I noticed something today that I hope is not typical. In an Army Times photo a Marine from A 1/3rd Marine Regt is using an AK instead of a US weapon.
Why?
Despite redneck talk of how great the AK is, compared to the M16A2 or M4 it is a piece of shit. Inaccurate, too loud, and not able to take scopes and NVGs. Most importantly - inaccurate. And it is NOT more reliable than an A2 or M4, despite myths of firing thousands of rounds after being buried in mud. And when it does malfunction it has a nasty habit of blowing apart in the user's hands (well, not that nasty if the enemy is using it at the time.) It also, depending on the quality of the ammo, tends to overfeed and jam (and my guess is the enemy in Iraq has some old-ass ammo). And did I mention less accurate?
So while armchair commandos think it is normal for US troops to use AKs, to me it shows something wrong. Did his weapon malfunction, and the supply chain couldn't get him a replacement fast enough? Are they low on ammo so that he is burning up enemy stuff and conserving US rounds? Is he so poorly trained that he prefers looking "cool" with an AK instead of using his own, better, weapon? Does he have an outstripped weapon that hasn't been replaced, so the AK is actually better than his worn-out rifle? What the F? None of these scenarios are good.
Then I noticed something else.
None of the Marines in A 1/3 Marine Regt. had scopes. They didn't have day scopes, NVDs, AN-PAQ-4 designators, nothing. Just iron sights. All they had were plain vanilla M16A2s, with no "goodies." And those "goodies" help, especially at night. A designator, for instance, sends out a beam, like a laser sight, that you can put on the enemy and, if you are properly zeroed, that is where the round will go. So you put the "dot" on the enemy's forehead or center mass and send him to Paradise. The enemy, unless he is wearing NVGs, can't see the beam. And if he isn't wearing NVGs then he can't even see you, and that is why the US Army owns the night. Plus, in well-trained units, the use of designators helps you to stay in your sector of fire and avoid two soldiers engaging the same target. And day scopes are handy even when not firing - you can see farther and pick your next position, or see what is going on, and communicate farther with hand and arm signals.
So why doesn't A 1/3 have them? Are they standard in the USMC, or do the Marines do without? The US Army has them. The M4 has the rail system designed to take the "goodies," and most pictures of US soldiers show them equipped with sights and night vision and designators. Pictures of Marines aren't showing this. If you are a Marine don't give me the "we are better trained and don't need them" line of bullshit. The Marines are awesome, but not better than the US Army. And you don't go to combat without ALL the advantages you can get. So I want to know why some American kids are over there without the proper equipment, especially since other American kids have it.
They also don't show the helmet-mounts for NVDs. Soldiers operate at night almost as well as in the daytime because of our huge investment in night vision. Not that night vision doesn't suck to use - it is like walking looking through a paper towel tube. But it is better than being blind. And with the helmet mounts you can use them even when flares are constantly going off and illuminating the scene bright as day. Pop - flare goes off, you flip up the NVD. Flare burns out and you flip them down. You are never blind.
So where are the NODs for the Marines? And why the F is one of them shown using a piece of crap AK? They have the rest of the equipment they need, from what I can see. I've seen them with shotguns, and with lots of frags, and I saw some use a pre-prepared demo charge to blow a hole in a wall. So why not NODS and scopes?
This bothers me. Can somebody tell me why the Marines aren't as well-equipped as the Army? And are they as well supplied as they should be?
A quick explanation for civilians, but veterans and those already familiar with the US military can skip this:
NOD- night observation device, a "night scope." The green picture you sometimes see when news networks are showing night battles is taken with a NOD.
NVD - night vision device, same as a NOD.
M4- the shorter version of the M16A2 that the US Army has adopted, with adjustable stock and a rail above the barrel and reciever to take NODS and other things, like flashlights, etc.
Designator - a "laser sight" kind of device that shoots a beam visible only to those wearing NODS. The beam is aligned with the sights. You put the beam on the target. You know why.
Zeroing: adjusting your sights so that when your sight is center mass on a target the round is too.
AK - most will already know this. The standard assault rifle of the former Soviet Union, and pretty much the entire third world, with a distinctive very-curved magazine. Usually fires 7.62mm rounds in the AK-47 version. It has been updated to fire 5.54mm ammo in the AK-74 version, which is very common nowadays. The 5.54 mm high-velocity round is even smaller than the 5.56 NATO round of the US military. Smaller is not necessarily less effective: since force = mass times acceleration, the round is smaller but moves much, much faster, causing more impact and damage than a larger, slower bullet. It is cheaply made, fairly reliable, and not very accurate. It is cheap and simple to use and maintain, which makes it the weapon of choice for conscript armies that don't have the time or money or motivation to train their soldiers to a high standard. The M16-series in the US military is actually a much, much better assault rifle, but more expensive and more complicated to use. It is thus preferred by professionals, but not by mass conscription armies. The AK fires in the semi-automatic mode (single-shot each time you pull the trigger) or full automatic mode (empties out when you hold down the trigger). The M16-A2 and M4 fire on semi or 3-round burst mode. Full auto is usually the equivalent of saying "I can't shoot accurately, watch me waste up all my ammo before a well-trained enemy ends my misery." US troops like it when they face enemies that use full auto - it means the enemy can't shoot straight and is very poorly trained.)
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19 comments:
I doubt that any of the neocon paintball commandoes and cheerleaders will be able to answer this, so let me throw in some responses that they can use. Feel free to cut and paste, boys and girls.
1. It's Kerry's fault - He voted AGAINST outfitting the troops.
2. It's Clinton's fault - he should have spent some of that alleged surplus money on better weapons.
3. It's the liberal media's fault. They are only photographing and reporting the bad stuff.
4. Whine, whine, whine...all you liberals do is whine. Why don't you just shut the hell up and support the troops.
5. You complain that we are spending too much money in Iraq. Then, when a patriotic marine chooses to save the government cash by using an inferior weapon you complain. Flip/flop, flip/flop, flip/flop.
6. You're helping the enemy.
7. The picture was bogus, it never happened.
8. If they are using an AK 47 then Wolfowicz and Rummy must have carefully thought it out and decided that this was the best plan.
9. What the hell do you know? Even though I never put on a uniform, I've read enough blogs to know that the AK47 smokes the M-16.
10. The Army Times is just a front for Dan Rather and Michael Moore.
Thanks all. I feel much better.
Vrangel, I don't know what unit you were with in the Soviet Army, but it sounds like you got more training than most. And AKM Soviet weapons are better made than most export or locally produced AKs, not to mention the difference in ammo quality. I carried a wide variety of AKs when I was OPFOR, and most of them sucked - often jamming. Yes I cleaned them. The AKM and AKMS were decent though. But still not very accurate compared to the M16.
Carrying it for greater penetration makes sense.
As for not carrying their night vision scopes and designators because it is daytime, I guess I am dating myself, but in my day (waaaay back in '97) the scopes had to be zeroed, and removing them could mess up your zero, so once they were zeroed you left them on the weapon. I guess the new technology allows them to be removed and re-attached without losing the zero.
Is that right free?
redleg, I agree that if you have not trained with advanced optics you shouldn't use them in combat. And I also agree that front-line riflemen have the gear more often than other units. But this unit was a front-line rifle unit, so I would expect it to have the gear and to have trained with it.
Your quote about Kerry (stop telling me what Kerry woulda shoulda coulda done) and your saying "Your kvetching about a picture belies the good work these men are doing" was, I feel, out of place. This wasn't a political rant (the election is over and the lies about democrats not being patriotic or supporting the military can stop now). And I am not under the impression these men aren't doing good work - I am wondering if they have the gear that I know exists, and that I know other units have. Good gear that would make them more effective. I am not comparing them to the terrorists, but to how they are now and how they could be. I want the Marines to be as well-equipped as the Army, and I know that sometimes they aren't because of budget issues (Marine units are more expensive because it costs money to float).
Free, your comments are great. It is true that scopes don't improve accuracy without training, but they do help improve already good marksmen. Target acquisition at long distances is easier too - you use both eyes, and use the scope to "zoom in" when you see something, therefore you aren't losing your wider field of view except when you see something you want to look at closer. And of course everybody should be comfortable with iron sights, but they should also be trained on advanced optics after that. To say that the Marines are focusing on the fundamentals and don't want or need "whiz-bang toys" sounds like BS to me. You can't hit shit with advanced optics unless you master the fundamentals first, and "whiz-bang toys" that help you acquire targets better and see at night and designate targets are certainly not something the Marines should sneer at.
