Douglas Macgregor responds

We surely don’t need the 1942 Marine Corps the Lieutenant Colonel accurately  describes, a force that is roughly equivalent to the Jordanian Army albeit with about a third of the armor (tanks and armored trucks LAVS) that the Jordanians have.  Today’s Marine Corps, like the U.S. Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps is a light infantry force already dependent on air strikes for survival, let alone effectiveness.  What this officer describes is an even less-capable and less-relevant force.

Misled by America’s colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this officer thinks maneuver is impossible, that concentrations of force on any scale larger than a squad are all impossible. This is worse than misleading. It’s wrong.  Army and Marine Forces need to build self-contained combat forces designed for high mobility with armored protection and accurate, devastating firepower, but these formations need not come in WW II configuration. Putting Marines on ten speed bikes with digital radios and laser designators is not a solution inside today’s lethal battlespace. In fact, the easiest target to find and kill is a dismounted, unprotected human being. SEA DRAGON in 1997 demonstrated both the vulnerability of his concept, as well as, its ineffectiveness. The officer should go back and study the findings.

Static forces like the ones he advocates are easy to identify, target and destroy.  During the Kosovo Air Campaign, it was the Yugoslav Army’s mobility that kept it intact and ensured it would not be simply decimated from the air as so much of the Iraqi Army was in 1991. In 78 days of incessant air strikes by the best air force in the world, the Yugoslavs only lost 13 of more than 300 tanks! Thermal blankets reduced thermal signatures when stopped, and armored forces moved constantly making targeting extremely difficult. When integrated with competent air defenses (Yugoslav Air Defense were never degraded below 83 percent effectiveness) these forces remained in a state of readiness to repel any ground assault.

What planet is this man on?  In a real war with a real enemy equipped with air defenses, air forces, armies and some modicum of coastal naval defense, small teams of Marines, along with SOF, SEALS and other theoretically stealthy forces in smaller than squad strength will end up being arrested or simply executed on the spot as the SEALS in Panama that Panamanian Forces captured were in 1989.

Field Marshal Slim raged against the stupidity of the Chindits, brave men who were either killed or ruined physically in a series of pinprick raids behind Japanese lines that changed nothing on the ground.  Even Hitler was appalled by the terrible casualties his paratrooper sustained in their airborne assault on Crete, a victory that cost more than it was worth.

But there is a need for what former CMC, General David M. Shoup called a “Light Strike Force” that goes ashore to seize key points ashore for brief periods, a force that can conduct punitive raids and protect U.S. citizens.  The question is how to equip this force--a force arguably smaller than today’s MC.

Americans should appreciate what SOF capabilities offer along with their extreme limitations, but we should increasingly rage against the kind of foolish non-sense outlined in this article.

ForeignPolicy.com
March 26, 2013

Can The Marines Survive?
If America's amphibious force doesn't adapt, it'll be dead in the water.

By Lt. Col. Lloyd Freeman

On one day in 1965, a large sortie of U.S. Air Force F-105s dropped over 600 750-pound bombs on the Thanh Hoa Bridge, just 70 kilometers south of Hanoi. The result was the loss of five U.S. aircraft and a complete failure to destroy the bridge. Amazingly, the bridge would withstand over 800 more sorties from U.S. aircraft in the next seven years and receive the moniker "The Dragon's Jaw" because of its seeming indestructability and the nearby air defenses that stymied U.S. forces. Finally, in 1972, a sortie of F-4Ds carrying the new Paveway laser-guided bomb destroyed the Thanh Hoa Bridge.

Although not obvious at the time, the advent of the Paveway marked the beginning of a dramatic transformation in U.S. military technology that would change warfare forever. The revolution in precision munitions that began then has so accelerated in recent years that enemy forces can no longer operate in formations and in mass. They simply present too big a target.That, in turn, means that the days of U.S. corps, divisions, and brigades maneuvering on a battlefield with tanks, artillery, and motorized/mechanized infantry are numbered. Our surveillance capabilities allow us to sense everything on the battlefield. Any sizable vehicle formation, or single vehicle for that matter, can be destroyed with the click of a button half a world away. On today's battlefield, movement means death.

A lively debate is taking place within the Pentagon these days over how to adapt to this new reality. The Air Force and the Navy have come up with a new concept called Air-Sea Battle, which focuses on integrating naval and air forces to defeat adversaries with precision weapons backed by robust intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets. Simply put, the Air Force and the Navy are embracing new technology and have come to understand that with an integrated approach they should be able to defeat an enemy that is hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away.

By contrast, the marines -- and the Army -- are still trained in infantry tactics that would be recognizable to a World War II vet, organized to fight big land battles with heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers. There's an elephant walking around the Pentagon these days and everyone is trying to ignore it. No one wants to talk about the fact that land forces, as currently organized, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. This is not to say that there is no use for ground troops. They are needed, but in future conflicts they will only play a secondary role. Land forces will no longer win wars. Computers, missiles, planes, and drones will. If the marines want to survive, we're going to have to adapt -- and fast.

Struggling for Relevance

The marines are a door-kicking service, designed to breach enemy territory and establish an [amphibious] entry point for the Army's strategic land capability. [EDITOR: Army has its own door-kicking forces for airborne entry points: Rangers and Paratroopers] But the U.S. military's development of unmanned aircraft, combined with stealth technology and unmatched ISR capability, makes it almost impossible for an enemy today to significantly impede the landing of U.S. forces on a beach or at a port. Forcible entry no longer requires landing forces -- it takes precision strikes, coordinated by special operations forces as needed. But if the door is going to be kicked in by a cruise missile, an unmanned aircraft, or other platform delivering precision munitions, why does the Marine Corps insist on maintaining such a large amphibious forcible entry capability based around the same marine who stormed ashore at Tarawa? Because to argue that the United States does not need an [amphibious] forcible-entry force would be to question the very necessity of having a Marine Corps. Unfortunately, that is the question the Corps must now answer.

The marines could have pushed for change 10 years ago. Following the 9/11 attacks, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approached the marine commandant and asked if the marines could take on a special operations role within the Department of Defense. For the secretary, it seemed logical. The Marine Corps is designed to operate independently when necessary; it can sustain itself with a well-oiled logistics organization, and it even has its own air wings. At the time, most special operations forces resided in the Army and in Navy Special Warfare and there was an emerging shortage of operators. The Corps could have filled the gap in special forces that existed right after 9/11.

The Marine Corps leadership balked at this proposition. A compromise with Rumsfeld did lead to the creation of Marine Special Operations Command, which now operates under U.S. Special Operations Command, but it was slow to get off the ground and has had trouble establishing credibility within the special operations community. The Marine Corps then focused on fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next 10 years. With Iraq over and Afghanistan drawing to a close planners can now focus again on what the United States will need in a possible unlimited war. But the Marine Corps -- and the Army -- have been caught flat-footed, unable to truly grasp the superiority of U.S. technology and how ground forces must adapt to harness its potential.

