RE: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,185670,00.html

In part he is right about the little things- using heavy spt when making contact to reduce our casualties- but most officers & NCO's are well read on tatics, and higher Army Schools encourage reading other tatical tomes other than the FM. I am just simply amazed how a political hanger-on with no military experience and no battlefiels experience seems to know everything- strongly reminds me of the McNamara period of the Army- when it was run as a business and not a profession. Lets send this fruitcake to Afghanistan w/o any support & let him when it for us!

Oh yeah, this guy is a real expert. Just who the heck thinks his opinion is worth publishing? I can tell from all of those failed battles that US tactics are bad. Oh yeah!!!! Better yet, he has his facts all screwed. he says our tactics are modelled ont he French when it was the French who advocated infantry attacks with "ELAN". Those suicidal charges got them mutinies in WW1. It was the germans who developed the combined arms warfare used today by the US Army and Marines. The guy isn't just an idiot he is an uninformed idiot.

Sorry, I stopped reading after the third paragraph. What are the guy's qualifications? Yes, he can read books. SO WHAT! Has he been there? Doesn't look like it. Overwhelming firepower is key for us. SO WHY NOT USE IT? To not to, would invite a higher casualty count on our side. What is the objective in a fight? To win, right? I used to think so but when politicians such as this sound off when they have never felt the crackle of small arms come whizzing by their head, I tend to see red! Its war, people die. Positive target ID is taught to us, before engaging a target. Yeah, kinda hard to do at mach 3 at however many thousand feet. What people fail to realize that some of these casualties might possibly be sympathizers, supporters, or members of a terrorist organization. OR MAYBE THEY ARE HUMAN SHIELDS, like Hezbollah and Hamas use. WTF? Why does this politician even brings this up? Does he or does he not support us, the troops? Its DAMN EASY TO BE AN ARMCHAIR GENERAL THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY FROM THE CONTACT! So Mr. Lind, in an effort to educate you, I am extending an offer to go somewhere in uniform. So as to make one such as yourself better informed on the subject matter that you profess to be an expert at. For the simple people, put your money where your mouth is! Dont use the "I'm too old" excuse, either. There are a lot of us over 40 still throwing their bodies around like we are years younger. Mr. Lind, if you were Truman in WWII, would you have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I bet that you would not..... in an effort to save American lives. And for anyone else of like liberal-mindedness, MUSLIMS DO NOT FEEL ITS UNETHICAL TO LIE. So maybe these people are taliban, hamas, JAM, AQ....

Mr. Lind only had one thing right: the continuity problem.

Sure our leaders (not just infantry) need to know more about military history, pschi, etc.., but these leaders are already task saturated with their jobs, but Lind wouldn't know that not having served. I'm sure they would all love to sit in the cigar smoke filled library of Yale or Harvard with ascots and smoking jackets on discussing the alternative outcomes of battles of yore.

It's amazing we are as successful as we are in austere locations like the Stans, it could be a lot worse. And, so what if the terrorists decide to violate the Law of Armed Conflict and hide in between the civilians?

It does make it hard strategically to win the war, but most infantry (and other specialities) are thinking tactically about the buddy next to them and living until tomorrow even during down time in a secure environment with random indirect fire, but Lind wouldn't know about that either.

I'm anxiously awaiting Lind's book on "strategic fire fights" that he can propose to the armed forces. We can call it FM 7-8(L)for Lind. I also think he forgot to mention storm trooper tactics that the Nazis used and that the USMC has adopted a little bit. We can read it to the troops waiting in an hour long line for chow interspersed with quotes from Sun Tzu too.

General Patton said that "Bad infantry needs good artillery, and our infantry needs all the arty it can get."

Things have changed very little as far as needing supporting arms for tactical success.

Lind is right, and even if he were not, just don't dismiss him out of hand.

