Tofflerian "RMA" Firepower versus Heinlein/Fehrenbachian/Van Crevaldian "4GW" Maneuver: which is right for 21st century combat?

UPDATED 3/22/2009


Click here to start Firepower vs. Maneuver Non-Linear Warfare Power Point Presentation

Note: if reocities or oocities conks out due to band width restrictions click here for an early version of the power points: www.combatreform.org/FEHRENBACHvstofflersNLBv1.0.ppt

Please try to view the reocities-oocities slides because they are packed full of new information added since the power points were first made in 2002.


"We need smart people who can think about old things in new ways that make sense."

--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, February 22, 2002

The painful irony in RMA zealot Wolfowitz's words is that his former DoD team refuses to admit their philosophy of war is a failure and to adapt---which is by definition hypocrisy. Photo immediately below shows M113 Gavins and M1 Abrams escorting a truck convoy (cannot depart from roads/trails) in Iraq exploiting the former's greater armor protection. The picture beneath the first pic is a Canadian M113 Gavin in ACAV gunshield configuration in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia in the 1990s. Maybe if we stopped making up new labels like "SASO" and studied what works in our profession from events going on all around us we wouldn't have "discoveries" like tracked armor works in ALL forms of combat on planet earth.


"Tanks and armored personnel carriers have been out of favor with the advocates of 'military transformation' for so long that their value and versatility in Iraq has come as something of a revelation," the report says. "Not only have they provided critical capabilities in waging urban battles, but they have proven surprisingly relevant in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations."

--Lawrence Korb, He is vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration

What Korb doesn't understand is that RMA disciples are anti-PHYSICAL; physical means effort, it means $ buying durable things that can be re-used; in their techno-arrogance they think MENTAL firepower replaces physical MANEUVER; its failed obviously in Iraq and now Lebanon, yet the Andy Marshall gang are still ruining DoD and getting Americans killed (disposible people) as they waste billions on "inexpensive" disposible guided bombs and lust for expendible platforms like LCS ships. U.S. Naval War College professor of Joint Operations, Milan Vego writes about "net-centric warfare" (NCW) in the January 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal in his article, "The NCW Illusion":

"There is no proof, at least not yet, that NCW would be effective in quickly and decisively defeating stronger and much more skilled [nation-state] opponents than the ones U.S. forces faced in Afghanistan and Iraq. NCW also appears not to provide much of an advantage in fighting an insurgency in the post-hostility phase of a campaign, as the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate. In fact, the ongoing insurgency in Iraq is a powerful proof, if any is needed, of how little practical value networking one's forces has in obtaining accurate, timely and relevant information on the enemy. There is probably no conflict in which U.S. forces have fought in such ignorance of the enemy's purpose, strength and leadership. Even more dubious are ideas that somehow NCW can be effective in fighting and defeating international terrorists such as al-Qaida."

BREAKING NEWS: U.S. Army and now marines reject RMA "Effects-Based Operations" (EBO)

Effects Based Operations (EBO) aka Air strike Firepower Mentality of USAF Rejected by the U.S. Army in 2007

Mattis is a Luddite; he rejects anything new out of hand; in this case something bad, which is fortunate...just don't expect any innovation or progress from him.

Attached from his memo shows he's just copy-catting views of others; in this case the U.S. Army which rejected USAF air strike EBO in 2007.

Let's give credit where its due.

USJFCOM Commander General General Mattis Rejects EBO and gets on the anti-RMA band wagon:


www.combatreform.org/usjfcomebomemo.pdf

Maneuver Warfare is a Fraud

www.rusi.org/publication/journal/ref:A48AD5019CB46E/

Aug 2008, Vol. 153, No. 4
By William F. Owen

The concept of Manoeuvre Warfare (MW) in its modern form was first advocated in the early 1980s as part of the U.S. military conventional response to perceived Warsaw Pact superiority. It has since become widely accepted as a style of warfare and generic concept of operation. This paper will argue that the community it was intended to serve based its wide acceptance largely on ignorance and a lack of intellectual rigour.

Read Wilf Owen's great article on the MW hoax:

www.combatreform.org/Owen_Journal_August_2008.pdf

My reaction:

USMC: Both Maneuver & Attrition Warfare as Excuses for Military Malpractice

As a friend of Bill Lind and most of the maneuver warfare (MW) proponents stemming from my time in the USMC, I can report that their goal was to make the marines tangibly change for the better since they tend to be narcissistic, stupid dumb asses bent on macho self and peer validation. The intended result that the USMC would light mechanize and be a modern-day German-style, blitzkrieg combined-arms, warfighting organization did not happen because the MW proponents didn't realize that the slacker marines would simply use their ideas of bypassing enemy strength and collapsing a center-of-gravity (COG) to SUBSIDIZE THEIR INFANTRY HAND WEAPON, FOOT-SLOGGING FROM WHEELED TRUCKS NARCISSISM. Actual result: no tangible change in the USMC which simply states it will now die heroically gunslinging from trucks in search of COGs in lieu of dying on beaches frontally assaulting fortified position ala Iwo Jima. The pack-marines-like-sardines-in-amphibious ships racket continues unhindered despite the proliferation of thousands of anti-ship missiles, sea mines and torpedoes ready to swarm and overmatch any anti-this-or-that defenses.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBQo6z_mnmA

When the USMC was given a maneuver axis to reach the Baghdad COG in 2003, they almost didn't even make it in their wheeled, unarmored trucks and were 6 days late while the mechanized U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division waited holding their half of the capitol city, enabling Saddam and subordinates to escape and start a guerrilla war against us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYOGj-MAYFs

In Afghanistan, marines moving around on foot and in vulnerable wheeled trucks are quick to call in clumbsy, too-fast fighter-bomber air strikes when Taliban rebels run into villages; causing innocent civilians to die and their relatives to join the rebellion against the central government in Kabul for revenge

The bottom line reality is the USMC uses when convenient both maneuver and attrition warfare as excuses to do what it wants to do; which is racketeer maximum monies from Congress while doing as close to nothing as possible beyond sailing penny packets of troops in bloated amphib ships to do showy but military meaningless evacuations and saber-rattling. If the USMC honestly embraced attrition warfare means to overwhelm possible enemy beach fortifications, it'd have a fleet of Percy Hobart-style combat engineering tanks to break open the way, BUT IT WOULD REQUIRE TANGIBLE MONEY AND EFFORT and you cannot hold dress uniform and barracks inspections nor paint rocks and mow lawns if you are in coveralls with greasy fingers getting a mine flail to work right on your sapper tank.

The bottom line is the USMC is a fraudulent outfit composed of lazy slacker gunslingers bent on whatever excuse necessary to perpetuate its Iwo Jima racket. The USMC is not willing to do the due diligence necessary to properly and tangibly adapt to ANY type of war be it sub-national conflict or nation-state duels; its founded on the quick-sand of ad hocery and slip-shod improvisations that often fail to get the job done but have a smokescreen of false valor on tap to excuse away constant episodes of military malpractice.

The RMA aka EBO pundits will ignore our troops' physical truck-generated lack of off-road mobility and armoring that gets them killed by NEAR MISSES and instead change the subject claiming that enemies with sophisticated guided weapons with the ability to specifically hit a spot on targets, NO ARMORING WILL WORK. We call this the "Jap Zero Mentality".


Superb painting by Lou Drendel shows American armored P-40 diving through and flaming a Jap Zero; "Flying Tiger" John Allison in one mission single-handedly attacked a formation of enemy fighters and because his plane was armored was sturdy enough to stay intact despite enemy hits so he could fly back to base

The RMA defeatist mentality that there's no point to having any armor because if you are direct hitted by HE you are "dead" has already been played out in WW2 with the Jap Zero. The Zero had no armor or self-sealing fuel tanks to be absolutely light in weight for maximum maneuver (paper) to get line-of-sight to gun down its targets (scissors) and in the beginning of the war, outsped, out-climbed and out-turned all our fighters. Our current generation of fighters are all Jap Zeros without armor (rock) except the A-10. In response to views re: the character and limitations of post-WWII aircraft, legendary air warfare expert, Chuck Myers writes:

"Post-WWII combat aircraft were designed for nuclear war. 'Fighters' were mostly designed as mass nuclear bomber raid Interceptors (F-102/F-106/F-101/F-4/F-104/F-14); others F-105, F-111, A-4, Tornado and Harrier for low altitude delivery of nuclear weapons and the Navy A-3J for high altitude supersonic delivery of nuc weapons. My F-106 even had a visual air-to-air nuclear missile, the Genie (imagine that mission; a head on intercept, launching a nuclear warhead visually through a telescope at a mass of incoming Russian bombers).

For nuclear war missions, nobody cares about gun fire vulnerability or cockpit visibility or maneuverability or affordability (or even survivability; for what?). That's how we ended up with so many Tactical Aircraft that were completely inappropriate for our unexpected war against North Vietnam. It is why they were so vulnerable and we had such high losses from AAA and missile fragment damage. And it contributed to how our industry lost the art of designing the kind of affordable aircraft we really need now."

In WW2, we had officials who felt some loyalty to our men to not to send them into battle in deathtraps like the Japanese did. As they struggled to get better protected platforms, they ADAPTED and changed tactics in the meantime. They did not believe their own "spin" and sat on their asses like today's Rumsfeld DoD does. Our pilots were instructed by smart warfighter like General Chennault in China or realized themselves to not get into a turning dogfight with the Zeros and to climb and dive against them (F-4F Wildcats and P-40 Warhawks) and to open fire while passing through. ANY hits striking the Jap Zero's fuel tank or engine turned them into flaming streaks and any hits on the pilot injured or killed him so the plane crashed out of control. In other words, the Zero had a "glass jaw" so it wasn't just direct hits but ANY near misses or fragments hitting it killed it. If the Jap Zero pilots got on the tail of our fighters or fired back head-on we had armor and self-sealing fuel tanks to survive and dive away to make another attack. We then developed a generation of planes retaining armoring that were more powerful and maneuverable than the Zeros as the rigid Japs didn't adapt when their BS was exposed (sound familiar?) and replace the Zeros en masse.

Actual Color Gun Camera Still Photos from the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier of a Japanese Zero being easily flamed by .50 caliber heavy machine gun tracer bullet strikes...

Jap Zero =

www.ussyorktown.com/.../yorktown%20video.html

The "SASO" Racket: Wheeled Trucks and Foot "Presence Patrols"

Bush/Cheney/Rummy and those misleading DoD have the RMA Jap Zero mentality in spades; their idea of "cutting costs" (exalted bean counter false efficiency) and weight in ground warfare is to be ON FOOT and in WHEELED TRUCKS thinking like the Japs that they will somehow "avoid the hit" when really at less than 4 mph on foot and restricted to roads/trails (man-made strips of open terrain) THEY WILL BE EASILY SEEN AND NEAR MISSED AS WELL AS HIT. The near misses will kill them, in fact every HE effect will kill them that gets near.

We are headed for the same defeat the Japanese experienced in WW2 in a tragic cased of role reversal via re-enactment.


Note the U.S. Army today is repeating stupid dark green camouflage on their helicopters that made Japanese Army aircraft so easy to shoot down in WW2; except at least the Zeros were gray underneath; our helicopters are green all over! Americans must have a death wish---we can't be that dumb

"You go with the Army you have, not the one you wish you have"

--Donald Rumsfeld callously scolding our ground troops when confronted with the "Jap Zero" Humvee trucks he's sending them to their deaths in

The Jap Zero mentality also extends to how Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld REFUSE TO ADAPT WITH THEIR BS "STAY-THE-COURSE" and become the main course for rebel ambush meals. The Japanese "stayed-the-course" and tried to fight the entire war with just Zeros and not obtain BETTER EQUIPMENT. When we confronted the Zero, we found out its weaknesses and then built better planes, making it obsolete. That's how we won the war in the Pacific in WW2, the Japanese LOST. The Bush/Cheney/Rummy mentality of taking the Humvee and other-trucks-we-give-you and slap some armor on them is EXACTLY the failed mentality the Japanese lost WW2 with. The Japanese tried adding some cockpit armor and self-sealing fuel tanks later in the war, but it was too little, too late; American fighters already outrclassed the Zero in maneuver performance, firepower and armor protection. Telling our Soldiers to "stay-the-course" inside wheeled trucks when that "course" has rebel high explosive bombs waiting for them is pure suicide and its high time the U.S. military grow a pair of testicles and tell DoD "NO!, we are not going to colonize and depopulate Iraq for your evil neocon schemes and we ain't gonna be driving around in wheeled trucks anymore on BS 'presence patrols' that snuff out the lives and limbs of our Soldiers." Sending people to die in today's versions of the Jap Zero are unlawful orders and its high time we stop going along with them. The Bush/Cheney/Rummy mentality of troops-in-trucks isn't obsolete, it was never right.

Mark Ash's Tenets of the "Wrong"

1. In the "New Age" of Warfare we must seek battlefield enlightenment through information technology at the cost of everything else.

2. This is War and in War there must be losses. (ie; when RMA and information "dominance" fails physically use patriotism to hide scoundrels)

3. The Battle Plan is never wrong. The Battle Plan must be followed no matter what happens. All Battle Plans must be made at the highest level.

4. Without Leaders there is now reason for troops to fight. Troops need Leaders more then Leaders need troops. (without the hierarchy the sheeple peons would be lost and without purpose)

5. Combat Troops do not need physical combat power, just the ability to tell Leaders were the Enemy is. (See #1 and #6).

6. Combat Troops do not need the ability to maneuver; the Enemy cannot escape Lethality of our air power and strategic weaponry.

7. The Nuke is the ultimate weapon of War. All other weapons must be measured by its Lethality.

8. The only way to Defeat the Enemy is to kill them. Killing requires Lethality, nothing else will do.

9. A military should be designed to free Leaders from planning by having uniform light and flexible units that can be transported anywhere on short notice and that don't need a much in terms of logistics and don't have much armor or maneuver capability lest they deviate from THE PLAN. (see #5 and #6).

10. A Weapon Systems effectiveness is directly proportional to its cost, how new it is and how different it is from previous systems.

Racket Theory Explains Military Incompetence

Racket: An organized, self-perpetuating, self-serving, less-than-optimal "solutional" beavior to a societal need/want

Reading Professor Roger Thompson's new book, "Lessons not Learned" there is a constant theme of the U.S. Navy lying and denying its failures. So you ask yourself WHY would the USN not be interested in military efficiency excellence?

The answer that screams at you is BECAUSE THE NAVY IS A RACKET.

Admitting to errors would mean an end to that racket. The thing Americans do not understand about themselves and life in general is that IT PAYS MORE TO BE INEFFICIENT WITH A PARTIAL SOLUTION THAN IT DOES TO BE EFFICIENT WITH A FULL SOLUTION. Military men do not need excellence on a daily basis, they are most of the time not at war against a human foe trying to kill them. In the air forces and navy the earth itself is trying to kill them and this keeps a certain amount of efficiency in play but it doesn't have to be the best means to defeat a future enemy, it can be a COUNTERFEIT set-up.

Essentially in ALL human militaries, the men involved are trying to justify their existence and pay parasitically taken from the civilian populace who have to earn this money (certificates guaranteeing reciprocal behavior) by creating tangible goods/services. This was a dire necessity for the USN's racketeers like Admiral King during the economically depressed 1930s, and he damn sure wasn't going to spoil their racket by a little thing like WW2. If the battleships can't be the lucrative cash cow, FINE he will demand Congress buys him a dozen large, ego-gratifying "fleet aircraft carriers" instead of the 100 escort carriers made from humble cargo ships actually required to fan out across the still very large planet earth oceans to effect sea control from enemy submarines and surface ships, aircraft etc. that FDR ordered him to use to win the war. Its more greed and ego lucrative to have a COUNTERFEIT NAVY that inefficiently spends more money on inefficient means that never solves the problem that can then be milked for years and years than to have an efficient navy that gets the job done best, with least. There simply is no reward for EXCELLENCE in human behavior "that works itself out of a job" if an OK less-than-full-solutional racket offers counterfeit goods/services that pays off the most people. You could say its better to run less-than-optimal solutional rackets in human affairs than to run perfect solutional human organizations because the former keeps more people busy and employed.

Think about it before reading further.

A lucrative, money-for-everyone bloated racket is OK as long as the less than optimal solution is unchallenged or is challenged only by minor crisies where its "good enough" to get by. In other words, as long as everybody is fat and happy, why bother to change the racket? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the folk saying. The mortal danger to a society is that as time goes on and there is no threat to force the racket to become more efficient, arrogance and smug delusions of "we are great" begin to grow as the reformers warning of future disaster due to fatal inefficiencies and fatal flaws are dismissed and more and more people want to get their piece of the growing racketeering pie. The fatal danger is that these series of minor successes smothered in years of no wars at all create a false sense of security that the less-than-optimal racket is "good enough" or even "the greatest military in the world" while dangerous vulnerabilities grow uncorrected and if exploited, KILLS THE ENTIRE CIVILIZATION.

The American military refuses to look at any problems on their cause-effect merits to get EXCELLENCE because a series of small successes with the racket is used to justify not having any sense of urgency to fix this problems. The racketeers will tell you there is no sense of urgency, in fact if 3, 000 are killed and 22, 000 are wounded in Iraq by military inefficiency they will say its not a problem since we lost over 650, 000 dead in the Civil War or 385, 000 in WW2 ie; NO AMOUNT OF MILITARY FAILURE WILL DEMAND THE RACKET BE REFORMED BECAUSE WE HAVE TAKEN FAR GREATER LOSSES AND STILL CONTINUED TO EXIST AS A NATION-STATE etc. so the current losses due to military incompetence pose no "clear and present danger" to the survival of America, so SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP those all victim force people dying and being maimed for life KNEW WHAT THEY WERE GETTING INTO WHEN THEY VOLUNTEERED FOR THE RACKET. They knew that they could be sent on some fucked-up corporate war of convenience as part of a deliberately less-than-optimal military racket and die or be maimed in exchange for middle class wages, college benefits and a chance to order people around and wear sexy looking uniforms. YOU SIGNED FOR THE RACKET so now you must forfeit your what's-best functional common sense and your conscience, THUS SAITH THE RACKETEERS.

This is utter BULLSHIT, YOU ARE ALWAYS A FUCKING HUMAN BEING, PERIOD. And you NEVER abrogate your rights to do what's right and I do not give a flying fuck what you scribble on anyone's piece of paper. There comes a time when you have to start acting like a moral human being and damn all the social consequences of the various racketeers you cross when you do so. We used to call this capability human FREEDOM. If you are not free to do what is right you are not free.

History is full of examples where sewers leading under the city are unguarded and enemy forces sneak in unopposed and wipe-out every man, woman and child without mercy, wiping out the entire society. I dare say, America is on such a collision course because the American people as a whole DO NOT UNDERSTAND HUMAN RACKETEERING BEHAVIOR. They have no clue about how a partial solution racket in any walk of human life will be milked by those doing it so it grows and grows like a cancer until it stops working completely and shuts down society's vital organs, killing the nation-state.

Former marine general Smedley Butler is quoted as saying "war is a racket" but didn't fully think racket or "rice bowl" theory through. He just hated it in an anti-military, knee-jerk. We need a military---it just needs to not be a racket.

Rackets are standard human behavior in ALL walks of life.

Dutch, British, Canadian and other militaries have a CULTURE of excellence that understands--even without realizing it---to not corrupt its practices and equipments for less than optimal solutions that can be manipulated into a self-serving racket. Maybe because they are SMALLER they don't have the $$ to waste and their small solutions can employ enough people...maybe its our LARGE SIZE that corrupts us to less than optimal solutions to give more people a job to do?

Large Size = Rackets

For example, in the '80s/'90s the "heavy tankers" mis-ran the U.S. Army and refused to buy the M8 Buford Armored Gun System light tank because if the 82nd Airborne which had just kicked ass in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994) by flying in M551 Sheridans would continue to "get all the action" leaving nothing for the M1 Abrams heavy tankers to do. Boo-Hoo. Light tanks threaten the ego and existence (racket, rice bowl) of the Heavy tankers when if they were less selfish they'd realize their ROLE (mission) to fight in OPEN TERRAIN for 2D MANEUVER will always be needed in conjunction with light force's closed terrain 3D maneuver. In other words, if you want to contribute to some small wars requiring light tanks rapidly deployed GET OFF YOUR ASS AND LEARN HOW TO PARACHUTE JUMP. If not, shut up and wait 'til you are needed for an open terrain fight ie; Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-91.

Because of the foot slogger lightitis and heavy tanker "mech pussy" rackets America doesn't have the light tracked tanks it needs and people like OBL remain on the loose to keep the GWOT racket going.

The way to stop racketeering behavior is for the people involved to have the self-control and wisdom to CONSCIOUSLY CHOOSE efficiency over more lucrative inefficiency.

In a word we have to be SMART.

Smart enough to know the subtle nuances of human behavior that if you do not fight against it, rackets will develop. Rackets and less than optimal solutions MUST BE REJECTED AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE.

Right now, Americans have no such principle of excellence, the "market" drives everything ie; GREED AND EGO to get the maximum cash for the least work to the most people because the more people corrupted by the racket, the more clout we have to keep the racket going.

Americans are not smart, we tend to be FULL OF SELFISH EGO, PRIDE and GREED to make a lot of money quickly at the lowest personal effort possible.

"Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall" as God says.

In a nation-state, this means having a morality-based, logical CULTURE which America does not currently have. Other nations have good culture and they have good military services because of it since they determine what they do from honest war games and experiments and when they go to war they actually learn from it. In a smaller group like the U.S. military, some sense of what war realities are and to take what these demand to be done and do them---not factoring in what's best for the service bureaucracy racket. Without actual wars, war games and experiments could be the driving force like practice games and scrimmages are for football. However, the racketeers have learned to rig the games and lie about their results so as to not have to change their lucrative ego and greed rackets. A voluntary military attracts racketeers to its ranks so its the American people who do not have a cultural sense of themselves that are to blame for their less than optimal military. If a society does not have a self-control and excellence-seeking culture, then the next best thing is to not let volunteer greed and egotists take over the military services turning them into self-serving rackets but to force everyone in the nation to be involved to inject some get-the-job-done efficiency since these folks are not interested in "making the service a career" ie; being involved in a racket.


Where does the technological arrogance come from? Formula to Understand World History to Current Day

Occult = Bush = IG Farben = Nazis = Wunderweapons = Paper clip = MICC-TT = RMA = Emasculated U.S. military = NWO vs Caliphate = Apocalypse

Occult (Satan wants to be God)

www.biblebelievers.org.au/bb940516.htm

Supernatural fallen angel, Lucifer/Satan, who hates God, tries to use temporal man, who God loves---to shield him by making man rebel also against God making him the "Devil" the great deceiver. Gives man technology as bait to make him think he can attain immortality. Satan through serpent deceives woman Eve that he will get her the technology ("Illumination") she needs to know everything, impregnates her to give birth to hybrid-human Cain. God finds out, bars Adam/Eve from Garden of Eden replenishment to live forever since both are now mentally/physically/spiritually corrupted with evil--the knowledge of what it is. Man in rebellion to God likes to fill his life with his own inventions seeking a cure for death. Adam/Eve get back to original Earth program of being fruitful/multiply have many offspring starting with Abel.

Cain vs. Abel (get man fighting amongst himself)

Type A personality self-made man Cain grew crops under his own power but God wanted humility which he got from Type B personality Abel who offered up a God-provided lamb instead of crops he had grown. Cain was infuriated that he "busted his ass" and got rejected, kills Abel. Cain leaves Eden area and starts building big civilizations. Fallen angels inter-mingle with both his and Adam/Eve's off-spring, creating horrific GIANTS. World wide flood from God necessary to save last remnant Noah and his family. Lost civilization where Cainites knew all kinds of neat technology = "Atlantis" that Illuminati lust for a return to

www.stevequayle.com/Giants/index2.html

Throughout history, Cain type humans are always at war with Abel type humans doing the Devil's bidding which is to kill as many humans as possible in the Cain state where they haven't wised up and realized they need to humbly ask for a pardon from Jesus Christ---the Messiah--the lamb of God---as Abel did. Devil wants to bring down as many humans as he can to ruin. Cainite type pride manifests itself later in a more complicated form by dictator Nimrod exploiting one-world language/government to build a tower of babel to reach heaven.

Fast forward to the 19th Century.

Bush (blue blood anti-christ Cain line)

The Bush crime family "Cain path" begins with Samuel Bush who begins to forge steel rather than be a minister as his father was. "Cain" kills "Abel" again. Son, Prescott Bush joins with several German firms making war materiels.

James Smith Bush (Cain but repents to be an Abel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Smith_Bush

Was Yale Law Grad Skull 'n Bones demonic crap. However, loses wife, turns to God.

Samuel Bush (Cain)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Bush

Note he lost a son during child birth and a wife in an accident. Turns to manufacturing.

Prescott Bush (Cain)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush

I.G. Farben & German Industrialist business dealings

http://ecosyn.us/Bush-Hitler/Bush-Hitler.html

The Bush backed German industrialists convince Hitler to take power to "restore social order" to post-WW1 Germany using fascism and militarism.

Nazis

Hitler was a Luciferan/Satanist/Occultist who wants technological power from evil supernatural forces. He gets this technology in return for mass murdering and torturing millions of people in a new World War 2. At the same time he tells the German people how he is such a great "christian" for starting a world war.

Man wants to be God: Wunder Weapons

www.combatreform.org/black_sun.htm

Nazi Germany excited by the quest for advanced firepower technology (Cain) overlooks practical military maneuver technology to get the war over with that would require the mundane common folk to be empowered; Guderian is ignored but Satan has deceived Hitler; he has stirred up too many mundane people to anger who simply want to live normal life spans and offered too little, too late Wunder Weapon technology to withstand them.

Paper Clip

Smart Germans have a "Plan B" and escape maneuvering Allied and Soviet ground forces to South America and Antarctica. Allies immigrate former Nazi scientists into their weapons labs, creating the Military Industrial Congressional Think Tank Complex (MICC-TT) that President Eisenhower warned us about too late. JFK realizes MICC-TT threat is assassinated by Texas war profiteer VP LBJ as is his brother RFK, and civil rights activist MLK.

MICC-TT

www.combatreform.org/braveamerican.htm

Faced with the negative side effects from nuclear weapons that prohibits their use that they already knew about in WW2, German paperclip scientists continue working on SAME Wunder Weapons projects from WW2 but for USA and Russia. Possiblity that German 4th Reich is in South America/Antarctica and has anti-gravity aerospace craft (UFOs) and death rays; WW2 never ended.

RMA

www.geocities.com/transformationunderfire

The MICC-TT are greedy snobs who want to make themselves "gods". Their tower of Babel to unite the world against the wishes of God that we stay separate is a tyrannical computer network (666); it steers firepower (PGMs) from the heavens like lightning bolts to vanquish all that oppose their bullshit. Increased gadgetization weakens physical properties of wunder weaponry but increases "tail" and corporate profits. Leo Strauss Neocons are fascists who want the Abel folk to believe a mythology and shut-the-hell-up. They think they will eventually solve death through computer-aided bio technology if the "unwasheds" just shut-the-hell-up and give them a "blank check". All this is is replicating the Garden of Eden's fruit to continue PHYSICAL body life without regenerating the mind/soul. This Satanic trap will make people live hundreds of years and get very bored and depraved Sodom and Gomorrah style. A living hell. As snobs, they want the Wunder Weapons of firepower that only the Cain-like upper ranks control/employ not the MANEUVER that requires empowerment of Abel-like lower ranking Soldiers.

Americans are so busy worshipping themselves and their "new" ideas in their MICC-TT racket they don't bother to check before bragging if someone else BEFORE them came up with the idea first, U.S. Naval Aviation News from the 1950s reports:

A French "F-16" from the 1950s...

Here's a flat-screen TV from 1955...



A Spaniard created the first stealth NOTAR helicopter in the same time period:

We even had remote control operated helicopters in the 1950s...

...so all this RMA ego bragging about how great UAVs and UCAVs are is a bunch of bunk...in WW2 we had fixed-wing UAVs in COMBAT successfully attack and sink Japanese ships....and strike a few point targets in Korea...the Army played around with UAVs after the war for recon...this is all "old hat"...

To top it all off, the whole "precision guided munition" mentality was first created and proposed to the U.S. government by a young lieutenant in 1846:

Yet for all this "RMA" TALK today, we still have noisy, slow tail-rotor helicopters and aircraft without adequate flat screen TVs to fly through bad weather...why do you think we have so many shoot-downs and crashes still? And today's UAVs/UCAVs still can't see well enough to find the enemy to replace manned observation/attack planes but theere were at least some common sense men back then who knew this, today we don't and the enemy is free to land mine us to death at will....we can't hit anyone with "precision" if we can't first locate them, can we?

So much for "progress".

Every human generation wants to BRAG about all its advancements and not let you in on their actual copy-catting and lack of imagination inherent in stealing other people's ideas at no risk to themselves.

Emasculated U.S. Military

www.geocities.com/militaryincompetence/militarismsucks.htm

The Cainites hate the WW2 U.S. industrialized MANEUVER military that beat their firepower Wunder Weapons by taking the ground from under them that their labs required. The common Abel people defeated the Cain people. To insure this winning formula never happens again, the MICC-TT feeds American Cainite snobs the lie that they can just mouse-click Wunder Weapon guided HE firepower to get nuclear effects and do not need the hassle of empowering the mundane Abel peons using low-tech maneuver.

Precision Bombing of Nothing: an American Tradition

www.geocities.com/operationalliedforces/airinterdictionfails.htm
www.history.navy.mil/library/online/bombing_tool.htm

Americans want to replay WW2 on the cheap and do the firepower part from sexy aircraft and not do the necessary ground maneuver to take a Berlin or a Tokyo. Since nuclear SHEs are off the table to break the will of a nation-state foe, small amounts of HEs from small fighter-bombers from extremely costly, vulnerable aircraft supercarriers or piss-off-the-locals land bases going too fast to see what they are hitting means they can only hit what is obvious. Smart foes will not offer obvious targets seen from the air. Foes that are not nation-states with American-style industries will not HAVE ANY OBVIOUS air targets. Only if many heavy bombers are used to mass HE effects can nation-states be forced to bend their wills but only if we are willing to carpet-bomb and kill many civilians in the process and be just as evil as the government leaders we are opposing if those citizens are victims and not guilty accomplices of placing the governmental leaders in power.

The power of planet earth to absorb our inefficient fighter-bomber airstrikes is greater than our ability to throw money down the drain or create narcissistic egomaniacs to fly such pricey aircraft. America will continue to be defeated by foes refusing to play our partial WW2 re-enactment game with small amounts of HE until we finally realize that firepower cannot win wars short of SHE annihilation of all the people we THINK are against us, and to develop a MANEUVER based warfighting force structure that can DIFFERENTIATE between good guy and bad guy from the ground without getting itself hurt by it being in armored tracked combat vehicles with EFFICIENT firepower proving leverage to HELP. This would mean projecting massive amounts of precision HE BALLISTICALLY via guns from ships and artillery pieces whenever possible so as to prevent a human pilot from having to fly over or near a target to try to hit it. We must preserve THE WILL OF OUR OWN PEOPLE and not fritter it away delivering HE against mud huts. Men in aircraft flying low and slow must help ground forces find the enemy to not only hit him with HE/KE attacks but to control the ground itself so he cannot use it to wage war. Robbing the enemy of the ability to wage war by not allowing him the ground needed can force him to conclude that he should stop trying. When an enemy can no longer fight you, he is defeated. When an enemy has been made to changed in his mind to stop trying to fight you, you have hope that he can someday be your friend.

NWO

www.bushisantichrist.com

Grand son "NeroBush" as soon as he stole the 2000 election proclaimed he would skip a generation of weapons for the next round of RMA Wunder Weapons, then staged the false flag 9/11 attacks on America to dupe the Abel populace Americans to allow him to occupy Afghanistan/Iraq to secure oil profits and run down the U.S. maneuver capable military. Years of occupying illegally a country in a stagnant way instead of maneuvering should weaken both the military and America economically into ruin so the North American borders can be wide-open from Mexico to Canada to eliminate any middle class of Abels to oppose the rule of the corporate Cainites to have a "New World Order".

Caliphate

www.combatreform.org/johnpaulvann.htm

Satan is having too much fun just corrupting Western civilization, creates counterfeit religion using false prophet M to energize the bastard child off spring of Ishmael--another Cain type envious of his Abel-like brother the Israelites from post-flood Abraham but without the Tpe A personality to be industrious. They sit upon oil reserves created from the dead organic matter from the world wide flood which have become fossil fuel the Type A Western Cainites need to power their technology.

Apocalypse

Cainites and Ishmaelites clashing over oil/religion and small remnant in Israel leads to WW3 or WW4 however you are counting it all. God the Creator feed up with all this crap, returns and sets everything in order but a lot of people are going to die tragically in a Cain-like state.

The Situational High Ground: Refusing Battle where the Enemy got there first: Narcissists Will Have None of It and are Easily Defeated

Its 1863. Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is on the march. For the first half of the American Civil War, the "Johnny Rebs" could out-march and out-fight the slow, cautious and conservative Union Army, taking the high ground first and waiting for them to charge blindly into their withering rifle fires. He is way up in Pennsylvania roaming about and the Union Army can't stop him. He is headed towards the general direction of the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

Where is the Union Army? What is it doing? Does it know where Lee is?

Union Cavalry General John Buford finds out.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQvj2HfEokE

When Lee gets to Gettysburg, he has a rude awakening: Buford's blue cavalry on horses was already there holding the high ground, and he has no JEB Stuart gray cavalry to push them off because their impulsive leader was on wild patrols seeking some "action". Dispatching the word to General Meade to send everything he's got to Gettysburg since he found the Confederate Army---in a battle of hours, soon the entire Union Army held the high ground and could entrench---which combat engineer Lee of all people would know--would mean he would have to fight uphill while the "damned Yankees" poured kinetic energy (KE) aka bullets and low explosives (LE) aka artillery fire into them.

Lee should have walked away and refused battle.

He did not.

Lee was more than anything else a southern military man full of "honor" and "pride"; vanities that no General commanding the lives of thousands of men should indulge. He decided he must attack the Union Army when they offered to do battle with him, even though the laws-of-physics deck-was-stacked against him lest his men think he was a "coward". He was a prisoner to his own vanity. After repeated charges and the loss of thousands upon thousands of men, Pickett's charge up Cemetery Ridge sealed the doom of the entire Confederate cause as from then on, they would never have the numbers to meet the swelling ranks of the industrialized Union Army in equal terms of either firepower or maneuver.

Had he REFUSED BATTLE and placed himself between the Union Army and Washington D.C., this would not have happened and Lee might have even taken our capital city and earned a negotiated war end with the south becoming its own nation-state, but his judgment was clouded by NARCISSISM.

The North under Lincoln's leadership finally got the message: take or create the situational high ground. Lincoln soon thereafter put non-vain, practical warfighters in charge who knew that the proud, narcissist Confederates would never refuse battle, so he obliged them with battle-after-battle by Grant in the Wilderness wearing them down, while maneuverist mastermind Sherman in the south flying in two mobile columns free of railroad supply dependence offered them two choices for battle---and he ignored whichever choice they made---to instead destroy their logistical means to fight.

The Civil War was won by no-non-sense operational maneuver and appreciation for the terrain but the history books are filled with romantic lusting over Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart and Lee's feel-good battlefield maneuvers and duels with the Union Army connected to no lasting political effects. They lost the war accordingly.

Most career military people are narcissists who want to be seen of men, gaining their peer approval to "self-validate" themselves. It was only after 3 years of military disasters before enough of them were fired in enough quantities to clear the way for Chamberlains, Grants and Shermans to rise to command to win the war.

