The new global electronic battlefield

M142 HIMARS rocket launcher

About 50 percent of fighting a war is done by soldiers on the battlefield, and 50 percent is fought with public relations campaigns trying to convince the enemy and the rest of the world that you’re winning.  It makes a lot of sense.  If soldiers are hearing from folks back home that their side is losing, they become demoralized and are less willing to take the fight to the enemy with the same forcefulness they would be capable of if they thought they were winning.  Where do the folks back home get their information?  From the public relations about the war being run by each side.

Back in 2003, the United States was fighting a losing war trying to convince its own citizens and the rest of the world that the invasion of Iraq was justified, and having invaded, that the U.S. was winning.  The whole Weapons of Mass Destruction lie fell apart pretty quickly.  Soon, bodies in aluminum coffins were arriving at Dover Air Force base in Delaware.  Stories in the press counted numbers of IED explosions that wounded and sometimes killed their targets, American soldiers riding around in canvas-sided Humvees with no protection from the main weapon Iraqi insurgents were using to kill their enemy, which was the invading U.S. Army. 

The Pentagon needed some good news to sell to the public, so they started giving daily briefings to the media in Doha, Kuwait. (Don’t ask.  That’s where the PR headquarters was.)  Right off the bat, they started selling the idea that the war in Iraq was being fought on a new “electronic battlefield,” with high-tech weaponry, satellite intelligence, and God-only-knows what other military gimcrackery.  The Army’s briefer, a brigadier general, stood in front of a bank of three flat screen TV’s with a pointer, and boy did it look good!  This TV showed footage taken by army PAO (Public Affairs Office) soldiers who carried army video cams just for that purpose.  That TV displayed the figures that proved we were victorious – numbers of enemy captured and killed, numbers of operations to disrupt insurgent activity, even though because it came down from the White House they were not allowed to use the word “insurgent,” because there was no insurgency opposing the victorious Americans who were being greeted as heroes for saving Iraq from Saddam Hussein.  The third TV showed typical displays of graphs and diagrams, more data that proved how victorious we were.

One of the first things I did when I arrived in Iraq in November of 2003 and got myself embedded as a reporter with an Infantry company was ask where the electronic battlefield was.  I asked privates, sergeants, captains, majors, and all of them gave me a blank look.  One sergeant at night manning a checkpoint outside of Sadr City, a Shiite slum on the outskirts of Baghdad, put it best:  “Electronic battlefield, sir?  I ain’t seen no electronic battlefield down here in my squad.”

About a month later, I was flying somewhere with a colonel who commanded a brigade in his command-and-control Blackhawk helicopter, and I asked him where the electronic battlefield was.  “Oh, it’s right here,” he said, throwing a switch on a little flat-screen tablet that was mounted on a metal arm next to him.  “It’s called the Blue Force Tracker,” he explained as the screen came on, showing our passage over the ground as a dot on a map.  As we approached an Iraqi village, he told me, “watch this,” and proceeded to push buttons on the sides of the tablet.  The map switched to a photographic image of the land we were passing over.  Soon, we could see the streets of the village we were approaching, something like Google Earth shows on your computer, but years before it was publicly available.  He pushed another button, and the image got sharper and closer as we passed over individual walled compounds around houses.  “Now watch this,” he said, grinning as he pushed yet another button.  The view on the tablet changed to show the fronts of the houses we were passing over, kind of like Google Street View today.  “It’s taken with side-looking satellite cameras,” he explained.  “We’re able to see the exact color of the metal gates of a compound when we attack on the ground at night. We’ll get intelligence there’s an IED factory somewhere, and this helps us avoid attacking the wrong compound and endangering innocent Iraqi civilians.”

Finally!  I found the electronic battlefield, and it was flying around in a colonel’s helicopter!

Well, the electronic battlefield has come a long way since 2003.  Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that American soldiers sitting somewhere at a military facility in Germany were helping to aim HIMARS rockets when they are fired at enemy positions in Ukraine.  M142 and M270 rocket launchers provided by the U.S. to Ukraine fire several kinds of missiles guided by GPS targeting systems with different warheads designed to hit troop concentrations, fortified buildings, and tanks and other armored vehicles.  The rockets can travel as far as 50 miles and are extremely accurate.  According to an online story in “Military Today,” one Ukrainian source said “there were cases when the first HIMARS GMLRS rocket would hit the building and the second rocket would go through the same hole in the building.”

