A Clausewitz for Every Season by Hew Strachan

Although this is from 2007 it is still very much worth reading today as this is probably the best essay that exposes those who read Clausewitz for the pithy quotes and not for On War's true and deep meaning.  It is the best explanation of why the Trinity is not simply the people, government, and army but passion, reasons, and chance.

Conclusion:

The Clausewitz so readily condemned by commentators of today, such as Martin van Creveld, John Keegan and Mary Kaldor, is the Clausewitz who was fashionable in the 1970s. The fact that the rationality of the “formula” of war’s relationship to policy looks less clear in 2007 does not invalidate it as an interpretative tool. The problem has arisen from its artificial exclusivity, from its being taken so very much out of context. There is much more to On War than one hackneyed catchphrase, and the tragedy for the armed forces of the United States and their allies today is that greater attention to rather more of the text would have provided the intellectual underpinnings for greater self-awareness and strategic sensitivity than has been evident over the last half decade. We need not to ditchOn War but to read more of it, and to read it with greater care.

Appeared in: Volume 2, Number 6
Published on: July 1, 2007

A Clausewitz for Every SeasonHEW STRACHAN

HTTP://WWW.THE-AMERICAN-INTEREST.COM/2007/07/01/A-CLAUSEWITZ-FOR-EVERY-SEASON/

On misreading On War.

In 1975, Colin Powell entered the National War College in Washington, DC. Once there, Powell, a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War for the first time. He was bowled over. On War was, Powell recalled in My American Journey, “like a beam of light from the past, still illuminating present-day military quandaries.” What particularly impressed him was Clausewitz’s view that the military itself formed only “one leg in a triad” whose other two elements were the government and the people. All three elements had to be engaged for war to be sustainable. In the Vietnam War, America’s had not been.

Powell may have been right about the Vietnam War, but not about Clausewitz. Like many others before him, Powell misread the final section of On War’s opening chapter—that which describes war as “a strange trinity.” Its three elements are not the people, the army and the government, but hate, chance and reason. Clausewitz went on to associate each of these three elements more particularly with the passions of the people, with the commander and his army, and with the political direction of the government. But in doing so he moved from the “trinity” itself to its application. The people, the army and the government are elements of the state, not elements of war. The distinction is crucial to the relevance of On War today.

Powell is not the only American soldier to have misinterpreted Clausewitz’s trinity. In 1982, Army Colonel Harry Summers wrote one of the most influential analyses of the U.S. failure in Vietnam, On Strategy. He, too, had Clausewitz saying that war consisted of the people, the army and the government. After the end of the Cold War, with wars allegedly being waged to an increasing extent by non-state actors such as guerrillas, terrorists and warlords, who in turn funded their efforts through crime and drug-trafficking, neither Powell’s nor Summers’ definitions were of much help. As they became less helpful, so too, it seemed, did Clausewitz. Their take on the trinity tied On War indissolubly to the interstate wars of Clausewitz’s own lifetime. If the so-called Westphalian order waned, so too would the applicability of Clausewitz’s insights. This was the thesis which sustained Martin van Creveld’s The Transformation of War (1991). By erroneously identifying Clausewitz’s understanding of war with the people, the army and the government—the “Clausewitzian universe”, as he termed it—van Creveld could invent in order to reject what he called “trinitarian war.”

Like the others, van Creveld had not read the original text with sufficient care. He had also not thought sufficiently about Clausewitz’s use of language—in this case, German. Scholars during the Cold War, determined to use On War as a mirror for their own times, cherry-picked the text for readings and quotations which sustained their views rather than reflected Clausewitz’s. Van Creveld was responding to them, not to Clausewitz, but in the process ditched On War as well.