Iraq is our Gettysburg

In 2003, the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom; we got there "first" with the U.S. Army's tracked mechanized 3rd Infantry Division taking Baghdad but didn't exploit the situational like a Buford by immediately getting reinforcements by rehiring Iraqi Army Soldiers and government workers we promised jobs to. To pump up our egos, we instead moved into former dictator palaces and built forward operating bases (FOBs) around them, surrendering the roads/trails to the enemies we created by disenfranchisement and constant civilian house raids looking for Saddam Hussein and his loyalists. Hussein & company had escaped because uber-narcissist marines mostly in wheeled trucks who "pride" themselves that they don't fight mobile mounted warfare (which is for "weak pussies" so they say) didn't know what they were doing and were thus easily ambushed and stopped so they were 6 days late reaching their sector of Baghdad. Another failure was the unimaginative heavy tankers at CENTCOM who did not even make capturing Saddam a task on their to-do list and wimpy 173rd Paratroopers who sat & held as 1st Infantry Division troopers in M113 Gavins and a handful of M1 Abrams heavy and M2 Bradley medium tanks flown in one-C-17-load-at-a-time into the seized airfield in Northern Iraq who did not employ decisive 3D air-mech maneuver to "close the back door" from Baghdad to Saddam's home town in Tikrit. With Americans on a 9-to-5 routine in the FOBs like it was garrison and they were being sent out on lawn care missions: the rebels were then free since we neither looking or there on the ground 24/7/365 to stop them from laying roadside bombs and drive their car bombs into civilian areas to slaughter them.

Instead, we began doing Robert E. Lees: either daily "Pickett's Charges" down landmine filled roads in wheeled trucks or large sweeps that created more rebels than they found. The daily sight of burning Humvee /Stryker trucks does not inspire any confidence in the civilian populace that we can defend them nor strike any fear or "respect" in the minds of our enemies. Our willingness to die stupidly does not impress even those with their own nihilist death cult mentalities if its a result of our own INCOMPETENCE. Slapping armor onto Humvee s and buying expensive Canadian Stryker or V-hull shaped wheeled trucks to feed our narcissism does not work for long if at all and I have been warning everyone in DoD since my U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article in November 1989 about these road-bound, non-combat vehicles and explaining why on the non-linear battlefield all our troops must be in 28% more space/weight efficient than wheeled trucks, M113 Gavin-type light and heavier tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) so they can go cross-country at will in any direction to avoid landmines and other ambushes and be adequately armored to prevail when they must fight. The Israelis think we are nuts for patrolling Iraq in wheeled trucks instead of sound, well-armored tracks.

"Anti-Islamism" is Islam in another form in the opposite direction

Today's volunteer Army is permeated with narcissism in all the ranks at all the levels. We are the clones of the impatient and lazy Confederates who do not want to invest in the ground for lasting outcomes but want to be feel-good shooters doing Pickett's Charges as if war was some sort of group duel between mirror images for self-validation. Rather than REFUSE BATTLE in Iraq, we insist we must stay, doing daily "Gettysburgs" lest the Islamics see us as "weak", which is surrendering the initiative to the other side just like the Confederates did to the Union Army in our Civil War. War is NOT the ultimate test of manhood validation, it is a necessary evil and no more; to think otherwise in an American "Anti-Islamism" form is just another form of Islamist (hate attempted to be excused by religion) narcissism wrapped in red, white and blue. Call us the "American Taliban". We berate social conformists for being "weak" and "following the crowd", but those who are NON-conformist are just pretending to be different from the crowd because they are REACTING to and rebelling against what the crowd is doing--what drives them is what the crowd is doing not an internal, moral compass. America should not operate in a knee-jerk against whatever the Islamists are doing which would then empower its death cult mentality to be the thing that dictates who we are and what we are going to do lest we want them to own us as Grant/Sherman owned the Confederates in 1865.

In American football, the advent of the computer led Tom Landry to profile the tendencies of his opponents and prevail upon them until Bill Walsh and the 49ers decided to "jam the computer" and MARCH TO THE BEAT OF THEIR OWN DRUMMER and run scripted plays created at random that Landry's Dallas Cowboys couldn't anticipate. Walsh's adaptive 49ers owned the computerized Cowboys from then on and dominated football for 2 decades.

What America must do is stop replaying Robert E. Lee and refuse battle situations in Iraq or anywhere else where the enemy has got there first and holds the ground to decided advantage. Like Bill Walsh, we must start stacking-the-deck in our favor according to our moral and tactically sound playbook and stop worrying about whether the enemy will cower before us or "respect" us. We are not playing to their approval. Respect will come when its EARNED through VICTORY by fighting on our terms on ground of our own choosing, where we have first prepared it by combat engineering (blocking). You cannot "throw the ball" or "run it" without first "blocking" and "tackling" the enemy so you deny him the ground and instead control it yourself.

Take the Situational High Ground and Stop Charging into Ambushes

There are actually 4 "wars" going on in Iraq. 3 are sub-national conflicts and one is a nation-state war. In order of precedence:

1. Internal Civil War (Sunni vs Shia Islamic factions)
2. Rebellion to U.S. occupation
3. Iran vs. Iraq/U.S.
4. Militant Islam vs the West

To do an Union Army "Anaconda" strategy on this situation, we need to fully ANSWER each one of these "wars" with a grand strategy and tactically be pro-active Buford/Meades and Grant/Shermans not be re-active 1863-1865 Robert E. Lees and Picketts.

Option A: Block & Separate

To stop the civil war, we build a 20 foot high wall across the middle of Iraq and divide a generation of Sunnis/Shias from free movement to park car bombs or plant road land mines for a about 20-40 years. Make this generation cool off and get a civilian "life". We screwed them up and caused a civil war and the best we can hope for is to separate the combatants and hope the next generation will want something better. To pay for this, we cut the $1B/week U.S. occupation forces of 130, 000---most of which are doing nothing but consuming supplies---in half so $500M is freed for separation wall construction and our eyesore obnoxious presence causing rebellion is reduced. Those that remain "picket" (British term not in our playbook) only the main supply routes (MSRs) we need to sustain ourselves every 1, 000 meters by a string of forts made up of Soldiers in mobile but fortified ISO container BATTLEBOXes and M113A3 SuperGavin light tracked AFVs doing security creating maneuvers (SCMs) laying ambushes and waiting on the rebels to appear instead of vice-a-versa. Overhead, aerostat balloons and guard towers with ground surveillance radar in each picket fort and roaming manned 2-seat observation/attack planes scour the skies looking down below 24/7/365 to help the pickets deny the ground to enemy landmine layers and car bombers and monitor the oil pipelines. Like we need to do on our own SW border of the USA, we build a security sensor fence on the Syrian/Iranain border and use the proven French Morice line-type techniques of constant air/ground patrolling backed by tracker teams and quick reaction force (QRF) paratroopers in Mini-Gavins sized to fly inside C-130/C-27J transport planes and CH-47 heavy lift helicopters to hunt down and kill any intruders to keep Iran out of Iraq. This will also keep the militant Islamist Mufsidoon out of free live-fire demolition training at U.S. taxpayer's financial and offspring expense.

Option B: Redeploy & Watch

However, If the Sunnis/Shias are not willing to man the center separation wall to protect their own neighborhoods and the weak central government is too pro-Shia to keep the Iranians out at the border sensor fence, then we are indeed in a REL/Gettysburg like no-win situation and its time to pull out of most of Iraq and refuse battle on our many enemy's terms.

We can redeploy 50K troops to uninhabited southern Iraq as was suggested as a strategy all along (See Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq book by Trainor/Gordon), making it our enclave with QRFs to respond as needed to any crisis in the region and focus our military powers on the actual militant islamic sub-national groups residing in weak nation-state Afghanistan/Pakistan---but without participating in the Iraqi civil war nor fueling a rebellion against us. Certainly, there will be Islamist triumphalists name-calling us as having been "defeated" etc. etc. ad nauseum but this is a sucker's ploy to get us to be stupid and remain being their victims through our own vanity. If we resist the temptation to act like a weak ego adolescent and do what is sensible, they will soon see an American Army that actually adapts and fights smarter that does not operate on an ego emotional knee-jerk to what the rebels are doing and thus, cannot be led by the nose. The Shias will stop having us subsidize their "factionocracy" and have to adequately power share with the Sunnis or else suffer a generation of needless bloodshed. Iran will no longer be able to create trouble under the smokescreen of chaos in Iraq with our forces blocking them in.

Where are our competent technotactical leaders that take the Situational High Ground?

Flash back to 1863. Robert E. Lee was many things but he was not ready to resort to frontal assaults without at least first trying to "turn" the flank of his foe, he tried to get around the left end of the Union lines at a rocky hill called Little Round Top. Already waiting for him, was a college professor and self-taught tactician, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Along with him, were over 100 deserters who were being held on duty beyond their contract dates (like today's Soldiers/marines who are "stop-lossed"); and sure to die in bloody frontal assault upon bloody assault uphill against Johnny Reb positions because they always could get there first. They had a right to be angry for they were being mislead to their useless deaths or maimings by incompetent "lifer" narcissists.

But not this day.

No, not here.

No, not ever again in this war.

No, this time, we come to win.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw8Tm550SJ0

Chamberlain was a LEADER OF MEN. He explained to them that the fate of the Union Army and our nation rested on their shoulders and that he and the 20th Maine had come down to this place to fight for them. That in the final analysis we were fighting not for vanity and snobby pretences of superiority over different classes of men or even the land itself, WE WERE FIGHTING FOR EACHOTHER. This time it would be different. We have the situational high ground and this fight was important and for "all the marble's". If it were not so, he would not be going there himself to lead the defense in person, not back at a FOB. And a few desperate hours later, after the smoke had cleared, it was his creative use of the playbook to launch a pivoting bayonet charge when his men had run out of ammo that defeated the Confederates in the nick of time to save the Union Army, that saved the United States of America.

However, today America's Army and marine's do not have Chamberlains, Grants and Shermans in charge of them with full playbooks and a willingness to take the situational high ground. They got elevated to general officer rank by playing it "safe" and "running the ball" even if the "blocking" was not there and the "ball" went nowhere or was even driven back. They take whatever the parameters are given to them by their superiors and don't speak up on the men's behalf to get a better hand---lest they displease them and not get promoted to keep their existentialist journey to "greatness" on track. They say "Yes, Sir!" and fu*k-it, drive-on (FIDO) knowing full well it is their men who are going to pay the ultimate price for FIDO and instead of getting the job done for America, results in a succession of an elegant, but superficially excusable failures. Under uber-narcissist "shooter" Army Chief of Staff General Schoomaker and successive riflemen "gun nut" marine corps faceless commandants, combat engineering has been diminished despite the fact that holding the ground is vital to defeating high explosive as well as kinetic energy bullet attacks. 4 years of explosive attacks by enemy defacto combat engineers has not significantly altered either Army or marine plans for more terrain-ignoring, heavy casualties by M16 vs AK47 foot narcissist gun battling gadget fantasy futures. A Combat Engineer cannot even rise to the top of either the U.S. Army or the marines because the light or heavy "shooters" wanting to do Pickett's Charges have stacked-the-careerist-deck against them and deny this entire MOST IMPORTANT aspect of land warfare from driving either vehicle or force design or the CONcepts or OPerationS (CONOPS) we employ--our "game plan" to use a football analogy--of how we fight wars. Without combat engineering being at least one of if not THE central driving force in our war plans we cannot gain the situational high ground. Its therefore no surprise at all that landmines blowing up our narcissistic shooters in wheeled trucks has come as a "surprise" to the infantry and armor officers perpetually running our Army/marines and they have tried to cover up their incompetence by calling these things a new BS buzzword "IEDs" when we have had landmines for centuries since discovering low and high explosives. What it will take to win modern non-linear wars where we cannot flood areas with a 100 divisions of ground troops like we had in WW2 by mass mobilization requires a full playbook and Chamberlains, Grants, and Shermans who are not narcissistic hot heads, who can stack-the-deck in our men's favor through personal example and insist that they be in winning situations (GIDO = Get It, then Drive On).

Its high time the American Congress realize that its ground maneuver forces are mislead and to inject the necessary reforms as a Lincoln did; starting with a DoD-wide HONOR CODE that rejects by name and definition NARCISSISM as a valid reason to be in military or any other public service, psychological screening of all persons wanting to be and actually are in uniform for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and not allowing them in or to stay in the service, a Haldane Board of alternative thinking military reformers advising Congress on all military budget plans and weaponry instead of rubber stamping whatever the military industrial congressional think tank complex (MICC-TT) ordains as the next "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) fantasy. A repudiation of the Tofflerian RMA mentality of mental gadgetization firepower as the guiding theme of America's way of war in favor of a sound, balanced view of the battle against the earth and man predicated on the principle that the epitome of warfighting is to make your enemy into your friend through maneuver and firepower to deny violence as a behavioral option. Next, we need to ditch the Key West Agreement and stop deceiving ourselves that the USAF is willing to operate slower armored fixed-wing observation/attack aircraft with back-seat observers that can actually spot the enemy to help the Army and marines do ground maneuver and at the same time fly fast, sexy jets to shoot down other jets or bomb civilians to try to win wars all by themselves. The USAF only wants to fly fast jets and its time we stop giving them centralized control over jobs they do not want to do. The Army should operate O/A and tactical transport aircraft that are best located with themselves not at long runway air bases miles and miles away where its thought to be safe. A Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) should be formed that specializes in sub-national conflicts (SNCs) using M113 Gavin and M8 Buford/Thunderbolt light tanks, O/A planes and Morice Line type Combat Engineering means that get the short shrift in the Army/marine shooter's paradises. The NLB-SC should be commanded by a 4-star general who is a COMBAT ENGINEER and receive its funding directly from Congress. They can obtain, buy and operate ANY aircraft, ship (to include restoring one or two Iowa class heavily armored battleships to render fire support that really can land in all weather that hurts the enemy without making us go broke like dropping expensive guided munitions) or tracked armored tanks that they need to get the job done. The NLB-SC can handle SNCs bigger than what an Army SF Group can handle but no larger than an Iraq. After the nation-state war "shooters" take the situational high ground by regime change, they are sent home before they can start committing atrocities with their snobby outlooks. The NLB-SC takes over discreetly and quickly re-establishes civil government and secures borders, oil pipelines etc. without inciting a rebellion to its presence by seabasing and BATTLEBOX rural FOBs.

_______________________________________________________

* The author is an infantry officer not a combat engineer

Senior Military Officers are Another Country

A New American Parable of the Corporations

A Japanese company (Toyota ) and an American company (Ford) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River . Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese team won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to "investigate" the reason for the crushing defeat. A "management team" made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.

Their conclusion was the Japanese team had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 8 people steering and 1 person rowing.

So American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. The consultants advised that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

To prevent another loss to the Japanese, the American's rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 Steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant Superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the "Rowing Quality First Program," with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles!

Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment.

The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.

I recently had a telephone conversation with a friend over a project we are both working separately only to realize he's a senior military officer who is a "gatekeeper" for the status quo on nearly every other issue. As a non-linear thinker, I wanted to lay all options on the table and examine them at one time to look for possible arrangements to create a pattern for success (Get It, Drive On or "GIDO") but as I did this, I encountered a string of angry "you-can't do-thats" and "that's not the way it s dones" from him. He is clearly a linear, "FIDO" guy. FIDO stands for "Fuck It, Drive On" or take whatever the parameters you have been given, shut up, accept them and make do. I could understand FIDO in a lower ranking officer but when a senior officer with the authority and planning power to GIDO and "stack-the-deck" to get us a winning hand refuses to do so and has only a narrow set of FIDO options on the table, one starts having alarms going off. If a full bird colonel can't think, then who can and when does this happen? Or does it NEVER happen? When you think of being "inflexible" and "narrow-minded" this is the classic example; he has no flexibility because everything in the status quo with which we could possibly use in a new way has "sacred cow" status and a place where it fits in the joint puzzle that must not be deviated from because it would shatter the uneasy roles & missions "truce" in effect. DoD is at war with each other because since 1947 it has pitted firepower from the Air Force and Navy constantly at odds with maneuver from the Army/marines in attempts to win wars all by themselves to garner the glory and supreme budget share. My friend is inflexible because he is a "true blue" believer that the DoD structure is highly successful and this formula must not be deviated from. He then proceeded to lecture me that I needed to go learn the new DoD Joint Operational Concepts (JOCs) and see that its all "really sound" and "Clausewitzian". At this point, I decided not to attack this underlying, inherent, nation-states-can-only-do-organized-violence foolishness with the case that we actually need more eastern Sun Tzu style military thought to combat eastern sub-national conflict and nation-state enemies incorporating unusual small group techniques because I wanted to explore more of his thinking to get an "inside view" of the senior joint colonel. I bit my tongue a bit.

I decided to be honest though, and told him up front, that I don't see the need to learn this "joint language" since its obvious from common sense that its not working. He said Congress uses this jointspeak. I asked; "where did they learn it? Did someone use it to bamboozle them better?" He got even more angry at that point, and declared that them and their staffs learn it on their own by going to DoD web sites---which I find hard to believe with their busy schedules. Nevertheless, we continued with him railing on me to understand DoD's joint "doctrine" on their terms and to stop using my own common sense derived from observing the facts-on-the-ground or else I will continue to be persona non grata in DoD circles. I replied that I'm always willing to somewhat "play the game" better if it will help, but I will not lose my connection to reality to do it. However, he had an agenda beyond me just having better language skills to relate my reform ideas to DoD---he wanted me to somehow sans the facts all around us actually see the "success" that DoD's doctrine has created. I was aghast.

"Success? We are having our asses handed to us in Iraq" was my honest reply.

At this point, he was ready to answer such criticism with a ready-made answer, and in my case as a fellow but junior officer not on the inside or in power, he decided to play the "I've got-a-secret-you-don't-know-because-I'm-in-and-you-are-not" game. He asked: "do you even know what the actual JOC for OIF was?"

Fortunately, I knew the answer to this having studied the situation through friends who were involved in the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) operations planning: "Regime change."

Check-mated, that I wasn't flatly ignorant, he then delved into the minutiae of the operations plan (OPLAN) knowing full well I wasn't a party to it; "We did exactly that, as we were told to do. We did exactly as we set out to do." A perfect FIDO response of air-tight circular reasoning, if there ever was one.

I replied not sarcastically---though tempted---but critically; "You mean regime change into chaos?"

He exploded and proclaimed; "That was DOS's fault."

I countered, "Au contraire. Mon frere. Gordon/Trainor say in Cobra II that DoD didn't trust DOS and decided it was going to handle reconstruction".

Status quo gatekeeper: "No, Phase IV and V of OPLAN was DOS's fault, Trainor/Gordon are wrong. Read the OPLAN" (ie; only we know the real facts and we will not let you read them, so stop criticizing; we didn't fail AKA argument-by-assertion doesn't need proofs from reality).

At this point, now I have conflicting information. Maybe that's all he can do at this point is to prop up the failed status quo is to create a shadow of doubt? A best-selling book by a retired marine general and New York Times reporter both privy to inside information and this older senior officer trying to keep a younger junior one "in-line" over the phone with statements that there really is a "Wizard of Oz" logic behind those "pulling the cords" behind the "curtains" in the "emerald city". Have faith. The great pumpkin will come. I decided to let this issue go and proceeded to the next glaring, obvious failure in Iraq. I stated;

"One of the reasons we failed is because we let Saddam & subordinates escape to start a rebellion against us".

He replied bitterly:

"No, we had a force cap, we didn't have the forces to clear everything out."

I said, "No, we had plenty of forces and I don't mean clearing out all rebels, I mean maneuvering forces into the north to block his escape. The 4th ID's equipment were sitting in cargo ships doing nothing. We could have taken some of those tankers (people) and flown them into the northern airfield the 173rd Airborne had taken to be a task force to take up a position between Tikrit and Baghdad to block Saddam's escape route."

In typical heavy tanker, anti-airborne strawman talk, he distorted what I said to fit into his pre-contrived prejudices. The facts are that a C-17 Globemaster III 4-engined turbofan jet transport can fly indefinitely with air refueling to any place in the world @ 500+ mph delivering loads as large as a 70-ton M1 heavy tank and America had at the time 120 x C-17s available. With a prejudice-created, heavy tanker mental block that justifiably hates the Airborne mentality which usually lies to itself that it doesn't need ANY tanks at all not even light ones, he like many others throws the baby out with the bath water and proceeded to create a can't-do construct by declaring that if we can't airlift his big brigades and battalions then this force option was not possible. If you can't do it his way, he cannot even conceive of it any other way. His reply was first to try to deflate my argument by finding some personal ignorance on my part of how big the 4th ID is even though I wasn't advocating flying the whole division in, just enough to block some thugs in pick-up trucks and SUVs from fleeing the capital city. He switched back into ad hominum mode: "How many M1s are in the 4th ID?" I replied;

"432." [EDITOR: number of M1s in all the armored battalions in a heavy division is 396, then you add the M1s in the cavalry troop.]

Failing in busting my grasp of the military wire diagram, he then "took off" into his anti-Airborne strawman by saying; "the ENTIRE 4th ID is too big to airlift into northern Iraq, it was not physically possible, so when the politics wouldn't let us go through Turkey we had did all we could, it wasn't our fault that we didn't get Saddam."

I didn't and don't buy into this and countered; "Yes it is our fault. We got Noriega in '89. We could have flown some M1 heavy tanks in to block Saddam's escape, I know this because Trainor/Gordon reports 10 x M1s were flown in by C-17s to the northern Iraq airfield to help Delta Force in vulnerable wheeled trucks hunt for mythical WMDs."

What I learned at this juncture in the exchange, is that senior officers don't know the basic facts of their military profession. If they don't grow up in the "Airborne mafia" they are not going to know what's possible by USAF or any other aircraft type to effect 3D maneuver. Ignorance can be initially accepted and then mitigated against by patient pleading of facts but when ignorance is EXCUSED AWAY AND SHIELDED BY A SMUG, PONTIFICATING, CONDESCENDING ATTITUDE ie; a closed mind eager to attack the honest messenger, it cannot be corrected. It doesn't want to be corrected. In this case, we have unimaginative senior military officers wanting to do only the bare bone minimums to get by using the FIDO set before them by the National Command Authorities (NCA) and even then to have built-in DoDspeak "wiggle room" to excuse away any failures. The facts are the 4th ID (M) is on its ass and should have continually trained for years before OIF to fly with USAF C-17s to generate 3D maneuver task forces so they didn't have to sit the war out when sealift couldn't get them there. They didn't have this ready, because of their heavy tanker prejudices are not interested in Airborne operations using the excuse; "Its not my job, man". The Army culture itself is driven by its own narrow-minded facts-of-the-situation ignorance and doesn't want anyone to leave their social place and role, either and doesn't challenge units like the 4th ID to "air-mech". That's why we wrote a whole book on the subject www.geocities.com/air_mech_strike/amsbook.htm but I don't walk around with a stack of $24 books to hand out whenever needed to hopefully effect instant technotactical epiphanies. A task force of the 1st ID from Germany did fly in slowly to the northern Iraq airfield at one or two C-17s at-a-time but failed to get off their asses to go block Saddam & company's escape routes. The cause of this timidity was the light Airborne mafia's refusal to permanently own M113 Gavin light tracks and parachute them in like the Russian Airborne does with its BMDs to effect operational maneuvers like blocking SUVs of fleeing dictators/loyalists trying to escape nation-state capital cities. Airborne lightfighters want to foot slog at 1 mph or ride around in sexy "rat patrol" trucks that cannot stand alone and block those determined to get through (too light) and the heavy tankers that can block want instead to play George S. Patton stampeding thousands of armored vehicles over favorable open terrain and not take any personal death risks flying in an airplane to get the situational high ground before the enemy can escape (too heavy) and there is no "middle option" for either of them lest they admit to shortcomings in their extreme mentalities. What we are talking about here is a CAVALRY that no longer exists in the heavy/light polarized U.S. Army and marines.

Check-mated by the facts, my senior officer fell back onto his last line of defense: hair-splitting the OIF OPLAN verbage, he screamed into his telephone mouthpiece:

"What was the mission????!!!"

He was saying getting Saddam was NOT on the list of things to do.

He was the strongman holding the violently opposed factions together, yet all we wanted to do is evict him from offices and palaces in Baghdad and we were not concerned if he would escape and roam about leading a rebellion?

This only makes sense if dark, sinister forces are the real driving forces in American foreign policy and they deliberately wanted Iraq to degenerate into chaos first against Americans refusing to get public works going, and then amongst themselves so as to bleed American stuck occupying Iraq indefinitely and harm it. The real duty of Senior officers is to oppose such no-win policies and come up with a GIDO CONOPS that can win privately and if this is blocked, resign publicly not FIDO along as accomplices to the defacto treason.

"Terminologate" or Die

Where do such senior Colonels come from?

The fact is we have thousands of colonels in the U.S. military with nothing to do because we don't have enough battalions for them to command. We are still operating under the post-WW2 construct of OPMS whose goal is to shuffle officers around to a lot of different jobs to hopefully give them a broad view of warfare and in the end make lots of Colonels into good generalists to be cadre for a WWIII mobilization and expansion into 100 divisions from the current 10. The result is we have thousands of colonels in a "holding pattern" waiting for the call to self-validation into general officer rank with nothing to do, so we make them go to joint schools and write joint "doctrine" ie; talk about talking about how we would do things if we could. And when we really do get a mission to do we are then saddled with all this rigmarole with which to wade through and by the time you are done you are no longer in touch with realities on the ground or have a cause/effect view of what can be done to create a successful outcome. We are so log-jammed with BS we now try to burn holes through red tape and jargon using mantras like "effects-based" operations when what we really need to do is fire most Colonels and reorganize the entire officer career path to one where horizontal excellence in tactical and practical real commands with UNIT ACHIEVEMENT as the goal like how it is in the British Army not vertical advancement up a "pyramid of ego" to individual general officer rank. Until then, our too-many-chiefs-not-enough-Indians, DoDwonks order you that you must buy into their fantasy world and its terminology and accept their built-in excuses that go along with their verbiage or else you will never see the "Wizard", much less be the "Wizard" (join the general officer's clubhouse).

My experience verbally clashing with the status quo gatekeeper did not overthrow the facts-on-the-ground that can be viewed with common sense. It did show, how that senior brass are by choice, out-of-touch-with-reality because they don't want the American citizen to be able to employ common sense and view military operations and expect RESULTS. They certainly don't want subordinates aware that they are naked emperors, they need these folks to fawn over them to provide narcissistic supply. By using mythical terminology so military practice is somehow made into an unknowable "black art" that only insiders know, they can insulate themselves from responsibility (CYA) to get positive results with America's blood and treasure. If you don't use their terminology and accept their built-in excuses they can play a verbal "gotya!" game of trying to bullshit you, that the facts-on-the-ground are not facts-on-the-ground and "you don't know what's really going on" because if you did you'd use the DoD language as if REALITY depends on their gobblegook to somehow exist. This explains why Humvee and Stryker trucks are constantly blown up and DoD sees no problem with continuing to use them. They are trapped in their own language, terminology and built-in failed ideas. Here's an important example;

You and I justly think and say with logical cause/effect without DoD institutional baggage;

A.) wheeled trucks can't leave roads/trails.

B.) Roads/trails are predictable paths wheeled trucks must take so the enemy easily lays landmines and waits for us to be blown up.

C.) this results in horrific American deaths and maimings and no civil populace security.

A + B = C. Outcome (C) is both immoral and incompetent.

The GIDO mind sees a "bad hand" is being "played" says let's stop using A + B; wheeled trucks that can't go cross-country at will with unpredictable paths and instead use widely available M113 Gavin light armored tracks that can;

notA + notB = notC = a DIFFERENT POSITIVE OUTCOME = right thing to do However, the DoD senior officer replies "Iraq is a SASO...its not appropriate to use tanks according to our joint doctrine."

Doctrine says this is a SASO = so you can only use wheeled trucks = FIDO = A + B = C (casualties) = We are doing the Best We can Do because we say so in our Doctrine

Doctrine = Doctrine

Doctrine says use trucks, so we use trucks because doctrine says so.

We are being consistent and doing no wrong: A = A.

SASO = Trucks and nothing else because DoD Doctrine says so

The DoD gatekeeper continues by stating; "IEDs are a new capability the enemy is using so we must come up with new capabilities of our own to defeat them".

SASO = Trucks = Enemy blowing us up = How dare the enemy go against our doctrine with these new gadgets? = We need new counter-gadgets to stop what the enemy is doing to us because there is nothing wrong with what we are doing

A + B enemy's new gadgets + our new counter-gadgets = we will not experience C says the DoDwonks

When you reply that he is a lying motherfucker and that landmines have been around for years, it becomes clear that the DoD status quo gatekeeper is trying desperately to maintain the bogus SASO "doctrine" to not use tanks at all costs, in this case the majority of the 3, 000+ dead and 10, 000 maimed in Iraq moist of whom were blown up by landmines while in road-bound wheeled trucks. DoD doctrine CANNOT BE EVER WRONG.

TRUTH

(A) trucks that can't leave roads/trails around for 100+ years +

(B) landmines around for 600+ years =

(C) casualties suffered by those fools who have not been studying their profession

=

U.S. Military internally focused on self-created war fantasies and "Doctrine" not even reading about the Israelis in Southern Lebanon who encountered road side bombs in the late 1990s which should have given them warning to make tangible changes in force structure and equipment

DoD 's joint language is a "secret squirrel" code to insulate themselves from any criticism which guards reputations and egos and budgets/power, and this explains why people like Sanchez, Abizaid, Petraeus and Mattis refuse to "get it" (look at reality generically sans the DoD lingo with common sense) and stop the "presence patrol"/"sweep & clear" shooter's mentality in Iraq because they have been brain-washed to be insulated from reality by DoDspeak and its built-in rule of the schoolyard that the U.S. military is "always triumphant" and "never fails" because its was wrong. "It always does exactly what it sets out to do as told to do by its civilian masters" (FIDO) and their DoDspeak always has built-in wiggle room that if events "go south", they can split verbal hairs and proclaim victory in their part and condemn their civilian masters as the sole culprits for sending them on the mission in the first place with "insufficient resources". Sounds like an alcoholic who can't give up the bottle, doesn't it?

Good Men who mean well? Says Who?

In closing, my friend said we are inherently wrong in all our web pages www.combatreform.org because we question senior officer's motives. He says I MUST accept the fact that they mean well and ONLY AFTER I LEARN AND ACCEPT THEIR WAY OF DOING BUSINESS can I be justified for condemning their minor shortcomings which are only then at worse case a result of good intentions and thus excusable in the final analysis.

They are above the law.

They are a law unto themselves.

"They write the doctrine that makes the whole DoD sing" (work smoothly and successfully) to paraphrase Lucifer (hint: he ain't working on the positive behalf of mankind) through Barry Manilow. He can take their DoDspeak and lying doctrinal BS and "go to hell" as far as we are concerned and that's actually where they are headed as a matter of fact.

I will say that my friend means well and this is an exception.

But is he good?

I'd say not.

At the core of his being is NARCISSISM.

An idea of smug superiority that says:

"I don't want the American civilian citizen questioning what I'm doing, in fact, I don't want my junior partners doing it either. If they want to rise to the top of this outfit, they better damn well buy into the rules of the schoolyard and use our terminology and our inherent escape clauses for excusing away military failures."

Its the basic weak ego of the military narcissist which is really at fault here because MIS TAKES are not a reflection that the person doing them is a piece of feces and a "failure". They are just what they are---a MISS TAKE. You missed, so try again. Find out how you missed and maybe next time you will hit? However, by propping up weak egos so they never have to admit to failure by internal self-delusional language, we deny the ability to admit and understand mistakes so we can change and adapt to be genuinely successful so there is no doubt in anyone's mind---friend or foe alike---that we have the victory. If we have to "spin" victory it ain't victory.

Not wanting to be "real" and genuine with the rest of mankind on a level playing field of the facts is by definition snobbery that that person thinks he/she is better than other people because they have chosen the military profession and paid their "dues" which is classic, walk-of-life, social NARCISSM. Narcissism is not good, its an ugly evil of the worse kind. It also has a direct causative relationship to military incompetence, which is why I no longer present good military ideas of weaponry or tactics anymore as a "morality-free lunch". I am not a genius, there are plenty of smarter people than me out there and if their ideas are not being used in U.S. military practice its because someone stupid-by-narcissism is DELIBERATELY CHOOSING OR IGNORANTLY CHOOSING BY OMISSION NOT TO DO THEM.

I also do not think careerist military narcissism just happens suddenly at the rank of Major when an officer has passed from "summer help" to a possible ride to general officer's stars and "immortality" of remembrance passed on by successive generations of temporal human beings all of whom will biologically die unless God himself returns in actual space-time history. It is at this rank that the careerist behavior begins to manifest itself openly and shamelessly. Narcissism is the fundamental, existentialist secular base of the U.S. military "all-volunteer force". At least 49% of all in the U.S. military of all ranks are narcissists; the other 50% are weak, economic co-dependants and less than 1% are people like myself who just happen to like military stuff and adventure who want to win and bring everyone along as we do it. I don't care who gets the credit for good ideas, I just want us all to win here as many times as possible and be successful here on our limited time on earth to grow in wisdom because in the final analysis, we are all going to die whether we are general officers or privates first class. And what the Lord Jesus Christ is going to want from us before then, is that we understood we can never be perfect on our own power and have asked for a pardon from him. And from that moment forward, proceed to live our lives to help others unselfishly because all we have as human beings is indeed each other. We should drop the pretenses and airs of superiority we can temporarily play-act amongst ourselves so we can be completely and honestly connect to reality to co-operate fully with each other to get maximum greatest common denominator (GCD) synergistic effects through GIDO.

When Generals are not Generals

"But you and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that in the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must....and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their food opinion as you."

-- The Athenians, according to Thucydides

A General officer is supposed to be a broad-minded warrior/philosopher that can combine ALL aspects of the organization in new ways to achieve the most powerful synergistic effects to attain victory. We can only have a just and competent military if those in power make it so; subordinates cannot rescue and overcome a fatally bad situational "hand" given to them as the new COIN manual FM 3-24 tries to say otherwise to absolve generals from having good generalship to mastermind a winning situational construct.

We don't have broad-minded Generals today, we have narrow-minded "shooters" in command of the services and overseas commands who create concepts of operation (CONOPS) or war formulas based on their narrow set of prejudices and experiences and its obvious to the entire world that we are not winning.

EXAMPLE: Iraq is NOT a shooting war, its an ENGINEERING war. Landmines and car bombs are the most significant tools in play not KE bullets, yet "shooters" are in command. Is it a wonder why they haven't smothered the roadside bomb and car bomb?

Combat Engineers CANNOT CLIMB TO THE TOP LEADERSHIP OF EITHER THE ARMY OR MARINES. This is ludicrous. The Roman Empire was created by her Army that's chief characteristic was its ENGINEERING.

In the past, Prussians and Germans identified intelligent and open-minded officers early in their careers and put them on a separate track apart from the anal retentive, linear, zero sum thinking rank & file of their armies, designating them "General Staff Officers". They were then protected from the petty abuses and gotya! "From Here to Eternity" games the mediocre inflict on those with non-linear, open minds. Identifying who and who are not worthy of the fast track is a source for internal discontent but it can work, as the German military experience shows. Whether its best for the American military is another question we will turn to shortly.

