By Cpl Troy Hutchinson
THE first lesson of the Iraq conflict is the importance of human factors over technology, according to a US expert.

In a public lecture at ADFA recently, Prof Anthony Cordesman, an American military analyst, said what was found again and again was the importance of military professionalism, readiness, training and morale.

"The rapid advance on Baghdad simply would not have taken place. That was not a triumph of new technologies, it was a triumph of essentially human factors," he said.

When he spoke of the tempo of operations, he said the sealift capability was critical to their success over the airlift.

"That tempo when war began was incredibly fast, but was the product of sealift distributed over the period from [the start of] April 2002, to the beginning of the war.

"One of the missions that Australia performed in the terms of mine clearance was also critical.

"Coalition Commander Gen Tommy Franks has referred to what he called a 'culture of jointness', and that was a real change.

For the first time, there was a level of interaction between our four military services and a level of combined presence we had never had before."

Prof Cordesman spoke of the interoperability between the ground force manoeuvre and air assets that worked in tandem to achieve excellent results and helped justify the US military shift towards Network Centric Warfare.

"We made very useful strides in the way of weapons, in the first Gulf War we used 8 per cent guided weapons. In the second Gulf War, 65 per cent of ordnance used was from a guided weapon that took on a far greater aspect in the outcome of the war."

Prof Cordesman also spoke of the integration of the various sensor systems employed by US forces.

"The air-land battle also needs to be integrated, as the sensor platforms were unable to pass information rapidly to ground forces as each service of the [US] forces had differing sensor systems.

Logistics systems broke down rapidly in the rapid advance [on Baghdad] due to systems and human failures.

"Logistics were a failure not in combat performance, but the digital systems, the allocation methods, the human factors [and] the sort of standard management techniques broke down completely and we went to a flood forward system that worked well enough," he said.

Two basic problems were exposed about development of the US forces and policy toward the restructure of Iraq.

"We have optimised our systems around killing things, buildings and vehicles, not around infantry and insurgents, yet these forces dominate much of asymmetric warfare.

"Secondly, nation building, when it is under combat conditions, can only be done by the military, but the military have not taken this on as a formal mission. There are no NGOs, there is no international community, there is no civil branch of government which is ready to perform nation building in the face of sabotage, attacks on international organisations, attacks on humanitarian groups and attacks on people in the country seeking to do nation building."

Prof Cordesman has produced books on a range of military subjects. His latest book examines the military lessons of Operation Iraqi freedom.

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