he thought, would be “the ultimate after-action report.” There was much to learn from technology.
In a matter of days, a team from DARPA, led by Colonel Gary Bloedorn, flew to Iraq to interview soldiers who had fought in the battle. Bloedorn and the DARPA team heard varying accounts, read notes and radio transcripts, and listened to an audiotape made by a soldier in one of the command vehicles. The team traveled to the GPS gridline at 73 Easting, where they walked around the battlefield, recorded forensic evidence, and measured distances between U.S. firing positions and destroyed Iraqi vehicles. Then they returned to IDA to input data and reconstruct the battle down to fractions of seconds. The process took six months.
With a draft version complete, the reconstruction team traveled to Germany, where most of the battle’s participants were stationed. The DARPA team showed the soldiers the SIMNET version of the battle, took notes, and made final adjustments for accuracy. Back at IDA the team worked for another six months, then met with the key leaders of the battle one last time for a final review. They proved that “capturing live combat” after the fact could be done, says Cosby. Now it was time to take the show to Congress.
On May 21, 1992, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were shown the DARPA simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Retired general Paul Gorman led the opening remarks. But before playing the SIMNET simulation, Gorman pointed to the simulator and introduced the machine.
“This somewhat daunting graphic apparatus before you is an instrument of war,” Gorman told the committee members, “a mechanism designed to enable humans to understand the complexity, the kinetics, the chaos of battle.” Gorman reminded his audience what General Patton once said, “that it is men, not machines, who fight and win wars.” But the world had changed, Gorman said, and now machines were there to help. In the past, war stories were the only record of battle. Computer simulation had now changed that.
“I am here to urge [you] that all must recognize that simulation is fundamental to readiness for war,” Gorman said. With that, he played the twenty-three-minute simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Congress, Cosby recalled, was “wowed.” The military services would begin moving toward computer simulation as a primary training tool for war.
DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept had delivered results in the Gulf War, and at the Pentagon, renewed excitement was in the air. Ever since the Vietnam War, the Defense Department had struggled with a public perception of the military rooted in impotency and distrust. The Gulf War had changed that. The Pentagon was potent once again. The Gulf War was over fast, the death toll remarkably low: 390 Americans died, with 458 wounded in action. There were 510 casualties from all allied forces. President George H. W. Bush even triumphantly declared, “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”
But the optimism would not last long.
It was the early afternoon of October 3, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, a lawless, famine-stricken city run by armed militias and warlords. What had begun as a peacekeeping mission ten months prior had devolved into a series of quick-action Special Forces operations. On this particular day, a joint special operations task force named Task Force Ranger, made up of elite U.S. military personnel including Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Delta Force, embarked on a mission to capture two high-level Somali lieutenants working for the warlord and president-elect General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A group of Aidid’s lieutenants were holed up in a two-story building downtown, not far from the Olympic Hotel.
It was fifteen minutes into the mission and everything was going according to plan. Ground forces had arrived at the target location and were loading twenty-four captured Somali militants into convoy trucks when a series of deadly events began to unfold. A Black Hawk helicopter, call sign Super 61, was heading toward the target building with a plan in place to transport U.S. soldiers back to base, when suddenly a group of Somali militants scrambled onto a nearby rooftop, took aim at the helicopter, and fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
Norm Hooten, one of the Special Operations team leaders, watched in horror. The Black Hawk “took a direct hit toward the tail boom and it started a slow rotation” down, Hooten recalled. “It was a catastrophic impact.” Super 61 began spinning out of control. It crashed in the street below, killing both pilots on impact. In a videotape recording of the crash released by the Defense Department in 2013, a voice can be heard shouting over the military communications system, “We got a Black Hawk going down! We got a Black Hawk going down!”
A fifteen-man combat search and rescue team and an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter raced to the crash site to assist. But hundreds of angry Somalis were gathering in the surrounding streets, creating barricades made of burning tires and garbage, inhibiting access. A firefight ensued, trapping the Americans and pitting them against a violent mob. The situation grew dramatically worse when a second Black Hawk, call sign Super 64, was shot down. Another mob of Somalis charged to the second crash site, where they killed everyone except one of the pilots, Michael Durrant. Ranger and Delta Force teams took to the streets in an attempt to provide search and rescue, and cover to their trapped fellow soldiers. A chaotic, deadly battle ensued, lasting all through the night and into the morning. By the time it was over, eighteen Americans, one Pakistani, and one Malaysian soldier were dead and eighty were injured. An unknown number of Somalis, estimated to be roughly three thousand, had been killed.
This was asymmetric warfare—a battle between two groups with radically different levels of military power. The superior military force, the United States, killed a far greater number of the opposition while its own losses were played out on television screens around the world. Videotaped images of mobs of Somalis dr
agging the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of the dead American pilots and soldiers through the streets were shocking.
It was a watershed moment and a turning point in modern U.S. military affairs. The might and morale of the United States military, made evident in the Gulf War, had been weakened. Every war planner, going back at least 2,500 years, knows better than to fight a battle in a crowded place. “The worst policy,” wrote Sun Tzu, “is to attack cities.” The battle of Mogadishu was not part of any plan. There was no rehearsal for what happened. U.S. forces were drawn into a hellish situation, and the result was more lives lost than in any other combat situation since Vietnam.
“The Americans were not supermen,” commented Somali clan leader Colonel Aden. “In these dusty streets, where combat was reduced to rifle against rifle, they could die as easily as any Somali.” Technologically advanced weaponry had been disabled by sticks, stones, AK-47s, and a few rocket-propelled grenades.
After the battle of Mogadishu, DARPA convened a senior working group (SWG) to analyze what had happened in Somalia and make recommendations for how the Pentagon could best prepare for future conflicts of a similar nature—situations called Military Operations Other Than War, or OOTW. The group, led by General Carl W. Stiner, former commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, focused on solutions that would require new technologies to be developed. The group involved itself in ten study sessions over two months and spent six months preparing a written report.
The opening lines read like a salvo. “The world is no longer bipolar,” the Senior Working Group wrote. “The post–Cold War strategic environment is ill-defined, dynamic and unstable.” During the Cold War, America knew who the enemy was. Not so anymore. Terrorist organizations, paramilitary groups, and militia were destined to emerge from multiple chaotic urban environments around the globe. Third World instability, ideological and religious extremism, and intentional terrorism and narco-terrorism meant that the whole world was the new battlefield. In future military operations other than war, irregular enemy forces would include a “diverse range of adversaries equipped with an ever increasing array of sophisticated weapons,” including some that were atomic, chemical, and biological in design. The United States was not properly prepared to deal with these emerging new threats, the SWG warned. DARPA needed to refocus its attention on urban warfare. It needed to research and develop new weapons systems to deal with this threat, now growing across the Third World.