US military doctrine teaches that commanders must attempt to "strike the enemy in a time or place, or in a manner, for which he is unprepared."²⁹ Surprise can affect the outcome of battles, campaigns, or even entire wars. Surprise can be achieved by speed of attack and maneuver, taking unanticipated actions, using deception, varying the tactics used from those previously employed, maintaining operations security, gaining good intelligence and insights into enemy thinking and doctrine, and applying new technologies in ways that reduce enemy warning time, provide capabilities he does not anticipate, or contribute to his confusion.

In the realm of new technologies to achieve surprise, note the importance of stealth F-117 fighter-bombers in striking key targets in the 1991 Gulf War and the use of precision- guided cruise missiles with very small radar cross-sections. One of the architects of the US air campaign in the 1991 Persian Gulf War has written that

for the first time in the history of warfare, a single entity can produce its own mass and surprise . . . . Surprise has always been one of the most important factors in war--perhaps even the single most important because it could make up for the deficiencies in numbers. Surprise was always difficult to achieve because it conflicted with the concepts of mass and concentration. In order to have enough forces available to hurl enough projectiles to win the probability contest, the commander had to assemble and move large numbers. Of course, assembling and moving large forces in secret was quite difficult, even in the days before aerial reconnaissance, so the odds of surprising the enemy were small indeed. Stealth and precision have solved both sides of the problem; by definition, stealth achieves surprise, and precision means that a single weapon accomplishes what thousands were unlikely to accomplish in the past.³⁰

Until the NASTI regimes acquire radars or other sensors capable of detecting and targeting incoming stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, the United States and its allies have a means of achieving tactical surprise in any air strike or any cruise missile launch. The ability to strike "out of the blue" without warning, provided by the B-2, F-117s, future F-22s, and stealthy cruise missiles is limited only by how successfully US and allied intelligence can identify and locate significant enemy targets, and by the availability of stealth aircraft or cruise missiles.

Technological surprise can also decide battles when one side first employs a decisive new military technology which puts the adversary at an unanticipated disadvantage. One of the most dramatic illustrations of this was the decisive role of British radars in helping the Royal Air Force win the Battle of Britain against the German Luffwaffe. Although greatly outnumbered in aircraft, the British were able to pinpoint the directions and numbers of German aircraft as they took off in France and flew across the English Channel toward Britain. Armed with this knowledge, British Spitfires waited high in the clouds in ambush and concentrated superior forces in the air battles they chose to fight. The result was a British victory where bean counters would have predicted defeat. Radar was the biggest difference in the two sides.

The Principle of Simplicity in Warfare

US Army commanders are taught to prepare "clear, uncom- plicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding."³² Simplicity of operational concepts and goals should reduce misunderstandings of orders, reduce confusion, and enhance the understanding of key audiences whose support is necessary to conduct the war.

This simplicity of operation should be applied to all phases of combat; during the opening phase of operations, in the main campaign, and in the war-termination phase. The war plan should be a continuation of politics by other means, keeping in mind the national ends for which the conflict was begun, constantly relating national ends to ongoing military means, and understanding the unique limits on war termination imposed by the stark fact that the adversary possesses weapons whose destructive magnitude exceeds anything previously faced by other US commanders in previous conflicts.

Of course, simplicity and clarity of goals, plans, and orders alone do not guarantee a correct strategy or successful operation against a heavily armed regional enemy. A CINC could choose a clear, simple plan based on tried-and-true principles, but find that it would not work in a future MRC where the adversary was equipped with radically different capabilities well beyond those possessed by enemies in the past.

Armed with WMD, such adversaries might follow an escalatory strategy that could shatter the cohesiveness of an allied coalition, could scare off potential allies, might inflict a political defeat on the coalition by dissolving allied domestic support for the war, or even cripple an allied expeditionary force by turning NBC and missile assets against allied forces, ports, air bases, logistical tail, or allied capitals in the region. In such a campaign, a NASTI attack might conceivably inflict in a single day allied war deaths in excess of what the United States suffered in Korea, Vietnam, or even in World War II.

The right operational plan will be essential against NASTIs on the field of battle. Clarity and simplicity added to a sound approach contribute to success. Of course, if added to a flawed concept of operations, clarity and simplicity cannot avert defeat.

Additional Principles of War against Enemies with WMD

Military experience and recent technical innovations have spawned some additional principles of warfare to add to the list supplied by General Fuller in World War I. These new operating principles, when combined with the original MOSSCOMES principles of war may supply the decisive edge against radical hostile regimes armed with WMD.

These new principles can be summarized by the acronym SLIP:

S-Simultaneity and Depth of Attack

L-Logistics

I-Information Dominance

P-Precision Targeting

Simultaneity and Depth of Attack

When battling a NASTI, it is best to strike fast and simul- taneously at all key enemy assets to stun and paralyze his forces to defeat them in the shortest time possible. Simultaneous strikes throughout the entire battlespace may be enough to rob him of much or all of his WMD capability, and reduce his offensive potential.