When I was trained in CQB we didn't use scopes, but they were still mounted on the weapon. In quick-fire drills it was just as easy to use a weapon with a scope versus one without, and of course you don't engage close targets using the scope. But it helps to have the thing on there when you need it, and in urban fighting the engagements can vary from less than 50m to 400m in a matter of seconds.
I disagree that the AK is superior to the M16 in reliability, but then again it depends on the AK type. Chinese stuff sucks, but I had a Rumanian one that was pretty good, with a "broom handle" as part of the wooden receiver.
Glad to hear that the Marines do have helmet mounted NVGs, and the removable mount sounds better. Not glad to hear about PVS-7s - in front line infantry units they still have PVS-7s? Geez.
yes, we could have a better rifle than the M16 series, such as your H&K dream rifle. Could we afford to buy them in the hundreds of thousands, though?
I never carried a MOLLE pack. I'll take your word for it. I had an old-ass Alice pack with an external frame. I always was amazed to see that civilian backpacking gear was far superior to my military ruck.
I'm just glad to hear that the Marines do have the gear (apparently) and that the reason this guy had an AK made sense - 7.62mm has greater penetration than 5.56mm, so he was shooting through doors and walls with it, while his buddies had their US weapons for other tasks. And the Marines do have helmet mounts for their NVGs. I don't agree with Free that the Marines don't want or need advanced optics. It helps, and every little bit helps.
What I remember doing in the slight disagreements we've had with various coca growers over the past couple of decades, was confiscating AKs and 7.62 ammo off of the fallen enemy to supplement our own basic loads, and in close-in combat, revert to the AKs and the plundered ammo, and save the A2s and SOPMOD M4s for situations requiring longer range. It was mainly about ammo management.
One could say that a presidential administration is a singular failure and full of blundering idiots any time at all a rifle squad runs out of ammo, but let's be honest here. It's happened in every conflict ever engaged in since the advent of firearms, period.
The individuals I've kept in touch with in OIF did confirm some equipment issues early on in their deployments, and the problems had since been (mostly) resolved. Improvements have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, which doesn't make for sexy news broadcasts, but, I wondered if I might share this tid-bit of Army Times propaganda here.
Free, I think you are way out of line.
Fbg's assessment that we don't have enough troops doesn't seem politically motivated to me at all - facts are facts. While some think facts are unwelcome annonyances or politically motivated, that doesn't change the truth on the ground. Fact is, the military leadership was pretty united on the subject of troop strength, and ignored by Rumsfeld & co.
You ask where we would get more grunts, and launch into a tirade against the draft. Regardless of where the troops would come from, the fact is that they are needed.
And we don't need a draft. We don't need to resort to slave labor. If we need more troops and we aren't getting enough qualified volunteers, we can either lower standards, which you and I are both against, or draft, which you and I are both against - OR, do something else. For instance, raise pay. If we don't get enough qualified volunteers why don't we increase the pay for combat troops (NOT all troops - if we aren't short of sonar techs or crew chiefs we don't need to spend tax dollars on raising their pay). Revamp the pay system and pay the most to the jobs most difficult to fill - just like in the civilian market. If $25K a year isn't enough to attract quality recruits for the infantry then pay $35K, or $45K - it is still cheaper than a draft and much, much cheaper than lowering standards. Each failed recruit that washes out of training costs thousands of dollars, and even worse are those who somehow squeak through but are not proficient - they cost much more in both $$$ and lives. And each dead warrior costs hundreds of thousands, while the permanently disabled will cost at least as much over the course of their lives - not to mention the human cost in pain and suffering. So instead of buying the unneeded and unnecessary joint strike fighter at a cost of billions and billions of dollars, raise the pay of front-line grunts. No draft, no lowering standards, and we get the numbers we need on the ground.
Your analogy to us being unprepared for WWII is very weak. This was a war of choice, and in any case just because we have made terrible mistakes in the past that cost lives and harmed our chances of victory doesn't mean we should simply shrug our shoulders and say "so what?" We should hold people accountable. The problems we are experiencing in Iraq were avoidable, and to make it worse, were predicted. The senior leadership of the US Army warned the administration, repeatedly, and were so concerned that Gen. Shinseki took the unprecedented step of speaking out publicly about his concerns. For this he was humiliated and sent packing - and now that he has been shown to have been incredibly accurate, and those that ignored him to have been terribly wrong, you say "so what?" I don't.
Finally, your attack on fbg over his "lack of tactical knowledge" was incorrect as well. While you might be proficient in the use of the rifle, that doesn't mean you are trained for foot patrols. And even if you are, that doesn't mean the armored units training with AKs so that they can go on foot patrols is a good thing. It isn't. If we had the right numbers on the ground we wouldn't be using field artillery and armor for infantry tasks. That we are suggests exactly what fbg says it suggests - we don't have enough infantrymen in theater (or in the force structure for that matter).
Similarly, when people point out that 40% of the troops in Iraq are reservists, some attack them and say things like "the reserves knew what they signed up for" or "that is part of being a reservist." True, but it doesn't change the fact that if your reserve is used regularly, it isn't a reserve any more.
What I say next is NOT politically motivated. The election is over. The truth is this: the administration refuses to deal with reality. What can't go on forever simply won't. Our military is being wrecked with no steps being taken to correct the problems. Pointing out the problems and accepting that they exist is the first step in fixing them, but even that results in accusations of politics. Facts are annoying inconveniences. And we will pay dearly for this deliberate ignorance.
Free, you make some good points, but we disagree about some things.
For one, the controversy over troop numbers seems to have been forgotten - by you. Not me. It was controversial from before the first invasion, and the micromanagment and interference with the military professionals is well documented. It wasn't just Shinseki and Zinni and a minority of others - it was widespread and common knowledge among the Army and Marine leadership. If the Navy and the Air Force didn't think troop numbers were that big a deal - so what? They aren't the troops on the ground. We had (and have) enough sailors and airmen. We don't have enough infantry, either from the USMC or the Army. See http://buggieboy.blogspot.com/2004/10/if-you-love-your-country-read-this.html for more details.
That old canard about "the Army needs to adopt the Marine ideal of 'everybody is a rifleman'" is an old wives' tale that gets repeated constantly by those who don't understand the force structure or what it takes to run a military. For instance, 2/3rds of the USMC combat service support (CSS) comes from sailors in the US Navy. Are the tens of thousands of sailors that provide support to the Marines all trained as riflemen? Other than medics, I don't know of ANY sailors that train for ground combat in order to support the Marines. But you don't think about them as combat support because they don't wear Marine cammies. The CSS for the Army comes 100% from the Army, and all soldiers are trained in the basics of self defense - they all have to qualify with the rifle, for instance, and learn to throw hand grenades. Most of your support troops have not. So before you think the Army should adopt the Marine way of training support troops, you should realize this would mean LESS combat training for support soldiers, not more. Few, if any, of the combat service support personnel that your regiment and division rely upon have ever qualified with anything larger than a service pistol (and that rarely).
When you don't have enough infantry and MPs to secure your LOCs then the support troops end up in situations where they engage the enemy (or, in the case of the US Navy, they don't deploy to those areas at all and rely upon - you guessed it, the US Army to do it.) Instead of attempting to make infantry out of support troops (a very expensive proposition) why not make more infantry so that the support troops can peform their jobs?
The Marines are justly proud that every Marine is trained as a rifleman, but as a consequence the Marines don't have enough support troops to function properly. The Marines don't allocate enough positions to support because they have historically found them incredibly difficult to fill. It is hard to train a rifleman, harder to train a rifleman who also does support, and incredibly hard to find somebody who wants to train as a rifleman and then do combat service support. In every major campaign the Marines just rely on Army support and combat service support. Instead of telling the Army to train their troops better, you should realize you don't train yours at all - they don't exist. The USMC simply doesn't do it, and depends on the Army and Navy to pick up the combat support and combat service support tasks the Marine Corps can't (or won't) perform. Which is fine, and the Army has no problem doing it, and it probably makes more sense to have the Army do it, but when a Marine starts advising the Army to do better with support troops "like the Marines do it" I just think he should at least be fully informed.
The attrition rate for the Army infantry school, the most physically and mentally demanding initial entry training course the Army has, is quite low. That is because those that aren't ready aren't sent. The attrition rate for regular Army basic ("Camp Snoopy" to infantrymen who went through infantry OSUT) is much higher, even though it is much easier. Why? Because while gung-ho young men want to be GI Joe, they don't make war movies about mechanics, forklift operators, or fuel handlers. That the Army churns out so many professional, proud, well-trained, competent combat service support and combat support troops is a testament to the skill of the Army training system. But, no, they don't fight well as infantry. Making the recruits go through mini-basic would probably hurt readiness, not help it. Instead, what needs to happen is for combat support and service support AIT courses to incorporate the lessons learned from Iraq, for instance convoy firing courses. Guess what? They are. But that doesn't mean they should be forced to perform infantry missions because there aren't enough trained rifle units available.
