The Pentagon's Brain (36 page)

Arthur Cebrowski was a decorated Navy pilot who had flown 154 combat missions during the Vietnam War. He had also served in Operation Desert Storm, commanding a carrier air wing, a helicopter carrier, and an aircraft carrier. He retired from the Navy in August 2001. Regarding this naming issue, in internal documents sent to Rumsfeld in 2003 Cebrowski simplified why the concept of network-centric warfare would work. It offered a “New Theory of War based on information age principles and phenomena,” Cebrowski wrote. And network-centric warfare offered a “new relationship between operations abroad and homeland security,” meaning the lines between homeland security and fighting foreign wars would become intentionally blurred. Finally, Cebrowski wrote, network-centric warfare would provide a “new concept/sense of security in the American citizen.” Cebrowski was an avowed American patriot, and he believed that everyone else should be too. Network-centric warfare “had great moral seductiveness,” Cebrowski said.

With the doctrine of network-centric warfare in place, on March 19, 2003, the United States and its allies launched Operation Iraqi
Freedom and invaded Iraq. After the U.S. military completed its so-called “major combat operations” in just twenty-one days of “shock and awe,” Cebrowski told PBS how pleased he was. “The speed of that advance was absolutely unheard of,” he said. He attributed this “very high-speed warfare” to “network-centric warfare.” He espoused the idea that a war that relied on advanced technology was a morally superior war. America did not have to resort to “wholesale slaughter” anymore, Cebrowski said. We did not have to “kill a very large number of them,” meaning Iraqis, or “maim an even larger number,” because advanced technology now allowed the Defense Department to target specific individuals. This, said Cebrowski, was a good and moral thing.

“There’s a temptation to say that to develop that sense in the minds of an enemy that they are in fact defeated, you have to kill a very large number of them, maim an even larger number, destroy a lot of infrastructure and key elements of their civilization, and then they will feel defeated. I think that’s wrong,” Cebrowski said. “I think we are confronted now with a new problem, in a way the kind of problem we always wanted to have, where you can achieve your initial military ends without the wholesale slaughter. Because, remember,” he said, “this always cuts two ways. You have a moral obligation not just to limit your own casualties and casualties of nonparticipants but also those of the enemy itself. So we’re moving in the more moral direction, which is appropriate…. We need to come to grips with this reality.”

History would reveal that Arthur Cebrowski spoke too soon. All the technology in the world could not win the war against terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan. Local populations did not see network-centric warfare and targeted killing by drones, in their neighborhoods, as morally superior. And a new wave of terrorist organizations would emerge, form, and terrorize.

O
n May 26, 2003, Private First Class Jeremiah D. Smith, a twenty-five-year-old soldier from Missouri, was driving in an Army vehicle outside Baghdad when the convoy he was traveling in came upon a canvas bag lying in the road. It was Memorial Day, which meant that back in the United States this was a day to remember the millions of American soldiers who died while serving in the armed forces. Private Smith had been a proud member of the U.S. Army for a little over a year.

Three and a half weeks earlier, on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush had stood on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln
and announced that major combat operations in Iraq were over. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” he declared. The invasion, which began on March 21, had been swift. Baghdad fell on April 9. Standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier in a dark suit and a red tie (he’d more memorably arrived on board wearing a flight suit), the president exuded confidence. A banner behind him, designed by the White House
art department, read “Mission Accomplished.” At one point during his speech, the president gave the thumbs-up.

Now it was Memorial Day, and Private Smith was heading into dangerous territory. His convoy was escorting heavy equipment out of Baghdad, traveling west. Smith was a gunner and was sitting on the passenger side of the Humvee. As the vehicle approached the canvas bag lying in the road, not far from the Baghdad International Airport, the driver had no way of knowing it contained an improvised explosive device, or IED, and he simply drove over it. As the vehicle passed over the bag, the device exploded, killing Private Smith. In his death, Smith became the first American to be killed by an IED in the Iraq war.

The blast could be heard for miles. Twenty-two-year-old Specialist Jeremy Ridgley was one of the first people to come upon the inferno. “I was a gunner in the Eighteenth Military Police Brigade,” recalled Ridgley in a 2014 interview. “We were driving about five hundred yards behind, in a totally separate convoy. The explosion was extremely loud. We’d been informed that people were dropping things off overpasses, so every time we went under one, we sped up and came out in a different lane. Someone threw something at our vehicle, then I heard the explosion. I swung my gun around. It all happened so fast.” The explosion Ridgley heard was the IED detonating as Private Smith’s vehicle drove over it.

Ahead of him, Ridgley saw the burning Humvee in the road. Two bloodied soldiers emerged from the thick black smoke and staggered toward his vehicle, dazed. “One of the guys was trying to push something up his arm,” recalls Ridgley, “like he was trying to fix his sleeve. When he got closer I saw it was skin. Skin was just falling off of his arm.” A second bloodied soldier followed behind. “He asked me if he had something on his face,” Ridgley recalls. “Most of his face was missing. It was horrible. He was horribly, horribly burned.”