Where did Clausewitz’s trinity come from in the first place? Clausewitz, like some other military theorists—most obviously British Major General J.F.C. Fuller—had a penchant for thinking in threes (a point to which we shall return). But the significance of Clausewitz’s triad is that it is not a triad but a trinity: not just three related elements, but three parts of one whole. The Christian connotations are self-evident and could not be anything other than deliberate for an author whose family came from a long line of Lutheran pastors. Therefore, the first issue posed by the trinity in On War is not the identity of its three constituent elements but that of its mystical unit: What is the god in which the father, son and holy ghost are united?

Once the question is posed, the answer is self-evident: It is war itself, whose essential element, as Clausewitz makes clear in the opening paragraph of the section, is violence. Remember Clausewitz’s opening definition of war in the same chapter: “War is an act of force to compel our adversary to do our will.” Even if war can change its outer character like a chameleon (the analogy Clausewitz uses in the section on the trinity), its inner nature must, according to this simple description, be unchanging.

Carl von Clausewitz

What war is not, or at least not by its inner nature, is a political instrument. Reason and its extrapolation, the political objects of government, make up a single subordinate element of the trinity, not the trinity itself. Clausewitz likened each of the three elements of the trinity to magnets, so that reason, hate and chance alternately attracted and rejected each other, so never forming a fixed relationship. “A theory, which insisted in leaving one of them out of account, or on fixing an arbitrary relationship between them”, wrote Clausewitz, “would immediately fall into such contradiction with reality that through this alone it would forthwith necessarily be regarded as destroyed.”

Arbitrary and Fixed

One theory has formed an arbitrary and fixed relationship between war and policy, and we are living with the unfortunate consequences. When Powell went to the National War College, strategic thought had a vested interest in elevating and exaggerating Clausewitz’s interest in the relationship between war and policy. And that was why Clausewitz’s axiom, stated in the heading to another section in the opening chapter of On War, that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means”, became the thesis statement that presumably summed up Clausewitz’s very essence. This enabled the searching inhabitants of the second half of the 20th century to place Clausewitz on the side of the angels. Even the great French thinker Raymond Aron, in his 1976 book on Clausewitz, called it simply the “formula.”

The Cold War gave Aron little choice. The possession of nuclear weapons, and their incorporation into a system of international relations that pivoted on deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction, meant that war had to be avoided, not waged. War had to be subordinated to policy if mankind was to survive. Clausewitz could therefore be associated with notions of limited war, with the need to moderate and even avoid war. According to this interpretation, those who linked Clausewitz to Prussian militarism, to the brutality of battle and to wars of annihilation, had misjudged him. That was not “Clausewitzian”; this was.

Aron’s work notwithstanding, the “liberal” Clausewitz we think we know today was the work of two of the most distinguished scholars of modern war, Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Their fluent and readable translation of On War, which appeared in 1976, became a bestseller in a way the original German never has. Most students, particularly in the English-speaking world, cite Howard and Paret when they refer to On War, not Clausewitz himself. In so many ways both Clausewitz and we have benefited: The text has a grace that early 19th-century German, with its predilection for passive constructions, does not have. Its English version also possesses a greater coherence than is immediately evident in the German. Indeed, Howard and Paret gave the world not so much a translation of Clausewitz as an interpretation of him.

Howard and Paret gave consistency to On War through their choice of English words and, occasionally, by their glosses on the text itself. As a result they do not always translate the same German word with the same English word, instead preferring the English most consonant with its immediate context, or with their interpretation of the text. A significant exception is the German noun Politik, which they tend to translate as “policy” rather than use the equally acceptable alternative of “politics.” This is not just a matter of semantics, and it helps to explain how “Clausewitzian” today expresses a supposed whole that is no more than a lesser part. After all, “policy” conveys an impression of direction and clear intent; politics, like war, is an adversarial business, whose implementation, also like war, is messy and confused.

