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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 10/11/2003 6:56:10 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
The Stryker is really that good that American soldiers won't gripe about it?
For the first time, the Army has fully integrated combined arms at the company level -- a coming together, for example, of soldiers proficient in mortars, artillery, armor and infantry into the smaller unit.
How can an "infantrycentric" motorized rifle company fully integrate arms they do not have?
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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"... We are in the midst of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age, when France transformed warfare with the concept of levŽe en masse. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson has called it "a fundamental shift from what we call platform-centric warfare to something we call network-centric warfare," and it will prove to be the most important RMA in the past 200 years. ...-----------------------------------------------------------
Network-centric warfare and all of its associated revolutions in military affairs grow out of and draw their power from the fundamental changes in American society. These changes have been dominated by the co-evolution of economics, information technology, and business processes and organizations, and they are linked by three themes:
* The shift in focus from the platform to the network
* The shift from viewing actors as independent to viewing them as part of a continuously adapting ecosystem
* The importance of making strategic choices to adapt or even survive in such changing ecosystems
These themes have changed the nature of American business today, and they also have changed and will continue to change the way we conduct the sometimes violent business of the military. We are some distance from a detailed understanding of the new operations--there is as yet no equivalent to Carl von Clausewitz's On War for this second revolution--but we can gain some insight through the general observation that nations make war the same way they make wealth.
The Underlying Economics Have Changed
The organizing principle of network-centric warfare has its antecedent in the dynamics of growth and competition that have emerged in the modern economy. The new dynamics of competition are based on increasing returns on investment, competition within and between ecosystems, and competition based on time. Information technology (IT) is central to each of these.
The U.S. economy has been on a steady growth path generally attributed to the emergence of larger global markets, the globalization of labor and capital, and the widespread application of information technology within business enterprises. ..."
["Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future," by Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, U.S. Navy, and John J. Garstka]
Decision makers
at the very top of our
miltary seem
to be living in --
making decisions based on --
a very strange world...
High tech mortar mount in a Piranha III
Story out of the Olympia newspaper
When I was a young man we had a deck of flash cards with pictures of armored vehicles, and whenever we hurried up to wait instead of standing around scratching our nuts we did hip pocket training on vehicle identification. The gunner got about 2 seconds to shoot or not shoot. Not shooting a bad guy got you razzed by the rest of the crew, or sometimes the whole platoon. Shooting a good guy got you pushups while you screamed "I will not kill our British (or German or whoever) allies!" at the top of your lungs with each repetition.
As an Intel officer I used to conduct threat I.D. with those cards and other devices. After doing so I decided that combat boots were probably the only safe mode of transportation in a war zone.
I still remember seeing that footage of the Apache gunner that took out the Bradley in Gulf War 1. My jaw dropped that he could not tell what it was, even through the NV system. And these guys train hard to be able to tell the difference. That's why we went to draping our vehicles with those stripped panels reminicent of the D-Day invasion stripes.
BTR-80------------------------------------------------BTR-70
LIGHT ARMOR FOR FULL-SPECTRUM OPERATIONS
<
a href="
http://www.combatreform.com/strykerprogram.htm
">title, in this case LIGHT ARMOR FOR FULL-SPECTRUM OPERATIONS
< /a> but delete the space between < and /
Everybody in Congress who cares has already seen that.
Read The Way Things Really Work
You might get a chuckle out of it.
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