All right, so does Gates have a point? As you’ll remember, yesterday DefSec Gates said the services are stuck in a rut…they can’t pull their gaze away from high-tech programs that have nothing to do with today’s bloody fight but rely on assumptions forged into the plan back in the ‘90s.
So what I’ve done is to set up a survey to see what you all think. Lemme know…
[EDITOR: Survey Closed. We’ll post the results soon…]
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Get Gates out of office
Gates will be out of office soon Stu. He leaves on January 20th, the inauguration day for the next president. Gates is better than Rumsfeld ever was and I served under both men.
DoD has always been doing this push for more expensive and newer toys. This is nothing new. What is new is Gates telling them what the realities of combat are. The age of the major force on force combat has given way to the age of limited engagements, Small unit tactics, and Urban fighting.
This is not to say they will never happen again, but given the fact that the last 2 major force on force fights we have had since Vietnam were both dealing with Iraq could give you some signs of this.
Militaries around the world are now realizing that a smaller, determined enemy can cause problems to a larger, more combat ready force.
Good Morning Folks,
I’m with Sec. Gates on this one. As former Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld said “…you have to fight the war you got.”
It’s time for the brass to get their collective heads out of their “six’s” and face reality, we are at war NOW. If we don’t win this one any talk of the future might just be N/A.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
I agree with Gates as far as how long our R&D to production time goes. I think the main problem our military and government has is the need to have an absolutely perfect product that takes decades to develop. In the meantime, for example, you go from having the 82nd Airborne to make by with a so-so light tank, the M551 Sheridan, going into Operation Desert Shield that would barely been able to handle a armored assualt. Then the tank is retired in 1996 with no replacement because the XM8 Buford light tank program was cancelled as well. What was wrong with the M8, probably the same thing that is wrong with the FCS Mounted Combat System. So instead of having a Airborne Tank that would be a quick combat force against a variety of future threats, including small terrorist threats, you reduce the units down to light anti-tank units, not much use against terrorist. United Defense, now BAE Systems even has a diesel-electric hybrid version that now has room in the back for some troops. Why can’t we use this tank for Airborne troops instead of having just Anti-tank units that are small an unarmored? I was in both Desert Storm and in OIF, and between both wars, we were better equiped in Desert Storm as far as having what technology we had in the war. It would be alot better to have an Armored Infantry Airborne unit that has an M8 tank with infantry moving beside it moving in downtown Bagdad than in Uparmored Humvees, maybe even that in MRAPS. Even with MRAPS, especially in an urban setting, you have to get out of the vehicle. Would you rather have a small 3-4 man crew per each vehicle, or and infantry squad around a light tank that can manuver more that an M1? We are starting to get to the point of over designing our combat equipment that causing long development cycles that seem to parallel with what the Nazi’s did during WWII. Would if we continue this trend and, say the Next-war-itis does happen, with China or even a resirgent Russia. Would we want us to have overdesigned, expensive systems that take forever and a day to field like the Nazi’s. And have basic, cheap easy to produce systems from China and Russia (like us during WWII)that can handle our current systems but maybe not our new systems that are to late to help because the either still in development of bog down in production? We need to run our military development through lean line design equilvalent and do incremental development that keeps us ahead of any threat in the now and then in the future. Stop doing a whole program a satisfy first what is needed now and improve on it. Sometimes during OIF, especially when Rumsfeld said ” You go to war with the army you have now” this made us feel a desparation almost like what was happening during the beginning of WWII when Germany and Japan was ahead on technology. But then we had far superior technology that had to be developed as a program and need to be just perfect before the troops would get it. Live in the here and now, not so much in the future or you may never get the future you want.
Defense acquisitions are complicated enough without having an idiot like Gates screw things up.
Are there problems with our current acquisitions process? Of course. Can those problems be fixed? Well, some of them can.
Nobody is ever going to fix Congress sticking their noses into every little project. No one is ever going to fix some Senator pushing for his hometown factory to get a contract over some factory somewhere else. And no one is ever going to fix Congress pussing out and delaying acquisition programs for a decade or more because they don’t want to spend the money now.
None of those things are the fault of the military, and none of them come from “gold-plated weapons systems”. They’re simply the cost of doing business in an imperfect democracy.
We can’t afford to have another war like WW2. The ONLY reason that we’ve seen a sharp decrease in the number of high-intensity wars is that the US has overwhelming superiority versus any other country on Earth, or any other group of countries. If all of Asia declared war against the US, major hostilities (i.e., fighting against organized forces) would be over within a year, with the US a solid victor. The US cannot be defeated in conventional combat. And everybody on Earth knows it. THAT is why nobody tries it. Do you pick a fight with a guy who is seven feet tall and has fists as big as basketballs? Not if you are smart, you don’t.