(Continued at the link below)

HTTP://WWW.THE-AMERICAN-INTEREST.COM/2007/07/01/A-CLAUSEWITZ-FOR-EVERY-SEASON/

Army Needs Balance, Interoperability, Odierno Says

I certainly hope that this is not what GEN Odierno thinks about special operations forces.  If the Army thinks SOF and drones are only good for one kind threat terrorism then perhaps we do need to revitalize the OSS.  I certainly hope he was misquoted and does not think that (of course there are some in the SOF community who might agree  and think that terrorism is now SOF's reason d'être which of course should not be true) 

The Army must remain a balanced force as it downsizes, he said. Drones and special operations forces provide the capability to go after just one kind of threat -- terrorists, the general said.

We are in a bad way if this is the view of the Army and the military writ large and if this is what is being communicated to opinion and thought leaders (e..g, key communicators) at the Aspen Institute.  Again, I certainly hope the General was misquoted or at least that his remarks were taken out of context.

Army Needs Balance, Interoperability, Odierno Says 07/24/2014 09:40 AM CDT Army Needs Balance, Interoperability, Odierno Says By Claudette Roulo DoD News, Defense Media Activity ASPEN, Colo., July 24, 2014 - In the debate about how large the Army should be as the Defense Department faces the return of sequestration spending cuts in fiscal year 2016, it's more important than ever to build a balanced force, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said last night. "I've been very clear ... the president's strategy, that he built and we all signed up for in 2012, is a strategy that we think is sound," he said. Under that strategy, the Army would shrink to about 490,000 soldiers, the general told the audience at the first day of the Aspen Security Forum. "We believed that that size and the capabilities that come with that would allow us to execute that strategy," Odierno said. "Since then, we've had some things come in the way, such as sequestration." Based on the current budget, the Army will instead go down to about 440,000 or 450,000 soldiers by 2016, he said. "What we don't know is what's going to happen after '16," Odierno said. "If it goes to full sequestration, we're going to go to 420,000," he added. "And I've been very clear that at 420,000, we cannot execute the current strategy. We will not have the capacity or capability to do it." If full sequestration returns as scheduled, the general said, the national defense strategy would have to be rewritten. "For me, that is something that is somewhat concerning, because since 2012, the world has not become a safer place," Odierno said. The Army must remain a balanced force as it downsizes, he said. Drones and special operations forces provide the capability to go after just one kind of threat -- terrorists, the general said. "So if you believe that's the only threat we have, that's the way to build your force," he added. "I personally believe we have much more diverse threats that we're going to face." Declining budgets and unstable security situations also put greater importance on interoperability with U.S. partners and allies, he said. "Our NATO partners have significantly decreased their spending on security, so we have to better understand what all our capabilities are," the general said. "We have to understand what our strengths and weaknesses are. We have to work together to build multinational capability to solve these problems." The tensions between Ukraine and Russia are a "wake-up call" for NATO, he said, adding that "over the last several years, we've allowed our capabilities in NATO to slip." It's time to rebuild NATO's capacity, Odierno said. "We have to start doing more exercises, more interoperability," the general said. "We have to have some reassurance of our eastern partners, and we have to make sure we are serious about those. I think we are doing that through small-level exercises today." (Follow Claudette Roulo on Twitter: @roulododnews) Biographies: Army Gen. Ray Odierno Related Sites: Aspen Security Forum Forum Schedule Aspen Institute The Defense Department on Twitter DoD News on Facebook DoD News Broadcast Page DoDLive Blog Related Articles: Odierno: Information, Instability Travel at Similar Speeds Senior Defense Officials Attend Aspen Security Forum

Today's Army marches on its batteries while searching for alternatives

Good story on Pete Newell and the Rapid Equipping Force (REF).  It begs a couple of questions:  first, could we be this innovative in other areas within the Department of Defense and second, by making the REF a permanent agency will it evolve to function like the rest of the permanent bureaucratic organizations?  E.g., will it lose its innovation mojo?

V/R
Dave

Today's Army marches on its batteries while searching for alternatives

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/burn-energy-journal/todays-army-marches-its-batteries-while-searching

The U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force aims to help soldiers in the field by finding "the first, best, fastest solution." Above, as part of an exercise at Fort Bliss, one soldier team came up with its own design for a Combat Outpost -- a remote camp for 20 to 150 soldiers.

