Whither Land Power?

It wasn’t all that many years ago that one could sail one’s ships of war into the other guy’s harbor, fire a volley or two anywhere near the port, land the marines and dictate terms to the local dictator. That used to work really well in those societies whose political power was concentrated in a few hands heads above the average, particularly in those whose arms were handy,



If, however the possession of arms is spread out, dug in or behinds one’s back, the position of tyrant can lose its footing and fall head first or headless into the dark. What the tyrant fears most is the body politic takes up arms, or fears not for loss, or willing to stand up. The position of tyrant, however, is a matter of perception.



Since most people live on land, who controls what one must stand on to retain a footing in, or standing on the ground which supports the feeding and breeding of the significant population. Significant as in issues of social status: face, fate, fame, and fortune (F4F) and attending factors of the local concepts of time, distance, the ground, and the needs of the body as in eat, drink, and be merry.



If the land upon which the people eat is dependent on somewhere else, the control of the life lines is paramount, Cutting these life lines places the body politic at risk, but only to the extent that those below the top nine percent will stomach a small mouthful. When the breaking point becomes the tipping point, heads on high will roll. What the breaking point and the tipping point is made up of is highly subjective, and historically it comes with the frustration of growing expectation more than the absolute



The embargo/sanctions approach, however, is more counter production than not. The principles of supply and demand operate to increase the power of the few over the many, by the necessity of make sure the body politic is fed. Sanctions strengthen the hand of the dictator by increasing the dependence of the many on the few. Conversely, the existence of sustenance within often defeats control from without.

If, for example, the resources to sustain multiplication of the many are dependent on life lines, the control of those life lines is the life line of the body politic, severance of which by an outside power can produce a change of faces, or a head or more. If the goods and services from outside ceases as other outside sources and markets change to a new heading, the effect produces the same paucity of sustenance as if cut on purpose.

This is as much the case for that which fills the stomach and that which hands on necks, ears, arms, wrists, hands, and fingers as in luxury goods. Many a great civilization has grown by trading trinkets for essentials, like the beads and trinkets that paid for Manhattan.
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The trade in sugars and spices to flavor and preserve the digestible ranks with the trade in diamonds, rubies, amber, gold and silver became as important as grain to feed the Roman mob. The attraction of trinkets, tea, coffee and tobacco became matters of empire although the many had no access to luxury save as the local manual labor to handle, package, stack and rack the precious. Thus was the bitter wars waged by Western European empires over the Caribbean islands, the battle over which made the French fleet and French arms in our Revolutionary War. It was taxation on tea that triggered some protests in Boston.


Changing the sea lines of trade between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea with India and China collapsed the empires of the Indus River in the years BC (BCE). The incredible wealth of the Sugar Islands was side stepped with cheaper sugar, and refrigeration made spices no longer as pricey and exclusive. Likewise did the low price and availability of cotton from India and Egypt break the power of Confederate cotton over the mills of Europe, Silk worms smuggled out of China broke the high prices of silk. Difficult to woo and wed without the precious to feed and breed is.

The interdiction of life lines by force is to control the time, distance, and place in which the precious and/or the essential must pass. Blockage can be absolute as by physical presence or subject to blockage in time or distance. Such is the importance of the Brenner Pass, Iron Gates, the Straits of Gibraltar, Malacca, Tzushima, and the Chesapeake, or the deltas of Mississippi, Po, Rhine, Weser, or Yellow or Yangtse.

So long as the many will put up with shortages in essentials, interdiction becomes less effective in producing a change in or of the regime, Such was the case of the German submarine blockades of WW 1 and WW 2 that failed to defeat Britain although it was a closely run thing. The defeat of Japan and of Germany differed in one really big difference: Hitler went down with all hands, while Hirohito ruled in favor of his people at the risk of losing face. One decision maker took responsibility and the other blamed his own.

In order to determine national strategy, it profits to determine diehard from negotiator., who knows when to hold, and when to fold. While Hitler was a diehard, not all diehards are Hitler, Certainly George Washington was a diehard, as was Jefferson Davis. Robert E Lee, a diehard soldier knew when to fold. Mao’s China and the Russian Bolshevik knew when to hold, and when to fold, and still reserve the option to double cross. Thus there is no fast and firm formula to predict holding from folding without knowing the tell.

