McMaster on the Pentagon’s short memory
Most of you probably know the name Major General Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster. The younger generation remembers him from commanding the 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment that tamed Al Tafar, Iraq, the older soldiers will remember him from commanding the 2d ACR in the grand armor battle at “73 Easting” during Desert Storm. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that he told an audience there that the Pentagon is forgetting the tough lessons that it learned in Iraq and Afghanistan;
“What we are at risk of today is neglecting some of the hard-won lessons of our war in Iraq and our ongoing war in Afghanistan,” McMaster told 130 people gathered for a luncheon of the Colorado Springs World Affairs Council.
McMaster said he watched the military in the 1990s mistakenly bet its future on the power of technology.
The armed forces were designed for tank-on-tank battle in a rapid conflict similar to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and faced an insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq it was ill-prepared to fight.
McMaster said the insurgent fighting is something that could be a recurring theme for America.
“There are two ways to fight the U.S. military – asymmetrically or stupid,” he said.
“Our enemies will interact with us in ways to evade our strength and attack what they see as our vulnerabilities.”
McMaster said it’s also impossible to divorce warfare from political goals in the nation the U.S. is trying to change.
“We encountered this gap in our flawed thinking both in the early stages of Afghanistan and the early stages of Iraq,” he said.
While the military experienced early success in Afghanistan and Iraq, the quick victory proved elusive.
Well, that always happens after war, the difference in this case is that it’s happening DURING a war. But there have always been stellar officers like McMaster to keep the pressure on Big Army and be their memory.
As if to punctuate McMaster’s talk, the Army Times reports that the pointy-headed thinkers at the Pentagon are discussing reducing the number of troops all the way down to squad level and making the vehicles that transport and protect them, smaller and lighter;
Going smaller while focusing investments on increasing the combat punch a small unit can bring to bear will “make us more affordable, yet as capable” as the service is now, one leading general said. A key point is also to become faster and more expeditionary.
One senior leader said that in coming years, the Army will have to “reduce the size of our formations but increase the capability of our formations. …If we can be more effective with less people it will make us more expeditionary.”
A handful of reporters were allowed to sit in on the briefing under the condition that names not be used.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want my name attached to that bullshit either. So, let’s pretend that they go ahead and reduce the number of troops in a squad and make vehicles to accommodate the smaller units and then we end up in a war where we need need larger squads – so we go to war with the Army we have rather than the Army we need. Sound familiar?
Category: Big Army
So, obviously we don’t need to worry about war with countries like China North Korea or Iran….because they have smaller, lighter Army’s, right?
@1. No, especially since Jacques Kerry declared that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. It was not a widely reported story but the end of the nearly 200-year-old policy was announced w/o fanfare less than two weeks ago during a Kerry speech at OAS. Said he, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.[…] The relationship that we seek and that we have worked hard to foster is not about a United States declaration about how and when it will intervene in the affairs of other American states.” So, there you go. Who needs a military at all if we are no longer interested in protecting foreign incursion into our own backyard? But delay the pay of a some Federal workers and it’s a freaking crisis. We are so screwed and screwed up, I can’t stand it.
SSDD (Same Shit, Different Decade)
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. – Battlestar Galactica, the Book of Pythia
People should listen to McMaster. The man is both a leader and a perceptive scholar concerning national defense.
If you doubt the latter, read his work from 1997 titled Dereliction of Duty. It is one of the best works I’ve ever seen regarding explaining just how the US got involved in Vietnam.
“We could have smaller forces with more capabilities!”
Yup, heard that in the early 1990s. That didn’t work when the crap hit the fan, but hey! Let’s give it yet another shot! 😀
It’d be like paying less on my credit card but reducing the balance because I say the dollars are worth more.
Enough with the fairy, pixie dust already!
You can have the best trained and equipped Joes there are. But if there are fewer of them you can’t do as much. Period.
Don’t worry, America. Let me be clear. Make no mistake. If you like your armed forces, you can keep them. Just not as many of them.
Molon Labe.
Next, John “Lurch” Kerry will be telling us that Ground forces are obsolete, and use the Rebel Alliance’s victory over the Empire as evidence that war can be won with air power alone!
I thought a lighter GCV would be a good thing? Less fuel to move it, more can be carried, hopefully goes faster and more maneuverable, and existing and smaller transportation assets can also move it as well. If they are just reducing the squad size couldnt the platoon size be raised to compensate or is this an all around cut like when they reduced division sizes after ww2?
They should do one of those G.E. Back to the Future commercials, only instead of Michael J. Fox, have Wesley Clark do the voiceover.
When going to war, you really don’t want all your leaders who only learned from books and school. You need some who have experience.
But:”Experience is useless if the correct conclusions are not drawn from it.”
In so many cases where the US Military didn’t do well in war, it was from not fully understanding the enemy. Most Americans can not understand how anybody would be willing to kill themselves in order to kill others. It’s not “natural.”
You often can’t think of how the enemy thinks in “normal” terms.
@9 The GCV as it was being designed was too heavy to be useful. A 9 man squad is the basis of how we operate. Reducing that means less effective squads, platoons, companies, all the way up. This is a budget-driven discussion that makes no sense. Reducing the squad size but giving the platoon another squad as you suggest doesn’t help this numbers game the DoD is trying to play. As McMaster said we tried to play the “smaller, more effective” game through the 1990s and up until the war started. Even in a mechanized fight like the beginning of OIF we still needed troops. After we won that maneuver fight, we REALLY needed troops to try to secure the peace. That slogan about technology winning our wars for us is the budget and pipe dreams of warfighting being divorced from reality over and over.
@6 We’ll get it right this time. We promise. Just cut another division so we can buy weapons we’ll never use or cancel halfway through the ascinine procurement process.
The quotes from those various generals are EXACTLY what their predecessors were saying 15 years ago in speeches and 10 years ago when they actually got money to fund those ideas. It didn’t work. Just a month ago the Army stated the GCV was its number one priority and we should press ahead. Now they’re saying it needs to be scrapped and we need another “lighter, faster, more high tech, and somehow cheaper” force. Again.