As the US Army Training and Doctrine Command states in its concept of operations for the early twenty-first century, "The relationship between fire and maneuver may undergo a transformation as armies with high technology place increasing emphasis on simultaneous strikes throughout the battle space. Maneuver forces may be massed for shorter periods of time." ³⁴

Army doctrine also notes that "depth and simultaneous attack may be a key characteristic of future American military operations. These operations will redefine the current ideas of deep, close, and rear."³⁵ Indeed, such parallel war or hyperwar strikes blur the distinction between the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of operations and tend to blend them into one.

Recent effectiveness of simultaneous operations conducted across the full length, breadth, and height of the battle space have led to quick victories in Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf. Desert Storm, for example, showed that "deep battle has advanced beyond the concept of attacking the enemy's follow-on forces in a sequential approach to shape the close battle to one of simultaneous attack to stun, then rapidly defeat the enemy."

Colonel John Warden III, one of the architects of the air campaign that defeated Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, suggests that near-simultaneous parallel warfare strikes against key enemy leadership, system essentials, infrastructure, population centers, and fielded military forces may impose strategic or operational paralysis on him, leading to his rapid defeat.³⁷ Warden notes the impact of the fast-paced US parallel air strikes on the 1991 defeat of Iraq:

In Iraq, a country about the same size as prewar Germany, so many key facilities suffered so much damage so quickly that it was simply not possible to make strategically meaningful repair. Nor was it possible or very useful to concentrate defenses; successful defense of one target merely meant that one out of over a hundred didn't get hit at that particular time. Like the thousand cuts analogy, it just doesn't matter very much if some of the cuts are deflected. It is important to note that Iraq was a very tough country strategically. Iraq had spent an enormous amount of money and energy on giving itself lots of protection and redundancy and its efforts would have paid off well if it had been attacked serially as it had every right to anticipate it would. In other words, the parallel attack against Iraq was against what may well have been the country best prepared in all the world for attack. If it worked there, it will probably work elsewhere.

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Thus, the experience of the 1991 Gulf War is that parallel warfare can be decisive since regional adversaries are likely to have a relatively small number of vital strategic targets, estimated by Colonel Warden at "in the neighborhood of a few hundred with the average of perhaps 10 aimpoints per vital target." ³⁹ These enemy assets "tend to be small (in number), very expensive, have few backups, and are hard to repair. If a significant percentage of them are struck in parallel, the damage becomes insuperable."

Of course, there may be counter-measures that an adversary might take to offset the possibilities of simultaneous allied air strikes across the battlespace of a major regional conflict. Efforts might be taken to (1) disguise, diversify and "demassify" the key political-military-economic assets to make them less lucrative targets, (2) hide, harden, or put on mobile launchers, WMD assets to reduce their vulnerability, (3) employ WMD against allied bases from which parallel attacks are being launched, (4) attack allied C4I and employ various forms of "info war" to confuse, disorganize, and mislead allied commanders and "psychological warfare" to reduce allied morale and influence the publics of the United States and its allies to undermine political support for the war.

Logistics

When drafting the original list of principles of war, General Fuller failed to identify the overwhelming importance of effective logistics to the support of fighting forces as they mobilize, deploy, maneuver, reconstitute, withdraw, and demobilize. Without proper logistics it would be impossible to man, arm, fuel, fix, move, or sustain the soldier, sailor, or airman and their equipment as they enter and fight major regional conflicts. As one US Army general has put it, "Forget logistics and you lose." ⁴² On more than 230 occasions, US forces have been sent to other countries and regions of the world in the twentieth century alone. Logistics gets them there, sustains them, and gets them home again.

Increasingly, logistics will play an important part in whether US and allied forces get to the battle in time and whether they will predominate when they arrive. This is especially true now that fewer US troops are stationed abroad while still responsible for standing ready to win two near-simultaneous major regional conflicts (MRCs) and participating in a number of military operations other than war (MOOTW) as well.

MRCs and MOOTWs both require a force-projection logistical system that has "the demonstrated ability to rapidly alert, mobilize, deploy and operate anywhere in the world." ⁴³ As a recent analysis of the US Army in the Gulf War notes, logistics units do more than sustain forces in the field. Indeed, "the strength of the logistics engine determines the pace at which an intervening force makes itself secure." ⁴⁴

One student of that conflict has observed:

The Iraqi Army stood by and watched on television as the American Army assembled a sophisticated combat force in front of them with efficiency and dispatch. The act of building the logistics infrastructure during Desert Shield created an atmosphere of domination and a sense of inevitable defeat among the Iraqis long before the shooting war began. In the new style of war, superior logistics becomes the engine that allows American military forces to reach an enemy from all points of the globe and arrive ready to fight. Speed of closure and buildup naturally increases the psychological stature of the deploying force and reduces the risk of destruction to those forces that deploy first. In contrast, dribbling forces into a theater by air or sea raises the risk of defeat in detail.⁴⁵

A successful buildup of US and allied forces and supplies at the inception of a major regional conflict could, in turn, depend upon the early deployment of an effective multilayered air and missile defense and air superiority over the battle zone. As Col Warden has warned, surface forces and logistical support units are fragile at the operational level of war, especially against highly armed challengers.

