WAR IN A TIME OF PEACE: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals.

• Author: THOMPSON, NICHOLAS
• Position: Books - Review

WAR IN A TIME OF PEACE: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam Scriber, $28.00

WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN BLASTED into Kuwait in August 1990, the Pentagon's top brass showed little enthusiasm for a bombing campaign. Airpower alone had never won a war and, besides, planes supported ground troops. It had always worked that way before.

An obscure Air Force strategist, Colonel John Warden, had another plan. Modern states depend on electrical power, communication, and transportation, he argued. Blow up the centralized facilities and you can paralyze the enemy without really risking your own men or slaughtering civilians. We could send in our new stealth fighters undetected by Iraqi radar, fire off guided cruise missiles, and blast out the infrastructure.

The Air Force high command resisted Warden. The generals didn't trust new stealth fighters, and they wanted to attack the Iraqi army in the field. At one briefing, Warden's superior, three-star general Charles Homer, literally turned his back on Warden when the colonel spoke; angrily contradicted every point; and then, after the meeting, pointed at Warden's staff and asked them, one by one, to leave Warden and join him. A humiliated Warden lost his staff, but he ultimately succeeded.

According to David Halberstam's new book, War in a Time of Peace, Warden won over Norman Schwarzkopf, and then persuaded Defense Secretary Dick Cheney by explaining that: "during World War II, an average B-17 bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300 feet. Therefore, if you wanted a 90 percent probability of having hit a particular target, you had to drop some 9,000 bombs. That required a bombing run of 1,000 bombers and placed 10,000 men at risk. By contrast, with the new weaponry, one plane flown by one man with one bomb could have the same probability."

With Cheney's backing, Warden designed the air campaign. Airpower decimated Iraq with minimal casualties on our side, in large part due to the stealth fighters, and set the stage for the Army to come in and sweep up. American F-111s, for example, destroyed tanks almost at will in the desert night with their laser-guided bombs and thermal guidance systems. After the war, an Iraqi tank commander told the Americans that, during the war with Iran, Iraqis had used tanks for night shelter. Against the Americans, they had been terrified to get in them. Even given the effectiveness of the ground campaign, Halberstam considers the air assault the backbreaker. "If one of the newsmagazines had wanted to run on its cover the photograph of the man who had played the most critical role in achieving victory, it might well have chosen Warden."

A decade later, Cheney is running our government and our bombs are several times more powerful and accurate. Even better, in another decade or so, instead of 10,000 pilots strafing Germans or even one pilot putting his life at risk over Iraq or Kosovo, we could have one unmanned plane, flown by a guy sitting at a computer in Aberdeen, Maryland, firing precision-guided missiles with even greater accuracy. We've used unmanned reconnaissance planes with increasing frequency since the Vietnam War, and we've even drawn up plans for a generation of tiny planes, the size of laptop computers, able to zip around urban battlefields and signal back what's around the next corner. But we've never before had the power to send out armed unmanned planes, or UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicles). But soon we will. Boeing has produced the first few for testing, and there may well be many more to come.

If stealth fighters and smart munitions transformed war in 1990, UCAVs could do the same in another decade. Because an unmanned plane can be designed without having to take into account pilots' needs--cockpit, parachute, visual displays--the aircraft would be superbly stealthy, extremely fuel-efficient, and able to loiter in the sky for hours on...