Pentagon: Growth In Special Force Troops Key (Ft Carson's 10th adding Green Berets)

Colorado Springs Gazette ^ | Tom Roeder

[RDTF]

Growth in the number of special operations troops, including planned additions to the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, is necessary for maintaining the war effort, a top Pentagon official said last week.

Assistant Defense Secretary Mike Vickers, a 10th Group veteran, said that even with a planned drawdown of major combat units in Iraq, the need for Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs is unlikely to drop.

“Even as conventional forces draw down, it’s likely that special forces will stay at a higher level of deployment,” said Vickers, who took over in July as the defense department’s special operations and space programs.

Under the planned growth, each special forces group will get an extra battalion, adding several hundred Green Berets to Fort Carson’s 10th Group by 2013.

It’s hoped that the reinforcements will allow more time at home for the Green Berets, who have faced almost constant deployment since the war in Iraq began in 2003.

In October, Vickers visited 10th Group soldiers now deployed to Baghdad. Vickers said the Green Berets from Fort Carson have had great success in training Iraqi special operations troops.

“It’s a remarkable effort,” Vickers said of 10th Group’s activity. “It made me very proud.”

-snip-

[onedoug]

Robert D Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond

[taxcontrol]

Granted there is a place for special ops ... BUT .... drawing down conventional forces is a bad idea. If we learned anything in ground warfare from Vietnam is that you only “own” the ground that you control. There are very distinct levels of operations in warfare:

Combat operations - normally you need 3 to 4 times the opposing force to win.
Patrolling operations - normally you need 6 to 8 times the opposition force to succeed.
Controlling or Occupation operations - normally you need 10 to 12 times the opposition force to succeed.

The operational situation can often be determined or enemy estimated by what type of operations your forces are currently able to sustain.

To that end, the force multipliers and lethality of forces is less important as boots on the ground. Conventional forces supply this depth by saturating an area and denying that area as an operational base for the opposing forces. Drawing down our conventional forces impedes our ability to conduct such operations in the future.

I am a firm believer that we need to add 6 to 8 Active duty Army and 3 or 4 Active duty Marine combat brigades ... just to sustain a reasonable rotation schedule against our current deployment commitments. And we should SERIOUSLY consider a greater expansion of ground forces should we think that Iran will be a real threat. Further, building up such units will take time and to be as effective as possible, will require cross loading of combat veteran NCO’s and Officers. Ideally, you would want those new brigades to have a rotation in either Iraq or Afghanistan prior to deployment to gain combat experience.