Showing posts with label militay doctrine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label militay doctrine. Show all posts

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Russians to the Left, Russians to the Right, into the Election we charge



Russians to the Right, Russians to the Left, into the Election We Charge

By Gordon S Fowkes

While the card carrying Sanders Left is often a stooge for the Russian Energy and Defense industries (Polar Bear Scam and the Depleted Uranium Mirage),

 I find it damnable that Donaldian supporters of "National Defense" now, are conducting an assault on NATO and are in support of traditional Kremlin Imperial Russian geographic ambitions. These ambitions, once blocked by NATO at the East German to Italian to Turkish borders, now blocked from Estonia to Romania, are to be given license to finish the job of the conquest of Europe. 




Quotes from the Trompista Front......

“Gordon Fowkes well now was Russia supposed to hand over warm water Port entry to Soros and gang? If Soros wasn't funding opposition in Ukraine and responsible for how many deaths? At the time Ukraine signed deal with Russia and all was good. Compared to serial killer Hillary, trump is a saint in that sense”

“Gordon Fowkes Interesting you only mention Ukrainians and yet attack Putin about Crimea, how many Russians died during revolution and including my family members and Stalin's repressions and let’s go one step above Ukrainians helped Hitler during world war 2 and when realized they are losing joined Russia again but this is not the geopolitical/ historical thread”

The statements I read of how Crimea is traditionally Russian should remember that it was traditionally Greek or Turk for thousands of years until the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Fulda Gap and the Fish Hook

As one who froze his ass guarding the Fulda Gap

and have it shot at by Russian made rockets, mortars, machine gun fire, and detonations of the 24" directional mine in sunny South Vietnam, and served for over thirty years, and unaccustomed as I am to the written word, I cannot find the proper sense of outrage, anger, and betrayal to describe the most treasonous proposals since before Benedict Arnold.  

Arnold only wanted to give up the West Point fortifications, the Donaldians apparently want the Atlantic Coast our eastern frontier and give up Alaska on the West.


The Russians, it appears, now have us in  a pincer movement from Right and Left. A Cannae on a global scale.  The end result if carried to logical end recreates as it was in the Fall of 1940 to Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor.  



The Year that Churchill Saved the West




Monday, January 7, 2008

The Operational Artless

The shift in using the Guard and Reserves from a strategic reserve to an operational reserve suggests that the Guard and Reserves (RC) will operate without a strategy. It begs the question as to what exactly are meanings of strategy and operations mean, at least to the Pentagon.

In the halcyon days of wars between nations, where politics and warfare were considered to follow one after the other, there was an implied hierarchy between tactics and strategy with something called the “operational level” of warfare. This latter was made popular during the era of “AirLand Battle” which emphasized the movement of large units on a grand scale. It raised the view of battle from taking the next hill to doing what comes after. Jackson’s Valley campaign, the 1940 invasion of France, Patton’s breakout from Normandy and the maneuvers of Napoleon were classic examples of bold maneuver and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the best example of the operational art.

Understood in this paradigm is the notion that strategy dictates the operational art which, in turn, dictates the tactics and techniques use at the cutting edge of the force. In this paradigm, the guns move first in tactics, while trucks (ammo and fuel) move first in the operational art as in the “Hail Mary” of Desert Storm. As used, the operational art was centered on the movement of divisions within a corps, and on corps operations itself. Under the Abrams Doctrine, the bulk of the “trucks” and a good slice of the big guns were in the RC, and as an unintended consequence, the expertise of the operational art shifted to the RC, leaving the Active Army the run of the tactical level, and little sense of how and where the ammo, gas, repairs, and trucks were coming from.

This begs the question of the meaning of a shift from strategic to operational levels as the strategy for war included both operational and tactical operations and organization. As Transformation has sunk it’s claws into the military, operations have, until FM 3-24 was published consisted of rotations of units from Festung Kansas to the Eastern Front, and back without regard to any scheme of maneuver as any decent example of the operational art or strategy would have.

The establishment of modular support brigades for the Army Reserve fits the overall notion of “plug and play” but this concept that logistics isn’t modular, but systems and functionally organized and vertically oriented such as the flow of gas, ammo, repairs, and transportation. Putting a support brigade in a divisional task force doesn’t deal with anything until linked to a chain going all the way back to depots, arsenals and factories.

Under Army doctrine from WW2 until now, ammo was delivered from containers stateside to a Corps Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) where it was loaded on trucks (or trailers) for delivery to the guns. It was called throughput. The default rate of delivery was ten tons of ammo per gun per day.

