Category: Big Army

Since the nations in the Pacific Rim are mostly surrounded by water, the Army is worried that it might get left out of the fight, should one occur in the region. So, since Big Army doesn’t have ships, their big idea is to create mobile forces that will be stationed on those islands, according to the Washington Post;

Calculating that there are only slim chances of the Army fighting a big land war anywhere in the Far East other than the Korean Peninsula, the new top Army commander in the Pacific, Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, wants his forces to more quickly and effectively respond to small conflicts, isolated acts of aggression and natural disasters. Doing so, however, has traditionally been a challenge for the Army, which bases most of its soldiers assigned to the Orient in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state. To overcome what he calls “the tyranny of distance,” Brooks is trying to make his forces more maritime and expeditionary.

To cut travel time and increase regional familiarity, he is seeking authorization to send key elements of a U.S.-based infantry brigade to Asia and keep them there for months at a time, moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises. The rotating deployment, which amounts to the first proposed increase in U.S. forces in Asia in years, could enable the Army to move more speedily to address humanitarian crises and security threats.

Yeah, that makes sense, well, very little. I doubt very much that the largely peaceful nations of the Pacific Rim will welcome a foreign armed force for a few years and then move on to another location. And as difficult as Big Army is making retention, I’m pretty sure that it will be hard to retain experience that is being jerked from island to island every few years.

“They’re trying to create a second Marine Corps in the Pacific,” said a Marine general, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Army’s internal plans. “To save their budget, they want to build a force the nation doesn’t need.”

Big Army is worried about losing their budget, and I use the word budget in it’s loosest sense, because it seems to me that moving a significant number of troops from place-to-place seems like a huge waste of money. If they want a force in the Pacific that can respond to brushfires there, they should bring back the airborne forces, station them in Hawaii and Korea with an appropriate amount of airlift capability for each. Lord knows that there are enough 5-jump chumps in the Army to fill the ranks of a couple of divisions of paratroopers and from Korea and Hawaii, they can be anywhere within a few hours in the region. It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s a better plan than creating a bunch of trailer park gypsy battalions.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

The United States deposed Panama’s Manuel Noriega 24 years ago tomorrow morning in what was known as Operation Just Cause. ROS sends us a link from Stars & Stripes in which the commander of the 82d Airborne Division claims that it would be much more difficult for his unit to mount an operation like that today;

Today’s force simply isn’t as prepared as it needs to be for such a mission, officials said. Most air crews don’t have sufficient training, and there are not enough paratroopers in each unit to fill key roles like jumpmasters.

“An operation like Panama or Haiti — we would be hard pressed to do today,” said Maj. Gen. John W. Nicholson, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Nicholson said America’s ability to respond to any crisis in the world had suffered because of the focus on those wars but added that the division had a renewed emphasis on its role as the United States’ Global Response Force.

The Global Response Force must be ready to deploy within 18 hours and must be prepared for any number of combat or humanitarian scenarios.

Despite the emphasis, work is still needed, he said.

Only a quarter of air crews are qualified for such a mission, Nicholson said, and the division still needs more jumpmasters and soldiers certified to deal with hazardous materials in each unit.

“We’re not there yet as a joint team,” Nicholson said.

General Nicholson goes on that the whole operation was “muscle memory” because the units involved had trained for such a mission so often that it was just a series of properly executed battle drills. It was the same with Desert Storm. The reason the ground war only lasted 100 hours is because the war was just like a Table XII gunnery exercise at Grafenwoehr with fewer trees. Training won wars and advanced politicians’ policies. Training is the most important thing that troops do – because sweat in training saves blood in combat. I’m pretty sure that our next enemy won’t clear with our commanders the next time and place they’ll strike.

Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times writes that someone had a bright idea to remove images of Confederate Generals like Lee and Jackson from the Army War College,and the idea may spread to other military institutions;

“I do know at least one person has questioned why we would honor individuals who were enemies of the United States Army,” Ms. Kerr said. “There will be a dialogue when we develop the idea of what do we want the hallway to represent.”

She said one faculty member took down the portraits of Gen. Lee and Gen. Jackson, and put them on the floor as part of the inventory process. That gave rise to rumors that the paintings had been removed.

“This person was struck by the fact we have quite a few Confederate images,” she said, adding that the pictures were put back on a 3rd floor hallway.

“He [Gen. Lee] was certainly not good for the nation. This is the guy we faced on the battlefield whose entire purpose in life was to destroy the nation as it was then conceived…This is all part of an informed discussion.”

It is the kind of historical cleansing that could spark a debate Army-wide. Gen. Lee’s portrait adorns the walls of other military installations and government buildings.

Yeah, well, apart from the discussion we could have about the politics that led to the Civil War, we could talk about the things they should be talking about at a place called “The War College” namely “war”. Lee and Jackson knew a little bit about war and rewrote the book on maneuver and the use of artillery, the lessons they taught us are still taught today. Taking down their portraits and tearing down their statues, we might as well erase them from the books, too.

