The U.S. Army Has Quietly Created a New Commando Division
11.29.2014 at 10:31pm
The U.S. Army Has Quietly Created a New Commando Division by Joseph Trevithick, War is Boring
On Sept. 30, the U.S. Army unceremoniously stood up a new headquarters—the 1st Special Forces Command—at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The division-level unit brings together more than 15,000 Green Berets and other special troops in a single new organization.
Previously, the Army’s Special Operations Command had directly controlled all of these troops plus others on a wide range of missions. The idea behind the new HQ is to assemble a force specifically tailored for dealing with what the Pentagon calls “hybrid warfare.”…
Please take a look at the briefing from the Commander of the 1st Special Forces Command at this link to correct the numerous inaccuracies in this article (and note the term commando is not used once in BG Rogers’ presentation just to correct one of the many). http://www.benning.army.mil/mcoe/maneuverconference/presentation/pdf/BGRogers.pdf
Unlike the article, the presentation is clear and it sounds like a good concept. The one glaring shortfall from my seat is that it still does not fully address the shortfall in C2 capacity for Special Warfare. As the brief clearly points out, the world is a mess, and that mess is not limited to one specific area in the world. Since these missions will generally be enduring, we will still need enhanced Special Warfare C2 capacity at most of the TSOCs on an enduring basis. I can foresee the USASFC(A) C2 element supporting the highest priority effort or top two priority efforts, but other efforts will remain important and they need solutions to address the C2 gap.
The key to long term success for this concept is to avoid creating a bureaucracy that becomes paralyzing. USASFC C2 structures need to remain agile, flexible, and adaptive so they can change based on changes in the operational environment.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your point of view, there is no shortage of work.
A Navy Seal doesn’t know zip about taking Special Operations back to its roots. In Vietnam our regular soldiers, NCOs, and Officers did,on a regular basis, what you would assign to Special Operations. Get a Grip! A new Commando Division. Really! That is not special.
We’d be happy to correct any errors. But we do use “commando” as an informal, generic catch-all akin to “special operations forces.” Also, a two-star command is understood to be “division-level,” so again informally this is accurately a creating a “commando division” of sorts. The fact that the intermediate headquarters is the only thing new doesn’t really change that. The Army officially sanctions talking about “7th Infantry Division,” which was “created” by activating a two-star command to manage existing brigades. The same can be said of “creating” the 23d Infantry Division in Vietnam from previously separate brigades.
Are we not recreating the wheel or at least turning the wheel back to 1969 where CA and Psychological Operations forces were part and parcel under a single SF structure—it just was not a division slot/nor division formation.
While a nice shift of focus–no one really does seem to “fully understand” the depth and breath of the new Russian UW doctrine that they are actually field testing hourly inside the Ukraine while we just talk about “hybrid warfare”.
The Russian Army’s current use of combined CF and SF combined with intel armed units–cannot be currently matched at all by the entire US military regardless of how hard it tries—we are nowhere close to combining a strategic with a tactical UW field strategy supporting political warfare at the international level that the Ukraine is at currently.
What the Russians have pulled off is extremely interesting as it plays fully against our own internal weaknesses and negates our military/political strengths–that is why is was so designed and is currently so effective especially if coupled with tactical nuclear threats along the way—are we ourselves ready to threaten tactical nukes-no.
Example are we the US ready to pull the Article 5 trigger of NATO if all of a sudden a bunch of Russian speakers pour into the streets and claim they are being discriminated against and want “federalization”—are we ready to go to for war over “discrimination” and “federalization”—no not really as we see in the Ukraine–where blankets and MREs are about our only assistance in that ongoing “hybrid war” and that does not work well against T72s and 64s and BM27/31s.
Heck we cannot even get the current Army out of DATE and back to CAM which is an inherent part of “hybrid warfare”. In fact the Russian UW strategy is simply a combined CAM/DATE on steroids and not even the famous NTC can replicate that mixture.
And Russia info warfare–we are not even in the same room as they are currently everyday in the entire global media market—and we come nowhere even close to IS.
Example–the UK has shut down over 30,000 social media and internet sites of IS alone this year and they are sinking from the weight of even trying to keep up.
Notice the inherent disconnect?
There is currently no US strategy in place for countering the Russian doctrine of UW as a political warfare tool and yet we get the following comment from a US Ambassador.
“If someday hybrid warfare played out on #NATO territory, we’d be ready.”–US Ambassador Lute.
Now that is a disconnect.