Posted on 04/20/2006 4:32:49 PM PDT by neverdem
--snip--
Budgets reflected this love affair with aerial killing. Since Gen. Huba's first exposition in the early 1990s, 70 percent of defense investments, more than $1.3 trillion, have gone into shock and awe, delivered by Air Force and Navy aircraft and missiles.
The Army got 16 percent. Thus, we come today to an amazingly perverse strategic circumstance. We have more first-line fighter aircraft costing $50 million to $400 million per copy than we have Army and Marine infantry squads, costing less than $100,000 each.
Since Gen. Huba's experiments began, we have achieved a "kill ratio" in aerial combat of 257 to one over enemy air...
--snip--
So here we are trying to find a way to rid Iran of its nuclear weapons and the only warfighting tool in the tool box is shock and awe. Simply put, there is no ground option. We have too few soldiers to fight the wars we have, much less take on another enemy. Even if we had the ground forces, without an aerial maneuver option we could never hope to reach Iran's nuclear facilities by a ground invasion. So we'll blow them all up with bombs. Right.
I'm quite sure that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prays daily for a dose of shock and awe. It would be a badge of honor to have survived a fruitless aerial killing campaign only to resume serious work on building a bomb with the full support of the morally aggrieved Iranian people.
In time, of course, we could add an aerial maneuver tool to the toolbox, a capability that would give the president at least one option for the future other than aerial assault. But the plan now is to reduce, not increase, the size of the Army and Marine Corps.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
What did the army do in the intervening 15 years to plan and prepare for Iraq?
Are your going to blast Rummy for the Army's slow supply chain, bad tactics, bad equipment, lack of personal protective equipment?
That's a good point...They spent more on anthrax vaccine in the late 90's than they did on Body Armor. That stuff needed to be funded in 1995 to have it developed and feild by 2003.
"Well im sure his troopers can ride around in horses, WWII was ended with bombs,the army did not invade the big island."
WWII in the Pacific was won by the combination of US Naval power and Marines who took the islands from which we isolated Japan from it's outlying bases and sources of supply. The US Navy wiped the Japanese merchant marine from the seas, and American air power (particularly carrier-based) shot the Japanese from the sky in numbers at which they could not be replaced.
The war was over BEFORE the Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only question was how long the Japanese would continue to fight before they finally admitted it or starved to death. One estimate I've seen (a credible one) figures the war would have been over by mid-1946 without the bombs; the question was whether or not the American public could wait that long, or whether or not the US Navy could maintain that blockade in the face of mass Kamikaze attacks.
By the way, even AFTER Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 3 million Japanese troops were left to fight in China, Korea, Manchuria, SE Asia, and a host of bypassed island outposts. We "won" a war by NOT fighting 3/4 of the enemy army.
"In every major conflict the Air Force goes in first to scratch targets prior to the Army coming in and living large."
Actually, it's usually the US Navy and Marine Corps that goes in first since the Air Force cannot operate without airbases in theatre. Some units (like the B-2's and 52's) do have long-range strike capability, but there is no Air Force unit that can be "on the spot" within a week, let alone 24 hours, like the Navy and Marines can be.
The Air Force, like the Army, requires a long lead time when fighting beyond their bases because the infrastructure required by their mission either has to be begged from an ally,constructed from scratch or taken by ground forces. The Army requires a long lead time before going into combat because of all it's heavy equipment, a good deal of which cannot be airlifted in qunatities high enough to make a difference in the short term.
"The Army as a service needs to fix it's own problems and come up with a way to fight wars without thousands of field artillery pieces and tanks."
No, what The Army needs to do is to find a way to make infantry an attractive option in a day and age of "push-button" and "information-based" warfare. The Army, more than anything else, serves as an excellent training ground for those seeking a hi-tech career after their service is over, and as such, does not produce soldiers, but technicians. The problem is not having "thousands of tanks and artillery pieces" (they're needed), but in finding a way to make a "low-tech" and very dangerous, and dirty, method of war (face-to-face combat) a more attractive option to the PlayStation generation.
We are now in to our fifth war (WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and this one) with a defecit of trained, motivated infantry. The Army keeps making the same mistake and apparently hasn't learned a damned thing since 1944.
The emphasis and ;ove affair with technology and the aversion of the American public to casualties has borught us to this point: we now cannot fight wars because there are not enough committed young men available to do so. We can bomb the bejesus out of someplace, we can outthink and out-technology our foes, we can bomb Iran back into the Stone Age (or Afghanistan forward into the Stick Age) but we cannot impose our will (political, economic or military)upon them because there is no armed force (leg infantry in sufficient numbers) capable of making it possible.
