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Why Does the U.S. Get All the Tornadoes?
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 6:53 PM
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COINhata Col. Gian Gentile, director of military history at West Point, has a provocative article in the new issue of Parameters, the journal of the Army War College. "Currently," he asserts,
U.S. military strategy is really nothing more than a bunch of COIN principles, massaged into catchy commander's talking points for the media, emphasizing winning the hearts and minds and shielding civilians.
I think he's wrong, in a lot of ways, but I also think his article is worth reading. Col. Gentile is asking the right questions. (Just fyi, I get popped in a footnote as a "hagiographer." No worries -- that's more polite than a lot of words I get called. I have no problem with robust discourse.)
COL Giantile is right in at least one respect: our military has made COIN the end-all-be-all to solving all problems in the foreseeable future, and ignored your boss's lessons from "Eating Soup with a Knife": rather than adapting as a learning organization, we have replaced force-on-force kinetic operations and the study of them with COIN and the study of it in PME, training, and outside academic study. I think COIN is the key to winning in Iraq and (maybe) Afghanistan, but young officers and NCOs, after eight years (the majority of their careers) fighting asymmetrical warfare, have made counterinsurgency the "last war" we will try to fight in the future, no matter what the enemy has to say.
I have the sense that a lot of people in the Army and Marine Corps think of COIN as a bothersome distraction, and they "can't wait to get back to real soldiering," as the British sgt. maj. supposedly said on Armistice Day 1918.
What do you all think?
Best,
tom
I don't think it's a bothersome distraction at all, but I think there might be some that do.
Forgive me, because I'm on a slow connection and the 3MB PDF file hasn't finished downloading, but I'm familiar with COL Gentile and his arguments. I believe he's advocating flexibility in operations. There's obviously no telling what the future holds, but the next war might not be a pure counterinsurgency...it might have conventional elements like the Hezbollah war, requiring a few more conventional warfighting capabilities. I would say that future conflicts will look more like Iraq and Afghanistan than WW2, so focusing on small wars (noncombatant evacuation, hybrid war, the occasional Grenada-scenario, security assistance, etc) will probably pay better dividends.
That being said, I think Col. Gentile would be pleased that some professional military courses haven't stricken the conventional battlefield from the syllabus in the least. Although this isn't because they're particularly forward-thinking and think that the next war might have conventional elements, but because they're kind of lazy and never got rid of the old Soviet-based syllabus.
I'm sure you're right, but I doubt that there's much that can be done about it. You've got a large internal constituency for fighting the second-to-last (and previous) wars such as the conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Kosovo campaign, Desert Storm, and the anticipated conventional war against the Soviets that never happened.
You've got a second large internal constituency that is now focused on a future of counter-insurgency operations.
My McChrystal ball isn't working, so I don't know what we'll really need down the road. My analysis is that conventional war is less likely but far more dangerous if it happens, while "small wars" are more likely and less dangerous.
The enemy we face are jihadists. And, unless it controls a government, jihadists will always take the form of an insurgency. Those in the Army and the Marines who view COIN as a bothersome distraction are akin to those who viewed tanks in 1914 as a bothersome distraction or aerial weaponry in 1940 as a bothersome distraction. COIN is a critical tactical component in modern national security and military policy. It is not the proper approach in all situations, but it may be the only one in many situations.
And the debate on COIN tactics as strategy highlights the inability of Army thinkers to discern which level of warfare they're thinking about.
Strategy: your major war goals.
Tactics: how you attain your strategy.
Army: muddled in the middle.
The debate on "COIN tactics as strategy" doesn't reflect confusion of levels of warfare. It reflects a belief that those lines aren't rigid, or at least that sound tactics are essential for fulfillment of strategy...
Don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of getting into COIN fights. I "lean Gentile," but just sayin'....
That Gentile has gone from being a thoughtful commentator on COIN (or agianst COIN) to relying on a one-note schtick. His many diatribes on the subject have not grown in scope or complexity.
Yes, the military should remain flexible and capable of doing that which is not COIN. But the truth is this - from an insider looking further in - the Army has done very little beyond OJT to even institutionalize the learning in the current fight we are in. Aside from the Petraeus update to the COIN manual there is almost nothing being done. If you visited Fort Knox or Benning in the Captains Career Course they are still learning stupid Cold War tactics against Cold War style enemies for the most part. In CGSC phase I we read We Were Soldiers Once for chrissake...the class that followed a year later actually read Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. That's about the extent of the progress.
