Ground forces too small

The Washington Times ^ | January 25, 2005 | Robert H. Scales

[neverdem]

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The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

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Ground forces too small

By Robert H. Scales
Published January 25, 2005

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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.

    With the exception of Kosovo, the success of American arms in every conflict after World War II was threatened by a shortage of ground soldiers. In Korea and Vietnam, the shortage was addressed by rushing young men into deadly combat before they wereadequatelyprepared.The deadlyarithmeticinIraq continues true toform,with close-combat soldierscomprising at least three-quarters of our dead. Yet if all Army and Marineinfantrymen were collected together in one placethey would not fill FedEx Stadium.

    The pressures of war and the parsimony of past administrations have broken the Army twice in the past 40 years. In Vietnam, 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...

[506trooper]

Figured the junior service might respond sooner or later....but can you claim territory? Not deny it, or destroy it, but claim and hold it?

Not knocking the Air Force contribution, just pointing out the obvious difference in roles.

Besides, I love the Air Force....whenever anyone asks me how I could ever jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I always respond; "If you've ever ridden in an Air Force plane, you'll know that none of them are perfectly good."

[Ranger]

Adding more infantry to the total force structure makes immense sense in light of our current challenges. It dumbfounds me that Rumsfeld, after 3 1/2 years of combat with a known enemy, does not adjust accordingly.

6%!

The disdain shown infantry is reflected in the ridiculous shortcomings in body armor, vehicular armor, armored vehicles and ammo shortages experienced even after several years of combat. When you compare the cost of rectifying these deficiencies against the cost of navy or air force programs one is left bewildered.

[milemark]

In WWII, you had a tremendous number of naval and merchant marine personnel die, along with airmen.

In WWII there was actual warfare at sea and in the sky that we really haven't seen since. It seems to me that in this era, the nations powerful enough to wage such warfare are also nuclear armed. The United States, Russia, Great Britain have conventional military forces just for fighting small enemies such as what the U.S. and U.K. have done in Iraq and Russia is doing in Chechnya. If big countries fight each other it will be probably be nuclear war.

Even in the case of smaller nuclear armed nations, this will be the case. How do we mass an invasion force on ther border of North Korea or Iran the way we did on the border of Iraq? Those enemies could destroy the invasion force with nukes. The only options are nuclear first strike or conventional air strikes if we can have confidence in destroying all enemy nukes in the first wave so that there will be no counter.

[milemark]

That reminds me of something written in American Heritage's 'World War II Chronicles'- "Twenty million Americans were examined for military service in World War II; fourteen million were accepted. Only 14 per cent were infantrymen and those 14 percent took 70 percent of the casualties."