We're pretty much in agreement...
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Originally Posted by
wm
I concur here as long as the quality isn't gold-plated too.
True. One of the better Generals I knew had a big sign on his desk that said "Best is the enemy of good enough." System didn't like that philosophy so he departed with only two stars...
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Again I agree. What I don't understand is, that given the nature of the threat out there for the foreseeable future, why we are throwing huge sums at Joint Strike Fighters, Littoral Combat Ships and FCS family of vehicles.
Rock and a hard place. We have to be a full spectrum force. I truly do not know anyone at all knowledgeable who questions that. That means having a ready source of JSFs, LCS and such. Production of prototypes does not offer an adequate test and ability to correct flaws for operational hardware, thus a production run is needed. The more you make, the cheaper they get -- and stuff is so expensive today that any economies are seized, even red and fishy ones...
Besides, both those two do in fact bring potentially useful for the next 20 years or so capabilities to the table. JSF in particular has some great capabilities.
That also is the kind of quality that keeps the rest of the world honest. That quality -- and the obvious quality of the troops today (plus the huge number we alone in the woorld have with combat experience, something many forget) help in forcing others to contemplate the kinds of threat we will face for the next decade or so rather than something far more dangerous and messy.
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I didn't come here to be insulted.:D As you note, OODA has some merit in certain forms of high intensity engagements. It is not a panacea though.
Sorry 'bout that. :o
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You have a major piece of the puzzle. We also need to do a much better job at the whole info war piece. By that I mean we need to stop being "spin doctors" and start being purveyors of the truth, in a way that makes sense to the civilians who are getting caught between our troops and the bad guys hiding behind those civilians.
Totally agree. All bureaucracies go into the spin and self defense mode when they screw up or get attacked; the Armed Forces generally do it relatively ineptly. I will defend them to a very slight extent by pointing out that the lesser lights in Congress (the 481...) do have a tendency to showboat, ask inane questions (inanity topped only by the main stream media) and bloviate for hours about things not germane; that tends to make the services reply in kind. Not defending it but there's a lot of egg out there.
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I couldn't agree more, which is why I suggest we need more than just light infantry in theater. I believe the target you had in mind is more bureaucratic, on this side of the Atlantic, and clustered in offices around Capitol Hill or near Arlington Cemetary. That target is a self-licking ice cream cone and I'm not sure how to engage it. Turning up the heat hasn't worked in the past.
Not if your light infantry is properly equipped and well trained -- and we're getting there. There'll always be a need for other arms and services but we could significantly cut the number required with better training and the right gear.
Gotta point the heat at the right place. Congress; the rest of the system can self correct if that major impediment is repaired. Vote out all incumbents repeatedly and they'll get the message. Only one I ever voted in for reelection was Sam Nunn when I lived in Georgia -- and I now regret that. Vote 'em all out!
The Triumph of Bureaucracy
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Originally Posted by
wm
Properly controlled and administered, it probably has value--post-Cardwell reforms versions anyway. But I do not think that we want to try to develop it along the lines of geographic recruitment and home base staging areas used by the Brits (and French for that matter). BTW, I thought we went through this whole exercise back in the late 80s-early 90s--I seem to remember wearing regimental crests on the right pocket or some other location depending on which variant of shirt/sweater/jacket/blouse you chose to wear, honorary colonels, and all that other mumbo-jumbo. I guess it was an idea whose time had not yet come, eh? :wry:
Maybe we just didn't have catchy enough names, like John Wayne's Own Rifles (sort of like the Queen's Own Hussars) and such. :D
Seems to me that proper control and administration may be part of the problem. British Army traditions post Cardwell did an amazing amount of good -- all destroyed by "good personnel management practices." The 'human resources' fetish is just dangerous. The British Army today is having many of the same problems we are having due to that fallacy. Sad. In both cases.
We did try that starting in the early 80s -- that was one of Shy Meyer's many good contributions to the Army. Unfortunately, his attempts to cut MilPerCen in half -- it would not have been needed if we had truly implemented his plan -- were stopped dead by all those civilians living in northern Virginia flooding the Capitol and he was told to back off. MilPerCen survived, grew and is now the US Army Human Resources Command. May God have mercy on the Army. The 41s will not, those guys eat their young.
A properly set up regimental system will be self tending and will not need control or administration to speak of. Meyer's plan was good, the bureaucracy just waited him out.
The names aren't necessary. The closest you can get to a regimental system today is the 82d Abn Div. Folks leave there and go on short tours or long ones (mostly to the two other Airborne units) and return to Bragg. When they get back, they fight to go back to the same Brigade. Unit loyalty is strong; maybe not Brit post-Cardwell strong but close to it. Try to put a 504 guy in the 325 and he'll rebel -- and vice versa.
There is the disadvantage you cite of group think -- that is also a plus. Group think has saved the day in ground combat on many an occasion. Ask the Marines. There is also a significant advantage. Those Officers and NCOs returning to the same units keep other Officers and NCOs honest. In a typical Army unit, if you have a dirt bag for a peer, you'd like to get him boarded out of the Army -- but he's leaving in six months, it's too hard to do, so you don't bother. Or you're leaving and you don't bother. In a unit with personnel continuity, one will not tolerate the slackers.
