WASHINGTON: On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq one of the Army’s leading thinkers, warned Washington not to learn the wrong lessons.
[Click here from top Army generals on Iraq: Shock and Awe? Never again!] Keep reading →
iraq
Marines: Sequester, CR Would Ground F-18s, Slash Pilot Training; ‘Very Real Risk Of Killing Pilots’
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: As the government hurtles towards the latest fiscal cliff, March 1st, the Marine Corps‘ deputy commandant for resources outlined a host of painful potential consequences, from reduced rifle training to cancelled deployments to grounded fighter squadrons. Lt. Gen. John Wissler appealed to Congress for so-called reprogramming authority that would at least let the Marines move around the money they do have to mitigate the worst effects.
[Click here to read about the readiness problems for the Army, Air Force, and Navy]
“Our money’s just in the wrong places in some instances,” Wissler told reporters after his speech this morning to the Navy League. But they can’t move it without explicit permission from Congress, he explained: “What we would need is to move things between appropriations, and they would need to help us there.” Keep reading →
This September, the controversial Osprey will reach the five-year mark in its operational deployment history. In September 2007, the Osprey was deployed for the first time to Iraq. The plane has not only done well, but in five short years has demonstrated its capability to have not only a significant impact on combat but to reshape thinking about concepts of operations.
In this piece, I would like to reflect back on these five years, not just to grasp lessons learned, but glimmers of where the plane, and the Navy-Marine Corps team might be able to move into the future. The story of the evolution of the con-ops surrounding the plane provides a solid foundation for innovation and transformation of concepts of operations, if boldness overcomes timidity. Keep reading →
ACADEMI — ex-Blackwater — Boosts State Dept Business, Eyes Acquisitions: EXCLUSIVE
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
ARLINGTON, VA: How confident is the new management at private security contractor ACADEMI — formerly known as Xe and, also, infamously, as Blackwater — that they’ve turned the company around?
Last month, apparently without attracting any public attention (until now), they quietly bought another security firm, International Development Solutions, and took over its piece of the State Department’s $10 billion World Protective Services contract, which then-Blackwater got kicked out of years ago. Keep reading →
What the hell is hybrid warfare, anyway? While the other services increasingly fixate on China, “hybrid” is becoming the buzzword du jour in the U.S. Army, invoked even in Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno‘s official “marching orders” to the service. But like “counterinsurgency” before it – and like “transformation” before that – the term is increasingly used and abused in bureaucratic and budget battles with little regard for what it might actually mean. Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: The White House’s newly-minted national security strategy is full of big ideas. But among all these big ideas is a much smaller one that could draw the Pentagon much deeper into the small wars that have defined America’s global counterterrorism campaign.
U.S. special operations forces and counterinsurgency specialists returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are poised to ramp up operations across the globe, focusing on Africa and South America, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today. These small bands of special forces and COIN experts will lean upon “innovative methods” learned in Southwest Asia to support local counterterrorism forces and expand American influence in those two continents, Panetta said. The plan is part of the new strategy unveiled by President Obama today.
These “innovative methods” include increasing rotations of small special operations units into those regions for longer periods, bolstering military-to-military training with indigenous forces and supporting those troops with more U.S. weapons and equipment, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld said during the same press conference. The American military units heading to Africa and South America were the same ones that spearheaded the “high end [counterinsurgency] fight” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Winnefeld said. With the U.S. withdrawal from Southwest Asia already in motion, Pentagon leaders now have the flexibility to move more troops into places like Africa and South America, the four-star Admiral explained.
U.S. special forces were sent to Uganda last October to help those forces in their war against the Lord’s Resistance Army. The Army is also in the midst of creating a number of “regionally aligned brigades” whose sole mission will be to train and advise foreign militaries. The first of these brigades is set to deploy to Africa Command next year.
Small U.S. units schooling foreign troops on the finer points of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations is much different from the intensive, “long-term” COIN missions American troops carried out in Southwest Asia, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter pointed out today. The Pentagon’s new strategy moves the military away from building up security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in favor of the smaller, less-intesive training missions envisioned for Africa and South America, Carter said. “Its all about the force we need,” he added. That said, DoD isn’t abandoning that kind of COIN mission entirely.
Completely walking away from the nation building-style of counterinsurgency would be a clear example of “departmental hubris,” Winnefeld pointed out. To avoid that DoD planners have built in “reversability” clauses into its new COIN strategy, Carter added.When enacted, these clauses will allow the Pentagon to build its counterinsurgency operations back up to Iraq and Afghanistan levels. To make sure DoD retains that COIN know-how, the department will continue to invest in “specialized capabilities” and “keep the tradecraft” in house.