Now to the point about fighting the next war. Every potential opponent in the world is watching our success/failure rate in Iraq/Afghanistan....do you think they are going to try to fight toe-to-toe with us? That's just dumb. I don't think we will have the "luxury" of a conventional fight anywhere in the next 50-100 years. Bet on it.
Gentile doth protest too much, and I am now convinced that he just likes the attention. He really doesn't have anything to say, he should remain silent and be thought a fool rather than to continue to open his mouth and remove all doubt.
Opinion:
The odds of the United States Marine Corps losing its way or becoming confused on its mission is pretty close to zero. Marines know their job, know how to do it under the full range of potential circumstance, and - most importantly - they know who is their customer: the American People. The game they play is called You Bet Your Life. They are good at it.
Army, though, in the best of times has trouble sorting out its mission or how to do it. Given a task, it will do its very best to accomplish that task. But seeing the tasks ahead seems beyond the Army and it stays pretty muddled except when confronted with A, B, and the clear line between. The game Army plays is promotion. The Army sees the Army as its customer.
In fairness, this is very much an American Army, created almost from scratch each time it has to bulk up, saddle up, and actually go do something. Between these times of action it rests in garrison, trains for the last war at Fort Irwin, and studies tactics, strategy being beyond its ken.
The one bright spot is Leavenworth, where the majors get off by themselves and actually think. Command and General Staff School is good; SAMS - the School of Advanced Military Studies - is superb. But these folks are mid-grade and their follow-on influence in the Army Staff and in the field is watered down by low-grade group-think and the general inability of the Army at large to figure out the two big, interlocking problems it perennially has in peacetime: what's next and how do we mobilize this inert mass to get ready for it?
As to COIN, it IS the coin of the realm right now (forgive me) and the Services involved need to get good at it. But Marine Corps has a baseline to return to, whereas Army proves again and again the truth of Sir Basil Liddell Hart's observation that "The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out."
As said: opinion. YMMV.
A caveat on your generous description of the Corps, and one which I generally share. It was always my observation, both as an enlisted man, and a line oficer, that we were generally jack-of-all-trades and masters of none. About the time a command became proficient at something - a new set of priorities and focus were handed down, and proficiency in what once was, degraded and/or all but forgotten.
As you know, the Marine Corps is a force in readiness with a maritime forced entry heritage. I fear we are slowly losing our amphibious edge due in part to being tied down, in two inland theaters of conflict. And when that happens, there are some that begin to question why we have two seperate armies?
As you say - just an opinion, in between dropping birds in a deep fryer. :)
tom, without empirical evidence
it seems your assertion ("sense") is impossible to support or disconfirm. I'd look at attitudes of students at SAMS, CGSC, AWC, etc., to get a sense at what they "feel" is the real mission of the Army, and what the Army ought to be focusing on.
Colonel Gentile's article was interesting but somewhat misses the point. It is true that it is a bad thing if the whole American military gets obsessed with one narrow tactical doctrine but but the real issue about COIN is why the army is being asked to do it at all.
Colonel Gentile seems to be issuing a cri de coeur for 'traditional' military tactics but it seems pointless to undertake full scale armoured assaults on medieval villages. Better by all means to undertake some form of COIN but the front line infantry should be in a supporting role not taking the burden of the whole project on itself.
It is almost ludicrous the amount front line troops in the US army and MC (a very small percentage of the armed forces) are asked to do. Historically front line infantry units have always been the ugly sister where the army is concerned, people with ability and connections will join the artillery, armour or staff but it is the front line infantry that take all the hits and do most of the work.
Better if the infantry act as escorts for joint Afghan/US civilian teams. Such teams would need to be staffed by political officers who stayed in post in a location for at least three years to build up relationships with local populations. They should be modeled on the political officers used by the British on the NW frontier.
It's really asking too much of soldiers to move from a combat to a diplomatic role from one hour to the next. Would it be possible to recruit enough political officers to make this work? State department officials would have to get out of their cantonment in Kabul and do some work in the provinces.
In conclusion the army is too blunt an instrument to do everything that is being asked of it. This is no reflection on the troops and officers themselves it is just unfair to put the burden of implementation of the whole Afghan war strategy on so few heads.
We need an Army that is capable of fighting heavy combined arms battles of the kinetic Fulda Gap scenario as well as lower intensity and more lightly equipped counterinsurgency conflicts. It is up to U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command to decide which type of warfare should have the most emphasis at schools and in force structure decisions. I doubt that Fort Benning, Fort Knox and Fort Sill are prepared to give up on the fundamentals of mechanized infantry, armor and field artillery combined arms doctrine.
