The Pentagon's Brain (28 page)

A second SIMNET center was built at Fort Benning, Georgia, then another at Fort Rucker, in Alabama, for attack helicopter training. In 1988 a fourth SIMNET center went up at the U.S. Army garrison in Grafenwoehr, Germany, also for armor vehicles. In DARPA’s SIMNET, the U.S. Army saw a whole new way to prepare for war. Then an unexpected new center was requested by the Department of Defense.

“The high rankers at the Pentagon wanted a simulation center of their own,” recalls Neale Cosby, who oversaw the engineering on this center. The facility chosen as the host was DARPA’s longtime partner the Institute for Defense Analyses, just down the street from DARPA in Alexandria. The IDA offices were located in a collegiate-looking yellow-brick and glass building located at 1801 North Beauregard Street. In 1988, Cosby recalls, much of the ground floor, including the cafeteria, was taken over by DARPA so an IDA simulation center could be built there for Pentagon brass. Cosby recalls the production. “We covered all the windows with camouflage, laid down a virtual tarmac made of foam, set up fiberglass helicopters, tanks, and aircraft cockpits, then networked everything and wired it for sound.” Finally, a mysterious feature was added, one that no other SIMNET center had. For reasons of discretion, Cosby and Thorpe called the feature a “flying carpet.”

“It was a way for [participants] to put themselves into the virtual world not as a pilot or a tank driver or a gunner, but anywhere” in flight, says Cosby. “It was as if you were invisible.” At the time, the details of the invisible component were classified because the flying carpet feature was a way for Pentagon officials with high clearances to experience what it would be like to fly through a virtual battle in a stealth fighter jet. These were the results of DARPA’s “high-stealth aircraft” program, which began in 1974.

Over a ten-year period, DARPA and the Army spent $300 million developing simulation technology. In the summer of 1990 the SIMNET system was transferred over to the U.S. Army. Its first large-scale use was to simulate a war game exercise undertaken by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), in Tampa, Florida. For years CENTCOM had sponsored a biennial war game exercise called Operation Internal Look, based on a real-world contingency plan. The Internal Look war games trained CENTCOM’s combatant commander and his staff in command, control, and communications techniques. The exercises involved a pre-scripted war game scenario in which U.S. forces would quickly deploy to a location to confront a hypothetical Soviet invasion of a specific territory. In the past, the war games had taken place in Cold War settings like the Zagros Mountains in Iran and the Fulda Gap in Germany.

In the summer of 1990 the Cold War climate had changed. The Berlin Wall had come down eight months before, and CENTCOM commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf decided that for Internal Look 90, U.S. forces would engage in a SIMNET-based war game against a different foe, other than the Soviet Union. A scripted narrative was drawn up involving Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his military, the fourth largest in the world. In this narrative, Iraq, coming off its eight-year war with Iran, would attack the rich oil fields of Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. armed forces would enter the conflict to help American ally Saudi Arabia. Because new SIMNET technology was involved, realistic data on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and neighboring Kuwait were incorporated into the war game scenario, including geography, architecture, and urban populations, this for the first time in history. In playing the war game, CENTCOM battle staff drove tanks, flew aircraft, and moved men across computer-generated Middle Eastern cities and vast desert terrain with the astonishing accuracy and precision of SIMNET simulation.

“We played Internal Look in late July 1990, setting up a mock headquarters complete with computers and communications gear at Eglin Air Force Base,” General Schwarzkopf wrote in his memoir. And then to everyone’s surprise, on the last day of the simulated war game exercises, on August 4, 1990, Iraq invaded its small, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait—for real. It was a bizarre turn of events. Science and science fiction had crossed paths once again.

Months later, after the Gulf War began and ended, General Schwarzkopf commented on how strangely similar the real war and the simulated war game had been.

“As the exercise [i.e., the Gulf War] got under way,” General Schwarzkopf said, “the movements of Iraq’s real-world ground and air forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario of the game.”