As far as the lean Clinton years versus the "miracle worker" Bush, again I don't buy it. You don't create a professional military overnight, or in four years. Bush inherited a competent, well-equipped military. That wouldn't be possible if Clinton had neglected the military. Sure we didn't have everything we wanted, but we had what we needed. My barracks didn't have rats - but we fielded the SAWE system, the Miles II system, conducted two AWE exercises, and the 4th ID turned into the powerhouse it is today, plus the Stryker program went from concept to combat-ready deployability in record time - and this all began under Clinton. Oh, and military pay increased under Clinton faster than the rate of inflation.
As for Bush being a "miracle worker" - I agree. On 9/12 we had a small deficit, the support of the entire world, and the best military the world had ever seen. In just four years we have moved to the largest deficit in history, the entire world fears us (which is NOT a good thing if you want to remain the sole superpower) or outright hates us, our over-stretched military is suffering while our many enemies are emboldened to see how we can no longer deter them, and China and Japan sense a power vacuum in Asia due to our full committment in Iraq. It would be incredibly difficult to screw up that badly in eight years, much less four, but somehow your miracle worker did it.
And, once again, the GWOT and Iraq are NOT the same thing. Nobody foresaw 9/11, but if that is true why do you relate it to Iraq by claiming it is part of the GWOT and at the same time claim we should have deposed Saddam in '91? Either Iraq is part of the GWOT, or Iraq is unfinished business from '91 before the GWOT began. Fact is, we were smart in '91 and avoided the many problems that level-headed realists foresaw would occur if we occupied Iraq (in short, who the fuck wanted it?) while at the same time fully securing our oil supply. Now we pay dearly in Iraq while oil is at a record high, and for what? Not for GWOT - Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism and did not have terrorist links - it was an enemy state, not a supporter of stateless terrorists. And NOT for freedom - because there are many more deserving places where it would be easier to install democracy, for more people, at less cost, and we don't seem to care. We invaded Iraq because Bush and his cabal thought it would be easy and would 'send a message' that you don't mess with Texans. In short - HUBRIS.
Your analogy to the "blunder" of Market-Garden or WWII in general ignores several things: 1) market-garden was always risky, the risks were assesed up front, and the failure would have resulted in Monty's relief except for politics. He was Britian's hero and we couldn't touch him. Fire FDR for this? Not likely, he hadn't made the decisions, the military had. 2) In WWII many commanders were relieved of duty, including after Kasserine Pass and after Pearl Harbor. Your analogy suggest that FDR should have been held responsible, but in fact he did hold his military commanders responsible, and commanders were fired when necessary. And Lincoln fired McClellan, and the Union was saved. And Bush called Rumsfeld a "great" secretary of defense, and we are sucking in Iraq because of his criminal stupidity and arrogance. That's your analogy.
But, hey, Bush "has a backbone" and you "feel led." Well, the cult of personality usually trumps. Germans worshipped Hitler while Germany was destroyed. The Russians cheered Stalin while the purges took place (many Russians still revere him today as a "man of strength" - not surprising since his name (not his real one) of Joseph Stalin translates into English as "Joe Steel"), many Iraqis are still loyal to Saddam, and subjects throughout history have cheered kings that despised them. So you "feel led" and like having a man of action in the white house. That doesn't mean your "decisive" commander in chief is making the right decisions. In fact, it is pretty clear when you analyze what he has done and the reasons he has done it, he has usually been wrong. And our nation has been harmed by him, and that doesn't mean crowds don't cheer him, it means he is wrong and they don't know or don't care.
Ahhh, yes, Vrangel, whenever a realist portrays facts the reaction of the radical right is to proclaim that they are "blinded by ideology."
Methinks thou doth protest too much.
The truth is that reforming the Middle East by installing democracy at the point of a gun might work. I hope it does. But whether the cost is worth it to our nation is certainly debatable, yet those in charge of this immense long-term incredibly costly effort thought it would be cheap and easy, and also presented false rationales (the non-existent threat of WMDs, and the GWOT) to justify it. That doesn't lead me to hold much confidence in their judgment.
Next is the complete lack of competence when it came to the political consolidation of our initial military success. As I predicted in my Nov. '02 essay, military victory against Saddam's decrepit army was assured, but the problem would be after that. While Bush & co were declaring victory and pointing out how wrong the critics were who urged more troops (proving that Bush & co. didn't understand the principles of war because the critics never said the larger numbers were needed for the conventional military engagement) the experts were urgently cautioning wiser courses of action than were taken - for instance, if we had portrayed the Iraqi military as the primary force in Saddam's downfall, and used our extensive propaganda resources to convince the Iraqi people that our military victory was only due to the Iraqi army abandoning Saddam "for the greater glory of Iraq" we 1) would not have been seen by Iraqis as humiliating Iraq, and 2) could have used the existing and incredibly effective already-existing security force to maintain order. Instead we declared the Iraqi army no longer existed, and sent tens of thousands of trained and armed and now humiliated and angry soldiers home with no hope of employment and little hope of a brighter future. Then the billions allocated for Iraqi reconstruction were used to employ foreign contractors while Iraqi men, already seen by themselves as militarily impotent, remained unemployed. Then, when the attacks on US forces (as predicted by the Army all along) began to mount, we conduct raids where Iraqis are rousted and their homes are searched, the men are detained, and the women are inspected - in front of their men. Add the Abu Ghraib scandal on to that, and yet the Bush administration still continued to deny for months that a guerrilla war was occuring, continued to insist that only "baathist diehards" and "foreign terrorists" were conducting the attacks, and were surprised when events on the ground began to spin out of control.
And for pointing this out I am "blinded by leftist ideology."
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
Matthew 7:4
Thanks Free.
Just a few things:
1) Yes, 80% of the officer corps were Sunni. So what? It was a force that guaranteed stability, and it could have been used while transforming Iraqi society and changing the officer corps so that it wasn't baathist. It was a powerful symbol of Iraqi identity, and even the Shia felt humiliated when it was dissolved - because they see themselves as IRAQI Shia, not just Shiites. And in any case, if the Iraqi military was kept in organized units with pay and with discipline they would be easier to monitor, unlike now.
2) The new army is not coming along and fighting on our side. It is useless, regardless of the propaganda you hear. I would rather patrol without them than with them. "Want to by an ARVN rifle? Never been fired and only dropped once."
3) If Iraq becomes a success that will certainly be better than failure, but the benefit will be for the Iraqis, not for Americans. AND - the debate over the war is not something that suggests we should "stay the course." Attacks are growing worse, not better. This administration is the one that has been wrong all along - and saying "why continue to debate the war" at the same time as "stay the course" suggests we should not learn from our mistakes. And, apparently, we aren't. All we have to do is "stay the course" and "tough it out" and the same people who have been consistently wrong - about WMDs, 9/11-Iraqi links, troop numbers, the nature of the insurgency, the same people who fucked up the occupation, they will be proven right? if we don't change tactics? Forgive me for not agreeing with you.
4) Redleg says that Iraq is "Unrelated to the GWOT? Horse-puckey." Well, that certainly is a valid argument. I point out Army war college studies, and his reply is "horse-puckey" with no facts, or even anecdotes, to support his contention. The only reason Bush was even able to sell Iraq as part of the war on terror was because Iraq is arab and muslim. It had as much to do with Islamic terrorism as North Korea. Yes, it was an enemy (so is North Korea) but if we invaded North Korea (something that we are now incabable of in any case) would you buy it if it was sold as part of the war against stateless terrorism? Well, maybe you would. In any case it NOW is part of the GWOT because, as predicted, the invasion helped our terrorist enemies, both in recruiting and funding and in finding Americans to kill without having to bother coming all the way to the US. What a boon for them.
