Can the Army escape the fate over their overweight Hummers?
Friday, October 20, 2006 at 3:41PM Interesting perspective from recent boots-on-the-ground soldier.
In Iraq the high tech light weight cross country Hummer has been turned into a road bound over weight tanket. When I was in Iraq it always seemed strange that our Hummers featured about half an inch of armor plate supported by an almost flimsy light weight aluminum frame. We were issued new M1114s and it was interesting how the weight of the armor caused the vehicle to noticeably settle in the year we had them.In that year I witnessed the Military Transition Team (MiTT) that I was assigned to also settle on its frame. The leadership had the expectations of the "Leviathan Force" and did not grasp that they were the vanguard of the "System Administrator" force. They sought the big battle, the decisive engagement, the sound of screaming jets and overwhelming firepower on a battlefield ruled more by smiles, gestures, words and deeds. They taught the art of writing Operations Orders while skipping how to track operations on a map or even how to track what they had. They sought an enemy defined in black and white in a place with more shades than a paint store. The result was a great gap between expectations and results that lead in many quarters to "Sour Grapes." No screaming horde pouring through the Fulda Gap, but instead an enemy made up of handfuls of individuals armed with cell phones and IEDs. An enemy who's world turned not on great concepts and international politics but petty designs and private causes.
Ironically this MiTT was made up of the very people that the "System Administrator" force concept prescribes: professional people drawn from civilian business, engineering and IT. There was however no leap of intuition into the new role. Instead people fell back on what they had been trained to do, they remained blind to what they had not been trained on and tried vainly to superimpose their expectations over reality. The consequence was, for some, bitterness and for those who went beyond what they new and grew in the new roles some exultation. But even for the exultant there was the nagging thought that their untutored adaptations were not what could have been achieved with better preparation. Someone has to be first but the result was that both the success and the failure could not be fully appreciated by many of the participants.
What was needed was better vetting. The Army is often vetted more against
free thinking and experimentation than for it. In this the Army leadership has been accused of becoming addicted to employing the more flexible teams provided by other services. The Navy, for example, has provided small teams that; because they are employed far from their training base, have proven to be highly adaptive and aggressive as they move into the uncharted waters of prosecuting an asymmetrical counter-insurgency on land. Unfortunately, however the re-alignment of the Army at the end of the Cold War has left the Army Reserve with few soldiers qualified in Combat Arms. Those units with Combat Arms soldiers are subject to having their ranks full of Field Grade Combat Arms Officers who left active duty as junior officers. These officers therefore have experience in combat units during peace time as "Obligated Volunteer" junior officers without the benefit of the grooming being applied to their "Regular Army" counterparts. Such officers tend to be conservative or, worse, seeking that master stroke to prove that the chain of assignments that led them away from active command of a combat unit were wrong. Having neither great experience nor the benefit of being entirely inexperienced, they are consequently trapped by what little they know. And a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.The "Green Berets" were supposed to be the "System Administrators" of asymmetrical warfare, but unfortunately more than a Special Forces Tab is required. There has to be the expectation and the belief in the concept. There has to be the desire to learn, the ability and the willingness to network. There are no laurels from peacetime employment or past experiences on foreign terrain that could surpass current situational awareness, adaptability and networking skills. The over reliance on past experience is contrary current situational awareness. A soldier on the battlefield is required to know what is happening rather than what should be happening and to be a networked member of a group living in the present rather than an individual living alone in his personal past.
Like our Hummers, something specialized for one thing can be re-engineered to be specialized for something else. The results, however, while functional, will be expensive and probably less than satisfactory.
When I left Iraq, our Hummers were sagging like the old warhorses they had become. Transformed from high tech light weight cross country vehicles into road-bound, overweight tankets they were continuing their transition to the scrap yard, a transformation whose pace and ultimate design is preordained by their construction: heavy armor bolted to a light aluminum frame.
Reader Comments (8)
As a suggestion, Strykers are a better, safer, more functionsl urban assault/sys admin vehicle.
I hope Tommy gets this before boarding his flight to China. I'd really like to hear what he thinks about Daron Acemoglu's new book Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy availible here. A positive review which contains a summary was posted by Brad Delong a couple days ago.
And if the reader will indulge my self linking, I have written something about it as well.
TheJew: self-linking of pertinent content is always welcome. thanks.
(except, did it go with this thread? ;-)
"Sometimes you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Although, you may end up with an army you don't want either.
To TheJew:
Acemoglu's book strikes me as reasonable. Some countries are able to open up domestically (democracy) before externally (globalization). I think islands pull this off better, and remote colonies with big inlands to integrate (Canada, US, Australia,NZ, and India).
Most countries, though, will open up externally first (China model) and stay authoritarian until the dynamics he cites work their way through the system.
Hugh,
Tom has said (though i can't find it right now), that you go to war with the army you've been wanting for the last x number of years. we bought one military across the 90s (the Leviathan) and operated another (protoSysAdmin). what we ended up with was one that didn't match up with demand very well.
There is a battle between speed/mobility and survivability that will never be definitively resolved. In defense of the up-armoring program, what would domestic support for the sysadmin effort be like had hummers stayed as light as they were in those first days and we had gotten an increase in casualties because of it?
Today, the troops are sometimes not wearing all their armor because it slows them down/restricts them too much. Sometimes this is wise and other times it is foolish (as foolish as when they weren't wearing their geeky eyeshields but immediately took to the fashion conscious "gargoyle" styles). But people can understand personal body armor decisions. You can't run a motor pool like that when you have a hostile and mostly ignorant press clamoring "when will you finally get appropriate armor for all our humvees?"
In short, I wouldn't put too heavy a weight on the situation (yes, pun intended). The politics largely drove the armoring and we've got enough combat capability to spare. We don't have domestic support for the war to spare.
here's a comment from the anonymous author of this piece:
The fact that the few of us went with many Iraqi soldiers into combat and the Iraqi soldiers stayed together and became an increasingly effective fighting force says a lot. We helped to create the basis for the Iraqis outgrowing us in the prosecution of their war.
No the disaffection was because it was something other than what each had envisioned when they formed their idea of what war would be so many years ago.
Even if the adaptation is made successfully, the success may not be satisfying if it does not fit the preconceived idea of what success is.
Imagine too being one minute in the military backwater of the reserves in a support role and the next being put at the forefront of the battle. Not just the only 12th-man but on a team of 12th-men.