- Alex Chadwick

by Alex Chadwick

Marketplace for Monday, April 22, 2013

• STORY

BURN: An Energy Journal

The U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force -- REF for short -- is a little-known agency making big changes in how soldiers fight. It was created after an officer saw a video of soldiers trying to clear an Afghan cave with a rope and grappling hook -- why not robots, he wondered? That was 10 years ago, and since then REF has become an innovator in many fields, including energy.

The great military book is from early China, “The Art of War.”

There is no art of soldiering... you heavy up, go for a walk, look for trouble for a few hours. Or days. Watch a YouTube video of a patrol in Afghanistan.

“The average weight on a soldier's back is somewhere around 104 pounds.”

That’s Col. Pete Newell, U.S. Army. Soldiering doesn't change. Technology does.

“Twenty-seven of it is batteries,” Newell said.

Col. Newell is the director of the Rapid Equipping Force -- REF -- a think tank, hardware store, tech lab for combat soldiers. A perfect solution to a soldier problem -- a Humvee redesigned against IEDs, for instance -- might take years. REF tries to find pretty good answers that already exist, or are about to exist.

“What we'll describe is find the first, best, fastest solution we can,” Newell said.

Here's an example, something REF helped develop to answer a soldier problem with, again, IEDs. And if you wonder what all the batteries are for, well...

“It's called the Thor III,” Newell said.

Thor. It sounds heavy.

“The piece of equipment itself weighs 25 pounds,” Newell said. “Over a three-day patrol, a platoon of 28 soldiers will have three of these systems because of the bands that they operate at.”

Thor is a jammer, a signal jammer. Everybody adapts technology, including the people trying to kill us. A favorite tactic... a hidden bomb with a cell-phone trigger. Wait for the soldiers to get close, call the number... boom. If you're going out on patrol for three days, you want a Thor III, batteries included. If Thor is working, the bomb triggers will not.

“The battery total for that 72 hours is 238 pounds,” Newell said. “So 238 pounds distributed across 28 bodies, on top of the weight for the system and the weight of all the other stuff they're carrying.”

Col. Newell is a former brigade commander, awarded a Silver Star and a unit commendation for leadership at Fallujah, the biggest fight in Iraq. He knows soldiering, but when he took over REF three years ago, he didn't think about energy.

“I would tell you that I really did not see that as a major task for the Rapid Equipping Force,” he said.

But... combat outposts, remote battlefield camps for 30 to 100 soldiers, use a lot of fuel. The convoys to supply them are magnets for bombs, snipers -- they’re the Army's single greatest vulnerability in Afghanistan: Energy. It's also true for a single soldier -- heavied up, and walking patrol.

The Thor III is a REF solution. Too heavy, too power-hungry, though it works right now with existing tech, until they design something better. Still, in January, at REF headquarters at Fort Belvoir outside Washington, the colonel was more excited by something else.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/burn-energy-journal/todays-army-marches-its-batteries-while-searching

Gen. McMaster: Raiders, Advisors And The Wrong Lessons From Iraq

Excerpts:

The first mistake is what McMaster called "a raiding mentality": the idea that we'll get a "fast, cheap, and efficient" victory if we can only identify the crucial "nodes" -- enemy leaders, nuclear weapons sites, whatever -- and take them out, whether with a Special Ops team like the one that killed Bin Laden, a long-range smart weapon, or a drone, McMaster said in his remarks at theCenter for Strategic and International Studies.
…
The second fallacy, McMaster said, is that "we have exaggerated what we can accomplish through proxies or partners." There's a real value to T.E. Lawrence-like advisors who can guide a foreign force to victory, and the Army's spent a lot of time learning how to do that, with McMaster as one of the leading advocates ofcultural and language skills. 

