Haaretz
Tishrei 17, 5765
Six divisional task forces of the U.S. armed
forces, subordinate to three corps commands arrive simultaneously from six
different directions; two airborne expeditionary forces (combat wings,
transport, command and control, intelligence, refueling); five aircraft
carriers at a distance of up to 1,500 kilometers from their northernmost
targets; three Special Forces battalions - all struck at Iran and pushed
to seize its capital city.
The Iranians sent a far larger ground
force into action against them, consisting of 15-17 corps commands,
suffering blatantly from air inferiority but trained to use drones against
the invader, along with missiles and weapons of mass destruction (most
likely chemical and biological, not nuclear. The fighting centered on
Tehran, where the Americans were out to topple the regime of Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, who was 30 days away from installing a nuclear warhead on a
surface-to-surface missile, whose range included American
targets.
It is on the basis of this scenario that, for the past
three years, the central war game of the U.S. armed forces has been
conducted, under the codename Unified Quest, or UQ for short. The stages
of the game continue throughout the year and it reaches its peak in one
feverish week in May, at the War College in Carlyle,
Pennsylvania.
There was no point trying to hide the Iranian
background to the event, in which a large number of officers and civilians
take part - more than 500 every year - including observers from foreign
countries (Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Turkey, Australia and Israel,
too), from the State Department and the Department of Interior, from the
CIA and the FBI, and from organizations such as Medecins sans Frontieres
(Physicians Without Borders), which this year sent a delegation of
physicians. Indeed, not only did the Pentagon forgo any attempt to keep
the event secret, it tried to play up the Iranian aspect. The enemy state
was called "Nair," and for the mentally challenged it was explained that
this is a fictional state on the basis of the geography and culture of
Iran.
Officially, there is no direct connection between the
doctrinal, organization and operational ideas that the command of the
integrated forces and the land arm are putting into practice in Unified
Quest - similar war games are held under the auspices of the air force,
the navy and the marines - and the decisions that will be placed on the
president's desk, for him to make with his exclusive authority, when the
time comes. In practice, there is no differentiating between the insights
that are achieved in the war game and what the Pentagon will prepare for
the president's authorization. The one small difference is between a war
game and a war that will be no game.
Other
headaches
Just as the American presence in Afghanistan did not
prevent the incursion into Iraq, so it will not prevent an operation in
Iran, either. A hint in this direction can also be found in the innovation
that has been introduced into the next exercise in the UQ series. The
games of 2002-2004 dealt with three scenarios, of which the Iranian
scenario was only one, albeit the most important of the
three.
Alongside it Washington had to deal with two other
headaches, one an underground revolt in "Sumasia" (Sumatra / Indonesia),
the other terrorism in the American homeland. The Israeli representative
was assigned to help rehabilitate battle-torn Sumasia and not in the
activity in Nair, perhaps in order to ward off in advance allegations
about joint American-Israeli planning against Iran.
Now the Sumasi
scenario, which has been fully played out, has been set aside, and the
2005 UQ exercise, which will be played in May 2005, though the
preparations begin this month, will focus on "Nair." That is the immediate
mission, and to bridge the gaps that were revealed in the previous
exercises will require the massing of all the forces.
It turns out
that even as the eyes of the world are on the collision course between
Iran's thrust for nuclear arms and the international community, which is
imploring Tehran to stop and is hinting that there will be those
(Americans, Israelis) who will not balk at a preemptive strike against the
nuclear facilities in Iran, systematic preparations are underway for a
different type of military operation: not against the nuclear sites - that
could be part of the operation, by means of Special Forces and air
strikes, but that will not be enough - but against the regime that refuses
to stop.
To create a deterrent threat against Iran, as the country
pushes to go nuclear, without admitting to offensive intentions, a UQ
narrative farther into the future, in 2015-2016, was set. But the timing
ploy is transparent and suffers from an internal contradiction, because
the rationale of the confrontation with Iran will not occur in another
dozen years. It will be resolved, one way or the other, by Iranian
submission or American action, in the years immediately ahead, and perhaps
within one year.
President Bush's top adviser, Karl Rove, is said
to have declared that you don't shoot in an election year - and, in the
months ahead, the efforts at persuasion will continue, along with the
warnings and the sanctions, until the moment of decision arrives, though
the threat must not be brandished before the polls close.
Secretary
of State Colin Powell last week was careful to use the phrase "at present"
when he said at the United Nations that the U.S. does not have plans for
military action. As soon as the words left his mouth, that present ended
and a different present, a new one, began. In its official, futuristic,
timetable, the campaign that has been practiced in Unified Quest will be
superfluous or too late.
Lessons from the IDF
The two
main problems identified by the commanders of the Americans' "blue" force
(joined by the British and, it's hoped, by others as well) in doing battle
against the "red" enemy are the complexity of the urban environment and
the vulnerability of the supply and communications lines. About 12 million
people are crowded into the urban space of Tehran, and that number will
rise to 17 million in the coming decade. The population of Greater Tehran
has shot up by leaps of millions in recent years. Israelis who were last
there a quarter of a century ago, when Khomeini took power, will discover
that the city has more than doubled in size.
American officers warn
that the routine training for combat in built-up areas is more appropriate
to villages and towns than to a vast conurbation of this scale, a
"mega-city" that extends across dozens of square kilometers of
territory.
One of the commanders of the "red," quasi-Iranian,
force, retired Colonel Richard Sinnreich, wrote, in justification of the
Israeli arm's Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin, that U.S. forces are
more likely to encounter situations similar to those in the West Bank than
those they encountered in Afghanistan. That was before the war in Iraq.
