thedrifter
03-19-07, 02:55 PM
Iraq war remolds army into boots-on-the-ground counter-insurgency force
by Jim Mannion
Sun Mar 18, 6:42 PM ET
The bitter lessons of Iraq are remolding the US military into such a boots-on-the-ground counter-insurgency force that some generals worry it may lose its edge in fighting high-tech conventional wars.
Four years after the invasion, the US military is strained and stretched by the bloody conflict, but it has been forced to adapt and relearn how it fights its wars, analysts and military officials say.
Troops are training for urban combat at mock Iraqi villages in the Mojave Desert, and counter-insurgency is the subject of the day at military academies and in the pages of journals.
A new generation of combat-tested military leaders is in command.
General David Petraeus, the new US commander in Iraq, spent the past year writing the army's first counter-insurgency manual in two decades, reviving a military art that had been all but lost after the Vietnam War.
He is now leading a surge that is bringing some 30,000 more troops into Iraq, and moving them out of large fortified bases into the streets of Baghdad to put a lid on sectarian violence.
"Our force has been stretched, and it is stretched," said Colonel Michael Negard, an army public affairs officer who returned last month from a year in Iraq.
"But the goodness out of it is that you've got these soldiers from junior ranks, to mid-grades, to senior ranks who are truly seasoned at what they're doing," he said.
"We've been given the opportunity to look into the crystal ball and see what the nature of warfare is going to be like," he said. "I think the army is moving in that direction both in doctrine, in training, and certainly the leadership that has been forged in these young warriors."
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired army officer and expert on military strategy, said the army is trying to remake itself into a marathon runner.
The war has driven the army to revamp its structure to generate more combat forces to keep pace with the insatiable demand for troops.
It is shelving its Cold War-era division structure and replacing it with smaller combat brigades that can be more rapidly deployed and capable of sustaining themselves in the field.
"Certainly going into the war, we had an army essentially built to be a world class sprinter to fight wars along short timelines. We use the term surge now. We really had a surge army," he said.
The army performed brilliantly in the invasion of Iraq, capturing Baghdad and toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in three weeks. But the sprinter discovered it was in a marathon, he said.
A key question now facing the army's incoming chief of staff, General George Casey, the former commander in Iraq, is how far to go.
"Is he going to say, 'I've seen the future, it's in Iraq. The army has to undertake a fundamental change.' Or is he going to say, 'this is like Vietnam, it's a one-off, it's an aberration, and we really need to prepare for conventional threats," Krepinevich asked.
The chiefs of both the army and the marines have warned already that their forces are not getting the training they need for conventional warfare, and their readiness to meet other contingencies has slipped.
"My concern is that as a nation we've never done very well predicting the next fight. So in that regard we have to be prepared for whatever comes," said General James Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.
"Therefore, we have to have brigades or expeditionary forces ready to go on very short notice anywhere in the world to conduct forcibly entry to another land," he told defense reporters this week.
US ground forces, however, have so little time between deployment to Iraq that they are training almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency missions there.
"We're not doing what we used to do annually about ten times with our battalions, and that is combined arms live fire maneuver, under artillery, under our aircraft bombs at 29 Palms (California,)" Conway said, referring to the marine training base in the Mojave Desert.
"Now we go to 29 Palms to operate in a small Iraqi village, and to prepare people for the human dimension that they are going to experience there. It's great training, but it's not preparing you for those other missions we have by law assigned to us by the nation," he said.
Plans to increase the size of the army and marines over the next five years -- by 65,000 and 27,000 troops respectively -- may ease the pressure.
But Conway said the problem "is going to be with us so long as we face these rotations."
Ellie
by Jim Mannion
Sun Mar 18, 6:42 PM ET
The bitter lessons of Iraq are remolding the US military into such a boots-on-the-ground counter-insurgency force that some generals worry it may lose its edge in fighting high-tech conventional wars.
Four years after the invasion, the US military is strained and stretched by the bloody conflict, but it has been forced to adapt and relearn how it fights its wars, analysts and military officials say.
Troops are training for urban combat at mock Iraqi villages in the Mojave Desert, and counter-insurgency is the subject of the day at military academies and in the pages of journals.
A new generation of combat-tested military leaders is in command.
General David Petraeus, the new US commander in Iraq, spent the past year writing the army's first counter-insurgency manual in two decades, reviving a military art that had been all but lost after the Vietnam War.
He is now leading a surge that is bringing some 30,000 more troops into Iraq, and moving them out of large fortified bases into the streets of Baghdad to put a lid on sectarian violence.
"Our force has been stretched, and it is stretched," said Colonel Michael Negard, an army public affairs officer who returned last month from a year in Iraq.
"But the goodness out of it is that you've got these soldiers from junior ranks, to mid-grades, to senior ranks who are truly seasoned at what they're doing," he said.
"We've been given the opportunity to look into the crystal ball and see what the nature of warfare is going to be like," he said. "I think the army is moving in that direction both in doctrine, in training, and certainly the leadership that has been forged in these young warriors."
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired army officer and expert on military strategy, said the army is trying to remake itself into a marathon runner.
The war has driven the army to revamp its structure to generate more combat forces to keep pace with the insatiable demand for troops.
It is shelving its Cold War-era division structure and replacing it with smaller combat brigades that can be more rapidly deployed and capable of sustaining themselves in the field.
"Certainly going into the war, we had an army essentially built to be a world class sprinter to fight wars along short timelines. We use the term surge now. We really had a surge army," he said.
The army performed brilliantly in the invasion of Iraq, capturing Baghdad and toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in three weeks. But the sprinter discovered it was in a marathon, he said.
A key question now facing the army's incoming chief of staff, General George Casey, the former commander in Iraq, is how far to go.
"Is he going to say, 'I've seen the future, it's in Iraq. The army has to undertake a fundamental change.' Or is he going to say, 'this is like Vietnam, it's a one-off, it's an aberration, and we really need to prepare for conventional threats," Krepinevich asked.
The chiefs of both the army and the marines have warned already that their forces are not getting the training they need for conventional warfare, and their readiness to meet other contingencies has slipped.
"My concern is that as a nation we've never done very well predicting the next fight. So in that regard we have to be prepared for whatever comes," said General James Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.
"Therefore, we have to have brigades or expeditionary forces ready to go on very short notice anywhere in the world to conduct forcibly entry to another land," he told defense reporters this week.
US ground forces, however, have so little time between deployment to Iraq that they are training almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency missions there.
"We're not doing what we used to do annually about ten times with our battalions, and that is combined arms live fire maneuver, under artillery, under our aircraft bombs at 29 Palms (California,)" Conway said, referring to the marine training base in the Mojave Desert.
"Now we go to 29 Palms to operate in a small Iraqi village, and to prepare people for the human dimension that they are going to experience there. It's great training, but it's not preparing you for those other missions we have by law assigned to us by the nation," he said.
Plans to increase the size of the army and marines over the next five years -- by 65,000 and 27,000 troops respectively -- may ease the pressure.
But Conway said the problem "is going to be with us so long as we face these rotations."
Ellie