[US Defense Watch] Word is starting to seep out, like water slowly exiting a crack in a dam that the US Army's armored warfare capabilities, capacity and readiness are in big trouble.
Coming out of nearly a dozen years of infantry combat in the Middle East against insurgent forces, the Army is still heavily focused on infantry tactics operations, peacekeeping and special warfare.
The knowledge and skills needed to fight traditional US Army battles, with armor and mechanized infantry backed up by superior air support, in what used to be called Air Land Battle seem about as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
But, now, the Pentagon is starting to worry that the next fight might be against Russian forces in the Baltic or a conflict with the Iranians, backed up by an umbrella of high tech, Russian-made air defense systems and surface to surface missiles.
Where would the US Army stand in a slug fest against the Russian Army or the Iranians? To have an accurate answer, several tenets have to be examined: current tactical competence, capabilities, capacity, readiness and doctrine.
TACTICAL COMPETENCE
Retired US Army armor officer, Colonel Gian Gentile, recently wrote an eye opening article in Armor Magazine, titled "Death of the Armor Corps," which discusses the current tactical competence of officers and troopers from Armor branch. The article is shocking to say the least and quite frightening.
According to Gentile, "I have also heard reports from the field that the operational army has Armor (19K) Non Commissioned Officers as high as the rank of Staff Sergeant who have never qualified on a M1 Tank. When was the last time that a heavy Brigade Combat Team has done a combined arms, live fire exercise integrating all arms at Brigade level? Do the Armor, Artillery, and Infantry Branches even have the collective knowledge to know how to do one anymore? My own experience as a cavalry squadron commander returning from a combat deployment in Baghdad a few years ago mirrors these kinds of stories where I had lieutenants who had never qualified on a Bradley and a squadron that didn't know collectively anymore how to run a Bradley gunnery range."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