4) To say the analogy to a cult of personality is wrong because "NKVD with a Makarov at the base of my neck" was responsible for Stalin's power ignores my premise. Stalin, while purging and killing his enemies, was nevertheless actually popular, even loved, by many Russians. Yes Saddam is a bastard, but even now that he is out of power there are Iraqis who revere him and are still loyal to him. Not because they are afraid of what happens if they don't, but because they feel loyalty and reverence to a strong leader. And human history shows this is usually the case - otherwise most of humanity throughout history would not have been under the sway of kings and dictators. Your tendency to support Bush because you "feel led" and because he is strong and makes you feel strong and good as well is simply human nature - but it doesn't make him a good or competent leader, only a strong one. Which is why you blame Clinton for a weak military despite the facts showing the military was not neglected - you seek anecdotal evidence to support your beliefs and ignore facts, while excusing Bush for the massive mistakes and misjudgments he has consistently made - you seek anecdotal evidence to support your beliefs and ignore facts. It is normal, but not right.
5) Free's analogies to Holland, Germany, Japan, etc. ignores a basic and immutable fact: our true enemy is STATELESS terrorism, and any analogies to the defeat of states is thus flawed. The GWOT is not a war against states, because states, even states as mad as North Korea or Iraq in Saddam's day, are deterrable. The nature of stateless terrorism is completely different. Thus the invasion of Iraq had as much to do with the GWOT as fish has to do with bicyles.
Sorry to all for not creating a new post to further this great discussion, but I have been busy. I guess this thread will just grow until I get around to a new post.
to use a unit created AFTER the Iraqi army had been humiliatingly disbanded, AFTER the insurgency had caught fire and was in full swing, in the MOST hostile region of the entire country, a unit fielded AFTER the US military had been involved in heavy urban fighting, and use it as an example of why we were right to disband that army in the first place, well, no, I don't buy it. The damage had already been done, and recreating the Iraqi army after the fact would not undo that damage.
I think we are talking in circles. Free, I don't think I missed the point at all, and here is why:
1) Israel is NOT the United States. The interests of Israel and the US are not the same. Thus a terrorist organization that attacks Israel regularly is not necessarily a threat to the US, and US blood and treasure should not be spent for the benefit of Israel, but only for the benefit of the US. Thus the "terrorist" organizations you cite, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, are NOT the targets in our GWOT. We can not attack a tactic (terrorism) but must fight an enemy (the terrorists who threaten us). We also don't need to fight the IRA, or the Basque separatist ETA in Spain (which set off 7 bombs there today, killing five), or FARC in Columbia, or Filipino Muslim terrorists, or Chechens, or any other terrorist group that doesn't threaten us. And "terrorist" is a matter of perception sometimes. I know. I trained the "freedom fighters" of the Nicaraguan Contra movement in the 1980s, and they were NOT the good guys - and all of us training them could see it. While Reagan considered the Sandinista govt a threat because they were communist, we trained and equipped fascists, thugs, and drug traffickers. And called them "freedom fighters" while most of the rest of world saw that they were terrorists who did things like attack police stations and plant land mines and booby traps. And this Sandinista "threat" stepped down when it lost the first democratic election, in a peaceful transfer of power, something that the Contras would never have done since they were mostly ex-military from the evil dictator Somoza's era, and were enemies of democracy. What does this have to do with Hamas? Well, not all of the world considers Hamas a terrorist group, and Hamas has never attacked the US - and in fact condemned strongly the 9/11 attacks and every beheading of an American as "un-Islamic" and "barbaric." Do they use terror tactics? Yes. Does that mean they are our enemy? No. We aren't fighting a method (terrorism), that would make as much sense as a war on "ambushing." If Iraq's support of Hamas justifies invasion why are we not invading the other countries that support them, such as: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the UAE (and all other gulf states), and most of all, Iran. In fact, the two biggest donors to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are (and have been) Saudia Arabia and Iran. In 1998 the Saudi government welcomed Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin as an official guest and presented him with a gift of $25 million given by a member of the royal family, who was reported to be Crown Prince Abdallah, heir to the Saudi throne. So we invade Iraq for supporting Hamas? no. You were lied to and you believed it. Your use of the term "Islamo-fascist" (common in extremist sites like Free Republic) is one that fails to discern threats to us versus groups that don't threaten us. We are at war against Islamic fundamentalism, but groups like Hamas are not that, they are nationalist, and dedicated to a Palestinian state, not the destruction of the western world.
Next is the WMD threat. It didn't exist even if we had found tons of mustard gas. The fact that you believe Sarin was moved from Iraq to Syria yet you still believe we were right to invade in order to lessen the threat shows incredible inconsistency. As in the case of the high explosive that disappeared after the invasion, the overthrow of Saddam makes it MORE likely that such weapons will be used against us, not less likely - not to mention the warned against boon to terrorist recruiting and support caused by our invasion. But in any case the term "WMD" is a false one that creates images in the mind of enormous destruction along the lines of a nuclear weaponry, but chemical weapons are WWI technology that every nation who has used them has found ineffective. Hitler had them and didn't use them, and it certainly wasn't because he was a nice guy. Same with the Empire of Japan. The one Sarin attack on record, in the Tokyo subways, killed 19 people, but the Aum Shiriko terrorist group spent ten years and $100 million preparing it - and killed 19 people. Had they spend $10,000 on C-4 and planted conventional explosives on the subway the death toll could have been in the hundreds, and in the Madrid railway attacks conventional explosives did MUCH more damage, not to mention the damage caused on 9/11 by 19 guys with boxcutters. The use of biological weapons is even more difficult - after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the US and the Soviet Union, we never created a biological threat that could be weaponized effectively. The one biological attack on record here in the US (ignoring attacks through food poisoning - no way to prevent e. coli attacks) was the anthrax attacks. Four died. Four. Oh, and the strain of antrax used? From a US Army-developed strain, not from overseas. Thus if Saddam "might" have given "WMD" to terrorists - pretending that Saddam ever gave weaponry to terrorists, which he never did, and pretending that the WMDs he had were something terrorists would want, which it wasn't - the threat to us would actually be lessened. I would much rather have terrorists trying to employ chemical weapons against us instead of conventional high explosive. Just as in the Tokyo attacks, fewer Americans will die, and there is a much greater chance of the terrorists killing themselves before they can attack at all. And all of this was known to national security professionals well before the build-up to invasion. You were (America was) misled and lied to about the threat of WMDs. Oh - and any nation capable of making chlorine for use in pools has a chemical weapons program. Turning chlorine into mustard gas can be done in a high school lab. The reason we don't freak out is that mustard gas sucks as a weapon, whether in the hands of an army or in the hands of terrorists. And nerve gas? Raid is a nerve agent, and any nation that can make insecticide can make VX and/or DN easily. Why don't we freak out about them? Because, again, nerve agent sucks as a weapon. For instance, when Saddam used it in the well-known attack against the Kurdish villagers, it turned out he had to rain shells on them for some time. Had he used conventional HE, not to mention incendiary devices, he would have killed at least as many. Which is one reason that after the first couple of times he used it against Iranian troops he stopped using it - because it sucks as a weapon.
What is truly worthy of fear is the only weapon that can truly be called "WMD" - nuclear. No, not a "dirty bomb." THere is enough radioactive medical waste to create one of those right here at home, and if the govt truly wanted to neutralize the threat then the administration would educate the public on how little a threat dirty bombs actually present - but they aren't, and when one eventually is used the nation will freak out. For instance, if one is used in a subway that subway will be closed and not used - costing billions - when in fact it can be cleaned and made safe fairly quickly - but the public won't believe it unless they are educated about it beforehand. The only true WMD is an atomic bomb. Which we knew Iraq did not have, could not have, and was nowhere near to getting. Meanwhile Pakistan has the bomb, sells it to the highest bidder, and we ignore it. Iran continues its program, and we are helpless (because of our full military committment in Iraq) to prevent it. And I don't even want to get started on North Korea.
The truth is, your scheming Saddam, that was trying to destabilize the ME just as you say, was weaker every year, and presented less of a threat in 2002 than in 1998, and less of a threat in 1998 than in 1994, and so on. Containment worked better than we expected - in 1991 the plan was to destroy his military so that he couldn't present a viable threat for ten years. In fact he hever presented a viable threat again, even 13 years later when we invaded. You, and America, were lied to and misled.
And if the possibility of Israel killing every Palestinian, and the effect it would have on stability and oil production, concerns you, the invasion of Iraq had a negative effect as well, and meanwhile prior to 9/11 Bush simply ignored the ME peace process, while post-9/11 he has clearly sided with Israel in the conflict, destroying the chances of America being an aribitor and mediator in the conflict. Clinton was cheered when he visited the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians waved US flags, and kissed his limo, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad toned down their rhetoric for the visit in a very positive sign for the future. Shortly thereafter Bush took office and let the process fall to pieces, and then became a cheerleader for Israel, siding with Sharon. The invasion of Iraq was never justifible on the grounds of stabilizing the ME.
yes, it takes time to create a viable military and police force. That the administration failed to see this beforehand doesn't fill me with confidence that they will make good decisions now. The Bush administration predicted that the invasion and creation of a viable Iraqi govt would be cheap, quick, and easy. And yes, you are right, it isn't. but why let them off the hook for being wrong in the first place, or, amazingly, use the fact that it is hard to create stability as a reason to DEFEND the idiots that unknowingly blundered along to this point in the first place?
