Defense cuts might mean a draft
In the Air Force Times, Andrew Tilghman reports that Marine Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, outlined to reporters what the next decade might look like for the military if Obama is allowed to cut the defense budget by another $400 billion;
“The reality is, what you are most worried about a deeper cut? Is there another $400 billion behind the first $400 billion?” Cartwright said. “Now you start to look at things like, ‘Do I want to hollow out the force? Do I want to start to reduce the force size?’ ”
Cartwright divided the next decade into three segments and outlined the changes troops should expect as the budget cuts take effect, starting with a big drop in funding for things like training, flying hours and steaming days.
After that comes cutting manpower then retirement and healthcare entitlements. Of course, all of it adds up to lower enlistments and then the expensive proposition of forcing people who don’t want to soldier to be soldiers.
The Carter Administration had to reimpose draft registration after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and stationed 9,000 combat troops off of our shores in Cuba. The administration belatedly realized that they had stripped the military of manpower, training money and pay incentives.
“We’re trying to understand that if there is another $400 billion … what kinds of things [we] will want to do and what is the character of the force we want to have when were done.”
The force we’re going to have is the same kind of force that laid burning in the desert in Iran on April 24, 1980.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Military issues
“The force we’re going to have is the same kind of force that laid burning in the desert in Iran on April 24, 1980.”
Very true, however, I don’t fault any of those at Desert 1 for what happened.
This is what they want. Unhappy conscripts who will mobilize against the government and military and vote Democrat. Ah, just like the good ol’ days with the hippies and anti-war protests. Why else do you think that reinstitution of the draft is always advocated by Democrats.
Happens every single time after a war and when the budget gets tight. Every single time we end up regretting it and paying out more to rebuild the force (in both blood and money) than if we hadn’t slashed it in the first place. Someone should dip Barney Frank in pitch and light his fat ass on fire.
Although, I’ll add that the draft isn’t coming back. I’m almost positive that the service chiefs will cut manning levels before they take conscripts back. Nobody wants the draft, least of all us volunteers. Being in the military is hard enough without having to stand shoulder to shoulder with some resentful civilian in uniform who was forced to be there.
Politicians.
These SOB’s never learn. I despise the shadow they cast on the ground.
All we need is another Korea, throwing green troops with two weeks training into battle, because the political ho’s in DC thought ground warfare was over, everything will be nukes, so why have a standing Army?
What really scares me is that we as a nation have hedged our bets on being the high-tech marvel. the problem with High Tech stuff is it breaks. A lot. While FBCB2 is a HUGE force multiplier, and the ability to hover over a battlefield and literally strike without warning, leads one to feel invincible that capability must be maintained, and if able improved.
What scares me is that troops will get trained in these high-tech facilities with all these high tech toys, and when they REALLY need it the shit broke because some F**king bean counter wanted to go with the cheapest possible shit instead of the BEST
re #6
Yeah, in their delusional minds they can just skate through the 21st century with drones and SOF.
In 30 years the entire surface Navy will be obsolete. There’s no plan in place to fix that. The Marine Corps has no over the horizon ship-to-shore capability. It’s an amphibious force with no amphibious capability. The B-52 is forcasted to be in service for 100 years by time it’s retired. The Air Force has half the air superiority platforms they need, and along with the Marines are flying air frames over 35 years old; now the F-35 is on the chopping block. The Army has no survivable mechanized platform; the Bradley is 30 years old and the Stryker couldn’t fight its way through a daycare once the anti-armor shows up.
tl;dr
DoD needs to reinvest at current funding levels, not cut spending.
NSOM, I’ll be honest. I’m a Lightfighter. I don’t like tracks at all. To me they are Targets, but I worry even more that the aggressiveness breed into Lightfighters will be lost. You’ll be hard put to keep a warriors edge if you go “bang bang” or glass house all the time. But let’s be honest Tracks of any type only work in clear or lightly broken terrain (Europe parts of N Africa etc) they can’t do squat in the mountains. Being bount to the roads in Korea made our armor (and almost our Infantry) ineffective against the PLA, unless in prepared defenses. And Vietnam. . . yeah
You point is taken about Anphib. Our Airborne capability right now is about 6 brigades more or less. Assuming a generally Panamaesque invasion securing the Airfield, then pushing out. . . won’t work. We do not have enough c-17’s or C-130’s in inventory to support such a beachhead, nor do I think we would have the air-power to clear a safe corridor for same. Honestly I don’t know why we use MEUs, because they could NOT be effective as they are constituted. I tend to think it would be like the British 1st Para at Arnhem
As far as the AF. . . that’s an essay and a half. When they had to ground what was it 50% of the F-15’s, that should have been a HUGE red flag. I’m also not convinced that the F-35 is a better platform for ground attack than the A-10. Low, Slow and most importantly QUIET are generally GOOD things in ground attack. A 30 MM Gatling gun also tends to help things a bit.
Yea? Well, what scares me is Mrs Obama has a real nice big ass and some flunky camel humper from the middle east has his eye on it. When I think of asses? A woman’s ass? It brings something out in me, she has….a great ass! And President Obama’s head is all the way up it!