So what should the Marine Corps do?

First, it needs to recognize that future wars will be very different. Firepower will be brought to bear by unmanned surveillance aircraft and by small, highly trained teams. These teams will be fast, exceptionally physically fit, able to operate independently, but also able to operate with larger forces when necessary. Teams will be inserted by parachute, landing zone, or over the horizon from the sea. They will be backed up by a robust logistics tail and continuous, round-the-clock air support that provides security to compensate for their small size. Air support will consist of fixed-wing assets at sea, national assets based around the world, and fleets of unmanned aircraft that constantly surveil each team and the area in which they operate. That means teams are unlikely to be surprised or ambushed, and when threats are identified, they can be quickly neutralized by precision munitions launched from drones, manned aircraft, and ships. The teams will be able to conduct precision operations and a variety of raids, or hundreds of operators can be employed in coordination with each other during high-intensity conflicts.

In short, the future of warfare is in special operations, and the Pentagon will need a lot more operators. The future of the Marine Corps is as a special operations force that functions in a sustained combat mode.

Second, the Marine Corps needs to start thinking in terms of what the military calls "jointness" -- the ability to operate with other services. The Department of Defense is now joint through and through, and yet the Marine Corps still prides itself as an expeditionary force, able to deploy with limited external support. That has been a strength of the Marine Corps, but today it may be a liability. One problem is that the Marine Corps does not own most of the precision weapons platforms that are needed to operate on future battlefields. It needs to accept that it will have to rely on its sister services (particularly the Air Force) for ISR and close-air support to ensure the viability of small teams. Yes, there is probably some benefit to having a marine pilot supporting marine ground forces, as we were always told at The Basic School. But is a Navy or Air Force pilot really unable to adequately support marines on the ground? Just maintaining the command, control, communications, computers, combat systems, and intelligence structure that will eventually connect every marine on the battlefield will require Air Force platforms. The Marine Corps will not be able to maintain the data connectivity needed to manage the future battlefield. Instead of fighting jointness, the Corps should articulate how it can be leveraged to make marines even more lethal.

Third, the Corps will have to completely change its approaches to doctrine, training, and equipment. Organizing for land battles or amphibious forcible entry is outdated, because U.S. firepower can obliterate any enemy force that dares to occupy the battlespace. Quite simply, there will be nothing for tanks and large troop formations to fight. The future belongs to small teams who will not be supported by air power and precision munitions, but who will actually support air power and precision munitions. The doctrine of close-air support will be reversed, turning into "close-ground support" whereby marines will be a supporting component in a much larger campaign of missiles and guided munitions.

To operate in small teams that can coordinate a massive precision-engagement campaign, marines will have to change the way they fight and train. The ethos of "every marine a rifleman" will shift to "every marine a JTAC," or joint terminal air controller. A marine or team that cannot communicate on the battlefield will die. Marines will manage and become experts on dozens of different communications platforms ensuring double and triple redundancy. The battlefield of the future will be wired with data pipes bigger than the Alaskan Pipeline. If commanders today worry about information overload, they haven't seen anything yet. Every warrior on the battlefield will have access to the common operating picture, able to call in dozens of precision strikes from multiple platforms at once. Graduation exercises at infantry school will be based around scenarios that test the ability of the individual and team to operate in austere environments under physically grueling conditions -- while maintaining continuous communications over several waveforms. The Crucible will look like a day at the fair.

Organizationally, the marine rifle squad as we know it today will no longer exist. Each squad will have a signals intelligence specialist, data and communications specialists, demolitions experts, one or two corpsmen, a sniper, and two or three machine gun teams -- only one or two team members may be certified "JTACs" but all must know how to coordinate the use of precision munitions and air assets via multiple radio and data waveforms. From the lowest-ranking member of the team to the general officer leading the joint task force headquarters, live video feeds will stream continuously, giving every warfighter a clear, concise picture of the battlefield. Rarely will the marine of the future use his personal weapon; "rifleman" will become an antiquated term.

Elite Again
Leadership organization and manpower management will all have to be addressed if the Marine Corps is to conduct a significant re-organization. Marines operating in small teams will probably require over a year of training, probably more. A normal four-year enlistment might not be cost effective. Force structure may have to be reduced in order to ensure there are enough recruits with the qualifications and physical abilities to make the cut as operatives in the new elite marine teams. Suffice it to say, the changes will hit every area of the Corps from recruiting to training to organization to equipping. The Marine Corps has been historically infantry-centric; to remain so could mean its eventual irrelevancy.

We will never fight another war in the mud. However, special forces can currently operate only for short periods of time; they cannot operate in a sustained mode in the face of significant opposition. The Marine Corps is in a position to fill the gap that currently exists within the special forces community. The Marine Corps must recognize the change that is sweeping the U.S. military and be the trailblazers we have always been when it comes to innovating and providing the most bang for the nation's buck. Failure to act could mean increasing irrelevance for a force that has been one of the United States's most storied and effective fighting organizations.

Lt. Col. Lloyd Freeman is a marine infantry officer and has served three combat tours, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He currently serves as the Deputy Executive Assistant in the Expeditionary Warfare Division of the U.S. Navy.

Army Lessons Observed…But Not Learned

Link to article

By Douglas A. Macgregor

 The logo of the Center for Army Lessons Learned

Genghis Khan allegedly advised his sons that “occupations turn soldiers into jailers.” Whether or not the great Mongol general said these words is hard to confirm, but he definitely practiced what he preached. Genghis Khan conquered and controlled more of the world’s landmass than any man in human history — and he did it without tying down his armies in costly occupations. 

This achievement seems to pass unnoticed among the Army’s generals.

In a Defense Daily article entitled “Army Senior Leaders Consider Strategic Landpower AT UQ 2013 Seminar,” Ann Roosevelt quotes Army Lieut. General Keith Walker as saying, “For example, an important lesson from World War I is that the allied failure to occupy a defeated Germany allowed militarism to survive, he said. The German people never felt themselves defeated, thus World War II came within two decades.”

Walker is expressing a widely held view in the senior ranks: that the U.S. Army must be postured to repeat the multi-trillion dollar folly of Iraq by repeating the disastrous mistake of occupying countries when there is no need to do so.

These neocon inspired statements exemplify the ignorance and the delusional mentality of the Army’s senior leadership.

The real lesson of America’s participation in World War I — a war that cost the United States 318,000 casualties in only 110 days of fighting — was for the U.S. to stay out of the war. Once in, Woodrow Wilson’s neocon-like commitment to an ideological crusade, mired in the worst sort of wishful thinking, resulted in a postwar treaty and a set of international financial arrangements that guaranteed a second world war that might otherwise had been avoided.