Controlling life lines or the economic base of a nation may produce a lasting victory or not. Rome defeated the Goths for years until they were stiffed by the Emperor, and down came the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Empire at Byzantium managed to keep its head above water until the Bosporus was crossed and Ottoman cannon broke the walls in 1453. The resulting constriction of the western end of the Silk and spice trade (luxury goods) which made life in the castle mire miserable than before the Crusades, gave vent to demands to go around the Turk, and thus gave incentive to sail around Africa or take the short cut across the Atlantic to China. The Queen’s jewels were an investment, so it was thought, to trade up for more.



From that point forward until the Great War, control of the precious for the precious and by the precious, dominated policy, national and international. That others also benefited from the trade gave rise to reasons to vest in the vested. Cheap goods for the many also backed plays by the few, until it became noticeable that the few gave too little for so much. And so the dominoes fell, as did the headsman axe, on many of the few.


It is ownership of the means of violence, not that of production, that has shaped the long slow disengagement of the many from the few. In ancient civilization, populations exploded in rage and rampage sometimes erasing the civilization altogether. There is a telltale level of ash marking the burning of great cities, sometimes just once, and sometimes repeated marking a violent end.

No one really knows what civilization built the Mexican temples Teotihuacan. Many of the Mayan empires virtually disappeared before Columbus brought small pox to the New World and syphilis to the Old. What these great urban civilizations have in common is great engineered irrigation systems. As the control of water was necessarily centrally controlled, so was political power centrally controlled by the lash, blade, and math, the last kept classified, guarded, and mystified by priest and scribe.

The declassification of math was made possible by Shari’a compliant (Arab) numerals instead of the old Roman system. The advent of the abacus and sun dial had the effect on political power of greater impact than that of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Or that is also true of Gutenberg, Newton, or Einstein whose contributions were possible only through math.

It is not a accident that the Arab Spring is built on a digitally competent many, as were the English Civil Wars and the revolutions of the colonies, France, the revolts of 1848, Russia and China were built on print.

Land power is therefore a function of giving the many the advantages of the few through better math as well as superior firepower. The social significance of the machine gun, barbed wire, and indirect artillery as the firepower edge of Western (and Soviet) imperialism has been over shadowed by the firepower of the sub-machinegun, assault rifle, mortar and anti-tack rocket which empowers the small against the large, enabling the many to defeat the few



Thus the days of the big ship shell and marine has been pretty much dead since 1950 when massacre became decentralized and hidden. Thus the expeditionary model that the US Army rushed into place, half-baked, to displace the most successful expression of land power since the Spanish founded St Augustine. In that old model, was the makings of a properly done occupation by the friendly since enemies were invented.

The Shapes of Things to Come

The Shape of Things to Come Always is an illusion at best. Some get parts of it right, some miss it completely, and forever, and some are in the right spot at the right time. Innovation cannot be institutionalized, and where it is, is a booby hatch, This particularly applies to the profession at arms where the life of the state can be decided on whim, whimsy, and wishful thinking. I refer to our booby hatch, known as the Pentagon as it is walled off from reality by pipe dream and Byzantine intrigue,

It’s not that our Pentagon is particularly venal or stupid, it’s that no ones Pentagon is that smart. The correlation of factors of mission, enemy, terrain, troops available, technology, time and culture between multiple players is far too complex and shifting with technological tides to be all that predictable. Yet, there are constants in the continuum of war by other means that go to the hearts, minds, body and terrain that demand that understand, from the outset, the secrets of Hannibal, Napoleon, Robert E Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitloer, and others whose foot prints sink deep in the shape of things that are.

Consider the “Light Fantastic” concept of battle in which heavily armed wonder weapons cut, slash and run faster than the enemy could bring fires to bear. Thus British “battle cruisers” intended to hunt cruisers were used in the battle line at Jutland in WW1 and the HMS Hood against the Battleship Bismarck in WW2. They blew up.
Consider the US Army Air Force’s justification of the B-17 as the perfect battleship sinker in order to win the budget wars. No battleship was ever sunk by the B-17, but bigger targets like cities were flattened with no particular impact on enemy war production and the cost of a third of the air crews.

The Defense Department specifically forbad the Army to have helicopter gunships until the AH-1 Cobra was fielded behind their backs as a UH-1 modification, which itself was a modification of a Medical Corps requirement for an evacuation helicopter. Another ambulance modification is the M113, now the most ubiquitous armored personnel carrier in the world.