Ridgley’s team leader, Sergeant Phillip Whitehouse, ran toward
the burning vehicle. Whitehouse discovered Private First Class Jeremiah Smith unconscious, trapped inside. “He pulled Smith out. That’s when the vehicle started to cook off,” Ridgley remembers. “All the ammo inside started to catch on fire. There were massive explosions going off all around. I caught some shrapnel. A little burn near my sleeve. I was sitting on the gun platform thinking, I need to call in a report.”

Ridgley called for a Medevac and remembers looking around. “There were these Iraqi kids playing soccer in a field,” Ridgley recalls, “and I told the Medevac the helicopter could land there. Everything seemed like slow motion.” Ridgley had never seen mortally wounded people before, and he was having trouble focusing. “The Medevac arrived and the soldiers were loaded onboard. From the time I called it in until the time the helicopter took off was about twenty minutes,” recalls Ridgley. “But it sure seemed like it lasted all day,” he says. “Time stood still.” Later, Jeremy Ridgley learned that Private First Class Jeremiah Smith had died.

On May 28, the Department of Defense identified Private Smith as having been killed in Iraq while supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Pentagon attributed Smith’s death to “unexploded ordnance,” as if what had killed him had been old or forgotten munitions left lying in the road. Two weeks later, in an article in the
New York Times
titled “After the War,” a Defense Department official conceded that the unexploded ordnance that killed Smith might have been left there deliberately.

An IED is made up of five components: the explosive, a container, a fuse, a switch, and a power source, usually a battery. It does not require any kind of advanced technology. With certain skills, an IED is relatively easy to make. The primary component of the IED is the explosive material, and after the invasion, Iraq was overflowing with explosives.

“There’s more ammunition in Iraq than any place I’ve ever
been in my life, and it’s not securable,” General John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), told the Senate Appropriations Committee in September 2003. “I wish I could tell you we had it all under control, but we don’t.”

The month after Private Smith was killed by an IED, the casualty toll from IED attacks began to climb. In June there were twenty-two incidents. By August the number of soldiers killed by IEDs in Iraq was greater than the number of fatalities by direct fire, including from guns and rocket-propelled grenades. By late 2003, monthly IED fatalities were double that of deaths by other weapons. In a press conference, General Abizaid stated that American troops were now fighting “a classical guerrilla-style campaign” in Iraq. This kind of language had not been used by the Defense Department since the Vietnam War.

“A new phenomenon [was] at work on the battlefield,” says retired Australian brigadier general Andrew Smith, who also has a Ph.D. in political studies. “IEDs caught coalition forces off guard. ‘Surprise’ is not a word you want to hear on the battlefield.” Smith was one of the first NATO officers to lead a counter-IED working group for Combined Joint Task Force 7, in Baghdad. Later, in 2009, Brigadier General Smith oversaw the work of 350 NATO officials at CENTCOM, all dealing with countering IEDs. “The sheer volume of unsecured weapons in Iraq was staggering,” Smith says, “a whole lot of explosives left over from Saddam.” In 2003, there were an estimated 1 million tons of unsecured explosives secreted around the country in civilian hands. These were former stockpiles once controlled by Saddam Hussein’s security forces, individuals who quickly abandoned their guard posts after the invasion. A videotape shot by a U.S. Army helicopter crew in 2003 shows the kind of explosive material that was up for grabs across Iraq. In the footage, an old aircraft hangar is visible, stripped of its roof and its siding. From the overhead perspective, row after row of
unguarded bombs can be seen. One of the men in the helicopter says, “It looks like there’s hundreds of warheads or bombs” in there.

The IEDs kept getting more destructive. Three months after Private First Class Jeremiah Smith was killed, a truck bomb was driven into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-two people, including the UN special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The Pentagon added a new IED classification to the growing roster. This was called the VBIED, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, soon to be joined by the PBIED, a person-borne improvised explosive device, or suicide bomber. When Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the IEDs, the resounding psychological effects were profound. Before the invasion, there had been no Al Qaeda in Iraq.

DARPA’s long-term goals were now subordinated to this immediate need inundating the Pentagon. Initial counter-IED efforts involved Counter Radio-Controlled Electronic Warfare (CREW) systems, or jamming devices, that were installed on the dashboards of Army vehicles and cost roughly $80,000 each. The triggering mechanism on most IEDs consisted of simple wireless electronics, including components found in cell phones, cordless telephones, wireless doorbells, and key fobs. Early jammers were designed to interrupt the radio signals insurgents relied on to detonate their IEDs. First dozens, then hundreds of classified jamming systems made their way to coalition forces in Iraq, with code names like Jukebox, Warlock, Chameleon, and Duke. At the same time, DARPA worked on a next generation of jammers, developing technology that could one day locate IEDs by sensing chemical vapors from the relative safety of a fast-moving vehicle. The program, called Recognize IED and Report, or RIEDAR, would work from a distance of up to two miles away. The ideal device would be able to search 2,700 square meters per second, could be small and portable, and able to alert within one second of detection. But these were
future plans, and the Pentagon needed ways to counter the IED threat now. By February 2004, IED attacks had escalated to one hundred per week. The five hundred jammers already in Iraq were doing only a little good. In June, General Abizaid sent a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers, sounding an alarm. The Pentagon needed what Abizaid called a “Manhattan-like project” to address the IED problem.

