Army trains for “next war”
The Kansas City Star reports that the Army, the 1st Division specifically, at Fort Riley, has begun training for the next war by getting back to the business of fighting traditional enemies like the Russians or the North Koreans.
“You hope it wouldn’t be World War III, but you have to prepare for the worst,” said Lt. Gen. Robert B. Brown, commanding general of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. “We need to be ready to play against the pro teams, not just the amateurs.”
[…]
“It’s a paradigm shift for the Army,” Livsey said. “With Iraq and Afghanistan, it was all about COIN — counterinsurgency. We still need to train for that. But we also have to get back to bread-and-butter skills such as precise artillery, precise gunnery.”
Fort Riley officials say decisive-action training blends yesterday’s emphasis on battlefield prowess with the people skills required of troops more recently focused on counterinsurgency.
Personally, I wish the Army would finish this war, while they’re preparing for the next war. Ronald Reagan was able to fight the “low intensity conflicts” of the 80s while preparing for the Soviet hordes simultaneously, but I have my doubts that this crowd can do it the way that they’re slashing training funds and compensation packages while staffing their social programs.
Category: Army News
Also a little difficult considering the military is about half the size it was during the Reagan administration. But hey, reflective belts and SHARP/SAPR training. So we’ve got that going for us….
It’s making me a little nervous that our government is making the military focus on everything and everybody except the groups that have repeatedly sworn to destroy us. Is the administration clueless, or are they aware of something they’re not telling us. Either way, it’s not going to end well.
“..when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.” –George Orwell
Armies fight and adapt to the next war quite well, IMO.
It’s the politicians who suck at it. Take Afghanistan for example. Had they learned one of the major lessons of Vietnam, they never would have allowed the Taliban safe haven in Pakistan.
You mean like the way we won the Vietnam war by bombing Laos and invading Cambodia?
Wait, how’d that war end again? 😉
Yes, we won that war by bombing the shit out of the trails, supply trains, massed units, harbors, headquarters, and downtown Hanoi.
We lost that war, because politicians are stupid and cowards in their knowledge of combat.
To elaborate a bit, how do you think material goods get to a landlocked country like Afghanistan? Like it or not we need Pakistan as an ally, not an enemy, unless you think we should have mounted an Iraq-style invasion of Pakistan, with the same requirement of troops to garrison it?
The basic premise is that if you give an enemy safe haven, a place from which he can rest, resupply, etc., you’ll never beat him.
Look at the ROE the Johnson administration put on the military. How many pilots died because we weren’t allowed to destroy aircraft on the ground, for example?
I’m not saying they should have gone into China, or even Laos or Cambodia. By the time those people and material got that far, it was already too late.
As far as Pakistan goes, some fucking ally they’ve turned out to be. How long was Bin Laden sitting there, virtually in the open? They don’t even have control of Warziristan, and haven’t since they were formed in 1947. AFAIC, if they can’t control their own territory, they have no right to pitch a bitch. Throw in the complicity of the ISI, and my fuck-o-meter remains pegged low.
We don’t need Pakistan as an ally, we only need their roads. And when we unleash the total power of our military on the bad guys, to include any and all territory of Pakistan, we do NOT apologize for it. We tell them that the destruction will continue, until they agree to fight the bad guys our way.
When Pakistan learns that we will destroy them just as easily as we destroy Afghanistan, they will come begging to give us anything we need or want.
Middle East peoples understand and respond to strength and resolve. They will also quickly and fully take advantage of a weak opponent.
Right now, we are a very weak opponent.
IMHO, Middle Easterners will only cooperate with you while you’re completely willing and capable of wiping them off the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye. They’ll also change sides and alliances in the blink of an eye, but WTF do I know, I’ve only done two tours over there.
“Armies train to fight the wars they most recently fought” – damn, another aphorism bites the dust. In the latter ’70s, I know we trained to fight Vietnam all over again even though ‘the big one’ in Europe was far more likely.
So, we are doing what we did after Korea and Vietnam; going back to focusing on the fight that we’re good at (large scale, force on force, joint maneuver against a near peer competitor) and forgetting about the fight that we still haven’t figured out how to win (small scale counter insurgency and asymmetric warfare). In the words of H.R. McMaster, there are only two ways that our next adversary will fight us; asymmetrically or stupidly. Regardless of what we’d like, even if we fight Russia or China next, they aren’t going to be massing armor divisions to hold key terrain and moving RAGs and DAGs through the FLOT like we thought that they would in 1984.
I thought the Marines had a book for that, called “The Small Wars Manual.”
#curseyoujadehelm15!
bwahaha!
I like to think the media show went this way:
General: “We need to be ready to play against the pro teams, not just the amateurs.”
Reporter: “General, by amateurs, do you mean JV teams, such as ISIS?”
General: “No, I didn’t say that. Strike that. Is this on the record? Dammit. Shit.”
The real irony is that for most of the time the Army has actually been at war, our opponents have used asymmetrical approaches. Note that I count the Indian Wars as asymmetrical.