TWD - :) Great timing, huh? You crack me up.
As for your air wing points - all true, but it misses the point. The USMC does a great job of training Marines. And likewise anybody in an Army FARP can do the same, as they are well-trained for it, even if a crew chief or an Apache mechanic. I've conducted live fire exercises where my infantry unit trained forward support battalions and aviation companies - the cooks, the logistic techs, the fuel handlers, everybody. AND - aviation is a combat arms branch in the Army. Combat support and service support MOS's are different. You don't think your logpacs that your divisional supply units move just magically appear packed and organzied forward of the divisional rear boundary? No. Sailors do it and hand it off to Marine supply units. How did your supplies arrive? Did a Marine drive a truck from San Diego to Iraq? No, the Navy moved it. And the USMC has no EAC (echelons above corps) signal units, or supply/logistics nodes, etc. You rarely need it so that makes sense - they exist in the fleet, with commo and supply elements on Navy ships. The Marines don't even have combat engineers, relying on the Navy (which points out something I was wrong about - it isn't just corpsmen that are trained to fight in the Navy in support of the USMC - Seabees can defend themselves and fight as infantry if the need arises, and they are all sailors). The Marines have no independent logistics or support companies, like the one Jessica Lynch belonged to. But when an extended land campaign occurs those elements have to be on land, and the Army is designed for such campaigns. Thus the Army has them, the USMC does not. And that means that the Army must train and equip those units. It just isn't worth the cost to train units to proficiency in infantry tasks if they rarely, if ever, need them. It doesn't even save lives - the cost of getting a EAC signal corps unit to the combat proficiency of an Army forward support battalion, for instance, would mean increased training and recruiting costs, which would mean greater staffing shortages, and at the same time the unit, once staffed, would need to maintain proficiency, leaving them less time to master their own MOSs - as a result the front-line units relying on such support troops would have less support, and they (the front-line troops) would pay the cost in blood - not the support troops who would be able to fight as infantry and never would. And the USMC feels the same, which is why sailors who support Navy aviation that might give you CAS aren't trained to fight while Marines who work in aviation units are - because the Marines who are firefighters, ordnance techs, etc. will be stationed in areas where the threat of direct engagement exists, while the sailors performing those same tasks for the Navy will not. And the USMC isn't raising hell to get those sailors trained for land combat - because it wouldn't be worth the cost. Similarly, the Army will train support units who fight forward of the brigade rear boundary to a high level, units behind that but forward of a divisional rear boundary to a lesser extent, and units behind that will recieve even less combat training - but more than the sailors or air force personnel ever get. Even the sailors your regiment relies upon in order to function.
When you go to the dentist, the sailor examining your teeth will never have qualified on a rifle, thrown a hand grenade, or done any FTXs. If you are on an Army base the dental technician will have done all of these things. Before you lecture the Army on better training for their support troops, have your dental technicians learn to load and fire a rifle first - because your support troops aren't recieving any combat training at all.
Thanks fbg (btw, is that an allusion to fire base gloria?)
Being light is easier than being heavy AND light, but deploying from fixed and secure bases on land is easier than staying prepared and ready while conducting extended floats. Thus as you say the USMC and Army are different, and both have challenging missions. And both are the best in the world.
The Army does need to and is changing from the cold-war era heavy force. Not because there is no more Soviet Union - our military has to be prepared for everything from high-intensity to low-intensity warfare even if the Russians aren't coming through the Fulda Gap. Both times we fought the Iraqi military it was high-intensity with heavy forces winning the day. No, the reason it must change is technology. In a very short time tanks will no longer be the powerful forces they are now, because light forces will be able to engage and destroy a similar-sized heavy force. This is due to advances in missile technology. Javelin missiles (for example) are man-portable (even though the poor bastards who have to hump them might disagree) and can defeat any tank in the world. The Javelin can penetrate the front slope of an M1 (or any other armor in the world), and a gunner can pop up, fire, and run away, while the missile tracks and destroys the target. As a result light infantry will be more of a threat to heavy armor forces than enemy tanks. Enemy tanks can be seen and destroyed. A single rifle company can have 100 guys running around, 20 or so with Javelins, and simply overwhelm and wipe out a company of tanks. Thus while tanks aren't obsolete, they will play much, much less of a role. We won't have "tank" divisions any more, but infantry divisions (or, even better, smaller self-contained fighting units like the UofA brigades that we are now experimenting with) that are light and mobile. That is why there need be no replacement for the M1. We should have kept working on an AGS, and a vehicle like the Stryker is the wave of the future. Our enemies will shortly have Javelin equivalents, and tanks such as the M1 will be just as vulnerable as an armored humvee. Possibly even more since they are bigger, have a larger heat signature, and are much slower. We will still need tanks because they are able to destroy other vehicles more quickly than even Javelins, but they will be quite vulnerable. Fast-moving light infantry is the future - as light as the 82nd or 101st, but able to move quickly even after a vertical insertion. The 3rd ACR was an early prototype unit, and while it was not succesful (my motorized rifle company rolled over an entire squadron of the TOW Humvee equipped 3rd ACR at the NTC) it taught us great lessons. The Stryker is a step better. And it was always considered a stop-gap solution that would fill the need only as long as it took us to figure out the new force structure and develop the best platforms for the future. Shinseki started the ball rolling, and even though Scumsfeld has done his best to derail it and make the Army all special ops, the Army as an institution is now on board. Even the armor community is looking toward the future by seeking to prove that tanks can engage infantry and play a great role in urban combat (which the infantry community always knew, but the armor community tried best to avoid).
Thus, the best replacement for the M1 is the LPC - leather personnel carrier. A boot. Because foot-mobile infantry, combined with transportation that can quickly move them around the battlefield but that places very small demands on the logistics system, will soon once again be the most powerful force on the battlefield, even if facing modern Chinese tanks or heavy armor in Korea. As when the armored knight was defeated by pike-carrying infantry, or when infantry formed in a square learned to defeat horse-cavalry charges, the nature of warfare has moved forward by moving back - to infantry combat.
Which, as an infantryman, I am not thrilled about. Because it creates more of a level playing field, and I liked it when the US was invincible. Hopefully by using technology and good combinations of air power and land power, as well as accurate stand-off technology, we can keep our overwhelming advantage when facing a determined enemy in any level of battle, from low to high intensity.
Free, Damn you, you just did the same thing, posting while I'm composing.
Ok, on to your points:
The pogue who "hands out tools back at the hanger" is in fact combat arms if he is actually forward of FLOT - which is often the case with a FARP. Thus he needs combat training too.
I think we are in "violent agreement" on most things. We agree that troops who engage the enemy should be trained to do so. My point is that simplistically saying the Army should train their support troops "like the Marines" is conventional wisdom - and wrong.
Soldiers in units forward of the divisional rear boundary are trained for basic combat. But would you expect a naval hospital to fight as infantry? Of course not. And neither can an Army hospital, but in fact the Army hospital will have more and better combat training than an equivalent naval hospital. And it will have deployed into a field environment much more often.
I should have defined "logpac." It isn't your gear. The Army also embarks its own gear unit by unit most of the time. When it doesn't it is heavy units deploying hundreds of tanks and other heavy forces, and we don't expect the merchant marine to fight as infantry either. But "logpac" is a logistics package. Your MREs are not under Marine control the entire time - they are stored on a ship until needed. The Marines don't provide the cooked food you eat when afloat. Your POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) must be transferred from naval tenders to blivets before the Marines pick it up and move it ashore. All of these tasks are done by sailors who aren't able to fight as infantry. It is combat service support. And it is done by soldiers in the Army, but we don't train all of our units to fight as infantry any more than the Marines train all sailors in their supply chain to do so. For the same reasons - it doesn't make sense and would be too costly.
Your combat service support groups are the equivalent of army direct support battalions, and our DSBs are also trained to defend themselves, and conduct FTXs and participate in force-on-force exercises at the NTC and JRTC. Our FSBs recieve even more training because they are closer to the line units they support.
