Here is one of their inaugural articles, an excellent analysis of how the US military is caught up in the type of conflict it is ill prepared for. One of the inescapable points he makes is that the command structure, by playing out a doctrine that was created for a different kind of war, they adopt a strategy that is losing the war and creating unnecessary casualties.
The Agonist | On Strategy in Iraq
American forces have tactical doctrines which are unsuited to current missions, because they assume forward control is sufficient. This defect shows up in our logistical problems with trucking, and with the high percentage of personnel transport vehciles which are not ready to go through hostile terrain. The two problems reinforce each other - excessively forward tactical doctrine creates more chances for insurgents to attack flank and rear areas not covered by the forward deployed assets. This problem is about to become a vicious circle: to make up for the failure of a forward deployed control, and having a logistical capacity that is a "soft white underbelly", in the old military phrase, the US is about to over rely on the already overtaxed rotary wing arm. Since this arm is already undersupplied with spare parts for current committments, it is gravely increasing the hazard being faced by US service personnel fighting in Iraq. Instead of dealing with these problems, either by scaling back the mission, or demanding the committment of sufficient resources to accomplish the current mission - the SecDef has instituded steps which are designed to delay the day of reckoning, but do so by increasing the risk to personnel. Just as with the armor shortage, this will eventually manifest itself as increased fatalities, decreased mission effectiveness - as hard choices must be made as to which objectives to abandon - and increased insurgent effectiveness. The rising fatality and casualty rate is not, then, an accident, but the result of the failure of the civilian leadership to "bite the bullet". A war time economy should be managed, not to increase profits, but to win the war in the most effective manner possible. The failure to restructure the US to a war time economy has a cost - dead soldiers, and a live war.
Complete Article
On Strategy in Iraq
There is an old story, it goes like this: during the days before the second world war, a German diplomatic official toured the US, he watched an American football game. And said "Do not get mixed up with a people, who have a game like that."
But that is the problem; the American civilian leadership, most particularly its Department of Defense, is not paying attention to the lessons of sports and war. The most essential lesson as described by the classic work on Vietnam, On Strategy is to pursue actions that increase the chance of victory, and prevent enemy actions that increase their chance of victory. Football is just waking up to this fact. It's time that America's strategy in Iraq do the same.
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By Stirling Newberry in Iraqi-American War on Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 05:38:10 PM PDT
The problem is that the US military is still thinking of being an offensive wave moving forward towards a decisive engagement which will end the involvement. From the end of Vietnam until 2003, this was the political objective of military force, and therefore "rolling offensive" doctrines were correct. But they are not now.
Consider the following from FM 1-114: Air Cavalry:
Ensure maximum reconnaissance forces forward. The maximum number of intelligence-gathering assets and their capabilities are involved in the reconnaissance effort. Air cavalry is most valuable when it is providing essential battlefield information. To do this, it must be positioned as far forward as METT-T factors allow. It operates at a distance supported by CS and CSS assets.
Develop the situation rapidly. When the enemy situation is vague or unknown, the air cavalry deploys to gather information for the supported commander. Immediately on gaining enemy contact, it deploys to cover, maintains observation, and reports and develops the situation. It develops the situation based on the tactical order, unit SOP, or the directions of the commander.
This doctrine is not applicable to an insurgency of the type faced in Iraq, because the insurgents are not localized forward of safe US positions. As the cracking of the green zone demonstrates, there are no safe zones, there is no "forward" concentration. Air cavalry is then locating probable forward concentrations, and leaving flank concentrations without observation. That which is missed, stays missed.
This is not to single out Air Cavalry for specific criticism, nor to criticize a doctrine which, when it was developed, was perfectly appropriate to the strategic aims of US military deployment. What has changed is the nature of the mission, and therefore the nature of doctrine. These changes do not happen over night, and they do not happen without training.
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Instead, however, the military is getting an adhocracy, one which is oriented towards losing, and not winning. This is a harsh criticism, but it is justified. Instead of creating highly cohesive units, which are better able to face the chaos of the post-territorial warfare that we are going to be fighting for the next decade at least as part of the Global War on Terrorism and the Occupation of Iraq - we are converting the regular army to a structure that is leaders without the lead, and command without control. Already it is clear that regular Army units are better able to deal with the challenges of the post-territorial battlefield. However, the structure being offered is far more oriented to absorbing more National Guard units into service.
