Why Are We Preparing to Fight the Wrong War, Again?

I'm beginning to think I'm truly stupid. I see articles such as the one from GEN Sullivan, and comments from RCJ and I get confused:
1) Wasn't GEN Sullivan a 4-star at the top of the Army? Who can he blame for his service branch's unpreparedness? Did things go swimmingly when he was in uniform then go to hell the day after retirement? I keep reading similar sentiments from retirees that held all the damn rank - well, where were they when they were climbing the pay chart? Where was this laser-like focus on doing what's right and being prepared for any mission we may be dispatched to execute?

2) We fight where we're told to fight. Congress and the POTUS make that determination. With that in mind, GEN Sullivan is right to point out where we've been fighting and the nature of that fight over the past few generations. So, I read the comments of RCJ, speaking about our geostrategic advantages etc. While I don't see fault in his purist logic, we don't live in a purist world. Our politicians send us all over the place to conflicts that do not always fit neatly into our primary mission of winning the nation's land warfare battles (Army and USMC). So, it not only behooves our leaders, but it's a requirement that our leaders prepare us for such missions whether they are folly or of dire need. So I read the comments asking to preserve force structure, training, and so forth and I totally agree. I then read comments that our force is too big, that we need to act like a peace-time military etc and I scratch my head.

I will try not to make this come across rudely, but if RCJ thinks we are going to maintain any sort of training, any sort of readiness, by reducing the budget and force by massive proportions then he and others of a similar mindset are just not paying attention to reality. A hollow force will result and it is not debatable. I will give an example of a project I'm currently working on:

Large integrated training event, multiple MOSs and a small joint presence. Due to the past ten year's OPTEMPO, most of the positions required to run the event (OTs, admin control, all that behind the scenes stuff) come from contractors. Their salaries constitute almost half the budget. Current mission analysis points us to about 35% of this salary structure being redundant, that will still allow mission accomplishment, but it'll be strained. Who will pick up the slack in those duties and man hours? It'll be service members. What we identify as most likely is that 50% of this financial cost needs to become redundant with service members filling in the holes. This is because we are already starting the "train to budget" not "train to standard" transition.

The bottom line from this is that a lot more service members are going to devote a lot more hours to support this one event. While they pull guard duty, OT duty, and other stuff, guess what they're not doing - training. Take this further and look at the reduced ability of units all over the force faced with the same issues and you're going to have 'company level' training taking place with, at best, one full strength platoon. Now, amplify this even more by these misguided calls to reduce the size of the force and you are going to quickly find units that are unable to support training due to the other requirements they must fill. Their organic training will suffer and when their chance comes to attend integrated training, collective training, etc, the performance will suffer, the training benefit will suffer, and readiness will suffer. And, let's not forget the detrimental effects this will have on morale, the trickle down effects of cdrs doctoring their training briefs to say they're a "T", the showmanship, the superficiality and all the other window dressing that will become necessary for leaders to apply. Training will be canned, and largely useless.

We talk about risk aversion as a bad word - and it usually is. Cdrs only care about lives when it's tied to their evaluations. The time for any sort of "risk aversion" is in the preparation for combat, not the execution of combat tasks. To gut the force, to jeopardize mission readiness goes beyond a failure to mitigate risk, it's outright negligence.

We do have a lot of waste and I'm not saying there should be zero cuts but let's approach this with pragmatism and realism: we don't need color copiers etc. By the way, it costs over $20k per year just to support color printing needs in the exercise I mention above - and that is outright waste. We don't need to give Soldiers and Marines multiple sets of RFI gear, four Gerbers and so forth. We don't need a taco bar, a stir fry section, 32 flavors of ice cream and so forth in DFACs in theater. Those are areas where we cut waste without sacrificing readiness.

The first thing we need to do is a retrospective analysis of the post-Vietnam era and we need to excoriate and destroy the legacies of those that screwed it up, beginning at that time and moving forward. We need to serve notice to the current GOs that they will be judged on this transition and how they leave the force, and how the force responds to and fights the next war - not how many dollars and people they can cut while preserving their own rank and pension.

