Army wants in to the Pacific Rim
Since the nations in the Pacific Rim are mostly surrounded by water, the Army is worried that it might get left out of the fight, should one occur in the region. So, since Big Army doesn’t have ships, their big idea is to create mobile forces that will be stationed on those islands, according to the Washington Post;
Calculating that there are only slim chances of the Army fighting a big land war anywhere in the Far East other than the Korean Peninsula, the new top Army commander in the Pacific, Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, wants his forces to more quickly and effectively respond to small conflicts, isolated acts of aggression and natural disasters. Doing so, however, has traditionally been a challenge for the Army, which bases most of its soldiers assigned to the Orient in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state. To overcome what he calls “the tyranny of distance,” Brooks is trying to make his forces more maritime and expeditionary.
To cut travel time and increase regional familiarity, he is seeking authorization to send key elements of a U.S.-based infantry brigade to Asia and keep them there for months at a time, moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises. The rotating deployment, which amounts to the first proposed increase in U.S. forces in Asia in years, could enable the Army to move more speedily to address humanitarian crises and security threats.
Yeah, that makes sense, well, very little. I doubt very much that the largely peaceful nations of the Pacific Rim will welcome a foreign armed force for a few years and then move on to another location. And as difficult as Big Army is making retention, I’m pretty sure that it will be hard to retain experience that is being jerked from island to island every few years.
“They’re trying to create a second Marine Corps in the Pacific,” said a Marine general, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Army’s internal plans. “To save their budget, they want to build a force the nation doesn’t need.”
Big Army is worried about losing their budget, and I use the word budget in it’s loosest sense, because it seems to me that moving a significant number of troops from place-to-place seems like a huge waste of money. If they want a force in the Pacific that can respond to brushfires there, they should bring back the airborne forces, station them in Hawaii and Korea with an appropriate amount of airlift capability for each. Lord knows that there are enough 5-jump chumps in the Army to fill the ranks of a couple of divisions of paratroopers and from Korea and Hawaii, they can be anywhere within a few hours in the region. It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s a better plan than creating a bunch of trailer park gypsy battalions.
Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.
Category: Big Army
Definately trying to horn in on Navy-Marine Corps turf.
Who exactly does the army think we’ll be fighting in the Pacific Rim (that the USMC, the nation’s established mobile fighting force, can’t handle)? Vietnam? Taiwan? Malaysia? Indonesia? The only nations in that area we have any beef with at all are China and North Korea, and indeed they are the only ones in the region that have militaries that are not a joke (except Singapore, ROK, and Japan, all of whom are at least cordial with the US). We’ve already established that the combined ROK and US Army units on the Korean Peninsula are more than enough to shatter any attempt by KJU and his minions to take over the ROK. And if we go to war with China, it’s not going to be a land war. Since 65% of China’s GDP comes from exports (domestic consumption as a portion of their economy is the lowest of any country in the world at 35%), and every single one of those exports move by sea, the US strategy is going to center around blockading them, which we have more than enough military force to do with the navy (Q. Where does 80% of China’s oil come from? A. The Persian Gulf, and to get to China it must go through the Strait of Malacca—a body of water often less than five miles wide. Draw your own conclusions.). There won’t be a land war unless it involves North Korea becoming the battleground between China and the US—and we still have enough force there already between us and the ROK to win such a battle, and the capability to move much more there if needed! And even if the army moves troops there, it still won’t be enough to respond to acts of aggression (excluding the fact that those acts will probably be by China, and will be aerial or maritime in nature, like the new sea-air defense zone, in which case the army will be completely useless) or small wars because they still won’t be mobile enough to respond to such threats since they still don’t have ships and airdrop capabilities… Read more »
AU CONTRAIRE!
Our beloved United States Army does have a fleet of seagoing vessels manned by United States Army sailors, AND they currently do participate in combined international exercises and operations.
Support of the Ninth Infantry Division by seagoing vessels of our beloved United States Army while in the Mekong Delta in the old Republic of Viet Nam is well documented.
Here’s the URL for an archived post, “SAILORS IN MY UNITED STATES ARMY ! ! !”, at my own personal web site, “OUR ETERNAL STRUGGLE”:
http://writesong.blogspot.com/2011/03/sailors-in-my-united-states-army.html
Oh if its big enough the Army will have a job and get involved, as they should. During WW2 the Army had more men and suffered more casualties in the Pacific than the Marines.
