Great blog on the advertising business from a self-professed ad monkey.

An an  fake ad controversy that is raging across the pages of many a 'zine and blog (natch!) - "Is it real, or is it Photoshop?"  Hey, have you heard about  "subviral marketing?"  What will they think of next!

7:08:48 PM    

I like Fred Kaplan's work. I can't seem to find a bio of his to link to, but his work clearly  creates a stir. Everyone is assuming that Syria is the next target for Bush's Pax America (or  Pox Americus, as Doonesbury called it this past Sunday).  He clearly demonstrates why attacking Syria wouldn't be the cakewalk that Bush's hawks might think it would be.

war stories
Assad's Situation
Syria's military machine may be hollow—but it isn't harmless.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 3:25 PM PT

Syria's military mess

Bashar Assad, the young president of Syria, has got to be more than a little nervous right now. George W. Bush's press spokesman has called his country "a rogue nation." Unnamed senior officials are labeling him a member of the "junior varsity axis of evil." Even before U.S. tanks zoomed into Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld was warning him to stop helping high-level Iraqi refugees or face the consequences. Now that the three-week lightning war is over, Colin Powell is saying that, "in light of this new environment," Assad should review his "actions and … behavior" across the board.

And unlike Saddam Hussein, who may well have deluded himself with all those video screenings of Black Hawk Down, Assad must know that the Syrian military is no match for even a lightweight U.S. assault, should Bush decide to launch one.

On paper, Assad's armed forces seem formidable. His army has 215,000 soldiers with a similar number in the reserves. It includes eight armored divisions and three mechanized divisions, equipped with 4,700 tanks, 4,500 armored personnel carriers, 850 surface-to-air missiles, and 4,000 anti-aircraft guns. His air force consists of 40,000 personnel and 611 combat planes. By these measures, the Syrian military may appear to have more firepower than Saddam's did. However, in real life, it is burdened with at least as many shortcomings.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, itemizes some of these problems in a paper published just today. For example, take those 4,700 tanks. About 2,000 of them are 1960s-vintage T-55s, another 1,000 only slightly newer T-62s, both models from the USSR and utterly useless in modern combat. About 1,700 are T-72s, from the 1970s and '80s, but many of those are embedded in static defensive positions, and none have received much in the way of spare parts or maintenance since the Soviet Union went under.

The Syrian army was not merely supplied but trained by the Soviets, and so inherited their highly centralized, top-down, take-no-initiative style of warfare. In July 1998, Hafez Assad, the current president's father (who died in 2000), appointed a new chief of staff, who tried to press modern ideas on his officer corps, including an emulation of Israeli tactics. However, that fall, as tensions rose with Turkey over Assad's support of Kurdish guerrillas, the Syrian army (according to the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin) could not so much as deploy a serious fighting force on the Turkish border.

Syria's combat planes are pretty old, too—Soviet Sukhois and MiGs—and the pilots are trained badly, if at all. In 1982, Assad Sr. sent 90 of those planes into dogfights against the Israeli air force. The Israelis shot down all 90, the Syrians shot down zero. While they were at it, the Israeli pilots also managed to rip apart Syria's entire air-defense network.

There are no signs that the situation has improved since, either on the ground or in the air. From 1994-2001, according to Cordesman, the Syrians have received arms deliveries worth a mere $700 million. (By comparison, Israel has received $6.9 billion and Egypt $9.1 billion.) In 2000, Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center of Strategic Studies concluded, according to a summary in Ha'aretz, "that the strategic balance between Israel and Syria has never been so tilted in Israel's favor, and that Damascus has no real military option."

The Syrians do have three divisions of special forces, which have proved skilled in behind-the-lines action, and about 8,000 paramilitary gendarmes, who might be able to mount the sort of rear-guard assaults on U.S. supply lines that the Saddam Fedayeen pulled off in the Iraqi desert. However, the bottom line is that a couple of U.S. armored divisions, with a complement of air support, could break through to Damascus in little time.

Could Bush seriously be contemplating such a move? It's doubtful. Some of his house neocons see Iraq as the first in a series of Middle Eastern dominos to fall, but even they tend to theorize that Saddam's swift toppling will have a "demonstration effect" on his erstwhile allies, forcing them to "wake up" to the new geopolitical realities. It is also less than clear that Bush's soaring popularity could sustain a second round of war; certainly, he has not yet prepared the public for an invasion of Syria, as he set the stage over the course of a year for an assault on Iraq.

Still, if you're Bashar Assad, you've got to be noticing that, just as the U.S. 3^rd Infantry Division and 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force are preparing to go back home, the 4^th Infantry and 1^st Armor Divisions are starting to arrive. And while most of these troops will be tasked with establishing security in the new Iraq, might some of them—you've got to be asking—be sent on a little mission to the west?