The USAF does move a lot of the Army's stuff, true. And I don't need a C-130 crew chief to be trained as a rifleman, and I would consider it a criminal waste of my taxpayer dollars were he trained to do it. BTW, while the Marines depend upon the Navy for support, the Army also depends upon the Navy for support. A majority of the supplies Army units consume are not transported by air at enormous cost, but moved by the Navy. The Army could not exist without the Navy any more than the Marine Corps. But I don't think the Army should demand that a shipfitter or a sonar tech be trained as a rifleman either.
I was wrong about the Marines not having combat engineers, they do, the 1371 MOS. I don't know what I was thinking, because I have worked with them. I was confusing engineer and "combat" engineer. My bad. Marine CE's provide limited general engineering support, and anything more is provided by Seabees (or local civilian contractors) while in the Army the CEs don't provide any more than limited general engineering as well. There are engineers in the Army that provide more engineering support, but they aren't "combat" engineers. I was simply way off base.
You don't have echelons above corps because they are organic to divisions and below? No. You don't have them because the Marines are not designed for extended land campaigns but for the littorals or short land campaigns. If you are called to perform long land duty away from naval support you simply use Army EAC assets, and I have no beef about that, it makes perfect sense. But that does not mean you should think the Army has failed in preparing troops when tasks done by untrained-for-combat sailors are performed by soldiers given only basic combat training and no more. For instance, Jessica Lynch's company should NEVER have been on its own, and that it was ambushed was simply due to a huge chain of errors. Even then, the soldiers had been provided basic combat training, were equipped with and knew how to use their weapons and radios, and the tragic loss of life still would not justify the enormous cost it would take to prepare such units to fight as riflemen. And you may disagree, but if a marine finance unit had been in a similar engagement they would have suffered the same fate.
Your point about no front line is true but doesn't apply. Yes, it is true that "there will never be enough grunts to baby sit every pog, hence the need to teach them to fight there way out of a wet paper sack." But in fact the "pogues" who do the combat service support in Iraq are in fact trained. They don't need babysitting. Signal units and supply units often provide their own convoy security, and those that don't are usually units that don't move in convoys. They thus don't need the training. The Air Force doesn't provide such training to their personnel either, and likewise don't need to do so.
It kind of breaks down like this: There are three "levels" of military specialities.
1) combat
2) combat support
3) combat service support
The Marines, like any other force, needs all three, but the Marines are mostly combat, with some combat support (CS), and very few Marines in combat service support (CSS) jobs (Marines in JAG, finance, etc but very few). The Navy has few combat jobs (pilots, seals, etc.), many more combat support jobs (Seabees, corpsmen, any sailor assigned to a marine division, LCAC crews, etc.) and most of the navy is CSS. Thus the marines give their combat troops combat training, and most of their CS and CSS troops (who are mostly Navy personnel) recieve correspondgly less combat training, with CSS troops getting the least amount (or in the case of the Navy, none at all much of the time).
The Army has Combat, CS, and CSS, all 100% Army, all soldiers. Just like a Marine fighting force that consists of the visible combat Marines and the Naval CS and CSS that you don't think about, the Army provides excellent combat training for combat units, less for CS, and even less for CSS. But unlike the Marines, Army CSS personnel have ALL been through basic combat training. Every dental command unit, every Army hospital, every EAC signal corps unit, they have ALL been through basic combat training, must maintain their proficiency in their assigned weapon, and must meet PT standards.
Thus it is conventional wisdom that the Army should train all soldiers to be riflemen "like the marines" but in fact the Marines don't do that either. They just designate some of their CS and CSS as Marine positions, and others are Navy positions. The marines then train all of their selected positions as riflemen, but it is just word games. If you look at it like the Army does - above divisional level - then the "Department of the Navy" is the comparison, and the Marines are the combat arms of the Navy. You err, as most do, in comparing the Marines to the Army. Compare the Navy, including the subset Marine Corps which is part of the Deparment of the Navy, to the Army. The Navy does a great job in training its combat arms troops (Marines), but does not train its CS and CSS troops as much as the Army does. And it would be wrong for the Army to say "The Navy Department should train all of its troops to our higher standard of combat training" because there is no need. And it is just as wrong for a Marine to say "the Army should train all of it's CS and CSS personnel to be combat arms troops" when the Marines don't do that either. As I've pointed out, the Marine CS and CSS troops (sailors) get less trianing than their Army equivalents.
Again, to wrap this all up, when you go to the dentist on post, ask your dental tech when the last time he or she road marched, or went to the field, or threw a hand grenade, or fired a rifle. They will look at you like you are nuts. Go to an Army dental office and ask the soldier who is your dental tech the same question. They will answer you, and the answer will be a date within 365 days, because they have to qualify annually. Then tell me the Army should do like the Naval forces and train their CS and CSS troops "more."
I know you meant the post above my last - more composing while posting. Thanks for agreeing about the demise of the tank as the most potent land weapon.
And in the interests of OPSEC, I will agree with you about the penetration of the "currently fielded" javelin. In the future fire-and-forget man-portable weapons will be able to defeat any vehicle, even one with twice the armor protection of an M1. If it can't right now it is just a matter of time.
And I didn't know you were a javelin section leader. I can tell you this. At the NTC during regimental attacks (movements to contact with all the forces in the "box" playing) we usually ignored light infantry as simply irrelevant, other than to be more careful with our local security and change our scout pushes to avoid ambush. The use of a light infantry battalion, even a Ranger battalion, meant nothing to us because we would simply roll over them. We cared only about the heavy forces. When we defended or conducted other kinds of missions we worried about light forces, but in force-on-force manuever warfare the light forces were worse than useless - we often tried and succeeded in using them against their own side by, for instance, causing an earlier committment of heavy forces than they preferred because we were wiping out their light forces, or getting them to advance into an area where we wanted to slow heavy forces, and then committing our forces while the enemy would find their quickest route blocked by dismounted infantry - thus they had to slow down or take another route to avoid running over them. No more. The first unit to deploy with the Javelin (the 82nd) caused the entire regiment to stop and turn onto another axis of advance because the light forces were hammering our forward elements. They denied a critical route to us - which had never happened before. We still won (the OPFOR is AWESOME) but from then on we simply tried to avoid contact with the light forces, because we couldn't defeat them in a timely manner. If we began to mix it up with the formerly irrelevant light forces the heavy forces would manuever against us and we would lose. Thus light infantry, due to the Javelin, is just as important on a manuever battlefield as any other force. Their only (exploitable) weakness is that they are foot-bound, so we learned to find where they are and just avoid them. They in fact became impenetrable mine fields, denying us any access to the areas where they were when we attacked. If light forces can become as mobile as heavy forces without sacrificing stealth then they will be the key player, the most powerful force on the battlefield, and the only effective way to defeat enemy infantry is to commit your own.
free,
"I’m not suggesting we teach the sailors on ship or the airmen on the c-130 how to survive a firefight, but I am demanding we teach it to all personell stationed on the ground in theater in the GWOT."
As one Airman that was trained (and my afsc was nowhere near the front lines), I have to wonder what you knowledge of other branches of the service are.
Sure it wasn't our primary jab but I knew how to handle a weapon, clear & clean and take orders.
I could back or cover anyone in any branch of the service with an M16, pistol, anti tank gun.
I could save your ass with a trach, a tourniquet or an epi injection.
The point being that we all had tasks that were primary and others that were secondary none of better than the other in general, but definately more able in the specifics.
Not having enough trained personel in the right specialties and trying to generalize too many folks leads to disaster.
We still don't have enough troops of the right types in theater and are doing too much OJT in the trenches.
Free,
Apparently nothing I say (or others say) will dissuade you from your opinion that the Army is not training its troops as well as the Department of the Navy, but I will give it one more try.
"Aparently the Army can't even train it's 4th echelon troops as well as the airforce does." No, Free, wrong on two counts. 1) My C-130 crew chief was C-130 crew chief specific, trying (and failing) to point out to you that some military personnel have no need for the training you claim all should get, and that you are wrong to point out that all Marines get the training, so the other services should do the same. In fact, in the USAF the troops deployed with Army units (FACs or the very impressive AF combat medics) recieve excellent combat training. They often go through Ranger school. Do cargo plane crew chiefs? No. Paul was right. And the USAF is right to train that way. I have met some incredible stud-puppet warriors who wear Air Force blue. 2) The Army does an excellent job of training its "4th echelon troops" but could always improve. As I pointed out in my dental tech example, the Army does a great job of training its 4th echelon personnel, while your branch of service gives no combat training at all to most of your CSS troops. The difference is that Marines think that the Army is similiar to the Marines, when in fact the Army is more like the entire Department of the Navy, including the Marines. And all Army personnel go through basic combat training, while most of the Department of the Navy do not, even when you include the USMC.
