The real threat of hybrid conflict

Talk to ten different military analysts about the meaning of the term "hybrid war," and you'll probably get 20 different answers. Some folks like to talk about hybrid threats, others about hybrid warfare; some talk up hybrid adversaries, and still others worry about hybrid conflict. Usually what they're getting at falls into the grey area between irregular warfare conducted by poorly-armed non-state militants and the purportedly more traditional, "conventional" conflict waged by high-tech, capital-intensive state militaries. In the hybrid future, we're told, irregular adversaries will employ high-tech weapons while sophisticated state enemies are likely to adopt guerilla-style tactics—avoiding American strengths while maximizing their own.

Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.

You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.

Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?

Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.

The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.

Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.

Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.

Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.

We needed a new term for that?

I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.

The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.

The driver of the hybrid threat, for Johnson, is the spread of long-range weapons: anti-tank guided missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons (called "man-portable air defense systems," or MANPADS), even relatively unsophisticated long-range rockets like those used by Hezbollah in 2006. When Israeli airstrikes alone couldn't find and destroy the well-hidden rocket launchers, Israel sent in ground troops, only to be bloodied by unexpectedly fierce resistance.

Here we see the bankruptcy of the hybrid idea as a tactical construct laid bare: what's just been described as "the driver of the hybrid threat" is in fact the driver of nearly all tactical adaptation over the last century or so: the problem of the offensive in the face of overwhelming firepower—increasing weapons range and rate of fire, the deepening of the battlefield, and the consequent limitations on tactical and operational maneuver.

So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.

So how can the US prepare for hybrid threats? In part by going back to the future, said Johnson, whose books include a history of how the US learned to use tanks and airpower in World War II. "It is a problem that can't be solved by a single service," he said. The Air Force and Army today work together more closely than ever before in providing air support to ground troops in Afghanistan, but air-ground cooperation has gotten good in past conflicts as well, only to break down post-war when bureaucratic and budgetary battles between the services start to matter more. Hybrid threats will impose serious limits on helicopter operations – as the Soviets found out in Afghanistan after the CIA provided the mujahideen with Stinger missiles – so support from higher, faster, and harder-to-hit fixed-wing aircraft will be essential. Conversely, the Air Force will need the ground troops to root out hybrid enemies from their hiding places, he argued, just as the Israeli Air Force proved unable to spot Hezbollah's rocket launchers from overhead. "Ground maneuver is the only thing that will make him visible because he's hiding from everything overhead," said Johnson.

The challenge of so-called hybrid war is that it's reminded us of the need to consider these two questions together: firepower and maneuver, attack and defense, target identification and force protection. The excerpt above is like a billboard for Biddle's modern system (miraculously, Johnson doesn't cite Military Power in his recent study, though he does take lessons from a recent monograph Biddle co-authored about the Lebanon war): artillery and air power are used in close combination with ground forces to pin down the enemy, force him to keep his head down and allow friendly ground forces to maneuver on his position. But how to separate him from the population, to force him to come out and fight? Well-trained infantry must be capable of meeting the enemy in his sanctuaries – whether forests or mountains or urban areas – to identify, isolate, and fix him for destruction. These are the fundamentals of combined-arms land warfare, as useful for Americans in 2018 as for Germans in 1918.

But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.

I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which

strong states select themselves into armed conflicts only when their pre-war estimate of the cost of attaining their political objectives through the use of force falls below the threshold of their tolerance for costs. The more the actual costs of victory exceed a state's prewar expectations, the greater the risk that it will be pushed beyond its cost-tolerance threshold and forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces before it attains its war aims. (497)

She goes on to make a compelling case about the difference between wars of coercion and wars of destruction, but that's less germane to our point here. What I'm getting at is this: because we don't expect irregular adversaries to fight in conventional ways and with conventional weapons, we're not prepared for the sort of casualties that are normally associated even with wildly successful conventional ground combat. (This expectation is exaggerated yet further by the experiences of Desert Storm and OIF I, when U.S. forces inflicted historically unprecedented casualty ratios on conventional enemies due to a remarkable confluence of American technological edge, extraordinarily poor Iraqi force employment, and good fortune. Our recent opponents have been irregulars who mostly lack the capacity to engage our forces using the modern system and regulars who proved unwilling or incapable of doing so.) In short, we have forgotten that land warfare has significant costs in men and materiel, even when waged successfully.

This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.