Walt

Mr. Lind must be really smart to be able to explain these issues when the professionals who have spent years and years in training seem to always get it wrong. In fact, I bet he could write as an expert on other subjects. Heck, his next article will probably be on something really, really mind-numbing........maybe the theory of the force responsible for the binding of quarks into nucleons, or possibly plate tetonics and the movement of the Earth's lithosphere. Who knows?

question? why would we revert our tactics to the past? our tactics should be evolutionary from the best of the past, if not even revolutionary in vision. Some tactics are timeless, if and when the situation arises should be aggressively used. Should not the tactics used support the over all stratigic plan? As the enemy changes his scheme of battle our tactics to counter and overcome the enemy should evolve as well no?
Is it bad tactics or is it applying the wrong tactic to the situation at hand. At most it is the later, as a bad tactic would result in a continuation of heavy friendly losses no.
Tactics are simply the tools used to acheive a goal. The strategy is How you are going to apply those tools to achieve the goal. Our infantry is highly capable of many tactics and thinking on their feet. The problems lies not whith the executioners of the tactics but with the directors of the strategy.
to kill a snake you chop off the head and the rest dies at the one fell swoop.
to kill a worm, to chop off the head results in two worms. To kill the worm you must flood its lungs so it can not breathe and the rest will die in one fell swoop.
The strategy is to kill the enemy in one fell swoop.
The tactics are to chop or drown, although one tactic can be applied to both enemies, the second tactic can only be applied but to one enemy.
if you are limited to the first tactic on the second enemy then your strategy of one fell swoop must change but your goal of killing the enemy remains.
you must first know of your enemy in order to kill him. You must understand and know your enemy to eradicate him.

I read somewhere that armys will often spend their time training for the last war - and I wonder how much of that has found its way into our military culture/training?

When it comes down to maneuver/blitkzriege warfare against a defined (i.e. uniformed) enemy we have the best. But what is clear is that we are not doing well in Afganistan, and we are losing the propaganda war with the Taliban (etc.). It may be that after having a few successes using UAV's to kill enemy combatants that our command staff has determined that these excellent sytems are something of a silver bullet: they are highly mobile, we don't have to endanger any US lives, and we get to kill Taliban (etc.).

But this tool, while considerable, could very well be looking like a hammer. And if a hammer is the only tool you have, everything starts looking like a nail.

The best results seem to have come from the Special Ops folks - who become engrained with the locals and understand the people, languages, and customs. There aren't enough of them to go around, and the ones we do have are burning out from overuse.

The bottom line, is that using conventional methods in an unconventional war is only going to cause us a lot of trouble.

It would seem that Mr. Lind has a point. The real question becomes - how do we fix it in time to make a difference?

Compliments of Military.com

US Boosts Air Power in Afghanistan
February 25, 2009
International Herald Tribune

Every day from the deck of this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the coast of Pakistan, two dozen combat planes are catapulted into the sky for the 500-mile trip to southern Afghanistan. There, the pilots circle Taliban strongholds and zoom in when American and British troops, spread thin and often panicked, call in airstrikes.

The U.S. Navy has been back in these waters providing more air power since August, in large part because the ground reinforcements that commanders have been pleading for have not yet come. From 15,000 feet, or more than 4,500 meters, up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasing attack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call "bad guys" over the next hill, and go "kinetic" with bombs that kill three, four or five Taliban fighters at a time. They can always tell when troops who call in air strikes are under direct fire.

"They're trying to talk to you at the same time that they're running and being shot at, so obviously there's a lot of urgency in their voices," said Captain Kevin Kovacich, the Roosevelt's air wing commander.

Kovacich and many of his pilots last dropped bombs in Afghanistan in March 2002, when the U.S. military seemed to have dealt a near- fatal blow to the Taliban. Now the U.S. military is experiencing the limitations of air power in a seven-year war, in which an increasing U.S. reliance on airstrikes against insurgents has kindled growing fury over the civilian casualties that have come with them.

"Those insurgents are wily," said Commander Fredrick Luchtman, the chief officer of a Roosevelt squadron of F/A-18C Hornets, who also flew missions over Afghanistan in early 2002. "They will meld themselves within the population. They will fire from areas that they know that if we put a bomb there, it's going to look bad."

The pilots do not need to be told that civilian deaths soared last year in Afghanistan, the majority from Taliban attacks but others from airstrikes called in by U.S. and British troops under fire. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has so angrily condemned the strikes that in December he was invited to visit the Roosevelt, so that officers could try to convince him that they took care where they aimed their bombs. As Vice Admiral William Gortney, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region, put it: "We don't drop when we're unsure."