When U.S. Army forces did occupy Germany in 1945, the Army did so under conditions that favored success: the Germans knew that 15 million Soviet troops were poised to advance westward spreading terror, rape and communism in their wake. Even more important, we were occupying people like ourselves, people with the culture, history and economic foundation to rapidly return Germany to the path it was on before the Depression and Hitler changed direction.

These points aside, the more profound difficulty with Walker’s statement is the obvious unwillingness to come to terms with the devastating failure of our military occupation of Iraq.
In this connection, the jury is not out, it’s in:

The occupation of Iraq was a strategically self-defeating operation from the moment we dismantled Iraq’s army, police and administrative apparatus, and insisted on treating any Arab hostile to the foreign Christian army on his soil as an al Qaeda sympathizer.

Instead of recognizing the futility of imposing Western concepts of governance, social order and economics with the use of American soldiers on deeply troubled, non-Western societies, the Army generals want to repeat this failed policy in perpetuity. The lesson that whenever military occupations drag on for years, military power becomes an engine of destruction not just for its intended enemies; but for its supporting society and economy too.

The Army generals that emerged from the catastrophe of Vietnam learned this lesson and harbored no such illusions.
 
Most Americans will simply dismiss Walker’s remarks, but they should not. Walker’s statements mirror a mentality in the senior ranks that presents a clear and present danger to the American people. Why?

There is an inexhaustible supply of future “Iraqs” waiting to happen if only the American people will sleep quietly while the Army four stars empty the U.S. Treasury yet again.

First, there is Pakistan, a state that from its inception was torn apart by competing tribes, sectarian violence and corruption. Blanketing Pakistan with troops would not only be costly and provide further reinforcement for the jihadist cause, but any intervention in Pakistan puts U.S. troops at risk of exposure to nuclear strikes.

Second, there is North Korea, a failed state poised to implode rather than attack the South. The North Korean forces can’t even hit Japan with a nuclear warhead, much less the United States. North Korea’s current displays of belligerence are part of a desperate ploy to persuade the U.S. to sign a treaty with North Korea underwriting its continued existence, and bad behavior, in perpetuity.

Fortunately, China’s growing frustration with the failed North Korean state suggests a readiness to cooperate with Seoul to manage North Korea’s inevitable implosion. If the delicate process of managing North Korea’s disintegration is left to the Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, regional war will be averted and Korea reunified with the United States in quiet support of Seoul’s interests.

But China will not tolerate an aggressive U.S. military posture aimed at intervention north of the DMZ.  Any such plan should be shelved immediately.

And, there are always Syria and Mexico. Syrian society is at war with itself, with roughly a third of the population struggling to escape the dark age of Sunni Islamism that is engulfing North Africa, much of the Middle East, and now threatens to engulf Syria. An American military intervention in Syria would definitely rid Damascus of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s secular dictator, but U.S. military intervention would also set the stage for an Islamist alliance from Algeria to Anatolia, presumably led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his nation’s Islamists, powerful advocates for intervention in Syria. Erdogan is the same man who publicly describes Zionism as a crime against humanity.

Closer to home, there is Mexico, a country with domestic ingredients similar to those in the Middle East: widespread corruption, criminality, and a large, impoverished underclass. As in Egypt, these conditions are conducive to convulsive, violent unrest, disorder and instability that American military intervention could exacerbate, but not alleviate.

Of course, not all of the Army’s senior leaders are so easily beguiled by the neocons. Many privately have another purpose in mind: to preserve a bloated general-officer overhead and a large, amorphous mass of soldiers and Marines on active duty. These points are no less dangerous because they reflect a complete failure to recognize that the future will be different from the recent past. It’s also evidence for another serious malady widespread inside the armed forces: single-service thinking and behavior.

Walker’s interpretation of history ignores the criticality of integrating capabilities resident in each of the services to achieve strategic objectives as economically and rapidly as possible. All wars are catastrophes, but long, inconclusive conflicts involving hostile occupations are national misfortunes. Occupations negate maneuver. They make it impossible to achieve the same objective in warfare as in wrestling; to throw the opponent by weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance without risking self-exhaustion.

Unfortunately, the Army generals provide the same answer again and again: flood the battle space with American soldiers and muddle through.  This mentality is buttressed by the delusion of limitless national power. It failed in Vietnam and it failed in Iraq.

“In war,” British army officer J.F.C. Fuller observed, “It is absolutely true were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.” The point is in war, quality counts, perhaps more now than at any time in history, given the complexity and lethality of military technology. It is the quality of America’s professional soldiers and the technology they employ the Army must cultivate and develop, not masses of troops.

Change in military affairs points to a capable, professional Army of lethal self-contained formations organized around Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance, Strike, Maneuver and Sustainment, not masses of citizen soldiers mobilized for industrial warfare. These formations must be designed from the bottom up for employment within the framework of the Joint Force under Joint Command.

For the indefinite future, these “forces-in-being” must be ready to deploy on short notice to conduct Joint punitive military operations to neutralize or destroy unambiguous threats to U.S. national-security interests wherever they are and whenever they emerge. However, long, unrewarding and expensive occupations on the Iraq model are things Americans want to avoid, not repeat.

Finally, the Army’s four stars are expected to expand, not constrain, the nation’s range of strategic options. The disappointing revelations in this article suggest the opposite is the case.

A Matter of Mindset: Iraq, Sequestration and the U.S. Army

CPL. JEREMY ROSS
The M-1 tank proved itself in the battle of 73 Easting 22 years ago.
 

Fear-mongering is a common practice inside the Beltway.

Sequestration is simply making things worse.

Twenty-two years ago, a chorus of political pundits and generals engaged in fear-mongering, warning the American people that U.S. ground 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 fear-mongering pundits and generals were wrong.

At about 4:10 in the afternoon of 26 February 1991 — 22 years ago today — the two lead cavalry troops of an 1,100-man Armored Cavalry Battle Group, “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 “73 Easting.”

Taken by surprise, the numerically superior Iraqi armor brigade, supported by mines, artillery and infantry with anti-tank weapons, was swept away in salvos of American tank and missile fire in what turned out to be a battle of annihilation.

However, instead of exploiting Cougar Squadron’s stunning success, an attack with almost no U.S. losses, the Army generals and colonels remote from the battlefield ordered Cougar Squadron to halt, to break contact with the enemy, and withdraw behind a meaningless limit of advance, the 70 Easting. Cougar Squadron did not withdraw. It stayed and fought firing 1,100 artillery rounds and hundreds of MLRS rockets at the fleeing Iraqi enemy, but its attack was halted. Contact thus broken, the Republican Guard Corps’ main body continued its withdrawal over the Euphrates River.

