Posted on 11/18/2003 10:50:41 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
Edited on 11/18/2003 10:52:04 AM PST by Lead Moderator. [history]
U.S. military commanders, working with the Pentagon's Joint Staff, have revised plans for potential wars on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East and elsewhere based on assumptions that conflicts could be fought more quickly and with fewer American troops than previously thought, senior officers said.
The changes reflect advances in precision munitions, greater use of Special Operations forces, and improved coordination between air, ground and sea forces tested in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By incorporating these and other new elements in all U.S. war plans, Pentagon authorities hope to make them permanent features and gain greater combat efficiency, the officers said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Blurring the distinctions between "heavy" armored divisions and "light" infantry divisions is what the Stryker Brigade Combat Team is all about. The infantry, armor, cavalry and field artillery are going to morph into generic, branch-indeterminate, interchangable Brigade Combat Teams. The whole concept of Army branches and regimental designations may be overtaken by events. I hope I do not live to see 1st Battalion, 72nd Armor redesignated as the 172nd Interchangable Generic Combat Arms Battalion. Some people do not understand esprit d' corps.
LOL! Amen, brother.
BTW, love your treadhead graphic.
America's new military plans for the world
Bradley Graham reports in the Washington Post about an extremely important strategic/operational development in the Pentagon: the creation of new operational plans for such major theaters as the Middle East and Korea. Unfortunately, news of the sniper's conviction and Arnold's swearing-in pushed this story from page A1 to A18. But I think this is probably the most important story to come out of the Pentagon in weeks. The most important change is that the new operational plans assume America's ability to "do more with less" -- that is, to fight a military campaign with fewer boots on the ground and more airpower/artillery guided by "C4ISR" (command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance).
U.S. military commanders, working with the Pentagon's Joint Staff, have revised plans for potential wars on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East and elsewhere based on assumptions that conflicts could be fought more quickly and with fewer American troops than previously thought, senior officers said.
The changes reflect advances in precision munitions, greater use of Special Operations forces, and improved coordination between air, ground and sea forces tested in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By incorporating these and other new elements in all U.S. war plans, Pentagon authorities hope to make them permanent features and gain greater combat efficiency, the officers said.
Although many specifics remain classified, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has alluded to the revised plans in recent statements, saying they show the Pentagon would be able to deal with other conflicts while U.S. forces stay heavily committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has rejected calls from lawmakers and others to increase the overall size of the armed forces.
In the case of a North Korean attack on South Korea, one senior Joint Staff officer said, the new plans would allow the United States to respond without waiting for as many ground forces to arrive, by substituting air power for artillery and getting such critical equipment as counter-battery radars -- for pinpointing enemy mortar and artillery fire -- on scene ahead of the rest of their divisions. The resulting force might not be as "elegant" as planners would like, but "it will certainly be capable," the officer said.
Still, the new planning does not appear to have addressed issues of postwar stabilization and peacekeeping, which in the case of Iraq have imposed huge burdens on the Pentagon that were not foreseen by Rumsfeld and many of his top aides. Instead, it has focused on how to win wars fast.
Analysis: In essence, these changes take the alleged lessons learned from Iraq and incorporate them into updated and revised operational plans. We all watched the way that American firepower and intelligence capabilities worked together in Iraq to defeat the Iraqi army in three weeks. I haven't seen these new operational plans (obviously, they're classified), but I would guess that these plans assume a lower number of infantry, armor and combat-support troops on the ground as well for the mission, either because those troops may be tied up elsewhere (e.g. Iraq) or because there won't be time in future conflicts to deploy them before the balloon goes up.
What's wrong with this plan? Well, I see two glaring areas where the operational plans assume substantial amounts of risk -- at the strategic, operational and tactical levels.
Risk Area 1: Security. The decision to fight a war with less of a ground footprint leaves you with less manpower to protect those things that you do actually put on the ground. Although the initial stages of a war may be fought entirely by airpower, I think it's still true that you must eventually commit ground troops in order to seize, hold or occupy terrain -- or to truly impose your will on an enemy government. As T.R. Fehrenbach said so brilliantly in This Kind of War:
"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."