Ah, the Fulda Gap. Scene of (anticipated) former glory. Being ready for the Fulda Gap was the Army's substitute for strategic thinking for the entire Cold War. I suspect there were general officers with their own personal tree to hide behind at the Gap, 'their' tree because they'd planted the sapling when they first saw the Gap as 2nd Lts.
Pray tell, where has the gap relocated? And whose horde is poised to pour through it?
The capacity, in training base and industrial base, to build up to a Fulda-Gap scenario faster than a new threat threatens, that's a useful, even necessary hedge against an unknown distant future. But an all-up Army ready to go back to the Gap now 'just in case' — that's just plain silly.
The Army questions now: What should we buy? How should we train? Where should we be? How big should we be? Timeframe: now and near future, with the hedge against fortune residing in capacity to reshape and rebuild as need be, not in actual Army. It's the fleet-in-being strategy redone for Army and redone around capacity. Be able to get ready for anything faster than anything gets here. But don't even consider dundering off in the direction of always being the all-singing, all-dancing Army of your dreams. Can't afford it. Clutters up simple minds. Wave off.
Tables of Organization and Equipment
Fulda Gap is merely a shorthand way of saying heavy combined arms warfare with armor, mechanized infantry, and field artillery, supported by the other branches. It was not the only Army doctrine of the Cold War--air mobility was a major innovation of the early 1960s, and I was in the 7th Infantry Division when it converted to the light TOE in the middle 1980s. The problem with the light configuration was that the enemy could have caused a lot of problems with even light armored vehicles. Perhaps the solution is armor or mech infantry battalions that could be attached to more lightly armed infantry brigades or divisions.
And lest I forget--Beat Navy!
Maybe before you heavy up, you might try to identify an opponent other than the Navy: just who do you need to get heavy for?
Iraqi Freedom was right for your argument ... but then the bastards sorta morphed into the wrong kind of foe and melted into the urban landscape. Your heavy Army floundered and flopped for years (years!) until someone finally came along and said 'lighten up and find some way to contribute besides just blowing things up.'
The reason the Marine Corps is so useful is precisely because it isn't heavy. Mobile, flexible, and not at anchor waiting for 'the right enemy' to come along, it finds the way to fight successfully even if the other side doesn't conform to the text.
It also helps that the Marines bring their own air, plus have a very helpful relationship with carrier-based USN air. Perhaps a good amount of the perceived need for armor might be obviated with a better use of manned and unmanned aircraft in direct support of the ground forces. Of course, all that airplane stuff belongs to that other corporation, the US Air Force, and you guys barely talk to each other.
Let's give your preferred approach the right name. Let's call it The Dreadnought Strategy. Big guns and heavy plating, just like those behemoth battleships of yore. Of yore. Much lighter forces (carrier air and submarines) made the Dreadnought obsolete. Asymmetrical insurgencies and light, agile force seem to have had the same affect on the heavy Army and the thinkers who dream of more.
For this age and the near-future, get light and get joint seems a better Army prescription than just cycling back to Cold War strategy and Cold War structure.
Are the kinetics of the acquisition and appropriations process..
the over riding invisible hand. It takes a great deal of energy to secure and maintain the portfolio of "blood and iron". It is existential to all the services.
Think this demand causes strategy and strategic thinking to become more a task of the joint forces staff and officer school house; the first which is day to day and the second, without core or flag officer power unless serendipity causes it to be aligned with a rising 3-4 star.
I am one of those majors sitting out at Leavenworth with time on my hands to think about this very question. We have, in fact, discussed this both formally and informally in class these past few months because many of us would disagree with Mr. Ricks that the fascination with COIN is not cause for concern in the Army. COIN is about tactics, not strategy. As a troop commander in Iraq in the first year of our involvement I saw COIN as a very simple concept: These people’s lives suck and it’s my responsibility to make it better. We were out among the people as much as we could be and attempted to execute many of the COIN principles that were later encapsulated in FM 3-24. The problem from my foxhole was that our tactics were not nested within a comprehensive strategy. None of this is news to anyone posting here (I hope).
My concern today is that it is my impression that we are not preparing our current crop of platoon leaders and commanders for full spectrum operations – the Army’s operational concept. Instead we are equipping them with the host of COIN tools necessary to be successful in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is obvious need for this focus but the long-term effect on our force has the potential to be quite dangerous. Neither COL Gentile nor officers like myself are advocating an Army that sits around waiting for the Fulda Gap to reappear. We need to focus our training on operating across the full spectrum of possible operations and this means ensuring that our tactical maneuver organizations are capable of actually maneuvering in whatever environment they find themselves. MAJ Sallee is correct – at the tactical level the Army must focus on its core tasks if we are to retain our ability to act as our political masters see fit in the future.
