We need heavy forces and we need light airborne forces. And medium forces (Stryker brigades) to bridge the gap are fine. But the forces that can get to a fight the fastest aren't necessarily the forces that can win. And we don't necessarily have the logistics to enable them to fight if they could win that fight.
So this is a good starting point on forging the post-Iraq/Afghanistan Army:
The current Army is too large, too expensive and mostly geared to fight counterinsurgencies, and it is now seeking to forge a new identity as a multifaceted force that can adapt to a broader range of threats.
But this is problematic:
In the most recent strategy seminar, the Army was sent to a hostile Syria-like country where terrorists had obtained chemical weapons that were used in an attack against U.S. citizens. The Army's job was to secure the weapons and keep them locked down until civilian authorities decided how to proceed.
In the fictitious operation, the force was “pretty slow,” Smith said. Because most of the Army is based in the United States and carries a heavy logistics tail, the amount of airlift and sealift required to move even one brigade makes it difficult for the service to respond quickly. ...
A different scenario had the Army intervening in the same crisis, but with a drastically slimmed down force, with minimum heavy equipment and a new high-speed cargo helicopter. The lighter force was agile, but also more vulnerable, Smith said. “It moved so fast that it didn't have enough endurance. It had difficulties sustaining itself.” ...
The challenge is finding a happy medium so forces can get to hotspots faster and still have sufficient staying power, Smith said. “Somewhere in the middle we have to decide where to invest,” he said. “Should we pursue a future lift vehicle? Should we work on more sealift?”
If I may be so bold, the problems are in an arc of crisis from West Africa to Central Asia. We have a huge friggin' military alliance in Europe (that's NATO) with infrastructure that used to house a large American military presence.
If light forces are too light to win (regardless of where they originate) and heavy forces are too heavy to move quickly from the continental United States, put more ground forces in Europe!
We save money by leaving Europe and then spend it all and more for fast air and sealift to get our CONUS-based units overseas faster? Really?
We'd need a lot of airlift considering that I once read that it would be no faster to airlift a Stryker brigade to South Korea than to ship it there from our west coast.
A Europe-based mix of paratroopers, Stryker forces, airmobile forces, and heavy units--including heavy unit sets on ships in European ports that can be moved to the arc of crisis while troops fly in to draw the equipment--would greatly help this problem.
Come on, people! This isn't rocket science. Get closer.
