perfidy

Here are links to Part One and Part Two.

Assume that the military has taken my advice, and increased the size of the Airlift command, and bought several Mobile Offshore Bases. Now, we can move troops and equipment anywhere in the world, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Many defense analysts, and the Defense Secretary himself, have called for “transformation” of the armed forces. What this means is sometimes a little vague, but the general thrust of their argument is that we should focus on small, high-tech, adaptable and flexible, deployable and above all highly lethal forces. Cold War anachronisms like heavy armored divisions should slowly be phased out in favor of light, mobile, precision guided, networked, brilliant-weapon forces.

In principle, this is all well and good. It is traditionally American policy to sacrifice equipment (money) before the troops. As Patton said, “it’s not your job to die for your country, but to make the other sorry bastard die for his.” I think, though, that we have gone a leetle too far down the quality side, to the point where we are facing serious problems with quantity. The drastic military cuts of the Clin-ton years have forced the military to focus on high tech weaponry because we have no other choice. So to a large extent, Rumsfeld’s emphasis on transformation is putting the best face on a bad situation.

It is not enough to have sufficient forces to deal with x number of threats. You need significantly more than that, so that after a threat is dealt with, those units can return to the United States for rest and refit. That is the problem that we are facing in Iraq. The all volunteer army has done wonders, but if we abuse it, the volunteers will walk away when their terms of enlistment are up.

I believe that we need to change our focus somewhat. We now have the capacity to put nearly infinite force anyplace we choose. What we can’t do is put a lesser but still overwhelming force in two or three places at once. We need to seriously upgrade that ability.

As I mentioned in part one, the core of our lethality is our ability to communicate and coordinate. This should be the baseline for any new divisions. The army is in the process of switching its divisions to digital technology. The 4th ID, which didn’t get to Iraq in time to see action in regular combat, was the first division to go completely digital. The 1st cavalry is next in line, and will be followed by the others in turn. Any new division should start as a digital division. What this means is that they will have the complete set of communications and networking gear that was available to some but not all of the units in Iraq last spring.

C4ISR is the military acronym for this concept. It stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. No one in the world does it as well as we do. Constant and realistic training allows our troops to get the most of this equipment. By starting from that base, we will have highly adaptable, flexible and lethal troops right out of the box. Then, we can equip them to meet projected needs.

The needs that I see coming in the near term fall into two categories – the need to hit hard, and hit quickly, relatively well equipped and decent sized armies; and to occupy the nations that were once guarded by those armies. (By relatively well equipped, I mean something on the order of the Iraqi army in Gulf War I – equipped largely with late soviet era equipment, with a sprinkling of more advanced weapons acquired from France, Germany or China.) Our current line up of divisions doesn’t quite meet those needs.

The Airborne divisions are fast reacting, and can be inserted nearly anywhere. But, they are lightly armed. (Their ability to rapidly and effectively call on Air Force firepower, seen in Afghanistan, mitigates this somewhat.) The 10th Mountain division is in a similar position. The Armored and Mechanized Infantry divisions are not air deployable. We need something in between, both in terms of response time and firepower.

The solution is a light armored division. Instead of the 70 ton Abrams tank, it would be equipped with a lighter, 20 to 30 ton tank. It would have a gun nearly as powerful as the 120mm cannon on the M1, with all the nifty targeting and communications gear of the M1, but with significantly less armor. During the Gulf War, American tanks were engaging Iraqi T72s a thousand yards outside the Russian tank’s effective range. This is likely to hold true in future conflicts. Armor that can protect the crew against small arms, shrapnel and smaller cannon is sufficient. Similarly, a simple 10 ton armored personnel carrier, with good speed and armor to protect the troops from small arms fire and shrapnel, and armed with a bushmaster cannon would be more useful than a Bradley. Speed, coordination and firepower would allow the division to overcome the typically poorly trained and ill-organized third world army.

The Army has already done much of the research for the light tank - the M8 Buford AGS, or armored gun system was tested in the early nineties. Something like that could be put into production easily. For the APC, the old M113A3 should be upgraded with more modern communications and navigation equipment, and given a larger gun.

The vehicles would give the division mobility and firepower that the airborne divisions lack. Yet, with the weights I mentioned, the division would be air deployable. Even the small C-130s could carry two of the APCs, or even one of the tanks if they were on the low end of the weight scale. A C-5 could carry at least six of the smaller tanks, instead of just two Abrams. (A small number of Abrams and Bradleys could stiffen the armored force without drastically reducing its deployability.) While a light armored division could not deploy as fast as the 82nd, it would be a lot faster than the 1st Armored.

The other need is for occupation troops. Again, they would be equipped with all the communications and networking gear as a regular division. They would have armored vehicles, armored humvees, and a few tanks for firepower. But they would train heavily for missions that an occupation force would deal with – urban warfare, counterinsurgency, intelligence and military police roles functions, and military engineering.

Having a division of occupation troops would free up the traditional combat troops for their actual mission. Instead of keeping the troops that did the invasion in country for two years, as soon as they crack the shell and put down major resistance, they rotate back to the states for rest and refit. Then, the occupation troops move in to settle things down. This would allow us to keep a larger proportion of our frontline combat troops ready to fight.

We should keep the divisions we already have just as they are. There is still a need for armored and mechanized infantry. And there certainly is a need for the airborne divisions. The light armored divisions would fill a large gap in our capabilities, and the occupation troops would allow us to preserve the edge of our combat troops, while doing a better job of nation building when that is necessary.

I have thought that another five divisions would get us out of our current mess – two each of the new light armored and occupation divisions, and another infantry division, along with the necessary support troops needed to keep them operational. This wouldn’t put us up to our cold war force levels, but it would make us vastly more able to deal with the threats that we do face, and will over the next ten years or so.