But partners can only do so much on your behalf. Increasingly, McMaster said, you hear the argument that "'We're in fiscal constraints, so let's just outsource it to other armies. We'll just provide small advisory teams... and we can get them to fight wars in a way that is consistent with our vital interests.'"
…
"War is an extension of politics," McMaster said. "There's been a great deal of talk, as you know, about AirSea Battle" -- the influential Air Force-Navy concept for future war -- "[and] we talk about sea control, which is an important concept, but we never talk about land control, and land is where people live; land is where these problems emanate from."
…
The problem, of course, is a "range of capabilities" costs more than a single solution at a time of shrinking budgets. The manpower-intensive ground operations that McMaster and his fellow counterinsurgency theorists are associated with have gone out of fashion. Witness the fact that the room today at CSIS wasn't packed, even for one of the icons of "COIN," and even while 60,000 US troops continue to conduct counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In such an environment, how do you sell the Army's continued relevance to policymakers? 

"It's not my job to sell it," McMaster told AOL Defense. "You just provide your best professional assessment... In a democracy, you get the army that the people are willing to pay for."

V/R
Dave

Gen. McMaster: Raiders, Advisors And The Wrong Lessons From Iraq

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Published: March 20, 2013

http://defense.aol.com/2013/03/20/gen-mcmaster-raiders-advisors-and-the-wrong-lessons-from-iraq/

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.

Army Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, now chief of the tank and infantry school atFort Benning singled out two pitfalls in particular, one about over-reliance on Special Operations raiders, the other about over-reliance on proxies and advisors. Call them (our words, not his) the Zero Dark Thirty fallacy and theLawrence of Arabia fallacy.

The first mistake is what McMaster called "a raiding mentality": the idea that we'll get a "fast, cheap, and efficient" victory if we can only identify the crucial "nodes" -- enemy leaders, nuclear weapons sites, whatever -- and take them out, whether with a Special Ops team like the one that killed Bin Laden, a long-range smart weapon, or a drone, McMaster said in his remarks at theCenter for Strategic and International Studies.

"That's a fundamentally unrealistic conception," said McMaster. "We know raiding and an attritional approach" -- i.e. just killing enemies until the survivors give up -- "did not solve the problem in Iraq" (or for that matter Vietnam). "Targeting does not equal strategy."

At its worst, a raiding approach is a militarized version of "George Costanza in Seinfeld, 'leave on an up note' -- just go in, do a lot of damage, and leave," McMaster said to laughter.

The second fallacy, McMaster said, is that "we have exaggerated what we can accomplish through proxies or partners." There's a real value to T.E. Lawrence-like advisors who can guide a foreign force to victory, and the Army's spent a lot of time learning how to do that, with McMaster as one of the leading advocates ofcultural and language skills.

But partners can only do so much on your behalf. Increasingly, McMaster said, you hear the argument that "'We're in fiscal constraints, so let's just outsource it to other armies. We'll just provide small advisory teams... and we can get them to fight wars in a way that is consistent with our vital interests.'"

(Continued at the link below)

http://defense.aol.com/2013/03/20/gen-mcmaster-raiders-advisors-and-the-wrong-lessons-from-iraq/

Was Counterinsurgency Worth It?

With all due respect to my friend Christopher Preble, I think we are giving Counterinsurgency in the broad sense a bad name that could do long term harm to our military.  I think the more appropriate question(s) is was the US strategy worth it? Or was the US strategy correct and effective?  Or, did we appropriately adjust strategy assuming we assessed the problems and threats correctly as they were evolving?    

