OK... frunning the BS flag up the pole
I don't even know where to start... but I will do my best to be brief...
Mandatory caveat upfront... I too am a fan of reducing unnecessary levels of bureacracy where and when appropriate...
"I'm not exactly convinced of planning or even a fan of planning. I'm more into creating opportunities and exploiting the same with cat-like reactions."
Hmmmm.... Not sure which of the two to begin with... is it that you don't enjoy planning or is it that you don't find the activity of identifying likely future challenges and possible solution approaches very productive? Trust me, I hate planning too... it sucks... never ending series of what if's that the CDR wants examined... that said, perhaps not everyone has cat-like reactions or that they should have cat-like reactions... sometimes you have to go slow to go fast... maybe this approach is good up to a certain point... but to be honest I'm not a fan :rolleyes:
"Such a mode adds too many restrictions, too many delays, too much friction ... let's just mention that it's a bad idea. The time of the division has passed away. it has actually passed away back in the 50's when NATO planned to defend a 1,000 km front-line in Central Europe with basically only 26 divisions instead of having 100-400 divisions on a 1,000 km front-line as Europe experienced it a few years earlier. The wide frontages required a mobility and agility which simply didn't fit into the division corset."
Which operations are you referencing? Division centric operations in DS/DS weren't overly pedantric... leash was logistical not an inability to operate without detailed orders... OIF 1 wasn't exactly plodding either on the combat side... again logistics was the leash (that and a biblical-esque mud shower)...
How exactly have Division staffs impeded BCT operations in OIF/OEF beyond initial combat operations???
"The West German Army would have moved to BCT centric forces if not for NATO..."
and the obvious reason that keeps popping up... Resourcing, Managing and synchronizing non-maneuver combat enablers/forces
Redundancy in these capabilities is not sustainable (pun intended)... or at least that seems to be the case in this instance
Live well and row
For having offended thee, I am humbly sorry... maybe
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Fuchs
Which restrictions?
Well, a corps might order one division to give a Bde to another Div, but then you're again at a higher span of command for the latter division (and the div/bde staffs don't know each other). Keeping brigades under command of a specific division ties them together. You get bundles of brigades which you couldn't move as freely in a corps sector as you could without the division layer. That's one restriction.
A corps HQ has a picture of the corps area, issues missions to division HQs which in turn update their own intent and issue orders to brigades.
The lag in here should be obvious. Such a lag is a restriction on agility of command.
I'm not particularly interested in DS or OIF experiences. That's like boxing experiences based on punching ball training. The fact that there were problems at all is embarrassing. A competent army would have created very different challenges and a modern army structure should not be modelled with the least problematic and long since gone opfor in mind.
Yet, if OIF was of interest; the British 1 Armoured Division wasn't an effective HQ in that operation. It issued few orders, and those came often very late. The brigades pulled their weight.
By the way; the quotation marks (" ") are not for paraphrasing. Your third quote was paraphrasing and I would appreciate not to see false quotes.
I can assure you that nobody in the 50's thought of "synchronizing", for that is a much newer fashion - and mostly an anglophone fashion. There's an official military history book on the early years of the Heer (up to 1970) and it clearly tells us that the reason for the division in the second army structure was a political one. The German experts were advocating a brigade-centric army. The result was the Division 59, an often-copied structure which focused on the brigades and left only a small role for the division.
Example 1: Task Organization... you find your example a restriction... that Armies in general and the US in particular find the attachment of another maneuver force troublesome? Which decade and situation do you refer to??? 101st received a balanced TF during OIF and we couldn't be happier... and I KNOW if you asked the LTC or CPTs in that unit that they would overwhelmingly tell you we employed them properly... and in the end they wanted to wear our combat patch... they were fairly emphatic... we certainly didn't find them a burden... nor did they feel as if they were malused or somehow otherwise neglected... anecdotal evidence - certainly... any less rigorous than your hypethetical... nope
Example 2: Orders process... exactly how deliberate/regimented do you perceive the orders process to be in execution??? Corps finishes their order, then the Division starts, etc? Beyond the initial orders self-flagulation that might be CLOSER to reality, but not really representative of the parallel nature of the process... in combat the orders are actually without much delay at all because we've already done the staff work prior to receipt of the order... The fact that a British Division issued the order after the fact is not necessarily a condemnation... I don't KNOW, but I SUSPECT the order was meant to "clean up" the battlefield and formally capture the VOCO issued as commanders executed with CAT-like reflexes... an order as opposed to a FRAGO actually has a shelf life... since I don't presume that our British allies are a bunch of bungaling baboons... I think it likely to be closer to the truth
Example 3: DS and OIF are not valid... they are what we have in the last 20 years... so we should delve back to the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s as more representative of our likely future challenges??? Why is that? For which future challenges should we organize???..
False quotes... my deepest apologies... did I misrepresent the West German's allies by calling them collectively NATO? If so, mea culpa... For the record, I don't find the 1970's German Army particularly interesting so I guess we are even... However, for the sake of argument... that force would be used to do what??? defend the IGB... didn't have to deploy (actually was against the constitution right?) fought on intimately familiar terrain... known and well rehearsed OPLANS... hardened facilities and incredibly nice road and rail infrastructure... this is exemplar and more intellectually interesting than the fights of the past 20 years in terms of informing the future???
To be perfectly honest, I'm usually far more swayed by your logic