Excerpt. Another point of view is posted above. Or is it below? Where am I? Have we been introduced?
We have to speed the kill. For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops. We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.
Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them. Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists. To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.
Time is the new enemy. Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides. But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies. The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us. If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.
Peters makes a good point here, but rather than "killing faster" the solution has to be to ignore the carpers, which is a hard thing to do. I was damned disappointed at the deflation of the political will in Washington with regard to Fallujah. Not to Kerry on like Chicken Little, but it brought back memories of Vietnam: too damned much control from the top when commanders should have been concentrating on killing the enemy. It should have been planned and executed as a military operation. Give a competent S3 a problem and they can come up with a plan in 24 hours. Objective: Take the city of Fallujah. Go get it, guys.
Peters is right that it should have been carried out in jig time, with as few casualties on our side as possible; but the speed and the details of the operation should be been determined at the battalion or brigade commander's level, not in Washington. And once started it never should have been stopped. We said what we were going to do, then we didn't do it. That was the first time we've done that in this war, and I think not following through hurt us and will continue to hurt us.
I hope one of the things they're working on at Leavenworth and Carlisle right this moment is the difference between combat operations and post-combat operations. We've got the combat operations down: we field a well-equipped, well-led, disciplined force that's a match for any nation in the world. When we take on Iran and Syria and Sudan, possibly not in that order, each campaign will last less than a month and victory is going to be overwhelming. But we're going to take casualties in the occupations that follow, unless we get in, beat them up, and then get out right away, which actually makes sense to me. But then, I'm a believer in the "it's their country, let them screw it up if they want to" approach.
If we don't, we're going to need a different kind of force: not peacekeepers, because there isn't going to be a peace to keep; not police, because policemen arrest people and hold them for trial, while soldiers and Marines kill them or intern them; not the combined arms troops that smash and destroy similar enemy formations; and not civil affairs because we're going to be busy defeating a force of Bad Guys, organized or un-, rather than digging wells and handing out schoolbooks to all the cute little kiddies whose big brothers we're busy bumping off at night.
The difference between a soldier and a gunny, as I've pointed out before and Steven den Beste has pointed out more eloquently, is discipline and training. A force of real soldiers against a similar sized group of tough guys will beat the tough guys hands down 100.00 percent of the time. But the tough guys will continue to be able to beat the soldiers up in an alley significantly better than 50 percent of the time. It's the training, discipline, and esprit that makes the difference. In the field, we have the heavy artillery. In the alley, they're the ones with the brass knuckles.
So the army of the future has to be split into two parts: the maneuver divisions for killing large numbers of ploughboys and street yo's in tin hats, and the pacification divisions, which in the ideal will consist of guys trained to operate in very small units — three men and up, I'd guess — using police tactics to accomplish military ends, to whit, the icing of large numbers of hard boyz, several at a time. The three-man team should ideally be able to walk into the alley where the soldier was beaten up, meet the same six guys, and haul out two corpses, two hospital cases, and two talkers. That would imply something between special ops training and the training given in a reasonably tough police academy, with a search-and-destroy orientation. They'd be cruising, looking for alleys to go into.
It implies a heavy tactical intel element at the unit headquarters level. It implies small, heavily armored vehicles and probably robots controlled from within the vehicles. There would have to be organic EOD elements, ground surveillance radars, and bomb-sniffing dogs. The principle would be to bring the same kind of overwhelming force up close and personal that the Army and the Marines now brings in combat operations.
The more I think about it, the more logical it becomes. The TO&E shapes up okay, though the chain of command would be tangled from a military point of view, and the units could be assembled probably in under a year, with no new inventions having to be brought on line. Most large municiple police departments, for instance, have big blue armored cars that could be painted khaki, and they've got SWAT trainers they could lend.
Rummy, give me a call... |
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