Defense Technology International - July 2007 - (Page 50)

INSIGHT EDITORIAL efense Technology International’s staff has been on the move. While David Axe took a relaxing break in the unspoiled surroundings of Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, Joris Janssen Lok and I toughed it out at the Paris air show. Is a severely ripe Camembert any less dangerous than an EFP? When you bring those perspectives together and add some of the other topics we’re covering in this magazine, though, the contrasts can induce enough cognitive dissonance to knock you out of your chair. Two stories cover operations in Afghanistan, where the contributions of technology are overwhelmed by human issues and the need to gain and win the confidence of the people for whom, in theory, NATO forces are fighting. JDAMs and self-propelled PzH-2000 guns could win a battle but not the war, and troops are put in harm’s way while protecting a Dutch delegation visiting a girls’ school. It’s part of the mission, but it puts troops in a poorly defended spot at a fixed time. In Afghanistan, too, there’s a political distinction between Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the U.S.-led war on the Taliban, and NATO’s involvement in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Many NATO countries are not involved in OEF; domestic politics make it unthinkable. But the fact is that OEF and ISAF operate in parallel on the ground and are getting harder to tell apart. As our report makes clear, OEF is now working on reconstruction and links with non-military operations, while ISAF has grown weary of Taliban potshots and has started to “strike precisely at key targets in the opposing forces’ commandand-control organization,” which means pretty much what you think it does. We’re also looking at the lessons of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. In that case, Israel—displaying real guts to air its problems in public—has concluded that the modernization of its military went too far in the direction of reliance on long-range standoff fire support. The plan was to use small, mobile ground-force teams to find targets, supported by UAVs and air power. But after some initial successes, as Hezbollah moved its rocket launchers, there were not enough land forces in contact with the enemy to find the key targets. None of this is to say that standoff firepower is useless, but it cannot secure victory on its own. Nor is it to say that technological solutions won’t do the job—if Israel, for example, rebuilds its capabilities in maneuver warfare, it will still draw support from high-tech UAVs and precision weapons. But then, in Paris, I talked to the leader of D On War the Neuron UCAV demonstrator program, Thierry Prunier. Toward the end of our conversation, Prunier mused on the ability of a Neuron-type system to destroy a precision target without any risk whatsoever to its operator. “It’s almost ‘Second Life’ warfare,” he said, referring to the Internet’s massive virtual world. Of course, it’s not quite so virtual to those on the receiving end of the weapon. A manned stealth aircraft is also a safe place to be in most forms of conflict. Unless you do something dumb or are going up against S-400 missiles or people in Sukhois who know what they are doing, the chances of being shot down are slim. But is it too bloodless? One senior U.S. aerospace-defense executive at Paris wondered if all the technology made it too easy—too Second Life-like—to start a war. It’s not hard to see that the U.S. might not have led its partners into Iraq in 2003 had it not believed it would all be over within weeks. Is that an argument that precision longrange systems can actually make warfare worse than it is, because it’s more likely to start? Certainly, that kind of capability did not help in Lebanon. What technologies are essential today? Out of the systems we talk about in this issue, I’d select a few, some high-tech and some not. Software-defined radios make sense—today’s battlefield communications system is the equivalent of a world in which I can’t talk to a Cingular subscriber on a T-Mobile phone. Mine-protected vehicles, flying off the shelves in the U.S., earn a cautious approval. The risk is that they start an arms race with the bomb-planter, which ends when the vehicle is the size of a tank and can’t move. Already, they are being bought without regard to their impact on airlift requirements. Vertical takeoff UAVs are just coming out of the toy cupboard. Among all the potential uses for them, I think there are two that help in the kind of conflict we are writing about in this issue. One is close-look surveillance in the urban environment—and this is a different capability because we are talking about vehicles that can operate within feet of the objective, and even bounce off buildings and keep flying. The other—surprisingly, perhaps—is logistics. Risking two or more helicopters to drop off a platoon’s supply of bullets, beans and batteries is a hard thing to do; a single, smaller UAV is easier to risk, and quieter into the bargain. Which is interesting, since VTOL UAVs were originally thought of as surveillance assets. But the lesson of the world today is that the war is never the one that you thought it was when you started building hardware. I –Bill Sweetman www.aviationweek.com/dti 50 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL JULY/AUGUST 2007 http://www.aviationweek.com/dti

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Defense Technology International - July 2007

Around the World Science Watch Tech Watch Parallax Ghost Ship Low Visibility Red Tape Sub Catcher Boom Time Broad Access Fight or Flight Cut Loose Loud and Clear Drone On Postmortem The Net Cutting Edge On the Record In Review Insight

Defense Technology International - July 2007

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