It seems that USNS Rappahannock has fired on a small craft that ignored warnings and closed with her in the Persian Gulf.  From the NBC News article:

The crew aboard the Navy ship sent out repeated warnings, including radio calls, flashing lights, lasers and ultimately warning shots from a 50-caliber machine gun.  When the boat failed to heed the warnings, the crew was ordered to open fire with the 50-caliber gun.

It will be critically important that US civilian and military leadership emphasizes the above, and plasters images and accounts of USS Cole all over the news immediately and persistently for the next several weeks.  We should be very proactive in letting the world know that there is a terror threat to US warships and auxiliaries posed by small craft, and any such vessel that ignores the warnings as were summarized above will be fired upon and destroyed.

We mustn’t begin the oh-so familiar course of meekly apologizing for having to kill those who threaten us.   If we do, we will see many more actions such as this, likely designed to cause us to fit ourselves for ever-tighter handcuffs and more restrictive rules of engagement in combat on land and sea, which the enemy will use to increasing advantage to exploit his strengths and our weaknesses.  On the contrary, we must be firm and aggressive with our reaction to the incident.  Actions without strong narrative are subject to interpretation.

If the United States, and in particular the United States Navy, has any sense of true ‘strategic messaging”, we will let the rest of the world know that, should another small craft ignore similar warnings, it, too, will be fired upon.  And any death or injury that results from such incidents is the responsibility of those who willfully ignore the warnings, and on those who likely have sent them.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Homeland Security, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Piracy, Tactics, Uncategorized | read comments (10)
Tags: Alexander Martin

It would seem that the word “solidarity” doesn’t mean what it used to.

Turkey, a long-time member of NATO, invoked Article 4 of the Charter, which calls for emergency consultation of all 28 member states, in response to the Syrian downing of an RF-4E reconnaissance aircraft.   While not as serious as Article 5, which is invoked in the defense of a NATO ally that has been attacked, Article 4 has generally been seen as a preliminary to discuss options short of armed response.   Turkey had threatened to invoke Article 4 back in April, when a cross-border incident in a refugee camp left five people, including two Turkish officials, dead.

From the meeting in Brussels, all Turkey got was the expected condemnation and the assurances of NATO togetherness.  Turkey may have been expecting little else.   Which is a good thing.  In the case of Turkey and Syria, NATO is contemplating no such thing as armed intervention, or intervention of any kind.  Not least of which because of Russia’s stance and Putin’s support for Syria’s embattled Assad, combined with the general and embarrassing lack of credible capability demonstrated by NATO in Libya last year.

Despite a WAPO article with some speculation that NATO would consider sidestepping the UN and a certain Russian veto for real action against Syria, the chances of such a sidestep are virtually nil.   Turkey knows that, Russia and Syria (and Iran) do, too.   Making invocation of Article 4 a symbolic gesture by Turkey toward an increasingly impotent NATO, whose only action was to “condemn in the strongest terms”.   I am reminded of one of my favorite Daffy Duck lines.  “I will do everything in my power to help you.  Which will be nothing!”   The rather unimpressive response to Turkey’s Article 4 declaration bodes ill for any NATO member that might possibly wish to invoke Article 5, particularly if Putin and Russia wait in the wings.

Visegrad Group, anyone?

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Uncategorized | read comments (19)

UPDATE: Well, sometimes things don’t go as planned, and so it went for this show. So, we winged it a little and then started a “Best of Show” on China. Sorry.

Episode 129: China and its Eastern Approaches 06/24 by Midrats on Blog Talk Radio, 5pm (Eastern U.S.)

As a growing maritime power, when China looks east, southeast, and south – how does it see its neighbors?

Even more importantly – how do its neighbors see it?

Is Russia even a top-tier concern?

Our guest for the full hour will be Wendell Minnick, author, commentator, journalist and speaker who has spent two decades covering military and security issues in Asia, including one book on intelligence and over 900 articles.

Since 2006, Minnick has served as the Asia Bureau Chief for Defense News, a Washington-based defense weekly newspaper.