The Iraqi Army did, indeed, flee from Kuwait. But there the truth ran out.

Most of the Republican Guard Corps, the 80,000-man organization that kept Saddam Hussein in power, was allowed to escape in defiance of clear orders to destroy it.

Central Command chief Army General Norman Schwarzkopf’s orders to Lieutenant General Frederick M. Franks, the VII Corps Commander, were not carried out: “Pin (the Iraqi Republican Guard) with their backs against the sea, then, go in and wipe them out…Once they’re gone be prepared to continue the attack to Baghdad.”

A month after the battle of 73 Easting, in a 27 March 1991 interview with the New York Times, Schwarzkopf admitted, “Major Republican Guard units had `bugged out’ before the main attack by American forces and crossed the Euphrates River…”

Unfortunately, thanks to the determination of politicians, journalists and generals to fill the vacuum of public knowledge and understanding with illusions of victory, the Desert Storm myth became institutionalized.

In the absence of any meaningful political oversight, the Army’s four stars were allowed to transform the Cold War Army into a smaller replica of itself, ignoring the immense power of the mobile armored force that smashed the much larger Iraqi Republican Guard and the potential for the development of a new, more potent, post-industrial Army.

What those of us involved in the fighting along the 73 Easting understood was the enormous fighting power that could emerge when a mix of mobile armored platforms, integrated with manned and unmanned aircraft and sensors, provided the coverage needed to exploit the formation’s accurate, devastating firepower and mobility. We saw the potential for new, mobile armored platforms ranging in weight from 25 to 40 tons to become the foundation for a dispersed mobile warfare design, explicitly organized for decisive operations inside the Joint force.

And, here is the tragedy. If both the critical weaknesses in U.S. Army generalship displayed in 1991 had been identified and remedied — not deliberately concealed — and if the implications of the 73 Easting had been objectively studied and exploited — the outcome after 9/11 might have been different.

Instead of waiting months for the XVIII Airborne Corps to show up with light-infantry forces dependent on air strikes for survival and effectiveness, mobile armored forces smaller than divisions, but larger than brigades — self-contained, cohesive combat formations led by young, energetic brigadier generals, men selected for performance, not careerism — would have been in Afghanistan early to ensure Osama bin Laden’s capture and al Qaeda’s destruction.

It is customary in America to blame the politicians—and they are rarely blameless—but the record shows that whereas bad policies can often be saved through effective implementation, the reverse is rarely true. In short, political rhetoric is a fine thing, but it is what the general officers on the spot do, or fail to do, that counts.

The record is not pretty.

The 2003 combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the disbandment of the Iraqi Army and State, the misguided policy of using American soldiers to establish a secular, Western-style democratic state in a region where for reasons of culture and economics it has no chance of surviving, and the Sunni Arab rebellion against the U.S. military presence, cost the American people 36,000 battle casualties and at least $3 trillion.

The much-vaunted “surge” in 2007 turned out to be the final act in a tragic series of events that replaced a secular Sunni Arab dictatorship hostile to Iran with a Shiite Islamist dictatorship tied to Tehran.

Predictably, no one in the House or the Senate cares to discuss Iraq.

For the moment, it’s far more rewarding to dwell on the errors in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including one U.S. ambassador.

Unfortunately missing is the critical insight that our political and military leaders must stop wasting lives and money in attempts to cure culturally dysfunctional societies. Missing is the crucial lesson that soldiers and Marines cannot drag backward societies through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

And, it means remembering what the Army generals did, during and after Desert Storm, when they not only rejected the sea change in warfare, they preserved the anachronistic industrial-age status quo.

When the Army four stars protest the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration, Americans should remember the four stars’ resistance to dispersed maneuver and nonlinear operations in a world increasingly shaped by WMD; their strident opposition for 22 years to new methods of command, fundamentally new modernization parameters, and innovative organizations for combat.

What difference does this make?

The difference will be profound when the fight is with an enemy that can fight back, an enemy with armies, air forces, air defenses and coastal naval power.

At that point, no amount of courage and competence at the soldier’s level will compensate for deficiencies of general officer leadership and the wrong equipment set or, for that matter, years of neglect in the halls of Congress.

Douglas A. Macgregor is executive vice president of Burke-Macgregor Group, LLC. He is also a retired Army colonel, decorated combat veteran and the author of four books on military affairs, including Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting.

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/02/26/iraq-sequestration-and-the-army/#ixzz2MbAUN8KA

Hagel: A Different Kind of Defense Secretary

Former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination and inevitable appointment as Secretary of Defense is stirring controversy in the Senate.

It should.

Hagel’s appointment signals the end of 20 years of interventions that began with Somalia and ended with Iraq and, very soon, Afghanistan.

Hagel’s appointment also makes certain that defense spending will be significantly reduced to pre-2000 levels or lower. How that spending and the massive bureaucratic structure it supports will be reduced is unknown, but the proverbial handwriting is on the wall.

In this sense, Hagel’s appointment trumps the ideology of permanent conflict, a belief system promoted by neocons inside the Beltway that allows politicians and generals to define failure as success while spending money without any enduring strategic framework relating U.S. military power to attainable strategic goals.

To hear Hagel’s critics in the Senate, Hagel’s offense is the result of his determination to see the world as it is, not as the capital’s ideologues would like Americans to see it.

Hagel’s first sin was to reject the much celebrated 2007 surge in Iraq as a serious strategic blunder. His skepticism was no doubt informed by his personal experience with open-ended missions to install democracy at gunpoint in a backward society called Vietnam.

As it turned out, Hagel was right. It seems that his real sin was his determination to be guided by Winston Churchill’s admonition that “an exaggerated code of honor leading to the performance of utterly vain and unreasonable deeds should not be defended however fine it might look.”

Other than killing more than a thousand Americans in uniform, along with seriously wounding thousands more, the crowning achievement of the surge was the permanent installation of Iranian national power and influence in Baghdad in the form of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, Tehran’s preferred regime. Iraq’s current government is nothing more than a shabby democratic facade, one that barely conceals an Iranian-backed Shi’ite Arab dictatorship in Baghdad.

Hagel’s second sin appears to be his unwillingness to wage war on behalf of the Israeli government against Iran, a state that spends less on defense than Greece. Not to worry, Hagel is in good company.

Though as pro-British as his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt had no intention of declaring war on behalf of another state, least of all the faltering British Empire. More important, he would not make Woodrow Wilson’s mistake and commit millions of Americans to an ideological crusade that promised no tangible strategic benefit to the American people.

