[iwar] [fc:The.Lack.of.Battle.Damage.Assessment.Data:.The."Dog.that.Didn't.Bark]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-29 07:10:51
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:US.Muslim.groups.urge.Bush.to.halt.air.strikes]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Afghani.women's.group:.Taliban.should.be.overthrown.by.the.uprising.of.Afghan.nation]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200110291510.f9TFApE14068@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 07:10:51 -0800 (PST)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Lack.of.Battle.Damage.Assessment.Data:.The."Dog.that.Didn't.Bark]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The Lack of Battle Damage Assessment Data: The "Dog that Didn't Bark
October 25, 2001 
Anthony H. Cordesman 

In a famous Sherlock Holmes story, everything hinges on the "dog that
didn't bark." The fact that the Department of Defense has not reported
any battle damage assessment data (BDA) in nearly three weeks of air war
is equally striking, particularly given the daily assessments provided
during the Gulf War, Desert Fox, and in Kosovo. 

Part of this is almost certainly the result of two different learning
curves.  The United and Britain found that efforts to report BDA led to
endless press articles criticizing the uncertainty and inaccuracy of
such figures and had relatively little psychological impact on the
enemy, which did its own BDA and could control most of the information
flowing to its people.  The press proved to be extremely intolerant of
the probability data that the Department attempted to issue and wanted
black and white damage estimates.  Newspapers like the Sunday Times in
England attacked the NATO damage estimates issued during Kosovo in ways
that virtually endorsed the Serbian propaganda line.  At the same time,
some U.S.  briefing officers started talking about 96.4 accuracy at a
time when we were using many unguided weapons.  Quantifying BDA also led
to demands for equal precision in quantifying civilian casualties and
collateral damage--something that was technically impossible on any
real-time basis. 

This, however, was only part of the story.  The fact was that advances
in U.S.  battle damage assessment technology did not produce anything
like precise results.  Enemy forces learned a lot about how to disperse,
use camouflage and terrain, improve their sheltering, hide in civilian
populations, and manipulate the scene of U.S.  strikes to produce false
or exaggerated collateral damage and images of civilian casualties. 
More broadly, much of the U.S.  methodology proved to be inaccurate or
unworkable.  Precision strikes often showed entry damage to buildings
but gave no picture of the overall damage or of who and what was in the
building.  The United States has made no progress in assessing
casualties among scattered infantry, or human casualties in general,
since Vietnam.  It simply has no way to say anything useful.  Actual
strikes on weapons often failed to indicate whether they were really
combat active, although thermal imaging did allow the United States to
determine whether a vehicle had recently been run in some cases. 

More broadly, serious problems consistently emerged in attempting to
determine how many of a country's leadership targets were hit, and how
great was the actual damage to its air defense capabilities, logistics
and resupply, weapons and munitions stocks, utilities and civilian
communications, and military command, control, and communications.  Key
targets like missile plants and plants and facilities for producing and
storing weapons of mass destruction proved very hard to locate and
characterize.  Damage assessments had to be little more than guesses. 

When battle damage assessment could be confirmed, it almost always took
days or weeks, and often required a human source or HUMINT.  In many
cases, it required multiple sources and careful analysis of post-strike
activity patterns.  Near real-time BDA was only possible against a
relatively limited number of point targets, and then the imagery only
showed physical damage, not the importance of the target. 

The lack of accurate, near real-time BDA is slowly being corrected by
much more comprehensive satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle coverage. 
It does, however, remain one of the critical and largely hidden problems
in the "Revolution in Military Affairs." In spite of many studies and
interagency coordination efforts, most practitioners privately state
that it remains a crude and highly politicized art form in which there
is often intense pressure from commanders to produce figures out of
inadequate data and sometimes to exaggerate results. 

Afghanistan, of course, presents special problems.  All of the
conventional labels like "command and control" simply do not apply to a
country this primitive that has so few major fixed facilities with
equipment that is hard to disperse.  The good news for the United States
is that a nation with so few resources cannot afford to lose even a few
of them easily as long as it faces significant opposition.  The bad news
is that battle damage assessment is almost impossible because there is
no way to estimate what level of damage degrades a given level of
military capability, assess how important a given facility or building
is, estimate the impact of secondary damage and explosions, or measure
the resilience of a leadership and military forces that evolved with
virtually no dependence on modern war fighting technology and equipment. 

As a result, the United States almost has to fight a BDA-free war, at
least until the effect of its strikes are confirmed by HUMINT or major
changes in the behavior of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  The most the
United States can do is systematically hammer away at the ability of the
Taliban/Al Qaeda to use Kandahar as a citadel; to reinforce out of
Kabul; and to sustain garrisons in ethnically hostile territory like
those in Herat and Kandahar.  The United States also can fly
interdiction and close air support against Taliban/Al Qaeda combat
forces when it can be sure this really matters-which is when they are
either actively engaging hostile force or moving to do so. 

The great unknown in such a strategy is how well the Taliban/Al Qaeda
can disperse and dig in, how well we can find them in hardened targets
like caves and urban shelters, how well they can learn to exploit winter
and bad weather to move when air operations are limited, and how far
they can regress to the level of simplicity they achieved when they won
many of their victories.  Their ability to resupply through Pakistan is
another critical uncertainty, as is the effectiveness of various
opposition forces in making them concentrate or expose their assets to
U.S.  air attacks. 

In short, we may talk about "information dominance" and "real time"
force management, but in many ways this may be a Battle Damage
Assessment free war-at least in terms of prompt, meaningful damage
assessments. 

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:US.Muslim.groups.urge.Bush.to.halt.air.strikes]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Afghani.women's.group:.Taliban.should.be.overthrown.by.the.uprising.of.Afghan.nation]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:58 PST