Our Pentagon has latched onto a particularly flawed concept of the continuation of politics aby other means, principally that one ends and the other picks up instead of the other way around, that politics is war continued by other means. The misnomer COIN (Counter Insurgency Operations) used in Afghanistan misses the essential point that iSAF is the insurgent trying to foist a foreign misdeology on an ancient culture that has it’s own ways of doing things. The older concept of “stability operations” focuses not only on the stable not the unstable. Stability operations only work when the locals fall in line without the omniscient presence of greater firepower.

Mrs Clausewitz edited and published her husband’s personal blog, after his death in a pompous tome that lacks the sharp professional snap of General Clausewitz’s other publications. The most illusory item taken out of context is the concept of a “Center of Gravity” which is the center of malevolent attention. World War 1 was fought over entrenched centers of gravity, the collapse of which left the combatants permanently drained of their precious bodily fluids.

Today’s Centers of Gravity are firmly founded in PowerPoint presentations, particularly with interactive links to animated avatars. The Briefing Wars contend with Back Room Bargains by brokers of power often too ugly to prance and preen in front of the screen. Such is the fate of collective debate, be it corporate, Parliament, Palace, or Princely Court. The fate of this nation now is more dependent upon courtly demeanor than the Congressional exercise of Specified Powers as written in Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution.

Warriors wince at the mere mention of Congressional “oversight” of professional operations, but Congress has the specified (exclusive) powers to shape the force. Yet the constancy of error and arrogance in the Pentagon is of a durability that exceeds to duration of rotation of flag ranks and field. Or, the limited impact of the appointed anointed of political party, It is not in our Constitution that career Civil Servants be the superior civilian in charge of military affairs. There is no reason why our military be administered by corporate wonders and whiz kids with the administration of sharp objects that go boom in the night.

Our Founders did not envision a large long serving professional military force as the minions of defense. In fact, they were quite specific in allocating powers that made a large standing force temporary. The default defense of the US is the National Guard (Air and Army) and a Federal Navy. States are prohibited in keeping standing forces or ships of war in time of peace, save in times of invasion and disorder. The onset of the Cold War demanded a larger standing force that was customary, and a large temporary force including the Army of the Untied States, faced off against the Evil Empires of the Red Flag. In the mid Sixties a plan was hatched to purge the ranks of those pesky long term professionals of uncertain certification (reservists) and restore the Nineteenth Century paradigm of a separation of components on the battlefield.

The Vietnam War stalled the onset of the purge until post war force reduction provided a cover for the purge, which took place in 194-76. Since the purge of professionals in their second decade of service went down, there has been a critical shortage of Captains (O-3) for the last thirty years. The current solution to the Captain shortage has been to reduce the ration between Colonel and Captain by reducing the numbers of battalions per Colonel. Modularization as its basest.
And the future of the national defense is now spoken of by the anointed is focused on the shape of “the officer corps” which means the regular officer corps as if were vested by God the saviors of the American state. This is a very normal occurrence in other nations such as Argentina, Turkey, China, Prussia, and Tsarist Russia. It’s human nature, but a nature which doesn’t always work out, and is not in our Constitutional sytem.

Nor is it in the best interests of our foreign policy. It is a bit sad to see our prancing purveyors of princely advice to foreign powers, such as I have seen in my own tired eyes in Europe and South America of the wonderfulness of power projection by expeditionary expedience. Little do these clowns realize that these words are evocative of Pax Britannica, the Glory of France, and what these misinformed souls see as American Imperialism. Absent the Red Menace, is it any wonder that our former allies are forming different constellations of power that gives them more control over their own fate, without Pentagon and Foggy Bottom meddling.
We need to reverse the imbalance of full time career and the citizen professional to the latter, keeping on full time service those forces specifically required to extant threats from outside CONUS, and restore an integrated structure of follow on and mobilization forces based on the Guard and Reserves. The basic plan is one leading to full mobilization, and the determination of which parts need to be full time, part time, half time, and stomped out of the ground. In this regard the planning is more important that the plan. Any forces allocated in whatever mix, should have plans in hand, plans on the shelf, and plans on the drawing table.
If necessary, a dart board should be used to determine the combinations of threats and forces for a given set of parameters. Battles are won by those who can react to a totally unique set of circumstances with forces able to adapt as quickly. Think of Task Force Taffy Three in the Battles off Samar in 1944. Think of Patton’s Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge. Think of the Berlin Airlift, put together on the fly by Curtis Lemay.

The present task organization of rotational expeditionary forces supported by contractors and civil servants isn’t suitable for any kind of operation. The successes of our troops today is in spite of “transformation”, not because of it.