The bottom line is, we need commanders with a BROAD GRASP of war but we in the U.S. are building instead NARROW MINDED individuals bent on VERTICAL rank promotion derived from a post-WW2 up-or-out civilian resentment towards having people in uniform on the public dole for no apparent justification with wars only happening once every 10 years. General Marshall's post WW2 OPMS was based on shuffling around staff officers from staff position-to-position to BROADEN their minds at least with the mental details of different aspects of war so they could be Colonels available to cadre and command divisions/brigades for a 100 division mobilization expansion for a WWIII. When this doesn't happen, we get a glut of THOUSANDS of Colonels with nothing to do but write "doctrine" and more narrow-minded bureaucratic layers of rigmarole as they wait to get their nod to become a general or their walking papers.

Its high time to realize the WWIII huge mobilization is not going to happen fast enough to help us in modern "come as you are" wars and to create a HORIZONTAL career path to replace the selfish vertical one, where commanders get a broad-minded set of EXPERIENCES not just staff job wire diagrams in ALL aspects of war so they can come up with the BEST CONOPS when they are in command using all the arms not just their prejudicial preferences. The British Army does not have "up-or-out" driving their men; they can stay in their ranks/positions as long as they want and are competent. The joy is IN BEING the role they play ALONG WITH OTHERS not I-am-better-than-you, look-at-me-I-outrank you! The best way to see the better British model is to view their ethos in action in their recruiting videos:

Light Infantry

www.youtube.com/v/BvgZU6UwoWY

Air Assault Infantry

www.youtube.com/v/weudbL9tXCQ

Armored Infantry

www.youtube.com/v/Lfp-jqJB81U

Mechanized Infantry

www.youtube.com/v/jUxYXX7pFp4

First, American military men must know what RIGHT LOOKS LIKE from initial enlisted/officer training that understand the dominance of high explosives in modern war.

www.geocities.com/transformationunderfire/highexplosives.htm
www.combatreform.org/recruit.htm
www.combatreform.org/cluelessarmy.htm

To eliminate this them vs. us sub-branch prejudices from continuing beyond initial specialty training, we eliminate the EGO connection from the equation at the point that we require commanders to start looking at all their options. There will be no more "infantry officers" and "armor officers" at BATTALION level and above. There will be no more underclass specialist branches, either. Officers from the rank of Major on will specialize in broad FUNCTIONAL AREAS that in themselves DEMAND a broad mind and utilization of ALL assets.

On planet earth, there are two major terrain types that require different equipment/force structures: open and closed terrain. Lighter forces are needed to go over or through closed terrains and heavier forces are needed to survive/prevail in the open. At the rank of Major, ALL officers will cease being an "infantry officer" but become a "Combat Arms" officer for either 2D or 3D maneuver.

Combat Arms2D
Combat Arms3D

We are saying at the point where battalions are commanded and staffed, we expect the Combat Arms Majors to open their minds and start waging wars with all their means. To do this, we need more than lip service. And rather than GUESSING who is open minded or who is not and creating General Staff officers, we put EVERYONE on a path towards broad-mindedness unless they choose otherwise. We need to halt the vertical quest for rank and embark on a horizontal quest for techno-tactical EXCELLENCE that will take YEARS at a time. Wherever the Major started his career, let's say infantry, he will go to the other functional areas he has not had any direct experience with and go to a SCHOOL to learn the basics of it, then will COMMAND that type of unit for 1 year. He will be graded on how THE UNIT performs. There are 7 broad functional areas below. Assuming a 6 month school for each of the 6 areas he hasn't experienced, (3.5 years) and 1 year in command of each type unit (6 years) and 1 year as a foreign military observer, he will have about 10 years of diversified command experiences to mold him and give HQDA the best indicators of whether he is a leader of men to promote to LTC and command a BATTALION. How well he then leads a battalion will determine if he is promoted to full Colonel and becomes a brigade commander.

Shooter

Infantry
artillery

Maneuverer

air & ground cavalry (was armor branch)

Engineer

Flyer air part of air & ground cavalry--Yes, he learns to fly at least a STOL observation/attack plane

Sustainer

Communicator

Intelligencer

Live in foreign country for 1 year to learn what LIFE is all about, respect for other cultures

Foreign Military Observer

If the officer DOES NOT WANT TO EMBARK ON THE HORIZONTAL QUEST FOR DIVERSIFIED MILITARY EXCELLENCE he can STAY IN HIS POSITION AT THE RANK OF CAPTAIN FOR AS LONG AS HE WANTS TO AND IS ABLE TO DO THE JOB. If he wants to be the best damn infantry officer at company level then he can and many should. However, we are NOT going to elevate to high commands any more narrow minded people who do not fully understand and exploit ALL battlefield operating systems.

The Real Power Struggle Going on in DoD: RMA vs. 4GW; America needs to realize Volunteer does NOT = Professional, and SHOOTERS shouldn't be in charge of HIGH EXPLOSIVE dominated ENGINEER wars

Georgia Debacle: Light Infantry Narcissists Pre-Occupied with Chasing Rebels in Sub-National Conflicts Botch Nation-State War against Russia

EXCLUSIVE: Complete Analysis of the Recent Georgian Nation-State War

www.geocities.com/transformationunderfire/georgianwar.htm

www.combatreform.org/georgianwar.htm

The lying excuses are already coming in from the light infantry narcissists (see article below) who mis-EQUIPPED the Georgians making them QUALITATIVELY inferior to the combined-arms Russian army which has tracked, armored tanks, artillery and aircraft that rained high explosive effects upon them as their kinetic energy bullet gunslinging bounced off their armor to no effect.

Never before has such lying military malpractice been foisted upon the general public as that emanates from the current crop of light infantry narcissists populating the U.S. Army and marines that are botching sub-national conflicts in Iraq/Afghanistan--when not training others to botch their own wars. The appeal of the lightfighter is prevalent all throughout our popular culture; James Bond, Batman, and Rambo in the movies prevail over their many foes because their skill enables them to get close enough for a kill shot or to defeat them with hand-to-hand combat skills. We want to have romantic heroes like this and to get to play one in U.S. military uniform is quite an aphrodisiac. The problem is that in real life, the enemy doesn't have to let you have a fair fight or get close enough to use short-range guns and combatives; the planet is still a very big place and he can unheroically rain down exploding shells or push the button to detonate a land mine as you try to cross distances.

The Georgians could have been trained to Rambo standards and they'd still would have been defeated because what we are teaching them; just light infantry on foot or unarmored trucks/jeeps with hand weapons is no match for combined-arms armies with tanks, artillery and airplanes. The reason is that a skilled, mechanized force will rain firepower on the light infantry and not even let it get close enough to employ their hand weapons as it slices the nation-state into pieces taking strategic ground without which the government loses control and basic power over resources and people. The Georgians were out-classed QUALITATIVELY by the weak form of warfare we taught them--not because they were not trained well enough as foot-slogging, gunslingers. There are really two armies in the U.S. Army; a light one that wants to fight too light on foot and from vulnerable wheeled trucks restricted to roads and a heavy one that wants to fight from too heavy tracked tanks that if firm open terrain is not available is restricted to roads. Both "mafias" are wrong and misunderstand and botch warfare in closed terrains where smart enemies hide in and operate from. As we approach foes hiding in closed terrains, they can rain down HE shells and guided missiles at us as the Israelis found out when they foot-slogged directly into Hezbo bunkers after air strikes failed to dislodge them.

The rise of the redneck, gunslinger lightfighter type who thinks he only has to mop up after air strikes to prominence in the U.S. military is directly tied to the Bush administration's neocons who are vain, egotistical and obsessed with hate--conveniently directed to subsidize corporate and personal profits through military misadventures around the world. The President of Georgia is a mirror image of a Dick Cheney Chickenhawk which is why Bush was so in love with him that he promised him the moon--if he'd naively deploy a couple thousand foot-slogger gunslinger narcissists to Iraq to help the corporate money-making enterprise there. When the professional Russian army came to take his country away from him, George Bush and his light infantry narcissists were nowhere to be found in the face of tank tracks, artillery shells and aircraft flying in direct, close air support of ground maneuvers.

Thank goodness the Russians have taught us a valuable lesson in professional military competence and equipment by trouncing these light infantry retards in Georgia. Maybe we can purge ourselves from such military malpractitioners and get ourselves properly reorganized with a LIGHT MECHANIZED INFANTRY that can actually dominate a fight in closed terrain with high-technology light tanks and APCs using combat engineering means to seal off borders with security fences if its a sub-national conflict (SNC) or stopping a nation-state foe with trenchlines and/or strongpoints as the Finns did against the Russian tank armies in 1939-40.

There is a truth in that infantry must be bold and competent on foot in order to win wars; but it HAS TO SURVIVE TO GET THERE to work its magic; if it cannot get proximity for its short-range gunslinging to work because the enemy is raining down HE firepower and maneuvering tanks and its own infantry into kill shots by tracked armored tanks, then the war will be lost. On the other hand, if an army gets too wed to its tanks and loses aggressiveness it could end up driving itself into proximity of light infantry to be effectively ambushed as we saw the Russian army do in Grozny in 1996. The Russians have learned this lesson; we have not. We have half an U.S. Army that doesn't even have tracked APCs and no light tanks that is dependant upon the enemy blundering into their guns; if the enemy is smart and doesn't oblige like the Russians, we will get our asses handed to us.

What the U.S. Army must do immediately is stop this foot-slogging and wheeled truck non-sense and equip its light infantry brigade combat teams with upgraded M113 Gavin light tracked APCs and equip some with heavy weaponry to act as light tanks to re-learn WHAT RIGHT LOOKS LIKE that we once knew in the aftermath of the non-linear, closed terrain Vietnam war. These simple to-operate, cross-country mobile armored tanks can enable light infantry to fight a mobile style of warfare instead of waiting and hoping for a stupid enemy to appear magically into our gunslinging kill zones. We would also avoid appearing on roads for their land mines to work. Then, once WE KNOW WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING we will be in a position to export this force structure to others.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080818/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_military_tested

U.S. trainers say Georgian troops weren't ready

By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press Writer

Mon Aug 18, 3:28 PM ET

TBILISI, Georgia - U.S. military trainers - the only American boots on the ground - say the Georgian Soldiers they knew who were sent to battle the Russians had fighting spirit but were not ready for war.

The Georgians were "beginning to walk, but by no means were they running," said Army Capt. Jeff Barta, who helped train a Georgian brigade for peacekeeping service in Iraq. "If that was a U.S. brigade it would not have gone into combat."

Now on standby at the Sheraton Hotel, unarmed and in civilian clothes, six of the American trainers offered a glimpse at the 5-year-old U.S. mission and at the performance of the outnumbered and outgunned Georgian military in its defeat by Russia.

The Americans arrived for work Aug. 7 to unexpectedly find training was over for the unit they had been assigned to for three weeks, the 4th Brigade: The Georgian Soldiers were sitting on their rucksacks and singing folk songs as an Orthodox priest walked among them chanting and waving incense.

Then buses and trucks took the troops off toward Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia, where there had been sporadic clashes and shelling during the previous week. That night the Georgian army began an offensive trying to retake the Russian-supported region, and by the following morning hundreds of Russian tanks were rolling across the border.

"From what I've heard, a lot of the 4th Brigade was hit pretty hard," said Rachel Dejong, 24, a Navy medic from Richmond, Ind.

The Georgian company commander who was training alongside Barta was killed.

"Some of the Soldiers seemed really grateful for the things we taught them," said Barta, a 31-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, but he acknowledged it was not nearly enough.

Trainers start with the basics of infantry warfare - shooting, taking cover, advancing - then on to squad and platoon maneuvers, Barta said.

The Georgians do not lack "warrior spirit," he said, but added that they weren't ready for combat.

They inherited bad habits from the Red Army, whose Soldiers wouldn't move without a direct order from a superior, and need to be taught to think on their own, Barta said. To make things more difficult, many soldiers "come from the hills of Georgia, and some of them sign for their paycheck with an X," he said.

The Georgian army has five regular infantry brigades, each with some 2,000 troops. Only one of them - the 1st, which was rushed home from Iraq by U.S. planes after fighting broke out - has been trained to a NATO level.

There are also units of poorly trained reservists, Georgian men who do 18 days of one-time military training and then eight days a year into their 40s. Officially, the government says it has 37,000 regular Soldiers and 100,000 reservists.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, some of the American trainers spoke bluntly about problems with the Georgian troops, who one veteran sergeant said "got torn up real bad."

The Americans were training them to use the U.S. military's M-4 rifles [carbines], he said. But when fighting broke out, the Georgians went back to the Soviet AK-47, the only weapon they trusted. They appeared incapable of firing single shots, instead letting off bursts of automatic fire, which is wildly inaccurate and wastes ammunition, he said.

Another problem was communications: As soon as combat began, the army's communications network largely collapsed, he said, so troops conducted operations using regular cell phones. That left their communications easily accessible to Russian intelligence.

"Were they ready to go? The answer is no," the sergeant said.

The U.S. trainers come from different branches of the military: marines, Army, Navy and special forces. Most have combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the moment, according to the trainers, there are fewer than 100 of them in the country.

Officially their job is to get the Georgians ready to serve in Iraq, where the country has maintained a 2,000-man contingent.

Unofficially, some of the trainers acknowledge, the program hopes to give the U.S. a more robust ally on Russia's border in a country that houses a vital oil pipeline.

The Americans aren't the only ones here. Georgian corporals and sergeants train with Germans, alpine units and the navy work with French instructors, and special operations and urban warfare troops are taught by Israelis, said Georgia's deputy defense minister, Batu Kutelia.

While the U.S. mission is specifically aimed at getting troops ready for Iraq, the "overall goal is to bring Georgia up to NATO standards," Kutelia said in an interview at the Defense Ministry on Sunday.

This former Soviet republic has allied itself with the West and has hopes of joining NATO, ambitions that Russia has seen as a challenge to its influence and security.

Kutelia said Georgian troops who had trained with the Americans and other foreign forces - about half of the military - performed better in the war than those who didn't.

It isn't clear how many Georgian units actually had a chance to put what they learned into practice.

One Georgian officer who returned from the front said the army succumbed not to one-on-one combat but to overwhelming Russian air power. The officer, who appeared shaken by what he saw, showed photographs of Georgian military jeeps destroyed from the air, the bodies of their occupants lying bloated on the road.

He would not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

Barta, the Army captain, said of the company he was training: "I know specifically that Bravo Company, I'm sure, and I hope from what I did for them, that they're better off than they would have been if this happened four weeks ago."

An independent Georgian military expert, Koba Liklikadze, said the U.S. training was not a deciding factor, attributing the army's loss to bad decisions by the government. Georgia declared a cease-fire too soon, he said, which demoralized the troops before most of them had a chance to fight.

"It was not an absolutely decisive factor whether Georgians were trained by Americans or not," he said. "What happened was due to the political decision of Georgian authorities, and not the performance on the ground."

The U.S. program has been interrupted, and critically damaged, by the war. The Georgian army has been dealt a harsh blow: While official statistics claim 180 fatalities, Soldiers and civilians, Liklikadze estimated the number of dead or missing Soldiers at 400.

Many Georgian military bases, including the main U.S. training facility at Vasiani, were damaged or destroyed.

The U.S. trainers now lounging at the Tbilisi Sheraton have been relegated to following the situation from the hotel's carpeted halls and glass elevators. They seem eager to either get back to work or leave.

With the future of their mission uncertain, the trainers have been drafted to help the U.S. aid operation that began last week. But it is hard to avoid the impression they would rather be elsewhere.

"I'm not saying that we're suffering here with the one million-thread-count sheets or checking out the local females at the pool," said Capt. Pongpat Piluek, a veteran of the Afghanistan war. "But if our job now is to sit here and put down roots in the couch, I'd rather do it at home."

THE SHAFT OF THE SPEAR: RMA Civilian Neocons vs. RMA Military Bombard & occupy narcissists

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-kagan12nov12,0,3879627.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Rumsfeld's self-inflicted wounds

The outgoing defense secretary was too focused on transforming the military, and failed to plan for achieving political goals in Iraq.

By Frederick W. Kagan

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Finding the Target: The Transformation of the American Military."

November 12, 2006

DONALD RUMSFELD had the chance to be one of the great American heroes of all time. He held office at a moment of enormous danger. He had many admirable qualities necessary for success. But like the tragic heroes of old, hubris and inflexibility made vices of his virtues, leading to his own fall and the collapse of his life's work.

Rumsfeld was in many ways ideally suited to be secretary of Defense in the wake of 9/11. His experience in the same position under President Ford and as ambassador to NATO seemed to fit him to the task of overseeing a complex military coalition. His determination and self-confidence were essential in a wartime secretary - and unusual in recent times. When he showed, early in his tenure, that he meant to take positive control of the Pentagon's sprawling bureaucracy, many observers cheered. This was precisely the sort of man the nation needed at the military's helm at a time of crisis.

As former CIA Director Robert Gates prepares to succeed Rumsfeld, the chorus is already rising to declare that Gates must be more open to advice from the military, more of a consensus-builder than a tyrant. Perhaps. It isn't clear how a more open secretary of Defense would have fared given the advice the military gave Rumsfeld.

Belief in the value of technology and the need for light, swift ground forces pervaded the senior military leadership in the 1990s. Then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki had launched an ambitious program to "lighten" the Army and equip it with advanced precision weapons. Shinseki certainly warned that more troops would be needed to secure Iraq in the wake of major combat operations. But Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander who developed and executed the actual war plan, wanted fewer. Many officers opposed the "light footprint" approach with which Rumsfeld tackled the problem of the Iraqi insurgency - but not Gen. John Abizaid, who took over from Franks right after the end of major combat operations. A secretary of Defense who encouraged discussion and dissent would have perhaps anticipated more of the flaws in the policies he was proposing. Still, the strategy that has led to disaster in Iraq belonged to the commanders at least as much as to Rumsfeld. Scapegoating him in isolation will prevent us from learning the essential lessons of our recent failures.

For the problem with Rumsfeld was not his flawed managerial style, but his flawed understanding of war. Early in his term, he became captive of an idea. He would transform the U.S. military in accord with the most advanced theories of the 1990s to prepare it for the challenges of the future. He was not alone in his captivity. As a candidate, President Bush announced the same program in 1999 - long before anyone thought Don Rumsfeld would return as secretary of Defense. The program, quite simply, was to rely on information technology to permit American forces to locate, identify, track and destroy any target on the face of the Earth from thousands of miles away. Ideally, ground forces would not be necessary in future wars. If they were, it would be in small numbers, widely dispersed, moving rapidly and engaging in little close combat. This vision defined U.S. military theory throughout the 1990s, and it has gone deep into our military culture. Rumsfeld's advent hastened and solidified its triumph, but his departure will not lead instantly to its collapse.

At its root, this "transformation program" is not a program for war at all. War is the use of force to achieve a political purpose, against a thinking enemy and involving human populations. Political aims cannot normally be achieved simply by destroying targets. But the transformation that enthusiasts of the 1990s focused too narrowly on destroyed the enemy's military with small, lean and efficient forces. This captivated Rumsfeld, becoming his passion. He meant it to be his legacy. It was the fatal flaw in this vision that led, in part, to the debacle in Iraq. Focused on destroying the enemy's military quickly and efficiently, Rumsfeld refused to consider the political complexities that would follow that destruction. He and Franks pared the invasion force down to the smallest level that could defeat Saddam Hussein's army, but refused to consider the chaos that would follow the collapse of Hussein's government. This failure is inherent in the military thought of the 1990s. Rumsfeld did not invent it. He simply executed it.

Having made the mistake of failing to plan for achieving the political goals of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld then compounded his error. The war in Iraq threatened military transformation. It was expensive and sucked scarce defense resources away from transformational programs. It was manpower-intensive and hindered Rumsfeld's efforts to reorient the military away from a focus on land power. It was intellectually distracting; counter-insurgency has little to do with transformation.

Here Rumsfeld's virtues became his greatest vices. Instead of recognizing the danger of losing Iraq, he remained committed to transforming the military to meet undefined future threats, spending billions of dollars preparing to fight Enemy X in 2025. He consistently opposed increasing the size of the ground forces, despite the obvious growing strains on the Army and the marines of repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

He fought to keep expensive weapons systems, such as the F-22 fighter jet and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which were billed as "transformational" because they used precision-guided munitions to strike remote targets. That money could have been used for better armored vehicles, more body armor and more Soldiers. The same determination that had seemed so promising when he first took over became a stubborn refusal to change course in a storm.

Rumsfeld has paid a high price for this failure. He will not be known as the secretary of Defense who transformed the military, but as the secretary of Defense who, at best, nearly lost the Iraq war. Worse still, his stubbornness has destroyed the ground forces. The Army and marines have worn out their equipment and their troops. Units must swap tanks and Humvees just to be able to train. The Army brass recently leaked the fact that only the units that are in Iraq or about to deploy to Iraq are combat-ready - an unprecedented military crisis. Rumsfeld leaves behind him a military far weaker and less capable than the one he took charge of in 2001.

The greatest irony of all is that the military Rumsfeld has destroyed is the one he created. He was secretary of Defense in the mid-1970s as the military was shifting from conscription to the all-volunteer force. He shepherded the volunteer military through its early growing pains and supported it valiantly against its many critics. Perfecting it through transformation was to be the culmination of his life's work. The damage he has done to it instead is his tragedy - and the nation's.


Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld/Neocons and the uniformed Generals believe in the Tofflerian world-view that we are in the "3rd Wave" of civilization where we can do without the physical and mentally steer firepower despite several disastrous years in Iraq showing the PHYSICAL world dominated by High Explosives (HE) cannot by mouse-clicked away with mental tap dances and troops in vulnerable trucks.

Understanding the Great Mystery of High Explosives(not for the weak hearted)

Once you have caught up on the history of High Explosives (HE) from the web page above, you will then be ready to consider the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) and determine if its nothing more than a "transformation" sex change operation from male-to-female, making our military defective and weak. We suggest you read the text below to describe how this is a wrong framework for understanding war and to see a more correct snapshot of what's really happening, then go to the power point slides to cover the same factual context again with pictures illustrating the points.

This web site is composed of:

1. Text describing why there is no "RMA" and a proper 4GW framework

/\
UP/DOWN
\/

2. Power point slides going into greater detail of the proper Fehrenbachian 4GW framework

<------LEFT/RIGHT------>

The Coming Collapse of U.S. Army Ground Forces: Congress must act to protect America

The Military, Industrial, Congressional and Think Tank Complex (MICC-TT) is rushing head long towards an emasculated mental problem/avoidance, bomb-them-with-firepower structure that we are seeing before our eyes in Lebanon is a dismal failure against even a sub-national foe with favorable rocky, hilly, mountainous terrain that he has dug into with civilians acting as shields on top and then erecting a defensive surveillance strike complex (SSC) to hide an offensive rocket/missile mobile launcher force to shoot into Israel the minute their Iranian puppet masters pull-the-string. Before the IDF's current problems, we've had over 3+ years of failures in Iraq using digital problem avoidance and firepower, yet this has not changed DoD's and the Army's plans for the future one iota. Making mental gadgets that skimp on the physical is cheaper in MATERIAL but industry can still charge more money because they are dubbed "high tech". Its a win-win situation for them and a lose-lose situation for our Soldiers/marines. Consider the hand-launched Puma UAV, essentially a model airplane with a TV camera relay. It can only survive 200 landings yet costs $35, 000--3 times the cost of a new car, this same money could up-armor an entire M113 Gavin to make it RPG and landmine proof. UAVs are not durable, reusable goods, but for the MICC-TT disposable = maximum profits regardless if it doesn't get the results we need to win in war. They still think "RMA" firepower through disposable mental gadgets is needed since it will be a nation-state we will fight next, as if that would PHYSICALLY change the SITUATION if Hezbollah was named and looked at differently. If you factor in Hezie-B's sponsors, IT IS NATION-STATE WAR in Lebanon; Iran vs. Israel....and RMA mentalism has failed there miserably for all the world, including our potential enemies to see. Planet Earth is planet earth. The battle against the earth (TBATE) is always taking place, the MICC-TT in their technoarrogance refuse to make TBATE the first consideration in any force design, thus they are lost and out of touch with reality. They want to focus on the latest gadgets to counter what human enemies are doing as if this was a science fair, they are in no position to prevail in the battle against man (TBAM) if TBATE is kicking them in the ass and diluting their military force effects.

The following is what should be happening:

MANEUVER (physical)
|
|.................X Greatest Common Denominator Army = Maneuver + Firepower
|................/
|............../
|........... /
|........../
|......../
_________________FIREPOWER (mental)

We should be spending money to simultaneously get more physical maneuver and firepower steered by mental means. This is not what is happening, we are spending more and more on mental means and physically getting weaker and weaker.

MANEUVER (physical)
|...\
|....\
|.....\
|......\
|.......\
|........\
|.........X Least Common Denominator Army
_______________________________________FIREPOWER (mental)

Mental problem avoidance: FCS, LAV-I, LAV-III "Stryker", Humvee trucks, UAVs, Modularity etc.

Modularity disorganization will turn the Army from being 62% in light, medium and heavy armored tracks to 62% on foot and in vulnerable wheeled trucks. The tracked, armored physically capable of MANEUVER forces that took Baghdad and that are saving the day for the IDF when their mental "precision" firepower air strikes failed ARE BEING SQUEEZED OUT OF EXISTENCE BY LIGHT AND SPECIAL OPERATIONS NARCISSIST GENERAL PETER SCHOOMAKER'S REGIME. To smother open terrain maneuver training for all incoming Armor branch officers, he has moved their school to Fort Benning, Georgia where its closed terrain covered in trees. He has placed the majority of the Army's budget into the mental problem avoidance and physically too light-for-open-terrain-and-too-heavy-for-closed-terrain-and-air transport Future Combat System (FCS) as a bone thrown the way of Army tracked units to deceive them into thinking they have a future when really FCS is too expensive and will be cancelled. After FCS is cancelled, mental gadgets will be spliced into Stryker/Humvee trucks and nearly everyone will become emasculated motorized "line" infantry that can't leave roads or trails, but must dismount early and often to prevent their vehicles from being ambushed and create a line-on-the-ground and call in firepower from someone else to save them (HELP! HELP! WE ARE PINNED DOWN! WE HAVE WOUNDED!) if the enemy is anything more than a couple guys with AK47s. What Schoomaker's "mafia" wants is a simple 19th century Army like the Italian Army of WW2 with plenty of free time to do "From Here to Eternity" garrison games starting in the morning with sports PT so middle-aged men can think they are back on the high school track team and to create tired and sleep-deprived peons easily ordered around, wasting time showering and switching clothes, going to chow to eat cafeteria food 3 times a day, typing into desk and laptop computers perfect-paperwork-documenting-everything (why? because we can!), stabbing lesser ranking Soldiers in the back for haircuts and other unpardonable sins, doing lawn and building care, standing at change of command and retirement ceremonies so middle-aged men can feel good about their years of wasting tax dollars on non-warfighting military time-wasting bullshit, 'til final formation. When does anyone study war? They don't. Once in awhile when "resources are available", they will put a backpack on to march and find more Soldiers to berate for not "keeping up" and shoot and run around in the woods playing laser tag without combing arms realistically during "Field Training Exercises" (FTXs).

Before Modularity

Tracked & Cross-country Capable------------Truck & Road-bound

____________________________________________________________
62%----------------------------39%

After Modularity

Tracked & Cross-country Capable---------Truck & Road-bound

____________________________________________________________
39%----------------------------62%

Now some will say, the light units can dismount and fight on foot, so they are able to go cross-country--albeit very slowly 1-4 mph so if detected, enemy high explosive NEAR MISSES can kill them, create casualties and pin them down as they plead on the radio for fire support and rescue. So can the forces in tracks, they have doors and hatches to dismount from and fight on foot, too WHEN PRUDENT. The difference is in open terrain, medium weight 33-ton M2 Bradleys and heavyweight 70-ton M1 Abrams can BE THERE WITH THE FOOT INFANTRY, in closed terrain, 10.5 ton M113 Gavins can BE THERE WITH THE FOOT INFANTRY providing superior firepower support, medical treatment on the spot that surgically repairs arteries and veins, carriage of superior amounts of ammunition, water, food other supplies for long-term and long-range operations as well as an ability to fight mounted and advance in the face of enemy fire. Near misses will not kill them. The Army's Modularity disorganization will make both light and heavy brigades physically weaker by taking their 3rd maneuver battalion which fights and making it into a (Recon, Surveillance, Target Acquisition) "RSTA squadron" that looks at the enemy and calls back mentally for some sort of firepower from someone else to handle the problem; a poor substitute for a fighting CAVALRY.

Modularity takes 1/3 of combat power away, percentage of U.S. Army who physically fights

Tracked & Cross-country Capable-----Truck & Road bound------Observers
________________________________________________________________________
26%--------------------------------------42%-----------------------32%

Clearly, Congress should cancel MODULARITY reorganization IMMEDIATELY.

If allowed to continue we will lose 1/2 our combat power, and that which remains will be structurally weaker.

How Should the Army Reorganize?

If we stop Modularity disorganization and the FCS/Stryker anti-heavy force conspiracy, we'd have $ BILLIONS of dollars to fix the U.S. Army correctly, we'll call this the "Air-Mechanized" plan because it combines light tracked AFVs and aircraft to get the 3D maneuver capabilities we now lack.

The Battle Against the Earth

www.combatreform.org/indexprettyblueplanet.htm

There are two terrain types on planet earth:

PLANET EARTH

CLOSED----------------------------------------OPEN

The failure to understand TBATE loses wars; in 1940 the Allies ASS U MEd the Ardennes forest was not passable by German light tanks and had no Maginot line forts there. The Germans poured through and France fell within weeks and the British were forced from the continent.

Germany panzers primarily in excellent Czech-built T35/T38 Light Tanks Swarm through Ardennes Forests Allies Thought were "No-GO" terrain

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4MD3-fzglM

Yet a year later, the Germans not fully tracked mechanized and with many wheeled trucks and no Airborne 3D to act as cavalry ahead of the main body falls short of Moscow due to severe winter mud and snow---and Russian paratrooper and light tank resistance.

Partially-Mechanized German Army on wheels and horses defeated by TBATE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC_B8hvWPIA&sdig=1

The irony is that today, TBATE is ignored by the techno-narcissist U.S. military with increasing regularity as it emasculates itself into wheeled trucks under the delusion that help by mouse-click will solve physical problems in the mud.

Light Forces

EXPERIENCE ONE FAILURE DAY IN THE LIFE OF A FUBAR LAV-III/Strykerrr UNIT....

Strykers fail: VIDEO of Canadian LAV-IIIs hopelessly stuck in mud, breaks main bearing, mission aborted

American Stryker versions of the LAV-III are even more bloated and weighted down with bird cage and electronics inside....why are we wasting $4M on each of these flat-bottom, road-bound trucks?

From the recent PBS documentary, "Afghanistan: the Other War"

Go to 2:58 and see why the Canadians have gone to tracks in Afghanistan like other smart armies, Brits, Dutch etc.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXFMix3dudU

We need to stop wasting billions on fatally flawed break-down-prone wheeled Strykerrr trucks that fail to get the job done and put our men into constant road/trail ambushes and put our money into M113 Gavin light for cross-country mobility but medium-weight in armor protection tracks that don't get stuck and break down in a mere light rain and minor mud.

STILL PHOTOS OF THE LAV-III DEBACLE IN AFGHANISTAN (AMERICANS EXPERIENCE THIS DAILY, TOO)

1: UHO. Its raining in Afghanistan. 20-ton wheeled trucks + muddy roads don't mix. Too bad wars don't take place where its comfortable and dry.

2: "We are going to make contact with a new village and reach out to them and win over their hearts and minds in our low-maintenance, all-terrain, high-speed SASO wheeled vehicles. Our LAV-IIIs are used by the Americans who call them 'Strykers'".

3: "WAHOO! Look at Me! I'm going 60 miles per hour on the road!!" (Not for long!)

LAV-III stuck a 1st time; Road Speed: 0 MPH

4: "Ohhh....sh$%^&! I drove into a rut....."

5: "Can we get it out?"

6: "We had technical difficulties and had to cancel the mission to the village"

7: "What's that dangling underneath the LAV-III?"

8: "Oh No. Its the main bearing. Its broke, man. This thing won't run its trashed."

9: "What a Piece-of-Shit (POS)."

10: "Careful! Don't get the 'recovery' LAV-III stuck, too!"

11: "Oh Boy. The 'recovery' LAV-III is spinning in the mud, too."

12: "Please...please grip...grip....we don't want to be stuck here outside the wire when the sun goes down..."

LAV-III stuck a 2d time

13: "Gun it!!! Get through the dip!"

14: "Damn! We are Stuck Again! Dude! It's Getting Dark!"

15: "We Got to get Back to the FOB before the Taliban come out!"

16: "Go Easy! Easy! Let the Wheels Catch!"

17: "Damn. Forget it. Cut the Engine!"

18: "Mission Aborted! Maybe an officer will figure this out."

"We REALLY showed our Afghan allies today why they should trust their very lives to us.

Yeah, Right. We need to turn these pieces-of-shit in and get tracks so we can win"

Paul Hornback's Wheels vs. Tracks Article in the March-April 1998 issue of U.S. Army Armor magazine (before it became politicized) Warned Us Against the Wheeled SASO "Nation-Building" Racket EuroFad


1st TSG (A) EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wheels/Tracks NRMM Study (corrected)


























A Stryker truck stuck....again...rather than be seen in a track and look like the "mech pussies" the lightitis crowd detests, they'd rather be constantly ambushed along roads/trails that their high ground pressure (30 PSI+) wheels can't leave...here in open terrain if its too soft the wheeled truck is NO-GO

The light infantry are dishonest narcissists/SASO racketeers who try to foist the lie that CLOSED terrain = NO GO terrain for vehicles; thus we need "light" forces that can walk. Nevermind that heavy forces in medium/heavy tracks can get out and walk, too. They are liars and tactically inept because the truth is that LIGHT TRACKS like the M113 Gavin can go through and be flown over closed terrain by aircraft by virtue of their light weight and low ground pressure where their tracks meet the ground. The Brits, Dutch and Canadians have re-learned this lesson, again.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrATZkFUhaI

The Dutch are using M113 Gavin tracks, too and are being VERY successful in counter-insurgency operations!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKa3tK3zi4c

What caused the turn-around?

COMBAT.

REALITY.

AFGHANISTAN.

A DESIRE TO WIN, NOT CONTINUE TO LOSE IN WHEELED TRUCKS...

CLOSED terrain = Light tracks.

Light armored tracks are the ideal vehicles for light infantry if it wants to get the job done and stop worrying about how it will look vis-a-vis the rest of the Army or according to their prejudices. Their second lie is that they walk everywhere when in fact they are trucked and aircrafted from A to B, all the time. They sleep in the trucks and have a "missing time" incident as if abducted by a demonic UFO. They like wheels because they can distort what is happening and say they walked and fought, trucks do not draw attention away from THEM. They are all actually motorized infantry. When the time comes to do nation-state war, if the terrain is open like in Iraq, the "light" units in trucks cannot be given their own independent maneuver objectives least they get creamed by enemy artillery, mortars, RPGs, ATGMs, and gunmen with automatic weapons...so they mop-up enemy remnants in the wake of heavy units in tracks that can advance in the face of enemy fire. We have 5 types of handicapped infantry (6 if you include the USMC) that think they are "light" but are actually motorized in wheeled trucks with slightly different force structures (modified tables of organization and equipment or "MTOE"):

10th Mountain, 25th Tropic Lightnings "Light"
82nd Airborne "Airborne"
101st Airborne "Air Assault"
75th Rangers "Ranger"
Numbered Special Forces "Special"

Heavy forces


M1 Abrams Heavy tanks with high ground pressures (15+ PSI) cannot go over soft and closed terrains, only light tracks like the M113 Gavin can by virtue of its low ground pressure (8 PSI)

Heavy forces refuse to tackle closed terrain (or try and get stuck) with an equal and opposite disgusting attitude compared to the light narcissists towards it; "Death before dismount", they also think the world is composed of either terrain you can fight mounted "GO" and terrain you can't "NO-GO" which they are not interested in; let the lightfighters do it etc. This again is factually incorrect. LIGHT tracks can "GO" in closed terrain.