COIN is a necessary capability in which we must maintain proficiency within the complete spectrum of US military capabilities.  I think it is appropriate and necessary to question how we did things, how we developed and applied the doctrine but we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and as we did in 1975 and toss COIN out the window and purge it from our schools and training organizations because we may have had the wrong strategy and policies.  The real focus must be on the strategic questions.  COIN is merely one method or way to support accomplishment of the strategic ends.  It is not the strategy.  We should not have a COIN strategy or even a COIN campaign just as we should not have UW strategy or UW campaign or a Major Combat Operations Strategy or a Major Combat Operations Campaign.  None of our doctrinal terms should be in the "name" of the strategy or in the "name" of the campaign.  Our strategies and campaigns should be described in plain language without resort to military jargon (COIN, UW, MCO, FSO, etc) and describe ends, ways, and means, and tasks and purposes in ways that are understood by senior policy makers and political leaders, military professionals, our friends, partners and allies and the general public.  If we cannot explain it in plain language it is very possible that we cannot succeed.

 We really need to focus on our real weaknesses: strategy and policy and the proper communication and implementation of them.  If we get those right the military will effectively support them.

I think the argument that GEN Petraeus felt he had to "drive a wedge in Army and mainstream thinking and broaden the official definition of war" is really an indictment of our incorrect and poor strategy.  Had we developed a strategy that called for the methods of COIN our military would have adapted a lot sooner.  But, according to the popular narrative anyway, GEN Petraeus had to drive the change in strategy from the bottom up (though as we know there were many units in the Army and Marine Corps who were practicing effective COIN long before FM 3-24 was even conceived).  

And in regards to an "official definition of war" I think it is interesting to note that in the Joint 1-02 DOD Dictionary Military and Associated Terms there is no definition of war.  There are definitions of insurgency and terrorism but no definition of war.  I looked back as far as the 1994 edition of JP 1-02 and war was never defined; however, insurgency and terrorism are defined in every edition.  So I cannot find an official definition of war in our doctrine.  Therefore I guess the best thing is to stick with the enduring definition of the nature of war: "War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case.  As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone."  This definition defines the nature of war whether it is revolution or insurgency or civil war, terrorism, or state on state or state on non-state actor.  But I digress.

V/R

Dave

Was Counterinsurgency Worth It?

By Christopher A. Preble

This article appeared in US News and World Report Online on March 7, 2013.

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/was-counterinsurgency-worth-it

On Feb. 23, 2006, over one hundred invited guests gathered at Fort Leavenworth to discuss the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, COIN for short.

The need for such a doctrine was becoming more evident by the day. The war that was supposed to have been a “cakewalk” had turned into a brutal, deadly slog. The war’s advocates had sneered at the suggestion that a large-scale U.S. presence would be required in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s ouster. Three years later, more than 140,000 U.S. troops remained in country, and the last quarter of 2005 had been one of the deadliest since the start of the war.

It would get worse. The day before the group convened in Kansas, Sunni terrorists bombed the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shiite shrines in the world. The attack would plunge Iraq ever deeper into a sectarian war, with U.S. troops stuck in the middle.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan recounts the discussion among the current and former military officers, academics, policy scholars, and journalists in his latest book The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. The group was there to share their honest assessments of a draft field manual on COIN with its authors, chiefly John Nagl, whose book on the British experience in Malaya, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife had become a COIN cult classic, and Conrad Crane of the Army War College. According to Kaplan, “No one in the Army had ever gathered such an eclectic crew in one place for any purpose, certainly not to vet a field manual.”

“

If we aren’t prepared to invest the time and money—and risk the lives of our troops—then it is better not to become involved in the first place.”

But David Petraeus wasn’t just any American general. He wanted, Kaplan explains, “to drive a wedge into mainstream Army thinking, to broaden and overhaul the official definition of war.” He and his fellow COIN true-believers would wage their own insurgency, of sorts, a low-level information operation aided by friendly journalists whom he cultivated with great care.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/was-counterinsurgency-worth-it

Why Armies Matter: Navies and air forces can be crucial, but they don’t win wars.

An important essay on strategic land power.

Conclusion:

History, therefore, presents one inescapable conclusion. Air and sea power are necessary, sometimes even crucial, ingredients for strategic success, but they are never sufficient in and of themselves to attain positive strategic results. If the next century is to be another American century, with the continuation of the Pax Americana, then this nation must possess a land force — Army, Marines, and Special Forces — of sufficient capacity to meet the numerous challenges, as well as opportunities, an uncertain future will present.