From 2000-2006, he served as the Taiwan Correspondent for UK-based Jane’s Defence Weekly.

Join us live by clicking here or pick the show up for later listening here or on the Midrats iTunes page here.

Posted by Eagle1 in Foreign Policy, Hard Power, Navy | read comments (0)
Tags: China, Midrats

Those were Adolf Hitler’s words in December of 1940, as he revealed to his senior Wehrmacht Field Marshals and Generals his plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

At a few minutes past 0300 on the morning of 22 June 1941, the rumble of 8,000 artillery pieces shook the western positions of the Red Army, all along the new borders of the Soviet Union.  Simultaneously, more than 3,300 aircraft roared overhead on their way to attack Soviet airfields, troop concentrations, command posts, and artillery positions.  The most fateful day of the Twentieth Century had begun.

In the west, the Wehrmacht of Hitler’s Third Reich consisted of 2.5 million men and more than 4,000 tanks comprising 180 divisions, organized into three massive Army Groups, which were poised to smash their ideological and political enemies, the Bolshevik dictatorship of Stalin’s Soviet Russia.

Opposing the German onslaught was more than 3 million soldiers of Stalin’s Red Army.  Numerically superior to its German opponent in men, aircraft (4,000), and tanks (more than 7,000), the armies on the Soviet western boundary were nonetheless abysmally led and poorly trained.  Still reeling from Stalin’s 1937-39 purges of most of its officer corps, and from the bloody humiliation of the disastrous “Winter War” with Finland in the winter of 1939-40, the Red Army was ill-prepared for war against a modern western foe.

The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, was a finely tuned weapon of mechanized warfare, having conquered Poland two years earlier, and overrun France in less than six weeks in 1940.  Superbly trained and equipped with modern armor and the most advanced combat aircraft, the three German Army Groups shattered the Soviet forces opposite them.  The Luftwaffe swept the Red Air Force, the VVS, from the skies and smashed it on the ground.  By the end of the second day, more than 2,300 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed.    The Red Army was already being shattered and destroyed piecemeal, in what would be the “great battles of encirclement” of that summer and autumn of 1941, from which few escaped death or captivity.  The eradication of the VVS was nearly complete.  Nearly.  The Red Army almost bled to death.  Almost.   Yet, somehow, they held on.

Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, more than any other, was Hitler’s war.  It was the war of Mein Kampf, the war for Lebensraum in the East, whose purpose was to open the great steppes for colonization by the Aryan race.  It was a war not just of conquest but of subjugation and annihilation, fought with a brutality that had not been seen in Europe since the Tatar conquests of seven centuries before.   It was a war of unspeakable horror and unimaginable suffering, by soldier and civilian alike.  Prisoners on both sides died by the millions, worked to death as slave labor, starved, or simply shot or hanged out of hand.  But it was also a war of grim and fatalistic heroism on both sides.   The German-Soviet conflict, when it ended in the rubble of Berlin nearly four years later, would take the lives of almost twenty-three million souls.

Some of the most enduring images of the Eastern Front, and for the Soviets the Great Patriotic War, are of columns of Russian and German prisoners forlornly marching to their fates (the Russians seemingly always in the dust of the summer, the Germans in the bitter cold of winter).  And of grainy images of executions and hangings by the German SS Einsatzgruppen, and far less publicized, of the execution of suspected Russian collaborators by field units of the NKVD, the terror apparatus of Stalin’s brutal regime.

There are lessons and cautions abundant in examining this titanic struggle.  Cautions about underestimating one’s enemy, his will to fight for family and homeland.  The Russian soldier, deemed racially inferior and incapable of waging modern war, proved individually tough, able to endure hardship and privation in startling measure.  He was also fanatical in the defense, fierce in the attack, and bore a hatred of the “blue-eyed oaf” that would be carried across the borders of Prussia with terrible effect.

The Russian was also capable of producing simple but highly effective weaponry, and of mastering its employment.   The T-34 and KV-1 tanks that began to appear in the autumn of 1941 were superior to any German design.  Soviet aircraft began to close the technology gap with the Luftwaffe far faster than anticipated.   Soviet artillery, superior to the Germans even in June of 1941, would dominate the battlefield as the Red Army’s “God of War”.   All these would surprise and confound the German commanders who were told to expect an enemy of limited intellect and poor character.

