By Emery Nelson

While there may be all kinds of chemical, and maybe some biological, agents hidden around Iraq, it's really not all that dangerous. If the roadside bomb had been filled with high explosives, those two guys would have been dead. As for WMD proof, even if they get it, the outcome will not be changed. We will still be fighting an insurgency with a woefully unprepared civilian and military leadership. These are all "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) guys. It's their Jesus.

The Hersch article (www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact) tells me a lot. RMA, although a myth, requires pinpoint targeting in order to destroy the enemy center of gravity. It's clear that they authorized torture because they haven't been able to get the targeting that successful RMA requires. Since that's not going to happen, they will just pull out, rather than admit that their "RMA Jesus" doesn't exist.

If we are forced to retreat from Iraq it is not because we didn't have enough troops.

The drumbeat throughout the land is that former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki was right. He said it would take 200,000 Soldiers to pacify Iraq (www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-02-25-iraq-us_x.htm). An Internet search of "General Shinseki was right", brought up 11,700 hits on Google. I suspect that we'll be long gone from Iraq, without ever having come close to this many troops, but this myth will endure forever more or at least until reality kicks us in the teeth (again). Even if we were to put 500,000 Soldiers in Iraq it still wouldn't guarantee victory because we need better QUALITY not more of the wrong quantity.

Adding mass (Soldiers) to fight a growing insurgency flies in the face of history. In fact, fewer and better-trained armies are the most lethal. If numbers won insurgencies than Vietnam would be the 51st state. Since the end of WWII, no western style nation state army has defeated an insurgency without the overwhelming majority of Soldiers coming from the host country. You can advise and provide material but never battalions. The very act of jamming the host country with invaders insures that the invaded will never flock to your banner.

The highly centralized and conventional U.S. Army cannot beat decentralized and loosely aligned guerillas. We can hurt them badly everyday, but win without changing who we are? Never! The people of the country in question are the only ones that can accomplish victory. If they fight with us, victory is assured. If they fight against, we won't lose so much as get tired and go home.

Even in conventional warfare numbers are not always the answer. It didn't help the British at the Somme in WWI. But here we go again, unlearning the lessons that have been around since the start of organized warfare. Alexander the Great always faced larger armies; most of the time far from home, with unfortunate results for his enemies because he took on allies as he went along. Our populist leanings ignore the historical fact that large armies are rarely well-trained armies, and although capable of great carnage, its mostly to itself, in the form of half-trained and ill-led troops blundering into the meat grinder.

The beauty of mass (for general officers at least) is that its a built-in excuse. When things go badly, generals always say we need more Soldiers. General Westmoreland in Vietnam lived this lie unto the deaths of 69,000. The final straw came when he asked for another 135,000 troops, on top of the 535,000 already in country. He never understood that each additional Soldier added to an occupation is a recruiting poster for the insurgents, a drain on the local productive economy, as well as the economy of the invading country.

Unless they intend to slaughter occupied in the style of the Roman Legions, occupiers are nothing but targets for the guerillas, particularly the U.S. Army with its huge tooth-to-tail ratio. Invaders put treasure, and their finest young men, into the host country while getting coffins and ruined lives in return. The moral confidence of possible gains will fade as the casualties mount and the treasury empties.

We conservatively have at least one General officer, plus his staff and security detail, for every battalion in Iraq. Many generals, if not all, have moved into Saddam's palaces. Could we do anything more insulting to the Iraqi people (well, apparently yes)? In a method reminiscent of our failure in Vietnam, We divided the country into sectors where a each general officer has his own fiefdom. While some units fight all the fights, other units are in very quiet zones with little or no action. Has the army ever heard of economy-of-force? This mania for zones and lines is symptom of all that's wrong. The conditions we are trying to create can't happen when fighting a guerilla war because it all takes place with a non-linear enemy with no respect for lines, zones and borders.

To understand what you get with more linear-minded generals you only have to look at the Abu Gharib scandal. More generals obviously do not mean more control of a clearer chain of command. The ever-increasing number of generals trying to get their tickets punched, while avoiding anything that will hurt a career, dilutes any real accountability.

Now the army and its supporters are rushing to cash in on the more troops madness. Highly respected writer and retired Colonel Ralph Peters just did an editorial in the NY Post entitled, "Troops Dont Trust Rummy" www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/20841.htm. His loyalty to the organization that spawned him, particularly the senior officer corps, is clouding his judgment. As is the custom at most newspapers, Col. Peters probably did not decide on the title. Surely he knows that since WWII, study after study has shown that junior officers and enlisted men have little faith in their senior officers, which is not the case in other armies like the British and WWII Wehrmacht.