Here magnificent M113A1 Gavin light armored tracks break brush and act as a sort of moving shield for the WALKING infantry...do you see any penises falling off from their bodies? Are they wimps for boldly going into closed terrain to hit the very capable NVA enemy where he least expects it with superior shock action? No, they are in the process of kicking the enemy's ass with what works BEST.

11th ACR in Vietnam: What RIGHT LOOKS LIKE

www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FB45D34D4CFF663B

The Vietnam armored cavalry warfighters knew this, but were purged from the Army immediately thereafter so their Fulda Gap brethren would not have to compete against folks with combat experience for promotions. Without a fighting CAVALRY BRANCH to insure that light tanks are developed and those that use them in cavalry units and to support light infantry have a safe place to serve their country, those who fight in the main body in heavier tanks or in foot-slogging clusterfucks will foist all the money to themselves and not the force that has to be by definition be different and more mobile than them. The military weak ego cannot tolerate someone higher-speed-than-thou. The generations of Soldiers thereafter, choked into not going off-road lest they infuriate an "eco-nazi" or uglify the post or worse get stuck in their too-heavy Bradley never learned what "right looks like" in cross-country, brush-breaking maneuver in M113 Gavin light tracks like the Vietnam war Soldiers did. Army heavy units still have thousands of M113 Gavin LIGHT tracks to operate in closed terrain, but many heavy unit die-hards do not want to aggressively maneuver cross-country in their M113 Gavins to include swimming across rivers/lakes nor fly in aircraft let alone parachute from them to get 3D maneuver because it showcases that their more sophisticated but heavier ego-gratifying mounts can't go there. Their dismount infantry might have to..GULP....DISMOUNT and fight. 3D maneuver by a defacto light cavalry executed by light forces or an actual cavalry in lighter tracks would support their 2D maneuvers in open terrain by their medium-weight Bradleys and heavyweight Abrams heavy tanks, but that means sharing the limelight in a Zero sum game of ego biscuits. Read the accounts of the 3rd ID without a cavalry on the way to Baghdad; the main body is constantly getting lost, having to turn around or slams head-on into the enemy because IT HAS NO CAVALRY----BS Humvee scouts can't in real shooting wars be sent ahead to make first contact with the enemy, but the modularity madness has the non-fighting "RSTA squadron" in Humvees with bloated Bradleys in the background. They are going to sneak up on no one and get themselves killed against a capable foe. Another problem is a heavy unit is only 50% in tracks, the Jessica Lynch support* underclass is in unarmored, unarmed wheeled trucks even more fatally road-bound than the line motorized (allegedly "light") units; on non-linear battlefields; they don't take weapons firing seriously and are run ragged in garrison running light troops (who walk everywhere, yeah right) all over the post or in a heavy unit are not ready to defend themselves resulting in the heavy unit's supplies are in danger of being destroyed by enemy forces bypassed while driving to take down the nation-state's center of gravity. Roads and trails are MAN-MADE STRIPS OF OPEN TERRAIN.

The following depicts how today's U.S. Army units look fighting the earth:

As you can see, this is a fatal but fortunately fixable mess. Nearly ALL Army units can FLY over any given terrain with little (airdrop) to enormous effort (airland onto runways), so this option wasn't listed. ITS WHAT HAPPENS AFTER FORCES ARE DELIVERED, IE; WHAT THEY CAN DO USING THEIR OWN ORGANIC MEANS THAT COUNTS. The U.S. Army has thousands of inexpensive to operate, simple-to-maintain and drive, 10.5 ton M113 Gavin light tracked armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) that can be supplied en masse to give light units and support units closed terrain protected mobility even in the face of enemy fires to include swimming across rivers/lakes. Using band tracks, or rubber-padded steel tracks, M113 Gavins can drive on paved roads without damaging them and go over 60 mph if the former track types are used. Fuel economy equivalent to a Humvee truck is possible by hybrid-electric drive. By being a track, M113 Gavins are 28% more space-to-weight efficient than any wheeled truck and can be easily up-armored to be fully protective against enemy heavy caliber guns, land mines, RPGs and ATGMs. The minimum transportation standard on the NLB must be a LIGHT ARMORED TRACK. The wheeled truck is dead on the NLB and is as obsolete as the horse cavalry was in WW1. We can and we must have an ALL-TRACKED U.S. ARMY CAPABLE OF PHYSICAL 2D AND 3D MANEUVER to gain positional advantage and take war ending ground from both nation-state and sub-national foes and smash their possible SSCs. Without MANEUVER the smart enemy can easily evade our firepower with C3D2 (camouflage, cover, concealment, deceit and deception), even "precision" firepower. The "cat is out of the bag" to the entire world now on how to defeat U.S. "precision" air strikes and cause casualties by ambushing our vulnerable predictable road-bound wheeled trucks.

Consequenses of no TBATE foundation for military understanding

If you don't base your military thought first on THE BATTLE AGAINST THE EARTH (TBATE) you could end up like the light SASO racketeers. Without a TBATE appreciation of open/closed terrain demanding 2D/3D maneuver which means light, medium, heavy tracked tanks--you are just left with the battle against man (TBAM). The TBAM-only crowd sees war as a glorious manifestation of man's technological progress.

What is man DOING today to fight wars?

He ignores the TBATE parameters and how they shape the fighting, he is only interested in the latest war fad the enemy is wearing.

Fatally Flawed Non-TBATE Mythology

Cold War = Fighting Soviet Tanks = We have no Soviet Tanks to Kill = We don't Need Tanks

SASO counter-Terra-Ism = Fighting Ragheads on foot = We only need our own egomaniacs on foot and from wheeled trucks to kill ragheads

The TBAM narcissist doesn't GENERICALLY SEE THINGS FOR WHAT THEY ARE VIS-A-VIS PLANET EARTH, LAWS OF PHYSICS, he sees everything through his narrow TBAM ego labeling. "Tanks are for nation-state war", "Trucks are for SASOs" nevermind you could be in a SASO where you are in open desert and closed urban terrain where you need TANKS to get the maximum leverage against the enemy, our internal prejudices drive what we do---not external reality.

Killing "ragheads" is not different than killing "gooks" in Vietnam; when gunslinger egomaniacs get involved they ignore TBATE and try to solve everything with gun play when there are other more effective forms of military force can be used to SMOTHER conflicts. However, when you are a weak ego needing self and peer validation through war, PERPETUATING conflicts will insure careers and combat patches are handed out....let's look at how ignoring TBATE resulted in us losing the Vietnam war...

Terrain Ignored: How the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War, Part 1 of 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejRECkYU6Ck

This EXCELLENT documentary "Night of the Dragon" narrated by WW2 U.S. Army combat veteran, Charlton Heston validates what we in the military reform movement have been documenting for years: that the U.S. military obsessed with ego-gratifying gunslinging ignores The Battle Against The Earth (TBATE) which is foundational before undertaking any human conflict (The Battle Against Man or "TBAM"). To defeat "mosquitoes" in a sub-national conflict (SNC) you must "drain the swamp" by winning TBATE so the terrain is on your side--which requires hard work, preparation and resources (GIDO--Get It, Drive On) that the lazy and selfish American Soldier or businessman who only wants to swat bugs (gunsling) and whine about how hard war is for him (FIDO--Fuck It, Drive On) or simply exploit the foreign land and people for quick profits doesn't want to do--so he loses wars in Vietnam, and now Iraq/Afghanistan because of short-sightedness.

This amazing documentary shows visually that Vietnam has thousands of miles of closed terrain and beach borders--that if not blocked by fences/walls and mobile forces in outposts--enemies will flood into the country and attack all around making a Non-Linear Battlefield (NLB). America and the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam (ARVN) failed to secure their borders using tangible combat engineering means of cleared out "no man's land" demilitarized zones all around--and not just at the 17th parallel--stripped of vegetation by bulldozers and spray planes, covered with land mines, sensors and walls/fencing backed by mobile Quick Reaction Forces (QRFs) so the NVA/VC are fought at the outskirts of the country-not on the land where the civilian populace are living on.

John Paul Vann: Victor of SNC and NSWs

By our gunslinging laziness, we let the Viet Cong and NVA roam all over South Vietnam getting steady resupply by bicycles on the Ho Chi Minh infiltration trail

Military Bicycles at War

...and THEN tried to stop them in this non-linear mess at fortified villages surrounded by fencing, land mines, patrols etc. WHICH IS TOO LATE. After the 1968 Tet offensive--where the North Vietnamese leadership deliberately sacrificed the VC to score psychological warfare points with the American people that the war was far from over and they couldn't stop them from infiltrating and starting trouble-even with the Rural Forces/Popular Forces "Ruff-Puffs" now able to protect themselves from communist (socialism-by-force) thugs by the elimination of the VC, the U.S./ARVN had still not "closed the back (and front) door" to closed terrain infiltration and the North Vietnamese Army regular Soldiers with tanks and artillery simply marched in and starting occupying entire chunks of the South.

The culprits here were the incompetent gun-ego marines who REFUSED to build McNamara's sensor line at the 17th parallel (which would have been a start towards a winning strategy) when ordered; the commandant and entire chain of command should have been court-martialed and if the USMC persisted in insubordination, the whole crumby, selfish, disloyal outfit disbanded.

Terrain Ignored: How the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War, Part 2 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgqZNZnL3A

What should have happened is that the South's entire border should have been secured by a comprehensive "Morice" type line and THEN from a position of STRENGTH-not weakness-we should have sent a warrior-retired U.S. Army LTG James Gavin to Hanoi to negotiate directly with Ho Chi Minh to end the war with a time table for unification based on free elections and turned the enemy into our staunch ally by accepting them as mild socialists in the Yugoslavia/Tito mold since Red china is their natural ENEMY. Look who invaded Vietnam a few years after we left in 1975!

Crisis Now

Had FDR lived he would have insisted on Vietnamese unity and independence in 1945 at the end of WW2; Vietnam would have been our socialist, anti-communist "Yugoslavia" in the far east. However FDR died (or was murdered) and Truman caved in to French demands to recolonize Vietnam in return for their quasi-NATO membership in Europe to stand against the Soviet Russians. France was too militarily weak to keep Vietnam so they should have instead accepted their independence and less lucrative oil and rubber profits--instead of no profits. LTG Gavin was also the U.S. ambassador to France during the JFK administration keeping them in the NATO fold and would have been an expert negotiator with the Vietnamese/French aware of military realities-had we thought of using his talents to save American lives and tax dollars.

Instead of sound geopolitical actions, we refused to hold free elections as we agreed to in the 1954 accords that created South/North Vietnam and allowed the border between the two countries to stay porous as we re-played the WW2 OSS antics with the new CIA instead of acting like mature adults and smothered the conflict with secure borders.

Terrain Ignored: How the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War, Part 3 of 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkmn7s9fNrU

We taught the ARVN to be bad imitations of ourselves; we had them land foot troops in wide-open rice paddies from helicopters so they could get chopped to pieces by the VC/NVA hiding in the adjacent treelines. Without smokescreens, this forced ARVN troops in M113 Gavin light tracked APCs/tanks to charge ahead and be targeted by enemy recoilless rifles to try to get the momentum of the attack going again. After the VC/NVA retreated upon sight/sound of our noisy helicopters

U.S. Air Assault Tactics Flawed

or unwisely stayed and were routed but friendly forces bloodied, the latter left the field of battle and returned to a forward operating "fire" base which had short-range, 105mm artillery pieces-so there was no excuse for not laying smokescreens to blind enemies on LZs/DZs---

Where are the Smokescreens?

the actual terrain was left to the VC/NVA to control and burrow underneath in a maze of tunnels to avoid our aircraft high explosive bombing. Note in the video when an ARVN attack stalled, Airborne FACs in observation/attack planes or GFACs on the ground called in A-1 SkyRaiders and jet fighter-bombers to lay down heavy HE Snakeye bombs and napalm jellied gasoline firebombs ("snake & nape") on the enemy to eliminate him.

Killer Bees, Part 3

The ARVN fought well with M41 Walker BullDog and M113 Gavin light tanks/APCs; when they foot-slogged from overly complex Huey helicopters they suffered horrendous casualties that broke their will and their budget so by the time the NVA divisions (little military experience) U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger allowed to stay ensconced in the South during the 1973 Paris negotiations made their final move on Saigon in 1975, without Civil-Military Chief retired LTC John Paul Vann around to insist on B-52 heavy bomber strikes, the war was lost.

Now let's look at how fighting other men should be schematically arranged.

In the Battle against Man: there are Nation-State Wars and Sub-National Conflicts.

BATTLE AGAINST MAN

Nation-State War-----------------------------Sub-National Conflicts

In the past, we could force people into the Army with the draft and flood entire nation-state areas with troops and push the enemy to our front until we reach their nation-state center-of-gravity (COG), usually the capital city, Berlin, Rome etc. while having a social "support" underclass in unarmored, unarmed trucks shuttling supplies forward and wounded machines/men back who the combat "studs" can ridicule and mock as "REMFs".

We no longer have the luxury of flooding areas with troops with come-as-you-are-wars with a small 10 division/33 brigade U.S. Army. Cutting this into 48 mini-brigades doesn't provide enough combat power to linear fight like it was WW2 when we had 100 DIVISIONS. Wars will be non-linear, (NLB = Non-Linear Battlefield) meaning to get to a COG, we will have to bypass and fix enemy remnants, AND SUPPORT UNITS WILL NEED TO BE ARMORED AND ARMED in order to fight through to keep spearhead elements supplied. EVERYBODY WORKS AND EVERYBODY FIGHTS.

Therefore, we need Sustainment Forces (* get rid of snide remark "Support" name) that can FIGHT their way to and from bases to spearhead units going for the COG (s) holding the nation-state's resistance together.

Now let's superimpose a non-linear, nation-state war on top of terrain that is a combination of open and closed terrain types. If we fix both light and heavy units they can then contribute more to the fight by both 3D and 2D maneuver. All Army light units and Rangers will reorganize into the Airborne MTOE since they all fly by USAF aircraft to reach the foreign battlefield. One 3D Maneuver Light MTOE for all "Light" units. Numbered SF groups are exempted because they are organized into 12-man "A" teams not 9-man infantry squads, so its not feasible to mirror their MTOE to Army light units. These Light units would replace Humvee trucks in their "Delta" weapons companies with M113 Gavins light tracked AFVs so HHC, A, B, C can have armored mobility as needed. A 30mm autocannon used by AH-64 Apaches on a stabilized mount with thermal sights would give light infantry for the first time an ability to fight on-the-move and have a decided edge over foes who have to stop to shoot accurately. Light units already have scout units that can have all the latest RMA mental firepower gadgets imaginable without us having to lose 1/3 of our combat power. Their S&T units get XM1108 Gavin armored resupply tracks. For better 2D maneuver without road/trail dependant logistics, heavy units would also have their Sustainment units supplied with XM1108 Gavin armored tracks so they can FIGHT their way through to spearheads if their unpredictable cross-country maneuver axis is challenged by enemy remnants bypassed by the spearheads.

U.S. Army Today (2006)

Tracked & Cross-country Capable Truck & Road-bound
____________________________________________________________
62%-----------------------39%

How would a 21st Century 2D/3D Maneuver U.S. Army Look Like?

After Air-Mechanization Plan

Tracked & Cross-country Capable Truck & Road-bound
____________________________________________________________
99%--------------------------less than 1%

Maneuver + Firepower = The Best Army in the World to defend America

MANEUVER (physical) entire U.S. Army tracked & armored
|
|.................X Greatest Common Denominator Army = Maneuver + Firepower
|................/
|............../
|........... /
|........../
|......../
_________________FIREPOWER (mental)

Once we have the PHYSICAL ARMY SOUNDLY MOBILE IN ARMORED TRACKS we'd be spending money to simultaneously improve these platform's mental means to coordinate their actions and steer firepower better, but without the false utopia that we will "send a bullet and not a man" to win our nation's wars.

Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps: Send the 2D/3D Maneuver Forces home ASAP


Would YOU feel the area is safe walking by an infantryman "protector" who has to duck and cover every few feet to keep himself alive?

However, in the aftermath of taking down a regime or kill/capturing a sub-national group leader like a Bin Laden or a Noriega, Army forces composed of narcissistic egomaniacs on foot and in wheeled trucks under the age of 30 are constantly getting themselves ambushed which inspires ZERO confidance in the civilian populace that they can defend them since they can't even defend themselves from non-linear rebel attacks. They lash out in all directions and round up thousands of folks in midnight dragnets because they are simply too full of themselves to restore stability and not create a rebellion against us from their heavy-handed ways: www.combatreform.org/johnpaulvann.htm. Their garrison generals in garrison FOBs send them out on suicidal "presence patrols" as if its but a lawn care chore they can as former Iraqi commander General Ricardo Sanchez said; "go figure it out for themselves".

BATTLE AGAINST MAN: THE AFTERMATH, ORDER OR CHAOS?

If we had the Air-Mech Army organization, we would have kill/captured Saddam immediately and got Bin laden and his side-kick Z-man before they fled to Pakistan. We would have had a longer "honeymoon" period of support from the Iraqi people than the roughly 4 months we had. We need a Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) of more mature, non-narcissist combat troops to live in low-profile BATTLEBOXes not former dictator palaces and do security creating maneuvers (SCMs) in M113 Gavin tracks while immediately restoring TV, radio and telephone service to call back government workers to duty within 24 hours after the capital city falls to 2D/3D maneuver forces.



American Iraq War Casualties Report v1.0 (2003-2004)

FULL REPORT:

www.geocities.com/militaryincompetence/americaniraqwarcasualties.htm

SUMMARY:

KILLED

There have been 1,471 coalition troop deaths, 1,331 Americans killed, 75 Britons, seven Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 19 Italians, one Latvian, 16 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and nine Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of December 24, 2004. (Graphical breakdown of casualties). The list below is the names of the Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, Sailors and Coast Guardsmen whose families have been notified of their deaths by each country's government. At least 9,981 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. The Pentagon does not report the number of non-hostile wounded.

CAVEAT: USMC Headquarters does not admit to how its men were killed so many of these deaths are by roadside bombs and not the minimal assumption of bullets killing them which to their narcissistic minds appears more "heroic" because it implies the marine was fighting back compared to driving by a place on the road and getting blown up by the enemy pushing a button. 240 primarily USMC deaths are unclear accounting for 18.03% of all deaths. Therefore we will factor in only the deaths we know about---1, 091 known death causes.

Where did they die?

Ground vehicular deaths: 560
On foot or in tents/buildings deaths: 658
In aircraft deaths: 83

*Wheeled Cash Cows

There are over 130,000 troops in Iraq, while most drive in 12,000 Humvee trucks, the lucky ones move in about 500 M1 Abrams 70-ton heavy, M2 Bradley 33-ton medium and 1, 700 M113 Gavin 11-ton light tracked armored fighting vehicles. DoD/Army refuses to properly up-armor the tracked AFVs lest they be too successful. There are about 300 19-ton Stryker (LAV-3) and 100 14-ton LAV-1 (USMC) rubber-tired armored trucks in Iraq at any given time. Don't let the weights of these thinly skinned trucks fool you--its composed primarily of drivetrains, suspensions and oversized box that has to fit on top of this conglomeration of fragile moving parts and 8 wheels with 8 air-filled rubber tires--NOT armor protective thickness. Out of 15,000 ground vehicles, LAVs constitute less than 2% of all the ground vehicles in Iraq, yet they contributed to 4% of all Soldiers/marine deaths indicated by the * in the death narratives, almost twice the death rate ratio for their low numbers.

USMC LAV-1 dead 22
Army Stryker Dead 30
___________________________________________
52 out of 1, 372 dead = 3.9%

Despite slapping $ Billions of dollars of mental computer aids to try to skirt around enemy contacts and extra armor, Humvee and LAV trucks continue to roll-over and be ambushed due to their road bound nature, killing their Soldiers/marines. Weighed down by these extra desperate pounds focused on narrow tires and fragile suspension, drivetrains and steering mechanisms, the Humvees and LAVs are constantly breaking down requiring millions of dollars of on-scene civilian contractors to keep the battered trucks running. Armored cars/trucks are so costly even within their own units their support personnel ride in unarmored trucks, creating an unbalanced and vulnerable overall force structure. The idea of buying new thinly armored trucks as a means to "transform" the force--be it Army or marine---is simply tactically unsound and economically not feasible.

How did they die?

Small Arms Fire: 228/1091 = 20.89% of all deaths

44 killed because they were in inadequately protective wheeled HEMTT, Humvee, Stryker wheeled trucks

See death narratives coded S-1

9 killed because Army refuses to attach top and gunshields to M1 Abrams, M2 Bradleys, M113 Gavins

See death narratives coded S-2

142 killed because they were on foot or in flimsy above ground buildings/shacks without Interceptor Body Armor, weapons gunshields or ISO container "Battle Boxes"

See death narratives coded S-3

34 killed by despair/suicide due to blind obedience, snobby U.S. military culture that promotes inaction and days filled with busywork instead of hands-on weapons/vehicle training that could prevent accidental discharges See death nrratives coded S-4 or S-4

Roadside and Car Bombs/Land Mines 368/1091 = 33.7% of all deaths

344 killed because they were in inadequately protective wheeled HEMTT, Humvee, Stryker wheeled trucks or on foot

See death narratives coded B-5 and B-5

8 killed because Army refuses to attach extra underbelly/side armor to M113 Gavins

See death narratives coded B-6

10 killed because design flaw of Bradley has side armor with no spacing from hull, fuel tank in vehicle center too close to turret ammunition

See death narratives coded B-7

5 killed because Army refuses to attach extra underbelly armor to M1 Abrams, M2 Bradleys to counter the "threat from below" which has killed more Soldiers since Vietnam than any other cause

See death narratives coded B-8

Accidents, Medical: 249 deaths out of 1091 = 22.82% of all deaths

40 killed because wheeled vehicles especially those with make-shift armor are exceedingly top-heavy and overturn easy

See death narratives coded ACC-9

3 killed because Bradley with overly large, 2-man turret makes the vehicle top-heavy. See death narratives coded ACC-10

8 killed due to constant need of replacing fragile rubber tires on numerous trucks; also driving skill incompetence due to lack of training in garrison.

See death narratives coded ACC-11

61 killed due to crushing/fire by being in a weak wheeled truck, could have survived in a tracked AFV if properly restrained.

See death narratives coded ACC-12

10 killed due to being thrown or falling from from vehicle.

See death narratives coded ACC-13

13 killed goofing off in former dictator palaces and swimming in rivers.

See death narratives coded ACC-14

14 drowned because vehicle he was in does not float/swim (Humvees, Strykers etc.)

See death narratives coded ACC-15

14 died due to poor health in reserve/guard system that offers no medical or dental care to them prior to mobilization, on-scene defibrillators/medics not at troop training events, living areas

See death narratives coded ACC-16

In the U.S. military in garrison we live in denial of the fact that in modern land combat TROOPS WILL MOVE AROUND BY MOTOR VEHICLES (light narcissistic units are the worst about this still dreaming that they walk wherever they go), yet all vehicles are parked so as to reduce wear/tear and increase readiness numbers reported in to make officers look good. Consider Ward Cleaver the father in the old TV show "Leave it to Beaver" who kept his family car parked and when his sons/friends borrowed it they with their low driving skills/maturity got it stuck. Garrison U.S. military officials have same paternalistic, condescending keep-the-car-parked mentality towards subordinates. They'd rather keep Soldiers constantly sleepless and tired getting up before crack of dawn and then doing sports PT and mindless lawn care and paperwork than actual combat driving and outfitting vehicles with weaponry/armor. Drivers skills are negligible, when we actually "do it for real" in combat fatal accidents are sure to follow. Humvees don't even carry a spare tire! How are Soldiers going to train to raise a vehicle and change a tire shredded by gunfire/explosion or burned to the rims in combat if the vehicle itself is in a state of denial? The "run-flat will suffice" hubris plays into the overall wheeled Army laziness. Tow bars are never used to actually tow vehicles in training to avoid risk/danger (protect NCOERs/OERs) re: the Tillman Ranger debacle in Afghanistan. The wheeled Humvee/Stryker U.S. military is symptomatic of a phony outfit that is on full-time taxpayer payroll pretending to look warlike with SUVs painted in camouflage but unarmored and unarmed that doesn't want to fight which requires tracked, armored combat vehicles and taking risks in training to gain required driving skills. The Army brass hope the Air Force will bomb the enemy into submission and their subordinates can then roll in on rubber tired SUVs bringing along their transplanted garrison Army daily routine, maybe picking off a "few bad apples" with their rifle for an otherwise uneventful occupation while receiving hazardous duty pay and earning a combat patch.

Clearing supply roads is a "rear area" dirty job for underclass MPs who drove around in Humvees and do not physically occupy and cover every meter of the threatened roads---as infantry could do if assigned as pickets. Since Army linear war doctrine doesn't allow this, truck drivers are getting blasted to bits in Iraq/Afghanistan. In typical weak, co-dependant stay-in-you-lane behavior, those in the trucks simply try to speed as fast as they can to somehow evade a saboteur with a finger on a button that sets off an explosive charge at the speed of light. When accidents happen by enemy ambush or driver decisions/mistakes and collisions are magnified in these flimsy wheeled trucks at these excessive speeds, their bodies crush and fuel tanks burst causing fires and explosions killing the men inside. While tracked AFVs are more robust in collisions due to their armored bodies and should be the minimum transportation standard on the non-linear battlefield (NLB), the truth is that Soldiers cannot afford to ride in them while in seat belts and when they collide or turn over they are killed by being crushed or thrown from the sudden stop. We need to face this reality and develop a belt that has a safety cord at the rear that reels out so ther Soldier is not stuck to his seat so he can fight from his tracked AFV but stops reeling out in event of a sudden stop to secure the man from being thrown. We also need to invest in infantry and armor actually securing our supply roads even if its not "sexy" and ego gratifying for the combat arms troops to do so. Interface with foreign civilians should be done by a Stability Corps of older, more mature Soldiers not youngsters trying to prove they are bad asses. Overhead should be MANNED fixed-wing observation/attack aircraft that can actively investigate and immediately strafe/rocket rebels trying to lay bombs into the road. Without supplies we cannot exist.

Rocket-Propelled and Hand Grenades: 93/1091 = 8.52% of all deaths

55 killed because they were in soft-skin wheeled trucks easily penetrated or had to dodge RPG/AKM fires, did not have or failed to use vehicle smoke grenades to mask selves

See death narratives coded G-17

5 killed because they were in overly large AAV7s or Bradleys without required reactive armor tiles or top shields and/or didn't use vehicle smoke grenades or engine smoke to mask selves

See death narratives coded G-18

23 killed because they were on foot or in tents/flimsy buildings and blasted by RPG explosions

See death narratives coded G-19

3 killed because they did not know how to properly load/fire RPG rockets which have a booster charge that has to be fitted to rear of rocket before inserting into the launcher and firing

See death narratives coded G-20

Mortars/Large rocket bombardments: 65 deaths out of 1091 = 5.95% of all deaths

58 could have been saved had they been in dug-in ISO container "Battle Boxes" that can be moved around so we do not present a fixed target or live in former dictator palaces

See death narratives coded RM-21

7 should have been in a WAR mode in a tracked AFV for a short combat tour that can be moved not trying to bring all the comforts of home and garrison mentality for 12 month tours

See death narratives coded RM-22

Aircraft Shoot-Downs: 75 deaths out of 1091 = 6.87% of all deaths

47 killed in Army aircraft painted in wrong camouflage green in blue sky over desert tan Iraq (Army sin)

See death narratives coded A-23

16 killed in aircraft without adequate infared countermeasures in addition to being in wrong camo

See death narratives coded A-24

3 killed in aircraft without armor protection (USMC sin)

See death narratives coded A-25

3 killed flying in an unarmored fast jet instead of an armored A-10 to do CAS (USAF sin)

See death narratives coded A-26

6 killed in aged aircraft that should be replaced but can't because V-22 doesn't work

See death narratives coded A-27

Who could have been saved had they been better equipped?

CAVEAT: "At least" the following lives could have been saved because we do not know exact cause of death for the primarily USMC deaths described in vague terms. Actual lives that could have been saved would no doubt be much higher.

392 lives could have been saved If troops who died were mounted in amphibious M113 Gavin armored tracks instead of Humvee, Stryker trucks or walking on foot. If they had gunshields on their individual weapons, many face, neck and arm deaths/injuries could have been avoided, too.Details:

www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/armoredhmmwvsstrykersfail.htm
www.combatreform.org/hmmwv.htm
www.combatreform.org/gunshield.htm

S-1 + S-3 + ACC-9 + ACC-11 + ACC-12 + ACC-15 + G-17 + G-19 + RM-22 =

42 + 142 + 40 + 8 + 61 + 14 + 55 + 23 + 7 = 392

359 lives could have been saved if the troops who died had been in M113 Gavins tracks properly up-armored and gunshielded instead of vulnerable, armor-limited wheeled trucks or neglected M113 Gavins. Details:

www.combatreform.org/m113combat.htm

S-2 + B-5 + B-6 =

9 + 344 + 6 = 359

159 lives could have been saved if Soldiers were in dug-in, fortified ISO container "Battle Boxes" instead of flimsy tents, above ground buildings and occupying former Saddam palaces, drowning in swimming pools and generally easily targeted by enemies. Details:

www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxes.htm

S-3st + B-5St + G-19st + RM-21+ ACC-14 (code RED and St for Static Situation) =

36 + 38 + 14 + 58 + 13 = 159

20 lives could have been saved if M2 Bradleys had proper armor, external fuel tanks, and shields atop smaller 1-man autocannon turret. Details:

www.combateform.com/mechinfantry.htm

B-7 + B-8 + G-18 =

10 + 5 + 5 = 20

8 lives could have been saved if M1 Abrams had belly armor, top shields

B-8 + ACC-10 =

5 + 3 = 8

47 lives could have been saved if helicopters were in proper gray camouflage with IRCMs, and troops equipped with bail-out parachutes if flying a flight profile above 1000 meters to avoid enemy small arms fires. Details:

www.combatreform.org/escape.htm

9 lives could have been saved if proper armored A-10s were used over Iraq instead of giving the sexy fast fighter-bombers/pilots a chance to bomb civilians in buildings, and the failed V-22 cancelled and safer helicopers bought by USMC. Details:

www.combatreform.org/mas.htm
www.combatreform.org/aircommandos.htm
www.geocities.com/usarmyaviationdigest/mas.htm
www.combatreform.org/trail2aircraft.htm

14 lives could have been saved if reservists/guardsmen had annual medical/dental care prior to mobilization, and defibrillators/medics on-scene at troop living areas and physical training events. Details:

www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/realreadyreserve.htm
www.geocities.com/skedco2000/nlbmedicalthreats.htm

GRAND TOTAL OF LIVES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SAVED IF DoD/MILITARY WERE COMPETENT: 1,008

If 19th century U.S. military culture was not narcissistic and blind obedience based: 1, 046


The battle is really over which RMA Tofflerians controls the Pentagon--the "shaft of the spear". The Garrison Generals Who Do Not Want To Fight (GWDWTF)--they were promoted in a make-believe garrison world where no one is shooting at you that rewards doing less. Their demands for greater troop numbers was to hopefully put the Invasion of Iraq into the "too-hard-to-do" box. They like large troop numbers because they are narcissist egomaniacs who want more power and people to order around as their servants. The All Volunteer Force (AVF) is an attempt to bride weak, compliant young people at higher costs to do the GWDWTF's bidding with less adult resistance than having draftees in the ranks. Problem with AVF is you have to BRIBE the weak people into the service so you have less troops. Less troops in a corrupt, lemming blind obedience outfit works only if enemies are weak and small (Grenada, Panama etc.). Against a large enemy over a large geographic area there will not be enough troops in the AVF to clear the enemy so he is only to our front and create "safe", "rear" areas for the support underclass to flourish. To do non-linear warfare, you need a PROFESSIONAL ARMY of STRONG ADULT PEOPLE and the U.S. military of weak volunteers has been found wanting. America also needs to fire RMA GWDWT officers in order to win the so-called global war on terror as Lincoln had to to get the Shermans/Grants to win the Civil War. Bush is no Lincoln and has fired no one despite saying he holds Winston Churchill as a role model.

THE TIP OF THE SPEAR: RMA vs. 4GW vs. Reality

Being lazy and not wanting to fight over the years, the GWDWTFs have emasculated the force into being dependant upon firepower bombardment steered by them from remote command posts using mental gadgets to create a quasi-linear battlefield for a support underclass to flourish. The Rummy RMA Tofflerians like this lie of lightness because trimming down the force means less power for the GWDWTFs so they can run DoD. While we can and should trim the upper headquarters staffs and get more trigger puller "teeth" as Col Macgregor argues for MILITARY COMPETENCE, the GWDWTF resist this because it means less slots for their old men peers to act like tyrants to the gullible younger men, and of course more power for DoD civilians.

Since neither the Rummy RMA Tofflerians or the GWDWTFs want to employ MANEUVER (physical and mental) which requires empowerment and not being a snob, they think that after the enemy has been blasted to bits we can simply roll in on the same garrison peacetime military trucks/mentality and transplant garrison life to a foreign country to include BS morning formations, sports PT and mindless paperwork and procedures designed to make everyone look busy. The GWDWTF are used to ordering weak co-dependants around in garrison when they arrive in Iraq move into former dictator palaces and proceed to round up civilians and rough them up to find rebels which just create rebels when you try this stunt on adults. We need LESS TROOPS IN IRAQ OF HIGHER QUALITY IN ARMORED BATTLE GROUPS who respond as needed not occupy everywhere as a daily nuisance. The rebellion grows....

THE POINT OF THE SPEAR: Tracks vs. Wheels

The rebels discover the heavy handed American GWDWTFs surprisingly are lazy and snobby and have an underclass that drives around in vulnerable trucks so they proceed to blow them up with glee. While what we need is humility and actual QUALITATIVE reform by making everyone work and everyone fight by empowering them with tracked armored fighting vehicles and dropping the snobbiness, the GWDWTF call for more QUANTITY ie; more cannon fodder for them to throw into the jaws of high explosive (HE) death. They hate tracks because they represent warfighting empowerment for the younger and less ranked unwasheds and actually spending the majority of the time in garrison on combat and not the garrison egomaniac BS they really want to do. The tactically unsound Stryker rubber tired truck full of "mother may I?" top-down dictatorial gadgets represents how they want their egomaniac cake and eat it to (somehow be combat capable when simultaneously being combat incapable).

RMA vs. 4GW: IN DETAIL

To understand the direction the U.S. Army as a sub-part of DoD is headed in, you need to read two books, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and Alvin and Heidi Toffler's "War and Anti-War". If this doesn't alarm you, that reading sound wisdom like Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is not required to understand the current U.S. Army's technotactical course charted, it should alarm you. To understand the true 21st century non-linear, 4th Generation war (4GW) arena, you must read Martin Van Crevald's "The Transformation of War". Since you may not have read the above books, I will summarize.