But quite apart from the numerous political, economic, diplomatic, and humanitarian reasons for not plunging into a war on Syria, there is one military caveat as well—Syria really does have weapons of mass destruction, probably more than Iraq ever had, and its whole military strategy is geared to using them if necessary.

After the Israelis stripped bare the myth of Syrian defenses in 1982, Hafez Assad abandoned his goal of achieving "strategic parity" with Israel and instead aimed for "strategic deterrence." To that end, he built up huge stockpiles of biological and especially chemical weapons—including an arsenal of missiles with sufficient range to reach Israeli cities, as well as bombs and artillery shells to kill enemy troops on the battlefield. (This shift of doctrine and the resulting chemical buildup might be a source of solace for Bashar right now, but they also provide evidence that he knows how weak his conventional forces are; he knows that Dad pretty much stopped competing in that arena.)

Hafez Assad received his first batch of chemical artillery shells as a gift from Egypt just before the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After that, he started buying them in quantity from the USSR and Czechoslovakia, though it's generally believed that the Soviets refused to help him set up his own production facilities. For that, he went shopping in China and North Korea. Until the early '90s, before export controls started tightening, he also bought chemical precursors from companies in France, Germany, Austria, Holland, and Switzerland (from the same firms that supplied Iraq). He started producing nerve gas in 1984 and was able to pack chemical weapons into missile warheads by the following year. The CIA estimates that Assad started deploying missiles with VX nerve gas in 1997. He is thought to possess 500 to 1,000 tons of chemical agents, including VX and sarin.

Syria is now believed to have several thousand chemical bombs, packed mainly with sarin, as well as 50-100 chemically tipped ballistic missiles, mainly Soviet-built SS-21s and Scuds. Assad bought Scud-B's, as well as the longer-range Scud-C's and -D's, from North Korea, which also provided the means for Syria to manufacture them.

There are reportedly four chemical-weapons production sites in Syria, though there may be more, since the Assads integrated this effort with the country's extensive commercial pharmaceutical industry. Intelligence analysts and their think-tank associates have written of underground bunkers and tunnels where chemical weapons are churned out and stored. It is hard to tell how much of this claim is true and how much is "threat-inflation," fostered by the Israelis, the Syrians, or both. (Each country has reason to exaggerate: Israel, to make the case for additional military aid; Syria, to deter a pre-emptive attack.)

If the United States were preparing an invasion of Syria, special operations forces would no doubt be scouring the areas around these suspected sites. The facilities would be bombarded the first night of the war. However, airstrikes might not destroy all the weapons—and if Syria retaliated, the results could be disastrous. In any case, it is no coincidence that the lab chiefs at Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Center, which runs the country's weapons-of-mass-production program, have been holding their first air-raid drills lately. They, too, clearly have cause to be nervous.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2081578/

5:39:52 PM    

Funny, but I was just thinking about this question the other day and then I saw this post on Slate by Fred Kaplan from last Friday that explains it all to us. I can better understand the recent calls for reviving the Draft.  It isn't just a ploy to try to get Middle America to care about the human cost of Bush's wars of preemption, but it addresses the theory that a non-volunteer army with the resulting lower levels of professionalism and training would be less likely to be wielded as a Big Stick casually around the world:

war stories
Force Majeure
What lies behind the military's victory in Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 3:45 PM PT

So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders' real-time view of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold within the military since then—a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture.

The new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert Storm, when the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the School for Advanced Military Studies. The school's founder was a colonel—soon promoted to brigadier general—named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam, witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army thought about combat.

In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army's war-fighting manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training. The previous edition, written in 1976 by Gen. William DePuy, had recited a strategy of attrition warfare, a static line of defense against the enemy's strongest point of assault, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. Wass de Czege's rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines.

The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.

By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege's students had been promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to themselves as the "Jedi Knights," designed the ground-war strategy of the first Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege's book—the feinted assault up the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army's western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides, hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.

The Marines, meanwhile, were going through a similar transformation. Col. Mike Wiley, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, revised his branch's war doctrine on the basis of a 1979 briefing called "Patterns of Conflict" by a retired Air Force colonel named John Boyd. Boyd too had concluded that successful warfare involves surprise, deception, sweeping quickly around flanks, and creating confusion and disorder in the enemy's ranks. The Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. Alfred Gray, considered himself a Boyd disciple and ordered his officers, who led the assault into Kuwait, to avoid frontal assaults and to maneuver around the Iraqis and attack their flanks.

For the Air Force and Navy, Desert Storm saw the inauguration of "smart bombs" that could explode within a few feet of their targets. Fewer than 10 percent of the munitions dropped in Desert Storm were smart bombs; the weapons were new and expensive (between $120,000 and $240,000 apiece); not many had been built; and they still had lots of technical bugs. By 1999, in the war over Kosovo, smart bombs were more reliable and a lot cheaper ($20,000 each); they constituted about 30 percent of bombs dropped. In Afghanistan, the figure rose to 70 percent, which is probably how the math will work out in Gulf War II as well.