I'm sure the Colonel, along with most senior officers, would put this off to normal troops bitching. In Vietnam, where it became a matter of life and death, this bitching came in the form of fragmentation grenades. Now they want to increase the size of the army so that half-trained troops can play beat the clock for a year, while clueless junior officers spend a few months in any danger and don't even learn how to be good platoon leaders and company commanders. Imagine what it would be like to be a young Soldier in Iraq and no that you will probably have 2 or three inexperienced platoon leaders during that time.

Peters rightfully accuses Rummy and his minions of failing to understand that, Airpower doesn't win wars on its own. Technology doesn't trump courage, guts and skill. But if he thinks for one minute that army General officers don't believe in these same things than the good Soldier has not been paying attention. Long before Rumsfeld arrived on the scene the army was involved in all kinds of navel gazing linear warfare garbage like Blue Force Tracker, digitization, and Land Warrior to name but a few. The common denominator with these systems is the desire to further centralize the command and control capabilities of ever more superfluous general officers. If technology and air power don't win wars then he should inform the generals.

Peters goes on to assert that Rumsfeld was the architect of "transformation". Although there's a great deal of truth to this, it isn't a good thing, the army version was General Shinsekis doing, along with a host of army generals (some now working for General Dynamics) with his vulnerable, rubber-tired wheeled Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (SBCT). The SBCTs have little firepower and proven easy to set fire to but are supposed to somehow overcome this with the notion of complete situational awareness (The daily images of burning rubber-tired wheeled vehicles in Iraq makes a mockery of this notion on a daily basis) and stand-off firepower (Where's that firepower supposed to come from? The air???). This was the army's plan long before Rumsfeld came on the scene. Its easily documented that the army itself, not Rumsfeld, saw its own infantry as nothing more than a constabulary to "clean up" after a conventional warfare mess caused by a perfectly targeted enemy that's killed from afar. Nothing the army has done in the recent past has prepared it for fighting long-term insurgencies, and that goes back to the Reagan Administration.

Desert Storm was an aberration, fought against a third-rate conventional army that we heralded as world class. Insurgency is the warfare of the past and future and those who cant deal with it will fight it anyway. The army's tired phrase, "we don't do mountains and we don't do jungles" is as close as it ever came to dealing with the predominate method of warfare in the 20th century, with a new addition: "we don't do cities" despite USMC 3-block war foot-infantry claptrap which failed miserably in Fallujah. In the latter part of that century and moving into the beginning of this one, so-called 4th generation warfare, conducted by gangs, groups with all kinds of political and religious leanings, and old-fashioned nationalists, is the order of the day, and its high time we adapt to it, not make excuses. During Shinseki's 4 years, he squandered most of the army budget on SBCTs when just a fraction of these funds could have ADAPTED the entire Army correctly to non-linear warfare by upgrading our thousands of tracked armored vehicles that can go off roads and fight. When 9/11 struck, Shinseki's army was unready and we ended up throwing troops into HMMWV trucks with disastrous casualties; so far over 800 dead and 3,500 seriously wounded, some maimed for life. From 1999 to 2003 Shinseki wasn't interested in properly equipping the "mass" of the U.S. Army, only his pet handfuls of Canadian-made Stryker trucks.

The U.S. Army/marines have already suffered one major defeat at the hands of insurgents (Vietnam), although they've always tried to blame it on someone else. Learning to deal with guerilla warfare would mean moving away from the senior officer holy grail of mass, combined with methodical battle, directed by a very centralized hierarchy. I suspect the general officer corps would rather see us lose then see their status reduced with the decentralized army it takes to beat insurgencies.

If we want to stay in Iraq, we need to learn from the British Imperial Policing tactics of the 1920s/30s: withdraw forces into secure fortified base camps near where the trouble areas are, but have them air and ground mobile using plentiful but RPG up-armored M113 Gavin light tracked armored fighting vehicles with gunshields to form Quick Reaction Forces (QRFs). 700 Gavins are sitting unused in Kuwait as we speak. Gavins can even be flown inside air force c-130s if we need to get them into a corner of Iraq in a hurry. Reduce American forces, most of which that are sitting on their hands to 70,000 and halve the $1 BILLION/week drain on the U.S. economy. Get the Iraqi Army clearing the streets of trash that hide bombs and create a feeling of lawlessness. If there is trouble have our tracked armored QRFs swarm all around the trouble area with infantry pouring out of Gavins to assist the Iraqi police like the Brits do successfully in Northern Ireland. Get the locals telling the rebels to cut their mischief out so the Americans DON'T have to come.

In light of the DoD and American military culture, the best we can do is "to do no harm" by staying out of the way until actually needed.

OPERATIONAL

The Shinseki Wheeled Curse: will it destroy the U.S. Army?

