Armies depend on movement. They use it to create surprise and to provide protection (by denying certainty of their location and strength). They move to place themselves beyond the reach of their opponent army’s weapons. They rely on vehicles for heavy firepower, armored protection, supplies, engineering support, and face-to-face meetings between command echelons.

Yet at Khafji, the Iraqis found that to move was to be discovered, to be discovered was to be attacked, and to be attacked was to die, if you stayed in your vehicle (no matter how much armor plating protected you). They quickly found that when they saw or heard aircraft, their best course was to abandon their vehicle. “In the Iran-Iraq War,” a captured Iraqi general reported, “my tank was my friend, because I could sleep my soldiers in it and keep them safe from Iranian artillery. In this war, my tank was my enemy,” because it was constantly attacked by aircraft day and night. If his soldiers slept in their tanks, they were sure to die.

This fact did not impact on our planning as forcefully as it should have. During the Gulf War, we had almost unrestricted information about the size and location of the enemy forces but failed to appreciate all his real strengths and weaknesses. We could count his tanks and locate them daily with overhead intelligence, Joint STARS, or Killer Scouts, but we missed the implications of the Iraqi soldiers’ terror of sleeping in their tanks. Our reconnaissance pictures showed us parked tanks with new slit trenches nearby. Those who measure effectiveness by the number of tanks destroyed fail to understand that sleeping away from your tank means that you are highly unlikely to get the first shot off if you are suddenly attacked, and are therefore likely to lose the engagement.

★ The aircraft and weapons of today are far more capable than those used in the Gulf War. With more modern computers and improved radar, the Joint STARS aircraft now has a far greater capacity to detect and identify moving vehicles. GPS bombs can now be dropped in any weather. The wide-area munitions, such as the sensor-fused weapon, permit aerial attack of massed armor columns, with tens to hundreds of sub-munitions homing in on individual vehicles.

What does the denial of movement mean for battlefields of the future?

Certainly it means that you have to control the air if you want to maneuver your forces. It also means that you should no longer prepare your ground forces to fight force-on-force against a slow-maneuvering enemy. Given that our control of the air puts severe limits on an enemy’s ability to survive the lethal battlefield of the future, expect him to feature small, fast, stealthy movement, and expect him to collapse into urban areas, jungle, or mountainous terrain and to avoid combat in the wide-open spaces.