Gordon S Fowkes

Replace the SES with a New General Staff Corps

Replacing the Senior Executive Service with a Military General Staff Corps.

Have you heard the one about the war in Afghanistan is cutting into the time needed to train for a big war? That’s a popular refrain from the opponents of actually winning the war in Afghanistan. Not that these worthies are in favor of a defeat, which is something they can define out of existence, but fearful of actually winning. For winning wars is not in the long term vested interests of a long service professional service or profession. Big wars have been dismissed as not in the vision for the future. Congress might get the wrong notion that a long service professional service might not be needed.

If crime could be prevented, then there would be no need for SWAT teams, SCI labs, or undercover narcs. Mental health professionals would go out of business if patients actually got well. Lawyers insist on maintaining a death grip on law and order with the inane blather that one cannot take the law into one’s own hands. Restoration of dueling would cut billions in trial and incarceration costs, with a profit to the public coming from the Entertainment Division of your local law enforcement agency.

9/11 was the signal for a coup d’état in the Pentagon which rushed to rebuild the military establishment while engaged in battle to “transform” the military from a “battle ready” force into a “battle hardened” force as stated in the now infamous QDR 2006. The battle proven field tactical organization of Theater, Field Army, Corps, and Division was disassembled. The end product was a modular maneuver brigade barely half the size of the average divisional brigade consisting of two maneuver elements. The Support and Artillery Commands of Division, Corps, and Field Army were dissolved to allow the addition of command and field grade staff officers from the Combat Arms.

Were it not for the fact that the extant General Officer Corps has some vestige of prestige to salvage many of their commands to be used as a matter of convenience to manage the battle here and there. While General Dempsey is aware of the fact that there is a real need for armies, corps, and divisions, the Pentagon is bound to keep the General Officer Corps at bay.

Since WW 1 experiences were documented in our field manuals, also known as Field Service Regulations, the doctrine was a single body of tactics, procedures, practices, principles, and policy for the care, feeding, and deployment of field forces, and of those forces that support them. The organization and principles of task organization and deployment was a body of skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed for victory in the field. This body of knowledge was under constant revision, and the politics that went into changing it was the stuff of constant competition within and between the services. That body of doctrine for the operational and strategic levels of war has dissolved into remnants here, and memories there.

Absent the well tested and war winning structure, the US Army is not likely to be ready to fight a really big war for less than three years, once a serious effort is launched. Or longer, because the chaos of today’s task organization has to be undone, and mighty organizations rebuilt. Three years is wishful thinking based on the experiences of WW1 and WW2. In both cases massive casualties had to take place to gain sufficient command interest in fighting the way in front rather than the politics in the rear. Few want to recall that the largest US Army organized combat force was in the Philippines in December 1941, or the fact that they were overrun on Bataan and Corregidor by a vastly inferior force of Japanese troops. Nor should we forget the time it took for combat hardened divisions from WW2 to dissolve into ineffectiveness before the North Korean Army in obsolete T-34 tanks nearly smashed their way to Pusan. We had to learn the hard way, again, to begin to cope with the Viet Cong whose courage and utter determination to defeat us kept then VC to continue to attack, attack, and attack regardless of loss or troops, material, and terra firma.

It is difficult to measure the smug factor of the brains in the Pentagon, until one realizes that the Pentagon isn’t run by those in uniform or those appointed by the Commander in Chief. By following the buzz words associated with Evil Transformation one follows them back to the Fifties and the Pentomic Division which had five Battle Groups of five infantry companies to fight the highly mobile and open battle field of the radioactively induced image of atomic warfare.

The Battle Group was commanded by the Colonel with companies commanded by captains; there was one slot for a Lt Col, That was bad news for field grades and had to go, and it was replaced by the ROAD division which was modeled after the Armor Division that had three O-6 “Combat Commands” aka brigades. The reduction of the five Battle Groups into three brigades cost the infantry two O-6 commands per division. Transformation restores the balance by eliminating Divarty and Discom O-5 commands and making them mini-maneuver brigades.

Thus the dissolution of combat task organizations and the doctrine pertaining thereto was and is driven by personnel management concerns. Virtually the entire Combat Service Support (CSS) has been dissolved and replaced by Civil Service and their slave labor force, the contractors. Even the term is banished. I have a little difficulty in visualizing a civilianized beach head like at Normandy, Inchon, Saipan, Tarawa, or Okinawa. But that is what the Senior Executive Service (SeS) is doing. They have co-opted the role of the (German) General Staff in mufti.

