Posted on 11/27/2001 1:03:46 AM PST by JohnHuang2
The first non-Special Ops unit deployed to Afghanistan is the U.S. Marines Corps – no big surprise to this old Army doggie.
In World War II's South Pacific, Marines were "the firstus with the mostus" into the Solomons, and they led the way into Vietnam. In Korea, they landed second, but unlike the Army units initially deployed there, Gen. Edward Craig's Marine brigade hit the beach ready to fight. And without their skill, sacrifice and courage, the beleaguered Eighth Army would've been pushed into the sea during the early months of the conflict. A similar scenario occurred during the early stages of Desert Storm, in which Marine units came in ready to fight while the first Army troops – the 82nd Airborne Division, with its insufficient anti-tank capability – were a potential speed bump waiting to be flattened.
The Corps, which has never lost sight that its primary mission is to fight, remains superbly trained and disciplined – true to its time-honored slogan "We don't promise a rose garden." When, under Clinton, the Army lowered its standards to Boy Scout summer-camp level in order to increase enlistment, the Corps responded by making boot training longer and tougher. Now under USMC Commandant James Jones, that training has gotten even meaner for the young Marine wannabes waiting in line to join up, as well as for Leathernecks already serving in regular and reserve units.
Unlike U.S. Army conventional units – their new slogan, "An Army of One," says it all – the U.S. Marine Corps remains a highly mobile, fierce fighting team that has never forgotten: "The more sweat on the training field, the less blood on the battlefield."
The Marines are flexible, agile, ready and deadly, while the Army remains configured to fight the Soviets – who disappeared off the Order of Battle charts a decade ago. For example, right after Sept. 11, the two Army heavy divisions in Germany – with their 68-ton tanks that can crush almost every bridge they cross – deployed to Poland for war games.
Hello, is there a brain at the top somewhere beneath that snazzy Black Beret being modeled at most U.S. airports by too many overweight Army National Guard troops?
The Army has eight other regular divisions, all designed to fight 20th-century wars. Three are heavy – Tank and Mech Infantry – and two are light, the storied 82nd Airborne and the elite 101st Airborne (now helicopter), and then there's the light/heavy 10,000-man 2nd Division that's in Korea backing up a million-man, superbly fit South Korean Army.
Less the light divisions, our Army's not versatile, deployable, swift or sustainable. The heavy units require fleets of ships and planes to move them, and it takes months to get them there – it took Stormin' Norman six months to ready a force for Desert Storm. The 101st – while deadly, as Desert Storm proved – is also a slow mover requiring a huge amount of strategic lift – ships and giant planes – to get to the battlefield, not to mention the massive tax-dollar load to outfit and maintain it.
Sadly, today's Army is like a street fighter with brass knuckles too heavy to lift.
After the Rangers' disaster in Somalia – where there were no tanks to break through to relieve them – and the embarrassment of not being able to fight in the war in Serbia, Army Chief Of Staff Eric Shinseki started forming light brigades strikingly similar to USMC units. When I asked, "Why the copycatting?" an Army officer said: "It was either copy or go out of business. We'd become redundant because of long-term lack of boldness and imagination at the top."
The Army costs about $80 billion a year to run. It's time for Congress to do its duty and stop enjoying the benefits of all the pork this obsolescence and redundancy provides. If the Army can't change with the times – as the powerful horse cavalry generals couldn't just prior to World War II – then it should fold up its tents and turn the ground-fighting mission over to the Marines.
The law of nature is simple: survival of the fittest. And in the 21st century, heartbreaking as it is for me to admit, the forward-based and highly deployable U.S. Marine Corps is the fittest.
You know just how to please your Mother, don't you, Young'un??!!
(((hugs))) ..:)))
Maybe you ought to sing it to the tune of: Ghost Riders in the Sky!
Captain Herman T. Voelkner, U.S. Army (Retired)
"When Sara Lister was forced to resign her Pentagon position after labeling the Marine Corps as "extremists," there were those among the fair-minded who wondered whether she had been treated too harshly.
Perhaps she was quoted out of context, we thought, or was making a sophisticated rhetorical point, inelegantly phrased. It was not necessarily the case that she was yet another social engineer determined to bring the military to heel and force it to conform to fashionable societal trends.
Alas, we need wonder no longer. In this article, she shows herself lacking even a basic understanding of the military ethos. She seems as determined as ever to reshape the military along the lines of some fuzzy notions of "fairness." Ms. Lister thus joins a depressingly long list of political appointees who believe that storied notions of "warrior spirit" and so on are merely antiquated "constructs" to be swept into an ignominious corner. She is similar to Duke University professor Madeline Morris, hired by then Secretary Of The Army Togo West to be his special assistant on gender relations. Ms. Morris was chosen on the basis of her law review article suggesting the Army give up its "construct of masculinity" and emphasize instead "compassion and understanding" and the adoption of an "ungendered vision."
No wonder there is a "gap" in civil-military relations. Naturally, Ms. Lister does not attribute this to the fact that the services have been commandeered by agenda-driven dilettantes, whose military experience can be more or less summarized by their belief that every fighting unit should look pretty much like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. It is not enough for her that the traditional view of the military as the consummate meritocracy has been expunged, and that an officer's career is not determined as much by gender and minority status as by heroism and leadership ability.
