Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
Don't see the point in this.

When you have enough problems with the quality of infantry training what (for crying out aloud) is the point of taking armour trained soldiers all the way to a foreign theatre to act in the infantry role?

If there is a need for a handful of tanks in Afghanistan then deploy them and leave the rest of the regiment at home.

It just gets stranger and stranger.
Simple - necessity. We can't afford to leave the rest at home.

Simple fact is we didn't have enough infantry/dismounts to support repeated Iraq rotations, and therefore routinely have converted tankers, artillery, and sometimes engineers into ad hoc infantrymen. They did pretty well too - at a cost to their core skillsets which are beginning to get rebuilt.

None of it is ideal. We did this from the occupation phase of OIF 1 forward because of the decision to go in with a "light footprint". My Stryker CAV squadron will fundamentally act as infantrymen in Afghanistan next year. The cavalry hasn't trained actual recon in about 5 years, but have served as another infantry unit.