Aside for the neo-fascist bitterness of Heinlein wanting a society where only military veterans can vote and hold elected office, Starship Troopers written in 1959 (!) is about Super-Infantry dropped from space like Paratroopers in capsules, that have power suits enabling situational awareness (SA) through shared communications and increased firepower and mobility by armor and a "jump" capability to fly short distances for 3D positional maneuver advantage.

The force structure is all teeth, no tail "everybody fights, everybody works" egalitarianism where subordinates are powered down with the ability to take the initiative. This action and sense of shared adventure is what attracts our best young men to join the U.S. Army, and is why Starship Troopers has been one of the most, if not THE most beloved book at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where idealism is still a virtue. The Army is well underway towards a primitive "Starship Trooper" with its digitized 21st Century Land Warrior program for the dismounted Soldiers of our Army.

Another book with the same emphasis on ground MANEUVER is T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War" which bitterly recounts how the air strike firepower mentality failed in the mud and mountains of Korea in 1950-53. Reading this in conjunction with Van Crevald's Transformation of War, you soon realize man is in the 4th Generation of War where the battle is over the MIND and loyalty of the people themselves. Whereas 1st generation warfare was hand-to-hand implements, the 2d machines as in firearms, the 3rd maneuver to collapse enemy organizational structures, the 4th generation strategem seeks the dominant will. In 4GW, ALL previous manifestations of war are still in play as possible courses of action, especially on Non-Linear Battlefields (NLBs) where we simply lack the mass numbers of men to create front and rear "lines".

How the "Do More With Less" Mantra Kills American Soldiers

In contrast, Alvin and Heidi Toffler's War and Anti-War (WAAW) is a very popular book with senior U.S. military leaders who ride around in staff cars a lot surrounded by yes-men staffs and spend little unscripted time with the troops and want everyone to stay in their social and battlefield "place". WAAW offers us an illusion of painless war because we are in an alleged enlightened "third wave" of civilization where computers (mentalism) replaces the physical (2d Wave) as "industrial age" and passe'. Computer mental gymnastics can create mythical "lines" and areas on the battlefield that have not been actually created in reality by troops, to keep everyone in their WWII-style place and role in the Army pecking order. Tofflerians actually think "we can do more with less", this mantra enables them to skimp on Army ground maneuver/protection via rubber-tired wheeled vehicles and use these savings to buy more computers and guided munitions that can be steered by them from a remote command post far from the enemy. Even though we still live in a world that has to grow food to eat (1st wave) and live in physical bodies requiring the physical resources of our earth (2nd wave), the Tofflers offer us a hubristically labeled "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) feast full of expensive, keep-the-defense-contractors-employed-and-politicians-elected stand-off firepower munitions to destroy mythical enemies who obligingly stand off from us for easy targeting; a fantasy that ironically was condemned as unsound, unworkable tactics and strategy in Starship Troopers even as far back as 1959! The enemy who doesn't have to abide by our battlefield "lines" frequently "votes" with his RPGs and road-side bombs exploding our wheeled vehicles and men as they operate in "safe" areas we have created in our minds. Its like the Bush Administration declaring the war was over and the "mission accomplished" in Iraq because they said so after their firepower bombardments had no more role to play to get the media limelight. 2, 700 dead and 22,000 wounded Soldiers later, its the ground maneuver Army that is no longer needed in the Tofflerian/RMA world-view that is keeping Iraq together at a stiff human price, not firepower munitions. No discussion of this in the media.

If you think we are making this up, read Jeff Steinberg says:

http://members.tripod.com/adm/ad/popup_source.shtml?member_name=american_almanac&path=toffler.htm&client_ip=205.188.116.5&ts=1085564780&ad_type=POPUP&category=ent&search_string=congressional+military+reform+caucus&id=35a005badc5b7a57603a9fbdd57a8b78

Toffler's 21st Century -- Strategic Insanity By Jeffrey Steinberg
Printed in the Executive Intelligence Review,

In April 1982, at the moment when Lyndon LaRouche was engaged in intense back-channel negotiations with the Soviets, on behalf of the Reagan White House, around what would later be adopted by the President as his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)--a true revolution in warfare--two of the most lunatic advocates of the post-industrial ``New Age,'' Alvin and Heidi Toffler, were being brought into the inner sanctums of the Pentagon, by some of the U.S. military's leading utopians.

At least in part, as the result of the Tofflers' collaboration with some senior officials of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the United States has increasingly adopted a military strategy that can best be described as ``Nietzschean warfare,'' in which all principles of morality, strategy, and mission are abandoned, in favor of a senseless, high-tech ``scorched-earth'' policy of destroying every bit of infrastructure, and tallying rates of civilian casualties near 80%.

Toffler's notion of warfare might best be described as the most advanced form of state-sponsored genocidal ``blind terrorism'' ever put forward as a military doctrine.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush's 1991 Persian Gulf War was hailed in the Tofflers' 1993 diatribe, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, as the greatest military victory in modern history. They referred to it, self-servingly, as the first war to occur between a ``Third Wave'' (i.e., post-industrial, ``information'') versus a ``Second Wave'' (i.e., industrial) society. This idea of warfare between post-industrial nations (i.e., the United States, western Europe nations, and Japan) and industrial and Third World pre-industrial nations, was favorably compared, in the Tofflers' book, to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ``benign'' imperial and colonial wars, conducted by the British and other European colonial powers against the populations of Africa and other corners of the underdeveloped world.

Already, advocates of ``air war'' and other utopian war-fighting doctrines are championing the 78-day aerial bombardment of Serbia and Kosovo as proof that the ``era of air power'' has finally arrived. It was only a matter of time, these ``Third Wave air power'' fanatics argue, until the proper amount of ``information-intensive'' gadgetry could be assembled, to enable warfare to be a bloodless, casualty-less affair--for the winning side.

- The new triad -

By their own accounts in War and Anti-War, Alvin and Heidi Toffler were approached, in April 1982, by Gen. Don Morelli, who, along with Gen. Donn A. Starry, was working on an overhaul of U.S. military doctrine, drawing heavily from the Tofflers' 1980 book, The Third Wave. That book set forth the idea that industrial civilization was obsolete, and that large-scale production could be replaced by ``information.'' The Tofflers received a series of detailed briefings from Morelli, Starry, and others, and, eventually, a decade later, wrote their book-length venture into the world of ``operations research,'' ``future war,'' and ``AirLand Battle 2000.''

In that book, they put forward the idea of a new strategic ``triad'' for global warfare below the threshold of thermonuclear extinction. In what they looked forward to as a three-way ``clash of civilizations'' among agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial societies, the Tofflers argued that ``Third Wave'' warfare would be successfully fought through the combined deployment of ``niche'' special forces units, overwhelming use of ``information-driven'' air power, and ``information warfare''--the use of advanced electronic systems, computer viruses, non-lethal weapons, and other wunderwaffen to disrupt the enemy's command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (``C4I'').

Much of this grab-bag of lame-brain toys and tactics was codified in the Pentagon's mid-1980s ``AirLand Battle 2000.'' If there is any doubt that the Tofflers' kookery has penetrated deeper into government than merely through the thick skulls of Newt Gingrich and Al Gore, both of whom figured prominently in the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, then just consider the recent remarks by Defense Secretary William Cohen.

Speking to the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, at the University of Georgia on April 28, Cohen said that he had just been reading the Tofflers' War and Anti-War, and that this was ``must'' reading for strategists. He returned to the subject of the Tofflers' ideas three times during the discussion period.

The Tofflers themselves, of course, are little more than pop-cult scribblers who take the insane ``paradigm shift'' ideas, generated by far more serious monsters from the Tavistock Institute, the Frankfurt School, and their many offshoots and fronts, and put them into barely readable prose, suitably byte-sized for an audience of ``New Age'' true-believers. The vastly bigger problem is that the U.S. military is now teeming with just such ``New Age'' policy wonks, with hundreds of billions of dollars in defense budget money at their disposal, and the increasingly frequent opportunity to play their ``Nietzschean'' war games against living and breathing human targets--most recently in the Balkans and Iraq, but, perhaps, coming soon to your neighborhood.

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The Executive Intelligence Review. It is made available here with the permission of The Executive Intelligence Review. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The Executive Intelligence Review

However, the fact that even the recent ground victory over the Iraqi nation-state army was done primarily by ground MANEUVER not firepower has not fazed the RMA/Tofflerians; they simply ignore by convenient computer mouse-click and public affairs officer (PAO) "spin" this 99.9% reality and say that we need to spend more money on expensive mentally steered precision guided munitions (PGMs)! PGMs launched from sexy, expensive aircraft, (soon unmanned ones) are all designs of civilian DoD technowonks who never served a day in a uniform and Generals who want to fight wars bureaucratically from the top-down. See the DoD news story below. Never mind that it was several divisions worth of Army and marine troops marching on Baghdad with some flying in from the north is what compelled the Iraqi regime to collapse---the Tofflerians don't want any money going to these big units, they want ALL DoD monies poured into their gold-plated munitions which they can increase their personal budgetary power and prospects for post retirement employment with a defense contractor. The Toffler's "snake oil" is just what risk-averse politicians, wannabe civilian mandarin technowonks and power-hungry generals would want: a force that doesn't employ large terrain-controlling maneuver which requires trusting lots of young men on the scene making decisions, but a top-down bombardment of the enemy using digital mental means fired from small groups of sexy but expendable special forces teams or small units populated by weak, co-dependants in emasculated VEHICLES like the fragile rubber-tired Lav3stryker armored car and the proposed Future Combat System (FCS) for the mounted Soldiers of our Army to get into the mouse-clicking firepower act. The recent Army unclassified report from the war phase in Iraq warns us:

"No degree of IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield) could compensate, alert, or prepare any U.S. force for the massive numbers of RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) stored in houses, shacks, lockers, and cars. The only way to counter RPGs fired from covered and concealed positions was to absorb the hit, identify the source of the fire, and respond with massive overwhelming firepower.

Tanks and Bradleys repeatedly sustained hits from RPG's and ground directed anti-aircraft fire that dismounted infantrymen, HMMWVs and other light skinned vehicles could not sustain. Bradleys successfully protected the infantrymen inside while at the same time delivering a massive volume of fire against dismounted enemy, trucks, tanks, and armored vehicles. The firepower and shock generated by tanks and Bradleys could never have been matched by dismounted infantry. Without the use of these systems initially, the enemy would have caused many more casualties."

Whereas Heinlein's Starship Troopers have stand-off firepower means on their power suits (but no ground vehicles to more efficiently do this--a flaw in the book) they never assume that these things replace physical ground maneuver which the "Mobile Infantry" does to root out dug-in enemies impervious to even precision, nuclear firepower.

That firepower-bombardment is an old failed bromide, does not seem to faze those leaders in the Army who want to "unmanned vehicle" the human Soldier out of combat entirely. While we could name some names of those who prescribe to the Tofflerian hubris, it will do no good to entrench them any further than even their own firepower could root them out. The Army's current Tofflerian bombard & occupy scheme is nothing more than the mentality of the Air Force strategic bombers in "Army green". What is happening is while our troops are dying and being maimed in Iraq, back in the safety of the Pentagon, the generals are spending the majority of our money on their pre-war on terror projects excused away because the Iraq counter-insurgency operation is an "exception", real wars will need their expensive war toys like V-22s, F-22s all tied together by computers for their top-down micro-management and the like. Even the U.S. Army War college admits network-centric warfare is a failure in Iraq. Don't be surprised that in the next round of base closings that Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania suddenly gets eliminated to shut down the voices of reason that sometimes speak from there.

U.S. Army War College 15th Annual Strategy Conference: Winning the War by Winning the Peace: Strategy for Conflict and Post-Conflict in the 21st Century

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS:

Many of our problems in Iraq spring from our inability to follow our own doctrine, to learn from past experiences, and to avoid making uninformed decisions out of theater. The Global War on Terrorism is here to stay. Consequently, we will need to increase the size of our ground forces. We also need to reorganize at the national level to fight it effectively. Although the Defense budget will remain adequate, the Federal budget deficit and increasing personnel costs (including more ground end strength) will force hard choices. As a result several favorite programs in all the services may be scaled back.

Iraq Reconstruction:

Pre-conflict reconstruction planning was done pretty well but lacked integration. Four major concerns were oil well fires, massive refugee flows due to chemical warfare, food shortages, and epidemics. None of these happened. Critical contracts were delayed because they could not be written before the conflict began and the bureaucracy slowed moving money to get contracts in place. In the future we need a rolling pot of money to get contracts in place quickly. From the beginning lack of security made it difficult for the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (OHRA) to do its mission.

Because the U.S. took out the entire Iraqi State and all its authorities, ministries had to be totally reconstituted from top to bottom. Wartime destruction of the communications grid was a major challenge. Iraqi infrastructure had not been maintained for decades but the country has the resources and skills to do well if the insurgency can be stabilized. The U.S. track record of walking away from difficult commitments has hampered our ability to get the Iraqis to cooperate.

Five essential actions:

o Destroy and kill the insurgents
o Reestablish the Iraqi regular army
o Stimulate the economy
o Create a system to share oil revenues
o Establish a government of federated entities (the hard part)

The U.S. did a horrible job of talking to the Iraqi people and is still not doing it well. We need a world class strategic communications capability that can work in other cultures and get the message out. Future reconstruction efforts must belong to the Combatant Commander and he needs an interagency group that works for him to do it. Three poor decisions made .out of theater in mid-May caused things to turn against the U.S.

o Disbanding the Iraqi army
o De-Baathification down to 5-6 levels
o Eliminating the group of Iraqi expatriates that had been created to talk to the Iraqi people.

Reconstruction planning started much later than it should have. George C. Marshall began planning for post-World War II reconstruction three years before the end of the War.

Grand Strategy for the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT):

Because the GWOT is unbounded, unilateral, and preemptive, it represents strategic overreach by the U.S. On, balance globalization tends to enhance and entrench U.S. power. The future is very favorable for the U.S. relative to other states. Future strategy should leverage U.S. ability to change international institutions and reshape the world order in our interests. We need to get our grand strategy right. We're using a lot of resources but not linked to grand strategy. The main imperative of our strategy must be establishing legitimate and effective government in large parts of the world that lack it. Many of our challenges are symptomatic of the good governance deficit, especially in the Islamic world.

We need to replace the National Security Act of 1947 with something that integrates all elements of national power to meet our current and future challenges. 1814, 1941, and 2001 all reflect fundamental changes in threats to the U.S. that drove major changes in U.S. grand strategy. 9/11 was a watershed event that caused us to truly recognize the threat posed by radical Islam and WMD and shifted our balance of risk equation. The apocalyptic nihilism of Islamic fundamentalists makes deterrence impossible. Present institutions (national and international) can't solve our post 9/11 problems. The war on radical Islamic fundamentalist terror will be long, costly, and unavoidable.

Fiscal and Political Sustainability:

Outlook for the U.S. economy is good but the budget is worrisome if current policies on taxes and spending continue. We can afford a strong defense but can't do it on borrowed money. The U.S. economy is resilient to shock. The past recession resulted from inevitable collapse of the '90's boom. 9/11 had minor impact. The deficit is currently high at 4.5% of GDP. This is not an immediate problem but we're on track to sustain large deficits for 10 years. Then the situation worsens dramatically due to boomers' entitlements. Interest rates are expected to increase one or two percent, more, if the U.S. becomes unable to borrow abroad. One third of U.S. debt is foreign held; thus, loss of confidence in the dollar could be a real problem. The U.S. will be forced to make hard choices on the revenue side also. Revenues are now at 16% of GDP, a historic low. Older and newer military equipment is more expensive to operate. The military medical budget grows faster than everything else. Cost estimates for DD (X) and LHAR are way under what costs will really be.

Army is in the worse shape for risk. Historically huge cost risk (70%) is driven by FCS. Defense spending will decline as a percentage of the Federal budget and the economy. Over time there will not be seven- percent increase per year in Defense. Enormous deficits will cause tough choices in Defense. Neither Kerry nor Bush is in competition for fiscal responsibility. Defense won't have to tighten its belt for the next one to two years. The national political center of gravity is not to cut defense. Kerry is hugging Bush on defense but might increase Army end strength by 40,000 (to 520,000). $500 to $600B deficits are not sustainable. The speaker argued for a 50,000 increase in Army end strength to give the Army some breathing room on personnel tempo. To generate savings of two times the increase in personnel costs, he argued for the following changes in programs:

o FCS. Keep in R&D for five more years

o F-22.makes sense to buy some against the future Chinese threat but don't need as many as planned. Buy more/refurbish F-15Cs.

o V-22. Survivability problems. Use as a prototype and SOF platform. Buy 50 only.

o JSF.2500 manned aircraft makes no sense. Buy several hundred VSTOL models, cancel Navy buy. Buy 1000 or fewer total. Buy more/refurbish F-15Cs.

o DD(X).Navy costing at only half what program will really come in at. Hull design is unseaworthy. A lot of other platforms can strike shore targets; thus, DD(X) is duplicative.

o Nuclear Weapons. We need only a few hundred. Modest force of only 1000 warheads is adequate.

o Virginia Class Submarines do more overseas basing of other ships. Two crises, Iraq and the economic future, don't permit easy, old-fashioned solutions. In two years the nation's politics will cause hard choices in Defense. The GWOT hasn't had a major effect on Defense spending. The increase from $300B to $400B in the defense budget is mostly a reflection of increased compensation, R&D for transformation, the end of the procurement holiday., and rising O&M costs (some for increased force protection).

o DD(X) and LCS: the Navy needs more, smaller combatants but the question is in what numbers with what capability. You can make an argument for DD(X) but it's harder to argue for 24.

Some plausible future scenarios, most of which are Army intensive missions:

o U.S. assistance to Musharraf in Pakistan

o U.S. intervention to prevent a nuclear war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir

o Conflict with Iran over the Straits of Hormuz

o China-Taiwan

o Peacekeeping operations in Indonesia, the Philippines, or the Congo

Insurgency and Terrorism:

Insurgency is the only way weak actors can try to affect the global system. Radical Islam provides a powerful critique of the existing order but can't generate a successful alternative state. U.S. will have to choose between a strategy of victory or management of terrorism.

Key determinants of success (in Iraq and elsewhere) are the legitimacy of a new government and the effectiveness of economic reform. We are now seeing a global insurgency because the U.S. dominates and enforces global order. The good news is that it is based on a narrow, negative theology and ideology. Insurgency was the most prevalent form of conflict in the 20th century and probably will remain so in the 21st. Although there are some changes (IO, weapons, etc), the causes and requirements for combating them remain the same.

Cordon and search approaches have never worked well. Sometimes the best you can do it to restore law and order and reduce violence to acceptable levels. Formulating a counterinsurgency strategy requires recognition of the nature of the enemy. Is Al Qaeda a snake that can be beheaded or a virulent mold? Why no small-scale Al Qaeda attacks since 9/11? Even small operations require infrastructure. After 9/11 the U.S. was seen as too hostile an environment; thus, terrorists may be waiting for a better opportunity. Since 9/11 there have been 25-30 attacks overseas.

Phase IV Operations

Army doctrine phases operations as follows:

o I. Deter/Engage
o II. Seize Initiative
o III. Decisive Operations
o IV. Reconstruction

Secure
Stabilize
Build institutions
Hand over/redeploy

We historically plan for IV when we do III. Can no longer do that. Planning must be simultaneous.

In Iraq all the Iraq experts were put on phase III planning. U.S. military doesn't like doing phase IV but it's the only institution that can do it. If it can, the Army follows the Von Moltke model of only being engaged in decisive combat, then allowing the civilian leaders to take charge of the aftermath. Policy goals cannot be achieved without long-term Army commitment. Combatant Commanders should control reconstruction with civilian deputies and an interagency staff.

U.S. has done a reconstruction operation every two years since 1990 but each one overwhelms our security apparatus. We need to improve the capabilities of other agencies or the military will continue to bear most of the load. However, civilian agencies have no planning capability, no lead agency, no way to move money quickly, and no stand-by capability. Afghanistan has one peacekeeper per 1000 population needs 20. Iraq would require 500,000 troops at that level. In Iraq the CPA is vastly understaffed and confined to Baghdad. It's now on its fifth plan for transition to Iraqi rules. Attempts to privatize reconstruction have run into problems because the U.S. doesn't have its act together on contracting. Has led to serious problems, like training and equipping Iraqi security forces.

The U.N. has much to offer in reconstruction operations

o Unique legal authority
o Unique moral authority
o Unique global membership to generate unique combinations of forces. In the Congo, 50 percent of the U.N. officers are African, greatly enhancing the UN's ability to operate there. [The Congo was Africa's World War.3.5 million dead, 17 foreign armies fighting there.]
o Burdensharing

Democratization

The Arab-Israeli conflict is the central problem in the Middle East. The issue of political identify in the Arab world was never resolved. Iraq is the most egregious example. An election putting one ethnic group in power could lead to civil war, as in Algeria. The only solution elsewhere in the Arab world has been liberalized autocracy. In Iraq, if the follow-on Iraqi government doesn't have a degree of legitimacy, it will be unable to get any public support to do anything else.

You must first have a state to have democracy. The state must have a monopoly on the means of violence; thus, security is a preeminent requirement. Sadr's Mahdi Army has committed numerous acts of terrorism to cow its opponents through fear.

Implications for U.S. Force Structure:

We need to determine what the primary mission of the U.S. military is before we make changes to force structure. The U.S. military is a Western world asset. Most European forces fail the test of usability.

We clearly need more ground power. It matters. Close combat capability is critical. One of the shortcomings of force transformation is that it ignores the uncertainty of war and tries to reduce combat to a targeting drill. Net Centric Warfare (NCW) doesn't work in counter-insurgency. Today, the focus of all four services is on land. The enemy can use our networked awareness to make us deceive ourselves. Many low-tech opponents present no key nodes to attack. Training and education of military and other agency leaders is essential for effective counter-insurgency. We need to learn from past conflicts, particularly Vietnam.

As you can see, when you take away the constant hue and cry for better pay/benefits, the real crisis in the U.S. Army is over its basic identity and future driven by two different schools of thought in a vacuum of classical military understanding. Adding to this mess (which resembles a bad Star Trek TV episode but so far without a happy ending) are fools in the marine camp who think all we need is a retro-bonehead approach to war with a more heroic, romantic, light, egocentric foot-infantry with a lot of trash-talk about combined action platoons quasi-emulating NVA/VC tactics but without combining arms that the latter usually tried to do. Light infantry romantics seduce some 4GW reformers because their fantasies offer cheap forces on foot and in trucks, that fail when actually tried in the real world fail against enemies with more men with AKMs and RPGs than our Zero population growth west could ever match. The debacle in Fallujah where light marines in trucks and on foot have been easily blasted and killed by the enemy is proof that the USMC mentality be it "3-block" establishment trash-talk or John Poole's light infantry panaceas are miserable failures. Don't be talking about the second and third blocks of a city when marines can't even control the block in front of them. Clearly we, the reformers that put people first---think we need "Starship Troopers" with some robust tracked armored fighting vehicles to FIGHT THE ENEMY FROM SUPERIORITY. Such TAFVs carry both direct and indirect firepower far superior to the enemy's legions of foot-mobile troops (since we are a long way off from Heinlein's power suits carrying such firepower), and can deploy by both fixed and rotary-wing aircraft (we are a long way from boot rockets) to support our troopers when they drop in on the enemy to take the ground away from him. Manifestations of these ideas can be found in retired General David Grange's Air-Mech-Strike, Colonel Douglas MacGregor's Long Range Strike Group and some RAND futurists who pay attention to the operational art and do not buy into technohubris "hook, line and sinker". Its not clear where the Rumsfield/Marshall DoD "vision" exactly stands--if its firepower & maneuver balanced or just throws maneuver a verbal attaboy "bone" while funding goes to munitions as the physical means to ground maneuver atrophy and die by defacto neglect. Indications are that the Tofflers and not the troops would be pleased. We should trashcan the Tofflers and their mentality, the Tofflers never served a day in uniform---whose ideas would have us surrender maneuver and empowering men using the fear of budgetary/political consequences over casualties as justifications to do less when getting the job done well through excellent maneuver reduces casualties because we care about our Soldiers as people. The Tofflerian mandarins gut the Army of tracked armored vehicles in favor of expensive guided bombs thinking all war is is blowing things up. When they are done blowing things up, it falls upon the neglected Army to actually defeat the enemy nation-state army, mop-up enemy resistance and rebuild the country. However, the Tofflerian mental gymnastics that with computers "we can do more with less" physical men and means makes the Army fatally vulnerable in allegedly cost-cutting rubber-tired wheeled vehicles, creating preventable casualties that the Tofflerians then use as proof that we need to spend more money on firepower bombardment. The Tofflerians set the Army up for failure. DoD and the Army acts like a 21st century version of the 1960s MacNamara and the "wiz kids" all over again; trying to fight wars like it was a Ford motor company CEO board meeting where profit margins can be increased by skimping on safety features on the Pinto. A GOOD mobile infantry like Heinlein proposes in air-transportable armored vehicles optimized for either heavy 2D maneuver or lighter 3D "leaps" will be able to attain decisive results of enemy collapse not possible by just firepower-bombardment, regardless of how well executed; when applied to sound military concepts like Sun Tzu's extraordinary/ordinary force and Liddell-Hart's "Indirect Approach" and past 2D/3D warfare combinations employed by Generals Patton (both of them), MacArthur and the Israeli Defense Force. A good tracked mobile, protected infantry can shrug off enemy non-linear bomb ambushes and not fire wildly into innocent civilians making them into new recruits for the anti-American guerrilla movement.

Another disturbing reality in the Iraq urban guerrilla war is the huge number of casualties compared to dead in contrast to other wars where blast effects have been absorbed by soft rural terrain. Wounded are coming at a ratio of 8 for every dead; and these are people who are horribly disfigured with amputated limbs. ALL OF THIS IS THE RESULT OF THE STUPID U.S. LIGHT INFANTRY IN TRUCKS AND ON FOOT WE ARE JUST OCCUPYING MENTALITY that offers our Soldiers unprotected to enemy bombs and RPGs going off, blast effects magnified by urban terrain. On the NLB you cannot afford to be wounded in the first place. WE MUST PUT ALL OF OUR ARMY IN AT THE VERY LEAST LIGHT TRACKED AFVs A-S-A-P.

Senior Army Leaders lusting for linear WWII battles and everyone-stays-in-their-social-place?

Colonel Douglas MacGregor's recent appearance on the Lehrer News Hour

www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june04/army_1-13.html#

calling for a reorganized Army is not just a "nice-to-have"; the failure of our Army to have robust and self-sufficient units like he proposes is costing us lives in Iraq. In the minds of too many Army officials, Tofflerian computer graphics have painted a mythical arena where wheeled trucks and armored cars can shuttle men and supplies forward to "the edge" of a linear battlefield much like Belton Cooper describes took place in WWII Europe in his book, Deathtraps. Cooper explains how allied air supremacy was so great that trucks were driven end-to-end for miles with their headlights on to get superior numbers and mass on the enemy to overwhelm him. When its pointed out today that the 8-wheeled Stryker armored car is extremely vulnerable to RPGs, the computerized Army officials excuse this fatal flaw away by declaring "its not a combat vehicle, it will just shuttle men to the forward edge of the battlefield".

This is not 1944, its 2004.

What "forward edge" of the battlefield are Army officials talking about?

Then there is the real, non-linear battlefield taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army does not have 100 Divisions to fully control large areas and clear out all enemies to make "safe", "rear" areas for an underclass of support troops to do the dirty work for the upper social class of combat arms Soldiers on the "front lines". The Army has just 10 active-duty divisions, spread thinly around the world in Korea, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq yet is commanded by thousands of people in several layers of bureaucracy yet wonders why simple things like enough body armor reaches the troops. In still-not-pacified Iraq/Afghanistan, the enemy is all around, and there are no "front" lines for Army troops to ride up to on the cheap in rubber-tired trucks, dismount and fight the enemy less-than-"even" M16 vs. AK47/RPG/IED but hope to overwhelm him by superior numbers and "information" about the enemy's location and condition. The only "Forward Line of Troops" (FLOT) is wherever your units are and these are small FLOT circles that have only local control possibilities not FLOT lines firmly controlling large areas of terrain. Tofflerian/RMA hubris tries to foist this lie that with computers units that can only control FLOT circles can somehow physically control large areas with less troops to create FLOT lines and pacified areas ie; recreate WWII linear battlefields. Reality dictates that Army units must be able to--fight in all directions at any time---to control FLOT circles. Yet, why doesn't the Army use light tracked AFVs when the preponderance of evidence demands they must be used for successful 2D/3D maneuver war and SASO operations?

The Army in love with computer mental gymnastics espoused by Alvin and Heidi Tofffler, has forgotten there is a huge difference between knowing and being able to physically DO something about it. Steering firepower by mouse-clicks has not worked and you would think that the Army doing the actual physical ground maneuver would know this better than anyone else in DoD. Instead, Army officials want to "homogenize" the Army into all-wheeled truck formations to showboat their Tofflerian computers that through their own egomaniac general officer pseudo-genius we can "do more with less". They want emasculated wheeled platforms to draw attention to their C4ISR; what they think is their soley unique Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) contribution to the "history of warfare". Splice C4ISR mental means to physically robust track vehicles (common sense keep the good physical strengths you have and ADD mental strengths) but this would risk the tracks getting some or even all of the attention for their fire & maneuver dominance--which is actually more important in the real world we live in than the C4ISR. We can't have the tracked vehicles getting the spotlight, they are supposed to be "2d wave" in the Tofflerian timeline. Furthermore, the current crop of Army general officers didn't "create" tracked vehicles--thus, they can't as easily take credit for someone else's work. Rubber-tired wheeled-vehicles-with-computers are symbols of general officer egotism that through their self-acclaimed brilliance we can now skimp on our Soldier's physical armor protection, firepower and mobility costs and buy even more expensive gadgets/munitions. Nevermind, that the wheeled Stryker armored car costs $53/mile to operate and the light tracked M113 Gavin costs $3/mile to operate; the Army's generals THINK they are saving money with rubber-tired vehicles, it looks different and they can then take personal credit for changing, ehh "transforming the Army". As long as the true cost figures of the heavily overweight and road-bound wheeled vehicles never becomes widely known public knowledge, the lies of "doing more with less" can continue.

However, Army Soldiers have not forgotten about real reality: they are being killed/maimed in the un or weakly-armored wheeled vehicles that are traveling in predictable, linear paths along roads/trails that are not safe and clear of the actual enemy living on the actual planet earth. The "shock and awe" aircraft firepower bombardment didn't kill Saddam; ground troop MANEUVER got him months afterwards. Yet DoD press releases constantly proclaim the victories brought to you by precision guided munitions and computer "situational awareness": Tofflerian spin all the way.

Where is the physical "Can-Do" of the WWII Generation?

Non-linear warfare requires vehicles that can go anywhere not be restricted to linear roads/trails. Cooper warns us repeatedly that the Army's M4 Sherman 33-ton medium tanks needed wider tracks in order to go cross-country at will to out-maneuver the Germans. Even in WWII, the so-called "rear" areas populated by rubber-tired trucks moving along roads/trails were pummeled with enemy artillery fire which shredded and burned their tires. Cooper doesn't even refer to wheeled vehicles as combat vehicles. Yet today's Army officials are crazy about putting the ENTIRE ARMY ON RUBBER-TIRED WHEELS steered around a make-believe linear battlefield that exists only in their minds and computer screens. If wheeled vehicles didn't physically work in WWII, why are we trying in the even-more lethal 21st century send them with our men inside into "near" combat areas? What do we do when the enemy does not conform to our computer-generated "lines" and "areas" and attacks the not-ready-for-combat wheeled vehicles with our men packed inside?

Cooper describes how welders worked around the clock in 30 days to add armor patches around the ammunition holding areas of an entire armored division's 232 x M4 Sherman tanks when it was discovered they were vulnerable to enemy gunfire. Today, Army Soldiers are dying and being maimed in wheeled vehicles and all the Army says it can do is two years from now "up-armor" 3-ton HMMWV into 6-ton HMMWV trucks from the factory at great cost that will NEVER be RPG-resistant and cannot even go cross-country without getting stuck. In stark contrast, the Army today owns over 13,000 M113 Gavin 11-ton light tracked armored fighting vehicles with 1.5 to 1.75 inch thick armored walls, with most sitting in storage while Army Soldiers are driving around Iraq in the thin-skinned wheeled trucks getting blown up, shot-up and incinerated. Only the Army's heavy divisions have M113 Gavin light tracked AFVs, not the light divisions that desperately need them. But the Army refuses to take even a few hundred M113 Gavins and quickly add RPG-resistant side, underbelly landmine, and upper gunshield armor as Belton Cooper's generation would have done if they had these vehicles available in great numbers to adapt and overcome the enemy.

Why?

Its all about General Officer Ego: wheels look like we are "doing more with less" thanks to their "genius"

NEW! Analysis of General Schoomaker's expansion of the Army into 48 "mini-brigade units of action" (BUAs): transformation or "Pentomic Army all over again?

www.geocities.com/pentomicarmyagain

The Army's current generals have "other plans" for its future; a Tofflerian plan where weak people ride in weak vehicles in a make-believe linear battlefield that does not exist except in the linear, bureaucratic minds of several layers of bureaucracy commanded by senior Army officials who do not have to get real results in reality but can "spin" and "sound bite" lies to Congress and the American people through their PAOs. Buying new wheeled vehicles means easy power, prestige and money for the Army and defense contractors who will hire the Army officials after they leave the service. Never mind that if the Army upgraded its light tracked AFVs, for the same money that only buys a handful of armored car brigades it could TRANSFORM THE ENTIRE ARMY to new capabilities, gaining the respect of Congress, the American people, keeping moral faith with our Soldiers and sending a message to our enemies that America's Army is ready-to-fight.

However, upgrading tracked vehicles that already exist requires HUMILITY--admitting that someone from gulp--the past---actually did something right and to build on that. It would take being ego-less and respecting others, a two-way street when the truth is Army leaders want a 1-way street where you respect them and their "visions". You are a peon, what do you know? If the Army wanted to ACTUALLY do more with less, not just appear that way it would upgrade its tracked AFVs and improve the entire Army with new capabilities. Form should follow function. Why doesn't the Army follow Assistant Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz's advice to "think about old things in new ways that make sense."?

The current crop of Army officials are wrong and our Army needs to be reformed to fight non-linear warfare

The 4GW, non-linear battlefield (NLB) requires strong people in strong vehicles. The days of an upper class "fighting" Army and a lower class "Support" Army commanded by vast staff bureaucracies in some sort of rear area are over. Army Chief of Staff General Schoomaker has directed every Soldier be a rifleman, a combatant. But he must go farther than this and provide every Soldier a vehicle suitable for non-linear battle; you cannot walk everywhere---you will need a motor vehicle and this means tracks not trucks. We have the M113 light tracks to do this, we just need the will to face real non-linear reality and to do it as the WWII generation would if they were in our shoes today. The can-do IDF has up-armored their M113 Gavins and they don't lose a man a day in combat operations like we are. We need to put the mission and the men before general officer transformational glory-seeking egos.

Tracked vehicles are non-linear combat vehicles because their tracks enable them to go off roads/trails, cross-country for two-dimensional maneuver. The best non-linear combat vehicle for the walking infantry is a LIGHT tracked AFV like the 11-ton M113 Gavin because it can go anywhere the infantry can, so it has more firepower from the vehicle, staying power supplies of ammunition, food and water than can be carried on a Soldier's back. Instead of fighting enemies at a disadvantage, its our men behind M113 armored gunshields firing Heavy Machine Gun-Disposable Rockets-M16s vs. the enemy on foot with AK47s/RPGs/IEDs. When our infantry dismounts, it has more ammunition because the M113 Gavin is nearby not left far away at a road/trail junction as a wheeled vehicle should be. Enemy fires at its tracks will not mobility kill the M113 as it would shred and set fire to the wheeled vehicle's rubber tires.