General Kevin Byrnes, commander of TRADOC (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine
Command), said this year in a lecture that the study of the up-to-date
lessons of the Israel Defense Forces and the British Army was an essential
element in planning for Iraq. Even as he spoke, the reds of Sinnreich and
his colleagues surprised the blues in the capital of Nair by transferring
military units from sector to sector not secretly but completely in the
open - though without the blues being able to bomb them, because the move
was made in the course of a parade in the streets where thousands of
children and other civilians were gathered.
Every soldier a
combatant
The Americans don't yet have an answer to the problem
that is vexing them in both Iraq and "Nair," along the 900 kilometers of
the road from a southern naval base to the capital: how to minimize damage
to their combat troops along the access roads.
One in four American
deaths in Iraq takes place in non-combat circumstances, usually in vehicle
accidents. Many of the other casualties result from the detonation of
makeshift bombs. The Americans discovered that there is a large difference
between "soldiers" of the type of the captured heroine Jessica Lynch -
that is, uniformed personnel in the role of combat support, who have
forgotten their basic training - and combatants. The first type are very
soon killed, wounded or taken captive.
General Peter Schoomaker,
who was recalled from retirement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
become army chief of staff, in order to make the ground force more
combative, set a new goal: every soldier will be a combatant. Signal
operator and artillery gunner, military policeman and sergeant in a
civilian auxiliary unit - all will first of all be riflemen, so they can
defend themselves (and undercut the image of costly
entanglement).
In the UQ game the lesson of Iraq was described in
more rational terms: there is no gradual transition between the stages of
the campaign, from "main battle operations" (whose conclusion Bush
festively declared on May 1, 2003) to operations of stabilization and
security. All the stages are intertwined. Even if Tehran is conquered, the
regime is toppled and the president declares victory, resistance will
continue, with the possibility that four of every five Iranians will
support it (and there are 68 million Iranians, half of them too young to
remember the shah).
It's likely that the Americans will look for a
local or exiled underground which it will invite to assist the invasion
and thus legitimize it, in the hope that the masses of the regime's
opponents - of whom 30 percent or even 40 percent are unemployed - will
join. The astonishing phenomenon of the past few weeks - the popular
demonstrations in the wake of a promise by a mysterious individual, Dr.
Ahura Pileghi Yazdi, in broadcasts from Washington, that Iran will be
liberated from the revolutionary regime today, October 1 - shows that
latent processes can be awakened at any moment and for any reason. But an
external attempt to ride that wave will be a gamble. The Iranians possess
a proud national consciousness; they want democracy without ayatollahs,
but they also abhor external intervention, and they still remember with
affront the intrigues of the CIA and British intelligence which toppled
the prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, half a century ago.
The
Americans have a long account to settle with the dead Khomeini and the
living Khamenei. The day after the U.S. elections in another month will
mark the 25th anniversary of the Iranian seizure of the American embassy
in Tehran, which led to the incarceration of 50 hostages for 444 days.
During that period the U.S. Army shamed itself in its own failure, without
making contact with the enemy, in the planning and execution of an
operation to free the hostages.
Afterward, toward the end of the
Iran-Iraq war, the Americans fought the Iranians and felled them on the
margins of the "war of the tankers" in the Persian Gulf. Iraq, from this
point of view, was a double and ongoing diversion, in 1991 and 2003, and
in the years between those two wars. The bothersome adversary - in
developing missiles and seeking to go nuclear, in assisting Hezbollah and
in exporting the revolution (and now also in encouraging insurrection
against the Americans in Iraq) - was and remains, Iran.
American
dreams
What exactly will await the Americans in Iran, even they
do not purport to know. Speaking just a few months ago, at the convention
of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, Philo Dibble, the deputy
assistant secretary of state for Iran and Iraq (formerly the deputy to the
U.S. ambassador in Damascus), said that in the absence of an ongoing
presence of his government's representatives in Iran in the recent past,
America has no concrete acquaintance with the field there; there's
material for reading, conversations are held with Iranians outside their
country, developments are analyzed - but America doesn't really
know.
Powell, in a talk with the Washington Times, recalled the
period when he was a young colonel, the adjutant of the undersecretary of
defense in the Carter administration, Charles Duncan, during a visit to
Iran. The Iranian air force put on a spectacular show of fighter planes
for Duncan, but the American experts who were deployed to assist the air
force spoke about it with contempt to Powell, and described to him the gap
between the pilots, who were from the aristocracy, and the operators of
the systems in the backseat, who were from the lower classes. Powell, who
was the national security adviser in the Reagan administration at the end
of the Iran-Iraq war, quoted approvingly a remark by Henry Kissinger, who
said, "It's too bad both sides didn't lose." And Powell is considered the
spokesman of the moderates in the Bush administration.
All these
channels converge to one clear operational conclusion. The Americans will
be happy not to be drawn into a large operation in Iran. They would rather
Khamenei abandons nuclear development, as Khomeini suddenly changed his
mind on the eve of his death and gave in to the Iraqi demand for a
cease-fire (according to a new study, one reason for this was the downing
of a civilian Airbus of Iran Air by missiles fired from an American ship).
They will ask the UN to authorize a multilateral operation. They will want
the counter-revolution to come from within and not be tainted by foreign
intervention. But if all these dreams do not come true soon, and if the
connection between missile and nuclear warhead becomes imminent, they will
pull out the plans that were practiced in Unified Quest and send the blues
to fight the reds.