by Col. Patrick Lang (Ret.) (bio below)
On Meet the Press yesterday we learned that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace USMC says that the armed forces can cope adequately with its impending crisis of personnel and unit “fatigue” by re-training support personnel to perform the duties now done by the infantry.
This means that some of those young folks who were recruited on the basis of a better future through Army training and the experience of a measure of discipline in their lives are going to be re-trained to be an approximation of an infantryman. Mechanics, finance clerks, chaplain’s assistants, truck drivers, artillerymen, etc. The list of possibilities is extensive.
Can this be done? Certainly. Will it produce a force equal in quality to the one we now have? Certainly not.
THE INFANTRY. The “poor bloody infantry,” as the British sometimes say. The mission of the infantry is “to close with the enemy and to kill or capture them by fire and maneuver and close combat.” Not everyone is “cut out” for that. Some people have the idea that the way people end up in the infantry is that new infantrymen are those who were left over after the Army was finished sifting through the recruited for people who were “trainable” for more complex jobs. Not so! The Army is looking for men who will fit into the kind of social set up that exists in infantry units, live easily in the out-of-doors, and are not easily shocked into trauma by what their duties will expose them to. The process of screening new recruits, of training them and evaluating the results tries to identify the suitable. Life among other infantrymen produces the men you see on television at Walter Reed. Most of them want to go back to their company, battalion or regiment. They want that almost as much as they want that missing hand, foot or whatever back.
It can be argued, that all soldiers are basically infantrymen. This sounds good but is not true. All soldiers should be able and willing to fight, but it is one thing to be useful in a fire fight when you must be and another to be someone whose every day job is to be at the center of fire fights.
The marines maintain stoutly that every marine is a rifleman. This is a pretty fable, useful in building “esprit de corps,” but just about any seasoned marine officer will tell you (as they have me) that there is a big difference between marine infantry “grunts” and the troops from marine aviation (the air wing). Additionally, the U.S. Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy. It is basically a naval landing force and as such receives quite a lot of its support from the U.S. Navy. This means that the percentage of marines who are already infantrymen is higher than in the Army. Pace’s experience of this very different force may have something to do with his willingness to go along with this re-training idea. On the other hand, the plan may well have more to do with the now legendary distaste of Donald Rumsfeld for the US Army.
There are rumors that something similar is going to be attempted in the Navy and Air Force to produce scratch battalions of Air Force and Navy people guarding things in Iraq. They could not do more than that because such units would have little or no combat value.
A policy of this kind is a measure of desperation. A sustained policy of disregard for the terms of enlistment of our soldiers will wreck the volunteer Army force. Does the administration believe that Navy and Air Force enlisted people will accept a re-classification of this kind without protest?
In 1944 and 1945, the U.S. Army “re-classified” large numbers of men into the infantry from aviation and logistical support duties. A little research will show that the people treated in this way were not the best of infantrymen.
Pat Lang
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
Guess all that happy talk about meeting their recruiting goals for the year was just that.
By reducing the target number they were trying to reach after they realized they would fail to meet them.
Thus, in January, you say you intend to sign up 500 recruits in by the end of the first quarter. The second week of March, you realize you’re not going to meet it, so you look at the number you’ve already got (let’s say 405) and declare “we’re revising our recruiting goal for this quarter because we realize we don’t need as many as we first thought, it’s now 400.” So you’ve met your goal, in spite of the fact that you don’t have enough recruits to meet your real needs.
That’s a fairly simplistic way of demonstrating it, but IIRC, that’s pretty much the way they did it.
This is very troubling. As word seeps out, it’ll hurt recruitment even more. Who will trust what any recruiting officer tells him?
Beginning to think that very few are trusting what a recruiting officer says now.
What irked me, Ok, pissed me off, was that Federal money to the schools under No Child Left Behind is is based on ‘letting recruiters on campus’. Yup, no campus access to recruiters – NO MONEY.
That sucks. They always have a hidden agenda don’t they?
Sure do! And I (just as well as everyone else here) hates it!
Did anyone see last week’s episode of NOW on PBS? The biggest segment was on dodgy recruiting policies in high schools, etc. Apparently the pentagon is building a huge databse of ALL 16-18 year olds and targeting them.
Here’s a link —>
http://www.pbs.org/now/society/recruiting.html
P.S. Talk about cannon fodder.
Good lord.
This is really upsetting:
and
Half wonder if the admin is really up to something else? Remember after Katrina, the lack of military/national guard in NOLA? WTF does support really mean?
This is a strange Update linked to by LeftCoaster (hat tip ThinkProgess) the count of lost national treasures was adjusted upwards: 2,245 by the Department of Defense.
Now, can we believe the official count?
Can’t believe a damn thing anymore! Shit!