Between 1939 and 1942, FDR resisted Churchill’s considerable powers of persuasion, providing only what assistance Britain needed to survive and nothing more. When Adolf Hitler turned on the Soviet Union, his closest ally until June 1941, FDR knew the Nazis had overextended themselves. He could afford to build up American strength while the Nazis and communists exhausted themselves in a war of self-destruction.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler foolishly declared war on the U.S. as a party to his treaty of alliance with Japan, FDR acted. Again, his response was calculated and, with the benefit of hindsight, correct. Moving prematurely to challenge the German military machine at the height of its powers would have meant 10 times the number of American dead we lost, if not outright defeat.

Hagel’s caution regarding the use of force against Iran is equally justified. Negotiating with an Iranian leadership that has one foot in the seminary and the other in the bazaar will not be easy, but it is more likely to serve American strategic interests than brute force.

Hagel’s third sin is reportedly his lack of personal experience inside the Defense Department’s bureaucracy. As one Washingtonian put it, “The man running the Pentagon is in charge of one of the biggest and most complex bureaucracies in the world, and there is nothing in Senator Hagel’s background that says he can do the job well.” Really?

Presumably, this inside-the-Beltway expert regards the last 20 years of wasteful and expensive procurement programs — from ship building to body armor, with an endless succession of ineffective military operations — as evidence of brilliant stewardship in the office of Secretary of Defense of American blood and treasure.

The truth is, federal auditors, poring over the Defense Department’s conflicting financial statements, missing data and accounting discrepancies, have thus far been unable to account for hundreds of billions of dollars, even as Congress continues to fund the defense establishment. The loss or waste of billions of defense dollars each year is a condition the Government Accountability Office says has afflicted the Pentagon for decades. If Hagel is not part of this disastrous problem, maybe he can be part of the solution.

Finally, FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower were men whose judicious application of American blood and treasure flowed from an appreciation of the country’s political, economic and military limitations as well as its potential.

All three men were imperfect by today’s lofty public standards. They reached the White House in different ways and with different political parties, but all were able to distinguish reality from fiction in the conduct of war and the preservation of peace.

Hagel is a man very much in the mold of these men, being unpretentious and parsimonious with American blood and treasure. As a result, he has the moral courage to make choices that serve the national interest and mission accomplishment. Even if that means — as he demonstrated under fire in Vietnam — taking action that jeopardizes his own well-being.

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/01/08/hagel-a-different-kind-of-defense-secretary/#ixzz2HS8Qp4BT

2013: Time For US Strategy To Get Real

AOL Defense
December 27, 2012
Strategy & Policy

2013: Time For US Strategy To Get Real

By Doug Macgregor

As the old year dies, AOL Defense has asked its expert Board of Contributors to look ahead at the next (click here for the whole 2013 forecast series: ). Today we hear from Col. (retired) Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran of the first Gulf War, prolific author, and a passionate skeptic of conventional strategic wisdom.

In his book Only the Paranoid Survive, Andrew Grove describes a strategic inflection point as a point in time when the balance of forces shifts from the old structure and the old ways of competing to ones. As Grove writes, successful business structures adapt and thrive. Archaic structures that fail to adapt, decline and die.

What Grove describes is precisely what the incoming Secretary of Defense and his (or her) team must do in the opening months of 2013: Recognize we've passed a strategic inflection point and adapt the armed forces to new realities, fiscal and military, while extracting real $ savings in the process. After all, if businesses can do it, so can the American defense establishment, right? Actually, it's not so easy.

Hindsight tells us that machine guns and artillery would kill millions of infantrymen during World War I and that command of the airspace would be vital to the outcome of battles on land and sea. Frankly, it never required much imagination to figure out that the Arab Spring would soon turn to winter with the replacement of a secular dictator like Mubarak with a Sunni Arab Islamist like Morsi.

Today, it seems incomprehensible that anyone in or out of uniform could miss these realities. Why, Americans ask, could hindsight not have been foresight if viewed through a better, more focused lens? Yet, since the end of World War II, the political and military leaders of the United States have established a record of recurrent misjudgment and misperception of strategic reality from Saigon to Baghdad.

To be fair, the human ability to see into the future is always limited, but foresight of any kind is impossible if the lens cannot focus. Whenever the rich record of human cultural, historical and economic experience is dismissed in favor of wishful thinking, a world comes into view that does not really exist; the kind of world described in 1992 by the late Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, where the US Armed Forces are employed to "punish evil doers."

Inside the Beltway, the lens of wishful thinking is further deformed by the unending struggle on Capitol Hill with the myth that only generals and admirals can or should formulate the concepts governing the application of American military power or military doctrine. In the last four years, this myth has transformed the president, as well as the current Secretary of Defense, into door mats for the four-stars. It's why many Americans in and out of uniform think the United States is doomed to experience a military disaster on the scale of Pearl Harbor, or the Communist attack on South Korea in June 1950, before the post-9/11 paradigm of neo-Wilsonian nation building and counterinsurgency are tossed onto the "trash-heap of history." The skeptics have a point.

On the Hill, the cocktail level of familiarity with real warfare, informed by an unhealthy dose of nostalgia for a post-World War II world order that is crumbling fast, is certainly not helpful. Combine these problems with the unreasoning fears of dysfunctional, backward Muslim societies that have no scientific-industrial capacity; with the grossly exaggerated dread of China, a country riddled with corruption and a ruling class obsessed with keeping the lid on unrest amongst 1.3 billion people; and the picture worsens.

However, like it or not, the incoming Secretary of Defense has no choice but to project technology and conditions into the future while they develop armed forces today that will be used a decade or more after their conception. The question for 2013 is whether the incoming defense team will chart a new course in defense?

Will the new team simply reinforce the pursuit of global dominance with the use of military power to control and shape development inside other peoples' societies? Will the new defense team devise a military strategy that does less with less, while concealing as much as possible our trimmed down military posture from the American public?

Or will the new team begin framing a new national military strategy, one tied to realistic, attainable political and military goals? Will the new defense team treat the American military establishment as a hedge against wars we don't want to fight? Will it foster a military establishment designed to maintain our market-oriented, English-speaking Republic, a Republic that upholds the rule of law, respects the cultures and traditions of people different from ourselves and trades freely with all nations, but protects its commerce, its vital strategic interests, and its citizens?

Put another way, will the incoming defense team admit that it is truly a matter of strategic indifference to the American people which Asian nation controls the Spratlys in the South China Sea, so long as our freedom of navigation, our ability to pursue commerce, is not limited or obstructed?

Whatever actions the new Secretary of Defense and his team undertake, it will not be easy to align the structure and capabilities of American military power with strategic reality, but it is still essential they start doing so in 2013.

