However, in terms of impact to the average American citizen, these paragraphs are the money shot:
"The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks."
"In addition to the disciplined disobedience required to execute effective mission command, the US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031. The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000. These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription."
I have no idea how the formatting messed up the title, but it should be “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force”
Help me out here, Folks!
How is "disciplined disobedience" required in order to execute effective mission command?
Wouldn't, rather, disciplined obedience be required?
Regards,
The US is slightly more than 4% of the world's population. Its latest "lesson" about public education is that we are "graduating" almost functionally illiterate, innumerate young people.
That Crombe and Nagl write such an essay, with War College stamped all over its "Selected Bibliography" suggests that they are operating in an echo chamber into which they launch their next-to-be cited article.
An overweight, unfit and poorly educated generation will not solve recruitment issues, whether voluntary or conscripted. An entire overhaul of the "liberal world order" currently being led by Biden (and therefore Obama) would be required, to begin to raise up a healthy, fit and skilled generation from out of the incompetent unionized public education system which is failing dramatically.
This duo writing such seemingly "scholarly" stuff proves today's military cannot see the forest for the tree in front of which they stand. The tree at which they focus has an infestation of transsexual "bark beetles" eating away at it, from the two many four-stars down.
To answer a problem, first the problem need be clarified. The article misses by a mile. One should not focus on General DePuy in the time of the Yom Kippur war, but on the Israeli command which won a war.
Footnote -- The War College's graduates have won no recent war, even when the battles all were won, for the Pyrrhic victories remain -- like Vietnam through to Afghanistan -- the waste of materiel and treasure.
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We are facing a crisis in recruiting because of how we have configured today's culture: we have raised a few generations of young people who no conception of a duty to serve their country in the armed forces. They are being taught that "it's somebody else's job" and that they "have better things to do".
It's from a steady barrage of lies from the Leftover Left during and after Vietnam and an encroaching, enveloping desire to live comfortably and drug-addled and chubby.
We have lost the ethos that men have a duty to serve in wartime and that combat is the truest test of a man's courage and strength. We have replaced that with "if it feels good, do it" and that military service, even direct combat, can be done by mentally deranged men wearing dresses and young women.
I have three military aged sons. I will do everything I can to keep them from being drafted to fight for Ukraine.