Please try to view the geocities 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.
--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 defeatinginternational terrorists such as al-Qaida."
The RMA 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.
"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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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).
* 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.combatreform2.com 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.
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
THE SHAFT OF THE SPEAR: RMA Civilian Neocons vs. RMA Military Bombard & occupy narcissists
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.
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
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UP/DOWN
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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).
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
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 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 $4M on each of these flat-bottom, road-bound trucks?
From the recent PBS documentary, "Afghanistan: the Other War"
Go to 2:58 and see why the Canadians have gone to tracks in Afghanistan like other smart armies, Brits, Dutch etc.
We need to stop wasting billions on fatally flawed break-down-prone wheeled Strykerrr trucks that fail to get the job done and put our men into constant road/trail ambushes and put our money into M113 Gavin light for cross-country mobility but medium-weight in armor protection tracks that don't get stuck and break down in a mere light rain and minor mud.
1: UHO. Its raining in Afghanistan. 20-ton wheeled trucks + muddy roads don't mix. Too bad wars don't take place where its comfortable and dry.
2: "We are going to make contact with a new village and reach out to them and win over their hearts and minds in our low-maintenance, all-terrain, high-speed SASO wheeled vehicles. Our LAV-IIIs are used by the Americans who call them 'Strykers'".
3: "WAHOO! Look at Me! I'm going 60 miles per hour on the road!!" (Not for long!)
LAV-III stuck a 1st time; Road Speed: 0 MPH
4: "Ohhh....sh$%^&! 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)
Understanding the Great Mystery of High Explosives(not for the weak hearted)
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