 LAND POWER TRANSFORMATION
The Land Power Journal |
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Vol. 3 Nos. 3/4 |
March-April 2005 |
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LAND POWER TRANSFORMATION
The Land Power Journal |
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Vol. 3 Nos. 3/4 |
March-April 2005 |
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Table of Contents
IS THE U.S. ARMY'S ORDEAL BY FIRE IN RUBBER-TIRED TRUCKS ABOUT TO END?
EDITORIAL
Beset by over 12,000 destroyed American lives, Congress questions failed troops-in-trucks path of our Army
FEEDBACK!
More truck madness: hauling water kills Soldiers
Stryker trucks are lemons!
Where are the watchdogs of our society?
GEOSTRATEGIC
Faction-ocracry in Iraq
OPERATIONAL
FCS fantasy needs to be stopped
TECHNOTACTICAL
Civilian ISO Container modules: Almost a Battle Box
DoD HOT LINKS
Carlton Meyer's www.G2mil.com
Spring 2005 Articles
Letters - comments from G2mil
readers Chess is Key - to
professional military training Thoughts
on Seabasing - good and bad Small Commercial Trucks are
needed - modern jeeps Military
Films - G2mil's list of the best Remove
the HMMWV from Iraq - guntrucks and M113 Gavins are better The Coming
Wars - what the Pentagon can now do in secret Closed
Base Reuse Success Stories (pdf) - how BRAC is often good Readiness
of the U.S. Army Reserve - a leaked internal document What
Generals Don't Know - U.S. Army lessons learned in Iraq The
Pentagon Channel - the US military now has its own "news"
network
Mortgaging
the Future of Our Armed Forces - Bush to increase military spending
How Iran Will
Fight Back - with big rockets and missiles
Iraq in Pictures -
gruesome war photos not shown by the US media
Defense Update - a
military news website
West
has Bloodied Hands - Anglo-Americans slaughtered Iraqis too
US
Combat Airmen - drafted for Iraq duty
US
Fury over EU Weapons for China - embargo to be lifted soon
A Time for Leaving
- withdraw from Iraq No
Peace in Palestine - Sharon rejects peace
G2mil Library Previous G2mil - Winter 2004 issue
Past Editorials - by Carlton Meyer
2005 Base Closures- likely closures
Visit G2mil's library
PME HOT LINK
Sometimes in April: African Genocide Ignored by USA
E-mail Land Power Transformation Staff
ON THE RADIO AND TV
General David Grange daily and weekly Thursday appearance as Military Commentator on CNN's Lou Dobbs MONEYLINE Show, "Grange-on-Point"
Return to Land Power Transformation home page,
click here
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EDITORIAL U.S. Army Burning up in rubber-tired trucks in Iraq: Time to put the fire out by cancelling FCS and Stryker trucks?
Reality Check Needed in DoD and in America's Army
BREAKING NEWS! EXCLUSIVE! CNN VIDEO REPORT EXPOSES STRYKER TRUCKS AS FAILURES IN COMBAT! Even though the Army tries to hid Stryker trucks from combat, an internal Army report details their many flaws which have resulted in calls for millions of dollars of repairs/alterations/fixes...retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor is interviewed... www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14284-2005Mar30.html
Study Faults Army Vehicle Use of Transport in Iraq Puts Troops at Risk, Internal Report Says Its becoming clear with 2 Americans dying each DAY in Iraq, $1 BILLION spent each WEEK, that we can no longer afford junk like Stryker and Future Combat System trucks.
Carol Murphy FEEDBACK!