This is still true. The problem then becomes one of force protection. Our enemies have learned to hit us asymmetrically because they know that they cannot hope to succeed against the combined-arms effort of American infantry, armor, artillery and air support. Indeed, if Gulf War I and II are any indicator, they will lose thousands of soldiers in any such effort. However, they have also learned from Somalia, Afghanistan and Gulf War II that asymmetric tactics can be highly effective -- particularly against those parts of the American war machine that are less well-protected: supply lines, logistics bases and command posts. Such units are absolutely critical to the American way of war, because our front-line units can't operate without the support of a heavy logistics tail -- and they will be less effective without the assistance of a command post to direct close-air support and artillery, among other force multipliers. Asymmetric attacks on these targets will likely produce American casualties, which in turn will make Americans question the war effort and possibly hasten our withdrawal from any endeavor, according to this theory. They will also reduce our effectiveness and slow our advance.
As we saw recently in Iraq, such attacks will eventually rise to the point where the operational commander must pull front-line troops out of the fight to secure the lines of communication and critical American high-value assets. The asset requirements for force protection will sap combat power from the fight, where it's needed. And if the decision was made before the fight to deploy less troops to the theater, it's often too late during the fight to get them there, since American units typically require weeks to deploy anything heavier than a paratroop battalion to war. If this problem grows bad enough, it will necessitate an operational pause. But at that point, the whole point of moving fast and light is lost, and you should've just deployed enough troops when you had the chance.
Risk Area 2: Troops to Secure the Peace. As this article states, the new operational plans don't fully consider the post-war requirements in each respective theater of operation. In Iraq, those post-war requirements were assumed away too, according to excellent reports in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, among other sources. The result was a hasty effort to secure the peace in the immediate aftermath of the war, compounded by a lack of resources (boots on the ground) to do the job in April and May. The result was chaos. If there is one lesson that operational planners (and I've been one) should take away from Iraq, it is this: don't assume the post-war phase of the operation out of the planning process. You simply can't afford to assume a d*mn thing when it comes to planning, and failing to plan such a major part of the operation is planning for failure. The post-war phase in Iraq is turning out to be far more important, far more costly, and far more lengthy than the war itself.
But that's always been the case. In every war we have fought since WWII, the ends have been messy. After WWII, we had to occupy Germany and Japan for years. We're still in Korea, although the nation-building efforts were largely complete by 1960. Vietnam ended quite messily, though we're now returning there to rebuild the nation's economy with the foot soldiers of capitalism. Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, East Timor -- every recent nation-building op has shown that it takes more troops to secure the peace than to win the war (or change the regime, if that's the case). I made this point in May in the Washington Monthly, and Amb. James Dobbins made it more elegantly in the RAND study America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq.
If you commit less troops to the fight, then you will have less troops on the ground at the moment the mission changes from war to post-war stabilization. Moreover, America lacks the strategic-lift (think Air Force cargo plane) capability and rapid-deployment (think 82nd Airborne) capability to rapidly get troops to the battlefield in the time it will take to affect the situation on the ground. In Iraq, the situation deterioriated in a matter of days, and even if we had made the decision on 9 Apr 03 to deploy additional forces, it would've taken weeks to get them there. The pre-war decision to commit less troops to battle has profound post-war implications, and these operational plans appear to miss that point.
I don't think these are necessarily fatal flaws. The combatant commands (e.g. CENTCOM) can scrub these plans, generate their own requirements, and request more resources for operations when the order is given. But they really don't have the resources -- or the asset visibility -- to do so as effectively as the Joint Staff and the service staffs (e.g. Army and Navy). Plus, they will be under significant time pressure to execute the mission, and it will be hard to request more resources if and when the balloon goes up in a place like Korea. The right answer would be to incorporate the real lessons learned from Iraq into these operational plans. History has shown us that winning the peace is often more difficult than winning the war, and we should plan for that. Depending on your perspective, such an event may be a contingency or an eventuality. But a good planner plans for both.
posted by Phillip at 9:43 AM
To achieve those goals, [General Peter] Pace said, the Operational Availability group has recommended looking at, among other things, building faster Navy cargo ships, providing more Air Force cargo planes and creating modular, interchangeable Army units that would blur the distinction between "heavy" armored divisions and "light" infantry divisions.