I suspect that the problem has more to do with careerism than ignorance and with civilian tactical meddling. The carpenter thinks that everything looks like a nail. There is a built in bias to preserve the position of influence and the career that makes telling ones seniors what is actually happening (or what will happen if they order this or that tactic) a very short term strategy. "Yes sir, we'll make it work" is a much safer approach, career wise. I don't know (never having been a senior officer but observing several in their habitat) but I suspect that this occurs all the way up. Note that Bush 41 stayed out of the kitchen (largely) but Vietnam and post Desert Storm operations have all had lots of cooks.

Why is it that senior Army officials seem to understand the role of land forces and the United States of America less accurately than any other group??

The army's mission is to fight land wars, for the purpose of securing our nation. So, why now, when we need a very small force committed to this land mission, do senior Army leaders demand that budget resources be diverted to preserve their force over the needs of our nation??

We have a geo-straetic luxury that is the envy of the entire globe. We have no threat of land warfare on our homeland. Certainly, as General Sullivan points out, we get ourselves involved in voluntary operations overseas, but these operations were often as problematic as they became due to the fact that we had an excessively large peacetime army to throw at them.

The Cold War, that forced upon us the geo-strategic reality of continental nations that require large standing armies for their security, is OVER. It is time for us to get back to our historic roots. It is time for us to build the force we need, not the force the Service Chiefs and their advocates want.

"Cyber" is the new battle cry to validate force structure. The services have chased Cyber capabilities like a wet behind the ears Cav LT chasing Crazy Horse over the ridge and far from support. Now they realize that what they thought was easy victory is suddenly overwhelming vulnerability. We do not need a DoD that defends the nation from cyber attacks, we need a DoD able to conduct its mission even when its cyber tools are disabled by a cunning foe.

To take on Cyber is to rob defense programs that are fully in the military's lane from the funding they need. When the space domain came into play, as the cyber domain is today, we were wise enough to stand up a civil agency, with its own budget, to focus on that domain. We do not need a global Cyber command in DoD, we need a new "Cyber-NASA" for this new age.

We are a nation at peace. We should act like it. We have challenges to be sure, but none that demand a wartime Army.

With which we have been confronted? Or which we <i>chose</i> to confront even while knowing that we were ill prepared to do so?<blockquote>"Over the past 40 years, the one consistent face of war with which we have been confronted is irregular warfare."</blockquote>The authors follow that with :<blockquote>"In 2006 we came face to face with the reality that we faced two tough low intensity fights in Iraq and Afghanistan.</blockquote>That statement begs the question, why did it take us over four years to realize we were doing something wrong? Not to mention three more years to turn it around.

This article is not the urging of retention of counterinsurgency doctrine and training it purports to be, it is merely a plea for retaining force structure for the Army -- and, oh by the way, the Marines...

I will be the first to ask for better equipment and better training -- particularly far better initial entry training, officer and enlisted, that thoroughly grounds a <u>smaller</u> force in the basics of the trade. This article alludes to training and equipping but then slides into a pleas for retention of an overlarge ACTIVE ground force -- strangely it does not mention needed improvements and added force structure for the Reserve Components.

The article further posits <blockquote>"This thinking will eliminate many of the programs that emerged as essential to success in irregular warfare. It is based in the misguided notion that we simply won’t “do” large scale, irregular warfare any more."</blockquote>Is there a misguided notion that we won't do that any more? Or is there a growing acknowledgment of the fact that we do not do it well for a variety of reasons only a few of which are structure or organizationally related. Given that there are often better ways to counter the problems without resorting to large scale irregular warfare avoiding such commitments makes more sense than seeking them.<blockquote>"Yet that is the very mission we have done repeatedly for the past 40 years. It’s the mission ordered time and again by Republican and Democrat presidents alike. It’s the mission that our enemies know they can win because we never prepare for it."</blockquote>In reverse order:

Not so much that we do not prepare for it, though that is true. It is more due to the fact that our opponents are more flexible than we will ever be, know that and continually suck us in. We are foolish enough to attempt to play by their rules on their field. Not smart of us at all.

Indeed, ill informed and ill advised Presidents from both parties have ordered us into strange operations of little merit -- often in opposition to the advice of their military advisers. Some of that is the fault of the Presidents involved, some to their NSC types -- and much accrues to Armed Forces that tend to offer too few options and that remain rather risk averse in efforts to protect their institutions. Large scale strategic raids can often provide better results than large scale irregular warfare commitments yet we have seemingly deliberately avoided enhancing our capability to perform such operations...

Yes, we have done that mission repeatedly for the past 40 years. Generally poorly. Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different result.