@3—Yes, you’ve got me there. I was not aware of those seagoing soldiers. However, the army’s blue water capabilities are still mostly lacking.
Jonn: I agree with the analysis WRT the Gypsy Battalions, but I don’t think more paratroopers are the solution. The cost of maintaining an airborne battalion is enormous compared to a straight-leg infantry unit (which I’m sure is probably why the 101’st was taken off jump status in the 1970’s.) Paratroopers are a lot of things but cheap isn’t one of them, so if the object is to save money, airborne units aren’t the way to go.
I hate to agree with a jarhead but I have to say I’m with the anonymous Marine general. We already have one Marine Corps, we don’t need another one.
As for the proposal itself:
“send key elements of a U.S.-based infantry brigade to Asia and keep them there for months at a time, moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises.”
That may be the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time. “Move every few weeks?” So, IOW, the brigade will be spending all its time either preparing for a move or recovering from one. It’s hard to imagine that the unit would have the “flexibility” to do anything, I would imagine it would take the effort of the entire unit just to maintain accountability of people and equipment during the frequent moves.
Honestly, I think it would’ve made more sense to have 4/25 in Hawaii than Ft. Richardson, but that’s my two cents on that. As for the “pacific pivot,” that’s been a complete joke. I’m stationed in Hawaii, and there’s not a whole lot of “pivoting” taking place other than what’s already been occurring…
@3: Very true, but also irrelevant to the topic at hand. Nobody’s talking about establishing a “brown water navy” in Asia, and such an organization would require a large logistical base that would be tethered to one specific spot anyway, which would defeat the entire purpose of this exercise.
Although it does make me think of a place – maybe it was Guam? – where the ground installation was under the control of the USAF, all the aircraft were operated by the Navy and the small boats that were used were all operated by the Army. 😀
@3- Yes, the U.S. Army does have maritime vessels, as every Soldier likes to point out to me in whenever they find out I am a Marine “The U.S. Army has more ships than the Navy!”. Unfortunately all of those ships are not rated for combat operations. There is (1) TSV, which is leased, not owned by the Army, (35) LCU’s, a surveillance ships, and a few coastal tugs. None of these would make an impact if a conflict was to break out in the pacific.
Once again the Marines and Navy already have this in hand, if stuff goes crazy, believe me the U.S. Army will get involved regardless (long with all of you USAV’s), the Marine Corps is just too small to fight a long contracted ground war alone, nor is that what we were ever intended to do.
Didn’t we have bases in the Marianas? And the Solomons? And then there’s French Polynesia. And Micronesia. What happened to all of that? And the Phillippines?
Oh, yeah, I forgot — someone decided we don’t need all that land area for use any more, so we dumped it. Sorry. My bad.
@11: Your comment makes me think about an old article by Fred Reed, who used to write for the Military Times, from about a decade ago, about the global presence of the US military during the height of the Cold War.
The most memorable line was something like “There was a time when we stood astride the world.”
It was a great, nostalgiac piece, which I have unfortunately been unable to find on the interwebs (including on Reed’s own site.)
I can vouch for the number of 5-jump chumps…I went to Jump School from 1st CosCom at Fort Bragg- when I got my wings I went to 782nd Maintenance Bn, got a letter of acceptance, which my 1st Sergeant trashed in favor of orders sending me to Germany to hang out with the Field Artillery…No shit, it happened about that fast…
@11 Good question! It is like us being in Canal Zone now with Southern Command and having control of the most important passageway in the western hemisphere, the Panama Canal. What? No…wait a minute, you mean we’re not in the Canal Zone anymore? You say Carter gave that away too!? Sorry. My memory of foreign policy things all F’ed up by the White House and Democrats is getting bad these days.
Way back, when the world made sense, the 25th ID had one bde on the green ramp, and one conducting exercises overseas in a number of various countries (RC was the 3d bde). True, not for months at a time, usually only 3-4 weeks, but it gave them interoperability training and most importantly, deployment & logistics training. Guess that made too much sense. And yes 4/25 SHOULD be in Hawaii, but the tree huggers didn’t want Strikers running over their unicorns.
After decades of hollering about how the maritime forces are irrelevant and how expeditionary isn’t needed.
US Army you so bipolar.
Give ’em hell, Marines.