There are also many myths and misconceptions surrounding the struggle between these oppressive dictatorships.    Here are two:

1.  The Wehrmacht was not capable of winning a short (ten-week) war against the Soviet Union.

Because the Germans did not win does not mean they were not capable of winning, or the Soviets capable of losing.  Had the Ostheer kept its focus on Moscow as the main objective (the plan was to surround, not enter the city), and had Hoth’s Panzers been unleashed in the first week of August, rather than frittered away in other operations until October, the capture of the European capital of the Soviet Union was within its capabilities.  Perhaps even more important than the purely political prize was the massive Soviet war industry that occupied the so-called “Moscow-Gorky Space”.   Siberian forces did not begin to arrive to defend the city and its immediate area in significant numbers until late September, 1941.  The capture of the Soviet war industry, which included the massive tank works at Gorky itself, and the aircraft engine factory at Kuibyshev, would have deprived the Soviet Union of its most valuable asset, the ability to replace the massive combat losses with more modern and capable equipment.  Had those factories been destroyed or fallen into German hands, there would have been no MiG or Yak fighters, no Il-2 Sturmoviks, no PE-2s, or any of the other increasingly modern aircraft that would eventually sweep the Luftwaffe from the sky.  There would have been no replacement divisions of T-34/76 and /85 tanks, no self-propelled guns, no artillery pieces to replace those lost in the massive battles or worn out in extensive combat.  Without those factories and the hardware they produced, there would have been no rehabilitation of the VVS or of the Red Army into the juggernaut that crushed Army Group Vistula into bits and eventually subsume eastern Germany.

2. The Soviet Union was capable of defeating Nazi Germany without Allied assistance.

While it is true that the Soviet Union bore the unquestioned preponderance of the weight of German arms (at various times, 80% of German combat power was employed in the East, and nearly 80% of all German losses were inflicted by the Soviets), and the suffering and casualties of the Soviet military and civilian population exceeded the rest of the Allies combined by a wide margin, Stalin’s Russia could not have won the war without Allied, and particularly American, assistance.   While many are familiar with pictures of some of the 9,000 US and British tanks shipped to the Soviets under Lend-Lease, these represented only about 20% of Soviet tank production during the war.  There is little question upon any examination, however, that there were two absolutely critical areas of direct assistance were the linchpins of the survival of the Soviet Union in the dark days of 1941-43, and their drive to ultimate victory in 1944-45.  The first of these areas was in food production.  The United States shipped more than seventeen MILLION tons of food, wheat and canned goods, to the Soviet Union whose agricultural bread basket was under German occupation.  That food sustained the Red Army and Russian war industry workers when none other was available.  Without it, the prospects for Soviet victory would have been slim indeed.  The second item so critical to the Soviet war effort was the supply of more than half a million American trucks.  Tough, six-wheel drive vehicles which carried logistical supplies from the rear areas to the front, and which mounted the famous 122mm Katyusha rocket launchers by the tens of thousands, allowed the Red Army to supply itself on the battlefield in the defensive struggles of 1942 and carried that Army to the great offensive drives that eventually smashed the German Ostheer.  Those trucks represent more than 70% of total Soviet vehicle production, freeing their industries to produce the war weapons, tanks, artillery pieces, and armored vehicles that equipped the Red Army.

The final victory of the Soviet Union is, however, a testament to the tough, fierce, and brave Russian soldier.  His image, the hardened veteran soldier sitting atop a T-34 with PPSh in hand, scanning for a glimpse of the hated enemy, his mustard-colored quilt uniform covered with dust and snow, will endure for centuries in the collective consciousness of the Russian people.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union has never been comprehensively treated.  The subject is far too large.  It is too complex and incapable of being understood, except gradually, within the context of its salient events, and those of the rest of the world during and since.  A thousand volume work on the subject would still require an explanation and a qualification that such a work was by no means all-inclusive.  Yet, it remains one of the most compelling subjects for historians, social and military, because of the world-altering impact of the events themselves and their decades-long aftermath.   The magnitude of the struggle defies modern understanding.   As does the agony of the armies and the peoples locked in the grips of that mortal struggle.

