One Army or Two?
One Army or Two? – asks Greg Grant at DoD Buzz.
… Does that ability of troops to shift back and forth seamlessly between different types of operations hold across the board? I would argue that it’s not always the case. For example: there was a clear difference in competence between Sallee’s soldiers doing a cordon and knock operation and an artillery company temporarily converted into a motorized rifle company doing the same task. The 11 Bravos, the infantry, were just much better at basic infantryman skills, which stands to reason. Special operators, who relentlessly train to take down a house or roomful of enemy, are much better than the 11 Bravos, although that gap has narrowed considerably in recent years as the rank-and-file ground pounder has accumulated a mass of experience doing cordon and knock operations during combat tours in Iraq.
Speaking earlier this month at a CNAS conference in Washington, Gen. David Petraeus weighed in on the issue. Our troopers can still very much fight,” he said, but instead of preparing just for the big battles, current and future wars require troops prepare for a constantly shifting mix of conflict, across the low and high intensity scale, he said. We’re not doing the big tank armies colliding in the central corridor anymore, we’re doing continuous complex counterinsurgency which sometimes requires very significant kinetic ops, often requires very significant stability and support, all integrated.” Readying units for a major force on force fight might mean a couple of weeks spent brushing up on shooting big metal targets at the NTC, he said.
The Army is wrestling with the issue. Trainers at the Army’s premier training center are mindful of a potential atrophy of high-intensity skills and try to include some training in those tasks for units preparing for Iraq and Afghanistan, said Maj. Michael Burgoyne, co-author of an excellent book on adapting to counterinsurgency: The Defense of Jisr Al-Dorea. It’s about finding a balance… somewhere in between counterinsurgency and high-intensity conflict, some kind of mix of capabilities where we can do a lot,” he told me…
Much more at DoD Buzz.