Friday quick-hits

There is a lot of stuff to talk about right now, and we've been largely absent from the conversation. Egypt is at the top of the list, of course. I'm reticent about engaging in the sort of sudden-expertism that's so prevalent in the blogosphere and on cable news, but there are certainly angles to this story that we can meaningfully weigh in on (for me it's American security assistance to Egypt and the broader U.S.-Egypt mil-to-mil relationship), and I hope to get to that in the near future. But for now I'm mostly focused on the immediate struggle against the Old Enemy (and late-afternoon drinks with some defense-blogging luminaries), so I just want to hit you with a few brief notes.

1. Read Jason's tank-wonk piece on what changing Army org structure means for armor culture and the future employment of tanks. Then read this excellent (if incidental) companion story in Aviation Week by Friend of Ink Spots Paul McLeary, Andy Nativi, and David Eshel: "Future of Main Battle Tank Looks Secure." Good contributions to the never-ending "Is Armor Dead?" debate.

2. Check out this review of the new Rumsfeld book by Bloomberg defense guy Tony Capaccio. Note this excerpt in particular:

“What was unique about Iraq was that the intelligence community reported near total confidence in their conclusions,” Rumsfeld writes. “Their assessments appeared to be unusually consistent.”

Now get in the way-back machine and go read Eli Lake in The New Republic in September 2002. This is six months before the Iraq war started, remember. Money paragraph:

But this is all mere speculation, because there is no NIE for Iraq and there probably won't be one anytime soon. The reason for this omission is that the Iraq hawks running the Pentagon and staffing the office of the vice president long ago lost faith in the CIA analysis. So they set up their own network for analyzing and collecting intelligence regarding Iraq and have been presenting it to the president themselves. The result is that instead of Bush receiving one assessment of the facts on the ground, he has for months been receiving two--one (more cautious) from the CIA and the other (more optimistic) from the Iraq hawks. As one former CIA analyst says, "Not since Vietnam has there been as deep a divide over intelligence as to enemy capabilities as you are seeing now in Iraq." The administration's confusion on Iraq, in other words, goes even deeper than its critics understand. It's not just that different factions in the administration disagree about U.S. policy vis-a-vis Saddam. They disagree about the fundamental facts on which that policy should be based.

The whole article is worth reading -- it's a thoughtful look at how the intersection of intelligence and policy is fraught with all sorts of problems of ideology, perception, and so on. Great, great work from someone I frequently butt heads with. Oh yeah, and Rumsfeld: face.

3. And finally, the Most Disingenuous Quote of All Time award goes to the anonymous defense industry flack who told Politico's Jen DiMascio (re: foreign military sales to Egypt)

“We do this because we are told by the U.S. government it’s in the U.S. national interest,” a defense industry official said, referring to U.S. sales abroad. “If at any time it stops becoming so, ... it’s not too hard to say we’d be on board with that.”

Um, riiiiight. That's why there's no Lockheed guy in Baghdad lobbying MNF-I and the Iraqi MoD that the F-16 is the best solution to Iraq's air-defense needs, right? They're just siting at their desks in Bethesda waiting for an order to come in, then executing on USG requests to support the national interest? Sure.

Hey, "national interest" can be a really complex mix of things, and it can include jobs and economic strength and industrial base health and a whole bunch of other stuff aside from military-strategic concerns. I get that. But it is just totally obscene for arms manufacturers to suggest that they only sell systems abroad "because [they're] told by the U.S. government it's in the U.S. national interest" -- with the further implication that they're not out ahead of the USG pimping their stuff as the best solution for everybody involved. Sure, the defense industry just fills orders as a public service, with the almost not-even-worth-mentioning side benefit that it helps to sustain their business and increase revenue. Bullshit.

And on that happy note, enjoy your weekend.

Old Tanker Syndrome Outbreak

Bust out the ointments, because we're having another rash of Old Tanker Syndrome. Adam Elkus brought this Military Review article to my attention last week, penned by an Army major, lamenting the demise of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR). In it, Major Walters states that the Army has lost its ability to conduct conventional combined arms operations at the hands of a myopic focus on COIN doctrine, that reconnaissance is pretty much dead across the full spectrum of operations, and that transition of the 3d ACR to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team is a terrible decision because there are no longer reconnaissance forces above the brigade level.

Let me start this by admitting that this transition from ACR to an SBCT hurts to every cavalryman. It was the last of the great combined arms cavalry units, each ACR facing transition to something else as well as the total loss of Division Cavalry Squadrons (DIV CAV). It sucks and it hurts. Especially as modular brigades are essentially based on cavalry task organizations so it's not fun to watch the model get canned. After we acknowledge that most of the concern over this move is about pride, let's move on to facts.