Which reminds me -- to all you future Chiefs of Staff out there; AR 600-200 says any NCO that gets selected by the centralized board will be promoted unless his Commander writes a letter to have him removed for cause. Commanders do not have time to write letters about marginal people so slackers get promoted just by sticking around. When you get to E Ring, change that to read the person will NOT be promoted unless the Commander writes a letter.
Another great Article by Colonel Henry Foresman
Dave posted this in his "More from the AFJ" entry on the SWJ Blog.
COL Foresman neatly nails several critical items, ending with:
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"The Army is transforming. In doing so, it must be willing not only to look to the past to shape how it is organized, but also to be willing to break with the past and forge new paths. This requires not only an adaptive Army but also a military of flexible and intellectually adaptive leaders. Whether transformation succeeds or fails will not be determined by how the Army is organized but, rather, how the leaders employ their forces and whether they are successful. That is the unanswered question — whether the Army can make a break with its past and the legacies of World War II to fight the wars of the 21st century."
"Culture battle."
As a Product of the Regimental System...
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Originally Posted by
Granite_State
I'd definitely agree on the issue of esprit de corps, a few guys I know and/or work with are ex-British Army, and a friend of mine just started at Sandhurst, and it seems like the benefits of the regimental system here are enormous.
But in the bigger picture, there are a lot of negatives too. In the past, the regimental system both retarded uniform training and institutional knowledge (see Britain's small wars from Clive on up), and even impeded modernization (cavalry regimental loyalties and fears often played a bigger role than conservatism in the slow pace of mechanization in the Twenties and Thirties).
That may all be in the past, but there are still some substantial negatives, mainly tied to parochialism, each regiment jealously guarding its perks and slice of the budget, particularly the more influential ones, i.e. Guards, Paras, etc.
However, some of these negatives might be negated in a much larger army like America's, I don't know.
I'd like to say that the Regimental System, when properly functioning overall, institutionalizes a degree of basic competence, and somethime outright execellence, that most other systems cannot provide under normal conditions. Probably the single most important virtue in practice of the Regimental System is that you don't have to keep re-training everyone at each and every turn in the basics, or keep having to reteach lessons learned; that's all (when the Regiment is functioning properly) more or less automatic. Obviously the troops have continue to hone the basics; but in the Regimental System there is (normally) sufficient stability and continuity of personnel and standards of training that make keeping and honing the basics much easier and more efficient while allowing for a great deal more time and effort to be used in learning about and training for much more advanced tactics and operations. Steve is very correct about the benefits of the Regiment System (when functioning properly).
The US Army wouldn't be particularly inclined (though doctrine in theory allows for this) towards using a regular (ie. Non-Air Assault/Airborne/Ranger) infantry battalion in an air assault raid on an enemy HQ or airfield, but a Commonwealth Army would. Similarly, US Marines are tasked with most of the amphibious mission (Rangers have a slice of the pie too) in the US Armed Forces; but a Commonwealth Army considers amphibious assaults a normal part of the infantry battalion role. A great deal of this is making a virtue of necessity, as the money and manpower just isn't there to maintain an entire Marine Corps or a large Airborne Force (and Commonwealth Airborne Forces and Marines tend to be commando-trained, not regular infantry who happen to be on jump-status or trained in amphib ops). But the Regimental System produces efficiencies that may allow for a much more expansive range of training and taskings for what would otherwise be a rather more pedestrian infantry battalion in an Army without such a Regimental System.
Also, an ordinary rifleman in a Commonwealth Army receives 6 month's recruit and basic infantry training (with no specialization in machine-gunning, recce, assault pioneer, anti-armour, etc. - that's for later - , just rifleman training) and to a generally higher standard than most other armies, where the battalions are expected to train the troops up to snuff, taking away valuable time for other training. The Regimental System goes a long way to avoiding this last situation. And again, it (normally) provides a continuity and stability of personnel and training standards that most other systems can't surpass, although a few can match. When you join a Regiment, you are a part of it for the rest of your carrer, and will spend most or even all of your career within that Regiment. This results in a cumulative degree of professional excellence and experience that is very difficult to acquire by most other means.
But, as Granite State and others pointed out, there are, amongst others, two potentially serious problems that they have already identified with the Regimental System. The first is "Group Think". Now, as pointed out by others, this actually has benefits too, providing both a sense of tradition and example and a force of will in the face of adversity that stands in good stead at critical moments on the battlefield. But there is also the problems that when the system isn't functioning properly, "Group Think" especially resulting in nepotism and the like, can result in tactical ossification and downright moral corruption and break-down of morale and discipline. There are such things as bad regiments, and when that happens, it often takes a wholesale housecleaning by outsiders to retrieve the situtation.
