Saw this letter in the latest issue of ARMOR magazine, thought it was very interesting. Can't get a link, so figured I'd post it here in three parts:

Future Force Structure Completely Wrong

Dear ARMOR,

The fundamental force structure of the U.S. Army in the Active, National Guard, and Reserve Components is completely wrong for the 40-year war against non-state terrorism. And nothing in the current brigade-based transformation process will fix it.

At their heart U.S. Army ground forces are still designed to defeat large, mechanized enemy elements through the use of maneuver, shock, and firepower. They are not fundamentally designed to defeat an insurgency and win the hearts and minds of a terrorized local populace. Further, the operational tempo of this Global War on Terror (GWOT) is rapidly deteriorating the entire U.S. Army's force structure skills and recruitment focus. We are not structured or training for the current fight and no longer offer the soldier any real choice among components.

Bottom-line: the U.S. Army Active Component should be rebuilt, from the ground up, as a generally light force based around the M1114 and the Stryker family of vehicles, and trained to conduct primarily anti-insurgency operations while continually deployed. The Army National Guard should be reconfigured as the primary heavy force, based on Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and field artillery platforms, and trained to break nations and destroy mass enemy forces as the national strategic fist. The Army Reserve should be reset as the support component, trained to rebuild places deemed worthy of rebuilding, and for low-density skills heavily required for occasional operations.

We are engaged in a GWOT that will boil and cool (much like the Cold War) over the next 30 to 40 years, toppling a dictator here, blowing up some infrastructure there, and covertly whacking key bad guys hither and yon. Sometimes it may require heavily mechanized forces to totally break a country. Other times, it will be a few bombs or individual bullets. The number of young Americans desiring to be forward-deployed warriors on this long-term basis is finite, certainly not enough to sustain the current mobilization tempo of all three components.

The current war in Iraq notwithstanding, the GWOT will not typically require mass formations of M1s, M2s, and cannons. The Active Duty warrior should reflect this with training and skills as a street-walking, door-knocking, language-talking anti-insurgency soldier. The Active Duty soldier should expect a career that sees him off to land on foreign shores again and again throughout his career; sometimes for a few days and sometimes for more than a year at a time. This soldier should enlist with the understanding that the Army of the 1980s and 1990s, and its normal civilian lifestyle, except with guns and gear, is a thing of the past, and he will be out the door and all over the world as a light, expeditionary ground-pounder, with his M1114 and Stryker to move him around and provide firepower. This Active Army will more reflect the expeditionary forces of the British Empire of the late 1800s, forward based around the world, and ready to move, shoot, and communicate at a moment’s notice.