Read that the DoD put out a correction that they erred and corrected their website. as per Leftcoaster http://www.theleftcoaster.com scroll douwn to “Rummy’s Untidy New Iraq bodycount”
Aside from the obvious betrayal of the already-serving troops and giving the lie to the propaganda about how good the recruiting efforts were turning out, this story indicates to me one big thing.
The Bush regime has absolutely no intention of reducing the force presence in Iraq anytime in the near future.
Very interesting opinion.
It would seem so … or, to quote someone’s story yesterday, it’s just part of the shell game.
Realistically, how in the hell can they reduce troops? They don’t have nearly enough to begin with! (McCain’s idea to increase troops, though, is insane, imho.)
Then we’ve got the Air Force frantic about increasing bombing missions if we don’t have reliable people on the ground to vet the locations. That requires a lot of troops — and a lot of knowledgeable troops who know the territories.
It makes my head hurt.
Last night, I listened to a bit to a C-Span presentation that featured William Kristol and others. Oh man. Their heads are so stuck up their asses, it’s pathetic.
If they ever did pull their heads out, they’d be as disoriented as convicts being freed after a half-century in prison with no relatives or other support group to help them re-orient themselves into society.
I’ve found that if ever I want the most accurate picture of what the Bush regime will do on any given issue, listening to Kristol is the best way to find out. He’s the direct neocon-PNAC source for such stuff, even more of an accurate barometer than Brooks or even Cheney.
Of course he’s crazy as a loon, (no offense to true loons), and should be in a straightjacket along with the rest of them, but hearing him talk about the perils of precipitous withdrawl, and warning that we need to keep up all the pressure that we can militarily in Iraq, this tells me that there will be no drawdown of US troops in Iraq anytime before the end of the Bush regime’s term of office.
BushCo has even managed to outmaneuver Biden in this recent flurry of bullshit about significant troop withdrawls next year. I’m sure Karl Rove is really happy Biden has been saying the things he’s been saying these last several days about withdrawls and about the need for Bush to announce a strategy and a plan for withdrawl. Biden has given the perfect cover for the Bush regime to perpetuate this latest propaganda fantasy about withdrawl, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Rove spin machine deliver praise to their new stealth Dem friend Biden, a guy who never misses a chance to advance his own ambition regardless of who he has to betray.
I can see now how they will ‘redeploy’ troops to Kuwait thereby ‘reducing’ the ‘official’ troop count in Iraq – – only to move those troops back into Iraq without removing them from the ‘official’ Kuwait numbers.
Think about it. The troops never have to move. It is just a matter of shuffling paperwork – the ultimate shell game.
It’s just like how they manipulate environmental numbers.
Of course not! Haliburton’s got a “personal responsibility”to fulfill those no-bid contracts!
<snark>
That’s it exactly. Every “support personnel” reassignment must be backfilled and is just one more juicy Line Item on a Halliburton contract.
“…the now legendary distaste of Donald Rumsfeld for the US Army.”
Might as well hate your foot. Gah, hate the U.S. Army, two hundred and thirty years old and the army of Wahington and Lincoln, Grant and Eisenhower. Yeah, let’s ruin unit morale and cohesion. Good idea, Rummy.
Sounds like someone is trying to cover his ass!
Frankly, I quite seriously think that we are facing the distinct possibility of (another) covert coup d’état of some sort before these kinds of things are extensively implemented.
THAT was what so troubled the administration about Jack Murtha’s public “change of heart”, and that was why they so quickly backed off of their original offensive against him. They are under the gun. Neither side of this standoff in Washington wishes to abandon Iraq to chaos, but they disagree on the tactics that should be used to forestall that from happening.
The REAL problem is that neither side is seeing the bigger picture, and this is a problem that might have no possible resolution. We have gone so deeply into economic imperialism and dependence of foreign oil that I am sure the movers and shakers think that this country and its economy would literally fall apart under the pressure that would ensue if we left the Middle East to its own devices and the depredations of OTHER superpowers.
And they may be right.
But the alternative…a constant war against an ever stronger Third World that outnumbers us 4 to 1…is equally bad if not worse.
I see only one possible hope, and it is a slim one because:
1-It would require an effort from the American people that would have to equal or surpass that of W.W.II, and I am not at all convinced that we have the backbone for it anymore.
Maybe…maybe not…
and
2-The people who control this country…the PermaGov…are not willing to take that chance or even apparently consider it. I say this because there is no major, likely candidate for office right now who is saying anything resembling “OK. That’s it. OUT of the economic imperialism game. Time to tighten our belts, even if it means rationing for 5 years or even more. Time to regain our own self-reliance. Time to find new ways to conserve energy and new ways to produce it. Time for a new austerity. We are drawing back, and we will defend ourselves from further incursions on OUR territory by any means necessary, up to and including nuclear retaliation. You have been warned. We will not fuck with you anymore, but God HELP you if you continue to fuck with us.”