And so it is likely to remain.  And it began with the flash of cannon and the roar of engines, in the morning darkness, seventy-one years ago today.

(Cr0ss-posted at Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid)

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Aviation, Books, Hard Power, History, Navy, Tactics, Uncategorized | read comments (3)

* Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace The Bad Old Days

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails
Let’s go backwards when forward fails
And movie stars you thought were alone then
Now are framed beside your bed

Don’t throw the pa-ast away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again

- Peter Allen, ‘Everything Old is New Again

There was a point, a decade or so ago (OK, maybe two decades back), when I thought some of my bete noirs, like medium- and intermediate range ballistic missiles and long-range cruise missile-armed supersonic bombers were going to go skulking off into that not-so-gentle night. Alas, it appears not so:

A move by Russia to sell its production line of Tu-22M3 long-range bombers to China for US$1.5 billion to China was confirmed by the US-based US-China Economic and Security Review Commission two years ago and the bomber’s name will be changed to the Hong-10, reports the state-run China News Service … The Hong-10, whose components will all be produced in China with the exception of the engine, is expected to fly in the second half of next year, and the country will produce 36 aircraft in the first batch to be delivered to the air force. One of world’s fastest long-range bombers which can also carry atomic weapons, the plane can cover the South China Sea, East China Sea and even the western Pacific. Sources here and here.

So now, along with pondering MRBMs that may be the Pershing II re-incarnated, alongside bulked up Badgers, we have the prospect of the Backfire being introduced into the increasingly volatile mix that constitutes the Far East Theater. Mah-velous. Previously rebuffed in the late 80′s/early 90′s by the Russians who didn’t want to upset the balance of forces in theater, the Chinese evidently closed the deal in 2010 to domestically produce up to 36 Tu-22M3 Backfires (Domestic designation: H-10) with the engines to be supplied by Russia – an agreement all the more curious because of the very real anger the Russians have (had?) over the Chinese knock-off production of the Su-27SK that formed the basis of the J-11 family and the navalized J-15 without paying the attending license-fees.

While it is easy to wave the “game changer” flag, the appearance of the H-10 in the region, especially in terms of coverage in the SCS and as a possible LACM platform for strikes against Guam, will be cause for more concern and an additional complication in the “Pacific pivot.” Already, H-6′s and H-6K’s running around the region with a variety of sub- and supersonic cruise missiles are cause for concern, and now, just as in the ‘Good/Bad Old Days’ the appearance of the Backfire on the stage once again places a premium on our ability to reach out and touch at long ranges, the archer before he has the option to shoot his arrows – rebuilding the Outer Air Battle as it were, but in an updated form to handle an updated threat and under conditions we didn’t necessarily have to face in the Cold War. It also means stepping up our training and putting renewed emphasis on countering the reconnaissance-strike complex that would support the H-6/H-10 (and ASBMs for that matter) – time to get serious about OPDEC, EMCON and a host of other TTPs we became very practiced with during the 80′s but have let atrophy over the years. Oh, and did I mention the need for some really, really good AEW?

And do-on’t throw the past away
You might need it some other rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again
When everything old i-is new-ew a-again

Crossposted at steeljawscribe.com

Posted by SteelJaw in Aviation, Hard Power, History, Navy | read comments (25)
Tags: AEW, China, Cold War, IAMD, Russia, Tu-22M3 Backfire

This is the final installment in my series of posts on William Sims and what his discovery and development of continuous aim fire a century ago can tell us about junior leaders and innovation.  They are part of the remarks that I delivered at NWDC’s Junior Leader Innovation Symposium.

PREVIOUS:

 A Junior Officer and a Discovery.

