Here we go. If you wonder why we go to war with the Army we have and not the Army we wish we had at that moment, it is because at some point in the past, people wished to have the Army we have. Here's the wish:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, say they want to reorganize U.S. ground forces to focus on smaller units with greater lethal force, fewer casualties and faster deployment.
The days of "Industrial-age big formations with months to set the theater" are "if not gone, are going," Gen Dempsey said. "The kind of threats we can anticipate are rapidly developing threats."
These same military reformers, however, say the Army must be ready for a full range of operations—from training allies to humanitarian relief missions to counterinsurgency fights to old-fashioned tank battles. ...
The Army's "organizational culture continues to focus nearly exclusively on state-on-state wars," he said, not the type of conflict he believes the U.S. is more likely to face in the future.
"They appear to be unwilling to make that next big step," Mr. Nagl said, toward reorganizing the Army for more work advising and training troops of allied nations, for example.
I suppose enough time has passed for the big guns to have gone silent. With memories of insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq still fresh, "reformers" have decided to prepare for the last wars. They forget that we would not have gotten to the counter-insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan if our conventional forces hadn't routed Saddam's brigades in 2003 and to a lesser extent hadn't shattered Afghanistan's conventional (although far weaker) military power that kept the Taliban in power.
People used to mock those who prepared for the last war. Now they are knighted with the title "reformer." Great.
And to make matters worse, by focusing on the need to get overseas faster, we have decided to make that problem worse by pulling our troops from overseas bases back to the continental United States where they have to go farther to reach a theater of operations.
Rather than deploying forces closer to potential theaters or increasing our use of prepositioned equipment sets to allow us to reach a theater faster, "reformers" have decided that we must lighten up and shrink our units to allow them to be flown overseas quickly.
These "reformers" seem to have assumed that the only problem is getting the Army to the theater fast to collect our predetermined victory as if the enemy doesn't even get to contest our light and small ground forces backed by distant firepower wielded with God-like knowledge.
And this despite the example we had during the Iraq insurgencies of the value of heavy armor.
And this advocacy for lightness and avoidance of training for force-on-force campaigns ignores the fact that we defeated the insurgents and terrorists in Iraq during the surge using better counter-insurgency approaches with troops no different than those who had failed to suppress the insurgents and terrorists.
Any good soldier is a good counter-insurgent and can be adapted to counter-insurgency if the leadership above them retains the skills to lead them and issue proper orders.
Conversely, an Army equipped and trained for pacification is ill-prepared to transition to high intensity force-on-force combat no matter how skilled they are for counter-insurgency.
But at least the Army leadership seems determined to rebalance the Army by preparing some units for high intensity force-on-force combat. I know, "reformers" like to say that because we are so dominant in conventional combat that no enemy would be foolish enough to confront us on a conventional battlefield. Have any of these geniuses considered that if we get so good at the reformers' vision of warfare at the expense of conventional warfare that foreign actors might not be foolish enough to confront us on an unconventional battlefield?
Hey, didn't Hezbollah do that in 2006 when Hezbollah used conventionally organized light infantry to fight ill-prepared Israeli ground forces to a standstill? Yes. Why yes they did. And Israel seems to want to make up for their failure to master conventional warfare.
Unless "reformers" screw us up, we can have a full-spectrum Army if we retain our hard-won knowledge of defeating insurgents even as we remember conventional warfare. If it makes the "reformers" feel better, even during the Cold War when our military was supposedly overly fixated on tank-heavy force-on-force campaigns, half of the Army's line battalions were infantry units rather than heavy mechanized forces.
