Word: airland
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...examining the basic tenets of U.S. military strategy, it is possible to draw a fairly detailed picture of what an allied ground campaign might look like. The key, say defense analysts, is an obscure Army publication called Field Manual 100-5. It lays out the principles of "AirLand Battle," a military doctrine taught to every American Army plebe and war-college student since the early 1980s...
...AirLand ground battle would bear little resemblance to the World War I- style frontal assault that Saddam Hussein's generals seem to be bracing to fight. "Don't give me a meat grinder," General Norman Schwarzkopf has repeatedly told his operations planners. Instead, AirLand doctrine calls for air attacks on the enemy's rear areas to cut off supply lines, destroy command-and-control centers, and strike at reinforcing units in order to isolate the battlefront...
...AirLand scheme was devised as the battle plan for World War III. Its roots go back to the 1970s, when NATO strategists were trying to figure out how to defend Europe from an attack by overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks. The key was to fall back on the front while trying to disrupt Soviet supply lines from the rear. A seminal 1979 study by Joseph Braddock, a military consultant, showed that the U.S. could predict the location of Soviet armor units as they moved up toward the front and that even modest success in slowing the flow of Soviet reinforcements...
...AirLand battle to succeed, commanders must learn to plan ahead: they must sequence operations so that the effect of a deep attack on Day One will be felt precisely when those crippled rear forces are needed at the front on Day Five. Relying less on brute force than on operational elegance, it requires commanders to concentrate their efforts on attacking the right thing in the right place at the right time. The enemy's crucial "center of gravity" -- a term borrowed from Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz -- is that target whose destruction will have the greatest ripple effect...
...AirLand scenario, the long-awaited face-off between the U.S.'s high- tech M1A1 tank, with its turbine engine and depleted-uranium armor, and the battle-tested Soviet-built T-72, with its devastating 125-mm gun, would never come to pass. Iraq's heavy armor would be kept at arm's length, picked off from a distance by armor-piercing rounds, laser-guided Hellfires and heat- seeking Mavericks fired from the air. Scout planes and helicopters would identify targets, "squirt" them with lasers, and guide helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in for the kill. "The point is to reduce...