I guess they could replace the pictures and statues of Jackson and Lee with some Union generals like George MacClellan who only provides lessons in regards to what not to do when it comes to modern warfare.

It’s funny how the budget issues always get hung up in the Senate, isn’t it? I’m guessing because there’s no real leadership in that particular house of government. But now the Pentagon is threatening even deeper cuts to their spending if this one doesn’t get out of the Senate by the 13th of December. And of course, the cuts aren’t coming where they need to cut, but rather messing with the troops pay (first time ever – hah!) according to Stars & Stripes;

Combat pay? Could be gone. Hazardous duty pay? Could be gone, too. Foreign Language Proficiency Pay? Same.

[…]

[The Senate’s inaction] creates an increasingly likely scenario in which special pay provisions will be eliminated on Dec. 31, if no defense bill is passed. That hasn’t happened in 51 years, but the political atmosphere in the capital is particularly poisonous.

Well, at least the generals will be able to keep their private cars, cooks, aides and the only ones feeling the pain will be the Joes in the trenches. That won’t impact retention or readiness at all.

Most of you probably know the name Major General Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster. The younger generation remembers him from commanding the 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment that tamed Al Tafar, Iraq, the older soldiers will remember him from commanding the 2d ACR in the grand armor battle at “73 Easting” during Desert Storm. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that he told an audience there that the Pentagon is forgetting the tough lessons that it learned in Iraq and Afghanistan;

“What we are at risk of today is neglecting some of the hard-won lessons of our war in Iraq and our ongoing war in Afghanistan,” McMaster told 130 people gathered for a luncheon of the Colorado Springs World Affairs Council.

McMaster said he watched the military in the 1990s mistakenly bet its future on the power of technology.

The armed forces were designed for tank-on-tank battle in a rapid conflict similar to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and faced an insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq it was ill-prepared to fight.

McMaster said the insurgent fighting is something that could be a recurring theme for America.

“There are two ways to fight the U.S. military – asymmetrically or stupid,” he said.

“Our enemies will interact with us in ways to evade our strength and attack what they see as our vulnerabilities.”

McMaster said it’s also impossible to divorce warfare from political goals in the nation the U.S. is trying to change.

“We encountered this gap in our flawed thinking both in the early stages of Afghanistan and the early stages of Iraq,” he said.

While the military experienced early success in Afghanistan and Iraq, the quick victory proved elusive.

Well, that always happens after war, the difference in this case is that it’s happening DURING a war. But there have always been stellar officers like McMaster to keep the pressure on Big Army and be their memory.

As if to punctuate McMaster’s talk, the Army Times reports that the pointy-headed thinkers at the Pentagon are discussing reducing the number of troops all the way down to squad level and making the vehicles that transport and protect them, smaller and lighter;

Going smaller while focusing investments on increasing the combat punch a small unit can bring to bear will “make us more affordable, yet as capable” as the service is now, one leading general said. A key point is also to become faster and more expeditionary.

One senior leader said that in coming years, the Army will have to “reduce the size of our formations but increase the capability of our formations. …If we can be more effective with less people it will make us more expeditionary.”

A handful of reporters were allowed to sit in on the briefing under the condition that names not be used.

Yeah, I wouldn’t want my name attached to that bullshit either. So, let’s pretend that they go ahead and reduce the number of troops in a squad and make vehicles to accommodate the smaller units and then we end up in a war where we need need larger squads – so we go to war with the Army we have rather than the Army we need. Sound familiar?

The Stars & Stripes reports that Military Times has discovered that, while it’s true that personnel costs in the Department of Defense have grown by 78%, those costs have actually shrank compared to total spending;

Experts quoted by The Military Times say some statements from the top brass are flat-out overblown.

Gordon Adams, a former national security budget director for the White House, suggested that focusing attention on military personnel costs is being done in an effort to shape the political debate in Washington.

Congress is deeply resistant to cutting pay and benefits. So the Pentagon leadership’s rhetorical focus on soaring personnel costs may help reduce pressure on the broader military budget.

“If you focus on the least doable thing, what you gain is leverage to bring the whole budget up,” Adams said. “By pointing to the hardest thing to change, they hope that the whole budget will continue to be high.”

Well, not only is it the “hardest thing to change”, it impacts fewer voters, because cutting actual defense spending impacts contracting and manufacturing jobs and entire local economies. Whereas, cutting the number and pay of troops affects far fewer people – people who wouldn’t ordinarily vote for the current administration and it’s less likely to have any real impact on elections.

Reducing the force without reducing actual defense spending worked for the Clinton Administration, and those people aren’t particularly imaginative and can’t see past the end of their nose, anyway. The generals’ careers are tied to the current administration because they know that if we ever get a real President concerned about defense, they’ll all be out of a job, so, like a flock of catbirds, they mimic the calls they hear in their echo chamber.