Brief History of Army MI - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

The Sandcrab jammer was positionedin northern Saudi Arabia, withits 5,000 watts of power and a massivetransmitter. It was ready to go towork jamming enemy transmissions,raising the old electronic warfare debateof whether it was better to foregojamming in favor of intercepting theenemy signals. A compromise wasreached whereby Sandcrab jammedonly the encoded beginnings of Iraqitransmissions, causing the enemy tobecome confused and send in theclear.The Iraqi COMSEC would haveto be rated as good however, but thiswas achieved by not talking on theradio at all or using secure land linesthat had not been severed by thebombing, a measure that crippled theability of units to communicatereadily. Despite their prolonged silence,just before the ground war alliedintelligence targeted for destructionwhat were believed to be signalnodes, but left four intact in the hopesthat the enemy would resume radiocontact in the heat of battle. And theydid, leading to valuable NSA interceptswhich, in conjunction withJSTARS, brought into view a vividpicture of their movements and intentions.The commander of allied forcesin the Gulf War, Gen. H. NormanSchwarzkopf, gave military intelligencetop marks during Congressionaltestimony on 12 June. Overall, hesaid, “it was excellent. We had very,very good intelligence support. Wehad terrific people. We had a lot ofcapabilities.” But he did find areas,like battlefield damage assessment,real-time imagery, interoperability,and overly caveated intelligence estimates,that could use improvement.His experience was incorporated intothe findings of the House Armed ServicesCommittee’s report on IntelligenceSuccesses and Failures in OperationsDESERT SHIELD/STORM issuedon 16 August 1993. The Oversightand Investigations Subcommitteeconcluded that:Intelligence collection...wasgenerally very good and deservingof praise.Intelligence distribution overallwas very poor, particularlywhen it came to serving air fightingunits. Both the hardware andthe people failed.Intelligence analysis wasmixed. The concept was brilliant.but the count of dead Iraqi tanks,APCs and artillery pieces exposeda major systemic failure in theability to accurately make battlefielddamage assessment.Overall, DESERT STORMcould be adjudged as an overwhelmingsuccess for U.S. Army intelligence.In addition to the above-stated opinionof the commander of the coalitioneffort, this conclusion was expressedby a captured Iraqi officerwho noted:We had a great appreciationof your intelligence system; weknew from our experience in theIranian War that at all times youcould see us during day and nightand knew where we were on theground. If we communicated,you could both hear us and targetus, and if we talked too long,you would target us and destroyus with your ordnance. On theother hand, as we looked at ourintelligence system, we had noidea where you were on theground, we had no intelligencesystem capabilities to see whatyour dispositions were, and wehad no way to monitor your communications.We knew you weregoing to attack only when youoverran our front line positions....”Ironically, when talking about hisown Army’s lack of sophisticated intelligence,he could have been describingthe U.S. Army in the early stagesof the Korean War just 40 years earlier.