The visit, by the navy's account at least, went well. Karzai watched jets take off from the flight deck and was briefed on how the pilots try to minimize "collateral damage." Afterward, he sent the ship one of his trademark karakul hats and a Christmas card. But for the pilots, tensions remain.

"If it was positively identified as hostile in Iraq, you took it out," said Luchtman, who flew missions over Baghdad in 2003. "Here, just because it's positively identified as hostile, you've still got to mitigate the other things around."

To support ground troops in Afghanistan, the United States flew more than 19,000 combat missions in the country in 2008 - more than ever before, surpassing even the number in Iraq over the same period. But over all, U.S. pilots dropped slightly fewer bombs and other munitions, perhaps as a result of more restrictive rules imposed in September after an uproar about civilian casualties.

"To win the insurgency, we're not going to bomb our way out of this," said Colonel Harry Foster, the chief of the strategy division of the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Southwest Asia, the command headquarters for the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. To that end, pilots on the Roosevelt often engage in a "show of force" - flying as low as 1,000 feet and making a lot of noise to scare the Taliban - and say they drop bombs as a last resort.

The navy says the pilots on the Roosevelt fly about 30 percent of combat missions over Afghanistan; the majority of the flights are handled by the air force from bases in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region.

The navy was called in last summer when attacks on American and NATO supply lines were on the rise and military commanders decided they needed to get the trucks off the roads and use more air transport.

The pilots fly many other missions for reconnaissance, using sensors to take pictures of, for example, how many Taliban fighters are on the other side of a wall, or how many might be ahead of a NATO convoy. The pictures go directly to the laptops of troops on the ground. "So if there are three warm bodies in that compound, we will know that there are three warm bodies in that compound," Luchtman said.

The Roosevelt arrived in the region in mid-October and was to remain until late March. The carrier was last here in October 2001. Although Kovacich and Luchtman were here around the same time, they flew from different ships.

The Roosevelt pilots say they did not expect to be back, but they make no judgments, at least none they are willing to share, on the need for their return, or on whether what they do is making a difference in the overall conflict.

On Wednesday in Washington, General David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the war was "at best stalemated" in the very region in which the pilots operate. Most of the 17,000 additional troops that President Barack Obama ordered to Afghanistan last week will be deployed in the area.

What the pilots do say is that flying six-hour round-trip missions six days a week, they are doing what they have been asked: providing air support to troops in remote areas. "All I know," said Commander Richard McGrath, another Roosevelt pilot, "is that we dropped the bomb where it was supposed to go, when it was supposed to go."

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from the Roosevelt this month and updated this article with information from Washington.

Am I the only one who notices the issue here? The writer is talking about an air strike killing civilians and blaming lazy infantrymen for it.

These are two different branches of the military for one thing. Beyond that though, let's analyze all of his points about us not taking the time to infiltrate and be sneaky.

Yes sir it is difficult to be sneaky, fast, fight on on the move or surprise enemies when you weigh nearly 300lbs. with all of our equipment on.

Oh and my qualifications? Two deployments as infantry (enlisted but working on my masters program, I hope that is enough reading to be able to comment...).

The writer makes good points, we can do more, but we also need to have the right conditions. You cannot do much when you are so weighed down that you are exhausted when the fighting starts.

norgwar, you make a good point. I thought about this more after writing the post and went back to read the whole article. He sounds like he read a book by Travis Poole (think thats his first name) called the Phantom Soldier. It dealt with the same subject, an enemy that is highly mobile and light. I do agree about being lighter but with the present command climate, or should I say risk adversiveness, we will never go back to the lighter days. The casualties that we have are reported daily. THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WILL NOT ACCEPT HIGH CASUALTIES. Even though I understand the risks of my chosen profession, the people above me have added "levels of protection."
Armor added to HMMWVs weigh them down to protect them but now they are slower and overheat faster. And EFPs still punch through them. Glass on HMMWV cupolas for "protection" have made them so heavy I need a crank(or traverse lever) to rotate around. The CF gunners are not even looking down their sights and they are responsible for security. Now MRAPs Strykers, and newer GMVs have automatic turrets that do not even expose gunners now. Some of the CF personnel look almost like knights with all of their "protection" on. Neck, nut, shoulder, and the main torso are all covered and yes, slowed down now. Anyone who reads military history cant help but think on Agincourt, where the french knights and their horses were too heavy to charge through a bog, and the light english bowman mowed them down.
Going back to the present climate. The PRESS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC WILL NOT STAND FOR A FRIENDLY HIGH BODY COUNT. Risk-adversive leaders will not stand for this. Does anyone not believe that the press would be in an uproar if we were taking more casualties? Most Americans DO NOT HAVE THE STOMACH FOR THIS FIGHT.
I am still sticking by my original post. The insurgents hide within the civilians and then use the BDA as propaganda. Or they just take away the weapons and voila, civilians. One point from Mr. Poole's book is that the enemies, past and present, are(were) prepared to accept heavy losses. We are not!

