The PDF File (see link below) was a paper written by Doug Macgregor in 1991
that was translated to Hebrew and published in Maarachot the IDF Prime Journal.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Going around Congress
February 5, 2014 - 02:17 PM
By Morgan Gilliam
Macgregor interview Feburary 4, 2014
Budget cuts to the Defense Department have put top priorities on the back burner. The Pentagon could find a way to work around the setbacks.
Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), executive vice president of The Burke-Macgregor group, discussed that and other issues.
Short URL: http://wj.la/LzhLmq
No American National Defense Staff: No Coherent Defense Strategy
Like
the British in the run-up to WW I, Americans spend a great deal of time
congratulating themselves on defeating enemies that are the
contemporary equivalents of the Sudanese Tribesmen at Omdurman in 1999 while dismissing (as most Europeans did before 1914) the possibility that large, powerful, modern Nation States and their supporting allies would ever actually engage in war. Asking people to ponder the seemingly incomprehensible—Real War—is
not rewarded with much attention on the hill or coverage in the press.
Here is a statement of part of the problem from this month’s AFJ:
U.S. casualty lists since 9/11 show that more than 6,700
Americans were killed and more than 45,000 wounded in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Yet in contrast to the major battles of World War II,
Korea, and even Vietnam, the vast majority of these casualties were
caused by improvised explosive devices during mounted and dismounted
patrols, sniper fire, hit-and-run ambushes, accidents and “friendly
fire”
from some Afghan troops.”[i]
The point is simple. When it comes to military power, we Americans are living in fantasy land.
We
are the only modern scientific-industrial state without a national
defense staff and a chief of defense with the authority to act on behalf
of the president and SECDEF to determine strategic military
requirements, plan and conduct military operations. Instead, we revel
in the absence of national leadership and strategy, an environment that
encourages destructive inter-service fights for resources, needless
military redundancy and political tampering on the Hill with defense
spending for self-enrichment and political benefit. Like the British in
1914, we’ve got something akin to a war cabinet, but no national
defense staff capable of assisting the President and the SECDEF with the
execution of their responsibilities.
Like
the British War Cabinet in 1914, our appointed and elected leaders
referee the fight among the services. In the run-up to 1914, the
competition was between the Army and the Navy with the Navy routinely
capturing the resources. Today, the inter-service competition is won by
the service or services offering the best spending opportunities to
congress and industry, preferably F-35 like programs that are too big to
fail. As a result, too few people are willing to accept or even
address the vulnerabilities, let alone, the irrelevance of their pet
rocks.
Instead,
we are maintaining an Army that now consists of more wheeled armor and
infantry than it does of survivable, tracked mobile armored firepower.
We are investing in a weak, infantry-centric Marine Ground Force that is
designed to assault defended beaches, a mission Marines have not
executed for 60 years. We are funding prohibitively expensive aerospace
programs like the F-35 and ship building programs like the LCS or slow
diesel mini-carriers for the Marines that are excessively vulnerable to
any opponent with a modicum of capability and add no useful capability
to the Navy. Meanwhile, we are investing defense dollars in ASB’s
precision-guided munition salvo for use against a continental opponent,
China, that will absorb the strikes like a sponge absorbs water.
Without
defense reform led by people other than the usual suspects inside the
beltway, the American people are screwed. It’s that simple. Cheers,
Doug
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