First, for those that don't know, ACRs were designed to be the forward eyes and ears of corps formations. Divisions had their own squadrons (I was lucky enough to serve in one of these before they were transitioned to Armored Reconnaissance Squadrons (ARS)) and brigades had their own troops. But modularity changed all of that. DIV CAVs went away, because modularity decentralized operations to the brigade level. Brigades lost their Brigade Reconnaissance Troops, but gained ARSs - putting the preponderance of reconnaissance forces in the hands of brigade commanders. As they were becoming the central fighting force of the Army - related to by not exclusively because of operations in Iraq - it made sense to beef up that colonel's ability to look out forward or to secure his own forces. There was some loss of capability in that DIV CAVs had tanks and APCs (Abrams and Bradleys), as well as mortars and two troops of Kiowa Warriors, whereas ARSs consist of APCs and wheeled vehicles (and mortars), but no organic rotary wing assets. They were given significant UAV support though.

So what is the effect of all of this? Brigades - the primary formation for battle command - have greater reconnaissance of their own, but those recon units had lesser ability to fight for their information, relying more on sensors. I don't see this as necessarily bad. While sensors are not the panacea that many advocates make them out to be, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (doctrinally the M3 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle) is a pretty robust platform that does not take hits all that well, but can destroy T-72 MBTs with a couple of its weapons systems. There are two other reasons that removing tanks from reconnaissance forces is a pretty good move from my perspective: logistics and the propensity to fight instead of fighting for information. Tanks have a heavy logistical footprint - something you may not want in the force you are sending kilometers ahead of your main body (this is in a conventional environment). They are great for many things, but the guzzle fuel at ridiculous rates and keeping them in the fight is difficult so far ahead. The second reason I don't have issue with this change is structure is that during the invasion of Iraq, while nominally conducting reconnaissance or security operations, my squadron was often just another maneuver unit. I think the cause of this was that we were able to fight like a small brigade so we were used in that way. A lighter force ensures your ARS does not become decisively engaged and actually performs its primary mission.

All of this is a bit of a diversion from the main topic, but the point is that while there are changes to how we've done cavalry business, those changes may actually be good for the force. To suggest that only 3d ACR can provide decentralized reconnaissance and security at the tactical and operational levels across the spectrum of conflict is ludicrously unfounded. To this point, I ask the question: where was 3d ACR during the invasion of Iraq? To no fault of their own (this is not to be taken as a swipe at this great unit) they were in the ocean trying to get to the fight. The invasion force's principle headquarters was the corps level - the type of organization an ACR is designed to support. So a DIV CAV squadron did what they were intended to do. Granted, DIV CAVs don't exist anymore, but I think we can see that the Army is a highly flexible and capable organization that will figure out how to win battles and wars. It is erroneous to state only one type of unit can perform a certain function - that argument hasn't held up to scrutiny since the end of the Cold War. Especially with regard to a unit designed to support corps commands in an environment that places greater emphasis on decentralized brigade-level operations.

Which brings us to my main point. The Army is changing for a number of reasons and while challenging those changes is healthy, let's all make the right arguments. Major Walker does make some valid points in his article, but those points are lost amid the same tired arguments against organizational change. My advice to the Armor community (of which I am regretfully no longer an active member) to stay relevant is to avoid the following worn out, specious statements unless you can actually show evidence that they are true:

1. The Army has gained COIN experience at the cost of combined arms competencies. The fact that your last unit didn't do a Table XII does not support this - especially if your last line-unit assignment was in 2005. Even in COIN, units still maneuver, they call for fires and CAS, worry about logistics, and work in TF teams. This statement may actually be true, but anecdotes do not make it so. Show me the numbers.
2. ARSs don't have enough manpower or dismounts. No they don't. You know what else didn't? ACRs, DIV CAVs, BRTs. As a scout platoon leader I was lucky if I ever had one dismount per BFV in the platoon and most often did not. For whatever reasons, the Army had problems getting enough guys trained to be dismounted scouts. It's somewhat understandable since doctrinally you're supposed to trust that SPC to call for fire and that takes time to do if you find the right guys capable of it. But manpower issues are not unique to ARSs - it's been a chronic problem in cavalry organizations. TOEs of ARS also give the force more reconnaissance than it used to have, even if more dispersed, so on the whole this statement is untrue.
3. Armor is dead. It's not. The 3d ACR may go the way of the dodo, but the Army still has lots of tanks and lots of tankers who just love what they do. Gunnery skills may vary by unit, but those core skills are still out there. Don't bitch about armor being dead - start writing about how to make core tanking skills universal across the force. (And please don't even try this line with some of my former PSGs and 1SGs - they might disagree in a more vociferous manner than I am here).