S
ecretary of Defense Dick Cheney sat in his office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon eating Chinese food. It was shortly after 6:00 p.m. on January 16, 1991. On the round table in front of him there were paper cartons of food: steamed vegetables, egg rolls, and rice. On a television set mounted on the wall, CNN war correspondents were reporting from Baghdad, Iraq, where it was the middle of the night. Secretary Cheney listened carefully as he ate his dinner. He would later say that what struck him as odd, even surreal, as he watched the news feed was just how ignorant the reporters and everyone else in Baghdad were regarding the reality that was about to unfold. Tomahawk land attack missiles, the engines of which were created by DARPA, and F-117A stealth fighter aircraft, also a DARPA-born program, were on their way to destroy parts of the city. The Tomahawks could not be recalled. War was less than an hour away.

Below the office of the secretary of defense, just one floor
down, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, sat reviewing target lists. The missiles and bombs were set to strike and destroy Saddam Hussein’s military command centers, communication towers, electrical plants, radar sites, and more. The plan was to “give them the full load the first night,” Cheney later observed. Any kind of gradual escalation carried the stench of Vietnam. It was an ambitious strategy. Baghdad had a sophisticated air defense network and was the second most heavily air-defended city in the world, after Moscow.

It was a little after 2:30 a.m. Baghdad time and the moonless sky over the city was dark as Major Greg “Beast” Feest prepared to drop the first bomb of the Persian Gulf War. Piloting his F-117A stealth fighter toward the target, Major Feest was overwhelmed by a wave of apprehension.

“Two thoughts crossed my mind,” Feest later recalled. “First, would I be able to identify the target? Second, did the Air Force want me to drop this bomb?” But the doubts were fleeting and lasted only a few seconds. “As I approached the target area, my adrenaline was up and instinct took over. My bomb was armed.”

Major Feest’s target was the Information Operations Center at the Nukayb Airbase, southwest of Baghdad, a key link between Iraq’s radar network and its air defense headquarters. Destroying this target would allow other, non-stealth aircraft to enter Iraq undetected. Feest looked down at the display panel in front of him. “My laser began to fire as I tracked the target,” he said. “All I had to do was play, what I called, a highly sophisticated video game, and in 30 minutes I would be back in Saudi Arabia.”

At precisely 2:51 a.m. local time, the weapons bay doors opened on Feest’s F-117A and a two-thousand-pound laser-guided GBU-27 dropped from the fighter aircraft, headed for the target. On the display in front of him Feest watched what happened next. “I saw the bomb go through the cross-hairs and penetrate the bunker. The explosion came out of the hole the bomb had made and
blew out the doors of the bunker.” Feest’s bomb hit and destroyed one-half of the Iraqi air defense center at Nukayb.

“The video game was over,” Feest recalled thinking. Except this was not a video game. This was war, and Major Feest had just dropped the first bomb.

Precisely one minute later, a second laser-guided bomb from a second F-117A took out the remaining half of the building at Nukayb. As Feest headed back to the base in his stealth aircraft, he was stunned by what he saw. The sky was filled with a barrage of antiaircraft artillery shooting blindly at him. “I watched several SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] launch into the sky and fly through my altitude both in front [of] and behind me,” as Feest later described it. But not a single missile was guided to hit him. The F-117A was invisible to radar. DARPA’s stealth technology program had created a revolution in warfare.

Ten additional F-117As were on their way to drop bombs on targets in downtown Baghdad. In the first twenty-four hours of the war, a total of forty-two stealth fighters, which accounted for only 2.5 percent of the U.S. airpower used in the campaign, destroyed 31 percent of Iraqi targets. This was technology in action, and it gave the United States not only a tactical advantage but a psychological one as well. Stealth was like a silver bullet. It had allowed U.S. fighter jets to sneak into Iraqi airspace, destroy the country’s air defense system, and leave without a loss. Still, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared, “The great showdown has begun! The mother of all battles is under way.”