Trucks hauling ammo require fuel and repairs enroute. The roads they need, need to be built and maintained, and traffic control exercised. Movement Control Centers (MCC) and Material Management Centers (MMC) coordinated the effort from rear to front. Rear Operations Centers (RAOC) managed the security of the routes along with Military Police Brigades. Early reports from Iraq suggested that little management or movement or materials were in effect as contractors unfamiliar with the totality of combat service support replaced the trained RC structure.

It might be useful to note that, hierarchically speaking, strategy dictates the operational level of war which in turn dictates the tactical level. Shifting the RC from “strategic” to “operational” has meant operating without a strategy.

There is a powerful and long standing offensive being waged from within the Pentagon to complete the process of modularization, so long standing that it has been several complete rotations of senior military officers and of political appointees through the Pentagon. This suggests that the force behind Transformation is civil service and/or industry oriented.

The Air Force and Navy is being subjected to policies focused on personnel that are consistent with the Army’s. The effects appear to be the same on the support structures of those services. The operational art without the art.





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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

NY Times Article: Law Breaker in Chief (?)

Lawbreaker in Chief, the article by Jed Rubenfeld, misses one point on the authority to operate outside the provisions of a law passed by Congress, and that is that the Constitution gives the President specified powers not granted to Congress, that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and the power to conduct relations with foreign nations. In fact, in those areas, the decisions of the President have the force of law.

It is the same power that a police officer or military officer has in issuing orders. A military officer who orders his unit to defend or attack a piece of ground, that order has the force of law.

The extension of Commander in Chief powers past the point in which military forces are directed on the ground, sea, or in the air, is problematic as the Constitution gives the Congress the authority to determine what kind of military the President gets to command, including the organization, staffing, training, and doctrine that the forces are developed under. Of the eighteen specified powers of the Congress in Article 1, at least seven deal with military issues.

Since the creation of the Defense Department after WW2, the Congress has ceded it’s authority to the Defense Department in what used to be routinely performed by the Congress. The failure of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to have a post invasion plan is due to a major shift in the regulation (doctrine) and organization of the military called “Transformation”.

“Transformation” is predicated on what is best for the retention of military personnel, and not upon actually winning. “Transformation” is more concerned with fighting a war than winning it. Winning a war is not in the best interests of the Pentagon as ending the war would end the funding. And that includes the billions of acquisition costs intended for a war that is entirely imaginary.

Congress should focus on what their authority is in the military arena instead of wandering outside their Constitutional authority such as putting time lines on the commitment of troops. The meddling in Turkish affairs just recently is a equally unconstitutional and which has, as intended, a devastating impact on the conduct of both military and diplomatic relations in the Middle East.


The division of national authority specified in our Constitution is a part of the Anglo-American political tradition with the separation of those powers going back to the English Civil Wars. There, the King wanted to wage war on French Catholics with whom the traders of London were trading with. End result, a Parliamentary Army today knows as the British Army, and the beheading of the King. The meddling of the Continental Congress in military operations reinforced the notion that Congress should stay out of the conduct of military operations.


The sticky part of the wicket is that while the Congress has the exclusive power to declare war, the conduct of military operations against a hostile foe or in the enforcement of the Presidents conduct of relations with foreign relations does not need a declaration of war to open fire. A declaration of war is a legal state, that may or may not involve military forces. Battles may be fought without a declaration of war. The only safeguard, as with the British, is the funding which cannot include a restriction of Presidential powers, lest the funds be treated as unencumbered money free to be spent as the President chooses.

The Founders clearly understood that giving the President (or King) a large standing military force would tempt the usage thereof. The British system kept the Regular British Army small with large supplements of colonial troops, such as the Indian Army from which Dr. Watson retired.

The “well regulated militia” guaranteed in the Second Amendment is the default military force for the United States. These state forces, however, are restricted from having ships of war or standing military forces in time of peace. Likewise, the “regulations” (doctrine) of the state forces is that which the Congress directs. Here also the Congress has failed by leaving these decisions to the Defense Department without adequate review, such as having hearings on the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which should be a Congressional task.

On an ominous note, the Army and Air Forces raised during the Cold War that used to be stationed overseas are being brought back to the Continental USA so that they can sally forth in ten days, win in thirty and rebound in another thirty. Given the failure of this approach, the Pentagon forges ahead with “Transformation” with a pig-headedness not seen since Sir Douglas Haig drenched the trenches of Flanders with British blood. One wonders in Rumsfeld’s New Model Army has a Pride’s Purge in mind. One wouldn’t like to see a “Rump Congress”