Does anyone have an answer to this double question?
How come if the US and Britain and France, and even Belgium, have bases here and there and protectorates, it’s ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’? But if Russia wants to claim all that land it used to rule, or if China wants to grab some islands between the mainland and Japan, it isn’t?
I’m only asking because the Chinese are moving ahead with their space program, having recently made a soft landing on the moon with a roving lunar lander. And as LBJ is credited with saying, I don’t want to go to bed at night by the light of a Communist moon.
If the government in this country doesn’t snap the hell out of its coma, the Chinese will get a moonbase started, claim the entire moon for themselves, and charge us rent for daring to land there.
The Army wants a job in the Pacific Rim. You can take it from here.
sounds a lot like UDP back in the 80s. “deploy” to Okinawa for 6 months but spend most of that time in Korea, the Philippines, Thailand or on a LST travelling between them. You haven’t lived until you’ve rode a Large Slow Target through a typhoon!!!
moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises.
Isn’t that the hallmark of the Frank Burns school of command? Once when left in charge he had the whole MASH pack up and move across the road, set up, and then pack up and move back. Because the “M” stands for “Mobile”.
@17—I’m not sure what you’ve heard, but I don’t know of anybody in the mainstream who’s been saying that Russia has a right to claim all the land it used to rule. I think that one’s pretty much over and done with. I also don’t think China’s claims over the Senkaku Islands are that clear cut. Yes, they’re douchebags, but they’ve also been screwed over royally by Japan, and the case over them isn’t quite so black and white. I definitely don’t side with them in terms of ownership, but it’s to the point where I would call it a legitimate diplomatic conflict where they at least have a legal case as opposed to something like, say, the Falkland Islands. And France and Belgium’s colonies are, by definition, imperialism and colonialism. Basically, they went to places that they were nowhere near and thus had no legal claims to and turned them into territories of theirs through military force, then didn’t give said places any political representation. Pretty much colonialism as I understand it. They’ve also used bullying to keep their overseas territories in line and in their possession (sending the DGSE to blow up the Rainbow Warrior to keep it from protesting nuclear tests in French Polynesia being the most recent example; Belgium wasn’t exactly a stellar citizen in its territories either, esp. the Congo). And I would say our overseas territories kind of are, too, by a strictly dictionary definition. Basically, they were independent countries that were taken over by Spain, then taken over by us in a war that in 20/20 hindsight really wasn’t justified seeing as how the USS Maine has been found to have been sunk by a coal bunker explosion as opposed to Spanish sabotage. Now, the caveat is that situations do change. The Marianas, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico have all decided in popular referendums that they want to keep their current status. But again, I haven’t heard much of a popular movement to call US overseas territories colonial possessions. And as for the Chinese moon base—don’t worry, we’ve got… Read more »
As a young snuffy in the USMC infantry, I learned with a quickness that all those different places we were sent to train up just had slight variations on the same old suck that always goes with field training.
Some places rained a bit more, some a bit less. The spiders and snakes might look different, but they bite the same. Immersion foot is immersion foot, no matter where you get it.
The actual value was gained by battalion staff. On a float, it’s the staff that does actual on site recon in subjects as:
Who the real movers and shakers are in that particular AO through the obligatory meet and greets;
How much transport infrastructure (rail, road conditions, etc) really exist;
Adjustments to the time and effort to move a body of troops from point A to point B particular to the various places, etc and so on.
Every BLT compiles reams of fresh data on all of its visited places, and there is a book o’ actual facts that the USMC has access to for all its areas of responsibility. The info is way better detailed and a whole lot more accurate than that CIA cookbook piece of shit.
Forgot to add:
So, if the US Army, in its deep and unquestionable wisdom (heh), really wants to do something to make itself useful in the Pac AO, it could get away with just sending battalion staffs around and about.
And keep it at battalion. Above that level requires a calcification of the brain that precludes the learning of actual functional practices.
Questions-
Why are the Marines involved in a land-locked war?
Why does the USAF want to mothball the A-10?
Why wasn’t DELTA utilized in Bin Laden raid?
Why is the Army pulling outside embassy relief in Africa?
A: Politics?
Pacific Rim Mission is just another name from the old “two war front mission.”
Here’s where the military fights for relevancy during a draw down–been there, done that.