Light tracked AFVs due to their compact size and light weight can be flown by fixed-wing aircraft (dropped by cargo parachutes) and helicopters into blocking positions anywhere on the non-linear battlefield to capture/kill Saddams and Bin Ladens before they escape a 2D maneuver force coming at them on the ground. These 3D air-maneuvers are not possible in overweight 19-21 Stryker and the planned 23-ton Future Combat System (FCS) wheeled armored cars because they exceed the C-130's 17-ton and the CH-47D/F's 11-ton payload limits. Larger C-17 jet transports could transport the heavier wheeled vehicles or better yet the more capable medium M2 Bradley and M1 Abrams heavy tracked AFVs by airlanding onto a runway; but if we are going to lose time seizing a runway from the enemy, the enemy will likely escape as Saddam did from Baghdad when the 173rd Airborne Brigade landed in the north.

The Army's current crop of officials oppose strong people in strong tracked vehicles because these would be units that would not be on a "short leash" to several layers of higher headquarters to micromanage but could take computer awareness and ACT ON IT because they would have the physical means to do so. On the fluid, rapidly changing, non-linear battlefield this is what our Army needs to get the Bin Ladens and get the Saddams earlier so we don't suffer daily casualties in a plodding, predictable linear campaign (easily resisted by the enemy) to hunt them down after they went into hiding.

Its time the American Congress assert civilian control over the military and get involved with the future direction of its Army. It must not stand on the sidelines as our Army self-destructs in an ill-conceived all-wheeled vehicle make-over. Congress should direct the Army to upgrade its M113 Gavins with the computers they crave, but with actual physical superiority features like RPG-resistant armor, band-tracks, hybrid-electric drive for 600 mile range and stealth operation, so that THE ENTIRE ARMY IS TRANSFORMED IMMEDIATELY as the WWII generation would, we are talking days and weeks here not months and years. America's Army is at war now and it needs more upgraded M113 Gavin light tracked AFVs in the non-linear fight not trucks. Congress should begin by creating units along Colonel MacGregor's designs and get rid of staff bureaucracies so they are manned by Soldiers not paper-pushers.

If our Army would expand its future identity and vision to include books written by the likes of sound, humility-driven, realistic war futurists like Sun Tzu, Liddell-Hart, Bolger, Leonhard, Antal, Vandegriff, Grange, MacGregor, Jarnot, Lind, Johnson in a required reading program with promotion points as incentives [www.geocities.com/equipmentshop/probooks.htm] it would not be at risk of being deceived by "snake oil" from misguided false prophets like the Tofflers or becoming an "Army of One" controlling an Army of "bots" in a bad replay of a Star Wars movie where the droid army collapses by a more cunning, clever human foe. The U.S. Army must have strategic maneuver capabilities.

You think we're making this up?

Let's hear what Maneuver Warfare reformer William S. Lind and others say:

ON WAR # 19:

The Men Who Would Not Be King

By William S. Lind

3 Jun 2003

Normally, the position of Chief of Staff of the Army is the ultimate brass ring an Army officer can hope to grab. There is no higher Army job, and merely holding it guarantees a man at least a small place in the history books -- though not necessarily a favorable one. In fact, the last Army Chief of Staff to merit Clio's praise was General "Shy" Meyer, who held the post twenty years ago. Since he left, the Army has been stuck in a Brezhnevite "era of stagnation."

It is therefore surprising that at present, no one seems willing to take the job, nor the position of Vice Chief. Both current incumbents leave this summer, and instead of the usual line of hopefuls standing hat in hand, the eligibles have headed for the hills. Rumor has it they may have to recruit the hall porter and the charwoman.

The interesting question is why. Part of the answer is Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. To put it plainly, Rumsfeld treats people like crap. Working for him is like working for Leona Helmsley, except that Leona is less self-centered. Unless you are one of his sycophants, equipped with a good set of knee-pads and plenty of lip balm, you can expect to be booted down the stairs on a regular basis.

Truth be told, some senior officers deserve to be treated that way, because that is how they always treated their subordinates. But Rummy does not discriminate between perfumed princes and the real thinkers and leaders. He has driven more than one of the latter to hang up his hat in disgust, to his service's and the nation's loss.

But that is not the whole story. Part of the reason no one wants the Army's top job are two fundamental contradictions in the Administration's policy toward the Army. Unless they are resolved, any Army Chief of Staff will find himself in a difficult position.

The first contradiction is that the Administration puts the Army last in line among the services at the same time that it is getting us into wars only the Army can fight. We are already fighting one Fourth Generation war in Afghanistan, we are becoming enmired up to our necks in another Fourth Generation war in Iraq, and we are sticking our noses into still more in the Philippines, maybe Indonesia, and possibly Iran.

Only the Army can fight Fourth Generation war, to the degree anyone can (and no one really knows how). The Navy is irrelevant, the Air Force almost irrelevant, and the marines want to get in and get out, fast, while Fourth Generation war plays itself out with agonizing slowness. Volens nolens, the Army is left holding the bag.

Logically, that should make the Army the Administration's focus, its Schwerpunkt. Instead, OSD is in love with the Air Force, to the point where it wants to make the Army into a second Air Force, waging the high-tech, video-game warfare that exists only in the minds of children and Pentagon planners.

That leads to the second contradiction. The Army needs and has long needed genuine military reform. Reform means such basic changes as adopting Third Generation, maneuver warfare doctrine and the culture of decentralization and initiative that goes with it; instituting a radically different personnel system that creates cohesive units, eliminates the bloat in the officer corps above the company grades and suppresses rather than mandates careerism; making free play training the norm rather than a rare exception; and getting rid of dual standards for men and women.

Secretary Rumsfeld also preaches reform, but what he means by reform is just more of the high-tech illusion. Again, the Air Force is the model: the more a system costs and the more complex it is, the better it must be. The result is absurdities such as the Stryker, where Light Armored Vehicles, which are wonderful for operational maneuver, are instead to be used for urban combat where they will be instant coffins for their crews, and the Future Combat System, a conglomeration of robots, tanks, drones and kitchen sinks that surpasses anything envisioned by Rube Goldberg. Meanwhile, the real reforms so badly needed go un addressed.

In the face of all this, becoming Chief of Staff of the Army is somewhat less enticing than becoming mayor of Baghdad. But at the same time, it leaves the troops desperately in need of not just a Chief of Staff, but of a highly talented and morally courageous Chief of Staff, someone who can defend his men against the follies emanating from the civilian side of the Pentagon. Those who know him believe the current Vice Chief, General John M. "Jack" Keane, is such a man. Some think he could be the Army's Al Gray, the reforming Commandant of the marine corps of the early 1990s who left an enduring and powerful legacy. So far, General Keane is refusing the job, on the legitimate grounds of his wife's health problems. Many are praying he will reconsider. If the job goes instead to one of Rummy's lickspittles, God help our Soldiers.

Willam S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.

A few weeks later, Lind elaborates on why "RMA" is no salvation for America to have a better military.

http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:bLAP2Y3zwSAJ:www.freecongress.org/commentaries/2003/030716WL.asp+congressional+military+reform+caucus&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

On War #25 Military Reform Is Not RMA

By William S. Lind
July 16, 2003

The June 30th, 2003, issue of what used to be one of the most cultured magazines in America, The New Yorker, contains a long article by Peter Boyer titled, "The New War Machine: How General Tommy Franks joined Donald Rumsfeld in the fight to transform the military." For the most part, the piece is a typical paean to America's "great victory" over Iraq. History will correct that error, as it already is beginning to do on the ground. The [ED: nation-state] war did not end with America's taking of Baghdad; that's when the real [ED: sub-national conflict] war started.

Mr. Boyer makes a similarly common error when he attributes the victory that did not happen to a "transformation" of America's military, particularly the Army, that also did not happen. "Transformation" is merely the buzzword for the latest game of keeping the important things the same while ramping up the budget for hi-tech Wunderwaffen. Somehow, whenever I hear the word "transformation" connected with the American military, a vision of Kafka's Die Verwandlung comes to mind. Perhaps it is because the Future Combat System will turn out to be a giant bug.

But Boyer's article is important, because alongside these common errors it introduces a new one: it confuses Mr. Rumsfeld's "transformation" with military reform. In fact, the two are almost opposites.

Here is the essence of Boyer's error, all within one paragraph:

The themes of maneuver warfare - speed, agility, flexibility - became the language of the military-reform movement. As a Presidential candidate, George W. Bush had associated himself firmly with the reformers, and with a particular wing of the movement (emphasis added) that placed its faith in the transformative power of microchip technology in warfare. This group, which included Rumsfeld and a handful of key defense intellectuals who would form his executive core at the Pentagon, believed in a "revolution in military affairs", triggered by the advent of precision-guided munitions.

In fact, the military reform movement and those who believe in the "revolution in military affairs (RMA)" represent opposites. The latter are not in any way a "wing" of the former. And candidate George W. Bush identified himself with the RMA, never with military reform.

The reformers' appreciation of the difference between military reform (including its key component, maneuver warfare) and the RMA goes back at least until 1989. In that year, I co-authored an article for the Marine Corps Gazette that first laid out Fourth Generation Warfare. It foresaw two alternate futures: one based on high technology, the RMA, and the other direction war has actually taken, where the state loses its monopoly on war. In a follow-up piece in 1994, we made clear that the RMA represented a false road and 4GW meant war by non-state actors.

The distinction between military reform and the RMA is even more evident if one factors in maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare depends on a military culture that focuses outward, on results, not inward on process; relies on self-discipline more than imposed discipline; and prizes initiative over obedience. The RMA, in contrast, uses high technology to facilitate centralization. It actually proposes to put a camera on each Soldier's helmet, so the commander can see and direct the actions of every man.

A further distinction between military reform and what Mr. Rumsfeld represents can be seen by turning to the briefing of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, which is the closest thing to an official document that the reform movement possessed. A small group that included John Boyd wrote it in the early 1980's. On page four, the briefing says, "To win wars takes three basic elements. In order of importance, they are: people, strategy and tactics (and) hardware." In contrast, Mr. Rumsfeld puts hardware first. Strategy and tactics mean the neo-cons' mad dream of American World Empire coupled with precision weaponry. And under Mr. Rumsfeld, people get tossed into the dumpster. Current Pentagon policy inverts the reformers' priorities. How much farther from military reform can you get?

The most curious thing about the New Yorker article is that Peter Boyer called me when he was researching it and I explained that Rumsfeld's "transformation" and military reform were opposites. The New Yorker's fact checker called, and I told her the same thing. But not a hint of what I said appears in the article. Did Mr. Boyer simply print the line handed to him by the Pentagon? And if so, why would the Pentagon try to tie transformation and the RMA to the old military reform movement? So it can say, "We've done that" when the reformers' ideas are raised? Or even to ensure that concepts such as maneuver warfare go down with the RMA ship?

One thing certain does come out of this odd incident: The New Yorker's fact checking sure ain't what it used to be.

William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism.

2006: New Yorker magazine writer Boyer still doesn't quite get it right after Rumsfeld's Firing

Boyer's key mistake again stems from not understanding the issue here is EARTH vs. MAN, FIREPOWER vs. MANEUVER.

You can't control the surface of the earth with even RMA precision firepower, you need ground maneuver because in the battle against the earth (TBATE) the earth is still too big and can absorb easily high explosive firepower. Marshall's thesis that precision HE = generalized nuclear SHE annihilation is false. Against specific platforms (large aircraft carrier battlegroups, fixed air bases full of parked fighter-bombers) precision HE strikes equals the effects of a nuclear blast from a distance away, but the rest of the earth around the precision strike is not obliterated. If you have no point, specific target to hit with precision and/or its camouflaged, dispersed, well-hardened etc. you have no military effects---and this can occur in BOTH nation-state and sub-national conflicts.

Lacking this framework of understanding he jumps ahead to a sub-national conflict and implies that firepower cannot work there because of just HUMAN considerations; the battle against man (TBAM). His construct is:

Nation-State War: FIREPOWER
Sub-National Conflict: MANEUVER

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Truth:

Nation-State War: MANEUVER + FIREPOWER
Sub-National Conflict: MANEUVER + firepower

Note that in SNC the "firepower" is in lower case as its needed in lesser quantities in relationship to maneuver.

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact?page=1

DOWNFALL
How Donald Rumsfeld reformed the Army and lost Iraq.

by PETER J. BOYER

Issue of 2006-11-20
Posted 2006-11-13

The improbable restoration of Donald H. Rumsfeld to the seat of American military power was consummated on a cold Friday afternoon in January, 2001, when he was welcomed back to the Pentagon with a full-honors review. The ceremony, a ritual display of martial pomp and fanfare, was staged on the River Parade Field, the vast lawn on the Potomac side of the Pentagon, where Rumsfeld had been welcomed as Gerald Ford's Defense Secretary a quarter century earlier. Standing before the assemblage, Rumsfeld seemed like a figure lifted from another age. He had run the Pentagon in the time of the Berlin Wall, the era of Brezhnev and Kissinger, and the reunification of Vietnam under a Communist regime. Then he was the youngest-ever Secretary of Defense; now, at sixty-eight, he became one of the oldest, and the only man ever to serve in the position twice. His selection by George W. Bush had been a surprise, not least to Rumsfeld himself ("What in the world am I doing here?" he sometimes asked himself). Rumsfeld had been out of government since 1977, and although he was still well connected, he had not been a particularly close Bush adviser during the campaign. Even so, when General Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who introduced Rumsfeld at the day's event, and declared him "exactly the right man for the job in this new century," everyone knew what he meant. Bush and Cheney had campaigned as friends of the military-"Help is on the way," the candidates had repeatedly proclaimed-and Rumsfeld, a totem of the Republican national-security establishment, was a promise delivered.

At the ceremony, Rumsfeld declared that the new President's first goal for defense was "to strengthen the bond of trust with the American military." Earlier that day, at Rumsfeld's swearing-in at the White House, the President had used the same phrase and promised to give Americans in uniform "the respect they deserve." The refrain was repeated so often that a reporter finally pressed Rumsfeld to spell out what he and the President really meant: had the "bond of trust" been ruptured by eight years of Bill Clinton? Rumsfeld allowed the question to speak for itself ("I'm looking forward, not back," he said), but no one missed the point: a central message of the Bush-Cheney campaign had been that the American military had somehow needed to be rescued from its Commander-in-Chief.

Of the several partisan fevers that afflicted the Clinton era, none was more acute than that having to do with Clinton and the military. Some of the disaffection reflected Clinton's moment in history: the end of the Cold War offered the chance for a "peace dividend" of a smaller military, which Clinton seized, but, in the eyes of many military leaders, he lacked a consistent doctrine for the use of American power. Early in his first term, a relief mission begun by the elder Bush in Somalia became a military mission aimed at capturing the nettlesome clan leader General Muhammad Farah Aydid. When eighteen Army Rangers were killed and one was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Clinton pulled out. The following year, when a humanitarian disaster unfolded in Rwanda, the United States stood aside, at the price of countless lives-for which Clinton later apologized on America's behalf. A "Clinton doctrine" eventually evolved, which defined the national interest partly in terms of humanitarian interventions, a construct that justified bombing in Bosnia, an air war in Kosovo, and the open-ended commitment of American troops to both. To Clinton's critics, it seemed as if American foreign policy were shaped by the latest ghastly images from the nightly news cycle, and Clinton himself seemed to confirm it, saying his aim was a world where "we don't have to worry about seeing scenes every night for the next forty years of ethnic cleansing in some part of the world." The military was deeply skeptical about what it called "operations other than war," such as peacekeeping and nation-building. The added duty for a smaller force put serious strains on the military's readiness for combat as well as its ability to retain people. Toward the end of Clinton's tenure, the Army, Navy, and Air Force each failed to meet its recruitment goals.

The revelation that President Clinton had had sexual relations with a female subordinate in the Oval Office, and then lied about it, struck a particular nerve in the military, and some of the deeply felt resentments began to surface. One marine major wrote an article in the Navy Times referring to Clinton as "an adulterous liar." Another marine, a reserve officer, wrote an opinion article, in November, 1998, questioning a military officer's obligation to obey the orders of "a morally defective leader." The marine corps deputy commandant, General Terrence Drake, issued an order to all the Corps's generals to remind their officers of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice-the provision prohibiting officers from using "contemptuous words" about the civilian authority.

And so, that January of 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was officially welcomed back to the Pentagon, "There was just great relief in the military," recalled Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms-control official, who was among the invited guests that day. "There was the feeling that now somebody was going to be on their side."

Bush had inherited a pressing problem. The American military continued through the nineteen-nineties to train, plan, and equip itself to fight an enemy-the Soviet Union-that no longer existed. It was hardly a secret that the military was badly in need of reform; everyone in uniform knew it, and those analysts and scholars who populated the think tanks of Washington had been fixated on the subject for most of a decade.

As a pro-defense Republican, Bush would have the political capital to bring about genuine, even historic, change. During the campaign, he had vowed to give his Secretary of Defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come," and he had chosen Rumsfeld because he believed that he would be more willing and better able than the other candidates to pursue his agenda. The contents and scope of that agenda were not yet known, but Rumsfeld made it clear that his approach to the military was very much hands-on.

Among those gathered at the River Parade Field for the Rumsfeld ceremony was an elderly man with a pleasant, grandfatherly aspect, who, amid the political celebrities and military brass, might have been taken for someone who had strayed from a Pentagon tour group. But within the national-security priesthood Andrew Marshall was something of a legend. He headed a unit called the Office of Net Assessment (he was its first and only director), which had evolved over the years into a sort of in-house Pentagon think tank. That made him the resident deep thinker, and what Marshall, who was in his late seventies, had been thinking about for every President since Richard Nixon (and for two decades before that at the Rand Corporation) was how America could prevail in the next big war.

Marshall's professional life had paralleled the full sweep of the Cold War. He was admired as a boldly original theorist; in the forty-year strategic chess match between East and West, it sometimes seemed as if Marshall were playing a three-dimensional game. Marshall was among the very few who understood the Soviet vulnerability, and it was largely Marshall who imagined the strategy for exploiting it-the Reagan-era conceit of a winnable nuclear war, based on technologies (such as the unproved missile-defense shield) and levels of expenditure that the Soviets could not hope to match.

Marshall fell out of favor under the Clinton Administration, which saw less call for an esoteric Cold War strategist. But he had already turned his focus on something that he believed was of immense and pressing importance. It was a new way of thinking about the military, an idea with vast implications for every aspect of American defense, from the nation's weaponry to its global posture, because it would radically change the way America waged war-indeed, it could alter the very nature of war. It was called the "Revolution in Military Affairs".

This revolution had begun to unfold in the Cold War's last stages. In the post-Vietnam nineteen-seventies, the Soviet-led forces of the Warsaw Pact conducted a steady, massive buildup of heavy forces-tanks and mechanized infantry-along the western edge of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Twenty thousand battle tanks, mostly Soviet, faced west; on the other side, NATO fielded a force of only seven thousand tanks. In the event of a conventional Soviet attack, NATO forces would be forced to wage a fighting retreat until reinforcements arrived, mostly from the United States. One option for countering the Soviet advantage was the deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons to Europe. Tactical nukes posed obvious political and strategic problems-the NATO allies did not welcome the prospect of even limited nuclear war in Europe, and there was always the chance of escalation into full-blown nuclear conflict.

But the Americans were also working on a non-nuclear weapons system that would change the equation. The top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was funding a program called Assault Breaker, which was designed to strike far behind enemy lines, disrupting or destroying follow-on forces, gaining time and cover for the Western alliance to launch a counter-offensive. Assault Breaker was meant to compress the process of locating a target and launching a strike into a synchronized target-and-fire action taking just minutes. DARPA equipped an Air Force plane with an advanced radar system and onboard computers that worked out the target's coördinates and transmitted them to an Army missile base, which fired rockets toward the target area. In a test of Assault Breaker at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, the system hit five out of five targets.

In the early nineteen-eighties, Marshall and his colleagues began to notice in their reading of Soviet military literature that the Russians were writing about this new American weaponry with increasing alarm. The Soviets assumed that deployment of Assault Breaker was imminent, and that this American advance represented the dawn of a new military epoch-what the Soviet analysts referred to as a "military-technical revolution." (The Americans weren't nearly as attuned to the implications of their own developments. Assault Breaker was not close to deployment; in fact, the Air Force and the Army were disinclined to coöperate, and the joint program eventually died.) Marshall began to analyze this idea, and, after months of study, his office concluded that the Russians had got it right. The Red Army's Chief of Staff, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, had recognized that advances such as those tested by the Americans would give conventional weapons many of the strengths of nuclear weapons, without the apocalyptic effects. Implicit in Ogarkov's insight was the idea that a key breakthrough in technology (for example, microprocessing) could suddenly reconfigure the battle-field-in this case, with accuracy so precise that, Ogarkov wrote, conventional warfare took on "qualitatively new and incomparably more destructive forms than before."

[EDITOR: Ogarkov created Operational Maneuver Groups (OMGs) that can penetrate deep into the west after Airborne insertion that would be co-mingled with NATO forces and thuis not be subject to precision targeting.]

Marshall was struck by this idea, and, throughout the eighties, he assigned teams of analysts to search for historical instances of such advances. ("What's amazing," Marshall told me, "is how much we know, it turns out, about the chariot revolution back in 1700 B.C.") The example he found most compelling was that of Europe in the years between the twentieth century's two World Wars. After the Pyrrhic victory of the First World War, France built the finest Army in the world, and an imposing defensive complex of forts, bunkers, and tunnels-the Maginot Line-along its border with Germany. A defeated Germany, on the other hand, had to overcome the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles (forbidding Germany warplanes, tanks, submarines, or heavy guns, and outlawing its general-officer staff) to build Hitler's Wehrmacht. Yet, in the late spring of 1940, Germany invaded France and won a French surrender in less than six weeks. The stunning German victory was produced by a battlefield innovation, blitzkrieg, that married two relatively new technologies-radio and the internal-combustion engine-to facilitate a tactic of rapid, coördinated movement. The Germans had designed their new panzer divisions to suit this doctrine, and their impact was decisive. The German forces bypassed the Maginot Line, attacked directly through the Ardennes Forest, and dashed to the French rear, sowing chaos en route and forcing a quick surrender.

[EDITOR: the Germans won because they used LIGHT TANKS that were physically sound to prevail against the closed terrain of the earth itself. Without this physical MANEUVER talking on radios would just let everyone know they were stuck]

To Marshall and his associates, the lessons were clear. The side that recognized and exploited such advances gained not just an edge in warfare but an overwhelming advantage; for the side that missed the chance, the consequences could be fatal. [EDITOR: the fatal hubris that mental computerization is a physical overwhelming advantage when the German success was both PHYSICAL and mental; maneuver and firepower]

With the impending demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was entering a new interwar period. Marshall had no doubt that some new competitor would emerge to challenge the United States, and it struck him as exactly the moment to prepare for the next big war. The U.S. led the world in microchip technology, and the information age promised a dazzling range of military applications, such as advanced sensors, satellite imagery, robotics, and laser systems. The danger would not arise in Europe, Marshall believed, but in Asia-most likely China. The conflict would not be a prolonged ground war, involving massed formations of infantry and tank divisions; rather, there would be long-range precision strikes by "smart" missiles. If there was infantry in the fight at all, it would be in small, specialized units. Marshall supposed, too, that in the global economy these technologies would be available to all. This made it imperative that the U.S. push conflicts to distant battlefields, if possible, and to reduce (or eliminate) such easy American targets as overseas airbases and huge aircraft-carrier battle groups.

In July, 1992, during the race between George H. W. Bush and Clinton, Marshall gave the Pentagon's senior leaders a formal assessment reflecting his conclusions about the "Revolution in Military Affairs". Marshall preferred that term to the Russians' "military-technical revolution," because he believed that technology only partly accounted for such bursts of progress. The other critical element was a military's adoption of entirely new operational concepts, organizational structures, and doctrines. For instance, the French and British had radios, tanks, and airplanes in 1940, but Germany put them to novel use. Marshall wrote that new ideas had to be tested, even if most of them failed. Perhaps most important, the Pentagon needed to stop depending exclusively on the big-ticket weapons that devoured defense dollars and perpetuated the status quo.

Marshall's assessment came just as the national-security establishment was trying to define America's posture in a world without a Soviet counterweight. Some, including the first President Bush, Brent Scowcroft, his national-security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, were avowed "realists," who believed that America's role was to be part of a new world order, with the emphasis on order. But others believed that the U.S. should embrace and, if possible, enhance its position as the world's sole superpower. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, was inclined to this view, as was his top policy official, Paul Wolfowitz, who argued emphatically that the United States should strengthen its military superiority so that potential rivals would have no hope of catching up. Marshall's "Revolution in Military Affairs" offered a means to achieve that goal, and both Cheney and Wolfowitz became converts.

There were also converts within the uniformed military, including a few in the senior ranks, but the services were generally skeptical about the R.M.A., as it was now being called. Some of the resistance, particularly in the Army, reflected the belief that Marshall's vision of long-distance precision strikes ignored the gritty reality of actual war, with Soldiers on the ground. Had President George H. W. Bush won another term, he might have been willing to impose upon the military the upheaval that a revolution in military affairs implied. But the last thing the Army was inclined to do while facing cutbacks under the Clinton Administration was tinker with its revered divisional structure, and the Navy was no less inclined to reduce the number of its aircraft-carrier battle groups. Clinton's last Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, had tried to get the Army to transform itself into a lighter, more expeditionary force. But Cohen, a Republican, was frustrated from the start. "I was coming into a Democratic Administration, and that had its own dynamic," Cohen recalled. "I must say that President Clinton gave me total authority, so it wasn't a question coming from him. But just dealing with the issue-how do you push transformation in a Democratic Administration? Is this something that's weakening the military? The perception on the Hill would be 'Here they go cutting back on the military powers of the Army.' "

Still, Marshall continued to promote his revolution. Using his budget at the Office of Net Assessment, he financed his own futuristic war games. The "Revolution in Military Affairs" thrived in think tanks and seminars.

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER continues >>

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact?page=2

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER (page 2 of 4)

As Marshall watched Rumsfeld's official welcoming ceremony, he was hopeful that the revolution's moment had arrived. During the Presidential campaign, George W. Bush had promised to build a new American military for the twenty-first century. In a speech at the Citadel in 1999, Bush had said that as President he would instruct his Defense Secretary to conduct a "comprehensive review" of the military, to question everything from its force structure and strategy to its acquisition process. He promised not just to make "marginal improvements" but "to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies, to use this window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology." That speech was instantly recognized, by those with a trained ear, as the language of the "Revolution in Military Affairs".

Marshall had known Rumsfeld over the years, and he liked him. Shortly after Rumsfeld's induction, the new Secretary arranged to have lunch with Marshall-not, as Marshall had expected, in Rumsfeld's private office but in the "Sec Def Mess," a nearby dining room where the guests seldom went unnoticed. "Oh, I think it was very clear," Richard Perle, a former Reagan defense official and a close adviser to Rumsfeld, recalled. "It went all over the building that Andy was back. It was like Deng Xiaoping's return." The President had pledged to conduct a comprehensive review, identifying probable American adversaries, and when and where the next wars would likely occur. Rumsfeld asked Marshall if he would like to take something like that on. Marshall said he could put a team together right away. The Pentagon's traditional review process, the Quadrennial Defense Review, was just getting under way, and wouldn't be finished for another nine months. Hundreds of uniformed staff officers from all the services had spent tens of thousands of man-hours trying to answer essentially those questions. This review tended to be an exercise in justifying the budgets, force size, and programs that the military services wanted to protect. Rumsfeld evidently intended to circumvent that process. He told Marshall that he'd like to have the first draft of his strategic review in six weeks. "We delivered on that," Marshall recalled.

Word of Marshall's new assignment rang through the Pentagon like a distress signal, which may have been part of Rumsfeld's plan. Rumsfeld had in mind for the military, and for the Pentagon itself, an agenda of radical reform. He called it "transformation," and the return of Andrew Marshall meant that it would be guided by the principles of the "Revolution in Military Affairs". Rumsfeld intended to remake the American military into a lighter, more agile, more readily useful force that would be able to leverage new technology to project lethal power over great distances.

Marshall would have been the first to say that technology and the "Revolution in Military Affairs" had very little application to certain kinds of conflict, such as a counter-insurgency fight against some indigenous guerrilla force. But that was the sort of war that no one-on the new Bush national-security team, or certainly in the American military-had any intention of ever fighting. That would be a war like Vietnam.

When war came, with the invasion of Afghanistan, in late 2001, Rumsfeld had only the barest beginnings of a "transformed" military, but he had a fully formed philosophy that dictated how America would fight. In Afghanistan, it meant routing the Taliban with small bands of American Special Forces and coördinating long-distance air strikes and Afghan ground troops. For the subsequent invasion of Iraq, in March, 2003, the Rumsfeld vision meant getting to Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime as quickly and with as small a force as prudence permitted. Many professional military men strenuously disagreed with Rumsfeld's war plan, but, fresh from the [alleged] validating triumph in Afghanistan, he prevailed.

The man who came to exemplify this new way of war was Major General Buford (Buff) Blount, a courtly Mississippian who commanded the Army's 3rd Infantry Division-the 3rd I.D.-and who became a popular figure with reporters. ABC's Ted Koppel rode with Blount, as did the late David Bloom, the NBC News correspondent whose dust-blown satellite video reports provided the signature images of the conflict's early days, and Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor, who died in a skirmish near Baghdad. The 3rd I.D., with its tanks and armored fighting vehicles, was, by training and structure, a [alleged] relic of the pre-Rumsfeld Army. But Blount was a creative, daring general, who, after weathering a brief storm delay, pushed quickly through to Baghdad. And it was Blount who devised and executed the "thunder runs" from the outskirts of Baghdad to the heart of the Iraqi capital, providing the decisive blow in the stunningly short campaign to end the Saddam regime.

[EDITOR: the line infantry narcissist marines with RMA mental gadgets in wheeled trucks were stopped by mere Iraqi rear guards and were 6 days late arriving into Baghdad enabling saddam & subordinates to escape]

But within a few weeks Rumsfeld and his closest advisers came to regard Blount as part of a problem they had not foreseen and were wholly unprepared to handle: the gathering chaos that soon became an insurgency.

With American troops in Baghdad, General Tommy Franks, the top commander of the coalition forces, left his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and flew in a Kevlar-lined helicopter and then a C-130 transport plane to Baghdad. He made his way to the Abu Ghraib North Palace, where he and his commanders shared a victory cigar, and Franks told them to start preparing to leave Iraq.

Blount's 3rd I.D. had been slated to go home, and his troops, having stormed into Baghdad, considered their mission accomplished. But the days passed, and Blount's unit found itself faced with a policing mission it didn't want and hadn't expected. Scores of looters appeared, and then hundreds and thousands, making off with anything that could be carried away.

"Never, from the first day that we ever started planning this until we got to Baghdad, in all the processes, rehearsals-nobody ever mentioned the word 'looter,' " Blount told me. "I mean, it was just never, ever, ever mentioned. Our focus was on fighting the war." Blount was loath to order his troops to use deadly force on looters. As he saw it, the raiders were indulging an impulse to street justice. "These are the people that we're liberating," he recalled. "The oppressed. You know, that have been without for centuries now, and they've got nothing, and they're trying to get a little bit back from the Baath Party."

Blount ordered patrols to secure hospitals, power facilities, and other key structures, but in many cases the looters had already come and gone. As it became apparent in Washington that the disorder might spin out of control, the 3rd I.D.'s pullout was delayed. At the division's home base, in Georgia, some of the troops' spouses began to voice their dismay, and in Baghdad, some of Blount's Soldiers complained to reporters. One, a private named Matthew C. O'Dell, told the Times, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home."

Blount's superiors in the Pentagon were furious, blaming his unit's recalcitrance on a lack of leadership. "We had no orders or plans to occupy Baghdad," Blount says. "There were just a lot of assumptions made. I've looked back at this a good bit at different times, wondering, you know, well, could we have done something differently?"

General Jack Keane, then the Army's Vice Chief of Staff and one of Rumsfeld's most trusted advisers in the force, flew to Iraq and was chagrined that the 3rd I.D.'s briefings failed to focus on containing the spreading disorder. But Keane later reflected that Blount's troops could hardly be blamed. "They were ill-prepared-they weren't educated to do it, and they weren't trained to do it, and they weren't expecting to do it," Keane said, of the unit's impromptu policing mission. When the 3rd I.D. eventually left Iraq, four months later, Blount was assigned to a desk job at the Pentagon, a role he served in for the remainder of his active career. He did not get a promotion and a third star, as many had once expected.

As chaos spread in and around Baghdad, Rumsfeld remained publicly serene. "You don't go from despotism to freedom on a feather bed," he told reporters on April 24th. Pressed to explain the vivid images of chaos in Iraq, Rumsfeld dryly observed that "freedom's untidy." From the start of the new Bush Administration, Rumsfeld had been the Administration's lightning rod, and he seemed almost to relish controversy. Just a few months into his tenure, as he was making enemies inside the Pentagon's bureaucracy with his insistent reform crusade, and on the Hill with his reluctance to pay deference, the political press had begun a deathwatch on his career. Maureen Dowd mocked him as Rip Van Rummy, and Slate observed, "Rumsfeld is probably toast." But by the time Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld believed he had seen his critics proved wrong so often that he had every reason to rely on his instincts.Two weeks before the Iraq invasion, a reporter had asked him, "Can you promise it won't be a quagmire?"

"I can almost promise you that someone in this room will say it's a quagmire," Rumsfeld replied. Indeed, by the second week of the drive to Baghdad, reporters had summoned the "quagmire" scenario, only to be chastened by the rapid fall of Saddam's regime. The subsequent failure of the search for weapons of mass destruction, whose existence had been a major justification for the war, may have been a blow to the Administration's credibility (as well as a distraction for troops engaged in the hunt), but it did not seem to affect Rumsfeld's certainty in his own judgment. More and more, he met questions about the progress of the mission in Iraq with ironic (and, some would say, arrogant) deflection.

In April, as the situation in the streets of Iraq grew messier, Rumsfeld said that "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." More pointedly, he refused to dignify the chaos with a name that might summon memories of Vietnam. To many conservatives, the Iraq war, quite apart from its strategic implications, was a way of exorcising those ghosts, a chance to demonstrate the national will and military prowess that had arisen in the decades since the humiliating withdrawal from Indochina. Long after others, on the ground in Iraq and even within Rumsfeld's inner circle in Washington, discerned the ominous signs of a gathering insurgency, Rumsfeld insistently declined to call it such.

Jack Keane, the Vice Chief of Staff, says that he was the first to raise the matter in the Tank, the super-secure Pentagon meeting room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I said, 'This is a low-level insurgency,' and I told them what the definition of that was, and what it looked like," Keane said. "They were targeting Americans, and it was organized. It was being done at multiple locations, which meant that there had to be some general guidance. . . . The operations they were conducting had some basic complexity to it. They were planned, and thought out, and well executed, in the sense that they were achieving success. They were killing us."

It was not a welcome observation, as General Richard B. Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made clear, according to Keane. "I got some pushback from the chairman, and he said, 'We've gotta be careful about that word,' " Keane said.

Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, also sensed that what was happening in Iraq was more than the untidy impulses of a newly free people. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, two months after the fall of Baghdad, he conceded, "There's a guerrilla war there, but . . . we can win it."