In short, this structure is designed to take more militia units - people who were not recruited, were not trained and are not equiped as front line battle troops - and putting them into front line service.
This causes to problems: first it weakens the command structure of the military. Second, it delays the day of reckoning created by over-commitment of troops. Instead of creating more elite units who are trained for the kind of urban battlefield we have entered, it creates a vagueness of unit integrity, which is therefore prone to breakdowns in communication. Such breakdowns are fatal in the present, because they create openings for insurgents and other guerillas and para-militaries to exploit.
This is, again, not to criticize the officers of the army. This new unit organization bears the marks of orders from the civilian leadership, and it is the civilian leadership which is wholly, or mostly, to blame for the result.
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Which brings us back to the current SecDef. Some months ago, the agonist reported that the term "Rumsfeld Roullette" had been used in reference to the effects of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), specifically that it had been noted that the survival rate for unarmored Hummers was much lower than for armored ones. The armor crisis has reached the mainstream press.
The problems with casualties for truck transport are related. The US military's logistical capacity assumes that we control most of the lines of supply. This conception is related to the air cavalry "forward deployment" mentioned above, and is, again, a bad decision based on the current mission of the US armed forces. The result has been fatalities and casualties among people driving trucks in Iraq - not reported as military fatalities because many are contractors - which have brought resupply to a stand still in many areas.
With typical pain adverse mentality on display, the answer has not been to produce an armored trucking force, which is what a mobilized US would do, but instead to shift to airlifting. The hazard of this cannot be overstated, it is a slippage in strategic position which could potentially have disasterous consquences for the US presence in Iraq. As with the armor shortage - it creates a vulnerability which the enemy shall, not might, exploit.
To understand why this is a problem, let us refer back to the Air Cavalry doctrine: namely that Air Cavalry's effectiveness drops when engaged. Air cavalry is most effective when it is moving, has control of the contact with the enemy, and can use surprise and stealth to take advantage of the lack of SA on of the enemy.
The Soviets, in their occupation of Afgahnistan reached the same point: roads were too hazardous, and therefore there was a shift to using helicopters. This is what made the supply of stingers so important: the Soviet supply jugular was exposed. Exposure of the logistical capacity is a tremendous risk of defeat - strategy may win praise, but it is logistics that wins wars.
This will compound the spare parts problem that US helicopters are already facing in Iraq. A military turbine helicopter is a giant vacuum cleaner in a land of sand. Air-ground ratios are higher, spart part consumption is higher, risk for extended operation without maitenance is higher, and operational capacity degrades faster. Increasing reliance on a wasting asset is strategic suicide. That the United States Department of Defense does not have the ability to convert industrial capacity to meet the challenge is saying that the war economy is being mismanaged.
And that again, rests on the actions of the civilian leadership.
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In summary: American forces have tactical doctrines which are unsuited to current missions, because they assume forward control is sufficient. This defect shows up in our logistical problems with trucking, and with the high percentage of personnel transport vehciles which are not ready to go through hostile terrain. The two problems reinforce each other - excessively forward tactical doctrine creates more chances for insurgents to attack flank and rear areas not covered by the forward deployed assets.
This problem is about to become a vicious circle: to make up for the failure of a forward deployed control, and having a logistical capacity that is a "soft white underbelly", in the old military phrase, the US is about to over rely on the already overtaxed rotary wing arm. Since this arm is already undersupplied with spare parts for current committments, it is gravely increasing the hazard being faced by US service personnel fighting in Iraq.
Instead of dealing with these problems, either by scaling back the mission, or demanding the committment of sufficient resources to accomplish the current mission - the SecDef has instituded steps which are designed to delay the day of reckoning, but do so by increasing the risk to personnel. Just as with the armor shortage, this will eventually manifest itself as increased fatalities, decreased mission effectiveness - as hard choices must be made as to which objectives to abandon - and increased insurgent effectiveness.
The rising fatality and casualty rate is not, then, an accident, but the result of the failure of the civilian leadership to "bite the bullet". A war time economy should be managed, not to increase profits, but to win the war in the most effective manner possible. The failure to restructure the US to a war time economy has a cost - dead soldiers, and a live war.
What is required is not restructuring the military until it is "the army Rummy wants", but the army America needs to prevail in the conflicts it is engaged in.
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