Ninety percent of the troops in the Pacific were in the logistic tail, eighty percent in Europe. And that doesn’t include the third of the US Army that was in the US Army Service Forces (ASF) equal to the Army Ground Forces (AGF) and Army Air Forces (USAAF). And we didn’t have to pay the Taliban to have our supplies delivered. The supplies also didn’t include pre-fab bunkers and burger joints.

The good news that there is the human capital to build anew a proper task oriented flexible organization on combat proven organizational principles. The effect of the revolution in information technologies will reduce the size if not the need for the Pentagon which should be mustered out immediately.

While the fact of a General Staff is in place, it does not include the same carefully educated, trained, and experienced in operations. They just have time in grade, and are permanently assigned in a position to negate any hot shot who thinks he can change the shape of water in a bucket with quick hands. We need to have a General Staff something like the Germans had before that unfortunate affair with that Bohemian corporal. Qualification as a General Staff officer should go with the officer and not tied to the position. Competition for accession to General Staff should be continuous through an officer’s career.

Command of field units in the German Army did not automatically go to General Staff Officers. Command and Staff often call for different personalities. As a branch, the Guard and Reserves will be required to maintain sufficient GS qualified personnel in the event of full mobilization. Full mobilization means a ten to twenty percent increase in the size of any service. WW 2 sets ten percent of total population as an average level of full mobilization with a corresponding war industry base of five times the size of the forces.

There has been an unfortunate aftertaste in Western filmography that associates German military science as robotic of which much fun is made. The prototype was the portrayal of a German officer by Erich von Stroheim, an Austrian of no great lineage in his films. So enamored of the efficiency of the German Army in WW2, that arrogant strutting image has survived in the American military as strut of emulation believing that absolute adherence to detail is worthy in it’s own way. The German military then and now stresses individual initiative, mission type orders, and professionalism. We threw the baby out, but kept the dirty bath water, to revise an old saying.

The Pentagon has repeatedly demonstrated its inability and reluctance to take full mobilization any higher than the next promotion boards for the current crop of O3’s through O-6. When President Carter took office, he found that GSA Region III had the national responsibility for manpower, resources. Transportation, and defense industry. He followed with a series of “Nifty Nugget” mobilization exercises which resulted in the present state of mobilization readiness that includes the local Armory or Reserve Center. The Pentagon should be torn down and the space used to expand the National Cemetery to make room for the next round of dead from our battlefields.

OBTW; There is no Constitutional principle of “civilian control of the military”. The President’s military rank is that of Commander in Chief. He is no civilian. Congress is the source of authority for issues of doctrine, equipping, and staffing, but has pointedly stayed unaware of their primary responsibilities. It is the Congress that these changes can be made.



Gordon S Fowkes

Lt Col, US Army (Ret_

Will Breaking?

The question at the core of the use of force, be it economic, political, kinetic or social is why such force induce others to accept the will of the guy at other end of the force. The beatings will continue until morale improves. "Bomber" Harris calculated that a few bombing raids of Germany would force Hitler to the bargaining table.

High Altitude Strategic Bombing was gospel in the US Army Air Force during WW 2. The theory, in addition to the "break their will" approach was to destroy key industrial complexes and communications centers with bombs dropped from 30,000 feet into specified "pickle barrels". The Strategic Bombing report done by the US Government after the war stated that barely five percent of the strategic bombs dropped by the USAAF on German or Japanese actually landed anywhere near their target. German production levels continued to rise throughout the war.

All the Anglo-American strategic bombing did of value was to divert Axis fighter aircraft from the front lines, which absence facilitated the forward advance of ground forces in no small war. The bitter aftertaste of the wreckage of German and Japanese homes is fundamental in understanding the popular resistance today in those countries for any further military adventures. In that regard, the bombing helped secure the peace.

The Japanese high command figured that the destruction of the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the invasions of the Philippines, Dutch East India, and the British would bring the Allies to the bargaining table. Their estimate was correct, of course, but the bargaining table was on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

This all goes to the heart of the question of what one is trying to do with using force against any political aggregate to get them to bend to our will. Military Theoreticians most revered today include Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Karl von Clausewitz. First for his work on Sea Power, the other on Ground Warfare. Both stress the concept of a massive engagement at a strategic time and place to win wars.