By Rod McCoy

In October 1999, Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki declared it his intention to transform the entire United States Army into an all-wheeled “medium-weight” force consisting of an all-armored car-equipped, tankless army. The impetus for this plan is that it was thought the U.S. Army was poorly suited to be the global policeman of the world because of its focus on heavy armor best capable of winning large-scale conventional wars. This plan is now well into the process of being implemented.

The initial vehicle to equip America’s new army is the Canadian LAV-III thinly armored truck. What is the main armament of an LAV-III you ask? Is it a 105mm cannon? Nope. How about a 90mm? Nope. It isn’t even a 75mm gun. The model all-purpose future armored vehicle for the entire US Army mounts a 25mm pea shooter. Not only would this Future Combat Vehicle be tank fodder, this vehicle like all other armored cars has only limited protection against standard Russian 14.5mm heavy machine guns firing armor-piercing rounds mounted on almost all Russian armored vehicles. They can be knocked out by Russian heavy machine guns at close range or even at medium range if hit in the rear or side-rear. So they would be machine gun fodder as well. So much for the vaunted U.S. Army ground superiority of days past. The Future Combat Vehicles will not mount guns with a large enough caliber to take out even Soviet model T-54/55 tanks built in the 1950’s, let alone World War Two vintage T-34’s. Instead, the Army plans to compensate for their lack of anti-tank capability by utilizing the excellent top-attack ATGM known as the Javelin, which probably represents the only shred of sanity in their whole future army transformation plan. But ATGMs are not point & shoot weapons required to survive surprise meeting engagements with enemy tanks and RPG gunners as the wheeled 9th High Technology Test Bed Division found out in the 1980s.

The schedule for the transformation is as follows:

Present day—equip two brigades with armored cars as an experimental “medium-weight” force.

2004—Five interim armored car equipped Brigade Combat Teams will be fully re-fitted.

2012—Entire army will be converted to a "Future Combat System" (FCS) armored car force. Entire tracked vehicle and tank fleet to be retired by the end of this year.

Each “Brigade Combat Team” is to consist of 3 motorized infantry battalions, which will fight dismounted. Yes, you read correctly. We are returning to an all-motorized World War I-fighting style “dismounted infantry-centric” force. No kidding. That is actually what proponents of the plan are calling it—“a dismounted infantry-centric” force. Army officials state that “all systems in the units are to support dismounted operations.”

Didn’t the U.S. and European experience in World War II and later in the Gulf War teach us that wars cannot be won without tracked tanks? Now not only are we told that the infantry will be the unstoppable war-winning force of the future, we are told that the tank itself in all its variations—light, medium, and heavy is a "relic" which deserves to be discarded and placed on the ash heap of military history? Apparently, the tank is worthy only of a prominent place in a war museum. The United States has unilaterally disarmed itself after every major war leaving it manifestly unprepared to fight the next; but conventional disarmament on this scale is pure folly. We must not make this mistake again if we are to remain a conventional military superpower.

Already, as part of this estimated $70 billion transformation of the U.S. Army from a force focused on the (tank-) heavy divisions to a “medium-weight” (i.e. lightly armored) wheeled force, the excellent and very promising Crusader self-propelled tracked artillery piece has been cancelled and the Comanche light-attack helicopter procurement has been halted. At least 7 other significant weapons and weapons upgrade programs have been targeted by the Army for elimination in order to provide some of the funding for the purchase of thousands of armored cars to replace the Gulf War-winning Abrams tank fleet which today is over 7500 strong. This $70 billion should be used to increase the capabilities of our military forces, not to disarm them.

The M8 Armored Gun System (AGS) would be the best vehicle to equip a lightly armored mobile force along the lines listed above. The AGS weighs between 18-25 tons depending on its selected modular armor package which has three levels the highest of which is equivalent to Bradley armor. It mounts a respectable 105mm gun and is fully developed. A version with a 120mm gun is also available--the same cannon the M1 Abrams heavy tank shoots. The AGS is parachute airdroppable, and air transportable and would be ideally employed with the 82d and 101st Airborne. It was originally slated to replace our obsolescent force of M551 Sheridan light tanks. Only 300 vehicles were originally planned. The only reason it hasn’t gone into serial production is that it was cancelled by the military-gutting Clinton Administration. One of the main advantages of the M8 is that it is tracked. Sometimes it takes a tanker to realize the considerable advantages of tracked vehicles over wheeled vehicles in wartime in terms of all-terrain mobility and increased survivability and armor protection. Unfortunately, according to Bill Gertz’s article published today, even though the tracked vehicles performed better than the wheeled in recent tests, Pentagon observers fear that “the Army lowered weapons requirements to ensure the wheels will win.”

