Urban Operations Challenge Shows Limits of U.S., Allied ISR Capability

Sea Power, May 2004 by Keeter, Hunter C

The violence at al Fallujah, Iraq, which in April drew the 1st Marine Division into a deadly street fight, highlighted weaknesses in the U.S. and coalition forces' intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities for supporting urban operations. Sources in Congress, the DoD and industry have provided Sea Power with insight into how the most powerful militaries in the world continue to struggle with the kind of urban operations that will typify 21 st century warfare.

Al Fallujah in 2004 is not Hue City, Vietnam, January-March 1968; nor is it Stalingrad, January 1943. But what has changed since October 1993, when U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force, U.S. Air Force combat search and rescue, and U.S. Navy SEALs took more than 50 percent casualties in battle with an untrained and shabbily equipped mob at Mogadishu, Somalia?

Despite enormous advantages in ISR capability - enabled by unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), spy satellites and the electrooptical, infrared or radar sensors these platforms carry - experts say the military still lacks proficiency in what former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak called the "three-block war," a metaphor for three types of operations humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and combat - that may occur almost simultaneously within the same urban setting.

The problem is that much of this technology is not aligned to provide complete visualization, shared from operational down to tactical levels, of the complex urban environment - including the locations of friendly and hostile factions, the status of the urban infrastructure, the political and economic situation, organizations such as aid agencies working alongside locals and the arriving military force, and the city's or town's cultural context.

Since Sept. 11,2001, DoD-wide command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) investment has risen to more than $3 billion in fiscal year 2004, a $1.5 billion boost over the previous year. That money has bought overhead sensing capability, in the form of UAVs such as the Air Force's Global Hawk, the CIA's Predator, and space-based sensor and communications systems. Other elements of that investment profile, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation satellite constellation, help to guide weapons precisely onto targets.

Overhead sensors and precision munitions provide excellent coverage of open battlefields, to track and strike many targets in the air, on land and at sea. Powerful data processing tools, such as the Navy's cooperative engagement capability and the area air defense commander, are able to build detailed images of all events in radii hundreds of miles from a command center.

Rear Adm. Kenneth D. Slaght, commander of San Diegobased Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), recently told Sea Power: "This nation's great technological advantage is in creating sensors ... but what is really transformational is the ability to link those sensors to the warfighters."

But according to operational experiences in places like al FaIlujah, high-tech tools have yet to answer the challenges of operating in cities and towns. In training troops, DoD continues to emphasize the skills of combat against a monolithic, Soviet-style opponent over teaching the skills of urban operations, according to Kenneth judy, a senior operations analyst on the Air Force staff. Urban combat skills are learned long after basic training by a select few who attend specialized schools and are not generally taught to campaign-ready units in any of the military services.

Since the end of strategic operations in Iraq during the spring of 2003, about 800 coalition personnel have died, and another 3,400 have been wounded, according to an April 14 report posted by the Global security.Org intelligence resource

Success in Krulak's three-block war begins with C4ISR, according to intelligence experts. As much as did Sun Tzu more than 2,300 years ago in The Art of War, the ISR community appreciates "knowledge of enemy and of self as a critical component for shaping the outcome of a conflict, and combat is only part of the equation.

Only recently has there evolved a holistic approach to C4ISR, one that leverages the kind of "information dominance" created by sophisticated technology to shape all types of operations.

"The problem with the urban area is that it is really far more complex than what we are used to dealing with," said Duane Schattle, deputy director of the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) joint urban operations office and leader of a recent experiment called Joint Urban Warrior. JFCOM is responsible for developing and vetting concepts of operation across all the services.

"In Iraq we are not only dealing with the complex terrain of structures and streets, but we are also dealing with ... the most complex challenge of all, the human beings that are there in that environment. It is a thinking-man's game and we have got to provide tools [to win] in the future," he said.