The Lessons Of Afghanistan

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ut the military stuffed Rumsfeld's most ambitious reforms. His plans to force a transformation by cutting weapons and troop levels alarmed senior officers, who colluded with congressional allies to turn back the changes. "Rumsfeld has abandoned talk of skipping a generation of weaponry," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution. "He will now argue that those systems the services already have in their budgets are transformational, which is what the services wanted us to believe all along." The steep rise in defense spending will actually make it more difficult to bring real reform. About a dozen major new weapons systems are just beginning to enter production, and their costs will skyrocket once the assembly lines spool up. Procurement of new weapons, now at $61 billion, is planned to reach $99 billion by 2007. The spigot will only get harder to turn off.

Pentagon officials argue it isn't better bullets that will transform the military but better intelligence on where to shoot them. The Air Force's goal is to "have an electronic picture in the cockpit of fused information that comes from all kinds of sensors," Air Force Secretary James Roche said. The goal, known as network-centric warfare, is to give pilots a high-resolution picture of the battlefield from sensors on the ground, in the air and in space, so they can dispatch smart weapons to their targets.

The U.S. military made big strides toward that end in Afghanistan. In the Gulf War, the U.S. had to deploy 10 aircraft to be sure of taking out a single target. Now it budgets two targets per aircraft. That's because the share of precision-guided munitions has grown from 7% in 1991 to 60% today. As bombs get smarter, planes can get dumber: for the first time, B-52s are able to drop satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions from high altitudes, beyond the reach of enemy antiaircraft fire. U.S. commandos on the ground are pinpointing targets with laser spotters and calling in target coordinates. "They use their satcom [satellite communications] to transmit the coordinates to a plane overhead," Lieut. General Charles Wald, who ran most of the air war from a command post in Saudi Arabia, tells TIME. "We can get a bomb from 37,000 ft. to land within the length of the bomb--these bombs are 10 ft. long--nearly 100% of the time."

Here's one example of how the New Military worked: In November, as the U.S. and its allies pushed across Afghanistan, General Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance commander, sought a U.S. Air Force sergeant's help in attacking an enemy position. "There's some Taliban over that ridge, and I need them taken out because I think they're going to attack us," Dostum said. The sergeant radioed a B-52 overhead and asked it to strike an area 2 miles long by 400 ft. wide. Nineteen minutes later, bombs began raining down, killing some 250 troops and destroying artillery pieces and a command center. Long-range bombers, some flying from the U.S. mainland, played a key role in the war because Afghanistan's neighbors did not want their soil used as a launching pad for American attacks. But the new defense budget contains no funds for new bombers and less than $300 million to improve the B-2 fleet.

Drones have enabled the U.S. military to stare at enemy positions for days, providing far more intelligence than could be gleaned from a reconnaissance flight or satellite flyby. Such surveillance detects patterns, and patterns betray enemies. Beyond spying and attacking, the Predator has used its own laser to pinpoint targets for satellite-guided bombs from high-flying bombers.

Rumsfeld said last week his new budget "substantially" boosted spending on drones, but TIME's review of the budget shows a 13% increase--from $971 million to $1.1 billion--for Predators, Global Hawks and other unmanned planes. (Spending for fighter jets jumps 37%.) Yet every week U.S. commanders go to Rumsfeld and plead for the drones to help gather intelligence in their part of the world. "There simply are not enough to go around," Rumsfeld said. "We're building them as rapidly as possible." But the Predator's manufacturer, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, tells TIME it is ready to crank out more than the two a month called for in the 2003 budget.

Critics say cronyism and greed are to blame for many of the misguided budget decisions. They seem to have a strong case when it comes to the Army's Crusader. It's not a nimble weapon; the two-vehicle system weighs more than 80 tons. Designed to destroy Warsaw Pact tanks on the German plain, it might have some utility if the U.S. Army ever has to battle Iraqi tanks, in the unlikely event that air power can't finish the job. The Crusader has detractors, like candidate Bush, but it also has powerful backers. United Defense, the company building the system, is owned by the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm known for its g.o.p. heavyweights, including Frank Carlucci, Reagan's Pentagon chief, and James Baker, George Bush Sr.'s Secretary of State and the man who helped George W. win his election struggle in Florida. The company is building the Crusader in Oklahoma, winning support from Senator James Inhofe and Representative J.C. Watts, senior Republicans with clout on military matters.