The only reason the US is in this position is because of our “military industrial complex”. We have decades of investment in creating an immensely powerful army. No one else is even close. But this is not a divine birthright. It came from decades of work. We certainly have the ability to piss it away, which is exactly what Gates is suggesting.
Are there even going to be any more Iraq largescale counter-insurgencies? Many of the rationales behind that war (e.g. that you can use the military to successfully impose regime change) have been largely disproven, and just about everyone has lost the taste for “preventive” wars.
Gates has it right. Unless the guys and gals in service are over there they seem to want to focus on the future with their predictions. Will China be a threat one day, probably but thats decades away. Is Russia a threat, not really since their military is in disrepair. The only way they could inflict damage to us is with nukes and I see no reason to use them right now.
We need to focus on getting what we need to finish the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need stop building stuff for the future when the current events arent being handled correctly. Do we need F-22′s and F-35′s. Yes, but not every plane we have needs to be stealth. We cant afford every plane to be stealth. We have transport planes older than their pilots that are in high demand and theirs political bs wasting more time there. Either give it to company that won or decide to keep military spending with US companies but you cant have it both ways.
We need to focus on whats going on right now instead of what might happen. Theirs too much bueacracy in the Pentagon and govt together and even with a budget of 600+ bil a year, we cant get what we need to our troops in combat. That is pure bs and shouldnt be happening. Stop funding programs that need materials and technology 20-30 years out when our military is stretched and our equipment isnt being replaced fast enough and out country is raking up debt we’re going to have trouble handling 10 years down the road.
Fighting an insurgency is tactics, not procurement. This is among the most damn fool threads ever, one huge non-sequitar.
SOCOM with 17,000 people is fully converting to the MK-16 SCAR rifle for just $20 million. We could probably convert the Corps for $200 million, the Army for $500 million. The stuff to fight an insurgency is cheap. It’s tactics.
Byron,
That is nothing further from the truth.
TINSTA ALLONS,
WR
Gates is wrong. Drinks are on me when he and England go.
Pretty short duration for a poll.
I agree in some terms with Gates, but only in case of very limited budget. My conclusion is that there is not just enough for military budget and should be what it was during the Cold War era. In other words, we should have enough money to spend for current wars, and for possible wars of the future. The Beijing Olympics is about to come and it has been often rumor it would be the point which China would start considering invasion of Taiwan after the Olmpics is over, the most likely scenario of war with western countries. We should not be dreaming a post Cold War era, we are in Cold War II with China, but even worse China is now a non-democratic Capitalist country that will not fall like USSR.
I just realized a corolation here that might be useful.
If any of you are followers of any sports team or season, especially football, what do you always hate that your team might do when there is a strong opponent coming up in the schedule and the week before you face what you think is a weak team that all you have to do to win is show up on the field and the game is yours.
Its called looking ahead, and in the sports world it is very dangerous and has led to many teams having major upsets to supposedly weaker teams. Sound familiar to any scenario going on in the military?
Iraq was identical to this. We thought for sure that there would be no insurgency in Iraq, that the Iraqi Army would for the most part throw down their arms and we would be greeted in the streets by the Iraqi People. Now we are deep in a hard fight which from the looks of things might be close to turning around for us. I’m not saying Iraq is turning for sure, although I hope that it is. But don’t you see the issue here? Yes we need to be prepared for future conflicts, but not at the expense of losing the battles we fight today.
This is what Gates is trying to stop. Are systems like the F-22, the F-35, the Virginia class submarines, LCS, FCS, etc. important for us to be a viable threat to future opponents? Most certainly this is the case. But have you all forgotten who some of our adeversaries are? North Korea, Syria, and Iran come to mind here, and guess what? Even though they have a large conventional force, they all also have unconventional forces and doctrines as well that fit into the combat we are doing today.
Ed, the reason we’re facing problems in Iraq today is not because we’re “looking ahead” at the moment. It is because Rumsfeld pursued a strategy that worked fine for overthrowing Saddam, but had very little real ability to stabilize Iraq afterward. Had we gone in with many more boots on the ground, expecting a bigger fight post-war, we’d have done a much better job in preventing this insurgency from springing up.
We were looking ahead in 2003, but we are not now.
Lesson for next time, if you are going to occupy a country, send lots and lots of men.
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