Likewise.
Good starting place.
Q What is a BCT (Brigade Combat Team)?
A A BCT (Brigade Combat Team) is a normal Army brigade with the support elements that normally come from other units on the post already integrated into the day to day training being conducted.
'preciate it!
Darksheare, you want in with this bunch of cutthroats, brigands and freebooters?
-archy-/-
I don't care how well-written or interesting their articles are. I'm not going to give them sex just so I can read the WaPo.
Even if it's not mine.
-archy-/-
"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."
This is still true. The problem then becomes one of force protection. Our enemies have learned to hit us asymmetrically because they know that they cannot hope to succeed against the combined-arms effort of American infantry, armor, artillery and air support. Indeed, if Gulf War I and II are any indicator, they will lose thousands of soldiers in any such effort. However, they have also learned from Somalia, Afghanistan and Gulf War II that asymmetric tactics can be highly effective - - particularly against those parts of the American war machine that are less well-protected: supply lines, logistics bases and command posts. Such units are absolutely critical to the American way of war, because our front-line units can't operate without the support of a heavy logistics tail -- and they will be less effective without the assistance of a command post to direct close-air support and artillery, among other force multipliers. Asymmetric attacks on these targets will likely produce American casualties, which in turn will make Americans question the war effort and possibly hasten our withdrawal from any endeavor, according to this theory. They will also reduce our effectiveness and slow our advance.
Haven't the North Koreans, along with the Chinese, been really, really big at not just attempting, but succeeding at embedding infiltrators in the rear echelon areas of the countries they wish to attack...including the U.S....to facilitate these hypothetical asymmetric attacks?
Of course, how we will do against a real Army, and not a bunch of ill-equipped ragheads, remains to be seen.
And I think you are right on the morphing of the Army. We already have Brigade Combat Teams, but they now mean a line brigade and the slices of the divisional support units - DIVARTY, DISCOM, Aviation, etc - that support it in combat. That will undoubtedly change.
And it also does not address the fact that no enemy force in its right mind will fight against us conventionally. Rumsfeld and his techies are planning to fight the last war. They are designing a force that will be absolutely deadly against the Republican Guard and formations composed of Iraqi conscripts in old Soviet-bloc equipment--I sure hope that's the enemy we fight in the next war! But against any type of reasonably well organized enemy that fights as dispersed small units using guerilla style tactics, that uses the civilian population to mask their operations, that uses protected buildings such as hospitals and mosques and apartment buildings and schools for their bases; our new small scale push-button wonder-weapon equipped high-tech flight-pay drawing defense industry satisficing military will be just as useless as the vast majority of our Air Force and Navy are right now in the Phillippines, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Based on Secretary Rumsfeld's faith-based planning for Iraqi Freedom, we didn't send in enough ground troops to secure ourselves, squash the initial resistance like bugs before they gained confidence and competence, hold Iraqi prisoners, Iraqi military bases, Iraqi ammo dumps, WMD sites, or the international borders. Much of what we are running up against now in Iraq could have been prevented or mitigated if we had gone in strong up-front--on the ground! Ten more air wings and 15 more carrier battle groups wouldn't have made a dime's bit of difference. And now we're going to transform the military to give us more of what we already have too much of and less of what we are already short. Brilliant.
The threat has changed. 4GW is upon us.
I find it hard to come up with many realistic scenarios pitting US Army ground forces in divisional or corps strength against organized armed forces of a functioning nation-state. Syria, Iran, North Korea if you call that functioning, Red China, Cuba; who else?
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