Building a Smarter, Smaller Military

National Security

Building a Smarter, Smaller Military

By Douglas A. Macgregor

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/12/06/building-a-smarter-smaller-military/#ixzz2EJXJOfyQ

Fact: The fiscal crisis will compel reductions in defense spending. More important fact: How do we do it in ways that make sense?

Economists argue that economic crises do nations a service by clearing the way for innovation, more-efficient production, and faster growth. If that’s true, crises also compel us to see with brutal clarity, what tasks and capabilities are critical and what is simply “nice to do.”

With these points in mind, when it comes to cutting defense, there are really three options:

Option 1. Let the Pentagon’s military bureaucracies drive outcomes. The division of effort among the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines compels its uniformed leaders to view all national policies, even conflict itself, in terms of what the policies attain or fail to attain for the specific Service. As a result, the uniformed military leadership is inclined to reject any serious appraisal of alternatives that changes the military status quo (little if any money saved).

Option 2. Politicians can tinker on the margins of the military status quo. Congress avoided confrontation with the four stars in the aftermath of Desert Storm and made the old industrial age force smaller, while retaining a bloated command overhead. Senior military leaders paid for expensive, often failed modernization programs by downsizing soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, leaving intact the enormous bureaucratic command overhead with its Cold War legacy of numerous single-Service headquarters (modest money saved).

Option 3. Politicians can leverage the fiscal crisis to reduce redundant bureaucratic overhead, streamline defense investment and, ultimately, cultivate greater war-fighting capability. These measures mean fewer regional unified commands, fewer four-star headquarters and more capability integration across Service lines. In 1947, General of the Army, Dwight David Eisenhower made the salient point: “Separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever.”

GETTY IMAGES
Ike was right then…and now.

Eisenhower was right. Sixty-five years later, it’s time to get on with the job and harvest the major financial savings generated by a smart retooling of the U.S. military.

Option 3 is the only option that allows us to see with brutal clarity what’s required and it promises both savings and increased capability. Given that “Jointness” and the unity of effort it is supposed to deliver is largely an illusion, a national reset of defense policy and national military strategy is vital.

This reset must produce an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum use of increasingly constrained resources.

Put another way, lawmakers and the White House should view defense cuts as a once-in-a-century opportunity to harmonize defense investments with the evolutionary trends in military technology, organization and command structures, as well as, the nation’s need for fiscal discipline.

It’s time to craft a new military strategy and a new force designed for the post-industrial age.

The top priority in U.S. military strategy is economic prosperity and the technological superiority that economic strength creates. Conflict avoidance is vital to this outcome.

President Eisenhower’s military strategy led him to invest in capabilities that would make American involvement in wars less likely, conserving America’s military, economic and political reserves of strength in the process. In this regard, open-ended missions to install liberal democracy inside failed or backward societies, missions that are prohibitively expensive and likely to fail, must be discarded in favor of U.S. foreign and defense policies that promote both solvency and security.

Constrained budgets demand armed forces that fight together, creating real unity of effort, and its corollary: American military power that is disproportionate to the actual size of the armed forces employed. This statement describes a force designed to maximize war-fighting capability, a force organized around Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR), Strike, Maneuver and Sustainment.

In an operational military context, economy is about integrating existing and future capabilities within an agile operational framework guided by human understanding. It’s about combining ground maneuver forces with ISR, Strike and Sustainment capabilities from all the Services.

The question is how to do it?

Here are some thoughts:

– Reduce redundant command-and-control overhead and establish Joint Force Commands.

Standing up permanent Joint Force Commands (JFC) in a reduced number of regional combatant commands bring together the aerospace, naval and land warfare expertise from the four functional areas – ISR, Strike, Maneuver and Sustainment — in one Command within a relatively flat, joint command structure inside the regional unified commands.

DOD PHOTO / ERIN A. KIRK-CUOMO

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta meets Dec. 5 with combatant commanders over breakfast at the Pentagon.

Sir Winston Churchill told his wartime cabinet, “Failure in war is most often the absence of one directing mind and commanding will.” Perhaps, Churchill’s point explains why from March 1942 to April 1945 when there were 15 million men in the Army and Army Air Corps the U.S. had only four four-star generals to command them: Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold. Today, the U.S. employs 23 four stars to command a combined Army and Air Force of roughly 879,000 soldiers and airmen. The situation inside the Navy and Marines during World War II was similar.

When there were roughly 4.2 million men in the Navy the U.S. had four four-star admirals to command them: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King, and, until March 1945, 485,000 Marines were led by a three-star named Vandegrift. Today, the U.S. has 10 four-star admirals and five four-star Marine generals for a combined force of roughly 500,000. The small number of commanders elevated to four stars during the Second World War reflected the understanding that no subordinate in an organization should report to more than one boss, that lines of command authority must be clear and uncontested.

Joint Force Commands address this requirement by consolidating the numerous two-, three- and four-star single-service commands into three-star Joint command centers that capitalize on the vast array of strike forces networked with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. However, permanent three-star Joint Force Commands are not a gimmick to justify massive new investments in technology.

GETTY IMAGES
The brass-to-grunt ratio is out of whack.

Joint Force Commands are really intellectual constructs with technological infrastructure, the lynchpin in the shift to a 21st Century force centered on integrated operations and Joint military command structures. The faster that command structures can accurately assess a situation, make “good enough” decisions on what to do about it, and act decisively to deal with it, the more lethal and agile the force becomes.

In future conflicts and crises involving capable opponents, there won’t be time in future conflicts for the “pick-up game” that cobbles Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine headquarters together, the approach we used in Iraq and Afghanistan where there were no opposing armies, air forces, air defenses or naval forces. In a confrontation with a great power like China, by the time the U.S. gets its operational construct and “command and control” act in order, one or more great powers will defeat or delay attacking U.S. forces and achieve their own strategic aims. In this strategic setting, competing single-Service commands and ad hoc Joint Task Forces are burdens, not assets when the size of general-purpose combat forces and the fiscal resources to support them is diminishing.

– Build mission focused capability packages for Joint employment.

The fiscal crisis in defense spending creates the opportunity to both economize and expand the Nation’s range of strategic options while reducing costs by constructing a 21st-century scalable, “Lego-like” force design, and a design structured for warfare inside an integrated ISR-Strike-Maneuver-Sustainment Framework.

The future points towards smaller, but more lethal force packages under one-star officers designed for missions of limited duration and scope, not mass armies created for territorial conquest and occupation. Building mission-focused force packages designed to deploy and fight under one star command or the military equivalent of “Legos” that can be assembled into larger joint operational forces is something aerospace and naval forces can do now, but the ground force cannot. Maneuver, Strike, ISR and Sustainment formations become clusters of joint combat power under brigadier generals or rear admirals (lower half).