The Washington Post story described a system whereby Ukrainian soldiers identify a target they want to hit with HIMARS rockets and send location data, generally map grid coordinates, up to higher Ukrainian military command.  That information is relayed to U.S. targeting centers by highly-encrypted computer communication.  The U.S. targeting specialists check the requested target location and relay more accurate coordinates back to the Ukrainian HIMARS battery.  Quoting a Pentagon source, the Washington post reported that “The Americans do not always provide the requested coordinates, in which case the Ukrainian troops do not fire,” the Post reported. 

“We’re all basically always online,” Maj. Gen. Andriy Malinovsky told the Post.  Malinovsky heads up Ukraine’s missile and artillery forces.  “They immediately get us the coordinates and we then fire the MLRS right away.”  (MLRS stands for Multi-Launch Rocket System.)

The Pentagon went to great lengths to explain to the Post that the Ukrainians are the ones pulling the trigger, not U.S. soldiers.  “The Ukrainians are responsible for finding targets, prioritizing them and then ultimately deciding which ones to engage. The U.S. does not approve targets, nor are we involved in the selection or engagement of targets,” explained a spokesman for the Pentagon, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.

So, what’s really going on here?  Well, Ukrainian forces identify targets they want to hit using drones and human intelligence from reconnaissance patrols.  The targets might include locations of buildings used by Russians to house their troops, or ammunition dumps or supply depots.  But because each HIMARS guided missile costs about $160,000 – almost $1 million for the six mounted on each HIMARS launcher – the Ukrainians don’t want to waste the expensive missiles by missing the high-value targets they are shooting at.  So they rely on U.S. intelligence from satellite-mounted cameras and geo-locating systems to get the final location data for every missile before they fire. 

Each HIMARS launcher has a crew of three – a commander, gunner, and driver.  The commander is probably the soldier who communicates with higher Ukrainian military commanders about targets he wants to hit.  Once he is fed grid coordinates that have been run through the U.S. targeting center, he gives them to the gunner, who punches them into the computer that aims the missile.  It’s all done electronically.  The launcher automatically adjusts for elevation and direction and the commander pushes the button to launch the missile.

It relies on intelligence from U.S. satellites that can see the flame of a lighter when someone lights a cigarette down on the ground.  The GPS aiming system is accurate to within feet.  If the rocket motor and the fins that guide the missile are functioning properly, the missile flies to its exact target and explodes.  Ukraine is using HIMARS to knock out Russian artillery positions, armored vehicles like tanks, and concentrations of Russian soldiers either moving on the ground or in buildings. 

Russia is said to be using so-called human-wave tactics in the fight for Bakhmut.  They attack with large numbers of infantry soldiers on the ground, trying to overwhelm the Ukrainian military’s ability to strike back.  Russia has two problems with this strategy.  The soldiers they are using are new, barely-trained conscripts.  And the way Ukraine responds to such ground attacks is by pre-targeting positions on the ground where an attack might come from, and when the attack begins, firing artillery barrages (which might include HIMARS rockets) at the pre-located positions when the infantry soldiers approach them.  Russia is said to be losing huge numbers of its soldiers in the fight for Bakhmut.  You have to ask yourself how Russia is going to bring off the big spring offensive they’ve been advertising when they’re losing so many troops trying to take a single small town in the Luhansk region.

The Washington Post story is a good example of the 50 percent of the war that’s being fought with public relations.  These kinds of stories don’t just appear out of thin air.  There was probably a coordinated plan by the Pentagon and Ukraine’s military commanders to essentially plant this story that describes in detail why and how Ukraine’s use of HIMARS rockets has been so deadly accurate.  I can tell you, if geo-location intelligence is being used to target HIMARS rockets, it is also being provided for use by Ukraine’s 155 mm howitzer artillery, which can shoot 15 miles, and given the right GPS data, are as accurate as guided missiles.

Drones are another crucial part of the global electronic battlefield.  Some U.S. drone strikes on terrorist targets in distant lands like Somalia and the Taliban-controlled parts of Pakistan and ISIS targets in Syria are being flown by technicians sitting in buildings on U.S. soil.  And now we know that soldiers somewhere in Germany, while they are not choosing targets or pulling the trigger, so to speak, are instrumental in the exceedingly accurate HIMARS missile strikes Ukraine is making against the Russian military that has invaded its land and is occupying its soil.  I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of a string of encrypted data as it makes it way from Germany to the woods in Ukraine where a HIMARS battery is concealed.