Mostly Dead
Mostly Dead:
Continuing the Discussion on the Reported Death of the Armor Corps
by Thomas Weiss
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In mid-April, COL Gian Gentile offered what amounted to an Armor Corps post-mortem in a piece for Small Wars Journal called The Death of the Armor Corps. Recently in the same pages, Major James Smith and Major James Harbridge wrote a rebuttal entitled A Combined Arms Response to Death of the Armor Corps. The first question which came to mind after reading the latter piece was: if two Jacks beat a lone King in poker, do two Majors trump a Colonel in a doctrinal argument?
COL Gentile, in many important respects, echoes the arguments made by three former BCT commanders in a white paper diagnosing the Field Artillery with a similar disease, entitled The King and I (which was, ironically, forwarded to me by a gleeful Armor officer some two years ago). In essence, both arguments state that the capability of the maneuver, fires and effects elements of the Army to prosecute a high intensity conflict has been drastically reduced by our commitment to the counterinsurgency competencies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, COL Gentile plainly declares that the Armor corps “is no more.”
In their rebuttal, Majors Smith and Harbridge seem to be saying, like the old man about to be put onto a meat wagon in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “We’re not dead yet.” They offer examples of units transitioning the spectrum of conflict and proffer that as an Army, our strength “is our ability to adapt and innovate while still retaining the ability to relearn our core competencies.”
Three fundamental questions arise from these two articles. First, is the Army truly at a place where its combined arms competencies have degraded almost to the point of non-existence? Second, if these competencies have degraded, does it constitute a crisis or a point from which we may never return? And third, looking beyond our current conflicts, how should we best organize and train our forces?
Download the Full Article: Mostly Dead
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Weiss is an active duty Field Artillery Officer with served in various command and staff positions in multiple tours to Iraq. Currently, he is rehabilitating at Fort Sam Houston, TX, following injuries received in Iraq last year.
