Posted on 01/25/2005 12:30:14 PM PST by neverdem
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www.washingtontimes.com
Ground forces too smallBy Robert H. ScalesPublished January 25, 2005 A close look at photos of American service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforces the painful truism that soldiers and Marines are doing virtually all of the fighting and dying. This isn't a new phenomenon. From Korea to Iraq, four out of five of those who died at the hands of the enemy were infantrymen. Not just soldiers and Marines, but infantrymen, a force that today comprises less than 6 percent of those in uniform.
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(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Preaching to the choir, Bro.
Trying to read through this, I think Gen. Scales was to long at the war college. However, I think they cut far deeper during the Clinton years than was safe and prudent. Regardless of how they are organized, be it division, RCT, or Brigades,I think we need more troops. High tech can "kick the door" open, but in the kind of conflicts we are going to be fighting, we need the manpower to hold and control the room.
Good link, thanks.
In WWII, you had a tremendous number of naval and merchant marine personnel die, along with airmen. Plus, you had more medical casualties among non-combat personnel - especially in the tropics due to diseases.
Now that our medicine is much better, our naval and air assets are harder to hit and the wars are confined to theatre, the front line troops are about the only ones our enemies can touch - unless, of course, you count terror attacks against civilians, which killed over twice as many as have died in Iraq to date.
I think Scales tripped over his reproductive appendage in his attempt to promote an expanded force.
Fighting the last war once again.
"the pressures of fighting a war with too limited a force caused Army noncommissioned officers, the human glue that holds our Army together, to leave en masse. The result was chaos. In the early '70 conditions became so bad that the American Army virtually ceased to exist as a fighting force. Again in the late seventies the Carter administration tried to accomplish too many missions with too few soldiers. Again the Army voted with its feet, creating a "hollow Army" that embarrassed the nation with its incompetence during Desert One, the failed hostage rescue effort in Iran. The lessons are clear: a good army takes generations to build and only a few short years to break.
The truth is, during this war so far, far more civilians than military have been killed at the hands of the enemy.
Civilians ~3000
Military ~1100
The reason we have a military is to prevent our enemies from killing our civilians.
Good point. What would you have done to prevent those 3,000 deaths on 9/11/01?
What would I have done? I would have treated the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 as the act of war that it was, and hunted down the culprits with the same vigor that we hunt them today. Remember, one of the key figures in that bombing - Ramzi Yusef - was an Iraqi intelligence agent.
I knew there was a reason I voted against that Bill Clinton guy twice. Was it two or three times he was offered OBL for the taking?
I'm a little surprised he would list Desert One as the result of weakness in the services. It was a relatively small scale operation which failed for logistical and technical reasons.
And I agree we need more soldiers. However, I find his diagnosis at the beginning rather strange.
A close look at photos of American service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforces the painful truism that soldiers and Marines are doing virtually all of the fighting and dying. This isn't a new phenomenon. From Korea to Iraq, four out of five of those who died at the hands of the enemy were infantrymen. Not just soldiers and Marines, but infantrymen, a force that today comprises less than 6 percent of those in uniform.
As opposed to WWII where we lost thousands of Merchant Marines to horrible deaths in the Atlantic? I do not see the fact that almost all of our combat deaths are front-line troops as being a problem - instead, to me it means we are able to keep conflicts in-theater and otherwise have complete control over our lines of communication to the theater - which historically is a luxury that few, if any, military powers have ever had.
And how will raising the number of combat troops decrease the ratio of combat troops to non-combat troops who are killed in combat? If you are cycling troops over six months instead of 12, you still have combat troops doing the fighting.
It's a puzzling way of approaching the core problem.
Four.
So you're talking about another 100,000+ troops. Where do we get them from? The Army and Marines are barely met their quote for 2004.
We're kind of in a bind here. The army is trying to recruit to staff an occupation army, not an offensive army. The Pentagon is saying that troop levels will be at about 120,000 for the next two years. That means that the troops in the ranks now can expect at least another tour, maybe two in Iraq. They are stretched thin, are going to be stretched thinner, and I can't see that the administration is doing anything to alleviate the situation. And if they start failing to make their recruiting goals then it's only going to get worse.
Then I added up all the TOTAL number of troops in our major Army units today (10 divisions and 4 brigade-sized elements) and got around 176,000. And not all of those (about half?) are "trigger pullers".
We have Marines, too, of course. But I wonder, even including them along with the Army, if we have much more than 150,000 actual ground combat troops in the active military.
The reason the enemy can "touch" our infantry is that infantry is the branch that takes the fight to the enemy. They're the ones kicking in doors, stabbing & jabbing & throwing grenades, etc. And for obvious reasons you suffer more casualties when attacking than you do while defending.
And the greater our high tech advantage, the more likely we'll need more infantry to find, fix, & finish the enemy as our adversaries will not operate in a way that allows them to get blown away by some laser-guided bomb from out of sight; witness Iraq & Afghanistan today.
In WWII, the enemy took the fight to us along our lines of communications as well. Enemy bombers and fighers were able to harass our troops and supply depos. So non-frontline troops took a lot of casualties. Those rates dropped as we gained control of the seas and command of the air.
So I see a high ratio of combat casualties as a sign that we control lines of communications - not as some inherent weakness in and of itself. I do agree we need more troops - but that is not gonna change the statistic that the author is citing.
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