Wolfowitz, too, got pushback, both from Rumsfeld and from Tommy Franks, who said three weeks later that "guerrilla and insurgency operations are supported by the people, and I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the people of Iraq do not support the violence that we're seeing right now."

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER continues >>

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact?page=3

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER (page 3 of 4)

Keane said, "They thought maybe it wouldn't be that bad, and there's no sense using those names associated with it, because you're gonna stomp it out in a couple, three months-it wasn't worth all the rhetoric."

In a remarkable exchange with reporters at a Pentagon briefing in late June, a reporter read Rumsfeld a dictionary definition of "guerrilla war" and asked why he was so reluctant to name it as such. "Can you remind us again why this isn't a quagmire?" the reporter asked. Rumsfeld replied, in his best vice-principal tone, as if patronizing a particularly dull student, "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world." He explained that the disturbances in Iraq were being caused by looters, criminals, remnants of the regime, foreign terrorists, and Iranian agents. "Doesn't make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance. It makes it like five different things going on that are functioning much more like terrorists. . . . Now, that is not-it doesn't fit that word. So, I think, that if one analyzes what is going on in that country, they would find a different way to characterize it. I know it's nice to be-have a bumper sticker, but it's the wrong bumper sticker."

At this, the reporter pulled out the official Defense Department definition of "guerrilla war" ("I knew I should have looked it up!" Rumsfeld said. "I could die that I didn't look it up!"): " 'Military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces.' This seems to fit a lot of what's going on in Iraq."

To which Rumsfeld replied, "It really doesn't."

Two weeks later, Rumsfeld's top commander on the ground, General John Abizaid, a Rumsfeld favorite, who had just taken over the leadership of the Army's Central Command from Tommy Franks, addressed the question squarely. The insurgents who were attacking Americans, Abizaid said, "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it."

Abizaid, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, went on to note that the insurgents were mostly mid-level Baathists, members of Saddam's Special Republican Guard and security services, and that they had organized regionally into cells. For his efforts, Keane says, Abizaid "got his ass handed to him."

The American invading force had prepared for a chemical assault from Saddam's Army, for a set-piece battle with Saddam's armored units, and for a long, bloody battle for Baghdad. "What we didn't plan for," says Jack Keane, "is what happened."

The American military had spent thirty years avoiding the thought of fighting a counter-insurgency, a subject that hadn't been part of the curriculum at West Point since the Vietnam era. The proud, professional volunteer force constructed since Vietnam was not built for a protracted occupation, an eventuality that, in any case, the nation's political leadership reflexively rejected out of hand. Bill Clinton fought a war in Kosovo by announcing at the outset that the commitment of ground troops was not an option; the Bush Administration came into power renouncing the idea of nation-building as a foolish misuse of military resources.

But the inability quickly to recognize and formulate a coherent strategy to fight the insurgency that arose in Iraq reflected more than the military's institutional biases, or Donald Rumsfeld's intransigence. It also partly reflected a crucial policy decision in Washington, which effectively dashed any chance that the coalition forces would be received as liberators rather than as occupiers.

The circle of defense advisers that had most ardently advocated the Iraqi invasion, including Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich, had imagined a strategy that wouldn't require a lasting American presence in postwar Iraq. The plan depended on the recruitment and training of "free Iraqis" to participate in the combat phase of the operation, and the imposition of a provisional government, run mostly by Iraqi exiles, after the war. Something like that had worked in Afghanistan, and, the reasoning went, the approach stood an even better chance of working in Iraq; Iraqi exiles had been planning for such an eventuality for more than a decade. But the program to train Iraqi fighters produced fewer than a hundred recruits; it also ignored the reality that prominent exiles like Ahmad Chalabi had less credibility, and less of an indigenous base, than those whom the U.S. had relied on in Afghanistan. The Defense Department's plan to set up a provisional Iraqi government was abandoned after a bitter interagency argument within the Bush Administration that lasted until the very eve of the war. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency refused to endorse the imposition of a provisional government composed of Iraqi exiles, arguing that it would not be seen as legitimate. In the end, Rumsfeld surrendered on the point-to the lasting distress of the hawks nearest him. "I think he made a serious mistake," Perle, a member of Rumsfeld's advisory Defense Policy Board, recalled. "I think he underestimated the importance of getting those matters right."

President Bush, with Rumsfeld's approval, ultimately decided that post-war Iraq would be governed by an American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, to be headed by a veteran diplomat, L. Paul Bremer. With that appointment, and the implicit personal authority conveyed therein, came a critical, and not entirely intended, shift in American postwar policy. Bremer became the American proconsul in Iraq, technically reporting to Rumsfeld's Defense Department but exercising a degree of authority that came to surprise even Rumsfeld. Bremer began his tenure, in May, 2003, by issuing a series of edicts that included the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the removal of senior Baath Party members from government jobs. (Bremer said that he was acting on instructions from the Pentagon.) The edicts signalled that Baathists would have no place in the new Iraq, but they also crippled the bureaucracy and eliminated the most important instrument of Iraqi unity and a crucial tool in establishing order. In effect, half a million men, many with guns, were sent into the streets.

These moves had a decisive impact on the coalition's response to the widening insurgency. A huge instant bureaucracy was set up inside the walls of Saddam's former Republican Palace, where Americans laboriously laid plans for undertakings ranging from the design of a new Iraqi flag to the restructuring of the Iraqi monetary system. Meanwhile, no coherent, unified plan to fight the insurgency emerged, which rendered such plans increasingly abstract. "It was Alice in Wonderland," recalled Gary Anderson, a defense specialist who was dispatched to Iraq by Paul Wolfowitz to help set up an Iraqi civil-defense corps. "It was surreal. I mean, I was so depressed the second time we went there, to see the lack of progress and the continuing confusion. The lack of coherence. You'd get two separate briefs, two separate cuts on the same subject, from the military and from the civilians."

To Wolfowitz and others who had advocated the quickest possible turnover of authority to Iraqis, the C.P.A. was a maddening obstacle to the ever-dwindling hope of replicating the Afghanistan success. "There was an explicit, coherent strategy," recalled Newt Gingrich, another influential neoconservative member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. "It was the strategy of staying light, getting in, rebuilding the Iraqis quickly, and getting out. The war plan was right. Bremer thought he was MacArthur in Japan. And Bremer, in thirty days, destroyed the strategy. And neither Bush nor Cheney nor Rumsfeld would intervene decisively enough, and neither would Franks or Abizaid. It was one of the most amazing strategic mistakes I've ever seen."

Such comments may be the retrospective rationale of men who'd advanced a war policy that had gone bad. Events in Iraq have provided no compelling evidence that the war hawks' plan stood any real chance of success, even if it had been followed. But Bremer did come to symbolize an occupying force that did not seem intent upon leaving anytime soon. "When one now looks back," Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense, would later observe, "and says, huh, we had an insurgency, and the insurgents were able to capitalize on the widespread perception that the United States wanted to occupy, own, exploit, and stay for a long time running Iraq-and that enormously valuable piece of information operations by the bad guys was facilitated by the way we organized the C.P.A. I mean, one can look back, make that point, and then say, what a dumb, obvious error."

As the weeks turned into ever more bloody months, it became increasingly clear that the coalition could lose in Iraq. General Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, knew that the coalition had to have a single, coherent counter-insurgency strategy, and it had to have one soon.

On November 11, 2003, Abizaid sent a memorandum to Rumsfeld, in which he provided the Secretary with the definition of "counter-insurgency," taken from the Pentagon's own dictionary of military terms:

Sir, our doctrine states: "Counterinsurgency-those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.". . . Clearly we must integrate elements of national power in any effort to defeat an insurgency.

Abizaid attached to the memo a one-page primer called "Elements of Successful Counterinsurgency" ("worthy of your time to digest," Abizaid noted to Rumsfeld), which included the advice to "develop a coordinated, integrated plan based on an accurate assessment of the insurgency's goals, techniques, and strategies." It is difficult to imagine that, at that late date, the Secretary of Defense needed to be told the meaning of "counter-insurgency," but the likely purpose of Abizaid's memo is no less remarkable. Seven months after the fall of Baghdad, the Administration still lacked a strategy for countering an enemy it did not fully understand. Abizaid's memo underscoring the need for an "integrated" strategy arrived at the same moment that Bremer was summoned to Washington for a series of meetings that effectively reined him in. He returned to Baghdad with instructions to hasten the timetable for establishing Iraqi sovereignty. (Bremer said that the new timetable was his idea.)

Insurgency and the means to combat it soon became the hot new subjects in military circles; books on counter-insurgency, such as John Nagl's "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife," became required reading around the Pentagon and among junior military officers. Rumsfeld himself never quite surrendered to the language of Vietnam-preferring terms such as "terrorists" to "guerrillas" or "insurgents"-but he'd long since realized that Iraq had devolved into something much worse than untidy. Just a month before Abizaid's memo reached him, Rumsfeld had written to four top Pentagon officials, conceding that the war in Iraq would be "a long, hard slog."

By the end of George W. Bush's fifth year in office, the inner core of true believers around Rumsfeld, such Iraq hawks as Wolfowitz and Feith, were mostly gone from the Pentagon. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was poised to become the longest-serving Defense Secretary ever, and was already a powerful token of the war itself, freighted with all its failures and controversies, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the harsh interrogation policy that Rumsfeld had personally endorsed. Among Democrats, insistence upon Rumsfeld's resignation became a kind of litmus test of anti-war seriousness. By the time of the 2006 midterm elections, more than a few Republicans were inclined to concur.

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER continues >>

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact?page=4

DOWNFALL by PETER J. BOYER (page 4 of 4)

To the end, Rumsfeld seemed to embrace the controversy. When, on the day after the election-an emphatic no-confidence vote on Rumsfeld's war-he joined Bush at the White House and his departure from the Pentagon was announced, Rumsfeld could not resist comparing himself to another civilian warrior who believed himself misunderstood by his critics. "I have benefitted greatly from the criticism," he said, invoking Churchill, "and at no time have I suffered from the lack thereof."

In some way, Rumsfeld's long tenure has brought the relationship between the military and its civilian leadership full circle. At the end of the Clinton Administration, some uniformed critics of the President had to be warned about possible insubordination; Rumsfeld inspired similar passion among some senior military leaders. This spring, what appeared to be a coördinated wave of criticism of Rumsfeld by retired generals moved some of their peers to suggest that they, too, be mindful of the prohibition on "contemptuous" remarks. On March 19th, General Paul Eaton, who had been in charge of training Iraqi troops before his retirement, last January, wrote in the Times that the Defense Secretary "has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to America's mission in Iraq. Rumsfeld must step down." Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, who retired in 2002, called for Rumsfeld's resignation in Time in an essay that cited "McNamara-like micromanagement" and stated that "a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort."

Rumsfeld had arrived at the Pentagon convinced that the American military had to be broken down and rebuilt, and he had done just that. In Rumsfeld's six-year tenure, he had initiated a dizzying list of reforms, some deemed necessary even by his critics, from the restructuring of the Army's once-cumbersome fighting formations to the repositioning of American forces abroad, shifting them away from Western Europe. Less visible change was brought to the military culture, especially in the Army, which now sees itself as the force of first resort-an attitude once reserved for the marines. But it is also true that the Iraq war has severely stressed the Army, and Rumsfeld's reluctance to significantly increase the size of the force has it stretched to its limits. It is a war-honed and immeasurably more knowledgeable Army, precisely because it is bound up in a conflict with no apparent end, facing a resourceful enemy who daily presents some new lethal challenge. It has truly been transformed, but not in the manner that Andy Marshall would have prescribed, or foreseen. It is caught in a de-facto civil war that has cost the lives of more than twenty-eight hundred service members, and those of many times that number of Iraqis.

Donald Rumsfeld might have made a fine peacetime Defense Secretary. But it may also be that Rumsfeld would never have lasted in peacetime. He survived in the job because war came, and he used the wars to force change upon a recalcitrant professional military. In a real sense, the war in Iraq allowed Rumsfeld to create his transformed military, even while presenting it with a mission that it may not be able to win-a war like Vietnam.

A real brilliant thinker is David Isenberg. He pointed out RMA was bogus early-on.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ28Ak03.html

U.S. warfare equation "full of baloney"

By David Isenberg

Back in June 1997, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report titled "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign". It was a report that debunked many of the claims made about the efficacy of US air power during Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. But in retrospect, perhaps the most interesting thing about it was that it took six years before such a report was done.

Eventually, studies were published detailing deficiencies in U.S. military operations. But most of these were found in the professional military literature in journals like Military Review or Parameters, trade press like Jane's Defence Weekly, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Defense Week, Defense News, and academic journals like International Security or special government commissions like Gulf War Air Power Survey.

In the aftermath of the second U.S. war against Iraq one might hope that claims about U.S. military prowess would be evaluated more skeptically. But, sadly, far too many claims about U.S. military battlefield successes are being accepted uncritically.

Consider the words of Winslow Wheeler, who directed the GAO study. Back in April he wrote: "I first started hearing about revolutions in warfare after some guided munitions hit a bridge in the Vietnam War. Since then, the declaration of another new revolution in warfare based on the accomplishments of guided munitions and aircraft has occurred for every single American war ever since. These declarations have become as predictable as they are full of baloney."

Yet, since the end of major combat operations in May 1, not much of the debate in the U.S. has been over whether the model of warfare championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ie heavy reliance on air power, "precision" guided munitions, special operations forces, and intensive use of automated sensors and realtime communications - generally referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) - and correspondingly less emphasis on armor forces and conventional infantry, is the way to go.

This is not merely an academic debate. The lessons U.S. officials draw from this war will shape equipment and personnel decisions for years to come.

One of the few moments of skepticism thus far occurred on October 21 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that took testimony from nongovernmental witnesses.

The first witness was Major General Robert Scales (Retired). In his written testimony he took aim at the RMA advocates who believe that technology is the answer. He wrote:

"Some futurists claim that new information and computing technologies will allow U.S. military forces to 'lift the fog of war'. According to this view, a vast array of sensors and computers, tied together, can work symbiotically to see and comprehend the entire battle space and remove ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction for the military equation, or at least remove these factors to manageable and controllable levels. Technology will triumph over the general friction of war, they claim. This view leads to the belief that all the American military needs to do to remain preeminent is to focus on acquiring more sophisticated technology. The arguments in support of technological monism echo down the halls of the Pentagon, precisely because they involve the expenditures of huge sums of money to defense contractors. In some cases law makers may reduce spending on relatively inexpensive but critical items such as body armor, believing that technology has precluded its use. Such policies, however, rest on a profound ahistoricism that entirely misses the lessons of the past, much less even a reasonable examination of recent events."

Similarly, a draft army study of lessons learned in the Iraq war, titled "Iraq and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy", led by Stephen Biddle, a professor of strategic studies at the Army War College in Carlisle, Philadelphia, who also testified at the hearing, found that the combined effect of U.S. technological superiority and an incompetent Iraqi military was the primary reason for the quick victory over Saddam Hussein's forces.

As a result, the study cautions against using the war as a model for planning future conflicts. It "would be dangerous to assume Iraqi-style scenarios as the future norm", the study said.

According to a slide version of the draft study that was leaked to the Baltimore Sun, "Without Iraqi ineptitude, even 2003 technology could not have enabled a force this size to prevail at this cost." Against an "adept enemy", the authors said, "results could be very different."

Another point made by Scales, which has implications beyond military operations, dealt with intelligence. He noted, "Raw information is not intelligence. The problem over the past 65 years has not been a lack of data. Rather, the problem has been erroneous interpretation of that data. Since World War II, intelligence organizations, both civilian and military, have proved to be all too willing to interpret information in light of preconceived political prejudices or expectations."

In that regard, it is worth noting that the New York Times reported in September that an internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value.

Similarly, in September the Washington Times reported that a secret report titled "Operation Iraqi Freedom - Strategic Lessons Learned", written for the joint chiefs of staff, lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that "limited the focus" for preparing for post-Saddam operations.

Although various military units and different military services, the joint chiefs, defense agencies, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense have all conducted various "lessons learned" efforts, there has not yet been a comprehensive, objective effort. Dr Andrew Krepenenvich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment in Washington, DC, noted, "I cannot emphasize how important a thorough independent assessment of the conflict is, similar to the Gulf War Air Power Survey commissioned by the U.S. Air Force after Operation Desert Storm."

Krepenevich also said, "since the gap between us and everyone else is growing, our adversaries are moving to the far end of the conflict spectrum: Get nuclear weapons, or go terrorist, or go irregular warfare. That's where the competition is heading. And so, if we think about this war in terms of how would we fight it better next time, we're missing the point because that's not where the competition is going. And I think that's how you have to view the lessons of Iraqi Freedom."

THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS HUBRIS: BRINGING U.S. MILITARY TO RUIN?

BREAKING NEWS!

Growing Realization that the Rumsfeld "philosophy" of war (cheapo troops-in-trucks to save money to buy sexy bombs) is bogus

Even friendly Iraqis realize this: www.iraq.net/displayarticle3189.html

Posted by: Editor on Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 12:00 AM

President Bush should be sending yellow roses to Gen. Eric Shinseki and begging him to come back. Before the war in Iraq, General Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, said that Mr. Bush was going to need "several hundred thousand" Soldiers to occupy and stabilize the country.

The general was denounced by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's civilian team and then ushered into retirement. Mr. Bush clung to Mr. Rumsfeld's misguided idea that a minimal force could not only capture Baghdad but could also hold, stabilize and rebuild an entire country.

Mr. Rumsfeld was right about the lightning strike into Baghdad. But he was tragically wrong about everything else, and the deeper the United States gets into this badly planned occupation, the more American Soldiers are paying the price. In the 13 months of war, about 700 American Soldiers have been listed as killed, including at least 100 just in April. The White House cannot continue to deny our forces and the Iraqi people the protection that adequate troop strength would provide.

The administration agreed to increase the occupation force from about 115,000 to about 135,000 after being surprised by an easily predictable uprising this month. But it did so by extending the stay of already exhausted soldiers. And it authorized the increase for just 90 days, suggesting that it is continuing to put off hard decisions and deny unpleasant realities. The White House does not talk about it much, but the Pentagon is planning to stay in Iraq at least until the end of 2006. Even that timetable is extremely optimistic. It assumes everything will go precisely according to a plan that no one outside Mr. Bush's circle seems to understand and that has certainly not worked well so far.

It is past time for the president to let go of Mr. Rumsfeld's flawed theories of war and authorize a real long-term increase in the force in Iraq. There is debate about how many more Soldiers are needed - some experts say at least 50,000 in the short term, while others say even more. What is certain is that the nation cannot continue limping along on small, politically calibrated 90-day infusions. The White House likes to shift responsibility to those in uniform by saying it is up to the military to figure out what it needs to do its job. Unfortunately, military planners are not certain what that job is in broad political terms. They stick to the safer ground of figuring an adequate force to handle very specific, immediate assignments. The administration needs to create a long-term military strategy and accept the burden of providing the troops to carry it out.

The failure to do that reflects the overarching error of the Iraqi invasion, one that has defined the entire Bush administration - the refusal to take the political risk that comes with asking the voters for real sacrifice. The president led the public to underestimate the time it would take to turn Iraq into a stable democracy and the likely cost in money and blood. Even now he is trying to avoid admitting that Congress needs additional appropriations for the war, while preaching an election-year gospel of tax cuts.

Right now, the wrong people are bearing the burden. The reserves have done far more than their fair share and many men and women on active duty are also being kept in the field too long. Iraqi civilian casualties mount and the Iraqi people, who were supposed to get their freedom, are prisoners in their homes while street crime, terrorist violence and insurrection are rife.

Sending more troops will cause further pain to an already strained military and it means acknowledging that units now being rotated home could be sent back to Iraq. But there seems to be no other choice. Much of the current trouble could have been avoided if Mr. Rumsfeld had not been so determined to disprove the doctrine named for his rival, Secretary of State Colin Powell, which posits that force, if it is to be used at all, should be overwhelming. The period after the fall of Baghdad was catastrophic: Iraq was looted, its police and army were disbanded, its civil servants were fired in a needless political purge, armed militias formed, and the thin American ranks could do little more than watch in horror. The United States should have had a much larger military force ready to actually occupy Iraq and restore order.

As much as we hope that Mr. Bush's very belated agreement to involve the United Nations in Iraq can clear the way for greater international military assistance, it would be folly to count on more than symbolic help in the near future. Any real increase in the military force in Iraq will have to come from the United States.

This page felt it was a mistake to invade Iraq without broad international support, and since then we have seen few indications that Mr. Bush's notion of establishing a stable democracy there is anything but a dream. Yet leaving Iraq now would create a situation so horrific that the United States is obliged to press forward as long as there seems any hope of making progress. The only possible, but by no means certain, road to a good outcome is to stick with the plan to allow the United Nations to set up an interim Iraqi government, to expand international political support, and to work with moderate Shiite and Sunni leaders to isolate the violent radicals. The Iraqi security forces have to be made into something far better than what they are now. It was a relief last week to see the occupation authorities finally start to reverse a foolish policy that denied work to Iraqis who had been forced to join Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in order to serve in the middle and lower levels of the deposed government and disbanded army.

We may, in the end, find that the task Mr. Bush has laid out for the brave men and women in the military and the brave Iraqi citizens who are struggling to create a better future is simply impossible to achieve. But we have not reached that point. This is not the moment for retreat and it certainly is not the moment for half measures.

GAO Says Army on Road to Ruin

** Sadly, this confirms what Colonel Doug Macgregor wrote in his book, Transformation Under Fire.

** FCS works under the false assumption that real-time networked data and stand-off precision fires will work as well for land warfare as it has for air warfare and is believed likely to work for naval warfare. But land warfare is different. Adversaries can get very close without revealing themselves or their intentions simply by not forming up conventional, industrial age mass formations, dispensing with uniforms, and otherwise taking up the tried and true methods of guerrilla warfare.

** Asymmetric warfare is nothing new -- the ancient Hebrews used it against the Philistines of the Mediterranean plain, the Spaniards, Britons, and Jews used it against the Romans, the Moros of the Philippines used it against Spaniards, Americans, and Manila's forces for centuries, and the Vietnamese used it against first France and then America nearly decades ago. It is even more effective in an era where the established major powers value individual life more than any previous era's hegemons, and where the individual insurgent can carry more firepower than a platoon could manage a century ago, can have instantaneous communications for miles, and can travel by individual vehicle or mass transit at speeds and over distances inconceivable back then.

** The realities of land warfare, especially in an era when America's adversaries are most likely to adopt irregular tactics rather than futilely seek to match the U.S. in conventional warfare, remain totally infused with the "fog of war." In the murky confusion of fighting irregulars, insurgents, bandits, and the like, often in crowded, built-up areas, FCS as currently conceived is likely to present an array of dispersed, distinctive, large, costly, and very vulnerable targets. The much maligned main battle tank and the even more often dismissed boxy tracked APC are at least as likely to be effective, given proper support and tactics, and more survivable. The real, sensible answer is to build prototype FCS units and put them through rigorous OT&E against baseline conventional heavy mechanized units, STRYKER units, and simple motorized light infantry mounted in camouflaged "dune buggy"-like vehicles. This of course will take time and money, but failure to thoroughly test all of the major options -- in terms of ConOps and tactics as well as in terms of equipment and of force structures -- risks spending billions on a future force that is less effective and less survivable than what until recently were called "legacy" forces or modernized versions of them. I personally believe that the next generation combat platform should combine the weight, off-road mobility, and footprint of the M2 BRADLEY, have the effective protection, firepower, and networking capabilities of the M1A2 SEP ABRAMS, and have on-road fuel efficiency and sustainability superior to anything in the current DoD armored vehicle fleet. A 30-35 ton tracked vehicle can incorporate enough armor to defeat light-to-medium automatic cannon and close-in weapons, while relying on active protection systems (used by foreign armies but as yet not operational with the US Army) to defeat heavier, longer-range threats such as air-/artillery- delivered top attack weapons, anti-tank missiles, and tank main guns. Such a vehicle using advanced, rubberized band track and a hybrid turbodiesel/electric powertrain can be much quieter than today's BRADLEY or STRYKER, have superior fuel economy and range, and be more agile in tight urban areas and rugged off-road situations. Complemented by UAVs with passive and active sensors and modern data networks, it can have far superior situational awareness than today's systems while carrying a sufficiently lethal mix of line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight weapons to engage a variety of threats ranging from mines and remotely fired anti-tank weapons to RPGs, heavy cannon, artillery, and suicide bombers in vehicles or disguised, on foot, with satchel charges.

--Steve X

GAO Says Army on Road to Ruin

By Noah Shachtman

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62931,00.html

02:00 AM Apr. 05, 2004 PT

It's been called the most ambitious military effort since the Manhattan Project, and the centerpiece of Donald Rumsfeld's plans to overhaul America's armed forces: a $92 billion push to change almost everything about the Army by 2010, from the guns GIs carry, to the officers they salute, to the tanks they drive.

A new congressional report is alleging that the Future Combat Systems program is poised for major delays and a financial train wreck. Worst of all, the report claims, the Army knew this was going to happen all along. "Army officials acknowledge that (2010) is an ambitious date and that the program was not really ready for system development and demonstration when it was approved. However, the officials believe it was necessary to create 'irreversible momentum' for the program," reads the report (see attached PDF) from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigational arm. "FCS is at significant risk for not delivering required capability within budgeted resources."

The Army and Boeing, one of Future Combat Systems' two main contractors, both say the sprawling project is on track. They assert the congressional report is off-base. But outside military analysts and former Pentagon officials are inclined to agree with the GAO's take on the Army effort. And they see it as the latest case of the military pouring countless billions into weapons systems before they're ready to go.

"For years, the GAO has been trying to explain in kindergarten-simple terms to the Pentagon that you should make something and test it before you buy it. But year after year, the process goes on. And the situation is getting worse," said Marcus Corbin, with the Center for Defense Information.

The Pentagon brass wants a military that's lighter, quicker and more deadly -- one that can be fighting anywhere in the world within 96 hours, instead of the weeks and months it can currently take to lug gear and personnel around the globe. Future Combat Systems is the Defense Department's strategy for meeting that goal. Getting there is going to be beyond hard -- the "greatest technology and integration challenge the Army has ever undertaken," according to the Army. And it has to do it quickly: FCS, officially launched last May, has initial production decisions due in 2008.

In that 5.5-year stretch, the Army wants 18 major systems designed -- including new sensors and munitions, as well as replacements for the Abrams tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle, staples of American armored power for decades. Over 100 defense contractors have been marshaled for the effort. They'll be responsible for constructing 53 critical technologies and 157 complementary systems -- as well as writing 34 million lines of code -- according to the GAO report. That's five times as big as the military's next-largest software project. But despite the project's leviathan size and watchmaker intricacy, there's almost no margin for error.

"The first prototypes of FCS will not be delivered until just before the (2008) production decision. Full demonstration of FCS' ability to work as an overarching system will not occur until after production has begun," the GAO notes. "This demonstration assumes complete success -- including delivery and integration of numerous complementary systems that are not inherently a part of FCS but are essential for FCS to work as a whole."

"It's one thing to strive for transformation, but another thing to expect a near-miracle. That's what we're talking about here, nothing short of a miracle," Eric Miller, a defense analyst at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said in an e-mail.

The military sees it differently. Yes, some of the FCS projects are tough to tackle. But the Defense Department has built in "technology 'off-ramps' or 'tollgates' -- specific decision points and criteria where decisions would potentially be made to use alternate, less risky" technologies, according to an Army official.

But FCS is about more than new gear. It's also a remix of the traditional way the Army arranges its forces. Separate armored or infantry groups are gone. In its place: the 5,000-person "Unit of Action," or UA, which blends grunts, tanks, flying drones and robots designed for on-the-ground combat. The idea, according to the Army's Maj. Gary Tallman, is to have a UA anywhere in the world within four days. Currently, a few of the Army's more mobile units -- like the 82nd Airborne -- can travel that quickly. But they don't have the tanks and heavy personnel carriers needed to sustain a long fight, Tallman explains. The UA will be speedier, in theory, because its armor will be a whole lot lighter than the current crop. Instead of a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank, for example, the FCS equivalent will weigh a svelte 20 tons.

But some wonder whether slender is such a good idea. In Iraq, after all, U.S. troops are dying because their Humvees are roaming around Baghdad and Fallujah armorless. "Lighter and smaller also means you're more vulnerable," said Jim Lewis, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Army wants to make up for the lack of brawn with precision and speed. That's why every Soldier, every drone and every tank replacement is supposed to be joined together in a wireless network for combat.

This could prove to be the toughest FCS task of all, the GAO believes. Imagine how hard it would be to set up a cell-phone system -- under fire, without any towers. Even if it works, all the chatter would eat bandwidth quicker than you can say "Homer Simpson." "An internal study revealed that FCS bandwidth demand was 10 times greater than what was actually available," the congressional report alleges.

Nevertheless, Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac told a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the Army is committed to "an FCS program that is in control, within reasonable risk and on schedule for a 2010 fielding."

Maria McCullough, a Boeing spokesperson, added, "We are definitely on cost, and on target."

But if all of FCS' systems are kept intact, the $92 billion budget is almost certain to be blown wide open. After all, that figure only accounts for 14 of FCS' 18 major programs, the GAO notes. There are still four more to go.

Big deal, argues Lewis. "To sell a program, you set your costs and faster deadlines than you're able to meet," he said. "It's a fairly standard trick."

But by repeating the trick over and over again -- and by paying for equipment that doesn't work as advertised -- troops in harm's way wind up suffering, replies Philip Coyle, a former assistant secretary of defense. Coyle wrote in an e-mail, "The victims here -- besides U.S. taxpayers -- are our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and marines who too often get equipment that doesn't work, and have to struggle in the field with inferior gear."

Message to DoD: there is no RMA Jesus: Why more Troops is not the Solution in Iraq

Emery Nelson reveals in the June 2004 issue of G2mil.com exactly why we are losing the war in Iraq and elsewhere.

I actually believe that there's all kinds of chemical, and maybe some biological, agents hidden around the country. But it's really not all that dangerous. If this thing had been filled with HE, those two guys would have been dead. As for proof, even if they get it the outcome will not be changed. We will still be fighting an insurgency with a woefully unprepared civilian and military leadership. These are all "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) guys. It's their Jesus.

The Hersch article (www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact) tells me a lot. RMA, although a myth, requires pinpoint targeting in order to destroy the enemy center of gravity. It's clear that they authorized torture because they haven't been able to get the targeting that successful RMA requires. Since that's not going to happen, they will just pull out, rather than admit that their "RMA Jesus" doesn't exist.

If we are forced to retreat from Iraq it is not because we didn't have enough troops. The drumbeat throughout the land is that former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki was right. He said it would take 200,000 Soldiers to pacify Iraq (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-02-25-iraq-us_x.htm). An Internet search of General Shinseki was right, brought up 11,700 hits on Google. I suspect that well be long gone from Iraq, without ever having come close to this many troops, but this myth will endure forever more or at least until reality kicks us in the teeth (again). Even if we were to put 500,000 Soldiers in Iraq it still wouldnt guarantee victory.

Adding mass (Soldiers) to fight a growing insurgency flies in the face of history. In fact, fewer and better-trained armies are the most lethal. If numbers won insurgencies than Vietnam would be the 51st state. Since the end of WWII, no western style nation state army has defeated an insurgency without the overwhelming majority of Soldiers coming from the host country. You can advise and provide material but never battalions. The very act of jamming the host country with invaders insures that the invaded will never flock to your banner.

The highly centralized and conventional U.S. Army cannot beat decentralized and loosely aligned guerillas. We can hurt them badly everyday, but win? Never! The people of the country in question are the only ones that can accomplish victory. If they fight with us, victory is assured. If they fight against, we wont lose so much as get tired and go home.

Even in conventional warfare numbers are not always the answer. It didnt help the British at the Somme in WWI. But here we go again, unlearning the lessons that have been around since the start of organized warfare. Alexander the Great always faced larger armies; most of the time far from home, with unfortunate results for his enemies. Our populist leanings ignore the historical fact that large armies are rarely well-trained armies, and although capable of great carnage, its mostly to itself, in the form of half trained and ill led troops blundering into the meat grinder.

The beauty of mass (for general officers at least) is that its a built in excuse. When things go badly, generals always say we need more Soldiers. General Westmoreland in Vietnam lived this lie unto the deaths of 69,000. The final straw came when he asked for another 135,000 troops, on top of the 535,000 already in country. He never understood that each additional Soldier added to an occupation is a recruiting poster for the insurgents, a drain on the local productive economy, as well as the economy of the invading country.

Unless they intend to slaughter occupied in the style of the Roman Legions, occupiers are nothing but targets for the guerillas, particularly the U.S. Army with its huge tooth-to-tail ratio. Invaders put treasure, and their finest young men, into the host country while getting coffins and ruined lives in return. The moral confidence of possible gains will fade as the casualties mount and the treasury empties.

We conservatively have at least one General officer, plus his staff and security detail, for every battalion in Iraq. Many generals, if not all, have moved into Saddams palaces. Could we do anything more insulting to the Iraqi people (well, apparently yes)? In a method reminiscent of our failure in Vietnam, We divided the country into sectors where a each general officer has his own fiefdom. While some units fight all the fights, other units are in very quiet zones with little or no action. Has the army ever heard of economy of force? This mania for zones and lines is symptom of all thats wrong. The conditions we are trying to create cant happen when fighting a guerilla war because it all takes place with no respect for lines, zones and borders.

To understand what you get with more generals you only have to look at the Abu Gharib scandal. More generals obviously do not mean more control of a clearer chain of command. The ever-increasing number of generals trying to get their tickets punched, while avoiding anything that will hurt a career, dilutes any real accountability.

Now the army and its supporters are rushing to cash in on the more troops madness. Highly respected writer and retired Colonel Ralph Peters just did an editorial in the NY Post entitled, "Troops Dont Trust Rummy" www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/20841.htm. His loyalty to the organization that spawned him, particularly the senior officer corps, is clouding his judgment. As is the custom at most newspapers, Col. Peters probably did not decide on the title. Surely he knows that since WWII, study after study has shown that junior officers and enlisted men have little faith in their senior officers, which is not the case in other armies like the British and WWII Wehrmacht.

Im sure the Colonel, along with most senior officers, would put this off to normal troops bitching. In Vietnam, where it became a matter of life and death, this bitching came in the form of fragmentation grenades. Now they want to increase the size of the army so that half-trained troops can play beat the clock for a year, while clueless junior officers spend a few months in any danger and dont even learn how to be good platoon leaders and company commanders. Imagine what it would be like to be a young Soldier in Iraq and no that you will probably have 2 or three inexperienced platoon leaders during that time.

Peters rightfully accuses Rummy and his minions of failing to understand that, Airpower doesn't win wars on its own. Technology doesn't trump courage, guts and skill. But if he thinks for one minute that army General officers dont believe in these same things than the good soldier has not been paying attention. Long before Rumsfeld arrived on the scene the army was involved in all kinds of navel gazing linear warfare garbage like Blue Force Tracker, digitization, and Land Warrior to name but a few. The common denominator with these systems is the desire to further centralize the command and control capabilities of ever more superfluous general officers. If technology and air power dont win wars then he should inform the generals.