COIN is a comprehensive strategy that encompasses all elements of national power – diplomatic, economic, political AND military. However, our platoon leaders should not be expected to conduct all of these elements in a vacuum. Let’s return, or at least start to implement, COIN at the strategic level. A point for another discussion I am sure, but let’s also start to decide what ends we are attempting to accomplish before employing additional military power.
I hope to have constructively contributed to the conversation.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US Government.
Best comment on the thread, by far.
I hope that the concluding sentence is incorrect and that this post actually DOES reflect the position of the DoD.
". . .but let’s also start to decide what ends we are attempting to accomplish before employing additional military power."
Damn good advice. In the past eight years I have yet to find a cogent strategic rational for a fabulously expensive American military commitment to Afghanistan other than our just efforts to tack down and destroy al Qaeda. No one, certainly not Bush, Cheney, McCain or in fact Obama and the rest of the drumbeaters for this war have indicated what overwhelming and significant national strategic interest is at stake that requires resetting Afghanistan’s society and culture to one we find more acceptable?
Below is a list of divisions in the current active duty Army. To my way of thinking prudence dictates that about half of our active duty force ought to be in either armored or mechanized infantry divisions.
1st Armored Division, Wiesbaden, Germany
1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas
1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas
2nd Infantry Division, Camp Red Cloud, Korea
3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Georgia
4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas and Fort Carson, Colo.
10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, New York
25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii
82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina
101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
This is an erroneous comment. Although these units are Infantry in name the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Infantry Divisions are all mechanized. In the past the difference between these Infantry divisions and an Armor Division was 1 tank battalion. (In other words an Armor division had 1 more tank battalion than the Infantry division which had 1 more mech Infantry battalion in lieu)
Indeed more than half of the units (the first 6) you list are heavy forces with a virtual split of tank and mech infantry forces. The remaining 4 divisions are light units with no armor forces in them, suitable for rapid airborne, and air assault deployment.
How many divisions/BCTs of airborne troops do we need?
I never said that several of those infantry divisions weren't mechanized.
While visiting family for the holidays and sitting in ‘Danny’s Bar’ on Coronado Island today with a number of my kid’s fellow SEAL officers I have discovered an almost universal agreement of the view that the conventional forces on Afghanistan are doing the hard duty of merely being targets with little to show for it. It seems that Joe Biden’s view that this war should be scaled back to a war against al Qaeda's terrorism is rather popular in the NSWC community if not in the Army. While these guys have a tendency to be ultra confident in their views they also intelligent, experienced and highly observant. If I was Bob Gate’s I would talk to a few of them and get their impressions before escalating this war to another level.
Many in my circle believe part and parcel of the problem can also be attributed to our operating experience in Iraq, which seems to have extended over into Afghanistan, and the fact that we've become too heavied-up. Our infantry needs to be lighter, less dependent on external logistics, and fire-support hindrances.
The Taliban aren't really better than we are. They have simply adapted through 30 years of experience, and use their knowledge of the terrain, and the "sea of people" around them, as force multipliers.
This is a war of light infantry. Instead of throwing technology at the problem, and playing it safe, we need to out-guerrilla the guerrilla, who tends to be the truly mobile light infantry.
Remember: "equip the man; don't man the equipment!"
One of the problems with current Army infantry units seems to be that the troops do not universally possess the stamina and endurance to track Taliban in difficult terrain. This would seem an essential characteristic if one is going to gain the initiative against the enemy rather than merely responding to his will. Insurgents such as the native Taliban with the prowess of big horn sheep in their ability to move lightly and swiftly on foot in difficult terrain can be assured that U. S. troops are too heavy and out of shape to impede them unless by fortuitous air interdiction.
The fact that many Army troops also have serious weight control problems probably is linked to their lack of physical endurance. A good place for regular Army troops to learn how to condition for harsh terrain wold be to study the training methodology of the Royal Marine Commando’s, British Para’s or their own U. S. Army Rangers where long term stamina and endurance are held in high regard.
The Rangers are what the whole damned Army should be. Why not? I'm from the submarine force. We don't have a second string - can't afford it. Why should the Army?