Street #9: I wasn’t laughing until the punch line. As in WTF is Street talking about… then, oh never mind, and spewing beer. I do like the feminine derriere myself…
509th Bob #2: You hit the nail soundly on the head. The 60s anti-war types have been struggling and The Draft is the answer to THEIR prayers (so to speak).
7# & #8 Exactly! Especially the point about drones and SOF. Most people believe that SOF are some kind of Jedi knights, not specialists with particular “niches” they were created to meet. They are not substitutes for line units in general or especially the infantry(Rangers too). That lesson seems to be eroding the further we get from Iraq and as people throw any half fast solution to exit Afghanistan.
Could have an entire post on the services TO&Es or their lacking(especially the Army). There simply is not much waste to cut frankly. Organisations can be tweeted a little but that won’t produce anywhere near the savings needed to maintain the force, never mind upgrade. It simply costs money to have feasible force projection at the ready.
Agreed we’ll cut end strength before we bring back the draft. The only realistic way you could ever have conscription again, is if you brought back corporal punishment, that will never happen.
Great discussion. Welcome to my old man’s Army of the 70s.
Warfare is evolving, and we lack a strategy, replete with resourcing plans, to meet the requirements for the next war. Which is already upon us.
Information is the strategic highground, and cyberwarfare is the new way of waging war. A hacker with a computer and internet connection can destroy our ability to control the battlespace; and given how we force tactical and operational-level leaders to fully depend on information, the destruction of information will destroy any unit.
Evidence of this is the Israeli experience in its last two forays against Hezbollah and Hamas. The Brigade and Division Commanders were tied to their command posts and forgot leadership. Sergeants and lieutenants are awesome, and can’t coordinate brigade maneuver on the fly.
You can get away from large formations of tanks and fleets – if you fight the enemy before he leaves port/airfield/barracks. GEN Casey gave away the Army’s only reliable strategic lift capability (the Ro-Ros), and now the USAF is busy shedding its C5s, so our Army will soon only be a force to be reckoned with in the North American continent.
Unfortunately, the Army’s cyberwarfare capability is in the pipeline, so it’ll be another 20 years, or another Kasserine Pass before today’s lieutenants and sergeants are in a position to take action.
Maybe we can hire WikiLeaks, LulzSec, and Anonymous to do our fighting for us?
Dave O, I think Kasserine, the Pusan Perimeter, Dak To, FSB Ripcord, and Operation Anaconda are all things we’re trying to avoid. For some its an intellectual experience, but for most trigger pullers it is a gut wrenching thought that will no doubt keep some up late at night worrying when that day might inexorably draw near.
I Would actually like to see a debate from all services, on what they need, to fight
#13 Doc – these are things rational people would try to avoid. Rational people get elected to Congress, and lose their minds within 100 meters of the Capitol.
The Navy entered the fray with an editorial from Gordon England and couple of retired admirals last week: essentially a variation on over-the-horizon sea strategy. It sounds pretty good until one considers naval maintenance issues, and that they’ve lost (almost literally) a boatload of skippers these past couple of years.
The USAF can’t find a tanker, and looks like the F-35 lacks the legs to fight, and the Raptors are grounded. What they need are some low-speed high-drag Brewster Buffalos – at least those things can fly!
On the other sides of the pond, the Russian armed forces and the PLA and India are upgrading and up-gunning faster than we are, thanks to some savvy investments in one of our political parties.
#12 Cyberwarfare is a new theater, has influence at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. It does not render air, land, and sea dominance obsolete however. “information is the strategic high ground…” that is exactly what Rumsfeld thought and the preceding revolution in Military affairs crowd of the late 90s and early 2000s believed. They quickly found the short comings of this approach in the cities of Iraq. The idea we’d understand our battlespace in its entirety, thereby get into the enemies’ decision making cycle, is a flawed impossible pipe dream. It ignores Murphys’ law, human nature, and the basic fact that a man will always find a way to out smart a machine. “Machines don’t win wars, men do and they win them with their minds.”-John Boyd. This is a time period of initiative and decentralisation, powered partly by the nature of current conflicts, but also by new technology. It has led to the US Army in particular, to relearn much of the tactical “policing” it had done in the 18th & 19th centuries. This it had discarded or allowed to atroph in the aftermath of Vietnam, where the USA became fastened to the Powell doctrine, and couldn’t adopt to any challege that was beyond a modern day battle of Marathon(see Desert Storm or Panama). To do so it had to put initiative back at the small unit level, something it was unwilling to do in the 90s during the peacekeeping mission period. As for Israeli command and control, I can’t say if commanders sat at their command posts(I have not heard anything about this), but the fact that Hezbollah admitted that it would not have survived if the war had gone on a few more weeks, speaks well of their prowess. This after Hezbollah had five years to stock up on rockets/antitank weapons and build excellent underground concrete strong points with land line commo. The IDF pontificated that their high level combined arms training was not what had it been in the past because their forces have been distracted. Policing amongst the Palestinians has not left much time… Read more »
Cedo,
The Israeli commanders were relieved. Small unit leadership and applied firepower nailed the terrorists.
