Date with History

Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting Wednesday, September 5 7:30 pm

Doors open 6:45pm Free Parking and Admission For more information call: 630-260-8187

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Experts warned Americans that U.S. forces would suffer heavy casualties at the hands of Iraqi forces who allegedly knew how to hold ground from years of fighting Iranians. But the “experts” were wrong.

Late in the afternoon of 26 February 1991, the lead cavalry troops of “Cougar Squadron,” the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, charged out of a sandstorm and caught Iraq’s Republican Guard Corps in the open desert along the North-South grid line of a military map referred to as the “73 Easting.” Taken by surprise, the defending Iraqi armor brigade was rapidly swept away in salvos of American tank and missile fire in what became the largest tank battle in the history of the U.S. Army since World War II.

Warrior’s Rage. The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting plunges the reader into the fight and its aftermath, explaining how a victory won decisively by soldiers on the battlefield was lost by a U.S. Army chain of command remote from the fighting, one that never appreciated the power of its own armored force or the enemy’s weakness.

Colonel Douglas A. Macgregor (Retired) served 28 years on active duty in the U.S. Army, beginning as a cadet at West Point. After the first Gulf War ended, he began to formalize the lessons he learned making the 2nd ACR such a self-reliant and efficient fighting force with all the combat arms of aircraft, artillery, resupply and intelligent command & control working together based on cross-country mobile, armored platforms as the maneuvering force. He began to write and innovate new formations and organizations so the entire U.S. Army could benefit from the Battle of 73 Easting. Over the years however, a thorough examination of this epic battle from an insider's perspective had not been written as the "safe" official account and video, along with some brief write-ups did not cover the geostrategic consequences and the importance of the battle for future defense understanding so sound decisions could be made. The disaster that has followed in Iraq ever since, has made it an urgent matter that he write this book to set the record straight.

Turkish military convoys deploy at Syrian border noted in the Chicago Tribune.

The Turkish General Staff (GS) has the plans, the prepositioned stocks, the equipment, the forces and the resolve to execute the intervention. In truth, many are anxious to do so. Prime Minister Erdogan has successfully populated the Turkish Army with Sunni Islamists who share his Ottoman aspirations to lead the Sunni Muslim Middle East and Central Asia.

However, Erdogan is clever and recognizes the criticality of exercising restraint and patience. He will not act in Syria directly if he can avoid it. Right now, he’s helping to orchestrate the rebellion and doing so very effectively. He has the unconditional support of the Peninsular Arabs who are inclined to trade U.S. protection for his against Iranian encroachment. To this point in time, the Turks have focused on crushing Kurdish rebels and insurgents, but, until recently, refrained from actively supporting Sunni Islamist rebellions.

The Sunni Islamist “awakening” in the region has changed that condition putting them into the fight through proxies in Syria. Given Assad’s deal with the Kurds to expand their autonomy and freedom of action, the Turks may yet decide it’s time to end the Assad regime once and for all creating a satellite state for themselves in Damascus the way Tehran has created one in Baghdad. Refugees in the region are an enormous problem. If they cannot go home, they are a burden to the host country. The Palestinians are the prime, but not the only example. Erdogan is acutely sensitive to this potential for instability.

Again, Erdogan understands it all, but he has no wish to put Turkish national cohesion and economic strength at risk in Syria if he can avoid doing so. Erogan does not want war with Iran, but he is interested in containing and emasculating Tehran, a Shiite regime he privately loathes as much as Riyadh does.

In this sense, Syria is a proving ground for various kinds of subversion conducted by Saudi Arabia and Turkey to achieve their strategic aims. For the Iranians, subversion comes naturally and has worked brilliantly in Iraq where a series of Army Four Stars created the conditions through the misuse of American lives and power for Iran’s success. The Saudis are not quite as good at subversion preferring to invest money in religious and social activities to cultivate Sunni Islamist thinking and behavior. For the moment, they are providing money and arms to Sunni Islamist forces in both Syria and Iraq. Even the arms flowing out of Turkey into Syria are largely funded by Riyadh.

To be blunt, Erdogan is the most impressive man to lead Turkey since Attaturk. His grasp of strategy and international politics is unsurpassed.

