Armed Forces: Non-War Is Hell

Hordes of 52-ton tanks churned up choking waves of orange dust over California’s Mojave Desert. Oil-drum devices released mushroom clouds to simulate atomic attack. In the 105° heat, smoke generators threw up acrid screens. Fighter-bombers singed the sand with the blast of their afterburners. The normally green Colorado River turned brown with machine-swirled mud, black with slicks of oil. Helicopters chattered, machine guns clattered and men swore.

All of the noise, grime and foul smells were generated by Joint Exercise Desert Strike, the biggest U.S. desert-warfare maneuver since General George Patton trained his tank forces in the same area in 1942 to prepare for the invasion of North Africa. Although considered a war “game,” Desert Strike ran up costs that smacked of the real thing.

The two-week exercise consumed some $60 million, since it involved more than 100,000 men (90,000 Army, 10,000 Air Force), 780 aircraft, 7,000 wheeled vehicles, 1,000 tanks. All were deployed over some 13 million acres of California, Nevada and Arizona landscape. Air Force units operated out of 25 airfields from Texas to Oregon.

The exercise caused or contributed to the deaths of 33 men, including six in aircraft crashes, five by drowning, five in truck accidents, and two sleeping soldiers who were run over by a tank.

Is Desert Strike worth such costs? General Paul D. Adams, whose Army-Air Force STRIKE Command is conducting the exercise, is certain that it is. Puffing on a cigar in his air-conditioned trailer at Needles, Calif., Adams, 57, who bears a striking resemblance to the original “Desert Fox,” German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, explained: “There are lots of things we try to accomplish in an exercise like this. It’s the first time we’ve been able to get a proper training area for the armored divisions for ten or twelve years now—where they will encounter the tactical and maintenance problems they would find in a real combat operation. We want to do all the things you’re supposed to be able to do in combat. There’s a close interrelationship of firepower and mobility in the two services, and we’re working further on the development of joint doctrine. We’re trying out techniques of conventional and nuclear warfare. There’s a lot of desert in Africa and the Middle East, and if we ever have to go over there, we’ll know what we’re doing.”