The Jessica Lynch "saga" was not an institutional failure, but a local leadership failure. The unit was simply fucked up. And while you feel no Marine units are ever like that, I have seen USMC rifle units that were poorly led, undisciplined, and weak. I have also seen Marine rifle companies that were awesome. Everybody has their 10% of dirtbags.
If you saw poorly disciplined units in Iraq there are several reasons for it: 1) 40% of the troops in Iraq are reserve/Natl. Guard. While every reservist and NG soldier deserves our gratitude, the truth is that of course the active-duty units that have career-minded NCOs and EMs with an average age of 22 and that train 300 days a year are better and more disciplined than reserve units that have part-time NCOs, have SGTs in their 40s and 50s, and train 36 days a year (supposedly - they drill 36 days a year but probably train less than 14 in most units). Even a six-month train-up will not make a reserve unit into a highly disciplined, motivated regular Army unit. And that is usually ok because they are supposed to be a RESERVE, not a full-time force pulling year-long tours in Iraq. The Marine reserve is better trained and better prepared, but much, much smaller. More than half of all infantry units in the "total" Army are in the reserves. If the Marines had to do that they would be hard pressed to keep their high rates of readiness. Not to mention the incredible politics that the Natl Guard suffers from - the NG is pretty much immune from sensible decisions because all NG troops vote in the same state, meaning the Army is often powerless to do things like relieve idiots of command or demand higher levels of physical fitness. Just the way it is, and before reservists out there flood this blog with accounts of how awesome their units are, I believe you - and stand by my statement that the reserves as a whole are an entirely different kind of animal from the Regular Army. 2) Again, you are also probably comparing Army CSS and CS troops to your combat units. If I compared your female finance and accounting Marines to an Army Ranger unit would you think that an accurate comparison? Or compared your typical rifle company to a Ranger company? In fact, the typical individual fitness and fighting skills in an Army infantry unit are very different depending on if it is a light or mech unit, so even comparing rifle companies is inaccurate. I've seen people do it, though. I saw a Marine unit at the NTC feel superior to a Bradley company they were training with because the Marines were much more physically fit and moved better when fighting on foot. Of course the Marine unit could not fight as a mechanized force and the Army Bradley company was in fact much more combat effective when engaging in manuever warfare (precisely the mission they were designed and trained to carry out) but the Marines still felt superior, because they could run faster and carry heavier rucks. In short, they couldn't see the point was combat effectiveness on the battlefield, not how many push-ups you can do. In Army light infantry units such as the 101st or 82nd, upper body strength is a critical skill, as well as cardiovascular fitness. As a result any rifle company in the 101st can run any mechanized company into the dirt, just as this Marine company could run faster and farther than the Bradley unit. Does that mean the 101 is filled with "better" soldiers, or more effective soldiers? No. Speaking as a soldier who has served in mech and light units, the different missions require different skills. Soldiers PCS from mech to light units, but when they do they must train-up and learn new skills to be effective - whether they are moving from light to mech or vice versa. Similarly, to feel the Army is not as well trained as the Marines is to compare apples and oranges. I have worked with all branches of the service, and speaking honestly, I would much rather have a Marine rifle company in an urban fight than an Army mech company, and I would much rather have a rifle company from the 101st Air Assault in an urban environment than a Marine company. And that same 101st company would pretty much be combat ineffective (and probably overweight and out of shape) if it floated for 3 months or so, while the Marine unit would be at pretty much the same level of effectiveness.
Again, when your dental tech has trained in basic combat skills like Army dental techs you can feel free to say things like "Aparently the Army can't even train it's 4th echelon troops as well as the airforce does" - or the Marines. Especially since your dental tech has never fired a rifle in his or her life, and probably has never worn a ruck, much less humped one.
Free,
I agree, all troops should be trained to survive the situations they are likely to encounter. And the Army is upgrading the training of CSS units to reflect the unexpected (but clearly predicted) insurgency. The Army wanted to do so earlier to prepare for the predicted insurgency, but Mr. Scumsfeld would not authorize more training dollars - and now he has. Duh. In addition if we weren't incredibly short-handed in Iraq we wouldn't have so many CSS troops encountering combat situations. We can of course train them better, but it is an example of treating the symptoms instead of the disease. CSS units should be secured and protected by CS and combat arms units, and if they are not then something is wrong. And something is, in fact, wrong.
It isn't that the Army doesn't WANT to train everybody more, but simply a matter of time and money. If we had unlimited budgets and 365 training days a year we could of course do better. We don't, so the decision is to do the best we can. As I said, the Army trains ALL soldiers in basic combat skills, a feat of which I am justly proud. You are proud that all Marines are trained as riflemen, and should be - but you rely on the Army to perform CSS jobs, and the reason is that the Marines and the Navy could not create and maintain those positions.
If you saw a unit from the 10th MTN that was F'd up I would believe it, but I have also seen 10th MTN battalions that were outstanding. One thing the Army does better than the Marines (IMHO) is unit esprit de corps - if you are a private in the 101st you will think your division is the best in the world and see yourself as a "Screaming Eagle" first, but unfortunately the Army is not half as good as the Marines in building service-wide esprit, so that the private thinks it ok to denigrate other units ("the 10th sucks compares to us") - and this is especially prevalent in SOC. Rangers who have never served anywhere but the 75th often feel the rest of the Army is poorly disciplined and untrained. And SF looks down on the "conventional" Army as well. As a result you might have heard negative things about Army units when working with Rangers or SF. In fact, as anyone who has spent time at the JRTC or NTC can tell you, the Army has excellent "conventional" units that kick ass, including the 10th. One things Marines do well is see themselves as Marines first, not as "5th Marine Regt" first. As a result if a Marine denigrates another Marine unit when talking with a soldier others will see an act of betrayal (even if he is telling the truth). In short - don't believe everything you hear. The 10th performed quite well in AF, and also in Somalia in '93.
Mech units DO need more light training. Much like the difficulties encountered in a float, the mech units have "motor pool" distractions that are hard to get around. Imagine not just training up for a float, but training up while on a float. Pretty difficult. Mech units are 1) short-handed on dismounts. Unfortunately the emphasis in mech units is (improperly) often on the vehicle instead of the dismounts, which ignores that a Bradley is just support for the dismounts. For instance, at the NTC a unit that deploys with less than 100% strength (usually all of them in peacetime) will have to decide which jobs go unfilled. Almost without exception they "steal" from the dismounts to fully staff the Brad crews. BIG MISTAKE. And I won't excuse the Army for it - your criticism is exactly correct. I have seen, entirely too often, 4 M2s roar into the battle, drop ramp... and 5 or 6 guys move forward, usually the lowest-ranking and least experienced. I have seen instances where there was 1 M2 per dismount, and the dismount was an E1 or E2. I would have relieved the commander on the spot if I were God for a day, but the armor officers who are often BDE commanders usually don't see a problem. As a result the M2 becomes nothing more than a shitty tank. I saw one genius BN CMDR who actually left 6 M2s behind so that he could fully staff his dismount squads, and his M2 crews were mostly driver and gunner, with the ranking NCOs serving as dismount leaders, not bradley commanders. And that unit was one of the toughest mech units the OPFOR ever faced, and their infantry removed obstacles, set up anti-armor ambushes, and cleared our augmentee dismounts (A Marine unit from Pendleton) from every hill we wanted to keep. At the AAR this incredibly smart and capable leader was asked by his (tanker) BDE commander "how many of your vehicles didn't cross the LD?" When told "six" the AAR pretty much ended. It became a lecture on how important it was to get every vehicle across the LD, how such "poor performance" was "unacceptable," and this guy's career was pretty much over - even though he was actually one of the best we ever saw, and his decision to leave 6 M2s behind so that he could perform as mech infantry instead of shitty tankers was entirely correct. (To be fair, our OPS GRP CO took the unprecedented step of making sure the DIV CO knew how awesome this guy was, so I don't know if his career was really over).
Some units get it right - ask the Marines in Fallujah who were supported by the Army heavy units. You will be hard pressed to get them to say anything negative about the Army.
Hopefully the very good performance of the Stryker units will show the way to the future.
As far as Marines and urban fighting, the Marines were actually tasked to take the lead with their Urban Warfighting Laboratory. It is a joint Marine-Army project, with much of the work done at the Army's infantry school, but the Marines are leading it and in charge of the project, and have done a GREAT job at it.