If the Turks do go into Syria, the Israelis will confront a very dangerous situation indeed, one they cannot easily master. This will not lead immediately to war with Israel, but Turkey is the regional military superpower with the national cohesion, economic strength and military power to dominate its “near abroad” including Syria. To be frank, it is the Turkish led Sunni Muslim alliance, not Iran, the Israelis should fear. Unfortunately, the Israelis have overplayed their hand on the Iranian issue; a grossly inflated threat none of the Europeans privately fear any more than the Russians do. As Admiral Fallon, former CENTCOM Commander said, “They (the Iranians) are ants. We can crush them anytime.” Fallon was and remains right. In contrast to the Turks, the Iranian military capacity to project any serious military power beyond its borders is nil.

Iran is weak, far weaker internally than Americans realize. It presents no tangible security threat, particularly given its fragile dependence on oil, 70 percent of which goes to China, Korea and Japan. The idea that the Iranians would willingly block the Strait of Hormuz is just not true. It would not only harm the world economy, it would destroy Iran’s economy and put the regime at real risk of collapse. Without oil revenues, Iran along with its Arab neighbors cannot import the food it needs to feed its population.

The Israeli civil and military leadership is understandably nervous and reinforcing security along its Northern Border, but Israeli military and intelligence leaders want nothing to do with direct military intervention in Syria. The IDF leadership knows the perils of involving themselves in neighboring squabbles. They intervened in Lebanon and were compelled to ignominiously withdraw leaving Hizbollah, a creature of Israeli occupation (much like al Qaeda in Iraq was a creature of US occupation) behind them.

We Americans should also stay out. We cannot shape the outcome in Syria. We simply cannot compete for influence in this Middle Eastern snake pit as we discovered in Iraq. In the end, these dysfunctional societies will struggle for decades internally and with each other. At some point, they will emerge under presumably Turkish rather than Iranian leadership. If and when they do, we can deal with them on terms that favor us, from a position of political, economic and military strength.

Meanwhile, the economic backwardness and enormous populations of the Muslim States leaves them little maneuver room in the world arena where, like it or not, to survive they must do business with the West. When they do, we hold all of the cards.

Cheers, Doug

Turkish military convoys deploy at Syrian border

Umit Bektas Reuters

11:35 a.m. CDT, July 30, 2012

KILIS, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkey sent at least four convoys of vehicles carrying troops and missile batteries to the border with Syria on Monday amid growing concern in Turkey about security on its southern frontier, witnesses and news reports said.

It was the latest in a series of deployments in the region in recent weeks. There is no indication that Turkish forces will cross the border, and the troop movements may be strictly precautionary in the face of spiraling violence in Syria.

Two separate convoys of about 30 vehicles left a base in Gaziantep province to head south to Kilis and were now stationed along a fenced-off section on the border with Syria, witnesses said.

"This is part of a training exercise," said a high-ranking officer in a second convoy of nine vehicles with armored personnel carriers, tanks and other military vehicles.

A second officer in the same convoy said the troops would remain on the Turkish side of the border.

The state-run Anatolian news agency said ammunition and military vehicles were brought by rail to the town of Islahiye in Gaziantep from the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun.

In a fourth troop movement, military vehicles, including tanks, were moved to Akcakale in Sanliurfa province, further east from Kilis and Gaziantep, and were now stationed at the Syrian border, Anatolian said.

Turkey, a member of NATO, has conducted in recent months a number of troop deployments along its 911-km (566 mile) border with Syria, which is in the throes of an insurgency seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a former Assad ally, is now among his most vocal critics, calling for him to step down from power amid the 16-month uprising that has killed thousands of Syrian civilians.

Tensions between the neighbors hit a peak on June 22, when Syrian forces shot down a Turkish military reconnaissance aircraft, killing two pilots.

Kilis houses a major refugee centre for Syrians fleeing the violence at home. About 44,000 refugees are in Turkey.

Erdogan last week warned the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an armed militant group that has launched attacks inside Turkey, against setting up camps inside northern Syria.

That area, which has a large Kurdish population, has been spared much of the violence seen elsewhere in Syria, but Turkey is worried the PKK could exert influence there amid a power vacuum and threaten Turkish security at the border.

The PKK has waged a 27-year campaign for autonomy in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast, and more than 40,000 people, mainly Kurds have died in the conflict.

