COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN IN IRAQ

The Pentagon’s mas­ter plan for the future relies on net­work­ing together every grunt, every gen­eral, and every drone — so infor­ma­tion is instantly avail­able to every­one on the bat­tle­field and in head­quar­ters. The Iraq inva­sion was sup­posed to the beta test for this mil­i­tary “trans­for­ma­tion.” And for the top brass, it all worked great. But for many of the front line sol­diers in Iraq, this tran­formed mil­i­tary looked like a com­bat force, circa 1944, reports Technology Review.
Take Lt. Col. Ernest Rock Marcone, a bat­tal­ion com­man­der with the 69th Armor of the Third Infantry Division. He was sup­posed to cap­ture a key bridge on the Euphrates River.

Next to the fall of Baghdad, says Marcone, that bridge was the most impor­tant piece of ter­rain in the the­ater, and no one can tell me whats defend­ing it. Not how many troops, what units, what tanks, any­thing. There is zero infor­ma­tion get­ting to me. Someone may have known above me, but the infor­ma­tion didnt get to me on the ground.
Marcones men were ambushed repeat­edly on the approach to the bridge. But the scale of the intel­li­gence deficit was clear after Marcone took the bridge on April 2.
As night fell, the sit­u­a­tion grew threat­en­ing. Marcone arrayed his bat­tal­ion in a defen­sive posi­tion on the far side of the bridge and awaited the arrival of bogged-​​down rein­force­ments. One com­mu­ni­ca­tions inter­cept did reach him: a sin­gle Iraqi brigade was mov­ing south from the air­port. But Marcone says no sen­sors, no net­work, con­veyed the far more dan­ger­ous real­ity, which con­fronted him at 3:00 a.m. April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi sol­diers com­ing from three direc­tions. This mass of fire­power and sol­diers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 sol­diers sup­ported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles. The Iraqi deploy­ment was just the kind of con­ven­tional, massed force thats eas­i­est to detect. Yet We got noth­ing until they slammed into us, Marcone recalls.

Microwave relays, meant to trans­mit satel­lite and spy plane images, were not more reli­able.

Critically, these relayssome­times called Ma Bell for the armyneeded to be sta­tion­ary to func­tion. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass infor­ma­tion to one another. But in prac­tice, the con­voys were mov­ing too fast, and too far, for the sys­tem to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehi­cles were actu­ally attacked while they stopped to receive intel­li­gence data on enemy posi­tions. A lot of the guys said, Enough of this shit, and turned it off, says Perry, flick­ing his wrist as if click­ing off a radio. We cant afford to wait for this.
One Third Infantry Division brigade intel­li­gence offi­cer reported to Rand that when his unit moved, its com­mu­ni­ca­tions links would fail, except for the GPS track­ing sys­tem. The unit would travel for a few hours, stop, hoist up the antenna, log back onto the intel­li­gence net­work, and attempt to down­load what­ever infor­ma­tion it could. But band­width and soft­ware prob­lems caused its com­puter sys­tem to lock up for ten to 12 hours at a time, ren­der­ing it useless.

All of this jives with ear­lier “after action” reports on the inva­sion, where com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems were the norm. Some mem­bers of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, for exam­ple, had to use a hel­met head­set, four radios and two lap­tops at once to com­mu­ni­cate with their com­rades and commanders.

October 12th, 2004 | Comms | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.