Colonel (ret) Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of four books and a PhD. He is also Executive Vice President of Burke-Macgregor Group LLC, a consulting and intellectual capital brokerage firm based in Reston, VA. He was commissioned in the US Army in 1976 after one year at VMI and four years at West Point.
His groundbreaking books, Breaking the Phalanx (1997) and Transformation under Fire (2003) has influenced change inside America’s ground forces. His doctoral dissertation, The Soviet-East German Military Alliance, published as a book by Cambridge University Press in 1989.
In 1991, he was awarded the bronze star with “V” device for valor under fire with the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment that destroyed a full-strength Republican Guard Brigade on 26 February 1991. The Battle of the 73 Easting, the U.S. Army’s largest tank battle since World War II is the subject of his book, Warrior’s Rage. The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting.
Macgregor has testified as an expert witness on national security issues before the House Armed Services and House Foreign Relations Committee. He is a frequent guest commentator on radio and television.
President Obama said that he will not put U.S. forces on the ground in
Iraq, but he is weighing other military options. He also pointed to
problems within the Iraqi government and security forces. Judy Woodruff
gets views on whether the U.S. should act in Iraq from Zalmay Khalilzad,
former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor and
retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor.
Background information for the interview tomorrow:
Petraeus
told CNN in March 2008: "We didn't advertise, you know, 'Join the
police force, and we'll give you money.' These guys lined up by the
hundreds because they were sick and tired of what al Qaeda was doing to
their communities, and they knew that they had to stand up and fight."
So what happens when the money dries up? Critics,
"We have to understand that this expedient policy of paying your enemy
is very dangerous. It's fragile, and eventually, hatred of the foreign
occupier overwhelms greed," he said.
In
the years that followed, AQ made amends with their Sunni brothers. Now
they are working in common cause against the Shiaa, beginning in the
very place where the 'awakening' began: Faludjah. Their movement is
spreading. Nothing gains followers
like success, and we can now expect that with the profound successes of
the past couple months, the so-called ISIS is likely to grow much
stronger. But this is the key point:
Had the United States not
intervened in Iraq in 2003, none of this would even be
happening. Second, after intervening if we'd have kept the Iraqi Army
intact and quickly redeployed, again, none of this would have happened.
But at every turn, our four star generals and their political sponsors
made the wrong strategic decision: wrong for going in in 2003, wrong for
staying in 2004, then compounded the first two bad decisions by paying,
training, arming, and then supplying some of the very groups who are
rising to power now in Iraq.
When markets crash, when economic indicators fall by double digits,
investors panic, stocks drop like rocks and governments teeter on the
brink of collapse. Unable to understand the sudden break in prosperity,
the public asks what happened; politicians hold hearings, financial
institutions are investigated and, eventually, “too-big-to jail”
financial wizards go to prison. At least, that’s what happened in the
years after the 1929 crash.
Similar conditions emerge when the United States Armed Forces
are defeated in ways that the government and the media cannot conceal.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, captains and majors like Matthew
Ridgway, James Gavin and Bruce Clarke—men who would have otherwise ended
their careers in obscurity—were promoted, eventually rising to flag
rank in time to command the men who came ashore at Normandy in June
1944, 70 years ago this week.
Yet, in most cases, markets don’t
suddenly collapse and neither do armies. Instead, armies, like markets,
decline gradually. The public seldom notices until it’s too late.
In October 2013, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno claimed
that cuts in the Army’s total annual budget of $125.2 billion,
including $37.8 billion for readiness, made it impossible for an active
Army of 550,000 troops to provide more than two brigades ready to fight.
In March 2014, when 80,000 Russian armored combat forces were poised to
invade Ukraine, the U.S. Army was incapable of deploying an effective
combat maneuver force to Europe or anywhere else.
How did this
happen? How could an Army of 550,000 with 32,000 troops in Afghanistan’s
forward operating bases fail to provide more than two combat-ready
brigades, roughly 8,000 men under arms, to deploy and fight?
The answer is deceptively simple: It’s by design.
In
1950, before the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. Army had 593,167
soldiers on active duty. Despite the impressive numbers, Army divisions
contained hollow brigades and regiments, units with only two-thirds of
their combat power. Armor was almost non-existent and artillery was
sparse. Task Force Smith, a force of riflemen with light, towed
artillery from the Army’s 24th Infantry Division, was quickly defeated
and overrun by 90,000 attacking North Korean troops with 300 T-34/T-85
tanks in July 1950.