Before designing and articulating a new defense strategy, DoD officials must answer an important question: Will the most dangerous twenty-first century threats emerge more from unfavorable order or unacceptable disorder? Keep reading →
Washington: The Army’s fleet of light tactical vehicles is about to get a lot smaller once a service-wide review wraps up.
Army Training and Doctrine Command is fine-tuning a plan to cut a significant number of light armored vehicles and replace them with the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, according to an Army official with knowledge of the plan. “Our current today requirement for the light [combat] vehicles for our Army . . . is 144,000. We reducing that and we are reducing that by a good measure,” the official told me. Keep reading →
Washington: The Army’s strategy to close long-term readiness gaps stemming from its rush to rebuild war-torn equipment is falling woefully short of expectations, leaving service units to come up with their own solutions.
The Army’s R3 initiative has been the blueprint for how the service plans to reset, retrograde and redistribute weapons, vehicles and equipment coming back from Southwest Asia since 2009, Col. Gregg Skibicki, chief of the current equipment operations division in the Army’s resourcing directorate, told me today. His office is spearheading the initiative.
It’s a “living document” the Army updates monthly to keep pace with troop rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan. R3 synchronizes “all the [equipment reset] activities from the headquarters all the way through the supply chain” down to the “field level” where the actual repair and reset work takes place, he said. R3 priorities are vetted by all the major combat commands and Army component commands to make sure Army units get what they need, when they need it.
The problem is R3 never coordinated the list of what it needed to fix from the wars in Southwest Asia and what it needs to get ready for the next fight, a yet-to-be released Government Accountability Report claims. “The Army lacks an explicit reset strategy that coordinates equipment requirements with warfighter needs,” according to the report. “There is no metric reported that measures the [need for] long-term reset.” With American troops now coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army simply doesn’t have enough vehicles or gear to support them stateside, GAO says. “The need for equipment will increase as [those] units move into the train [and] ready phase,” according to the report.
GAO analysts acknowledge R3 is a good strategy. But like many things in the Army, the initiative continues to be caught in service red tape. The latest iteration of R3 has yet to be formally approved. And like many things in the Army, individual units are doing what they can to get what they need until the initiative is approved.
Army units rotating back to bases in the United States are “relying on other sourcing methods to fill equipment shortages,” the GAO says. “Units will have to continue to remedy readiness deficiencies through other means and may not have assurance that reset can serve as a reliable source of needed equipment,” according to the report. These ad-hoc fixes will get those units by in the near term, government auditors claim. However they’re only masking the “systematic problems” that lie in the service’s postwar reset plans.
Skibicki dismissed the idea the Army’s overall reset plan is plagued by systematic problems and mired in service bureaucracy as alleged in the GAO report. “There has not been an issue where [R3] has been stuck” in the service’s chain of command, he added. He also dismissed the notion that Army units had to scrounge around for necessary equipment once they were stateside. However he did admit the Army had to push through some growing pains to make the R3 plan work.
At first the Army tried to put all of their reset priorities onto a single to-do list. Service officials eventually realized key reset requirements were being missed because they could not all be covered on one list. “We didn’t realize that for the first six months,” Skibicki said. The R3 plan in place now is broken into two lists. The first list covers the equipment reset needs of units preparing to go into theater. The second list details the reset needs of units who scheduled to come back stateside but have not yet returned. This way Army officials can address unit reset requirements for training and non-combat missions before they come home. They can also make sure a unit has everything they need before they step off, he said. This bookend approach ensures equipment reset needs are known and met before a unit sets one boot onto the battlefield.
The GAO also criticized the Army’s ballooning cost estimates for equipment reset and its apparent lack of oversight of those dollars. Beginning in 2007, the Army received over $32 billion from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill to buy and restore vehicles and equipment lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, “reports do not show whether the Army’s reset execution is consistent with [its] annual planning and budgeting process for reset,” GAO auditors write. Army reports on reset spending do “not distinguish between planned and unplanned reset,” they claim. The Army also has yet to report what its “total reset liability” — or the total cost to rebuild equipment lost in combat – to Congress. Keep reading →
Colin Clark
Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.
Retired Teacher Pens 10,000 Letters To Troops; Touching The 1 Percent
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.One man, Paul Gleason, has an answer: one handwritten letter at a time. The retired history teacher, not a veteran himself, started writing soldiers in 1965 when one of his students joined the Army and has kept at it ever since: more than 10,000 letters over almost 50 years. Some go to friends he’s made — though sometimes never met — and corresponds with weekly. Since his retirement, he’s camped out at a side table in a local Burger King and cranked out about three letters a day, totaling about 15 handwritten pages. He’s currently corresponding with 10 people, from a young Marine to the widow of a decorated Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. (Click here to watch an NBC video interview with Gleasonand his young Marine Corps pen pal; click here to read a Springfield State Journal-Register profile with more details). Keep reading →