Peters goes on to assert that Rumsfeld was the architect of "transformation". Although theres a great deal of truth to this, it isn't a good thing, the army version was General Shinsekis doing, along with a host of army generals (some now working for General Dynamics) with his Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (SBCT). The SBCTs have little firepower but are supposed to overcome this with the notion of complete situational awareness (Iraq makes a mockery of this notion on a daily basis) and stand off firepower (Wheres that firepower supposed to come from? The air???). This was the army's plan long before Rumsfeld came on the scene. Its easily documented that the army itself, not Rumsfeld, saw its own infantry as nothing more than a constabulary to clean up after a conventional warfare mess caused by a perfectly targeted enemy thats killed from afar. Nothing the army has done in the recent past has prepared it for fighting long-term insurgencies, and that goes back to the Reagan Administration.

Desert Storm was an aberration, fought against a third-rate conventional army that we heralded as world class. Insurgency is the warfare of the past and future and those who cant deal with it will fight it anyway. The armys tired phrase, we dont do mountains and we dont do jungles is as close as it ever came to dealing with the predominate method of warfare in the 20th century. In the later part of that century and moving into the beginning of this one, so-called 4th generation warfare, conducted by gangs, groups with all kinds of political and religious leanings, and old-fashioned nationalists, is the order of the day.

The U.S. Army/marines have already suffered one major defeat at the hands of insurgents (Vietnam), although they've always tried to blame it on someone else. Learning to deal with guerilla warfare would mean moving away from the senior officer holy grail of mass, combined with methodical battle, directed by a very centralized hierarchy. I suspect the general officer corps would rather see us lose then see their status reduced with the decentralized army it takes to beat insurgencies.

Carlton Meyer adds:

Ed: We wouldn't need more than 10,000 troops over there if that fool Bremer hadn't disbanded the Iraqi Army. We had direct communications with Iraqi Generals prior to the invasion; we could call their personal cell phone numbers. Most agreed to order units to disperse in exchange for cash or immunity. (General Franks has confirmed this.) We could have offered them cash and retention of their command if they ordered their troops to stay in their barracks area with a promise they would not be bombed or attacked. After Saddam fled and U.S. tanks moved into Baghdad, Iraqi troops (which included Shia and Kurds) could have moved into the cities to prevent looting and restore order. However, I suspect the idea drove our Generals nuts, who dream all their life of a chance to bomb the hell out a country while armored columns charge forth.

The American media failed to note that Iran's religious leader harshly denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq; he had remained silent about the U.S. invasion until this year. On May 16th he stated: "The Americans are trapped. There is nothing they can do. They will fail if they continue along this path, and they will fail if they pull out. But continuing will be the greater defeat." No reporter seems to understand the real issue in Iraq today. The U.S. Government doesn't really give a damn about who runs Iraq, so long as they can maintain order, allow US oil companies to do business, and allow the U.S. military operate from their four new permanent bases in Iraq.

MacNamara vindicated: will his clone, Donald Rumsfeld learn the truth 20 years after leaving power, too? Why wait?

www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The (2003)

We strongly encourage everyone watch it!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804&q=fog+of+war

Thompson tells President Kennedy, "No" during Cuban Missile Crisis that saves the day and gets him to act on the Krushchev peace overture and not the military hard-liner's message, saving the world from nuclear WWIII. Thompson had the strength of conviction having lived with the Krushchevs to know how he thought.

Today, do we have such people in Bush's administration to do same with Iran?

As a dictator, Bush is no JFK, and he surrounds himself with yes-men liars.

Blind-obedience bureaucracies create such situations, professions where men of conscience act on the behalf of the people they serve can make the hard decisions and not bring disaster on the world. There was no Thompson to stop Bush/Cheney from occupying Iraq in 2003.

Other observations:

1. McNamara HAS learned his lessons from his failures in Vietnam
2. He is a very nice man and a good human being
3. Most of what he says NOW (repeat N-O-W) is 100% right on
4. We now like the guy a lot

Some of the cynical people here no doubt hate him, but the truth is PEOPLE DO CHANGE. McNamara has. We like the McNamara of 2003 better than of 1963. This is what LIFE is all about. We are here on the earth for a reason; the phrase, "its all good" is true. All the bad that happens in the world is there for us to resist it, to dig deep and ask ourselves what's wrong and why and to FIGHT IT, to be heroes or villains, its our choice.

Here is the most important point of McNamara and its where we need to take what he says and Van Crevald and GO FARTHER. You did hear me correctly. This bullshit that we have nothing to offer and add to the work of great men is simply BS.

McNamara's first lesson in the film and #9 in his formal 11 lessons is EMPATHY.

We must be able to see and feel what's going on in the minds of others and our enemies. The war in Vietnam boiled down to simply this according to McNamara: The North Vietnamese wanted to unify their country and have independance and thought we had replaced the French as colonial rulers. We thought the North Vietnamese were puppets of the communists and would be the first domino to fall that would lead to a communist southeast asia. We at no point talked directly to the North Vietnamese to reconcile these DOMINANT STRATEGIC IDEAS (DSIs), and when we had a back-channel open to Ho Chi Minh the military bombed as we were delivering the message.

The point is in ALL WARS there is a DSI of us and the enemy. It may be irrational hate. But it is an IDEA. There may be several DSIs of several sub-national groups in play (Iraq) but there are indeed DSIs. We're telling you McNamara's empathy thinking and other observations backs up our concepts of DSI.

We are not talking about throwing the towel in and surrendering or suing for peace, but we MUST understand ourselves and our enemies as Sun Tzu warns, to do this we must be honest, humble and have empathy. Many of us are not because we are narcissistic assholes eager to kill the _____ bastards (you fill in the blank).

Now on to Van Crevald's observation of 4GW that the strong cannot be seen as bullying the weak sub-national groups. First, we need to ascertain the sub-national group's DSI. Then, we need to mentally come up with a morally superior DSI of our own. As we pursue our DSI even if we are indeed stronger we need to appear weaker, "If you turn the other cheek, DO NOT HAVE A GLASS JAW".

And yes you are damn right we're talking about M113 Gavin light tracked AFVs. Paint them all white and put in the native tongue a slogan like "U.S. ASSISTANCE" on the side. Have them on band tracks and hybrid-electric drives so they are quiet and not boisterous. But you damn well better have lots of extra armor layers on and hidden, discrete weaponry that can be instantly mounted behind gunshields the minute some thug tries to break the peace. Consider these "Q-Vehicles" like the Q-ships of WWI/WWII. Our men if they are driving around restoring public works do not present themselves as easy targets in wheeled vehicles so the opposition can get us drawn into a cycle of violence. If we turn the other cheek, we must not have a glass jaw!

The epitome of warfighting is TO MAKE YOUR ENEMY INTO YOUR FRIEND. If we cannot reconcile opposing DSIs through direct meetings of combatant leaders then we must smartly execute military operations so we "turn" not annihilate our foes into our friends. Its a big task but if we get on the right course we can do it.

P.S. there is footage of McNamara riding in the back troop section of a M113A1 Gavin light tracked AFV as it SWAM across a river in West Germany with the Berlin Brigade! I wish we were a physically agile U.S. Army like that again today!

McNamara's Film 11 Lessons by Robert D. Steele

LESSON 1: EMPHATHIZE WITH YOUR ENEMY. We must see ourselves as they see us, we must see their circumstances as they see them, before we can be effective.

LESSON 2: RATIONALITY WILL NOT SAVE US. Human fallibility combined with weapons of mass destruction will destroy nations. Castro has 162 nuclear warheads already on the island, and was willing to accept annihilation of Cuba as the cost of upholding his independence and honor.

LESSON 3: THERE'S SOMETHING BEYOND ONESELF. History, philosophy, values, responsibility--think beyond your niche.

LESSON 4: MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY. Although this was McNamara's hallmark, and the fog of war demands redundancy, he has a point: we are not maximizing how we spend $500B a year toward world peace, and are instead spending it toward the enrichment of select corporations, building things that don't work in the real world.

LESSON 5: PROPORTIONALITY SHOULD BE A GUIDELINE IN WAR. McNamara is clearly still grieving over the fact that we firebombed 67 Japanese cities before we ever considered using the atomic bomb, destroying 50% to 90% of those cities.

LESSON 6: GET THE DATA. It is truly appalling to realize that the U.S. Government is operating on 2% of the relevant information, in part because it relies heavily on foreign allies for what they want to tell us, in part because the U.S. Government has turned its back on open sources of information. Marc Sageman, in "Understanding Networks of Terror", knows more about terrorism today than do the CIA or FBI, because he went after the open source data and found the patterns. There is a quote from a Senator in the 1960's that is also compelling, talking about "an instability of ideas" that are not understood, leading to erroneous decisions in Washington. For want of action, we forsook thought.

LESSON 7: BELIEF & SEEING ARE BOTH OFTEN WRONG. With specific reference to the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the failure of America to understand that the Vietnamese were fighting for independence from China, not just the French or the corrupt Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, McNamara blows a big whole in the way the neo-cons "believed" themselves into the Iraq war, and took America's blood, treasure, and spirit with them.

LESSON 8: BE PREPARED TO RE-EXAMINE YOUR REASONING. McNamara is blunt here: if your allies are not willing to go along with you, consider the possibility that your reasoning is flawed.

LESSON 9: IN ORDER TO DO GOOD, YOU MAY HAVE TO ENGAGE IN EVIL. Having said that, he recommends that we try to maximize ethics and minimize evil. He is specifically concerned with what constitutes a war crime under changing circumstances.

LESSON 10: NEVER SAY NEVER. Reality and the future are not predictable. There are no absolutes. We should spend more time thinking back over what might have been, be more flexible about taking alternative courses of action in the future.

LESSON 11: YOU CAN'T CHANGE HUMAN NATURE. There will always be war, and disaster. We can try to understand it, and deal with it, while seeking to calm our own human nature that wants to strike back in ways that are counter-productive.

Rumsfeld's anti-physical Folly Continues: running Army into the ground with world-wide deployments

The IRR: Emptying the Cupboard

July 06, 2004

By George Friedman

Summary

The U.S. Department of Defense is now activating the Army's Individual Ready Reserve for combat duty. Given the inherent problems associated with such a move, it is clear that U.S. war planners were caught in a trap: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "revolution in warfare" has not evolved as expected.

Analysis

On July 6, 5,600 members of the U.S. Army's Individual Ready Reserve will start to receive notices that they are being recalled to active duty. Members of the IRR are generally soldiers who have completed their primary active-duty assignments. They are not part of the regular Reserves or the National Guard, but are simply kept on a list as available for recall. In general, this has been simply a formality. IRR members have been called up on only two occasions: Once was in 1968, following the Tet offensive; the other was in 1991, in the context of Operation Desert Storm. There have already been some smaller call-ups of essential specialties, but this is the first large-scale mobilization. The Army has indicated that there likely will be more.

The recall is neither routine, nor what the Army would like to be doing.

First, the reactivated reservists will have been out of the Army for several years. They might not be in appropriate mental or physical condition for a tour in a combat zone -- where, according to the Army, most are going to be sent. Since the current plan is to keep them on active duty for no more than a year, there is little time for an extensive conditioning program if the troops are to spend much time in-theater. These are not the forces commanders want to lead if they have a choice.

Second, although this call-up might fix the Army's quantitative problem in the short run, it can wreak havoc in the long run. The volunteer army depends, obviously, on the willingness of people to join. That rests on a large number of variables, one of which is the idea that the volunteer can control his term of service, building it into his or her long-term plans. It has always been understood, in the fine print, that calling up the IRR was possible, and soldiers who are being recalled cannot complain that they did not know -- they can complain only that they did not expect it to happen. However, people who have already served and completed their tours -- and are busy with careers, children and mortgages -- are now going to be sent into combat zones. Their younger siblings, cousins and friends are going to be watching the chaos in their lives and could well decide that, while they would be prepared to serve a given term and even have that term extended during war, giving the Army control over their lives -- and those of their families -- for years afterward is simply not worth it.

The Army, the Defense Department and the Office of the President are all acutely aware of this problem. Nevertheless, they have chosen to go this route. Given the inherent defects of the choice and its obvious potential cost, they did not make this move frivolously; this was something that was absolutely necessary. That said, the question now is this: How did the U.S. Army get into the position of having to make this choice?

The call-up of the IRR in 1968 came in the midst of a crisis surrounding Vietnam. The United States had miscalculated troop requirements and found itself short of critical specialties that it could not make up from the pool of available conscripts. No one planned for the circumstances that presented themselves in 1968 -- or for those that prompted Desert Storm either. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait left little time to redesign the Army's force structure, and by 1991 it was dealing with a surprise. The IRR has been utilized twice, both times in the face of the unexpected. Sometimes it was mismanagement, sometimes reality, but always it was an attempt to cope with the unexpected -- and unwanted -- event. The 2004 call-up obviously fits into this category. The issue is what was unanticipated, and why it was not expected.

The Sept. 11 attacks certainly were unanticipated. This cannot be disputed, although whether they should have been is going to be an interminable debate. However, this large-scale activation of the IRR is taking place not six months after Sept. 11, but almost three years later. That indicates a much broader and deeper surprise than the attacks themselves.

The first surprise had to do with the nature of warfare. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was an advocate of what has been called "the revolution in warfare." This concept is the belief that as technology of all sorts comes online, the need for massed armies will decline. Few would debate that a revolution in warfare is under way. The issue is whether it has matured to a sufficient degree that policymakers can depend on it, or whether it still has several generations to go.

Throughout his tenure, Rumsfeld has been highly critical of the Army. He felt that it was too heavy, in the sense of relying on armor and artillery -- supply hogs that take a long time to get to the theater of operations. Rumsfeld's view of the war against al Qaeda was that it would require very small, very fast and very lethal forces to execute. Rumsfeld was right, but he failed to factor in two things.

The first was that while the deployment of small, fast, lethal forces potentially could take out al Qaeda units and could be used to destabilize nation-states, those units could not be used to take control of those nations. There is a huge difference between shattering a government and governing a country. Indeed, there is little value in destabilizing a nation unless it can be pacified; otherwise, destabilization opens the door to al Qaeda, rather than shutting down the network. Therefore, insufficient thought was given to the problem of pacification -- not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Denying terrain to al Qaeda means being present on the ground in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Rumsfeld constantly tried to find a way to transfer responsibility for the ground to an indigenous government -- failing to recognize that the high-tech destruction of the state creates a vacuum that either is filled with U.S. forces or left in chaos.

Rumsfeld focused on the first phase of the war: regime change. This phase was certainly amenable to the kind of war he favored. But the second phase -- regime construction -- is not at all influenced by the revolution in warfare. It requires a large security force -- and even that might not be enough. Rumsfeld's hostility toward the Army's cumbersome, traditional ways of doing things caused him to make a massive miscalculation: Rather than building up Army ground forces in 2002 and 2003, he restricted the growth of the Army, thereby leaving it short of troops for the prolonged second phase of the war.

Rumsfeld's second surprise was a persistent underestimation of the enemy. In particular, he seemed to genuinely believe that with the occupation of Baghdad, all organized resistance would cease. The idea that there would be people in Iraq who, out of support for the Baathist regime or simple patriotism, would resist the American occupation in an extended and effective way seems never to have been factored into plans. Indeed, when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was very much concerned about extended resistance, argued before the war that in excess of 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq for an extended period, Rumsfeld attacked him as being alarmist. Rumsfeld failed to plan for occupying a country of 25 million people or policing a city of 5 million people -- both in the face of resistance, albeit relatively light resistance.

Occupying a country or a city takes manpower. That is a requirement -- though not necessarily the only one -- for success. Rumsfeld's view of warfare did not take into account the complexities of occupation. The tension between Rumsfeld and the Army created a situation in which dramatically pyramiding responsibilities for the Army were not met with equivalent increases in manpower.

This is the first global war the United States has waged in which neither the command structure of the armed forces nor the force structure evolved dramatically in the opening years. The fact that there has not been a doubling or tripling in size of the U.S. Army is startling. In spite of the fact that it is involved in a variety of combat operations in remote areas of the world -- and that the enemy can choose to open new theaters of operation that are unexpected (such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) -- the armed forces have not grown substantially in three years.

Rumsfeld apparently thought the war would be easier than it has been, and he believed that technology would be more effective than it possibly could be. The need to occupy, pacify and govern hostile nations was not built into the war plan -- nor is it there now. The fact is that the call-ups from the IRR are Band-Aids on a fundamental issue: The United States is involved in a land war in Asia again, and it is trying to fight that war with a military -- especially an Army -- that was designed for peacetime in the 1990s. It cannot possibly stretch.

The central conceptual problem in Vietnam was that the United States did not want to spend its resources on doing the things that might give it an opportunity to win the war. Having insufficient resources, the United States simply decided that they were sufficient.

In Vietnam, the military had recourse to a draft. It did not work very well. Not only did it create deep social tension between those who served and those who did not, but also a two-year term was not sufficient to master most of the specialties of warfare -- including rifleman skills. Between two years of service and a one-year tour in Vietnam, the military lost its people just when they were learning to do their jobs. The draft -- particularly as it was structured during the Vietnam era -- was the failure point, not the solution.

Two-year conscription is simply too short a period of time to master the specialties the military needs now. Today's military does not consist of cannon fodder, but of highly trained specialists who need two years to begin becoming proficient at their jobs. Moreover, another draft in which half the eligible candidates were exempt would rip the United States apart. Universal conscription creates too large a manpower pool. It creates more problems than it solves. What it needs is an expansion of the volunteer force.

For that, very large sums of money are needed, making it attractive to choose the military as a profession. The problem is that the United States is out of time. The time for this expansion should have been early 2002, when it became clear that al Qaeda would not be easily defeated and that other military campaigns would be coming. Had the Bush administration asked Congress for sufficient money to expand the volunteer Army, large numbers of well-trained troops would be coming out of the chute just about now.

No such request was made. Rumsfeld ignored Army requests for increased manpower, focusing instead on surgical tools for regime change. The force structure did not undergo a quantum expansion. As a result, when the worst-case rather than the best-case scenario came to pass in Iraq -- guerrilla war -- the United States was unprepared for it. It had to reach into the IRR for a few thousand men. The military is, in effect, cannibalizing itself, using up its reserves. Since this war is not likely to end soon, and the IRR is not a bottomless well, it is clear that something will have to be done.

Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved

The Threat From Below

Not only is DoD failing to understand WHAT IS GOING ON, ON THE GROUND, its failing to realize what's going on BENEATH THE GROUND:

www.combatreform.org/thethreatfrombelow.htm

The Threat From Above: the RMA "bogeyman" they themselves ignore

This is NOT Strategic Maneuver or sound C3D2 to defeat SSCs: where did our Soldiers learn such bad habits?---Fort Lewis, Washington: "From Here to Eternity" Garrison U.S. Army Unready For War: As Seen From Space

James Jones, an Army combat veteran revealed the bankrupt and snobby Army culture as being unready for WW2 in his book; From Here to Eternity. As Japanese planes are bombing and strafing U.S. Navy ships and Army/marine planes parked in neat rows to ward off "saboteurs" our entire force in the Pacific was nearly wiped out resulting in us almost losing the war on day 1. Despite the obvious need to drop the rank snobbery, work together and stop the non-tactical "parade ground" military, after WW2 we reverted right back to "From Here to Eternity" and suffered grievous losses in Korea, Vietnam, and now in Iraq. We are today, parking both ships, planes and trucks, troops, tanks and buildings in easily targeted rows, both in CONUS and overseas.

Are We Headed For Another Pearl Harbor?

On the 21st century, non-linear battlefield dominated by high explosives we simply CANNOT afford to play BS barracks games and keep living in rows of buildings with our air, ground and sea platforms parked in rows, uncamouflaged.

If you have ANY doubt about the dangers we face of reliving "Pearl Harbor" which we compound by base closures compressing even more targets in smaller areas, look at the satellite imagery of U.S. bases using google maps.

1. GO TO

www.maps.google.com

2. Type in

fort lewis wa

you will see a street map

3. Click on "Satellite"

Click on + to zoom all the way in on to see the clusterfucks of Stryker and other wheeled trucks

Move <--- and ---> to shift view from space to keep the wheeled truck narcissist wagons in view etc.

Here's the photo of Fort Lewis, Washington taken from space by a satellite with key features of the U.S. Army "garrison" BS mentality explained:

1. HUGE parade ground for brass to self-worship themselves with troop standing in hot sun for hours at a time. Troops have to waste hours mowing this huge lawn. Parade grounds and useless golf courses should be ripped out of every Army post and the space used for tank cross-country open terrain maneuver training or at the very least a firing range. You will notice there is no maneuver training area on Fort Lewis--they have to drive over 100 miles southeast to Yakima training center--more time and resources wasted, when we do not have the time or the money to waste. Is it a wonder our troops are so road-bound and easily blown up by roadside bombs in Iraq?





2. HUGE motor pools of Stryker, Humvee and FMTV vulnerable wheeled trucks in Fulda Gap Olive Drab Green paint that makes them clearly seen against gray pavement. Troops waste many hours obssessing over these flimsy and tactically unsound trucks under the hot sun to micro-manage and alleviate the anxieties of the brass and their bean counters that they will work. However, the hot sun and temperature elements are degrading the rubber tires, optics, paint constantly.

So as mother earth kills the life of these flimsy vehicles, they make an easy Pearl Harbor-esque target for enemies who could with GPS guidance destroy them en masse with just a few direct hits. ALL vehicles should be painted in universal TAN or BROWN and dispersed and co-located with their units in the field at all times under concealing vegetation and/or nets to keep the sun off, or better yet IN ISO containers. Some "war on terror" we are waging, huh? We didn't declare war on 9/12/01 and we are still not at war.

3. You will see 5 x CH-47D Chinook heavy lift helicopters and a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter again in absurd "Fulda Gap" green camouflage paint making them easy targets on the ground and in the air. These aircraft should be GRAY for effective camouflage in the air and be covered in camou nets on the ground. The main runway of Gray Army airfield is only 6125 feet x 150 feet and the secondary runway is only 1867 feet by 46 feet. This is good enough to fly-away by USAF C-17s and C-130s, but the Stryker truck is too heavy to fly by C-130 even stripped down anywhere unless you want to go to Spokane, Washington. Only 3 Strykers can fit into a C-17 which we do not have many total, and only a squadron of 12 at nearby McCord AFB. If the Army were wise and transferred Stryker trucks to MP units where their road-bound fatal weaknesses would be offset by a less lethal mission and re-equipped with M113 Gavin and M8 Buford AGS light tanks, they could fly 4-5 at a time in C-17s and 1-at-a-time in C-130s to strategic distances (over 1, 000 miles). Moreover, if the main runway was lengthened to over 8, 000 feet, cargo 747s could fly brigade Gavin/Buford sets and all required personnel rapidly to any place in the world with international airports. This was what an Army that was serious about getting ready to fight anywhere in the world would do.

4. Here you see a feel-good sports field and 400 meter tracks for absurd sports PT in t-shirts, shorts and running shoes which has no combat relevance. Also notice the tennis courts. More evidence that the U.S. military garrison lifestyle is all about narcissism and not combat effectiveness.

5. Here you see the comfortable Rank Hath Its Priveliges (RHIP) officer's housing adjacent to the parade ground for narcissist ceremonies. This is disgusting and not leadership-by-example. These housing units should be torn down on all U.S. military posts/bases and everyone made to live off post in REAL civilian houses to have real civilian cultural lives instead of living in the cloistered artificial lifestyle that leads to snobby and disrespect of people with less money, rank and status--people like our foreign enemies and civil populace that we are trying to win to our side. Amerocentric snobbery does not win hearts & minds.

6. All over the post are multi-story troop barracks and enlisted family housing units where the underclass lives and the under 21 year olds can be frequently visited by their over-bearing "mother may, I?" chain of command to nitpick over the condition of interior paint and the state of the lawns around the buildings. So while America's enemies study how to kill us with the latest technologies, our troops spend their days picking up trash and mowing lawns in the hot sun or freezing cold after starting the day without enough sleep doing absurd sports PT to numb them down to better control them and remind them that they are somehow inferior to the careerist narcissists running the show who want to look good and get themselves promoted. Is it a wonder troops think 5-ton trucks weigh 5 tons? Is it a wonder they do not know what a RPG can or cannot do? Is it a wonder our troops are ignorant of warfare and think they can ride around in wheeled trucks and just shoot the enemy as if it were a TV western gun duel? The sad truth is they enter the combat zone sleep-deprived for months and years at a time and are falling asleep at the wheel and dying. They are getting blown up by a push of a button by roadside bombs before they can even get a chance to shoot their hand weapons. War is not an event to prove manhood and adulthood you should already have, its not a game or a duel. Its about winning or losing, living or dying. And we cannot afford any longer to waste time on 19th century parade ground BULLSHIT on today's lethal, non-linear, 4th generation warfare battlefields dominated by not just bullets but high explosive weaponry.

Let's be brutally honest, shall we?

Where is the constructive effort to be good at warfighting?

U.S. military is not "AMATEUR hour"; amateur implies at least we are TRYING; we are not trying; U.S. military is PHONY.

Air Force & Navy when they fly aircraft and sail ships are kept somewhat honest and combat capable because if they at any second fail they can be dead falling from the sky or in the water where man really doesn't live. To warfight they need to actively operate air/sea platforms.

In contrast in land combat, man lives on land; he does not need a platform to exist on land that automatically has a war function. He is under no compulsion to be combat ready even by platform default. Man can die on land from EXPOSURE however, and since he lives on land all the time for a peaceful, civilian life his answer to this is FIXED BUILDING SHELTER. Since man has a civilian existence means that has no military platform utility, both the Army and marines have been corrupted by building and lawn care as convenient excuses/time wasters by people who are phonies who do not want to be combat ready, they want to be phony narcissist snobs and extended adolescents paid middle-class wages.

Actives: wake up each morning sleep-deprived, roll call troop formation, do non-sense sports PT, then breakfast, some more troop formations, "leaders" meetings, paperwork, Mondays wasted in motor pool doing PMCS on tactically unsound Humvee SUV trucks, Tuesday/Wednesdays building and lawn care, Thursday meetings, Friday paperwork. WHERE IS THE TIME TO DO ACTIVE WARFIGHTING EXCELLENCE? The entire daily and weekly routine established by the narcissist egomaniacs to baby sit the economic weak co-dependants is geared around BULLSHIT (lawn and building care) not active thinking cat vs. mouse warfighting.

www.combatreform.org/sleeplessarmy.htm

Reserves: one weekend a month they arrive and waste Saturday and Sunday with roll call formation, sports PT then lunch, then yadda yadda meetings, then time to go home for the day. Two weeks in summer is fun time away from wife and kids.

Solutions

1. Get rid of static buildings: force ground troops to every day do combat things by making them live every day in tactically-sound, portable, fortifiable "Battle Boxes" THERE IS NO GARRISON. There is only the FIELD.

www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxconcept.htm
www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxes.htm

2. Make Reserves go to war for 24 hours each month

www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/realreadyreserve.htm

3. Get rid of phony narcissists and economic bennie boomers and replace with warfighter enthusiasts

www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/weakcodependantarmy.htm

4. Cat & Mouse Warfighting Experimentation Needed

www.combatreform.org/cluelessarmy.htm

Once we cut out all the BULLSHIT we will face the tools we have in front of us and start grappling with how we will use them in war and how to better use them by ACTIVE THOUGHT. Force everyone to FACE THE TOOLS THEY HAVE IN FRONT OF THEM their minds will be forced to THINK about what it is they have. FORCE THEM TO BE IN A WAR SETTING AND THEIR MINDS WILL PONDER hey, what if I left on foot over there to patrol and an enemy sapper team is already there?

The same intellectual development and innovation that I undertake will happen with the troops, what we call FIELD CRAFT. How can you have FIELDcraft when you are NOT IN THE FIELD but in garrison doing LAWN CARE?

A few examples:

Drive vehicles and lay smoke screens with OPFOR to perfect what it takes to evade optical weapons engagement

Off-road, x-country driving of TRACKED armored fighting vehicles to avoid roadside bombs/RPG ambushes

Finding out how to hide vehicles from thermal imagery

Shoot actual soft nose RPGs at vehicles and practice evading them

Actual hardening of combat vehicles and loading arragements perfected not static BS "this is the SOP we've always used so go back to sleep"



FEEDBACK!

Pre-Operation Iraqi Freedom

"Rowan Scarborough has it about right in his story today in terms of what Rumsfeld and his lieutenants have in mind for the Army. The Army wanted 7 of its interim wheeled brigades. It will get the 3 it has now which eliminates the need for the side-by-side. It is an example of their arrogance that they believe we will be able to depend on surrogate armies, they know best how to win the nation's wars and until some army lands on our shores, they may be right. In the meantime, the marines landing at Kandahar and SOF running around on horseback providing the ground sensor link to airpower are the examples they point to in planning for the next war. The air force is already claiming that they are now the dominant force and the Army plays a supporting role. We are seeing the wholesale shift in national military strategy. TR Fehrenbach is out. Douhet is in."

Post-Operation Iraqi Freedom

By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2003 DoD's fiscal 2004 budget proposal now before Congress "is the first to fully reflect the new defense strategies and policies, and the lessons of the global war on terror," the military's top civilian told senior legislators here May 14.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testified before the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He said the $379.9 billion DoD fiscal 2004 request would be applied "to meet the threats that this dangerous new century poses, and threats that emerge often without warning."

"We have to apply the lessons from the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq," the secretary emphasized, in transforming DoD and the services "as to how they organize, how they train, how they equip and exercise and fight" in the 21st century.

For example, Rumsfeld noted, speed and agility displayed by U.S. and coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom prevented Saddam's troops from putting up "a coherent defense," thus shortening the war's duration and reducing casualties.

Another important lesson learned in Iraq was the ability to quickly act upon fresh intelligence, as shown by the surprise March 19 air strike on Hussein's suspected headquarters in Baghdad.

New munitions have proved their worth in 21st century war fighting, Rumsfeld pointed out, such as the thermobaric Hellfire missile that was used for the first time in Iraq against enemy forces. With this Hellfire, an exploding mist creates a powerful shock wave where it detonates, wiping out whatever and whoever is nearby.

As such, that missile "can take out the first floor of a building without damaging the floors above," the secretary explained, "and is capable of reaching around corners, striking enemy forces that hide in caves or bunkers and hardened, multiroom complexes."

Also, U.S. and coalition military planners used computer modeling in determining the best direction, angle of attack and type of weapon to use for air strikes against enemy targets, while reducing civilian casualties and collateral damage.

Consequently, Iraqi Freedom "was done with greater precision than any conflict in history," Rumsfeld asserted.

The secretary said the use of precision munitions against enemy forces and facilities in the Iraq War, "had to have persuaded the Iraqi people that the effort was not against the country of Iraq, was not against the Iraqi people, was not against a religion, but, in fact, was against a regime."

Such success supports "the decision to request increases in the 2004 budget for research and development, testing, evaluation (and) procurement," the secretary observed, as well as ongoing efforts to expedite the development and issuance of new equipment to war fighters.

Joint operations also proved their worth in Iraq, Rumsfeld noted. He pointed out that former prisoner of war Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued "by a joint team of Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, marines, (and) Air Force" special operations troops.

The employment of such forces, Rumsfeld asserted, proved to be another combat multiplier during fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Special operators "were the first coalition forces to hit the ground" in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, noting that "a number of them went in before the war formally began." He also cited these troops' "remarkable performance" in Afghanistan.

Such successes "support the decisions we've made to transform the Special Operations Command and to request needed new investments in special operations in the budget," Rumsfeld remarked.

Other important lessons applied to 21st century warfare will also be gleaned from military operations in Iraq, the secretary pointed out.

DoD's 2004 budget request "was developed with warfare of this kind in mind," Rumsfeld declared, "and the experiences in fighting this war have confirmed the decisions made in the Defense Review, which are reflected in the budget before the committee."

NOTE: This is a plain text version of a web page. If your e-mail program did not properly format this information, you may view the story at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2003/n05152003_200305151.html Any photos, graphics or other imagery included in the article may also be viewed at this web page.

FEEDBACK! Post-Rumsfeld

An aerospace engineer writes:

"Its is damn discouraging to see billions wasted on V-22, F-22, F-35, Hummers, Net Centric Command Centers, and so forth. A combined arms force of tracked high rate of fire protection vehicles, large caliber, low recoil direct fire vehicles, command and control, and personnel movers together with a fleet of indigenous STOVL attack aircraft and STOL equipment/people mover aircraft with the correct ordnance would be tough counter to the arab/muslim tribal warfare tactics. So we need a basic tracked vehicle base to build a number of versions on, a direct attack aircraft that can get down and dirty, and a non-USAF, non-helicopter Army transport. All of these need an advanced fire control system that can give first shot hit snap shots. Done correctly you'll think you are using iron sights but really are not.

Walking through though streets with hummers or Abrams is not the way to go, it is ambush alley in a confined trap.

Is the Bradley effective in Afganistan and Iraq?

I remember pictures in WW II of the half-tracks with large bore mortars/105mm Howitsers that could be very effective.

How are we going to get this turned around? In listening to the generals testifying before congress they are like chinese heroin addicts that want more of the same to fell good all the time they are destroying themselves.

In the latest Aviation Week they have a disclosure of what the Chinese are working on and that includes building themselves the best fighter/attack aircraft made the Sukhoi Su-27 with there electronics. They have a knack of building what uniquely they need for their geography and tactics."

A former Assistant DA writes:

"Basically what you're saying is that the Navy -- and the Army and AF -- all choose, say, 50% efficient solutions so that they can employ double the number of half-assed (50% efficient) cronies, or do things at 50% efficiency so they can spend twice the amount of money. This is well known from business and government agencies in general. They have little or no incentive to do a good job 100% efficient because they reason that they will get less money and don't think of or care about the damage that 50% solutions do. 50% solutions are not mathematically scalable so that doubling them gives you a full 100%. A 50% military solution could be completely lethal to our side and doubling it only gives you two equally lethal 'solutions' that result in you being wiped out entirely, as you seem to be saying.

What is interesting and despicable are the asskissing bootlickers who cling to the 50% solutions and loudly proclaim they are really 100%. Their proof is the half that works and they cover up the half that does not. I have seen this so many times in so many different areas of life (business, govt, science) and it is just sickening. They cannot be reformed, it is hopeless. Only those who are teachable and willing to learn the truth are worth spending any time or effort on and there is some hope they can have enough influence and networking with other like minds. I know. I've tried."

Table of Contents

Liddell-Hart on Strategy

The Two Battles

Battle against the earth

Land Forces must be triple threat

Battle Against Man: WWII linear fights

Post WWII: Non-Linear Battlefields

Battle against man: the Iraqi debacle

Tofflerian gadgets trump all?

Tofflerians view reality by a timeline

Precision firepower not a panacea

Fehrenbach: who controls ground, wins

Air/Sea not same as Land combat

Land Combat: High and Low-Tech in play on NLB

Medium "cookie-cutter" best case

Medium Force worse-case: disaster

Man: killer angel

Yom Kippur War Day 1

World's first SSC?

ATGMs trump tanks for a time

ATGM/RPG Defense density

Fatal over-dependence on air strikes

Israel reorganizes!

Maneuver regained

General Sharon's bold 2D/3D maneuver

IDF Paratrooper 3D Air Assault

2D tank maneuver clobbers Egyptians

The cost of being unprepared...

Who won?

Whose will prevailed?

Never under-estimate the enemy!

Maneuver is the key to victory

No one to rescue U.S.

Air-Mech-Strike: deploy anywhere, any time

The BIG PICTURE

2D Force leading the way

3D Force leading the way

Robust 2D/3D combat teams

Urban Combat Missions

Madness of foot-mobile assaults

Hobart's Siege Engines are the answer

M113 Gavin MOUT vertical assault vehicle

2D/3D Force structure is the answer to 21st century combat

Got questions? We got answers!

Author: 1st Tactical Studies Group (Airborne)

Email: itsg@hotmail.com

Home Page: www.combatreform.org