In Washington, Congress put DARPA in the hot seat when, in the spring of 2004, in a research study report for Congress, the concept of network-centric warfare was taken to task. Congress asked whether the Department of Defense had “given adequate attention to possible unintended outcomes resulting from over-reliance on high technology,” with the clear suggestion being that it had not. The unintended consequence that had Congress most concerned was the IED, presently killing so many American soldiers in Iraq. In its report, Congress wondered if, while the Pentagon had been pursuing “networked communications technology,” the terrorists were gaining the upper hand by using “asymmetric countermeasures.” Congress listed five other areas of concern: “(1) suicide bombings; (2) hostile forces intermingling with civilians used as shields; (3) irregular fighters and close-range snipers that swarm to attack, and then disperse quickly; (4) use of bombs to spread ‘dirty’ radioactive material; or (5) chemical or biological weapons.”

To the press, Arthur Cebrowski claimed that he had been misunderstood. The so-called godfather of network-centric warfare complained that Congress was misinterpreting his words. “Warfare is all about human behavior,” said Cebrowski, which contradicted hundreds of pages of documents and memos he had sent to Secretary Rumsfeld. “It’s a common error to think that transformation has a technology focus. It’s one of many elements,” Cebrowski said. Even the Defense Department’s own Defense Acquisition
University, a training and certification establishment for military personnel and defense contractors, was confused by the paradox and sent a reporter from its magazine
Defense AT&L
to Cebrowski’s office to clarify. How could the father of network-centric warfare be talking about human behavior, the reporter asked. “Network-centric warfare is first of all about human behavior, as opposed to information technology,” Cebrowski said. “Recall that while ‘a network’ is a noun, ‘to network’ is a verb, and what we are focusing on is human behavior in the networked environment.”

It seemed as if Cebrowski was stretching to make sense, or at least resorting to semantics to avoid embarrassing the secretary of defense. Nowhere in Secretary Rumsfeld’s thirty-nine-page monograph for the president, a summation of Cebrowski’s vision titled “Transformation Planning Guidance,” was human behavior mentioned or even alluded to. While Cebrowski did television interviews addressing congressional concerns, the Office of Force Transformation added four new slides to its “Transforming Defense” PowerPoint presentation. One of the two new slides now addressed “Social Intelligence as a key to winning the peace,” and the other addressed “Social Domain Cultural Awareness” as a way to give warfighters a “cognitive advantage.”

On
PBS NewsHour,
Cebrowski defended network-centric warfare and again reminded the audience that the United States had, he believed, achieved operational dominance in Iraq, completing major combat operations in just twenty-one days. “That speed of advance was absolutely unheard of,” Cebrowski said. But now, “we’re reminded that warfare is more than combat, and combat’s more than shooting.” It was about “how do people behave?” To win the war in Iraq, Cebrowski said, the military needed to recognize that “warfare is all about human behavior.” And that was what network-centric warfare was about: “the behavior of humans in the networked environment… how do people behave when they become networked?”

If Cebrowski could not convincingly speak of human behavior,
he found a partner in someone who could. Retired major general Robert H. Scales was a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and recipient of the Silver Star. As the country sought a solution to the nightmare unfolding in Iraq, Scales proposed what he called a “culture-centric” solution. “War is a thinking man’s game,” Scales wrote in
Proceedings
magazine, the monthly magazine of the United States Naval Institute. “Wars are won as much by creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation.” As if reaching back in time to the roundtable discussions held by JFK’s Special Group and Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, Scales was talking about motivation and morale.

In 2004, amid the ever-growing IED crisis, Scales proposed to Cebrowski that the Pentagon needed a social science program to get inside how the enemy thought. The United States needed to know what made the enemy tick. Cebrowski agreed. “Knowledge of one’s enemy and his culture and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle,” Cebrowski wrote in
Military Review,
a bi-monthly Army journal. The Office of Force Transformation now publicly endorsed “social intelligence” as a new warfighting concept, the idea that in-depth knowledge of local customs in Iraq and elsewhere would allow the Pentagon to better determine who was friend and who was foe in a given war theater. “Combat troops are becoming intelligence operatives to support stabilization and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq,” Cebrowski’s office told
Defense News
in April 2004. It was hearts and minds all over again, reemerging in Iraq.