(Look, Army guys [a unisex term always], I'm critical here I know. But can you really say you've done well in this entire grinding debacle? The strong performances of the great men and women of the Army are noted and noteworthy: courage, wit, valor, honor. But the institution itself seems pretty hapless. Heavy or light? COIN or kinetic? This war or a future war? Get a grip. And start to come up with one set of answers - you are not a debating society. Geez, maybe we could put someone in charge. Call him the Chief of Staff or something. Just a thought...)
USMC recruited M1A1 tankers from the ranks of ex-army vets prior to Gulf-1, so the Corps-on-steroids goes back at least that far. It was the reserve Bradley company that was mauled by A-10's, while holding the East-side bridge at the battle of An Nasariya, in 2003. (The battallion command track was stuck in the mud, with a weak radio. Dunno why Marine AIr doesn't have an armored jet CAS platform, or why their jets weren't operating from shore in a long assault march. )
William Lind does some advocacy for a rejuvinated and leaner Marine Corp in "America's Defense Meltdown". Other pariahs in that book speak to the need for real eyes-on CAS, while the high altitude budgeteers in blue leave the infantry sucking dirt and wind.
I was under the impression that the question posed by Mr. Ricks was whether or not those that post here feel that the USMC & Army are determined to return to major war rather than focus on COIN.
"Rangers are what the Army should be." Seriously? The Army Rangers are great but they are a surgical organization created for an extremely specific mission. They have the luxury of kicking out (without having to ever justify why) anyone they feel does not measure up. I am sure that any military organization, including the vaunted submarine force, would like this ability.
"Get in shape" Seriously, seriously? yes our infantry are probably overloaded but I would have to ask one of my infantry friends to join the discussion on that note - if that was what this thread was concerned about. I venture to guess that many of our front line troops would benefit from increased physical fitness but to throw out unsubstantiated assaults on their physical fitness is pretty ignorant.
Let's get back to the issue at hand and have a discussion on whether or not you all feel we are too focused, or not focused enough on COIN. Whether you think we should be a debating society or not is not the question Rubber Ducky. We are a learning organization and a healthy internal debate is what professional learning organizations are all about. I imagine there was a time in the '90's when the elite submarine force looked around and realized that the nuclear triad was starting to not be as important as in the cold war and that they better find a mission fast before someone else found it for them...
Obviously the question to ask is should COIN become the single driver within the Army as well as our Nation's smaller premier gun club, the Corps?
I would say not. A balance needs to be struck. Look at Hezbollah's recent past ability to fight across the battle space randomly, using both conventional and irregular warfare - fighting the IDF to a political victory and at the least a military standstill - why can't we do that?
Events around the globe today are much more complex and change quicker then they ever did in the past. I posit, with a little foresight at the national level, and by dedicating both military and civilian foreign area teams to study likely regions/countries that may impact America's security and economic well being - perhaps war gaming them, allowing us draw valuable conclusions on how best to prepare the Army and the Corps for the future.
COIN has always been with us. It was contained in the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual written in 1949 - recently updated with newer coloquial language, and now reinvented in the new Army's Field Manual. We needn't let it become our master, only recognize when it is useful as a tactic, along with other tactics, to achieve the goals defined by our strategy.
However, we do need to control our fears. As Xenophon said, "tactics are only a small part of warfare."
"I imagine there was a time in the '90's when the elite submarine force looked around and realized that the nuclear triad was starting to not be as important as in the cold war and that they better find a mission fast before someone else found it for them..."
Yup, and I was at the ramparts saying this was a phony pursuit, designed to maintain the submarine force at the expense of national defense ... which had higher needs than a reserve of legacy weapon systems. In print. In the Navy's national professional journal. Twice.
Same argument as above: as a strategic hedge against possible emergence of another Cold War-type threat in the distant future, we submariners needed to maintain the craft. Not the force: the craft. Keep the training base and the industrial base, maintain the culture, but let the boat count drop to either the floor of this approach or the minimum number of hulls necessary for real tasks in the new world, whichever was greater.
As I recall, my math suggested maybe 35 SSNs & 6 TRIDENT boats. I was ambivalent about the conversion of 4 SSBNs to snake-eater ops, and I still am. Not quite the same as Pete's Fulda Gap heavy force above.
Sauce for goose, sauce for gander.
I thought Col Gentile's article was both thought provoking and balanced - nothing less that one would expect from a knowledgable professional.