I submit that Americans would do better to worry about whether their sons and daughters will be arriving at Dover Air Force Base wrapped in plastic because their leader was judged by standards other than those of competence.
It is an absurd reproach, and a red herring, to say that anyone in uniform questions the constitutional mandate of civilian control. What does worry them is whether decisions about the necessary integration of women into the fighting force will be made by experienced military leaders or by unabashed proponents of a feminist agenda. Lister and her like-minded colleagues make no secret of the fact that they want to break down all barriers to women, including combat exclusion. They are determined to discount any military opinion on this matter. They do so by mastering the first weapon of the politically correct: anathematize the opposition.
Warriors who resist her notions are clinging to an outdated "construct" of masculinity.
Women do play a vital role in our national defense. We could not and should not do without their participation. But that is not the same as saying that every barrier to women in the military should be removed.
Frequently, there are considerable trade-offs, which military leaders are entitled to take into account. When the Army integrated women into the ranks of its medics, for example, it found that two women, unlike two men, do not possess the upper body strength needed to carry a fully-laden stretcher. Faced with the mandate to assimilate women into these positions, the Army neatly redefined carrying a stretcher as a task that requires four soldiers.
Thus, the social engineers win another battle, and a new niche is opened for women. Few seemed to notice that, in the process, readiness has just declined by 50%. Extrapolate from that one example, across the length and breadth of the military, and one can see the cost such ill-considered policies can have in terms of our ability to fight.
Lister and her colleagues obfuscate the question of "feminizing" the military, when not actively ridiculing it. But then what are we to make of Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy? The senior intelligence officer in the Army has designed a "Consideration of Others" (COO) program, naturally to be made mandatory. An internal Army memo summarizing this sensitivity offensive cites that every military and civilian member of the Army will undergo training, under the tutelage of the usual legion of "facilitators," to instill in our soldiers "common courtesy, decency, and sensitivity to the feelings of others." One suspects that most women in the ranks, their jobs difficult enough, must cringe when they see policies such as COO being promulgated by their presumed role models. One also wonders how the Army leadership, with its shrinking resources and multiplying imperial burdens, feels it can expend those resources on counselors and "increasing sensitivity" instead of ammunition and combat training.
Meanwhile, training standards have continually been lowered to accommodate women. Men who experience the Army's initial-entry training now wonder what happened in the tough, disciplined basic training of their fathers' and grandfathers' stories. When I commanded a "mixed" (male and female) basic training company, the men did not feel challenged the way they had expected to be. Road marches had to be slowed down so that women could keep up the pace, and physical activity was "gender-normed" into irrelevance.
Nowadays, basic training resembles summer camp. The Navy no longer drills its trainees with rifles, and issues them a "blue card" to hand to their trainer if they feel discouraged.
This softness of training has its effects in the areas of recruitment and retention, with every service but one below its minimum personnel requirements. I suspect this has less to do with the vigor of the private sector than with the loss of any feeling of "specialness" which attracts and retains soldiers in the first place. Napoleon's maxim that "the morale is to the physical as three to one" reminds us that there are intangibles more important than material inducements. A military no more special in its ethos than the trendiest high-tech firm will find that its soldiers will see through the sham and desert it for that high-tech firm.
Finally, I mentioned that only one service is successfully meeting its recruitment goals. Instructively, that service is the United States Marine Corps, home of Lister's "extremists." It alone resists the feminist's demands to integrate basic training; it alone cultivates unabashedly a reputation for breeding warriors who don't need to call for a "time out" when things get tough.
Let us hope we never have need to discover, as we did with Task Force Smith in Korea, how dissipated has become that unique chemistry which causes soldiers to cohere when confronted with the sheer wanton brutality and chaos of combat. History, however, teaches us otherwise. It teaches us that it is only a matter of time before somewhere American hostages are taken, or somewhere an American embassy is surrounded by armed fanatics, or somewhere an invader runs rampant over a civilian populace.
And when such an event happens, the hopeless and besieged won't be looking anxiously over the horizon for a group of American troops liberated from their masculine constructs, polite and courteous, attentive to the sensitivities of others.
They'll be looking for the Marines.
And here is a link to Amazon.com's Reader's Reviews of Generally Speaking - a lot of top star ratings and babble about breaking through the glass ceiling in the military. Nothing about learning how to break through Taliban fortresses though.
Our Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and even the Coast Guard, all have important roles to play in our national defense, in spite of the overlap of equipment and duties, and the redundancy, and the duplication of effort and machinery, and the redundancy, and so much similar stuff, etc.
There's always room for improvement in the units, branches, and the DOD as a whole, but I wouldn't advocate getting rid of a whole branch. If we disband the Army, we'll soon find ourselves in a ground war against 10 million foot soldiers, simply because we created our own archilles heel. Enemies will design their forces to take advantage of any shortcoming they perceive in ours.
As a former sailor, I don't envy the infantry, grunts, airedales, or the others, or discount their contributions.
Besides, thanks to a merciful God, and the U.S. Marine Corp, the U.S. Navy has never, ever lost a gate. (:D
... If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scenes, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.
FReegards,
Sometimes they do this by rearranging their head.
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