However, in a country where people are trampled in shopping riots….I dunno…
And neither do they. If “they” did think this…if a sufficient number of the people who hold the real money here were of this opinion…then there would be a major candidate with major financing (synonyms really, those two ideas) saying this in public.
It’s an OBVIOUS alternate strategy, and I am quite sure that it has been gamed at the highest levels. My belief is that it WOULD work, and my further belief is that the gaming and planning is being done by (conscious and unconscious) racists and classists who FAR underestimate the capabilities of minority Americans…including the working white lower middle class and poor.
However…here we are.
Overtly discussing ways to continue our dominance of the Middle East without being driven insolvent, which is beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic tactic that our enemies are using against us now.
And covertly…bet on it…discussing how to get rid of this administration by any means necessary because they are about to completely break this system if they continue on their present course and they show no signs of understanding the mistakes that they have made so far.
Have fun…
And may you be born into interesting times.
Fasten your seat belts.
It’s going to be a rough ride.
AG
Carter put a sweater on and gave us Reaganomics.
No one runs on the austerity ticket, and that may be a problem. But you are right about one thing: BushInc. has broken the contract. And BushInc. is being pursued by powerful forces, many within their own party.
If the US military would fully conquer Asia the US would get 7 extra armies and be in the position to swing into Europe (5 armies) and Africa (3 armies). Then by turning in a set of cards they would get a minimum of yet another 3 armies — and depending on the turn and who else has turned in their sets maybe many, many, more.
This seems as reasonable as anything coming out of the Bush administration or the personnel sections of the Armny or Marine Corp.
Really interesting. No one can win. As soon as any one person gets closest to 50% of the Armies, the other two will get together and cut him down to third on the board.
That leaves one of the two temporary allies getting close to winning, so the other (second largest) ally will switch sides to join the now losing party and the two will cut the near winner down to third.
At which time the second and third join to cut down the biggest. This is a repeating pattern.
We once started a three handed game of Risk at 6:00 PM and finally we just quit at noon the next day so we could get some sleep.
Karl Polanyi in his great economic history book “The Great Transformation” uses that to explain why no really significant wars occurred in Europe between 1815 and the Crimean War, and suggested that it was the break-down of the numerous nations into only two opposing blocks after (roughly) 1856 that permitted WW I to break out. [Note – I said “permitted.” There were of course other causes.]
Another problem with the Risk approach to strategy is that players forget that the blank spaces on the board are actually populated in the real world.
All of the infantry shortages and desperate attempts to correct the situation are caused by a total failure of long term planners to see the way modern warfare involving the US would develop. It has been for many years obvious that “men on the ground” or infantry would be needed in large numbers and yet our military seems to have spent the time thinking only in terms of the various “elite” or high profile units. Even though times have changed we still seem to have been saddled with old cold war thinking.
Contractors can make a lot more money supplying Armor, Artillery and Mechanized Infantry units than they can Light Infantry or Airborne units.
Makes me wonder how many ex military officers and pentagon employees involved in planning and purchasing end up employed by said contractors.
It’s already happening.
I was talking to two senior NCO’s a few Sundays ago who were 30-plus year artillerymen. Their National Guard unit has had its guns taken away and they are retraining as infantry.
This is a waste! You lose the experienced artillerymen as their training and experience goes out of date, and you get poor infantrymen in return. The NCO’s in particular will not be the kind of men who can lead infantrymen into difficult situations because the men respect his experience and knowledge. Motivation and unit esprit-de-corps are now and will continue to be absolute shit.
I spent 20 years conducting field exercises for Maintenance, supply, transportation, medical and signal units. All of those units are taught and trained in defensive tactics. Nothing else. They aren’t infantry and aren’t expected to be. Conversion and retraining will not make the infantrymen.
As part of Command and General Staff College I read a treatise on how to deal with being surrounded. One statement I remember very well. It was that when a combat unit (Armor or Infantry) becomes surrounded, just before the last escape route is closed, they should get their support troops on it and out of the trap. They will be of no value in the defense when surrounded, will get killed, and if the unit survives, they will be needed after the battle. (As a maintenance and supply guy, that always gave me a feeling of comfort knowing that all those combat types were concerned about my security.)
The short summary of what that plan does is it avoids expanding the military by cannibalizing and destroying the ground forces we have. When those support troops are later needed to reconstitute the military, they will be gone. Even the survivors will no longer have the current skills needed.
Rick B2
If you know tell me how many tubes there are in Iraq or Afghanistan of caliber greater than 100mm. Pat
No idea. Sorry.