V/R
Dave

MARCH 9, 2013 2:00 A.M. Why Armies Matter  Navies and air forces can be crucial, but they don’t win wars. By Jim Lacey Admiral Gary Roughead    Comments 40 Jim Lacey  Around the Pentagon, the budget cutters have put away their knives and are reaching for axes. In times like these, every service naturally circles the wagons around its share of the budget pie. The stress is so great that otherwise smart people take incredibly silly stands. Last week, for instance, the former chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, published a paper that calls for cutting the Army in half and leaving the Navy’s budget untouched. He sums up the logic for this advice in a few simple words: “The force we propose accepts risk in the burden we are placing on our Army and Marine Corps.” Admiral Roughead, unfortunately, fails to tell us what risk he is accepting in the nation’s behalf. Let me do it for him. The risk he is taking on is summed up in one word: defeat. A combined Air Force–Navy effort popularly known as Air-Sea Battle takes a seemingly more reasoned approach. At its base, Air-Sea Battle calls for purchasing expensive new weapons (lots of them) so as to clear the sea-lanes of enemies (that don’t yet exist), and to be able to fight through any enemy’s air and coastal defenses. These proposals, however, fail to answer a huge strategic question: To what purpose? After you have opened the sea-lanes and broken through an enemy’s defense, what do you do if that enemy refuses to surrender? In the past, we carried out these missions in order to open the door for the Army and Marines to enter a country and defeat an enemy force. At present, our Army and Marine Corps are being set up to take an outsized share of the cuts. That will leave precious few troops to do any fighting. This is happening for two primary reasons. The first is that the Air Force and Navy think they were shortchanged during the last ten years as the Army and Marines claimed bigger helpings of the budget pie. Of course, there is an explanation for why the Army and Marines got a bit extra in the past decade, something that may have escaped Admiral Roughead’s notice. Allow me to spell it out: They were fighting two wars. In fact, if America does find itself in another conflict, in this decade or the next, it is highly doubtful that we will be engaged with another nation’s high-seas fleet, for the simple reason that no other nation has a comparable high-seas fleet. Nor is it likely that the Air Force will fight swirling air battles for control of the skies. The reality is that any future conflict is likely to look a lot like the ones we have fought for the past several decades, when the Air Force and Navy have played crucial, but supporting, roles. The second reason why the Air Force and Navy may receive a bigger share of the budget is that they have convinced many policymakers that they can win the next war on their own. Never mind that the one inescapable fact of warfare is that in all of recorded history, there is not a single instance of sea power’s winning a conflict on its own. And the record of air power is even more dismal. For instance, during World War II, despite repeated thousand-bomber raids, Germany increased its war production every year. Only by using atomic weapons was air power ever decisive. But one doubts the utility of such weapons in most of the situations we are likely to confront in upcoming decades. (Continued at the link below) http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342546

Discussion of Effects on SOF if there is a large Army Drawdown

I received this very provocative response to the article below.  But I think the key point to keep in mind is that when the Army is reduced in size the ability to sustain the current size of SOF will be severely impacted.  For those who think that SOF (and the Marines) can make up for reductions in the size of the major strategic land power force they really need to see the catch 22 we put ourselves in when we reduce the size of the Army (I know the Army has to be reduced in size and it will be – we just need to do so with a full appreciation of the 2d and 3d order effects some of which the provocative comments below illustrate from a SOF perspective).  Instead of doing more with less (our typical military mantra in times of austerity) we need to do the right things with the right forces, that are of the "right" size (and therein lies our dilemma – what is the "right" size?) - I would say that the size has to be based on what our nation tells the military it has to do – and of course that requires a balanced and coherent strategy (within the constraints and limitations imposed and acceptable risk identified)  that support our national policies.

Sir,
What is wrong with wanting to 'right size' the DOD to pre 9/11 size? Not exactly the numbers being discussed here, but how would that hurt the military?