I learned CQB back in '92, but it was actually something we weren't "supposed" to be doing because it was very different from Army doctrine. It was also harder to stay proficient at than just shooting at 50 meter and 400 meter pop-up targets center mass, or tossing in a grenade after cook-off. But after Somalia the infantry community jumped on it and it became the standard even before it really was the official standard. The Army still hasn't released the new FM, we are using a TC from the 75th. Or at least we still were last I heard. Wow, I said "we." I mean "they," even though I will always feel a part of the Army. The Marines are well-versed in MOUT, which is why they were sent to Fallujah.
As far as the NCOs of the Corps changing SOPs to reflect lessons learned, toot your horn, you deserve it as the USMC has done excellent work, but allow me to do the same. The Army pioneered the lessons learned system, and the awesome Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) ensures that the entire Army learns from those under fire. The CTCs (which the Marines should really replicate or help fund so that they can rotate as often as Army units) reinforce those lessons while at the same time providing an excellent way to learn new lessons, change doctrine, and experiment with different techniques. With CALL and the CTCs our Army is spreading knowledge throughout the force faster than ever before. The Stryker units went from drawing board to combat ready in record time, and have proven effective. They wrote their doctrine DURING CTC rotations, as they incorporated what worked and eliminated what didn't. That way lies the future.
THanks Free, here is your hug. :)
About the decision to "spend money elsewhere" instead of on combat training - please try and understand my point: of COURSE there is nothing more important, but there are levels of proficiency. A combat engineer unit is "almost" infantry, but is NOT as capable as an infantry unit at infantry tasks, while the infantry unit might have lots of cross-training, but the combat engineers will still be better at reducing obstacles, demo, etc. Why? NOT because the marines or the Army just decided to slack in one area or the other, but because there are 24 hours in a day and spending 6 years of training just for basic doesn't make any sense. Limits of time and money mean that every decision to make one MOS different from another requires a decision to train in one area and not another, and different levels of proficiency even when they have individual tasks in common. The Army AND the Navy choose to give limited training to their CSS folks because they rarely if ever need it, and the investment in making them proficient like you feel they should be would hurt us more than help us. It would cost enormous amounts of money, and it would mean that there would be less training in other areas - areas where the CSS troops might have more critical and needed tasks to perform. For every day of live-fire exercises a CSS unit conducts there is one less day of MOS-specific training. It takes you most of your training cycle to stay proficient. Most of the time (if you are in a unit as good as you say you are) you will be doing the relatively boring common task training - you will be practicing the basics over and over and over again. Even though you were a sniper you will (and should) go through the crawl-walk-run training before you qualify with your rifle. Even though you are a combat veteran you will still go through the CS chamber, qualify with hand grenades, practice the wedge formation, and practice immediate action drills over and over until it is instinctive. You will destroy any idiot who thinks it is ok to walk around with his dust cover open. You will also try to impart the skills you have learned to the newbies just arriving in from boot. I haven't even touched on training above the squad level yet, but your unit will train on the platoon and company and battalion level as well (IMHO, any training above battalion level can and should be simulated in command post exercises/computer games with the exception of combined arms exercises where the air and slice elements get to play).
So if you had to also master the skills required to be a troposcatter company, or operate a full-time dental clinic, or hospital, or depot-level maintenance.
Generating combat power requires the conversion of a force's potential, resources, and tactical opportunity into actual capability. Sustainment must support violent and coordinated action, allowing manuever forces to concentrate at the decisive time and place. The basic mission of CSS is to sustain the battle, not to fight it. The CSS system's sole purpose is to maintain and support soldiers and their weapons systems. CSS operations must focus on sustaining the force as it executes the commander's intent while conducting deep, close, and rear operations. The measurement of sustainment success is the generation of combat power at the right place and time, not the ability of CSS troops to conduct infantry operations. Nothing more than basic defensive skills are needed for rear operations. And, even in Operation Iraqi Freedom, there are rear operations. Close CSS units recieve more training, and deep obviously get the most, but there are very few CSS units forward of a BDE rear boundary. Other than basic convoy security techniques, CSS units need nothing more than basic soldier skills, and anything more is a waste of training time for their MOS specific tasks, as well as taxpayer dollars. And the USMC agrees. In a Marine Expeditionary Force level the highest CSS is a Force Combat Service Support Area (FCSSA), and that is a far cry from full support. It can sustain the force for only a limited period of time, and it can't even do that if the Navy isn't there to provide CSS support from the fleet. The Army never plans on deploying into a theater with CSS assets offshore and afloat. It can and must provide all of the CSS support it will need from the manufacterer/supplier to the point of the spear, relying on the USAF and the Navy for transportation only, and then mostly only inter-theater, while intra-theater the Army is again doing most of the heavy lifting (literally). Just as the Marines don't require shipfitters or dental techs to attend Marine boot camp, the Army doesn't require anything more than basic combat training - and despite the Jessica Lynch tragedy, the Army was and is right to do that. If there are soldiers encountering enemy and are untrained to respond there is an obvious problem, but what you probably saw were units that didn't look as ready to fight as your rifle company. You noticed the relatively fat guys, the people who appeared to treat their rifles as useless deadweight, the units where discipline was not as strict as in your front-line unit, you noticed soldiers who probably needed a haircut, or didn't wear their headgear properly, or who just looked F'ed up. But I will bet you a dollar to a donut you didn't see them engaging the enemy. You saw them only in areas where you felt relaxed - because that is where they stay. Were the Army to train all soldiers as riflemen, like the Marines train all Marines, you would find the Army budget would suck up billions upon billions more. The Army would end up spending twice as much on every soldier as the Marines do on Marines. Units like Jessica Lynch's would be readier to engage the enemy, but (like the Marine Corps) the front-line manuever forces would find they didn't have the CSS support they needed - instead of running full-time dental clinics, for instance, the clinics would either have to repeatedly shut down for about 25% of the time, or the Army would have to increase the number of dental techs by 25%. Firing ranges and live fire complexes would be either rarely used, even by infantry units, because they would be booked solid 365 days a year, and the taxpayer would have to spend untold billions creating and maintaining new ranges. The overall end-strength of the force would have to rise by tens of thousands because the soldiers would spend longer in the training pipeline, meaning more soldiers would be needed so that the CSS units in the field could remain filled. All of this so that the Army could avoid an incident like what happened to Jessica Lynch's unit. I honestly don't think that would be the right decision. Lynch's unit was f'ed up, and that happens, but the Army should not strive to make every soldier, or even every soldier in Iraq, a rifleman. The Marines don't either, but they think they do because they pretend the Navy doesn't provide most of their CSS support. They only see the Marines, and feel proud that all Marines are riflemen, and wonder why the Army, which does not have a Navy to provide CSS support, can't do the same - and never notice the dental tech that never fired a rifle is the one supporting them.
And, this may be heresy- the DOD budget is plenty big enough. It just isn't being spent properly. We don't need the JSF, we need troops. We don't need NMD, we need more troops. But troops don't have lobbyists like defense contractors do.
Free,
I don't know what the AF is doing for training these days. I left it in 82 because too many things were begining to be done wrong.
GEDs instead of diplomas, Civilian contractors holding mission critical positions, McD's Wendy's ETC ON BASE, Civilians running the BX from top to bottom.
The poor airmen were starting to have a hard time understanding what made them different from civilians, and the civilians started having a hard time seeing the difference as well. I grew up in a SAC family and I served a good part of my time with SAC and the perception was that SAC was the hardline part of the AF. But like I said, by 82 even SAC was subcuming to the civilianization/commercialization of the military.
I believe in a strong permanent standing force, the world is too small and things happen too fast to rely as heavely as we have on citizen soldiers. No disrespect to the guard or reserve, they are valuable professional group - but not a viable first force for the 21st century.
BTW You might be full of shit or not yourself, but more and more I'm begining to see you as being more opinionated than simply being a fight picking loudmouth.
free,
I'd love to be there the day that you mistake a 'small' 5ft 6 145lb guy for one of your liberal wimps and they leave you on the floor crying for mommy, God, 911 anybody to stop the punishment.
I'm not threatening you - I have no reason to do so, I'm just cautioning you that the smaller guy has a whole other set of attack options that you have to expose your weak spots to even try to attempt.
It only takes 3 inches of free movement to throw a lethal punch, so even someone the size of Herve Villechaize could take out someone as big as Andrè Roussimoff.
Don't let your size be your confidence, and don't assess your opponent based on simple appearance. But since your a cop I expect in truth you already know that and just enjoy making loud noises.
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