The Lessons Of Afghanistan

Aft

er lurking for hours above the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the Predator drone found its target: a truck surrounded by a group of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists who had been threading their way along precarious mountain roads amid 11,000-ft. peaks. From several miles away, the unmanned surveillance plane, operated by the CIA last Monday, locked in on the gathering. An agent somewhere in the region, viewing a live feed from the Predator's belly-mounted camera, thought the men were wearing Arab--not Afghan--garb, and that the leader was tall. After conferring with U.S. Central Command officials at their Florida headquarters, the agent signaled the Predator to shoot. A 100-lb. Hellfire missile roared toward the truck at nearly 1,000 m.p.h. According to Amanullah Zadran, a minister in the Afghan government, the dead included three local al-Qaeda members. Local tribal leaders claimed, however, the dead were not al-Qaeda. On Saturday, a team of 50 U.S. troops at the attack site began looking for evidence under a deep blanket of snow.

The tall man is not thought to have been Osama bin Laden, as the CIA had hoped. But he is believed to have been al-Qaeda--and the missile appeared to score a direct hit on him, a Pentagon official told TIME. It still isn't clear whether any innocents were wounded or killed. But if this Predator attack was like dozens of others in Afghanistan, it was a surgical strike on a terrorist target--and a case study in the new American way of waging war: killing foes by remote control, with no risk to U.S. troops, through an extraordinary convergence of intelligence, technology and high-explosive warheads.

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Seven thousand miles away on the very same day, the Pentagon was firing a more old-fashioned round on Capitol Hill--a five-year, $2 trillion budget plan larded with cold war-era weapons. There's the Crusader howitzer, a cannon so cumbersome that in 2000 a presidential candidate named George W. Bush questioned its utility. And there's the F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet designed to challenge a Soviet air force that no longer exists. The Raptor could prove useful against other foes, but critics call it redundant; there are two other fighter designs in the pipeline as well. Yet the Pentagon wants to spend $5.3 billion to build 23 Raptors and budgets only $100 million for 22 new Predator drones, even though U.S. commanders have been pleading with the brass for more. The Predator is "getting nickels and dimes, while traditional programs like manned jets are getting the tens and twenties," says Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a private military think tank.

The war in Afghanistan offers a blueprint for fighting future wars--through a mix of agility and lethality, with small groups of special forces on the ground wielding high-tech targeting devices linked to precision-guided munitions in the sky--but the military seems slow to embrace these lessons. And Congress is unlikely to challenge the Pentagon's $379 billion request for 2003. With Bush riding high and wartime patriotism still ruling Capitol Hill, few legislators want to be seen second-guessing the Pentagon, even as it proposes a $48 billion boost for next year that is larger than any other nation's total defense budget. Wartime budgets inevitably require painful sacrifice elsewhere (Bush wants to limit the increase in domestic spending to 2%), but this military-spending plan--the biggest buildup since the Reagan Administration--may be paying for the wrong war. Military budgets are always full of riddles and mysteries, but never has the Pentagon appeared so at war with itself. It is fighting a new kind of war in remarkably new ways, yet at the same time it is asking the nation to invest heavily in weapons that were created to fight old wars in old ways.

The irony is that Bush styled himself as a reformer, threatening to kill some of the Pentagon's costly "legacy" programs. In a September 1999 speech, he said the military should take advantage of the cold war's end "to skip a generation of technology" and move on to futuristic weapons without necessarily buying all those in development. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came in pledging to remake the military. "The U.S. defense establishment must be transformed to address our new circumstance," he said as he took the job for a second time. Pentagon corridors were buzzing last summer about how Rumsfeld planned to transform the military--cutting entire Army divisions, scuttling aircraft carriers, killing the F-22 Raptor and Crusader howitzer programs.

Yet with a surging budget, no hard choices are being made. The defense plan allows for some modest transformation: the Navy will spend $1 billion to convert four Trident submarines that now fire nuclear missiles into Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers. The Army will fork out $707 million to develop lighter tanks, and the Air Force will pay $629 million to accelerate development of the Global Hawk unmanned spy plane, which flies farther and higher than the Predator, surveying more terrain. The Pentagon wants $3.3 billion to speed the gathering and distribution of intelligence, and $1.3 billion to improve communications. Special forces--the heroes of Afghanistan--are scheduled to get antimissile sensors and jammers, along with four AC-130 gunships. And nearly $38 billion is earmarked for the military's growing role in homeland security. This week, for example, there are more U.S. troops patrolling the Olympics in Utah than there are in Afghanistan.