That's what the Japanese tried at Midway. Japanese submarines were not used as commerce raiders like ours and the Germans, and despite having some of finest subs and certainly the best torpedo, their submarine force did little significantly. The love affair with Clausewitz in the US Army has focused US military design, doctrine, and operations seeking to smash the "center of gravity" of the opposition.

The Concept of a Center of Gravity is holy writ in the US Army, mainly because Clausewitz didn't edit his book as it is a compilation of his writings gathered by his wife after he died. The book is long, and most I know don't read the book all the way through which shows there are several "centers of gravity" but leaves the instructions on how to find them in the wind. Centers of gravity are best thought of as a cross between the Emperor's New Clothes, and a snipe hunt.

WW2 shows some very critical differences on how wars are ended. Hitler retained effective control over his military which had tried 42 times to kill him until the Red Army posted it's Red Flag on the Brandenburg Gate.

Hirohito, on the other hand, pulled off a palace coup and took advantage of his status as a god, to end the fighting despite a last ditch attempt by members of his guard to stop him. Hirohito's mind and that of many other senior Japanese political and military leaders knew the jig was up as Soviet forces blitzed Manchuria and landed on Japan's Northern Territories.

Our operations in the Middle East have been driven by Clausewitzean logic, when the successes and failures of Hitler, Stalin, Lincoln, George Washington, Queen Victoria, and the Roman Empire provide a better selection of variables to study. In an effort to reduce the process to it's simplest form so that Sergeants and teach Generals and politicians where the cookies crumble. And it all has to start with how culture affects the structure, dynamics and cohesion and disintegration of groups be they simple aggregates or membership groups.

All too often the inner circle of the leadership core is solely concerned with it's own survival and aggrandizement. The security mechanisms to protect the leader are the link pins of the nation. Baghdad was virtually free of Saddam's Army as he feared the Army and Republican Guard would steal the nation if they could get Baghdad.

The Republican Guard was a counter weight to the Iraqi Army. The SS was the counterweight to the German Army, as was the KGB a counter to the Red Army. Our Constitution splits the military power of the nation between state and federal, and between Congress and the President.

The concepts of F4F and the Drama Triangle as applied to societies, organization and groups is the first place one looks for strengths and weaknesses and their susceptibility to pressure.

The Shaft to Come

The future of the war in the Muddle East has been decided. We are not only pulling out, we are downsizing the Army by at least a third. The decision has been made, and implementation has commenced, as announced by the Pentagon to cut officer accessions by half through ROTC and OCS. The Pentagon does not want to be caught with it’s pants down by having more junior officers than the attenuated post conflict military establishment can handle.


The groundwork for this drawdown was anticipated a decade ago with the clear and present danger that Army Guard and Army Reserve units would displace the peacetime civilian logistics and personnel empire built by the careful transfer of a wartime logistics structure to the Guard and Reserve after Vietnam




The side effects of “The Warrior Ethic” eroticism used to paint anyone not directly involved with small arms something less erotic than “Warrior”. Since the Field Artillery kills large numbers from a distance greater than direct fire weapons, the erotic status of the Cannon Cocker was downplayed and the ration of gunner to grunt was cut in half. Thus, should the Army have to face another People’s Army, the gunners won’t be there to blow them away. God help us if we face an army with big guns.




The downsizing of the Artillery also reduced the logistic foot print of an Army in the field with corresponding cuts in expenditures for ammunition that now can be spent on comfort contractors and hamburgers. The cost (MPA, O&MA, and PEMA
Secondary) of a Vietnam combat division was about one billion dollars (Nixon-Ford) plus or minus half a billion depending on how much ordnance was expended. I was the XO of the US Army Field Operating Cost Agency, Comptroller of the Army during their study of this.



Planning factors for the kinds of war we fought in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam called for an average expenditure of ten tons of ammo per artillery piece per day. That works out to one ten ton truck trailer combo on the road per day per gun. The entire field logistics structure was built around the effort to move artillery ammo.



Well, say the petulant pundit, our guns are more accurate than those old messy guns and we don’t have to shoot so many shells anymore. And, since artillery is so inaccurate, they can’t be used in counter insurgency. Huh? If we don’t need so many shells per target, why not increase the targets per guns? Of more often?



Napoleon once said that a soldier marches on it’s stomach. Someone else said that amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk logistics. Today’s stomach is run by contractors eighty percent of whom are local nationals according to a CRS recent report, most of which support is base operations.