Here's the bottom line: the Armor Corps is going through some changes, good and bad. If you're going to argue against it, make your case. I'm getting tired of old (in mindset, not age) tankers making the statement that COIN killed armor as prima facie. It sounds that it could be the case, but we don't know because there is no evidence available for or against. And it also ignores the realities of the current fight even it were true. Would these armor leaders suggest that tankers should have stayed home from the fight because it erodes their ability to wax North Korean mechanized forces? Because that's how I often read these types of critiques. A COIN focus was necessary for the force because that was the "strategy" proscribed by the command - so adapt and get in the fight. And stop worrying: the current COIN fights will wind down and you'll be doing your table XIIs soon enough. You'll adapt again - that's what cavalrymen do.

I apologize to some of readers who aren't so into the details of this discussion and for the length of this post. I'm sure that I missed some things and that many of you are going to smack me around in the comments. Which is good - let's actually have this discussion and stop with the bumper sticker slogans.

Tanks in Helmand: Great idea or greatest idea?

Well, I was going to follow up on this post on strategy, but didn't get to it. And then I was going to comment on this fantastic exchange at Kings of War, but won't be getting to it soon. But then I saw this Spencer Ackerman article at Wired and felt the need to comment.

Spencer apparently doesn't think much of the deployment of a company of USMC Abrams tanks being deployed to Helmand Province. While one of the original article's sources uses some misguided language (I thought we put "shock and awe" in the same discard pile with "mission accomplished"?), the fact is that tanks will probably provide an excellent tool in the COIN fight. I'm going to talk about this from a tactical perspective and then from the population-centric COIN perspective and why this is probably a good idea. As a caveat for our newer readers, I was a cavalryman in the U.S. Army in heavy units in Iraq. While this may cause bias, it also gives me the perspective and experience to understand how this actually works.

Tactically, an M1A1 Abrams tank can give you an edge. I'm not familiar with the terrain in Helmand, but save goat trails and narrow canal roads, these very heavy vehicles can get around surprisingly well. As far as firepower goes, it can put what is effectively an artillery round within a half a meter of where you intend it to go at targets of a few kilometers with relatively unobstructed fields of fire. I'm not sure why Spencer knocks the fact that the M1 is 30 years old and thus that it's precision is questionable. It is a line-of-sight weapon, not a bomb or artillery shell. If you can see it you can kill it. So yes, it brings a lot of highly accurate firepower that limits collateral damage.

You know what scares the hell out of dismounted insurgents? 70 tons of badassery that will make them dead if they mess with it. I could go on and on about this, but I'll cut this short. If the problem in Helmand is a highly-active insurgency that requires a firepower solution, then the M1A1 is what you want to bring to the fight. I'm sure the Marines will be pulling their hair out keeping this company running from a logistics perspective - they suck down fuel, spare parts are bulky and heavy, and recovering them off of the battlefield if they break down is a pain. But they pay professionals to figure that out and I'm sure they have it in hand. The bottom line is that the Abrams provides a highly mobile, well armored platform for long distance, highly accurate fire. To question that is to not understand tanks at all. It seems that the Marines need long distance, highly accurate firepower or they wouldn't be asking for it.

Now for how this behemoth of death and destruction fits into a pop-COIN operation. Tanks are designed to do two things: kill people and break things. That's it. What commenters like Spencer, who is hardly alone in this, often ignore about lessons learned from Iraq is that even the most population-centric COIN requires the killing of people and the breaking of things. Tanks were integral in defeating al Qaida in and around Baghdad in 2007-08, as were dropping bombs, etc. Tanks were often preferred because they could do these things with greater accuracy than bombs and with a smaller surface danger zone. This keeps the people happy, because they know as much as we do that we have to kill some people and tanks do it more efficiently with less impact on locals' lives.

So no, this isn't the opposite of Petraeus' "Get Out and Walk" guidance. This is part of the "kinetic" fight that needs to supplement the "hearts and minds" aspect of the fight. How a commander ties it in to his pop-COIN operations is by following up immediately after the tanks do their business with guys on the ground to take responsibility for anything that went wrong as a result of the engagement and to own the ground and deal with the locals and their issues. Does the Soviet use of their tanks make the use of the Abrams difficult? Yes, but that's why tactical controls are imperative. If the tanks are used for what they're intended - getting rid of the bad actors in Helmand with minimal civilian losses - then the Soviet legacy would become obsolete.