The war in Afghanistan, however, saw three innovations that would alter the way America fights wars. First, high-tech smart bombs were combined with high-tech command, control, communications, and intelligence. A new generation of unmanned Predator drones flew over the battlefield, scanning the terrain with digital cameras and instantly transmitting the imagery back to command headquarters. Commanders would view the imagery, look for targets, and order pilots in the area to attack the targets. The pilots would punch the target's coordinates into the smart bomb's GPS receiver. The bomb would home in on the target. Total time elapsed: about 20 minutes. By comparison, in Desert Storm, the process of spotting a new target, assigning a weapon to hit it, then hitting it, took three days.

The second new thing about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was that it was truly a "combined-arms" operation—a battle plan that involved more than one branch of the armed services, working in tandem. This had never really happened before. Often using the new high-tech drones as the communications link, Army troops on the ground called for strikes from planes flown by Air Force pilots. Some of these planes, such as B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been built 30 or 40 years earlier to drop multi-megaton nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. The notion of using them to drop 2,000-pound conventional weapons, in support of ground troops, would have appalled an earlier generation of Air Force generals.

Over the previous decade or so, that generation of generals, weaned on Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command, had died out, and so had SAC's central enemy and target, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the '90s saw the creation of a new Joint Forces Command, which promulgated doctrines, field manuals, and war games that envisioned all the services fighting wars together, under command structures that were unified or at least "interoperable." One such document, called "Joint Vision 2020," issued in June 2000, emphasized a strategy of "full-spectrum dominance," involving the conduct of "prompt, sustained and synchronized operations with combinations of forces … space, sea, land, air and information"—a "synergy of the core competencies of the individual services, integrated into the joint team … a whole greater than the sum of its parts."

Written doctrines are one thing, actual operations another. However, the new structures and doctrines did breed, in the words of one Joint Forces Command publication, "a common joint culture." The institutional barriers of inter-service rivalry, even hatred, were gradually broken down. Once new technologies made joint coordination possible, and once the war in Afghanistan showed that coordination could reap tremendous advantages, resistance seemed futile.

Operation Desert Storm was really two wars—the air war and the ground war—each fought autonomously and in sequence. Gulf War II was an integrated war, waged simultaneously and in synchronicity, on the ground, at sea, and in the air. The vast majority of airstrikes, from Air Force bombers and attack planes as well as Navy fighters, were delivered on Iraqi Republican Guards, in order to ease the path of U.S. Army soldiers and Marines thrusting north to Baghdad.

Another new thing, which started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq, was the systematic inclusion of the so-called "shadow soldiers," the special operations forces. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was best-known for giving new authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made special ops a separate command, with its own budget. (Before then, each branch had its own special-ops division, which tended to get the big boys' leftovers, in terms of money, equipment and everything else.)

Gen. Schwarzkopf didn't think much of special ops, so didn't use them in Desert Storm, except toward the end of the war, to go hunt for Scud missiles in Iraq's western desert. In Afghanistan, these forces were central. They could be parachuted into the country in small numbers, set up airfields, and develop contacts with rebel leaders. The information about Taliban targets, which the Predator drones transmitted back to headquarters, usually came from a special-ops officer riding on horseback with a laptop.

We may never know how much special ops have been doing in Gulf War II. Certainly, these forces were in the Iraqi capital days or weeks before the war began, scoping out targets and lining up contacts. They were in the western deserts again, hunting Scuds and preparing airfields. They were in the north, training Kurds and securing oil fields. They were probably accompanying, and perhaps advancing, the 3^rd Infantry and 1^st Marine divisions all the way from Kuwait to Baghdad, scouting targets and transmitting their positions to the air commanders back at headquarters.

We don't yet fully know the lessons of this war—in part because it isn't over yet and in part because, as James Carafano, a former Army officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, put it, "90 percent of the war was going on out of our vision." Most of that 90 percent was being conducted by special ops (no embedded reporters there) and by the laptop-wielding joint-forces crew in Qatar (a few embeds, but no access to that part of the operation). What they were and are doing, however invisible, formed a large part of what made this war so stunning and new.

 

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During World War II, combat aircraft flew close-air-support to protect soldiers on the ground, but at the time, the air forces were part of the Army. The Air Force didn't become an independent service until after WWII, at which time its generals—fresh from the strategic bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan, and eager to devise new aircraft and war plans based on the A-bomb—scrapped the close-air-support mission. This is why the Army started making combat helicopters. A postwar interservice accord gave the Air Force exclusive right to deploy fixed-wing aircraft, and the Army needed something to cover its ground troops.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2081388/

4:40:19 PM