Airpower, especially the tactical variety, works best when used in concert with a ground assault. The defender must maneuver to block the advance, and in so doing is exposed. Without the ground element, the enemies safest course of action is to hunker down, camouflage, and wait-it-out.
I'm going to quibble with your contention that the war against Japan was 'Won' before the Atomic Bombs were dropped. I say 'quibble' because your definition of victory is probably different than mine.
The Navy's plan was for blockade/starvation. It would have had to be a distant blockade since Kamikaze attacks like those at Okinawa were making the price too high in terms of ship losses. A closer blockade would probably meant the siezure of Taiwan (then Formosa).
The Army's plan called for the seizure of Kyushu as a first step. Isolating Kyushu from Honshu would have been darned near impossible for the Navy & Army Air Forces and this would also expose the Navy to unsustainable losses and no real option to pull back (unless they wanted to replay Guadalcanal).
Even with the atomic bombs there was an abortive coup against the Emperor by the dead-enders. If the war had been allowed to continue there would have been more attempts. It's hard to see how one of them would not have been successful and that would have resulted in lengthening the conflict.
My 2 Cents.
The war was over before the bombs were dropped. Japan was starving, could no longer produce the arms it needed to continue the fight and, given time, probably would have surrendered. They had been, for some months prior, working through the Soviet and Swedish Embassies to, do just that.
What kept the Japanese fighting was not so much military strength, but ideas of honor and shame that were peculiar to their culture, and demonstrated (and rigorously enforced) by the military government. There was also the consideration of gaining whatever advantage (or rather keeping whatever advantage) the Japanese could get in a negotiated surrender. The longer the Japanese could string the war out, the easier the negotiations became, for them, or such was the idea.
It is an idea that runs right through Japanese strategy from beginning to end of the Second World War: we can negotiate with the Americans. In the beginning of the war, it was to be a negotiation from a position of strength, at the end, a negotiation punctuated by threat of continued terror and massive caualties.
In the end, Truman's decision to drop the bomb was dictated by the lack of ground troops necessary for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Especially in the face of estimates of "1,000,000 casualties". By 1945, the US Army was out of infantry and trained replacements and there were no soldiers left. They were already scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time of the Battle of the Bulge (1944). Japan, on the other hand, still had almost 3 million soldiers in the field that never saw an allied army. They may have been hungry, they may have been undersupplied, but they would have fought and died and take an awful lot of Americans with them.
The Navy could have continued the blockade, the question is whether it could have withstood an even larger wave of kamikaze attacks than seem at Okinawa (300 American vessels sunk or damaged, over 15,000 US Casualties directly related to Kamikazes).
As for Taiwan (Formosa), it was surrounded and cut off from resupply or reinforcement by the taking of Guam, and the Philipines. There was no need to invade the island, which would have entailed huge casualties for little gain, especially with bases on Iwo Jima, Ie Shima, and Okinawa. Taiwan wasn't needed. So long as the US Navy patrolled the sea lanes, Taiwan was an isolated outpost.
As to how I define "victory" the Japanese did surrender, after all, but they did have an awful lot of assets with which to continue the fight. The Japanese Army, unlike the Wermacht, didn't run out of soldiers; we just flanked them, surrounded them, and left them to die on isolated outposts. These soldiers were, in effect, the victims of their own government and military strategists who made a fundmental mistake -- when you attempt to hold everything, you wind up holding nothing. In other words, the Japanese practice of fighting and holding ground to the death, became counter- productive when it came to accepting the concept of strategic retreat and the conservation of resources for future action. Escially after they had spilled blood in the taking of real estate. This is a cultural peculiarity, not necessary a military one. Hitler's "Old Prussian-blood-and-iron" attitude similarly hampered the Wermacht.
Ask yourself this: how many of those men died on tropical islands that had no strategic or economic value at all? And how many would have been saved (and used effectively) had they been evacuated and reposted to more vital places (like Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the Philipines)? This assumes that tthe US Navy left the Japanese the wherewithal of recusing them in the first place.
So, did we win by fighting the Japanese mano-a-mano, or by outhinking them, taking advantage of their own shortsightedness, outmanuevering them, and eventually starving them of food, fuel and resources? And even then, they still put up a hell of a fight, but it had to end at some point,probably well short of the need for Hiroshima, but circumstances dictated otherwise.