The Second, and perhaps most common problem with the Regimental System is Tribalism, which not only makes it difficult to work with other Regiments, Corps, and Arms at times, also resulting in tactical ossification, but in some real unpleasantness between Regiments. For those who have never been part of a Regiment, it may be difficult to grasp the sometimes gut-level, even visceral at times, psychlogical and emotional impact that being part of a Regiment has. The Regiment is your world; the Army is a "foreign" body with which your Regiment in effect has a contract with.
Promotions in the Regiment are made by the Regimental Senate, not the Army. Each Regiment has not only its own history and traditions, but its own institutions, museums (even Battalions of a Regiment may have their own museums), libraries, messes, clubs, barracks, associations, etc., that are all directly owned (except for barracks, the Army owns these) and supported personally and financially by the members of the Regiment (and to which each member must contribute). No outsider is permitted into these places without being accompanied and signed in by a member of the Regiment. Each Regiment is kept separated from the others by a respectable and safe distance. Real unpleasantness may occur when these rules are not consciously followed.
But the best system is not the Regimental System. For all its superiority over most other systems, the WWII German Divisional System is by far the best. Generally similar to the British Regimental System, including an emphasis on local recruiting, the Divisional System (in turned prodeuced by the Wehrkreise System) is the best, and while it produced no less strong regiments than the British system, the focus of tribal identity was the Combined-Arms Division, not the single-arm Regiment. Couple this with the superb training, discipline, leadership, and Auftragstaktik with the Geenral staff System (another thread in itself), and you have the finest "System" in the world. The performance of the Deutchesheer in WWII I think bears this argument out rather well. This is the system every Army should use.
The Regimental System is not exactly a stranger to the selective use/abuse of history for noble, and less-than noble purposes, especially when used to justify or excuse tactical ossification.
A perspective from inside a Regiment.
I agree there are many pluses to a Regimental
system -- and to the German system; I think the biggest advantage of the former is, as Norlfolks says:
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"...When you join a Regiment, you are a part of it for the rest of your carrer, and will spend most or even all of your career within that Regiment. This results in a cumulative degree of professional excellence and experience that is very difficult to acquire by most other means."
The advantage that accrues is an intangible -- if one is going to stay in a unit, one wants to be with competent people who can be tolerated. In most of the US Army for many years since WW II, people tended to move every two to three years. Thus if there was a slacker, it was too easy to say "He'll (or I'll) be gone in seven months, he's not worth getting into a hassle over." The transfers don't happen as often but that is still the overarching mentality. How much those transfers lend to professional competenece and development and how much they serve to justify a large personnel bureaucracy is in the view of the beholder and grist for another thread.
An exception to this has been the 82d Airborne which, in this sense functions like a large Regiment. Men go to the Division and spend years there; they may rotate out to Alaska or Korea or even Europe but they tend to go back to the Division and will generally fight to go back to their last unit. Thus, the NCOs there are long serving and prone to come down on the marginally competent and run them off.
Thus, the advantage is, I think, the continuity and not the structure.
A downside of the system is that local recruitment. The biggest problem is that if a unit has a bad day and receives massive casualties, it can devastate a small town back home.
Then there is the tribal issue. I've heard Patricias say bad things about the RCR :) and heard the Black Watch say unbelievable things about the rest of the British Army. The opinion of the 3 RAR about the rest of the Strine Army is also not good. In fairness, with no local recruitment at all, the opinion of the Fifth Marines about the 1st and 7th did not bear repeating once upon a time and the guys from the 504PIR will tell you about the shortcomings of the 325 and 505. Tribalism is an acquired trait in that respect but it has been my observation in the larger Army that such tribalism and unit loyalty is less intense, mostly due to the large number of units with whom one has served in several Divisions because of an individual assignment policy.
I suggest the greatest advantage the Commonwealth Armies have is in this:
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"Also, an ordinary rifleman in a Commonwealth Army receives 6 month's recruit and basic infantry training (with no specialization in machine-gunning, recce, assault pioneer, anti-armour, etc. - that's for later - , just rifleman training) and to a generally higher standard than most other armies, where the battalions are expected to train the troops up to snuff, taking away valuable time for other training."
and this:
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"The US Army wouldn't be particularly inclined (though doctrine in theory allows for this) towards using a regular (ie. Non-Air Assault/Airborne/Ranger) infantry battalion in an air assault raid on an enemy HQ or airfield, but a Commonwealth Army would."
That, fortunately, is changing but is sure isn't changing fast enough. These kids and units are capable of doing much more than we ask them to and, terribly, the biggest impediments all too often are nothing more than 'fear of failure' and lack of imagination. Norfolk is too polite to say so, I'm not -- we have too much money and we tend to overspend on the wrong things and pay inadequate attention to training.
We train better now than we have in my lifetime -- we still do not do it long enough to get an inculcation of the standards and basics embedded in Joe's little psyche. We're still oriented to training WW II draftees -- and Lieutenants. The Marines do it a little better for both Officers and peons but we're shortchanging the troops. Shame on us...