The Soviet Combined Arms Army was 100% truck or track mobile. The counterpart US Corps were about thirty percent wheel/track mobile. Now we don’t have corps support commands where soldiers control their own logistics. Now we don’t teach logistics to soldiers, we teach contract management.




What would the contract Army have looked like in the withdrawal from Chosin, or the breakout from Normandy, or the Normandy across the beach logistics. What would the battles of the South Pacific looked like with Brute and Scoot in charge.



The shape of things to come in the Post Terror War military establishment is before us. The shredding of the Division, Corps and Field Army structures to be replaced by the Senior Executive Service (SES – the old GS 15+) raises the question as to whether we need flag rank officers at all.



Why spend billions grooming field grade officers though schooling and assignment manipulation if they have no real role in war fighting? Or maybe we ought to take a serious look at letting tenured weasels manipulate war for job security.



Gordon S Fowkes

Lt Col, US Army (Ret)

Modular Lies and Distortions

Unit of Action, the BS BCT

I have just read a tepid and distortive allegation of the wonderfulness of the Brigade Combat Team aka “Unit of Action (UA)” in the latest edition (July-August, 2010) and it confirms many of the misgivings I have had concerning this aberration. Read here no further, as I have attached the article or you can get it at:

http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20100831_art007.pdf

This article spends a lot of space trying to refute the allegations of the Field Artillery in their quest to put Humpty Dumpty back on the battlements. The article dismisses the loss of FA command positions with the assertion that there isn’t enough brass around to supply the cannons, and that the BCT can handle what little fire support needs they have. The needs of combat arms career development in promotion timing and opportunity is exposed perhaps unwittingly … or not.

The article cites the organic artillery battalion found in the Armored Cavalry Regiment since the late Thirties was justification that organic tubes were viable. The original reason that cannons were made organic was that the reconnaissance, security and economy of force missions for an Army Corps (XXX) was at a greater distance that the divisional or corps artillery medium guns could cover. The actual experience in Vietnam of these battalions was that they the lost fire direction sophistication found in divisional artillery units. The Blackhorse Regiment’s cannons were used in direct fire or short log over the trees mode.

The article misrepresents that task organization of the combat divisions since the triangular division was adopted on the eve of WW2. It’s predecessor was a “square” division of two brigades of two regiments each. The article uses slight of word in saying that the brigade is the constant. The Square Divisional Brigade had six maneuver battalions plus support instead of the two or three that the BDT has. It’s the new math, I guess.

The article goes on the misrepresent the prevailing doctrine and practice of Army divisions in combat, the field, or in the school solutions of the day:

On a mission-by-mission basis, the division headquarters would briefly attach small, specialized units such as military police, air defense, and military intelligence to subordinate brigades. This transient organizational arrangement reduced the unity of command and complicated operational synchronizatio

In fact, the Division commander (as per doctrine in the entire Army school system from Benning to Carlisle and back, would task organize the division’s assets however he wanted it to meet conditions of METT. This was not limited to “small units” but normally to two to five maneuver battalions of any type of combat units (infantry, mech infantry, armor, armored cavalry, engineers plus the number and type of companies and detachments for combat service support plus the allocation of artillery in Direct Support, General Support Reinforcing and General Support (all terms now forbidden). A division usually had three DS battalions, one General Support battalion of mixed calibers, and a rocket, missile or really big gun battalion.

Artillery is never put in reserve, and when a brigade, regimental combat team (RCT WW2 – Korea), Combat Command (WW2-Korea-JFK armor division) or divisional ROAD brigade was put in a reserve position as was the rule in Armor to retain a big chunk for counter attack, the DS FA battalions were placed is a reinforcing role either under division control or more likely seconded to a DS artillery battalion.

The task organization of the Army division since before there were Army divisions is to assign what ever is available to whomever needs it. I served in the JFK-LBJ era in the 3rd Armored Division (Spearhead) at the Fulda Gap area and witnessed companies, even platoons being switched between battalions and other companies on the fly. As a mech aka Armored Rifle platoon leader, I could expect to change the company I supported at least once a day, sometimes more often as the war game shifted.

My experiences in the 1st Infantry Division in an intelligence capacity with the 2/2 Mech on QL 13 (Thunder Road), the same applied to the battalion task force. I have seen the battalion task force go from two companies of different battalions in the morning to five or another mix by sunset, and back again even at night. This was done effortlessly and was a standard I observed for that level of command even as I returned to the 1st Air Cavalry in I Corps and later in III Corps Tactical Zone (CTZ).