Carlton Meyer writes: "The 12-20-04 edition of 'Aviation Week' has a story about how the USAF plans to dedicate more C-130s to move cargo into Iraq to reduce the number of vulnerable Army ground convoys. This will replace 1600 truck loads of Army cargo a day. They will focus on the most dangerous routes, which will require air drops and landing on highways. Air Force Generals were surprised to learn that 30% of daily Army cargo was bottled water. They immediately ordered USAF water purification units deployed to Iraq to support the Army. This represents staggering incompetence by U.S. Army Generals. The Army had planned to operate in dry environments for decades, and developed advanced mobile water purification units in the 1980s, called ROWPUs. Generals can say they have trouble with parts or manpower, but they've been there two years now. What about private contractors? What about forming new units with new ROWPUs? What about asking for help from the Air Force or Navy? Meanwhile, a hundred or so Soldiers have died hauling bottled water, and dozens of trucks lost as well as millions of gallons of fuel burned." Steve Cook writes: "Thanks, Mike, I missed it when it was on TV. I can't believe it took 28 lost vehicles for that one officer to wake up. Whoever got the stupid idea that less armor is good for urban warfare? This video is good, because the only way to make changes at the Pentagon is to light a fire under their ass. Pressure applied by the media can be very effective. That bird-cage adds 3 tons to the vehicle's weight? It's already too heavy anyway! What a SNAFU!" LPT Staff asked a veteran of the Vietnam anti-war movement why there wasn't a big push underway to stop the unjustified U.S. occupation of Iraq. He replied: "There are several factors which come into play regarding any real peace or anti-war movement now in teh U.S. as opposed to the one that ended the war in Vietnam. 1. The media is now co-opted and under the total control of the right wing (corporations, politicians, regulatory agencies such as the FCC, and the viperous PACS such as the swift boat liars who almost destroyed Senator Kerry with outright vicious lies). No more pictures of murdered children are allowed. No pics of the coffins being unloaded at Andrews AFB in the dead of night. No pics even allowed of family members who want that last token or tribute to their loved ones - a simple and proud photograph. 2. There has been a change, in my view, in the way the X generation and the present [millenial] generation view the social pact - the mutual dependency of all of us in this country. They do not seem to have the same sense of that as my generation does (an example - the elderly are successfully fighting the threat of destroying social security by the Republicans - thus a stronger social awareness on their part. Since the Reagan years, there has been a concerted effort to move away from a socially responsible way of looking at things to a more selfish and individual way of looking at things (the "Me" generation is a term used). 3. The word "liberal" itself has been maligned and abused in our society. I am a proud liberal - always have been. The word has taken on a negative connotation due to Republican lies and mistruths and distortions about what liberal really means. 4. People are simply stressed to the max and working two or three jobs - both parents - just to survive and they are tired at the end of the day. There is no expendable energy to devote to these good causes and to the noble fight against this fascist and disgusting war. My own son and daughter-in-law, with two small children, have no time and no energy left to fight this war and the neocon government now in power here. The neocons and right wing fanatics want it that way. I could go on and on listing other factors. My point is simply that the social environment is so radically different now from what it was during the time of the anti-war movement in the sixties and seventies. I am myself tired - and of course older - but I detest this war and I also despise what the Bush regime is doing to my country and our world. So I must fight them." The LPT realizing now how hard it is to stop a war that is a gravy train for power elites in our country have new found respect for what the anti-war protestors did during Vietnam. They should have taken greater care to not attack the veterans who were doing their duty and focused their outrage on politicians and corporations. However, there simply was and still is no "nice", "easy" way to end an unjust war that the corporations and politicians want to occur and cleverly connect to an external threat, in this case the 9/11 attacks which Iraq had no part in. Protests and other civil demonstrations backed by voting out corrupt politicians must become the order of the day if we are to save America. GEOSTRATEGIC
Chicago Tribune
America's Unfinished War--And The Effort To Redeem It
By Dr. Douglas A. Macgregor P.H.D.
Before leaving Iraq in 1991, many gulf war veterans with frontline experience
against the Iraqi army concluded that Desert Storm had been a kind of Iraqi
Dunkirk, an unfinished war or, more precisely, a strategic defeat for American
arms. To many, the generals' declarations of victory over a weak and incapable
Iraqi army seemed hollow. By the time 500,000 American and allied combat troops