The U.S. air campaign against Baghdad devastated Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party military infrastructure. Between the laser-guided bombs, the infrared night-bombing equipment, and the stealth fighter aircraft, the Iraqi air force never had a chance to engage. In retaliation, the Iraqis launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but almost immediately, a U.S. Patriot missile shot down an Iraqi Scud missile, making the Patriot the first
antimissile ballistic missile fired in combat. The Pentagon promoted the Patriot as having near-perfect performance. But in classified communications a different story was unfolding. There were twenty-seven Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, and each battery was shooting nearly ten missiles at each incoming Iraqi Scud. At first the numbers did not make any sense, certainly not to U.S. Army vice chief of staff General Gordon R. Sullivan. How could it take ten U.S. Patriot antimissile missiles to shoot a single Iraqi Scud out of the sky? A classified investigation revealed that because of poor-quality engineering, the Iraqi Scuds were breaking apart in their terminal phase, shattering into multiple pieces as they headed back down to earth. These multiple fragments were confusing Patriot missiles into thinking that each piece was an additional warhead. Shoddy workmanship had inadvertently created a poor man’s version of the highly sophisticated MIRV—multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle—the deceptive penetration aid originally dreamed of by the Jason scientists thirty years before.

For the U.S. military, the Gulf War was an opportunity to demonstrate what its system of systems was capable of. While the stealth fighter aircraft received most of the attention, as far as high technology was concerned, there were other DARPA systems flying over Iraq that were equally revolutionary, just not as visible or as sleek. Drones played a prominent role in the system of systems, largely unreported. Remotely piloted vehicles, small and large, collected mapping information that helped steer Tomahawks to their targets. Some 522 drone sorties were flown, totaling 1,641 hours, many of them based on DARPA technology going back to the Vietnam War. Equipped with infrared sensors, the drones’ cameras easily located ground troops and vehicles hidden behind sand berms or covered in camouflage. The drones relayed back the information, which was then used to take out the targets. In one instance, a group of Iraqi soldiers stepped out from a hiding place
and waved the white flag of surrender at the eye of a television camera attached to a drone that was hovering nearby. This became the first time in history that a group of enemy soldiers was recorded surrendering to a machine.

Another DARPA technology workhorse was the four-engine Boeing 707-300 lumbering 42,000 feet above the battlefield. This was DARPA’s JSTARS, or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, a command, control, and communication center flying overhead in racetrack formation, managing much of the action going on down below. JSTARS, run jointly by the Air Force and the Army, involved aircraft equipped with a forty-foot-long canoe-shaped radar dome mounted under the front of the fuselage. Inside the dome, a radar antenna the height of a two-story house was able to send precise target information to Army ground stations below. The radar could detect, locate, and track vehicles moving deep behind enemy lines, making JSTARS the first and only airborne platform in operation that could maintain “real time surveillance over a corps-sized area of the battlefield.” The system software on board JSTARS was so complex it required almost 600,000 lines of code, roughly three times more than any other C3 system previously developed by the U.S. military. Sixteen years earlier, DARPA had begun developing this system of systems concept with Assault Breaker. Now it was in play in the war theater.

JSTARS was like an all-seeing commander in the sky. It could “see” some 19,305 square miles of terrain below, and it could detect moving targets 200 to 250 miles away. It could “see” in darkness and bad weather, including clouds and sandstorms. Two of these prototype JSTARS were flown in the Gulf War, providing what DARPA historical literature describes as a “real-time tactical view of the battlefield never seen before in the history of warfare.” When, on February 1, a ten-mile-long column of Iraqi armored tanks headed into Saudi Arabia, JSTARS saw it and sent coalition
aircraft to destroy the column. As bombing continued from the air, sorties passed the forty thousand mark—ten thousand more missions than the U.S. Army Air Force flew against Japan in the last fourteen months of World War II. The Pentagon began releasing mind-numbing statistics on what its system of systems had destroyed: 1,300 of Iraq’s 4,280 tanks, 1,100 of Iraq’s 3,110 artillery pieces, and 800 of Iraq’s 2,870 armored tanks.

Next came the ground war, which began on Sunday, February 24, at 4:00 a.m. Saudi time. Saddam Hussein delivered a radio broadcast telling his troops to kill “with all your might.” The decisive battle that ended the Gulf War two days later would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting, the last great tank battle of the twentieth century. But unlike so many of history’s great tank battles, which were named after the cities in which they were fought, the Battle of 73 Easting was named after a GPS coordinate, or gridline.