(Writing by Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Diana Abdallah)

Copyright © 2012, Reuters

Hampden-Sydney College

http://www.hsc.edu

Douglas Macgregor, Ph.D., recently spoke at Hampden-Sydney College

Syrian Fiasco

General (ret) Barry McCaffrey, MSNBC’s favorite four-star military analyst, is telling Americans how easily the modest application of American air power from carriers could bring down “the murderer” Assad. After all, McCaffrey argued, Damascus is barely 50 miles from the Mediterranean. Predictably, McCaffrey caveats his remarks noting it’s premature to act today. However, when the timing is right, McCaffrey insists, the U.S. should act in concert with our allies and ‘friends’ in the region.

Given the fragility of our economic condition and the disastrous strategic and fiscal consequences of our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan the idea of intervening yet again in the region, this time on "humanitarian grounds," may seem incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it’s not.

McCaffrey is a good bellwether for what the bipartisan elite is likely to do. He’s one of those rent-a-generals, ready and willing to serve the cause of military intervention regardless of Administration or ideological justification, especially if it’s profitable like Iraq and Afghanistan. And, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta already insists the President can send forces based on "international authority" without seeking explicit Congressional authorization beforehand.

The point is America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite of Demoplicans and Republicrats is eager for a new American military intervention and Americans should ask why? There really are lots of reasons.

First, just because there’s no real prospect for secular democracy to succeed anywhere in the Muslim World, least of all in the aftermath of an Islamist takeover, does not really matter. Ultimately, decision-making inside the Beltway is shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by the need to do so or a rigorous analysis of how U.S. military action does or does not serve U.S. national interests.

Second, the bipartisan elite subscribes to the idea that whatever military action the U.S. government initiates, it is inherently justified on moral grounds, even if, as in the case of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the military action turns out badly for the U.S. In Syria, the moral justification is a “massacre.” But whether the perpetrators were Ba'athists, Muslim Brotherhood splinter groups that have fought the Ba'athists since the '50s or one of al Qaeda’s independent franchises is unknown. For the Bipartisan interventionists it probably does not matter.

Third, knowing there is no appetite for military action that involves the use of American ground troops, the bipartisan foreign policy elite wants to intervene in Syria using other peoples’ soldiers. The idea is to act under the guise of NATO with the help of Turkey’s new Sunni Islamist leadership. Why not?

Working with the large, powerful, well-equipped and disciplined Turkish Armed Forces beats the hell out of relying one more time on the hapless French, bankrupt Italians, or worn-out Brits as we did in Libya and other places. Happily, in addition to the Sunni Arab Islamists determined to eliminate Assad’s secular regime, the growing Sunni Islamist majorities that are ejecting secular leaders from power from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean will celebrate the invading Turkish Troops as liberators.

But inviting the Turks to invade is not without risk. 21st Century Turkey is no longer governed by secular, pro-Western elites with the support of the old Turkish General Staff, most of which now resides in Turkish jails. Instead, Turkey's "democratic" Islamists are ambitious, angry and contemptuous of the U.S., Europe and Israel.

More important, Turkey’s Islamists promote a revival of the pre-WW I Ottoman Empire with the goal of restoring Turkish dominance over the Caucasus and Central Asia including oil-rich Northern Iraq. In contrast to Iran, a weak, divided and dysfunctional society, Turkey is economically strong and united. With almost 60 percent of its population under the age of 30, Turkey also possesses the largest and most powerful armed force in NATO after the United States.

What does this mean? Well, with the removal of Assad through U.S. assistance Israel will be compelled to watch as Turkish Forces arrive on the Golan Heights. In the years ahead, a regional Turkish-led alliance of Sunni Islamist States will emerge from the Nile Delta to the Caucasus reinvigorating the challenge of fighting a multi-front war, something Israel has not faced since 1973. It would also raise fears inside an effectively disarmed Europe, a region with millions of Muslim Turks inside their borders.

As witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, wish-based ideology of the kind the bipartisan elite employs to justify intervention makes the retreat from irrational policy pronouncements impossible even when the American population finally discovers they make no sense. Target sets for air strikes do not constitute a strategy. Messrs.’ Romney and Obama should keep their cool.

Unless, Syria’s behavior presents a clear and present danger to the vital strategic interests of the American People, the U.S. Government should live with the unpleasantness and move on. In the case of Syria, the United States should definitely move on.

Colonel (ret) Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran and the author four books on military affairs. His most recent is Warrior’s Rage from Naval Institute Press.

