BIG GUNS

Down in Texas, where I come from, the answer to the homicide detective's question, "Why'd you kill him?" is often, " 'Cause he needed killin'." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could have said the same last week in response to questions about his decision to terminate the Army's prized $11 billion Crusader artillery program. Put simply, it needed killin'. Why is a longer story, and one Mr. Rumsfeld touched on when he told reporters, "Our country needs an Army that is mobile, lethal and deployable across a wide range of future contingencies."

There is no question that the Crusader is a fine artillery piece. It has a high rate of fire and can keep up with high-speed armored columns. But it's not easily deployable. The Crusader weighs 42 tons; its supply vehicle 33 tons. The combination is enough to give nightmares to a logistician trying to figure out how to get it into a theater of war. It also exceeds the weight limits of most bridges in many places the Army might need to fight.

For these reasons alone, it should be self-evident that the Crusader must go. But resistance to change is strong within the armed forces. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki has been pushing hard to transform the Army, but he faces a great deal of resistance. Part of this resistance is cultural. According to one mid-grade Army officer, the Army has "tied itself culturally to the theory and practice of Second-Generation War. This focus centers on requirements to mobilize heavy forces for massive wars of attrition in Western Europe."

But the sort of missions for which land forces will be needed in the future are expeditionary in nature. As former Marine Commandant Gen. Carl Mundy was fond of saying, "Expeditionary is not a mission. It's a mindset." The Marines have developed this expeditionary mindset over decades. The Army now must come to grips with this requirement in a relatively short period of time; it won't be easy.

The Army's predicament was illustrated by Gen. Tommy Franks decision to deploy Marines in Afghanistan once it was determined that ground troops beyond Special Forces would be required. Gen. Franks' decision became a topic of great concern--to say the least--among Army officers. As Katherine McIntire Peters wrote in Government Executive magazine, "The fact that the Marines conducted what is considered to be a textbook Army mission, the seizure of an airfield in a theater of operations far from any shoreline, sparked fury among many mid-grade officers."

Many soldiers saw the Marine deployment as further evidence that the Army had become increasingly irrelevant since the end of the Cold War. Of course, this was an overreaction. As subsequent events illustrated, there was still plenty for the Army to do in Afghanistan, and there will be even more for the service to do in the phases of the war against terrorism that are certain to follow Afghanistan. But the episode does illustrate the degree to which the security environment has evolved over the past decade, and the fact that responsiveness, flexibility and adaptability are the characteristics most necessary in military forces of the future.

To protect its world-wide interests in the post-Cold War world, the U.S. must be able to project power globally. Sometimes, long-range precision air strikes can do the job. But often land forces will be required. Given its geographical position, the U.S. can project power, especially its land power, only by overcoming the "tyranny of distance."

During the Cold War, the U.S. handled the tyranny of distance by identifying the most likely theaters of war and stationing Army and Air Force units there during peacetime as a deterrent. Of course, the defense of Europe required more forces than the ones already there, so equipment for reinforcing forces was pre-positioned in theater. In the event of an emergency, troops were to be flown into theater from the continental United States and "married up" with their equipment. This approach worked as long as the U.S. military was planning against an identifiable adversary, the Soviet Union. It is less relevant now since the security environment has become more uncertain.

The tyranny-of-distance problem for the Army manifested itself during the Gulf War when it took the U.S. nearly six months to deploy the ground combat power thought necessary to defeat Iraq. Since that time, it has only become more acute. Indeed, this problem is a major consideration if the U.S. intends to use ground forces against Iraq, which most analysts believe will be necessary to ensure success.

Defenders of the Crusader point out that Army transformation could take years; meanwhile we'll need to rely on today's Army to carry out such missions as conducting a land war against Iraq. This is undeniable. But there are alternatives to the Crusader. The one backed by Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration is to utilize Crusader technology and apply it to the Army's Future Combat System, a family of lighter, more deployable vehicles that still possess high lethality.
There is also the joint response. Recently the Marine task force commander responsible for securing the operating base in Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. James Mattis, revealed that he made the call to leave his artillery aboard ship because he believed that the fire support he needed could be provided by air assets alone. This sort of decision was unheard of for a ground commander in the recent past.

However much the Crusader has going for it, it has been overtaken by changes in the security environment that make Army transformation imperative. As Gen. Shinseki has admonished those in his service who are not enamored of his transformation plan, "If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more."