Is Great Satan's Armored war fighting doctrine out of sync with her skills? Specifically - are the skill sets needed to do another Thunder Run - the fundamentals of fire and maneuver - on hand and ready to rock?While das unausprechlichen COIN külten has seduced tons of cats gearing up for the small, long wars (all magically located in the CENTCOM Gap), one of Great Satan's premier panzer experts has resisted the sirens call in a sustained effort to reinvigorate the panzer franchise:
"The Armor Corps in the American Army is gone, it is no more.
"The Army has become decidedly infantry centric. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was a fighting kind of infantry centered army. But instead it is an infantry centric Army grounded in the principles of population centric counterinsurgency and Rupert Smith's view of war in the future as "wars amongst the people."
"To be sure the American Army will be told to do lots of things from winning hearts and minds in the Hindu Kush, to passing out humanitarian relief in the troubled spots around the world, to nation building in Iraq.
"But first and foremost it must be an Army grounded in combined arms competencies. This must come first, and not second or third after fuzzy concepts as “whole of government approach” and building emotional relationships with local populations."
Whoa!
"Listen up, everyone: we are no longer a fighting Army. To all you veterans of COP Keating and Wanat -- you must have been doing nothing else but touchy-feely tea parties and absolutely no combat whatsoever."
COINtra Colonel Gentile does have a point though - COIN is what Dr Condoleezza Rice proclaimed about Iraq eons ago - a generational commitment.
"Nowadays military victory is subsumed under a never ending process of Counterinsurgency operations. Military victory in this sense has become the operation and its existential, never ending nature."
COIN Ops may never come to pass in future wars without an old school panzer blitz like Rock of the Marne did in '03 - annihilating the Hammurabi Panzer Grenadier Division enroute to Thunder Running Baghdad and revolutionizing panzer doctrine on the fly - injecting an nigh invulnerable armored force into forbidden enemy urban sprawl and taking down a regime from the inside out.
Pic " Great Satan will have to make the ability to learn to deal with messy, uncomfortable situations an integral part of her war fighting and regime killing couture" with "Beast from the East - Type 98"
Wait'll they get a load of the Type 99's...
ReplyDeleteBIG
TROUBLE,
R
I wouldn't be surprised if our Armor capability was in the toilet. During my war we lost a whole lot of our capabilities because all the money and training went into smaller unit jungle warfare. And by, say, 1970 there were very few with any combat experience that didn't get in in the Southeast Asian War Games.
ReplyDeleteSo, who are going to be the E-7s next year? Five years from now? Who are going top be the O-3s to O-6s next year? Five years from now? Who are doing the basic training now? Five years from now?
I went over the bow ramp in May of 1965 into Chu Lai very well trained and ready. For Korea and WW2. That's what I was trained for because that is what the men who trained me knew. Worse, though, when I came back after my first tour, they were STILL teaching Korea and Iwo Jima.
God help us all if China decides to do something about all those extra young men they have as a result of their one child policy in the next five years. The Thunder Run was seven years ago. Our then mid level Armor Officers are mostly retired by now, along with the senior NCOs. Our senior NCOs and mid level officers today? Well trained to be cops in a tough neighborhood.