We take our lessons learned, our technology, and move fwd.

We go back to a Corps and Division based Army. Get rid of the 4th BCT.

SOF? SF goes back to 3 BNs/Group. Ranger Regiment goes back to its original size. SOAR? I would try to keep it as it is now...we were always short platforms. CA can stay a BDE, but the 85th would need to go. MISO can go back to a single Group. SWCS must cut programs that were designed to fill the extra 18 series demand.

JSOC...let's look at what it is supposed to be, and return it to that. From 3 stars to 2 stars.

SMU's should also return to its mission statement.

USSOCOM? That is a tougher nut to crack because of its COCOM status. There is a lot of fat down there. It would need a leader with guts, and services to look at themselves honestly and find where they can loose positions.

The hard fact that nobody within SOF is really talking about, is that when the general population of our military shrinks, so does the recruiting pool. Our goals/objectives must be realistic, and we must empower the lowest element and gut our headquarters. Too many people doing redundant jobs. When you have a lot of people, you come up with a lot of work for them to do. Is all that work really necessary?

More Starbucks, please.

V/R

Dave

From: David Maxwell 

Date: Friday, February 15, 2013 10:06 PM

Subject: FW: Odierno: Active-Duty Army's Size To Fall Below 490,000 Troops

I have actually heard 350,000 to 390,000 mentioned (RUMINT only).

Inside the Army - 02/18/2013

Cites 'Bermuda Triangle' of fiscal uncertainty

Odierno: Active-Duty Army's Size To Fall Below 490,000 Troops

Dire warnings about the catastrophic impacts of sequestration aside, the

Army's chief of staff says he could stand to cut the service's end strength

below the planned floor of 490,000 troops, though neither he nor his staff

would specify the exact number.

"We all realize the Army's getting smaller," he said during an appearance at

the Brookings Institution on February 15. "We're going down to 490,000 in

the active component even if sequestration doesn't occur, but my guess is

we'll go a little bit smaller in order for me to balance the readiness and

the modernization. We're still working that number. Is it 490? No."

(Inside the Army requires subscription access)

Army plans to shift troops to U.S. Africa Command: Aims for quick crisis response

There can be no "quick crisis response" unless the force is in the right staging location)s) and there is dedicated airlift which of course is the same requirement for Commander's In-Extremis Force.

V/R

Dave

Army plans to shift troops to U.S. Africa Command

Aims for quick crisis response

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/23/army-plans-to-shift-troops-to-us-africa-command/?page=all#pagebreak

By Kristina Wong

-

The Washington Times

Sunday, December 23, 2012

U.S. Africa Command, the military’s newest regional force, will have more troops available early next year as the Pentagon winds down from two ground wars over the past decade, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Army chief of staff, told The Washington Times.

As part of Gen. Odierno’s Regionally Aligned Forces concept, about 1,200 soldiers will deploy to Africa as early as March in an effort to place troops strategically around the globe to respond quickly to sudden challenges in hot spots such as Libya and to develop ties with the people and officials in host countries.

“It’s about us moving towards a scalable, tailorable capability that helps them to shape the environment they’re working in, doing a variety of tasks from building partner capability to engagement, to multilateral training to bilateral training to actual deployment of forces, if necessary,” Gen. Odierno said in an interview.

Amid budget cuts and with President Obama’s new military strategy downplaying the chances of another major land war, the Army has sought to maintain its relevance among admirals and generals in the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa — likely places for the next flash point. When terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, no U.S. troops were close enough to help.

Gen. Odierno, the Army’s 38th chief of staff, said the idea for the Regionally Aligned Forces came to him during his tours of duty as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and as the commander of U.S. Joint Forces. He realized then that combatant commanders — the generals and admirals conducting foreign operations — wanted better-defined support for their missions and were not getting it from the Army because it was engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/23/army-plans-to-shift-troops-to-us-africa-command/?page=all#pagebreak