All,

I just learned an NPR interview the COIN Center gave in October was aired yesterday. In it, a MAJ "Neal" (can't anyone spell my name right?) Smith bemoans the lack of conventional competency in our force.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=99156039

Of course it's one quote out of an hour long interview we gave, but it does reflect the need for "balance" in the future between COIN and HIC tasks.

All Things Considered, January 12, 2009 · America has the most battle-hardened Army in the nation's history, but it's an Army that may also be broken. The seven years of war — in Iraq and Afghanistan — have taken a toll on the troops, tanks and trucks, as well as on the Army's leaders.

.....

A Debate Over Training

That switch has sparked a debate inside the Army over what missions it can perform and how it should train its soldiers. The training, lately, is all about counterinsurgency, and some in the Army are wondering if the pendulum has swung too far.

"Obviously we can't go back to the extreme we were in 2003 where the force knew nothing about counterinsurgency," says Maj. Neal Smith, the operations officer of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center. He teaches people how to fight the kind of wars we're in now in Iraq and Afghanistan. "But we also can't go to a force where if a tank division is needed someday — no one knows how to move, defend, attack or move to contact anymore."

But even he worries about what today's soldiers are being taught: how to fight a classic ground war.

"The risk we run as a force is that we have a generation of officers [who] have spent five to six years [at war] that never have done their conventional competency," Neal Smith says. "And if we were expected on short notice to fulfill that conventional competency, we would struggle very hard to do it as well as we did in 2003 during the attack to Baghdad."

The problem is there simply isn't enough time to teach people how to fight both conventional and unconventional wars — the soldiers are simply at war too much and troops now have only about 12 months between deployments.

"The reality is we really only have enough time to prepare soldiers for the next mission they're going to face," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who runs the Combined Arms Center for the Army. He oversees 18 different schools and training centers, including the National Training Center. "Then as time permits, we'll operate across the whole continuum of intensity of ops."

The Army says it won't even be able to really begin training for all kinds of warfare until 2010 at the earliest, so for now, the focus is on hearts and minds, not tanks and artillery.