By attaching Rummy and the ROMA efforts to the assertion that information is the high ground, does that invalidate the assertion?
As for the war in Iraq, I’m reminded of the experience of the Marine lieutenant PAO who told the press the Marines were going into Fallujah 24 hours early. Excellent use of military deception, and I recall efforts to get the young man court martialed. Given the enemy’s excellent use of information operations – did we win the war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or do we devolve into argument over the definition of ‘win?’
“By attaching Rummy and the ROMA efforts to the assertion that information is the high ground, does that invalidate the assertion” as a means of operation? It certainly degrades it. Technology will never make battlespace ominscience possible. That theory functions on the basis of knowledge that is nearly for practical matters unattainable. Which makes that entire vision void. Do you deny this? The times when you know all that is knowable about the enemy are slim, your intelligence is rarely perfect.
Hezbollah is something much larger then a terrorist organisation by many levels of magnitude. Its something more akin to a trained islamic militia that controls territory and conducts terrorist acts(like kidnapping/border attacks), then a simple a terrorist entity. “Small unit leadership and applied firepower nailed the terrorists” this is factually true but its execution was poor. Israeli tanks and armored vehicles had a tough time with the sheer volume of antitank weapons and the enemy survived much of the firepower thrown at them in their strongpoints. Armor/Infantry coordination was not good(see point above about combine arms degradation).
Last paragraph too many topics to go off onto, so I’ll stick with just the Marine PAO. I’ll take your narrative at face value, how do you it was an excellent use of military deception? What was the intent of his command? Maybe this guy was just being stupid and opened his mouth abit too much. Maybe the Marines’ didn’t want others(like the enemy)to know that they potentally planned to go in early, maybe they didn’t want to alarm shaky allied formations or governments about their intent. My point is the command could have had myrid reasons to punish him.
the point about information is indeed correct. What we have failed to do time and again is to really counter Terrorist information technology on a large scale. Catchy (for them) tunes about the glory of Jihad aside, they play up all the cultural aspects that Americans are ignorant of, in the process turning their own defeats into actual propaganda victories, like The NVA and VC did with Tet. If Information is indeed the battlespace that must be won first last and always then it must be noted that Bradley Manning and his embarrassing ability to leak ungodly amounts of secret, and top secret data is rather akin to Benedict Arnold giving up West Point. Only this time it went through. That we have not addressed this breach or the chain of events that allowed this to happen is a sure sign that leaders don’t have a clue what their dealing with. Major Nidal Hassan is also a failed opportunity. We could have, as a nation and more specifically warriors responsible for defending this nation, had a serious open and honest discussion about just how bad radicalization is, how our officers are not properly evaluating their subordinates, also the very real threat that the Army faces from subversive or conspiratorial elements. We had a real wake up call that political correctness, far from ensuring no hurt feelings has directly KILLED PEOPLE, and we were given opportunity to speak freely and tell the truth. This shit is a LOT scarier than CNN or Fox or MSNBC will lead you to believe. But we couldn’t do that. the manual that came out after that was a joke. Weapons systems aside (because Lord knows there are a ton of problems with all currently used systems) the current American force has neither the mindset, nor the capability to carry out and win a long term COIN war OR that big battle Cold War war we all trained for. That we have “won” in Iraq had more to do with the fact that occasionally small unit leaders would shit gold bricks, and if enough did it… Read more »
#18 I’m not denying information is unimportant, I’m pointing out that the entire theory advacated by the ROMA crowd(including Rumsfeld) is flawed and unworkable as a basic operating theory. See 17# first paragraph. Second information is something like air or water, perceptions can be influenced but never entirely. Its near impossible to do this in a closed environment(like the military) nevermind the open world. You destroy another side’s lies and gain credibilty, through success. Jihadi elements can’t deny who won Fallujah or turned Ramadi around, crushed Sadr, or subdued Tal Afar. Look at Baghdad Bob to see a good example of where blatent lies get you.
Yes PC nonsense has damaged our objectivity, but this goes well beyond the military to our society at large. The Services just reflect that, sometimes with lethal results to our own personel.
18# Third paragraph I entirely disagree. The US Army could fight another big cold war battle, just like Israel though, our skills would not be what they had been, because of atrophy. Almost cetainly we would take far high casualties then the force of 10 years ago. We would still win.
As regard to Iraq again disagree, prior to the surge we had small fleeting pockets of success, like Tal Afar or Ramadi. When Petraeus/Odierno took over that success was replicated on a large scale at the battalion level and below(Thats the brief this too is a huge topic). We brought basic security to most of Iraq(certain pockets like the North aside) and won tactically. Whether this holds on the strategic level is another question entirely. Only time will tell.
This has NOT happened in Afghanistan. One because of lack of manpower for years and two poor planning my RC commanding flag officers. The Obama administration’s half hearted surge is an umbrella issue that has done more damage then any other. I digress, another huge topic. I have commented a few other places about Afghanistan though look it up.
bump