The Gritty Truth of Junior Leader Innovation 

Years after serving as the Navy’s Inspector of Target Practice, as World War I raged, Rear Admiral William Sims was sent to England to command all U.S. Naval Forces based there.  Promoted to Vice Admiral, he arrived as the U-boat Wolfpacks of the German Navy were decimating the supply lines across the Atlantic.  The British Isles were on the verge of starvation.  The Royal Navy had been completely ineffective against the German submarines as they massed their battleships to take on the German Imperial Navy’s High Seas Fleet.

When Admiral Sims arrived he was approached by a group of young Lieutenants who brought him an idea which the Royal Navy had refused to implement.  These Lieutenants were the Commanding Officers of a new class of warship called a Destroyer, and they believed that working together they could convoy supplies across the Atlantic and take on the Wolfpacks, swarm against swarm.  The Royal Navy’s Admiralty refused to adopt the new tactics.  Sims requested more destroyers from the States, and told the Royal Navy that the US would help out if they tried the young JO’s ideas.

The convoy system showed results almost immediately.  The convoys were so successful and so vital to the war effort that Sims – the very definition of a Battleship Admiral – cabled back to Washington and told the Department of the Navy to stop building Battleships and put all shipbuilding into Destroyers … all because he listened to a group of Junior Leaders with a good idea.

After the war was over, Sims took over as the President of The Naval War College.  He made adjustments to the curriculum and he started running officers through war games.  These war games included early work on a war plan that could be used for a conflict in the Pacific.  The work that Sims started on the Pacific plan, which became War Plan Orange, suggested that the U.S. Navy should look into investing in a new kind of ship … the aircraft carrier.  The Battleship Admiral, who championed Destroyers because of the tactical and operational innovation of junior leaders, turned to the birth of naval aviation because of the ideas of his subordinates at the War College.  The Milwaukee Journal wrote that Sims “continued to be a thorn in the fat flesh of the naval hierarchy during his entire career.”

What can we learn from this story?

First, you have to know where your expertise lies.  You have to study, and do the deep research needed to understand why things are the way they are.  You have to understand that you don’t know everything, and like Sims working with his wardroom mates and his gunner’s mates, you have to work to identify challenges and problems.  It’s important to admit that you don’t know everything.  Once you admit it, start learning as much as you can.  Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote, “The study of history lies at foundation of all sound military conclusions and practices.”  The key element in his principle is that we have to study and develop our expertise.

Find a way to talk about your idea.  Take Sims’ warning to heart though and don’t be insubordinate, don’t write a letter to the President (it’s probably not going to get you anywhere today anyway). However, you need to engage both inside the system and outside the system.  Inside the Navy and the Military you have NWDC concept development.  You have SUBFOR’s TANG that we heard about from VADM Richardson earlier.  And we have some of the resources that Dr. Fall from ONR described.  You also have your chain of command.  You can submit changes to TTP’s and manuals, NATOPS changes, or write white papers to submit up the chain.  Outside of the lifelines there are also options.  Write an article for USNI’s Proceedings or write up your idea for one of the online publications like USNI Blog, Small Wars Journal, Information Dissemination, or the Next War Blog at the Center for International Maritime Security.  We can also engage with the community professional organizations like Naval Helicopter Association, Tailhook, or the Surface Navy Association.

Third, find something you believe in and demonstrate your own grit.  You have to want to do this.  This isn’t a fast or sure way to a fitrep or an eval bullet.  This isn’t necessarily going to get you another ribbon for your chest candy.  This is for the combat effectiveness of the Service.  This is about professionalism.  You have to be willing to spend 2 years writing 13 reports that everyone appears to be ignoring.  You have to be willing to invest the time and energy and hard work needed to see your idea through.  Christopher Hitchens wrote in his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, “Don’t expect to be thanked, by the way, the life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.”

Finally, we all need to learn to listen.  This is especially true as we become more senior.  Today we may be the junior leaders, but that means tomorrow some of us will be the mid-grade leaders, and in the future some of us will be the senior leaders of the Navy.  Sims is proof that when you remember it’s not about you but instead it’s about the idea and about the Service, you can continue to innovate as you are promoted.  However, as a senior officer or senior enlisted it takes more listening and more encouraging of your subordinates, because they’re likely to have the next great idea…like convoys or aircraft carriers.  Having senior leaders that listen, and who become the champions of the great ideas of their subordinates, is just as vital as having junior personnel with innovative ideas.