attacked on Feb. 24, 1991, no more than 200,000 of the 380,000 Iraqi troops
originally deployed in and around Kuwait were left to defend against coalition
ground forces. In the fighting that followed, 87,000 Iraqi troops were taken prisoner and an
estimated 25,000 Iraqis were killed, but Saddam Hussein's regime endured. Despite the overwhelming force that President George H.W. Bush provided,
Desert Storm's most important objective, the destruction of the Republican Guard
corps, was not accomplished. The generals knew that, without the Republican
Guard to protect him and impose his tyranny on the people of Iraq, Hussein would
be vulnerable to attack from his numerous enemies inside Iraq's borders, but it
was not to be. The palsied movement of the U.S. Army's most powerful combat formation, the
VII Corps, a force with more than 100,000 troops and 1,000 M1 tanks, ensured
that as many as 80,000 Iraqi Republican Guards--along with hundreds of tanks,
armored fighting vehicles and armed helicopters--would escape to mercilessly
crush uprisings across Iraq with a ruthlessness not seen since Josef Stalin. Millions of Arabs and Kurds inside Iraq were consigned to a fate no less
terrible than the fate of millions of Europeans condemned to 50 years of Soviet
occupation at the end of World War II. Sadly, the same American government that incited the rebellion against
Hussein's regime simply stood by and did nothing. Under orders not to interfere,
VII Corps soldiers watched from their positions along the Euphrates River as
Republican Guards smashed Hussein's opponents. America intervened in Iraq in March 2003 for many reasons, one of which was
to redeem the strategic defeat of 1991. Pushing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait was
never enough to satisfy America's strategic interests in the Persian Gulf any
more than expelling the British army from the European continent had been enough
for the Germans in 1940. Mixed feelings on occupation Today, Americans are justifiably delighted with the removal of Hussein's
regime, but they have mixed feelings regarding the occupation of Iraq. Many have
yet to determine whether America went to Iraq to liberate an oppressed
population and to remove a dictator with aspirations to build nuclear weapons or
whether the goal was to incorporate first Iraq and then the whole Middle East
into a vague American version of a globalized world. Still, after two years of violence in Iraq, any positive sign, such as the
election in January, is welcomed. To the advocates for the Bush administration's
policy of installing democracy with military power, the elections vindicated the
president's policies. But to the critics of the administration in the U.S. and Europe, the Iraq
emerging from the two-year occupation presents a different picture. In the "winner-take-all" political culture of the Arab world, the
Sunni Arabs of central Iraq saw no reason to legitimize the election with their
participation. Less than 2 percent voted. Participation among the long-oppressed
Kurds and Shiite Arabs was predictably high; the incentives for Kurds and Shiite
Arabs to vote were strong. Now, regional experts are troubled by the slow buildup of new Iraqi Army
units consisting mainly of Shiite Arabs and Kurds. Many fear that American military power may have inadvertently created in two
years what Iranian military power could not achieve through eight years of war
with Hussein: the foundation for an Iranian client state in Iraq. Frankly, it is
too soon to pass judgment. Look to history What Americans should remember is that the parliamentary democracies
established by the British and French in their former Arab colonies and
protectorates did not survive the departure of the British and French armies. The British who worked hardest to build the foundation for democratic
governance discovered quickly that only institutions fundamentally Arab in
character and origin had any chance of survival. And these institutions have
little in common with English-speaking concepts of government. Over the last 12 years of the Clinton and Bush administrations, American
foreign policy has tended to focus Americans' attention on the surface mechanics
of democracy, on popular elections in the aftermath of American military
intervention in Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo rather than on the true
foundations of democratic government and the rule of law--among them, a strong
civil society with a complex market economy that supports a thriving middle
class. Unfortunately, 12 years of economic sanctions destroyed Iraq's middle class,
and Hussein's skilled manipulation of ethnic and religious rivalries undermined
what little cohesion existed in the country before 1991, making it very unlikely
that democracy of the kind that English-speaking peoples struggled 500 years to
achieve will now emerge in Iraq after only two or three years of American
military occupation. The true test of whether democracy has sunk real roots into the deserts of
Southwest Asia will come when America withdraws its forces. Then, we will know
whether America's strategic defeat of 1991 has indeed been redeemed. Douglas A. Macgregor is a former Army colonel and a gulf war veteran.
Congress may cancel Future Combat System Fantasy Boondoggle!
