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| Military Assessing Changes |
| 2005-03-21 |
| Hard service in Iraq is wearing out some of the US military's core weapons. Tanks, armored vehicles, and aircraft are being run at rates two to six times greater than in peacetime, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress earlier this month. The bad news here is they may need to be replaced. But there's good news too, according to Secretary Rumsfeld: It's possible they can be replaced with something better. The need to refurbish equipment "is providing an opportunity to adjust the capabilities of the force earlier than otherwise might have been the case," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on March 10. Perhaps the same might be said of the military as a whole. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the tough work of helping rebuild a nation while fighting an insurgency has profoundly affected the organization and deployment of United States forces. Whatever Iraq becomes, the American way of war may never be the same. Throughout the services there's a new emphasis on mobility, guerrilla-fighting skills, and special forces. These changes might have occurred whether President Bush ordered the toppling of Saddam Hussein or not. But the urgency created by war may be making it easier for Secretary Rumsfeld to pursue a long-sought transformation of the Pentagon. -snip- The Army and Marines have created the kind of units needed for counterinsurgency. The Pentagon is increasing the size of special forces - 500 new Green Berets are scheduled to be added this year, for instance. Veteran special-forces operators are now eligible for reenlistment bonuses of up to $150,000. Slowly, after some missteps, the military is moving to provide troops with extra protection tailored to the manner in which insurgents fight. This means body armor, and armor for Humvees and other transport vehicles. But at a recent hearing members of Congress still pleaded with Gen. John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, to ship a stockpile of ballistic glass to Iraq, so that troops could custom-fit window shields. General Abizaid admitted that there was a lesson for the military in the fact that troops were unprepared to combat improvised explosives and other guerrilla weapons. "We have to design our armed forces for the 360-degree battlefield and not the linear battlefield," he told House Armed Services Committee members. -snip- Yet Iraq - and more broadly, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan - is also providing the military with opportunity for comprehensive change. The US may have gone to war with the Army it had, to paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld. But it's likely to leave the war with armed services that are considerably different. Take the Navy. In the old days it had a strict 18-month cycle for ship deployments, notes Thompson of the Lexington Institute. This meant six months at sea, followed by six months downtime, and six months spent preparing for the next deployment. That's been changed so that deployments are less automatic, and more responsive to events in the world. Such tactics as switching crews while ships remain at sea in effect increases the Navy's size, as it can lower the number in port. The Navy "now has a completely new model based on surging in response to threats," says Thompson. The Air Force, for its part, is inevitably becoming less fighter-centric. The most important airplane in Iraq, according to Abizaid of Central Command, has been the C-17 airlifter. For this reason, plus budget pressure, the projected numbers of the new F-22 fighter are dwindling. Then there's the Army. With the Marines, it has shouldered most of the Iraqi fighting, and suffered many of the casualties. Iraq has given the Army an opportunity to test and change its new Stryker brigades, which, with their wheeled armored vehicles, are intended as a lighter and faster-acting fighting force. It has put the service on notice of its need for greater modularity - in which each division might be less unique, with interchangeable smaller units. "The Army has been through very tough times in the last four years. What has come out is a determination to really completely change its organization," says Mr. Thompson. Right now the US military is embarking on a new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) process, a periodic exercise in which the Pentagon leadership sets down a broad vision for the structure and use of US forces in the world. If nothing else the QDR this time may allow the Pentagon and the Congress to draw on the Iraq experience and decide how to balance the demands of peacekeeping and war-fighting in the modern age. "We need as a nation to decide what we want our military to be," says Jack Spencer, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #5 ZF - peacekeeping is being ready (really ready) for warfighting. That's why we won the cold war. Nobody wanted to fight it, but the military was ready to win - even at the expense of most of the rest of the planet, if it came to that! |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-03-21 11:13:11 PM |
| #4 Mrs D - apparently maintaining that military superiority now involves not sharing our miltech with NATO countries. Sad, that countries can be such |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-03-21 9:21:03 PM |
| #3 ZF your comments reminded me of passages in Robert Utley's book Frontier Regulars, chapter three, The Problem of Doctrine - "Neither West Point nor the postgraduate schools addressed themselves more than incidentlally to the special conditions and requirements of Indian warfare. Indian campaigns found their way into professional literature as interesting history rather than as case studies from which lessons of immediate relevance might be drawn...Military thought continued to focus on the next foreign war, as General Hancock make clear when he advised a congressional committee in 1976 that the Indian service of the Army was 'entitled to no weight' in determining the proper strength, composition, and organization of the army. Yet for a full century, with brief interludes of foreign and civil war, Indian service was the primary mission of the army." "Instead, for a century the army tried to perform its unconventional mission with conventional organizations and methods. The result was an Indian record thta contained more failures than successes and a lack of preparedness for conventional war that became painfully evident in 1812, 1846, 1861 and 1898." BTW, I'm not aware of anyone in a position of responsibility or authority advocating any campaign plan or potential fight on the Chinese mainland. However, I'm sure you can point me to one. |
| Posted by: Thans Anginetch3773 2005-03-21 9:13:33 PM |
| #2 I am confident Mr. Rumsfeld will make sure that the QDR focuses on China. However, the U. S. will never create a military capability sufficient to defeat China during peace time. Fortunately, what we need do to prevent China from defeating us is to maintain naval, air and space supremacy, something much easier than amassing sufficient military capability to defeat China. A shooting war with China would involve tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dead Americans regardless of the outcome. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-03-21 8:58:21 PM |
| #1 Ultimately, warfighting is way more important than peacekeeping. It's one thing to lose a few thousand troops in an insurgency. Losing a shooting war with China could involve tens of thousands of dead Americans. No question here about priorities - situations like Iraq are little more than skirmishes extended over time, whereas China poses a threat of a much larger scale, in terms of the resources required, and the assets at risk. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-03-21 8:25:54 PM |