Firepower, targeting and intelligence
The US Military possesses great amounts of precision firepower. Just go on YouTube.com or LiveLeak.com and search for various weapon systems. The ability of the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force to deliver accurately lethal force has increased in leaps-and-bounds since 1991. Compared to the last major action in Vietnam it has been exponential. This has been due to the availability of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The focus of US weapon developers the last thirty years has been to increase accuracy, to the point where the size of the payload has been decreasing. Unfortunately, if you don’t have good targeting information then accuracy doesn’t matter. You have to know where the target is and why you want to hit it. When I did target development and planning we built charts of the area of operations. We then used all-source intelligence to develop a picture of the enemy’s positions. It was a lot easier, obviously, to find fixed positions but the US military intelligence system has been putting a lot of effort into building a real-time intelligence system. We then used this picture to make a List of Targets, all available enemy assets that could be targeted, and a Target List, the commander’s priority for destruction. Normally air defenses would be one of the highest. Today’s forces have to do the same, but due to the precise nature of their weapons and the desire to minimize collateral damage and blue-on-blue it has become a lot harder. In the counter-insurgency type of warfare the US is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan where your target is fleeting and not distinct it gets even harder still. Gone are the days of massed artillery batteries and carpet bombing of World War II firing against large fixed positions of enemy troops. The key is delivering a small munition on a small target. The Taliban found this out the hard way by providing fixed positions that were easily identifiable. The JDAM had no problem with that. Unfortunately if you have a group of fighters in small groups moving around an area, it is hard to use even the GPS guided munitions as they take time to respond. Stories from Iraq indicate that the decision loop on using weapons against targets can be too long, increased by again the desire to minimize collateral damage.
These are the kind of issues that need to be solved in order to have a system of target, strike, assess and re-strike.