Douglas Macgregor, PhD

Building a True 21st Century U.S. Military

When it comes to reform of the U.S. military establishment, we’ve tinkered on the margins far too long. We are currently in the ninth version of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) in ten years; the main process for determining our military requirements. Marine General James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had it right when he said, “It has been gamed to death — we’re going to throw it away.”

Unfortunately, like bad weather, the failed model always persists under new labels. Endless studies and analysis from GAO, assorted bvlue-ribbon panels, and legislation like the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act, all attempt to correct dysfunctional behaviors. But they ignore the structural flaws in an anachronistic World War II-Cold War force.

Thanks to an acute lack of clarity in national military strategy, service “equities” (core bureaucratic interests) fill the void. In the absence of accountability for repeated failures in big-ticket modernization programs likes the Army’s $20 billion Future Combat System, loyalty to one’s service and the promotion opportunities it brings trumps all other considerations.

Why? A big part of the answer is too much of the civilian national-security hierarchy is invested in the defense department status quo, and they are leery of challenging the generals and admirals in charge.

Instead, the civilian appointees sit on the sidelines while the four-star service chiefs adjudicate their respective service’s “interests” in the highly-routinized Quadrennial Defense Reviews.

Bottom line: the retreads from previous administrations, Republican or Democratic, that populate Washington’s think tanks, places like the Kennedy School at Harvard, and the business-development offices of the defense industries, always default to the status quo.

These men and women will cut and trim the military status quo, leaving Americans, in the long run, with a less-effective — and ultimately more-expensive – force. It’s a force that sacrifices current and future war-fighting capability, and risks the scientific-industrial base vital to America’s defense.

It’s time to scrap the fiscally-unsustainable illusion that the U.S. needs military services forged in Cold War molds. An early 21st Century version of President Eisenhower’s concept of national defense — solvency and security -– is desperately needed. Today, below the four-star level inside the combatant commands, we’re less Joint and more single-service in operational terms than we were 10 or 20 years ago. The cost to the taxpayer is astronomical — and we cannot afford it.

We need to do now what General Eisenhower would do: create a framework that leverages ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), strike, maneuver and sustainment across service lines, under permanent joint command and control, inside the combatant commands. We’ve got to go through the process of modeling, testing, evaluating and establishing this new paradigm for development and employment of America’s military forces that will operate within a reduced number of regional unified commands, getting more bang for the dollar.

Today’ military hierarchy knows this approach makes sense for the future, but it remains invested in yesterday’s paradigm. As Alfred Thayer Mahan said: “No service can or should be expected to reform itself!” Mahan was right. It’s time to implement the framework — a 21st Century national military framework — that will do the following:

– Reduces the bloated ranks of flag officers and senior civilians across the services.

– Alters World War II and Cold War policies and force design.

– Replaces service-specific “component” command and control with true joint force C2 on the operational level. It’s a way to dismantle the multitude of superfluous single-service headquarters currently residing inside the combatant commands that the nation no longer needs, nor can afford.

– Reduces the growth and cost of technology programs like the Global Command and Control System, Distributed Ground Control System , etc. that end in Service unique identifiers –N, -AF, A and –M.

– Scrutinizes the return on investment in expensive oversees garrisons and the way we currently conduct “presence” missions.

As these slides demonstrate, implementing this framework would reverse the trend of overpaying for the military the U.S. needs.

Then-Admiral Mike Mullen was right when, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he declared: “When you’ve had the money you haven’t had to make hard choices…we have lost that.” The hard choices ahead will meet resistance from the Pentagon bureaucracy, as well as from other stakeholders, Congress, industry, etc. But we cannot afford to squander the “opportunity” that future defense reductions represent.

The resistance can only be intelligently overcome by a national imperative to adjust our national-security strategy to a new paradigm that’s been evolving for decades. After all, we still have to defend the country now, and cultivate new capabilities for its defense in the fiscally-constrained years that lie ahead.

Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and defense consultant, is the author of Breaking the Phalanx and Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting.

Link to http://battleland.blogs.time.com

Strategic Implications for the Army in the Post‐ 2012 Election Environment

A presentation by
Douglas Macgregor, PhD
Colonel (ret) U.S. Army
Executive VP Burke-Macgregor Group LLC
Command and General Staff College
Intermediate-Level Education class
Fort Lee, Virginia
15 May 2012

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