There’s a reason why the title of my last slide says “Lessons Observed.”  These lessons are just ideas that I’ve pulled from this story.  William Sims offers us all a great example to learn from.  However, whether or not these observations actually become lessons learned … that’s up to you.

The author would like to thank VADM Daly, Bill Miller, and Mary Ripley from USNI for encouraging his involvement with the NWDC conference.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the US Navy, or any other agency.

Posted by admin in Hard Power, History, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Proceedings | read comments (11)

The news today carried the notice of the passing of actor Frank Cady, aged 96.   Frank Cady was best known for playing shopkeep Sam Drucker on the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres”.  Mr. Cady looked old then, which was more than 40 years ago.   What strikes one who reads the cast list for “Green Acres” is the fact that actors who played three major characters, as well as the composer of the “Green Acres” theme song, were all veterans of World War II.  (Warning: clicking on the link will cause that song to run through your head during important meetings and possibly religious services, so do so at your own risk. )

That composer was the late Vic Muzzy, who served in the United States Navy.  Actor Alvy Moore, who played Hank Kimball, was a US Marine combat veteran in the South Pacific.  And most notably, star Eddie Albert was a Navy salvage officer who experienced the terrible carnage on the beaches of Tarawa.  He talked of his experiences in the 1993 History Channel documentary Death Tide at Tarawa.   Moore passed away in 1997, Eddie Albert in 2005, and Muzzy in 2009.  Frank Cady was the oldest and the longest-lived of them.

These stars are all gone now, as are most of the Hollywood veterans who put their careers on hold to serve our nation.   Gone with them is their collective consciousness of service in wartime that made them so very different from those who act and produce what Hollywood makes and sells today.   Not every change is for the better.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Books, Hard Power, History, Marine Corps, Navy, Uncategorized | read comments (5)

The lead ship of the magnificent Iowa-class battleships, the fastest and most advanced gun ships every to put to sea, has arrived at her new home, Berth 87 in San Pedro, opposite the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, itself newly renovated.

Iowa (BB-61) was saved from her Suisun Bay purgatory, and the cutting torch, and will be open for visitors on 7 July.  The veteran of World War II and Korea was recommissioned in 1984, and suffered the tragic explosion in Turret 2 in 1989, which killed 47 sailors.

She now is the last of the four of her namesake class to be preserved, with New Jersey (BB-62) in Camden NJ, Wisconsin (BB-64 and Scott’s beloved Big Badger Boat!) in Norfolk, VA, and Missouri (BB-63) at Pearl Harbor, near Arizona (BB-39), forever in her watery depths at Berth F-7.

As a museum battleship, Iowa joins her sisters, and USS Massachusetts (BB-59) at Fall River MA, and USS Alabama (BB-60) in Mobile Bay, the two surviving South Dakotas, and the Grand Dame of US battlewagons, the venerable USS Texas (BB-35) at Galveston, TX.   (Texas is the lone second-generation Dreadnought still extant, and saw service in both World Wars following her commissioning in 1914.)

Iowa began her journey from the “Mothball Fleet” in Suisun Bay in October 2011, to Richmond CA to repair and restore, scrape and paint, and replace rotted teak decks that are the inevitable result of twenty years’ time at the mercy of the elements.  She also received the sprucing befitting a lady whom will be in the public eye.  From there, she passed under the Golden Gate one last time late in May, and arrived off Los Angeles on Friday.

Many thanks to all those folks whose pictures I used in this post.

******************************************************************

As Mr. Robert Evans points out, I am guilty of a most egregious omission.  USS North Carolina (BB-55) is preserved beautifully in Wilmington NC.   Shame on me for missing the “Showboat”.   Especially since it was a favorite destination during my two tours at Lejeune!!!