On February 25, eight hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks lined up on Iraq’s southern border with Saudi Arabia, and the following morning, the initial attack against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard Tawakalna tank division began with an assault by the Second Armored Cavalry Division. Spearheading the attack were three troops: Ghost, Eagle, and Iron. The Second Armored Cavalry Division had been stationed in Grafenwoehr, Germany, and had trained on DARPA’s SIMNET simulators before deploying to the Persian Gulf. The M1 Abrams tanks that Jack Thorpe and his DARPA team had driven around at Fort Knox had since been outfitted with a powerful new weapons system: night vision thermal imaging.

On the day of the battle that ended the Gulf War, there had been terrible weather all morning. After a night of rain, the flat, trackless desert remained encumbered by thick fog and clouds. Around 3:30 p.m. the sun briefly emerged, but then a sandstorm
kicked in. Between the bad weather and the thick black smoke moving across the desert from the burning Kuwaiti oil fields, visibility was reduced to nil. The gunners in the Iraqi Tawakalna tank division were blind. Not so the Second Armored Cavalry. Equipped with thermal imaging systems, the M1A1 tanks made it possible for U.S. soldiers to see in the dark. Night vision was a science DARPA had been advancing since 1961, when ARPA wrote the first handbook on the subject, the
Handbook of Military Infrared Technology.
Infrared vision was developed in Vietnam to help soldiers see through dense jungle canopies. Now it was being used in the desert.

“We had thermal imagery,” says Major Douglas Macgregor, who saw action in the Battle of 73 Easting as commander of Cougar Squadron, and “the Iraqis did not. Yes, our firepower was extremely accurate, pinpoint accurate, but we could see what we were firing at and they could not.” When the Second Armored Cavalry’s Eagle Troop launched its attack around 4:10 p.m., it caught the Iraqi Republican Guard unawares. In less than half an hour, Eagle Troop destroyed twenty-eight T-72 Iraqi tanks, sixteen armored personnel carriers, and thirty-nine trucks, with no losses of its own. “The battle took twenty-three minutes to win,” retired four-star general Paul Gorman told Congress. “The U.S. alone enjoyed the advantage of satellite navigation and imagery, and of thermal-imaging fire control.”

The Iraqi army was overpowered. Iraqi soldiers started to give up and abandon their posts en masse. During a vast exodus of Iraqi troops from Kuwait City, JSTARS pinpointed thousands of fleeing vehicles for coalition attack aircraft to bomb. The stark photographs of destroyed vehicles along Iraq’s Highway 80 provided a striking visual image of how a system of systems worked. Between JSTARS, stealth aircraft, GPS satellite navigation, bomber aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and night vision, the United States and its technological firepower wrought mega-death. Between 1,500 and
2,000 charred and abandoned vehicles were left littering the road, including Iraqi tanks, Mercedes-Benz sedans, stolen Kuwaiti fire trucks, and minivans. There were charred bodies and loose flip-flops, suitcases, and fruit crates. Some of the victims had been flash-heated to death in crawling and stretching motions, like the famous bodies from Pompeii. The international press called the four-lane stretch of highway between Iraq and Kuwait the “Highway of Death.”

Concerned about the negative narrative unfolding in the press, Colin Powell met with General Schwarzkopf to discuss the matter.

“The television coverage,” said Powell, is “starting to make us look as if we engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Schwarzkopf told him.

Powell asked General Schwarzkopf what he wanted to do.

“One more day should do it,” Schwarzkopf said, indicating he was authorizing one more day of bombing.

Late the following day, on February 27, President George H. W. Bush declared “suspension of offense combat” in the Persian Gulf and laid out conditions for a permanent cease-fire with Iraq. The Gulf War had lasted one month and twelve days.

One week after the cease-fire, back in Washington, D.C., DARPA director Victor Reis met with General Gordon Sullivan, vice chief of staff of the Army, for lunch. General Sullivan had formerly served as the deputy commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox and was a fan of SIMNET. To this lunch General Sullivan carried with him a copy of the
Stars and Stripes
newspaper. Pointing to a headline, “Ghost Troops Battle at the 73 Easting,” General Sullivan asked Reis if DARPA could put the Battle of 73 Easting in reverse simulation, as a training tool. Reis said he would see what he could do.