@21 – Find a map of USSR draan prior to 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed and ceased to exist. Everything west of Austria was behind the Iron Curtain. That includes Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, etc. – basically, anything that was not in western Europe, and some I’d have to look up. Oh, did I leave out half of Germany and all of Poland?
And while I’m at it, the Soviets went into Afghanistan in the 1980s in an attempt to add it to their list of “countries we own today”.
Try a printed world atlas printed prior to 1989, if you can find one. If they aren’t in your school library, your school is rewriting history for some reason. It used to be, back in those good ol’ days, that you couldn’t find Yakutia on a map. Now you can, but it’s still owned by Russia.
Putin has wanted for quite some time to return many of those now-independent countries to the ‘possession’ of the Russian government. Most of them have said ‘NO’, but some have simply gone to suicide bombing and disruption.
Go on. See if you can find one of those old Cold War maps of the world. A lot of things were very different then.
Looks like The Good Idea Fairy struck again.
And we ALL know how that will eventually turn out.
@26—I know what you are saying. I was referring to now. The reality has changed, at least to my eyes. It would definitely not be an exaggeration to say that there is probably not fifty thousand people in all of Eastern Europe who would like to see their region under Russia’s dominion again. Whatever fantasies Putin is harboring about a new Soviet Union, it doesn’t change the fact that his military is a rotting corpse, that the people in those countries hate the Russians—and that most of his former Eastern European domain now consists of NATO countries. Ergo, if he tries to take them over, he’s not going to come out on the winning end. I would not say that’s a threat America’s going to be facing anytime soon. Back to China, small wars, and Islamic extremism.
Now, Chechnya is a slightly different story. Putin is actually keeping the area under Russia’s thumb against the wishes of the vast majority of Russians (Although since when has that stopped him from doing anything, like, say, holding office in the first place?). Most of them think it’s an unwinnable war that has nothing to do with national security, at least at this point, and everything to do with resource control and political grandstanding. Basically, they think of it the same way Americans were thinking of Iraq in 2010. I frankly think that that area won’t be part of Russia much longer.
At one time we had an Army quick reaction force in the Western Pacific when the 173rd Airborne Brigade was activated on Okinawa in 1963. Patterned after the old regimental combat teams from WWII and Korea, it had its own support units including armor. Once it deployed to Vietnam, we lost that forward unit in reserve capability. The 173rd now serves a similar mission from its base in Italy.
@15 Rick correctly points out that the 25th Infantry Division has traditionally rotated maneuver units around the Western Pacific. On a business trip to Hawaii back in the early 80’s calling on military medical facilities, I stopped by the Army Branch Clinic at Schofield Barracks where I remember being told by the NCOIC that the 25th’s brigades spent more time in the field than any other Army units due to their rotational
movements throughout WestPac. That ongoing rotation kept a force positioned forward on an ongoing basis. I was unaware that policy had changed as another commenter noted and who also credited that change with lack of funding.
It is probably a return to that forward positioning capability that the general is seeking to re-establish. But, if there’s insufficient funding for maneuver unit rotations how can there be funding for a permanently-positioned brigade? Unless, of course, he’s seeking to grow his budget with a brigade-sized expansion of his command.
As Beretverde noted here, it’s almost always about politics and when you’re talking about semi-permanent stationing of American troops on foreign soil, it’s all about geo-politics. It may well be that the general was directed by the Pentagon to float the concept to see what the public and political, both foreign and domestic, reaction is.
“It may well be that the general was directed by the Pentagon to float the concept to see what the public and political, both foreign and domestic, reaction is.”
We’re long overdue for a public policy discussion on the merits of armed neutrality, a la Switzerland.
With an ocean on both sides and friendlies to the north and south, we sure don’t need US troops galavanting across the globe, pretending to liberate the oppressed and deliver democracy.
Consider Smedley Butler’s humble 1936 proposal:
http://justwarriors.blogspot.com/2009/11/smedley-butler-amendment-for-peace.html
They have a Pacific Airborne unit already! Fort Richardson, AK. I don’t know what the point of Cobra Gold every year was if we weren’t/aren’t showing we have an airborne QRF in the Pacific theater.
this constant movement concept sounds like a great way to develop a unit that is superb at pre-movement orders, inspections, packing up, inspections, movement, inspections, unpacking, inspections, temporary quarters and siting, inspections, and prep for the next move. Followed, or course, by inspec….