I agree with the author. I think he provided a concise and intelligent analysis of our mounting failures in that area.

OTOH, it's a bit hard to take him seriously when he begins the article with "For the gazillionth time" - that is SO Forrest Gump!

But I agree that training in tactics for infantry personnel - at the NCO level and for ALL officers - should include reading (and practical exercises) of the success and failure of different techniques and policies, including historical ones of other countries' armies. Too much of our training DOES offer just a rote of the usual "pat on the back" and "we are the greatest" rhetoric.

The author has good and valid points - the problem with the infantry (Army and Marine Corps) is that they never really want to spend the money training the personnel the right way (its expensive - I'm not talking about Ranger and Recon training, etc) which have their own issues.

quote:

Originally posted by PolicyWonk:
I read somewhere that armys will often spend their time training for the last war - and I wonder how much of that has found its way into our military culture/training?

I think I read somewhere that there is a difference between the professional soldier and the amateur. Professionals commit their lives to the profession of arms by training and doing; amateurs read about it while they sip their coffee at Starbucks.

quote:

Originally posted by mattkay4:

quote:

Originally posted by PolicyWonk:
I read somewhere that armys will often spend their time training for the last war - and I wonder how much of that has found its way into our military culture/training?

I think I read somewhere that there is a difference between the professional soldier and the amateur. Professionals commit their lives to the profession of arms by training and doing; amateurs read about it while they sip their coffee at Starbucks.

Heh -

I have also read that ameteurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.

Cheers.

For all his long-distance observation and lack of first-hand experience Lind may be onto something. Where's all the evidence that, after 7 years of dedicated application, 120 000 of the finest, best-equipped military force on earth not to mention another 60 000 variable NATO allies and a blizzard of friendly Afghan police and military) are having other than an irritating effect on the estimated 15 000 armed goatherds who are the part-time taliban?

There must be something wrong with the tactics because, aside from some minor interdictions, the logistics are top-notch. Maybe that's another part of the problem.

Read, think, learn and then try something different? Ain't too many lessons learned from the Talies.

"A piece in the February 19 Washington Post cited the American commander in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, as saying that the planned increase in American troops could allow for the use of fewer airstrikes. On the contrary, the bad tactics those troops will employ, because they know no others, guarantee that the demand for airstrikes will go up. So will Afghan civilian casualties, and with them the speed with which we will lose the Afghan war."



Mr. Lind, the General has a point on this one, his idea could work depending on the tactics, don't kill it before it's deployed. One more thing to remember, this is urban warfare, not jungle warfare. You have a point also, you don't need artillery or an air strike to clear one building.

quote:

The author has good and valid points - the problem with the infantry (Army and Marine Corps) is that they never really want to spend the money training the personnel the right way (its expensive - I'm not talking about Ranger and Recon training, etc) which have their own issues.

I think that is the key here, our military doesnt like spending money on training personnel that will be gone in four years or less. I think all personnel should recieve regular training(at least quarterly if not monthly) on survival, combat marksmanship, enemy tactics, and nighttime/urban operations. Not to mention making war games, and competitions regular events on all levels including unit and shop levels, it should be as common as PT'ing, not only for infantry but for non infantry MOS's as well, who often see action while guarding convoys and acting as a reserve force for the regular infantry. This will help build much needed confidence and help to start building a military that can operate from the bottom up, where NCOs and Junior Officers can take initiative, and make command decisions from the frontline, which is a key element in menuever warfare.
I am by no means an expert on this subject, but from my limited study of our military, as well as german, oriental, middle eastern tactics, this is a major weakness we have that we have to correct now.