www.slate.com/id/2115867
Today's New York Times reports that the U.S. Army's "Future Combat Systems"an elaborate medley of new hardware, fast software, and wild dreams that Pentagon planners regard as the "technological bridge" to tomorrowmay be about to collapse. Its price tag is soaring out of sight (well over $150 billion, up from an already extravagant $92 billion). Its most integral elements are untested and probably impractical. The programwhich is scheduled to field the first of 15 fully trained, equipped, and "mission-capable" brigades in a mere three yearscurrently lacks a blueprint, much less construction materials. But there's another, more serious issue, which the Times' otherwise excellent story doesn't explore: Even if all the technical problems could be solved and the costs brought under control, the Army may be tumbling down the wrong road; Future Combat Systems may not address the true nature and needs of future combat. Though FCS was conceived as a research-and-development project several years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sees itand has accelerated its developmentas the pinnacle and core of "military transformation," his vision of putting faster, lither, and more lethal weapons on the battlefield. It may be a case of good timing, then, that FCS's grave difficulties are coming to light just as several Army officers are questioning the validity of Rumsfeld's vision. FCS consists of 18 individual new weapons and other pieces of military hardware, linked together by a centralized communications network that's accessible to every computer-toting soldier on the battlefield. These 18 new pieces of hardware include a much lighter tank, a cannon and launch system that don't require the shooter to see the target, two new classes of unmanned drones, and an armed robotic vehicle. The ideaconsistent with Rumsfeld's transformationis twofold: first, to mobilize weapons from the base to the battlefield very quickly (hence the lightweight tank, which can be transported by airplanes instead of by much-slower ships); second, to extend the fruits of the military revolution seen in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (the integration of air power, ground forces, and information technology, which resulted in more rapid and coordinated offensives on the battlefield). In Iraq and Afghanistan, this revolution allowed U.S. commanders a fuller, more accurate picture of the entire battlefield. FCS will extend this omniscience to each soldier. Or so that's the theory. The Times cites a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, as well as the comments of some Army officers who concede the point, that this dream may never become reality. Nobody, it turns out, has yet figured out how to make a tank light enough to be flown by a C-130 transport plane without stripping it of so much armor that it's no longer really a tank. FCS envisions that soldiers, weapons, and robots will be linked by a network called Joint Tactical Radio Systems, yet JTRS (appropriately, if grimly, pronounced "jitters") is itself an unproven quantity. In an unusual step, the Army issued a stop-work order on a preliminary version of this system in January, citing a lack of progress. Yet, as the author of the GAO report told the Times, the system without JTRS is a travesty. The theory behind Future Combat Systems is to replace mass with information; without JTRS, we'd have neither. The FCS is a "system of systems," as the Army puts it. The positive spin on this is that each individual system (the 18 components plus the network) reinforces and multiplies the potency of all the others. The negative spin is that if one of the systems breaks down, so does the whole complex. And yet Rumsfeld pushes the machinery along without the slightest idea of whether a vast array of these systems is feasible or at what cost. And, given the high price of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now, the cost of fighting hypothetical wars in the future is a pertinent matter. One might argue that these concerns are Luddite distractions, that technical breakthroughs will happen; skeptics, after all, dismissed the feasibility of an unmanned drone that fires precision-guided missiles. However, each of the FCS's 18 components faces technical challenges that are far more complex. And there is a fundamental issue beyond that debate. The missile-firing drone has a clear-cut, and indisputably attractive, purposeto enhance the ability to hit targets remotely from a distance. The point of FCS is to "transform" the tools of warfare. So what about this transformation? Does it improve the U.S. Army's ability to deal with the threats of future warfare? If your guide to this future is the first 30 days of the war in Iraq, then the vision of transformation that underlies FCS might seem appropriate. However, if your guide is the subsequent two years of combat, then the vision seems out of whack. As retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, the president of the Army War College, testified before the House Armed Services Committee: Technology is useful in unconventional warfare. But machines alone will never be decisive. … The tools most useful in this new war are low-tech and manpower-intensive … night raids, ambushes, roving patrols mounted and dismounted, as well as reconstruction, civic action, and medial contact teams. The enemy will be located not by satellites and [drones] but by patient intelligence work, back alley payoffs, collected information from captured documents, and threats of one-way vacations to Cuba. … Buried in an avalanche of information, commanders still confront the problem of trying to understand the enemy's intention and his will to fight. The Army isand, to some degree, always has beensplit into two factions: the procurement commands, which are most interested in buying new, ever more complex weapons systems, and which funnel billions of dollars to large defense contractors; and the operational commands, which are most interested in fighting and winning wars. FCS is the fanciful wish list of the former faction. Scales' testimony represents the mundane reality check of the latter. Over the past year, the operational faction has been on the ascendancy, emboldened by the vindication of their objections to Rumsfeld's rosy-eyed war plan in Iraqand encouraged by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, whose background as a special-ops commander inclines him toward a gritty realism. They are writing new doctrinal manuals and conducting new training exercises on how to secure and stabilize a country after the battlefield phase of wara focus that emphasizes boots on the ground, cultural awareness, language skills, and intelligence-gathering based on eye-to-eye contact with the population. Select pieces of FCS might fit into this conception, but the overall scheme does notany more than its $150 billion-plus price tag can be accommodated within the Army's strained resources. For four years, the procurement faction has been given carte blanche to buy whatever it's wanted, as long as the desired weapons system is consistent with Rumsfeld's vision of transformation. It's time to examine the weapons and the vision. Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/politics/28weapons.html?hp&ex=1111986000&en=88a4039 3c91c76ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage
March 28, 2005 |