Air power is NOT the key. They've been selling that crap suince Billy Mitchell and Douhet. It's an important component, yes. The key ? No.
The Germans would have lost the Battle of the Bulge [as envisaged in Herbstnebel] simply because they didn't have enough troops to get over the Meuse and take Antwerp. The 2d Panzer ran out of gas before the air power kicked in. Did the air power affect the Germans ability to get POL? Sure, but not as much as the Russian GROUND troops seizing Ploesti [which stayed in oepration after severasl heavy poundings by air power]. Did they impact the German ability to move troops? Absolutely. Goes back to D-Day, and the tiome it took for the Panzer reserve and 2d SS 'Das Reich' to get to the beachhead. BUT, the Germans had a lot more trouble with naval bombardment in the FEBA, and if rommel had been able to position the panzers where he wanted, the Air Force wouldn't have meant beans.
As for Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, what's the point if you don't hold the terrain, a country wide 'no fly zone'? The pupose of war is to make the enemy do what he doesn't want to. Air power can contribute to that, but groundpounders make it happen.
We can disagree on the facts, and if you want to buy into 'Roger Ramjet saves the World', that's your problem. And no, procurement wasn't my bag. Tanker was.
As they say in 'Pirates of the Caribbean', "We have an accord".
You can't win with air power alone, but neither can you win with troops alone. You must have both, but the key factor is AIR SUPERIORITY, in order to knock out missle sites, enemy tanks, bunkers etc and without losing a lot of men in the process.
How far do you think and Abrams would get if the enenmy had air superiority? Do you think they would have rolled across Iraq virtually unapposed? No, they would have had the sh** shot out of them by air craft with tank busting missles and 30MM rounds. Ask a few Iraqis about A10s, they can tell you all about it.
I was a tanker, and I know without air power I would have been next to useless, just as every other army has been since WWII without air power. Because without air superiority you are no longer fighting the other sides tanks but their aircraft and you will lose.
Does the six day war ring a bell? Air power won it. Troops held the ground, but air power saved the day.
You really sound like a jealous ground pounder to me, someone who hates to admit that other services are as important, or more so, than you are.
Waiting around for communists to love you for serving the American people is a slow business. Hell will freeze first. Suck it up.
No...The key is not letting the communists have control of the US military. It has to be rebuilt after they've had their way with it.
The american people what is a stake.
There would have been no deal because Japan would have sought to maintain its rights in Korea, Manchuria, and the Northern China. Roosevelt/Truman was not going to abandon the "Open Door Policy" after bringing the war to Japan's doorstep. If we had cut a deal it would have amounted to throwing the Nationalist Chinese Government -- a member of the Big 4 -- under the bus by making a separate peace. So the US was not going to do a deal, in my estimation. "No Separate Peace" was another guiding principle of the war. Probably made it a lot bloodier and longer than might have been necessary, but there you have it.
BTW, I agree with you assessment that an Invasion of Taiwan would not have been necessary. It's just that the Navy planners of the day were seriously considering it.
It sounds an awful lot like the idea behind the Stryker Brigades. What am I missing?
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Excellent analysis. Thanks for posting.
Yeah, right. Air power is proving to be really helpful in putting down the Iraqi insurgency /sarcasm.
Did you even read the article? Obviously, air superioirty is essential, but ground forces are also essential. Air power can't take and hold ground. The author's point is that we've invested too little in the latter, and THAT'S why we've had so much trouble in Iraq, and that's why we have few good options with Iran. There's no way you can disarm Iran with air power alone.
No, but it does require occupation for long enough to put in the replacement regime, which takes time.
A determined sniper could take care of the issue with Iran.
In your fantasy world, maybe. Not in the real world.
Why would we want to "hold" Iran?
So that the bad guys don't come back before the good guys take control.
I know that's been true since the Vietnam war, when the moonbats took over the Democratic party. But was that really true in the days of Trueman and Kennedy?
Yes, but not on a large scale. For all practical purposes, you can't make an entire country, or even a province uninhabitable.
And that's the point. If you are going to do regime change, you have to take effective control over a country long enough to hand it over to the new regime. Airpower alone cannot accomplish this. It helps, but at the end of the day, you need boots on the ground.
That's the whole point of the article. Did you bother reading it? He is arguing that the army needs to develop the capability of flying tanks and troops into battle quickly and on a large scale. This idea has been around for years, and it is technically feasible, but it has not been implemented because the DOD has put too much focus on air power.
Read an article before you criticize it.
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