I was a G2 Operations officer in the DTOC of the 1st Air Cavalry Division in which I posted the battle maps, coordinated with the G3, Fire Support, Air Support,, and briefed the Commanding General (MG George I Forsyth) and staff each morning in a duet with the G3 briefer. The G3 briefer and I would coordinate the sequence of events to brief which either began with an enemy event resulting in a combat response (my brief) or the other way around (G3).

During the seven months I served in the DTOC added to the four in the field, the task organization of the division changed in a matter of a few hours. The division had twenty seven organic rife companies which on the map looked like some very serious fleas, hopping from LZ to LZ. Not only did we have 1st Air Cav units, but units from the 25th Infantry Division, 101st Airborne, 1st Infantry, the 14th ACR, plus ARVN and Vietnamese Marines deployed widely to meet divisional needs.

The trick was using the 1/9th Cavalry (three troops of air cavalry and a troop of wheeled cavalry) screening across the division front and in areas between firebases, The 1/9th used “Pink Teams”, an OH6 paired with an AH-1 Cobra. The OH6 zipped around at grass top level, in between trees and around them looking for trail sign of the VC, or hope that the VC fired. One fired upon the OH6 went up, the Cobra pounced.

As the battle developed the Cavalry Troop Commander would send in more aircraft, call in air strikes, or “insert the Blues”, the organic infantry platoon. If this didn’t resolve the issue, the battle was passed up and more assets just “piled on”.

During my tour in Vietnam I saw divisional brigades detached for extended service elsewhere in the country either working for the division or for higher headquarters. The 101st Airborne had a brigade in the III CTZ which we replaced and they returned to 101st control. The 1st Cav routinely detached brigades to cover the Parrots Beak area in III CTZ to work with the 9th Infantry Division and/or the US Navy on the branches of the Saigon River delta in “NavCav” operations.

In the twenty years of service in the Army and Army Reserve after Vietnam, the doctrine of task organizing on the fly was default. In fact, during another one of the computer simulation driven doctrines, the division commander started with a clean slate and allocated battalions to brigades depending on the number and width of avenues of approach in the division’s battle space. The problem with this simulation driven approach had was assuming that the infantry fought in the green, and the tanks in the white. Having served in Germany including Grafenwohr, Hehenfels, and Widlflecken and in large scale winter exercises from Kassel to Nurnberg, I found the woods in Germany were actually farms and that access roads big enough for the M113 and often the M60 tanks traversed the extent of the woods.

The author of this article acknowledges that the design of the UA or BCT was done in computer simulations. The problem with egg head simulation is the lack of fog and happenstance of field or combat operations. And I have a lot of experience in conducting command post exercises from rifle platoon to headquarters of every level of command up to an including Corps, Army, Theater and national level assets (Congress, DA headquarters, and NSA>

There is no solid evidence to prove that the UA/BCT is the basic building block of anything other then personnel. It is a fake, it is a fraud. One cannot become more flexible if one cuts up the whole into bigger parts than before. One cannot meet the changes of METT-TC with the smallest unit is brigade.

And, no one does. Nor have they ever. No one in command or in authority in combat is that stupid. Wars are fought with ad hoc formations, rarely organic clusters, There has always been cross attachments based on METT, even back in the Roman Legions.

Why Do We Need Two Marine Corps?

The Army turns green with jealousy over the existence of the Marine Corps, particularly their elan, panache, esprit de corps, and sang froid (French for cheeky upstart). The Marine Corps stole a march on the Army with the Banana Republic Two Step (Expeditionary Warfare) which folks forget is their traditional role going back to their 1776 raid in the Bahamas to disrupt British operations.

As long as there are American interests that span the Seven Seas, both the Navy and the Marine Corps are front and center in the ranks of the long serving professional force, particularly in those years in between Big Wars which tend to be Bananas and Nuts.

The Army and Air Force understand at a visceral level that the absence of a serious clear and present danger, there is no pressing need for a long standing professional Army or Air Force. What reinforcements needed by the Navy/USMC can be provided by Reserve and/or Guard forces. The fact that no serious big war threat faces the US is impressively documented by the return of Air Force and Army units to Festung Kansas where their forces are closer to the Middle East than either Europe or Asia (Globe please).

What is also damning is the Pentagon effort to Navalize the Army by creating Brigade Combat Teams be deployed like LGBs (Large Gray Boats). Rotating brigades is a copy cat of rotation of ships, except that some ships swap crews and go back to sea.