Supporting significant numbers of surface forces (air, land, or sea) is a tough administrative problem even in peacetime. Success depends upon efficient distribution of information, fuel, food, and ammunition. By necessity, efficient distribution depends on an inverted pyramid of distribution. Supplies of all operational commodities must be accumulated in one or two locations, then parsed out to two or four locations, and so on until they eventually reach the user. The nodes in the system are exceptionally vulnerable to precision attack.⁴⁶

In short, while the United States and its allies may be able to handle a NASTI regime such as Iraq in 1991, in the future it may be dealing with adversaries that have mastered the building of accurate ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads, chemically armed reentry vehicles, and relatively cheap, hard-to-detect cruise missiles. At that point, MRC forces and their logistics tails had better reduce their vulnerabilities by application of deterrence, preemptive strikes, defenses, deployment outside of enemy range, dispersion of units, constant mobility, or diversity of supply paths in order to avoid defeat.

Information Dominance

The importance of winning the information war should be a guiding principle of wars of the future. A US Army study predicts that "effective information operations will make battlespace transparent to us and opaque to our opponents."⁴⁷ Such, at least, is the goal.

One of the air commanders of the Gulf War also emphasizes the importance of information at the strategic and operational levels. He notes that

In the Gulf War, the coalition deprived Iraq of most of its ability to gather and use information. At the same time, the coalition managed its own information requirements acceptably, even though it was organized in the same way Frederick the Great had organized himself. Clear for the future is the requirement to redesign our organizations so they are built to exploit modern information-handling equipment. This also means flattening organizations, eliminating most middle management, pushing decision making to very low levels, and forming worldwide neural networks to capitalize on the ability of units in and out of the direct conflict area.⁴⁸

The information lesson from the Gulf was negative; the coalition succeeded in breaking Iraq's ability to process information, but the coalition failed to fill the void by providing Iraqis with an alternative source of information. Failure to do so made Saddam's job much easier and greatly reduced the chance of his overthrow. Capturing and exploiting the datasphere may well be the most important effort in many future wars.⁴⁹

Precision Targeting

Another principle of war flowing from technical innovations is the dominance imparted by using precision guided weapons. Suddenly, with great precision, nearly all important fixed targets can be destroyed in a campaign. Instead of having to fire thousands of bombs and missiles at targets, just a few will do the job today with much greater certainty than the imprecise massed attacks of yesterday.

Now "one bomb, one target destroyed" is more the norm instead of "hundreds of bombs, perhaps few or no targets destroyed." This helps in planning a successful campaign and in executing it. MRC logistics are simplified since a finite number of precision weapons can now be used to destroy a set <%1>of targets rather than the massive quantities of "dumb" weapons that would otherwise be needed to accomplish the same mission.

The combined advantages of stealth technology and precision guided missiles can be seen by comparing a conventional bombing attack in the 1991 Gulf War, against the same target, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, with a stealthy precision attack two days later. The conventional air attack failed to destroy the target even though it used 32 bomb-dropping aircraft, 16 fighter escorts, 12 aircraft for suppression of Iraqi air defenses, and 15 tanker aircraft. Two days later, this target was successfully destroyed using just eight F-117 stealth fighter-bombers supported by just two tankers.⁵⁰

Conclusions

There are many other principles of war that might be formulated to apply to different kinds of engagements. For example, war against a NASTI is far different from participating in military operations other than war such as UN peace operations. Further, low-intensity counterguerrilla warfare is prosecuted differently than more conventional battle, as fought in the 1991 Gulf War, and both might be fought differently in future wars.

One scholar has listed over one hundred principles of war that have been advocated by military thinkers since the time of Sun Tzu. ⁵¹ Indeed, in 1984 US Air Force doctrine recommended four guidelines (timing, tempo, logistics, and cohesion) in addition to Fuller's original list of nine principles of war. Some in the recent past have argued for the inclusion of the concept of deterrence as a separate principle of conflict management.⁵²

A review of the principles of war that pertain to a future conflict with an enemy equipped with advanced conventional arms and mass destruction weapons can provide a better understanding of how to operate on the future battlefield. However, such a set of principles are not infallible guides to action. They cannot substitute for judgment, improvisation, insights into the enemy, or initiative. Nor can they be applied by rote or as part of a checklist.

Understanding of these principles can add to the commander's understanding of how to conduct warfare, and a review of them can remind him of fundamentals to observe, but such application of these principles by themselves is not sufficient for victory. For one thing they are somewhat abstract and require judgment in application to specific cases.

In the end, the commander and his subordinates still must bring a depth of experience, concrete mastery of details, and an understanding of military affairs that reaches well beyond such general principles. Nevertheless, these principles of war can be useful ways to think about how to solve the problem facing a commander whose force is opposed by a NASTI.

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