{"id":38545,"date":"2013-11-21T17:20:56","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T22:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=38545"},"modified":"2013-11-21T17:20:56","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T22:20:56","slug":"thomas-ricks-is-readiness-overrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=38545","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Ricks; Is readiness overrated?"},"content":{"rendered":"

People keep telling me how smart Tom Ricks is, and I keep looking for something that proves it. He called Kayla Williams’ book<\/a> one of the best books about the recent wars, he called for a draft<\/a> saying the all-volunteer force is a thing of the past, he criticized Fox News<\/a> for keeping a spotlight on Beghazi, while he was on Fox, actually.<\/p>\n

Now he says that we really don’t need too much to be ready for the next war because readiness is overrated<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Do we really need a military primed to go to war? I don’t think so. Rather, what we need to do is preserve essential skills and personnel. That might mean going to a cadre-like military, with only two Army divisions kept at high readiness, likely one light infantry and one armored, and the other eight active-duty divisions shrunk down but preserving their skills. That is, with fewer soldiers, but with good training for that smaller force. That might mean squads entirely of NCOs, trained to expand if and when necessary. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, let’s say we’re attacked by competent warriors (not al Qaeda) and we need large numbers of troops to respond. I guess this goes to his whole draft thing. Where we can call up civilians and send them untrained into combat, like we did in Korea. But those troops had the benefit of training on the ship as they went to Korea. Not much time or space to qualify with a rifle on a C-17. <\/p>\n

Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, Ricks has no military experience. He’s two days younger than me, and he likes to talk about all of the stuff he’s written about war, and all of the war he’s seen, but he and I were both born after Task Force Smith, but it’s lessons are stronger in my mind than his obviously. I’m pretty sure he sees troops as numbers, like we did in the early half of the last century, not as technicians who must be proficient at their profession – that requires training and all goes to readiness.<\/p>\n

Somehow, he’s still thinking in early 20th century terms as far as naval power goes, too;<\/p>\n

And keep in mind the cautionary example of the Royal Navy in World War II: It was the world’s biggest and most powerful navy, but because of bad choices made by its leaders, was largely irrelevant to much of the war. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, when was the last time the Navy played an important role in warfare like they did in World War II? Not that they’re not good floating fire support bases, but, other than in the Falklands, not too many ships have engaged in actual naval warfare since World War II. So why is Ricks talking about the Navy when his main example of readiness was hollowed out infantry divisions? Maybe he should talk about the troops training with boards as rifles and cardboard signs reading “Tank” hung on a JEEP – now that’s readiness training that Ricks can get on board with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People keep telling me how smart Tom Ricks is, and I keep looking for something that … Thomas Ricks; Is readiness overrated?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}