The Lessons Of Afghanistan

By Mark Thompson/Washington

After lurking for hours above the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the Predator drone found its target: a truck surrounded by a group of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists who had been threading their way along precarious mountain roads amid 11,000-ft. peaks. From several miles away, the unmanned surveillance plane, operated by the CIA last Monday, locked in on the gathering. An agent somewhere in the region, viewing a live feed from the Predator's belly-mounted camera, thought the men were wearing Arab--not Afghan--garb, and that the leader was tall. After conferring with U.S. Central Command officials at their Florida headquarters, the agent signaled the Predator to shoot. A 100-lb. Hellfire missile roared toward the truck at nearly 1,000 m.p.h. According to Amanullah Zadran, a minister in the Afghan government, the dead included three local al-Qaeda members. Local tribal leaders claimed, however, the dead were not al-Qaeda. On Saturday, a team of 50 U.S. troops at the attack site began looking for evidence under a deep blanket of snow.

The tall man is not thought to have been Osama bin Laden, as the CIA had hoped. But he is believed to have been al-Qaeda--and the missile appeared to score a direct hit on him, a Pentagon official told TIME. It still isn't clear whether any innocents were wounded or killed. But if this Predator attack was like dozens of others in Afghanistan, it was a surgical strike on a terrorist target--and a case study in the new American way of waging war: killing foes by remote control, with no risk to U.S. troops, through an extraordinary convergence of intelligence, technology and high-explosive warheads.

Seven thousand miles away on the very same day, the Pentagon was firing a more old-fashioned round on Capitol Hill--a five-year, $2 trillion budget plan larded with cold war-era weapons. There's the Crusader howitzer, a cannon so cumbersome that in 2000 a presidential candidate named George W. Bush questioned its utility. And there's the F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet designed to challenge a Soviet air force that no longer exists. The Raptor could prove useful against other foes, but critics call it redundant; there are two other fighter designs in the pipeline as well. Yet the Pentagon wants to spend $5.3 billion to build 23 Raptors and budgets only $100 million for 22 new Predator drones, even though U.S. commanders have been pleading with the brass for more. The Predator is "getting nickels and dimes, while traditional programs like manned jets are getting the tens and twenties," says Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a private military think tank.

The war in Afghanistan offers a blueprint for fighting future wars--through a mix of agility and lethality, with small groups of special forces on the ground wielding high-tech targeting devices linked to precision-guided munitions in the sky--but the military seems slow to embrace these lessons. And Congress is unlikely to challenge the Pentagon's $379 billion request for 2003. With Bush riding high and wartime patriotism still ruling Capitol Hill, few legislators want to be seen second-guessing the Pentagon, even as it proposes a $48 billion boost for next year that is larger than any other nation's total defense budget. Wartime budgets inevitably require painful sacrifice elsewhere (Bush wants to limit the increase in domestic spending to 2%), but this military-spending plan--the biggest buildup since the Reagan Administration--may be paying for the wrong war. Military budgets are always full of riddles and mysteries, but never has the Pentagon appeared so at war with itself. It is fighting a new kind of war in remarkably new ways, yet at the same time it is asking the nation to invest heavily in weapons that were created to fight old wars in old ways.

The irony is that Bush styled himself as a reformer, threatening to kill some of the Pentagon's costly "legacy" programs. In a September 1999 speech, he said the military should take advantage of the cold war's end "to skip a generation of technology" and move on to futuristic weapons without necessarily buying all those in development. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came in pledging to remake the military. "The U.S. defense establishment must be transformed to address our new circumstance," he said as he took the job for a second time. Pentagon corridors were buzzing last summer about how Rumsfeld planned to transform the military--cutting entire Army divisions, scuttling aircraft carriers, killing the F-22 Raptor and Crusader howitzer programs.

Yet with a surging budget, no hard choices are being made. The defense plan allows for some modest transformation: the Navy will spend $1 billion to convert four Trident submarines that now fire nuclear missiles into Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers. The Army will fork out $707 million to develop lighter tanks, and the Air Force will pay $629 million to accelerate development of the Global Hawk unmanned spy plane, which flies farther and higher than the Predator, surveying more terrain. The Pentagon wants $3.3 billion to speed the gathering and distribution of intelligence, and $1.3 billion to improve communications. Special forces--the heroes of Afghanistan--are scheduled to get antimissile sensors and jammers, along with four AC-130 gunships. And nearly $38 billion is earmarked for the military's growing role in homeland security. This week, for example, there are more U.S. troops patrolling the Olympics in Utah than there are in Afghanistan.

But the military stuffed Rumsfeld's most ambitious reforms. His plans to force a transformation by cutting weapons and troop levels alarmed senior officers, who colluded with congressional allies to turn back the changes. "Rumsfeld has abandoned talk of skipping a generation of weaponry," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution. "He will now argue that those systems the services already have in their budgets are transformational, which is what the services wanted us to believe all along." The steep rise in defense spending will actually make it more difficult to bring real reform. About a dozen major new weapons systems are just beginning to enter production, and their costs will skyrocket once the assembly lines spool up. Procurement of new weapons, now at $61 billion, is planned to reach $99 billion by 2007. The spigot will only get harder to turn off.

