ARMY TIMES
THE ARMY IS FULLY INVESTED, BUT SOME SAY THE TACTIC IS IMPRACTICAL, COSTLY AND DISCONNECTED FROM MODERN WAR.
By Kyle Jahner
ZARAGOZA, Spain — About
1,200 soldiers from 13 countries looked up toward the thin white clouds
stretching across the sky. Having just participated in a brief NATO
battle demo, they awaited the November event’s finale.
First Lt. Tim Pena would later say it was “a beautiful day to jump.” But he hadn’t quite arrived just yet.
Right
on time, three C-17s cleared the hills to the north, about 1,000 feet
above the ground. They flew over the fictional village of “Casas Altas” —
an assembly of concrete buildings where the brief staged battle had
occurred. A few seconds later, soldiers who nine hours earlier had taken
off from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, began to pour from each of the two
rearward doors, in standard one-second intervals. Over 500 U.S.
paratroopers from 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division floated to the
rocky ground below — it was a beautiful sight.
The jump capped an
event, designed largely for the international press, to wrap up NATO’s
broader, 36,000-troop, 30-plus-country exercise known as Trident
Juncture. NATO described the demonstration as a message to Russia,
though Russia declined an invite.
Nevertheless, NATO and U.S.
leaders were pleased. The airborne jump may have been the most visually
stunning and logistically impressive element of Trident Juncture:
hundreds of soldiers in the U.S. travel across the ocean and reach
foreign land — on time, without an airstrip, and armed with M4s.
“It’s
a great opportunity for us to show what we can do on the Global
Response Force,” said Col. Joseph Ryan, the 2nd Brigade commander who
jumped along with his soldiers.
The GRF, generally a rotating
brigade in the 82nd Airborne Division, is the nation’s quick reaction
force designed to rapidly deploy in an emergency. As the Spain exercise
demonstrated, Army regards large-scale combat jumps as a crucial
capability of the GRF.
But some consider this tactic to be
impractical, disconnected from modern war and an unnecessary expense, if
not a virtual suicide mission in a real war. Mass combat jumps have
been rare since their introduction in World War II, and rarer still in
the last 20 years.
“(The) current composition of the United
States airborne forces appears more a product of the airborne
community’s lobbying efforts in favor of their own size and autonomy
than cold calculations about national interests or military
requirements,” writes military scholar Marc DeVore in his 2015 Army
study “When Failure Thrives.”
DeVore’s study, the first product
of the new Army Press, sent shockwaves through the airborne community.
In 90 or so pages, DeVore argues that airborne still exists today not
because of successful operations, but rather institutionalization and
military culture. Even from the start airborne operations produced
inconsistent results, and he said in recent decades technology advances
have all but removed them from the modern battlefield, both American
conflicts and beyond.
"We’ve gone 38 years with it being tough to
say any given airborne operation was necessary to accomplish the
overall objective of a given operation," DeVore told Army Times.
DeVore
is not alone. Retired Col. Doug Macgregor has emerged as a vocal Army
critic since retiring in 2004. The former 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry
commander holds a PhD in international relations and calls large-scale
airborne operations an “anachronism, a thing of the past” and compared
it with horse cavalry use in World War II.
Top Pentagon leaders
don’t buy it. They acknowledge a major airborne combat operation is a
low-probability option, but say a sizable airborne assault remains a
vital capability and deterrent.
“The whole new Army operating
concept is we’re back to our expeditionary concept ... the beauty of
airborne forces is they were always designed to be expeditionary,” said
Lt. Gen. Joe Anderson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for operations
and a former XVIII Airborne Corps commander. “Typically, an enemy is not
going to want to give you free access to a runway, they’re going to
damage it. So how else are you going to get in there and get that stuff
capable if you don’t have some light expeditionary package that is able
to get in there, doesn’t need a lot of supplies?”
“It’s not an
Army requirement … It’s a national security requirement,” Lt. Gen.
Stephen Townsend, commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, said of robust and
rapid forced-entry capacity. “This is the Army’s highest levels saying
this capability is something the country needs.”
Many of the
Army’s top leaders have earned their jump wings: Chief of Staff Gen.
Mark Milley, Vice Chief Gen. Daniel Allyn, U.S. Special Operations
Command chief Gen. Joseph Votel and acting Army secretary Patrick
Murphy. Nine of the Army’s 13 four-star generals have led or served in
the 82nd or XVIII Airborne Corps.
Airborne also offers training,
morale, retention and recruitment perks, according to leaders. Many
airborne soldiers absolutely love what they do, despite — or sometimes
because of — its inherent risks.
As many generals have noted, you
can’t plan for every war and the U.S. has consistently failed to
predict where the next war would be fought, or what specific skills
would emerge as indispensable. No one suggests jumping out of planes in
general to be obsolete; Special Forces and the 75th Ranger Regiment
frequently jump into enemy territory.
But does the Army need
four-plus brigades — from combat troops to cooks to public affairs
officers — training for low-altitude, low-speed static line jumps with
ever-tightening budget restraints? (Anderson said airborne brigades
costs about 10 percent more in maintenance than standard light infantry,
but still roughly a third as much as an armored unit.) And given a
paucity of use that spans wars and decades, what is that tactic’s true
place in a modern battlefield?
Low probability...but high consequence?
In
mid-August, the Army celebrated 75 years of airborne. It was on Aug.
16, 1940, when the 29th Infantry Regiment conducted its first jump at
Fort Benning, Georgia. Since that day, the mission task remains simple:
get soldiers and equipment safely from a speeding plane to the ground.
Over
the last 15 years, the members of the 82nd have seen more than their
fair share of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — but the vast majority
have never sniffed a combat jump. In fact, few large jumps into hostile
territory have launched since World War II.
The Army planned to
downsize the airborne 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division in
Alaska into a battalion task force by 2017. Milley told Congress in
February, however, he wants to push back that move at least a year. If
made, that cut would bring five airborne brigades down to 4 and 1/3
(three in the 82nd Airborne Division plus the 173rd Airborne Brigade in
Europe).
While leaders defend limiting airborne cuts to its share of Army-wide force reduction, others suggest slashing further.
MacGregor
does not see significant tactical need for a mass combat jump of
infantry forces. He says even basic air defense renders an airborne
attack suicidal.
_______
CORRECTION: Colonel Macgregor was misquoted in the article as saying "heavy" armor. He actually advocates medium-weight armor that is air-deployable and well-armored against the threat with active protection systems...etc.
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