But the architects of the defeat were not
President Harry Truman, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson or the U.S.
Congress. In 1950, the architects of defeat were the four-star generals
who wanted an Army designed to provide jobs for generals, not to fight.
To cope with the crisis the hollow Army created, Truman added 400,000
soldiers to the Army, including thousands of World War II veterans.
Fast
forward to the contemporary Army and it bears a discomfiting
resemblance to the Army that deployed to fight in Korea. Today’s Army,
with an annual base budget, in fiscal year 2014, of $129.7 billion and a
force of 550,000, is incapable of fighting a 21st century opponent with
armies, air forces, air defenses and missile forces. And yet, when you
include the estimated $30-40 billion for “overseas contingency
operations,” today’s Army easily outspends the Army that by 1953 totaled
1 million men and fielded 201,000 soldiers in Korea.
Today,
given the structure of the contemporary Army, it’s doubtful that $134
billion—the budget of the 1953 Army, in 2014 dollars—would buy that same
level of force. Consider that during World War II, 11 million American
soldiers were commanded by just 4 four-star generals. Today, the Army of
550,000 has 11 active-duty four stars, each of which comes with massive
amounts of overhead. This makes no sense. If the Army were a rowboat
with nine passengers, four would steer, three would call cadence and two
would man the oars.
The solution is obvious: Reorganize and reform the U.S. Army to
provide more ready, deployable combat power. Consolidate more combat
power under fewer headquarters. Flatten the command structure and reduce
the overhead. It’s not rocket science. The Japanese Self Defense Force
has already done it.
While the U.S. Army’s overhead absorbs 31 percent of its
officer and soldier strength, the Japanese general officer overhead
consumes only 6 percent. With a budget and manpower roughly a third the
size of the U.S. Army’s, the Japanese ground force’s combat formations
of 6-7,000 field more ready deployable combat power than the U.S. Army
does.
Russia’s Army has moved in similar directions. Today, the
country that fielded more divisions than any other nation in history has
disbanded its divisions. Instead, it fields 80 5-6,000 man combat
formations under generals. By 2019, the number is expected to rise to
200! These formations report directly to a three-star corps commander
who is expected to command joint operations.
Here’s the lesson: Shrinking the U.S. Army to fewer divisions
and brigade combat teams, without any commensurate increase in fighting
power or cost savings, is the wrong answer. Realigning brigades with the
10 divisions of the 1990s Cold War Army is a step backward, not
forward. Congress must intervene in the process and compel fundamental
change or face another Task Force Smith in the not-too-distant future.
Fortunately, the blueprint for action already exists.
As outlined in Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation under Fire,
my two books on military transformation, an Army consisting of
capability-based expeditionary fighting formations would contain 51
combat formations of 5-6,000 troops under brigadier generals. Organized
around the critical functions of Maneuver, Strike, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and Sustainment (logistics),
these combat formations would be designed to operate autonomously on
land like warships at sea, all within the ISR-Strike framework of
aerospace and naval power under joint command.
Inside an Army of
420,000 soldiers, the resulting fighting force would consist of four
corps equivalents of 55,000 men each, each corps equivalent ready to
surge in part or in total from a joint rotational readiness base, not
from a Cold War-era, “tiered” readiness posture as they are today. The
reorganized Army’s overhead would be reduced from 31 percent to 8
percent of the force.
Such an Army would also be aligned with air
and sea transport for rapid response to the unexpected: a Korea-like
emergency; a Sarajevo-like event; or deployments to support allies
already engaged in fighting, not counterinsurgency or nation building.
Events in Ukraine and the Western Pacific point to future wars that will
not resemble the interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, they
will involve conflicts as lethal as Korea or World War II, fights for
regional power and influence that overlap with interstate competitions
for energy, water, food, mineral resources and the wealth they create.
The
Army four stars, active and retired, will collectively groan, “It’s too
hard and will take too long to change the Army.” Well, it is true that
building combat power takes time. But it’s useful to remember that only
eight months after Gen. George C. Marshall received the executive order
in March 1942 empowering him to reorganize the War Department, he was
able to land a brand new Army on the shores of North Africa.
The
point is simple: The U.S. Army is unraveling. As Peter Drucker told
businessmen in the 1990s, “If you want something new, stop doing
something old.” Congress must act. There is no need to fill Arlington
Cemetery to capacity.
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