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Books, Coast Guard, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Homeland Security, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy, Proceedings, Travel, Uncategorized | read comments (17)

Over at OpFor, old comrade LTCOL P asks some thought-provoking questions as he links to an article by AOLDefense’s Sydney Freedberg.  The article covers the happenings at UNIFIED QUEST, the United States Army’s Title 10 Wargame being held at The Army War College at Carlisle Barracks.

Go there.  Ponder his questions, and read the article.  Well worth your time.

UNIFIED QUEST is usually a pretty illuminating event,  a “futures game” which posits the incorporation of as-yet unfielded technology or force structure, and the effects of that technology or structure on tactics and doctrine.  Occasional bits of self-delusion occur (tactical “offensive cyber” being launched at a Bn Commander’s say-so with a server dropped into a remote airfield comes to mind), but overall, the game is well conducted and has had (in my years of participation at least) a very sharp and aggressive “Red Team”.  This year appears to be no different.

What stands out in the AOLDefense article, fairly leaps from the page, is this exchange:

“You needed ports, [the enemy] knew you needed ports,” he said. “They were ready for you.” While the US-led task force maneuvered elaborately by sea and air to deceive the enemy commanders where they would land, ultimately the coalition had no way to bring in the supplies its own forces needed, let alone humanitarian aid, without controlling a handful of major seaports. So the enemy commanders ignored the feints — their militiamen lacked the kind of mobile reserve force that would have been needed to try to counter them anyway — and simply dug in where they knew the US would eventually have to come to them.

“We had to go here; we’re very predictable,” sighed one US Army officer later in the briefing. The military has invested in the capability to bring forces ashore where there is no port — formally called JLOTS, Joint Logistics Over The Shore — but the Army and Navy together only have enough such assets to move supplies for one reinforced Army brigade, while the Marines can land another brigade-plus. That’s only a fraction of the force required in this scenario. While the the resulting dependence on established infrastructure — seaports, airfields, bases in friendly countries — is often thought of as a purely logistical problem, in this kind of conflict it can have bloody tactical consequences.

We have spent a decade and a half (or more) talking about seizure of ports as the cheap and easy alternative to landing over a beach.  Time and again, the refrain that port seizure was the far preferable alternative to coming ashore at the surf line was drummed into our ears.  “Ports are smart, beaches are dumb” was how one senior Navy Officer explained it, somewhat condescendingly.  Problem is, seizing a port which is surrounded by built-up area, under the noses of an enemy that knows you need it and knows it is, in fact, your critical vulnerability, never was going to be as easy as those port seizure advocates assumed it would be.   (I did happen to notice none of them ever seemed to be infantrymen.)

Urban combat is never easy in the best of circumstances, but becomes especially challenging when you have a limited ability to transition forces from afloat to ashore without securing the very objective you are fighting for.  Even an unsophisticated and largely immobile adversary can defend effectively if he knows where you are going and why.   Cherbourg was destroyed by second-rate German garrison troops in June of 1944, even as US forces drove into the Cotentin Peninsula.  The loss of that port affected the Allied drive across Europe into 1945.

One other point worth mentioning:  The aforementioned JLOTS is not a system that can be used in an assault echelon.  The loading of the ships and craft are not according to the Commander of the Landing Force’s (CLF) Landing Plan.  JLOTS is a national asset which requires a secure beach over which to transit.   The brigade coming ashore isn’t doing so in fighting trim.  Very effective for bringing in follow-on assets, but not for forcing an entry.

So once again the value of landing combat-ready forces over a beach is highlighted.  As is the paucity of current capacity to do so, which includes the near non-existent Naval Gunfire capability of the United States Navy.

Kudos to the Red Team at UNIFIED QUEST.  Their job is to poke holes through the invalid assumptions in Blue Forces’ planning and execution, and they have done so here in a major way.   Our assumptions regarding port seizures are at the top of this year’s list.

With a “Strategic Pivot” toward the Pacific, let’s hope those who read the Lessons Learned from UQ 12 are paying attention.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Air Force, Army, Aviation, Books, Coast Guard, Foreign Policy, Hard Power, History, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Merchant Marine, Naval Institute, Navy, Proceedings, Uncategorized | read comments (10)