Here
is a response from uber-hawk Tom Donnelly,
who was pinged yesterday by our
cranky tankers for his assertion that light infantry guys have done better
at counterinsurgency than have treadheads. He says he likes heavy Army guys
just fine, but wouldn't want the next chief of staff of the U.S. Army to be
one:
Chad Foster is the
first person to ever accuse me of hostility to the heavy Army. As the co-author of Clash
of Chariots: A History of Armored Warfare, I have a tread-head
reputation to defend.
The quote you [that
is, Tom Ricks] used in your book [The Gamble] was to simply observe that
while the Cold War heavy force was focused -- quite correctly! -- on operations
on the German central front, the light Army was doing other missions (while
also figuring out how to play in WWIII; the 10th Mountain Division was revived,
in part, to do that in Europe and bushwhack Soviet armor with TOWs). The heavy community also understood the new
technologies of their systems -- Abrams and Bradley -- far better than others; we
should remember (and how silly this seems in retrospect) that the Iraqi heavy
forces were thought to be a near match before Desert Storm.
And while no one
would disparage that part of the Army which produced HR McMaster or Sean
McFarland (or the artillery branch in the case of Raymond Odierno) I do think
it is fair to wonder whether the domination of service leadership positions
through the post-cold War years by heavy-force officers (Gordon Sullivan was an
armor officer, Dennis Reimer an artilleryman, Eric Shinseki a tanker, George
Casey a mech infantryman) didn't have some effect (possibly, inadvertently,
exacerbated by having Peter Schoomaker, who served most of his time in special
operations). Generally, it has been hard
to break the Army out of its strict force-on-force mindset. And so much of the service's institutional
energy has been spent, during these years -- and again, it's a serious question
-- on wondering what the purpose of the heavy force was.
This all makes the
question of who becomes the next Army chief of staff a critical one. Interestingly, the vice chief of staff, Peter
Chiarelli, began his career in the 9th Infantry Division, which then was (or
was in train to become) a "motorized" division, with different gear
but a similar approach to today's Stryker units, mounted but not heavy and with
a higher number of infantry dismounts.
One might also say that the 101st Airborne (the community that produced
David Petraeus and Jack Keane) is also not really a "light"
organization in that the high number of helicopters (both lift and attack),
make it a pretty large beast, with a lot of firepower and mobility but without
the battering-ram abilities of tank-Bradley-based units. And should Odierno return to Washington (he
was, for six months, the vice chief before being reassigned to Baghdad), he too
would be a potential chief of staff.
Probably the real way
to think about the effects of individuals and "corporate culture" on
the direction of the service, though, is likely to be when there is a
"post-surge" officer at the top.
That is, someone who understands the nature of the Long War (which
clearly demands a land force made up of not just light but some mixture of heavy,
"motorized", heli-borne and pure light units) and has a track record
of success. The same is also true of the
Marine Corps: what will it do with Jim Mattis or John Kelly?
The need to actually
fight and win on the battlefield has meant that, to some degree, the service
institutions have yet to fully reflect the experience of its most successful
combat leaders -- the writing of doctrinal manuals matters, but so does
controlling budgets or setting personnel policy. In the long run, those may matter more.
Rennett Stowe/flickr
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