GETTY IMAGES
Future wars require lighter, more agile forces

Generals in the Army and Marines are resistant to Joint Command structures that do not ensure their forces operate under Army or Marine Command Headquarters. But in a world where the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction makes future operations by large concentrations of ground troops dangerous, especially operations from large, expensive fixed installations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deployment of large, unwieldy headquarters ashore to manage WW II troop formations is a liability. Instead, the ground force can make virtue of necessity and create battle groups under one-stars organized around ISR, Strike, Maneuver and Sustainment ashore, formations that operate like ships at sea, mobile, self-contained, and capable of independent operations under Joint Command.

Organizing forces to deploy and fight under Joint Command is the next logical step in the evolution of warfare beyond the ad hoc coordination of Federal Agencies or combined arms, air-ground cooperation, air-sea battle, amphibious and special operations. Eliminating the colonel or captain level of command also offers additional advantages. Not only does the one-star/three-star command structure allow more time for officers to become educated and qualified for Joint operations – something current Service career patterns obstruct – it can also speed promotion to one-star rank.

– Create a predictable revenue stream and job creation inside America’s defense industries through Joint Optimized Defense Investments.

There is plenty of evidence that functionally organized military establishments that integrate capabilities across Service lines while simultaneously eliminating unneeded overhead are not only less expensive to operate and maintain, they also reduce duplication of effort with the potential to create sustainable profitability inside America’s defense industries.

The topline in defense investments is going down in real terms, and the pressure to reduce costs will drive government clients to squeeze profits as well. What is needed is a new business model that stabilizes investments, increasing capability returns while offering sustainable profitability. The new business model is intertwined with the implementation of the ISR-Strike-Maneuver-Sustainment Framework.

America’s defense establishment desperately needs stability in modernization programs along with clarity in technology forecasting, the kind of forecasting that promotes a real and substantial return on research and development. Aligning defense investments with evolutionary trends in technology, organization and command structures is an essential feature of creating sustainable profitability. Applying the ISR-Strike-Maneuver-Sustainment Framework as a methodology for investment planning and programming to support informed choices as constrained budgets compel force optimization is an important part of this process.

Thirty years passed between the outbreak of World War I and the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Americans should expect at least as much change in defense technology over the next 30 years. As a result, binding military modernization efforts through massive programs intended to stamp out hundreds or thousands of ideal designs over two decades of production runs is the road to ruin as seen in programs like the Future Combat System.

ARMY
The Future Combat System: A road to ruin

The point is simple. What works now must triumph over “unobtainium.” Industry can deliver what’s required, but the military leadership must establish attainable requirements.

The Bottom Line

Welding American military power into a coherent operational framework is essential to save money and rationalize modernization, as well as extract greater capability from the existing force.

Action to achieve this outcome, however, requires tough, courageous decisions from lawmakers and the White House, and this won’t be easy.

As Benjamin Disraeli quipped over a hundred years ago: “Courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.”

Yet, shrinking resources always means a destructive inter-Service fight inside a fragmented defense policymaking process. Numerous active and retired four-stars, along with their political allies on Capitol Hill, will argue furiously against any change in the way the armed forces are commanded, funded or developed. They will always insist that critical capability gaps could emerge with unknown consequences for American national security.

This form of resistance springs from the natural instinct to protect one’s Service, one’s self, and more especially, the business model and war-fighting status quo one knows.

COLUMBIA
Mahan: Military services can’t reform themselves

Such behavior validates Alfred Thayer Mahan’s view that “No Service can or should be expected to reform itself.” Still, the risk of doing nothing, of living in the past and extending the life of structures and thinking the nation no longer needs, is far greater and, prohibitively expensive.

In the hundred years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Britain fought many small conflicts against weak enemies within its overseas empire, actions that did nothing to prepare the British armed forces for the great power wars of the early and mid-20th Century. As H.G. Wells recorded laconically, “I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation – in the British Empire, America, France, and indeed throughout most of the civilized world – thought that war was dying out…”

When the British entered World War I, they discovered what it meant to fight a determined enemy with capable armed forces.

Americans should not fall victim to similar illusions.

Building effective military power takes time, resources and imagination.

To be ready for the world that will emerge in the aftermath of today’s global economic crisis requires change in defense to begin now, not in 10 or 15 years. By then, Americans will be confronting powers that opted to exploit the coming “inter-war” period and wisely adjusted to the evolutionary trends in armed conflict.

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/12/06/building-a-smarter-smaller-military/#ixzz2EJWtr5uh

Armed Aerial Scout Helicopter: To Be Or Not To Be?

AOL Defense
December 5, 2012
Armed Aerial Scout Helicopter: To Be Or Not To Be?

By Richard Whittle

WASHINGTON: Reports that the Army has finally figured out whether the Hamlet of aircraft programs, Armed Aerial Scout, should be or not be are greatly exaggerated. Army aviation acquisition officials have looked at what birds in hand industry can offer to replace the service's aging OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters and have decided they'd prefer to go after a bird in the bush. They're still trying to decide, though, whether they can actually afford one.

The Army has been struggling for more than 20 years to come up with an aircraft to replace the Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. OH-58, which first went into service in 1969 and has been upgraded several times. Rumors were reported last week that a decision had been made to buy a new Armed Aerial Scout after a Pentagon meeting. At that session, Army aviation officials briefed the service's assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, Heidi Shyu, on the results of flight demonstrations of helicopters manufacturers could offer for the armed scout role. They also presented options and a recommendation, but no decisions were reached.

On December 18, aviation officials are to present their findings and the recommendation they decide they can afford to the vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III. Sometime in January, they are to take an official Army request to Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall.

"A decision will be made next year," said Army spokesman Dov Schwartz, declining futher comment.

In the flight demonstrations, conducted last summer and fall, five manufacturers flew prescribed maneuvers with helicopters they might offer if the Army were to replace the OH-58D. Some participants were certain their aircraft impressed Army observers sufficiently to inspire a new start, but AOL Defense can report that what Army officials saw left them unenthusiastic about buying existing helicopters for the armed scout mission. Even if outfitted with additional combat gear, the aircraft left Army officialsunconvinced they should invest the $10 million to $15 million apiece they have estimated it might cost to buy 425 new Armed Aerial Scouts.

As a result, aviation officers are studying whether the service should develop a more advanced version of some existing aircraft and thus get a scout able to fly faster and farther and hover with efficiency at higher altitudes, among other attributes. The answer depends partly on how much that would cost, how it might affect the helicopter industrial base, and how it might mesh with the Pentagon's joint Future Vertical Lift (FVL) initiative.

FVL is a science and technology program to develop four classes of advanced aircraft – light, medium, heavy and ultra -- that can take off and land vertically. Under existing plans, the first of the four to be developed would be a medium-lift aircraft known as the Joint Multirole, a vehicle that could be adapted for various missions.

