Army future not so “Strong”
In the competition between the military services, the Army is worried that they’re going to lose their edge on the battlefield to the high tech, long distance engagement capability of the Navy and the Air Force says retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales in the Washington Times today;
“We have an opportunity to take this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and really achieve dominance on the ground, just like the Air Force achieved with the F-22 and F-35 and the Navy has achieved with its modern fleet of carriers,” said retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales.
“But for whatever reason, the Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”
Ya mean like when I was a young sergeant and still using cold weather gear left over from the Korean War and weapons that had been made during Vietnam? Facing a 1990s threat with 1960s equipment? That’s the result of having an administration that hates the military unless they can make the administration look good. Like Jimmy Carter tried to do in an election year with his Desert One operation – but the equipment that the administration didn’t want to maintain failed them.
This administration has been fairly lucky thus far, since the operations that they hoped would make them look good didn’t depend so much on equipment as they did on people. Still they had equipment failure on the bin Laden operation that has been fairly well ignored because the overall operation succeeded.
You’d think that the failure of that one helicopter would give the administration pause, but it hasn’t so far. It’s much sexier to stand off from a few thousand feet, or a few thousand miles, and drop bombs. Much less sexier to fight with soldiers who have to hold terrain in order to make an operation successful. Fighting with soldiers requires losses and personnel costs which, in turn, costs votes at ballot box. But just wait until military members discover that their future in the Army doesn’t look so bright and we have to take Cat IV during a relative peace time like we did during the Carter Administration.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Military issues
And when those “long range assets” like the AF and Navy has are falling out of the skies like the F-15, or ships welded to the pier because we’re taking the smallest Navy we’ve had since WW I on an OpTempo that’s causing techs and leaders to vote with their feet in droves?
What then?
History keeps repeating itself…doesn’t anybody up there study it? I was in West Berlin right as Nam ended….we were using 1950’s 81MM mortars and ammo from the 60’s. When I joined the Calif Guard in the late 80’s, we had trucks and equipment left over from Nam. (1967 dump trucks). The Air Force spends more on one plane than the Army and Marines combind spend on all their rifles and pistol!
When we went to Iraq in late 04, some of us had to order online to get optics and shit for our weapons. I was issued one small bottle of CLP to last a year, so I went on line and ordered more.
At the end of every war, the govt cuts the shit out of the Army, It’s been happening since the Revolution, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Nam, the Gulf War and now it will happen again. 5 years after we’re done with Afgan, our Army will be so broke they wouldn’t be able to fight a girl scout troop. The soldiers will be high speed, but have shit for equipment and funding.
Ditto what CI said. When our Trans Company mobilized for Iraq in 2003, there was a lot of Vietnam era equipment that went with us. We had received a full issue of brand new vehicles and a rotation through NTC the year before though, it was solid evidence to us that we were sitting on the block for deployment.
I was on a coast-to-coast bike trip back in 1993. Bike started acting weird as I was passing through Cheyenne, WY in the middle of the night. Found a motel, got a room, and the next morning the owner brought me coffee while I worked on the bike. I’d noticed the 82nd patch on his cash register, and asked him if he’d been in the unit. He had, he said, for 31 years.
I started bitching about all the cuts in defense spending, and what I thought was going to happen. He responded by listing all of the ups & downs he’d experienced from 1941 to 1972. So believe me, we’ve been here before.
I can’t say that things are going to be any different this time. We will be pretty hard pressed to find anything of lasting value that the Army takes away from the last 10 years of orgiastic spending. At least in the 80’s we came away with essentially all-new vehicles, and a much-improved NCO corps; the 1st Gulf War saw us field an Army that was probably the best equipped and trained for just such an engagement.
@2 FYI during my last rotation through Afghanistan we used some 1960’s mortar rounds. Shockingly, short rounds and unintentional proximity explosions were not uncommon.
My battalion lost 1 of ours from a short round, and at least 2 ANA that I know of. After the sham of an investigation, they concluded that the ancient ammunition was at fault and then told us to use up the rest, but only for adjustments to range KPs.
^that was in 2006
in 2004 they took a bunch of the Scouts and snipers for the various Infantry battalions in 2nd Bde 25th ID to a warehouse somewhere in Pearl. The crates all had dust on them and each man was issued brand new M-14’s circa 1950. Those weapons were meant to fight the Korean war and were never used, 50 years later they were dusted off and sent to Iraq. Not knocking the M-14 but that’s insane!!!
The entirety of the American strategy from every branch has depended on technological superiority. Failing that (as some dogfights in DS showed) the war-fighters are simply the best at what they do. With no money for training, and no new equipment, and nothing in the pipe to replace the worn out stuff we do have we will Likely see a Bull Run/TF Smith/Desert One/Operation Anaconda sometime in the near future