This all-wheeled force plan, if fully implemented as Shinseki intends, will convert the army into a war-losing force capable of nothing more than peacekeeping operations and invasions of largely defenseless countries like Haiti. Even Iraq could defeat our new armored car army. The time has come for all of us concerned with our national security prospects (especially veterans) to contact our Congressman and urge them to pass legislation protecting our heavy divisions and Abrams tanks from elimination. Legislation should also be passed restricting “medium-weight” peace-keeping forces to no more than two divisions (out of ten, replacing our light, not heavy forces). Otherwise, the U.S. Army war-winning streak may come to a complete and final end.

TECHNOTACTICAL

IDF Better equipped than U.S. Army: up-armoring their M113 Gavins

Wish U.S. Army Senior leaders had a fraction of the gumption that the IDF has.

IDF negotiating $100m APC upgrade with IMI

Israel Military Industries intends to make the armor components in the US, so that US military aid can be used to finance the upgrade.

Felix Frisch 13 May 04 16:41

The IDF has been negotiating with Israel Military Industries (IMI) in recent months to upgrade hundreds of Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) with improved armor against RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), some anti-tank missiles, and proximate explosions from artillery shells and roadside bombs.

Sources inform “Globes” that the Ministry of Defense has already decided in principle to upgrade 50 APCs, and that the IDF ground command and IMI were now negotiating the details of a contract. If the deal goes ahead, the IDF is expected to upgrade 500 of its 8,000 APCs.

Each APC upgrade costs an estimated $200,000, which means the entire program will cost $100 million. IMI intends to manufacture the armor components at Marvin Engineering in the US, so that the IDF can finance the upgrade from US military aid.

The initial contract to upgrade 50 APCs will cost an estimated $10 million. The IDF will subsequently invest $20 million a year to upgrade 100 APCs a year over five years.

After the armor components are manufactured in the U.S., they will be brought to Israel for installation on IDF M-113 Bardelass ("cheetah" in Hebrew) APCs, similar to those hit in the Gaza Strip in the past two days. Defense establishment sources said the M-113's armor should have prevented the explosives they were carrying inside from exploding, but that there was no guarantee, since tanks had also previously been destroyed by large roadside bombs planted by Palestinians.

Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on May 13, 2004

---

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU SMILE!

20 Ways To Maintain A Healthy Level of Insanity

1. At Lunch Time, Sit In Your Parked Car With Sunglasses on and Point A Hair Dryer At Passing Cars. See If They Slow Down.

2. Page Yourself Over The Intercom. Don't Disguise Your Voice.

3. Every Time Someone Asks You To Do Something, Ask If They Want Fries with That.

4. Put Your Garbage Can On Your Desk And Label It "In."

5. Put Decaf In The Coffee Maker For 3 Weeks. Once Everyone Has Gotten Over Their Caffeine Addictions, Switch To Espresso.

6. In The Memo Field Of All Your Checks, Write "For Sexual Favors"

7 Finish All Your Sentences With "In Accordance With The Prophecy."

8. Don't Use Any Punctuation

9. As Often As Possible, Skip Rather Than Walk.

10... Ask People What Sex They Are. Laugh Hysterically After They Answer.

11. Specify That Your Drive-through Order Is "To Go."

12. Sing Along At The Opera.

13. Go To A Poetry Recital And Ask Why The Poems Don't Rhyme

14. Put Mosquito Netting Around Your Work Area And Play Tropical Sounds All Day.

15. Five Days In Advance, Tell Your Friends You Can't Attend Their Party Because You're Not In The Mood.

16. Have Your Co-workers Address You By Your Wrestling Name, Rock Hard.

17. When The Money Comes Out The ATM, Scream "I Won!, I Won!"

18. When Leaving The Zoo, Start Running Towards The Parking Lot, Yelling "Run For Your Lives, They're Loose!!"

19. Tell Your Children Over Dinner. "Due To The Economy, We Are Going To Have To Let One Of You Go."

And The Final Way To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity.......

20. Send This E-mail To a lot of people To Make Them Smile..

Professional Military Education Hot Link

---

www.uscc.gov/researchreports/2004/04fisher_report/04_01_01fisherreport.htm

THE IMPACT OF FOREIGN WEAPONS AND TECHNOLOGY ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CHINA'S PEOPLE'S LIBERATION ARMY

A Report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

January 2004

by Richard D. Fisher, Jr.
Center for Security Policy

---

Got bad Soldier gear? U.S. bureaucracy not listening?

Post your gear requests/ideas to Brigade Quartermasters, they will get good gear to the good guys (YOU)

www.actiongear.com

Return to Main Page, click here

equipmentshop@yahoo.com