"What they want to do is kind of hold what they've got and go for the next generation capability," an industry source who follows the Armed Aerial Scout issue closely said of Army aviation leaders.

Within the past eight years, two previous Army programs to develop a Kiowa Warrior replacement were cancelled for cost and other issues. The low-observable, futuristic RAH-66 Comanche was killed in 2004 after about 22 years and $7 billion of development. The ARH-70A Arapaho, an attempt to militarize Bell's successful 407 Ranger, was scrapped in 2008 after its costs soared. After the ARH-70A was cancelled, the Army studied its alternatives and decided the only way to meet its future armed scout helicopter needs would be to develop a new manned aircraft because an unmanned vehicle couldn't fly close air support missions. Army aviation leaders, however, decided they couldn't afford such a new start.

Instead, they decided on a plan that Maj. Gen. Timothy Crosby, program executive officer for aviation, described publicly as an "appetite suppressant." They would upgrade their OH-58Ds to an OH-58F model so those wouldn't become obsolete, conduct a service life extension program (SLEP) on the Kiowa Warriors later to keep them flying, and wait for the FVL to provide technology for a new Armed Aerial Scout. Now, however, following the flight demonstrations, Army officials are studying whether a wiser course would be to pursue a more advanced aircraft sooner.

"They'll look for a dramatic improvement in capability," the industry source predicted.

Theoretically, that might mean a compound helicopter based on Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.'s X2 Technology Demonstrator or on Eurocopter's equally futuristic X3 hybrid. Both combine rotors with propellers to fly about twice as fast as an OH-58D can, and both have proven their configuration works, at least on a demonstrator. A helicopter-airplane hybrid tiltrotor able to take off and land vertically and fly like a fixed-wing plane by swiveling rotors up or forward, as the Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey does, might be an equally speedy option.

What the Army might need to spend to get a more advanced aircraft is unclear, though the answer would certainly be in the billions. Asking for commitments like that when the sword of sequestration is hanging over the Pentagon budget's neck may sound awfully optimistic, but spending on aircraft development programs tends to start relatively low and rise to significant levels only years later.

In the meantime, the service is committed to its OH-58D upgrade, under which Bell is providing 15 new cabins while the Army replaces the Kiowa Warrior's distinctive mast-mounted sight with a nose-mounted Raytheon Common Sensor Payload sensor ball, also used by the Army's MQ-1C Gray Eagle unmanned aerial vehicle, a Predator derivative. Putting the sensor ball on the nose requires replacing the OH-58D's landing skids with a set that keeps the aircraft higher off the ground when at rest. With color cockpit displays to replace existing monochrome ones and a number of other technical changes, the OH-58Ds become OH-58Fs.

If senior Army or Pentagon leaders were to decide to replace the OH-58 with another conventional helicopter after all, Bell has proposed a Block II version of the OH-58F, followed by a Block III. The block upgrades would give the Kiowa Warrior a new engine, rotor blades, transmission, tail rotor and, in the end, a new cabin and airframe. Bell flew a Block II during its demonstration for the Army.

The U.S. arm of European defense giant EADS demonstrated both an "Armed Aerial Scout 72X" derived from the UH-72A Lakota light utility helicopter the company has built for the Army in Columbus, Miss., as well as an "Armed Aerial Scout 72X+" based on EADS subsidiary Eurocopter's civilian EC-145.

Boeing Co. flew an enhanced version of its AH-6, colloquially but not officially known as the "Little Bird." Anglo-Italian company AgustaWestland flew its AW139, while MD Helicopters Inc. of Mesa, Ariz., offered its 540F, a new helicopter that in profile resembles the Little Bird.

Sikorsky didn't fly anything but briefed Army officials on its S-97 Raider, a compound helicopter concept based on its X2 demonstrator. The X2, which made 23 flights between 2008-2011, used coaxial rotors and a pusher propeller to reach speeds as high as 290 miles per hour in level flight. The S-97 isn't flying yet but Sikorsky plans to have two prototypes in the air in 2014.

If the Army does go after after an advanced rather than an existing helicopter to replace the OH-58, it would come as little surprise. Crosby told the Association of the United States Army's 2012 Aviation Symposium last January that while the Army would look at existing helicopters, it was unlikely to buy one under current budget conditions. "Who thinks that's affordable?" he asked.

Another key official, meanwhile, Lt., principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, told an American Helicopter Society dinner just a few weeks ago that it was "time for the Army to look forward and do something dramatic in aviation."

Douglas Macgregor responds:

The root problem of the problem is here: "the Army studied its alternatives and decided the only way to meet its future armed scout helicopter needs would be to develop a new manned aircraft because an unmanned vehicle couldn't fly close air support missions. "

Says who?

If we can pass control of Predators and Reapers back and forth between local controllers for take-off/landing to mission operators 10,000 miles away in Nevada or Wyoming, why can't we do the same with battalion-level fire support officers or NCOs who would take control of the RPA when it is actively covering a mission, and employ its missiles to engage targets in support of their unit or use what they are seeing to call for fixed wing air support from USAF, USN, or allied/partner Air Forces? In the foreseeable future, there is no requirement for any rotor driven aircraft to fly armed reconnaissance missions beyond the Apache Longbow. Unmanned aircraft can augment, supplement and frequently replace manned aircraft for these Army missions.

ANSWER: We cannot because we have no Strike Coordinators, only fire support officers.

The Army also doesn't necessarily need VTOL at all.

The Helicopter mafia is really pumping these hybrid/compound helos, but this is nothing new. They tried one of those BEFORE the Apache... the XAH-56 CHEYENNE. It was a colossally costly failure, too. The Mil-24 also applied a compound helo approach, and while far faster than most conventional helos, it has virtually no hover capability out of ground effect and is useless over 12,000 feet. I am told heard that the wonderous Sikorsky X2, if it were fully militarized and stripped down for speed test bed, it would be as heavy and costly as a V-22. Absurd.

No, it definitely is NOT "time for the Army to look forward and do something dramatic in aviation." It's time for the Army to learn how to play in the joint arena as a supporting force, leave air power to the AF and Navy, and focus on developing a 20-years-overdue, lighter/more compact, more fuel-efficient, tracked medium armored family that can self-deploy on land, has lethality and survivability against the probable threats, and can be procured in sufficient quantities and variants to replace both our Cold War armored fleet AND the underwhelming Strykers.

Some will ask, “Why not all threats?” The answer is just as it is impossible to build an unsinkable ship, it’s also impossible to build an impregnable armored vehicle. This is why armored vehicles are a balance of armored protection, firepower, mobility and human tactical competence. All of these determine the fighting power and survivability of armored forces.