Meanwhile, if our own ground forces continue to follow current doctrine, our enemy army can expect to find large, massed U.S. ground forces opposing him, but with our mobility and capacity to maneuver hampered by our own ponderous logistical tail. As a result, he will attempt to employ his own form of airpower—guided missiles, ballistic and cruise—to weaken or even defeat this easy target.

This means that the intelligent commander of the future will configure his land forces to mass and disperse quickly. He will reduce the size of his force while increasing the lethality of his firepower. He will select transportation systems that can rapidly move his forces about the battle space with minimum fuel (to reduce the logistics tail). He will be hard to find, yet able quickly to exploit the advantages his superior surveillance of the battlefield affords him.

To bring all of this about will mean that land forces’ equipment, organizations, tactics, and strategy at the operational level of war will change drastically.

So the question is not whether or not there has been a revolution. There has certainly been a revolution in military technology, but not in how the military fight, or plan to fight.

★ Let’s look at how some of these technological changes affect the individual fighting man.

In the Gulf War, close air support relied on visual acquisition of the target by the pilot in the fighter aircraft, who was guided to his target by voice directions from a forward air controller located on the battlefield. The procedure was cumbersome and imperfect, and too often pilots misidentified the target and attacked Coalition ground forces. Fortunately, such mistakes happened more rarely than in wars in the past; unfortunately, the mistakes were far more devastating than they were in past wars.

Using present technology, however, we can virtually eliminate such mistakes.

For example, our soldiers in Bosnia are now equipped with small Global Positioning Satellite receivers that are coupled with a small laser range finder and radio transmitter. When the soldier sees a target threatening him—say, a tank or a sniper—he simply points his aiming device at it and initiates laser ranging. The device knows where it is in the GPS coordinate system, knows the heading and distance to the target, and relays that information to a nearby F-16 equipped with an improved data modem. The information from the ground is received in the form of a data burst, which is not audible to the pilot but is translated into words that appear on his heads-up display which describe the target and its GPS coordinates. The fighter pilot can either slave his radar crosshairs onto the target; or, when he’s in the clear, superimpose the target on the ground with the target designation box and gunsight on his heads-up display; or insert the target’s coordinates into a GPS-guided precision weapon. In effect, we are giving the individual soldier a 2,000-pound hand grenade.