However: for my money he is guilty of a slightly narrow analysis. Whilst FM 3-24 has acted as the neon lamp for the counterinsurgency moths (I don't mean that dis-ingenuously)I think the Colonel would do well to broaden his narrative analysis to take account of work such as Rupert Smith's 'The Utility of Force' which majored on 'population centric warfare'. His closing point that we would do well to study the British experience in the second half of the 19th Century is apt. There is something poignant about the fact that we (British Army) are back where we were 150 odd years ago, in Baluchistan, with the Pashtuns, Waziris and others. Same same for Iraq (look at the Kut experiences of the British Army in 1916 - 18).
It is from this telling cycle of history that we should be drawing strategic conclusions from, not continuing to wallow in this tactical (and occasionally operational) level debate.
Nor ought we to take our eye off the Army Officers' traditional love for the intellectual pissing matches. Look at Monty in the Western desert in 1942 and the way that he used Dorman_Smith's plan (having dismissed him from post) but of course made sure that in his telling of that story it was his plan. Patten and Eisenhower were no different in that respect either. The professional jealousy that von Manstein encountered amongst other senior German Generals during [and after] the war is symptomatic of the same thing.
There is only so many times that Gallula, Kitson, Thompson et al can be reviewed by the 'military chatterati' and something new and relevant/timely/telling be drawn out - they after all generally a series of tactical vignettes stitched together with a retrospective operational level narrative.
Lets raise the game and look at strategy and grand strategy. Is the coalition strategy right? Have we got an alliance campaign plan? Is the surge US thinking or is it a coalition game that we are in. When will we seize our Casablanca moment and get the senior coalition leaders on to a campaign footing and hold Karzai and the AfPak leadership to account.
I suspect that my great grandson will one day pull out FM 3-24, and Kitson, probably Petraeus and Ricks and others too, as part of his pre deployment training, before he strikes out onto the dusty plains of Kandahar; maybe he will take some good from those texts (as we do now because this game doesn't change that much)and then gently reflect on the irony of his great grandfather's generation of military leaders who failed to get 'the great game' and cut and ran on the basis of a 'sucessful surge' leaving in place a fragile peace, no better than how it was before they arrived.
Not in any particular order.
- Seems to me the COIN vs. Fulda Gap argument is a little specious. For most of the time the army was preparing for the Big One in central Europe it was a conscripted force with far less room for training flexibility and excellence than today's professional force.
- Which brings me to the second point – one that others here have discussed. If the army is unable to prepare for two or three different types of basic conflict, what’s the point? It’s clear that with the proper training regimen enlisted personnel and NCOs can be trained for insurgencies that look to COIN tactics, the Big One where everyone meets with their Tigers and T-34s at High Noon outside of Kursk, and (for example) Bosnia-type police/peacekeeping operations. So if the army’s brain trust can’t get their heads around the idea that there should never be one set of principles we have a pretty big problem.
- Rubber Ducky’s ideas about the Trident fleet may make some sense with heavy forces. Could we not mothball a division of M1A1s and turn an armored division into a light or mountain division, unless they need to get to Kursk in a hurry in which case the Abrams are broken out and the mountain division goes back to being an armored division? As Ducky said – I’m paraphrasing – keep the hardware but not the force. I’m sure there are lots of reasons why this is difficult or impossible – I’m just throwing it out there.
- Of course the USMC and various elite army units are more appropriate for the rigorous environment of Afghanistan but the number of boots on the ground are too substantial for just the Marines and Rangers. But again, this isn’t a draft army. Why should conditioning be a problem when we are talking about a professional force? If the problems involved with the vertical, bumpy, high-altitude, often cold or very hot environment of Afghanistan, what does that say about this professional army’s training?
- Only one mention of the Air Force here. Several have mentioned the close relationship the USMC has with both its own indigenous air (a huge factor in the Marines superior performance in Korea vs. the army) and carrier-based USN air. Has the Air Force still not gotten over the idea that strategic bombing and dog-fighting with Migs isn’t going to happen again any time soon? After 60 years why would the army and the Air Force “hardly speak?” Which service does this reflect on the worst?
Actually I'd go a step farther and retain only the capability to build tanks for 'the big one' (do Army guys talk this way? good lingo, but the 'big one' needs a 'big two' to have a fight and ID'ing the other party right now is pretty specious). We need the ability to hammer plowshares into swords faster than a peer competitor can become that. That and retain the craft (training base and culture) so we're not trying to figure out how to use this mothballed capability from scratch.
You're advocating a dry-land equivalent of a fleet-in-being strategy. I'm proposing a 'capability-in-being.'
And good call on My Favorite Air Force. Dwindling relevance to the real world.
How many divisions/BCTs of airborne troops do we need?
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