Pentagon officials argue it isn't better bullets that will transform the military but better intelligence on where to shoot them. The Air Force's goal is to "have an electronic picture in the cockpit of fused information that comes from all kinds of sensors," Air Force Secretary James Roche said. The goal, known as network-centric warfare, is to give pilots a high-resolution picture of the battlefield from sensors on the ground, in the air and in space, so they can dispatch smart weapons to their targets.

The U.S. military made big strides toward that end in Afghanistan. In the Gulf War, the U.S. had to deploy 10 aircraft to be sure of taking out a single target. Now it budgets two targets per aircraft. That's because the share of precision-guided munitions has grown from 7% in 1991 to 60% today. As bombs get smarter, planes can get dumber: for the first time, B-52s are able to drop satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions from high altitudes, beyond the reach of enemy antiaircraft fire. U.S. commandos on the ground are pinpointing targets with laser spotters and calling in target coordinates. "They use their satcom [satellite communications] to transmit the coordinates to a plane overhead," Lieut. General Charles Wald, who ran most of the air war from a command post in Saudi Arabia, tells TIME. "We can get a bomb from 37,000 ft. to land within the length of the bomb--these bombs are 10 ft. long--nearly 100% of the time."

Here's one example of how the New Military worked: In November, as the U.S. and its allies pushed across Afghanistan, General Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance commander, sought a U.S. Air Force sergeant's help in attacking an enemy position. "There's some Taliban over that ridge, and I need them taken out because I think they're going to attack us," Dostum said. The sergeant radioed a B-52 overhead and asked it to strike an area 2 miles long by 400 ft. wide. Nineteen minutes later, bombs began raining down, killing some 250 troops and destroying artillery pieces and a command center. Long-range bombers, some flying from the U.S. mainland, played a key role in the war because Afghanistan's neighbors did not want their soil used as a launching pad for American attacks. But the new defense budget contains no funds for new bombers and less than $300 million to improve the B-2 fleet.

Drones have enabled the U.S. military to stare at enemy positions for days, providing far more intelligence than could be gleaned from a reconnaissance flight or satellite flyby. Such surveillance detects patterns, and patterns betray enemies. Beyond spying and attacking, the Predator has used its own laser to pinpoint targets for satellite-guided bombs from high-flying bombers.

Rumsfeld said last week his new budget "substantially" boosted spending on drones, but TIME's review of the budget shows a 13% increase--from $971 million to $1.1 billion--for Predators, Global Hawks and other unmanned planes. (Spending for fighter jets jumps 37%.) Yet every week U.S. commanders go to Rumsfeld and plead for the drones to help gather intelligence in their part of the world. "There simply are not enough to go around," Rumsfeld said. "We're building them as rapidly as possible." But the Predator's manufacturer, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, tells TIME it is ready to crank out more than the two a month called for in the 2003 budget.

Critics say cronyism and greed are to blame for many of the misguided budget decisions. They seem to have a strong case when it comes to the Army's Crusader. It's not a nimble weapon; the two-vehicle system weighs more than 80 tons. Designed to destroy Warsaw Pact tanks on the German plain, it might have some utility if the U.S. Army ever has to battle Iraqi tanks, in the unlikely event that air power can't finish the job. The Crusader has detractors, like candidate Bush, but it also has powerful backers. United Defense, the company building the system, is owned by the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm known for its g.o.p. heavyweights, including Frank Carlucci, Reagan's Pentagon chief, and James Baker, George Bush Sr.'s Secretary of State and the man who helped George W. win his election struggle in Florida. The company is building the Crusader in Oklahoma, winning support from Senator James Inhofe and Representative J.C. Watts, senior Republicans with clout on military matters.

Or consider the politically protected Virginia-class submarine. The Navy wants more than $60 billion to build a fleet of 30 of these attack subs over the next 25 years. With warming U.S.-Russian relations--and the era of submarine battles 50 years in the past--the Navy is emphasizing the sub's intelligence-gathering potential and its ability, like surface ships and airplanes, to fire cruise missiles. Powerful lawmakers from the two sub-building states--Connecticut's Joseph Lieberman and Virginia's John Warner--are among the sub's champions, so there's a strong political push to produce it.

Rumsfeld's allies say he has not surrendered to the military and its congressional allies. They insist he is transforming the military, albeit slowly, and stress that the military must not view Afghanistan as a template for all future conflicts. "One size," warns Army General Tommy Franks, who is running the war, "will not fit all."

The post-Sept. 11 patriotic fervor has silenced skepticism on Capitol Hill. One of the few complaints heard last week was that the new budget buys too few warships. (It came mostly from lawmakers from shipbuilding districts.) "The Democrats are terrified to challenge the President on defense," says Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon appointee. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Armed Services Committee, expressed only mild concern, noting that the budget "comes without a comprehensive strategy or a detailed guide to that spending."

That sort of muted criticism was the exception; some members want to throw even more money at the Pentagon. Last year the Pentagon abandoned a decade-old benchmark, the ability to fight two major wars at once. The decision made sense, since the Soviets won't be coming through Germany's Fulda Gap any time soon. But on Capitol Hill, New York Representative John McHugh, a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, says the Pentagon should consider bulking up to wage three wars at once in order to face down the "triangle of terror," a reference to Bush's declaration that Iran, Iraq and North Korea are an "axis of evil." With such talk coming from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the defense budget seems sure to be going up, up and away, into the wild blue squander.