The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare
Written by Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik,
Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2002,
ISBN: 9781557509734, 552 pp.
Reviewed by: Major Russell Parkin, Research Fellow, Land Warfare Studies Centre
This analysis of the precision revolution by Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik has been described by the leading scholar of American air power, Benjamin S. Lambeth, as ‘a sweeping survey of the technologies of precision navigation and attack and an encyclopedic account of their combat employment throughout the 1980s and 1990s’. Professional soldiers should not be deterred by the focus on aerial precision in the title of this book. This study is, in fact, broad in scope and highly valuable, in that it examines the potential and the limitations of aerial precision, not only for air operations, but also for both land and joint operations.
In addition, Rip and Hasik, while highlighting the clear potential of aerial precision, are cautious proponents of this type of warfare. Indeed, they point out that the precision revolution should be seen as ‘a revolution with limits’. In particular, the authors pay considerable attention to the central paradox of precision warfare, namely that it often leads to destruction without decision. Between 1991 and 2001, American military strategy relied mainly on the use of long-range, stand-off, precision air power or ‘cruise missile diplomacy’. The authors believe that this approach represents a flawed understanding of military strategy. They suggest that, in the wake of 11 September and the War on Terror, there must be throughout the West ‘a profound military transformation’ that includes a willingness to deploy ground forces.
An overreliance on a precision strike strategy has created a situation in which Islamist political extremists have doubted the United States’ resolve to defend its vital interests. Rip and Hasik warn that, if the power to achieve almost nuclear results with ordinary explosives does not guarantee tangible political benefits, then strategy is clearly failing policy. In particular, they identify a gap between the often devastating physical effects of precision bombing and its indifferent political effects. he case of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq is cited as an example of the paradox of ‘physical destruction without political decision’. Precision attack may have the advantages of yielding impressive battle-damage imagery on television and it may succeed in winning public acclaim at home because it saves lives. Ultimately, however, precision warfare is of little use if it has only a marginal effect on the political system of a targeted country—as was the case with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1991 and the invasion of 2003.
The authors argue that US experience with precision attack in the 1990s offers a clear warning: technological prowess is important, but precision attack requires calibrated doctrine and a firm place in joint operations, because by itself aerospace power is not enough. ‘Constant reliance’, write Rip and Hasik, ‘on a single system to enforce foreign policy goals is dangerous’. When vital interests are at stake, political leaders must be prepared to risk the lives of their service personnel.
The study describes the way in which the Global Positioning System (GPS) underpins precision operations and has become the ‘single most important development in command and control technology since the wireless telegraph’. For land forces, GPS has made wide-area, rapid manoeuvre a reality, while the synergy between global positioning and night vision will be pivotal in future joint operations. Nonetheless, while GPS brings precision down to the tactical level, the system has weaknesses. The authors warn that ‘precision strike is problematical, and the strategy, doctrine and advanced technology that define it can be nullified by relatively simple and inexpensive asymmetrical responses such as decoy targets, camouflage, dispersal, and deception’.
Precision-guided munitions are also vulnerable to electronic warfare, especially jamming, while there are also serious intelligence difficulties in interpreting a flood of targeting data. Current methods of intelligence preparation of the battlespace and of the use of operational intelligence support are described as being woefully inadequate because, as the authors put it, ‘whether weapons will be able to fly through individual windows will be irrelevant if the precise windows to be targeted cannot be known with certainty beforehand’.
The ‘fatal visibility’ of immobile forces to aerial precision strike suggests that future adversaries will almost certainly place a premium on combat mobility. Unfortunately, autonomous precision-guided munitions are of limited utility against mobile enemies. Nearly all successes in precision strike during the 1990s were achieved against fixed sites. For Rip and Hasik, ‘if politicians are unwilling to send soldiers to hunt down evasive targets, their weapons may be found to be powerless against meaningful, mobile targets’.
In the future, enemy forces will adopt dispersible and resilient forces, and in order to deal with this challenge, intelligence will be essential. In the 1999 Kosovo conflict, maskirovka (the Russian art of strategic and tactical deception) was used by Serbian forces and in some areas was highly effective. The post-conflict Pentagon’s Kosovo Mission Effectiveness Assessment Team (KMEAT) found the wreckage of only twenty-six tanks (although it accepts that ninety-three were destroyed). The authors conclude that the Yugoslav Third Army in Kosovo was never incapacitated as a fighting force by the NATO air campaign. As a result, if the Western allies had been forced to mount a ground invasion in the Balkans, Serb troops may have given a good account of themselves.
There are clear rules that must be recognised if the precision revolution is to become a true force multiplier in modern warfare. First, the advocates of aerospace power need to understand that precision-guided munitions can often be ineffective political instruments. Second, there must be an appreciation that the ability to target the enemy precisely often encourages the micromanagement of warfighting and unnecessary political interference in military operational matters. Other rules highlighted by Rip and Hasik include warnings that effective maskirovka can compromise precision weapons campaign planning, while the need for exact geographic coordinates in precision strikes entails a huge intelligence effort.
This detailed study warrants close reading. The book demonstrates that precision strike is as vulnerable to friction, miscalculation and human error as any other type of warfare. One is reminded of Clausewitz’s famous observation that, in war, the apparently simple things are often the hardest. All operations are undertaken in a resistant element since the opponent is a thinking human being and not an inanimate object. For these reasons, and despite its undoubted revolutionary potential, GPS and aerial precision warfare have to be seen not as military ends in themselves, but as military means to achieving political ends.