Will these 16 tanks "shock and awe" Mullah Omar into negotiations? No. But it has the potential to make individual Taliban groups not want to go to Helmand to fight the Americans while at the same time keeping civilian casualties to a minimum. Again, go back to the Surge and scrape away all the crap that US tactics were all hearts and minds. It was as violent as it was benevolent. We've tried mostly benevolence for the last year in Afghanistan and before that it was mostly violence. If the tanks are used correctly and commanders follow up the controlled and carefully applied violence with benevolence, then maybe the USMC has a chance of turning Helmand around.

Old Tanker Syndrome

"Mostly Dead" must describe the horse it was beating - or so I thought. But alas, it is another post-mortem on the Armor Corps. Granted, LTC Weiss seems to fall somewhere between COL Gentile and MAJs Smith and Harbridge when it comes to his thoughts on "how dead" the Armor Corps really is. But this is still what I'm starting to call "Old Tanker Syndrome" (and yes, I noticed that LTC Weiss is an artilleryman) - or OTS.

OTS seems to cause those it afflicts to see the Armor Corps through the lens of their pre-Iraq experiences, when NTC was king and careers were made out of the brigade breach into the Northern Corridor. I'm not going to call it nostalgia - I don't think Gian is nostalgic - but their formative years in the Army were defined by these realities. I think that the biggest symptom of OTS, though, is a pre-GWOT conception of combined arms operations.

For these older field grades with OTS, combined arms operations are those brigade breaches and large maneuver formations - both Gian and LTC Weiss refer to them as lost capabilities. I have to say, as a former company grade, that I take umbrage at that. Tell any lieutenant or captain who has lead in Iraq or Afghanistan that they don't understand combined arms operations because they've never done an old school breach or brigade live-fire. Go ahead. I dare you.

Or maybe these young officers know combined arms better than their superiors - or at least more advanced at younger grades. They know how to work with host nation forces, call in fixed- and rotary-wing fires, artillery, and work with dismounts (conventional and SOF) and mechanized forces. Simultaneously. As lieutenants. If that's not "combined arms" then I don't know the meaning of the term.

And let's take a look at this focus on brigade and above operations. Do both of these experienced officers really believe that younger officers are "unschooled" in combined arms because of the nature of decentralized counterinsurgency operations? Both current theaters have plenty of examples of large-scale, combined arms operations - but just because the unit's front is more circular than linear doesn't dismiss the fact they are brigade-level operations. Further, employing weapons systems in this manner requires greater understanding of their capabilities because of the greater risk of fratricide.

Even during the invasion of Iraq, which was a corps-level operation, all I ever cared about was my commander's intent two levels up, my mission, and the missions of the units to my left and right. After the invasion, nothing changes except I now had to worry about what the units to my front and back and indigenous forces in the AOR were doing. Decentralized operations are the same in high- and low-intensity conflict. Even at NTC, I couldn't tell if we were doing a company or brigade operations, except that latter had three times as many observer/controllers wandering around. It doesn't matter to a company-level officer. Just as experience at corps-level operations isn't a prerequisite to effective leadership of battalions.

What I'm trying to get at, in a verbose way, is that today's younger officers are probably the most tactically competent officers our nation has seen in a long time with regard to maneuver and combined arms operations. Where I'll agree with Gian and LTC Weiss is that technical skills such as gunnery have atrophied - but this can be easily remedied. But the fact remains - the principles of warfare are the same for COIN as they are for HIC and our junior leaders are very, very good at executing those principles. So let's just stop with this "Armor is dead" leitmotif - it's not, nor is it endangered. Don't let OTS jade your perception of the quality and esprit of our Armor Corps. Please.

More on the future of the Armor Corps

This week saw a minor resurgence of the "death of Armor" motif through a paper on SWJ in response to COL Gentile. I found the discussion somewhat interesting if not really a rehash of the common themes to this topic between a number of SWJ regulars and fellow Spartan Brigade alumni. There was one comment that I think really sums up the danger facing the Armor Corps, from a great officer and commander who I had the honor of serving with at Fort Stewart, Mark Battjes. Here is most of his comment:

Do we have now in the Armor branch, or heavy portion of the Infantry branch, the junior leaders (SGTs, SSGs, SFCs, LTs, and CPTs) who know how to train to conduct heavy combined arms maneuver?

I worry less about whether we will be able to train 18-24 year olds to be able to hit targets with an M1 or M2. I worry far more about whether or not a SSG can develop a plan to train his section to not only shoot gunnery, but also conduct mounted maneuver.

My own experience as a company commander training a company to shoot gunnery for the first time without significant training experience in my formation (1 x SFC MG and only a handful of NCOs who had ever shot gunnery) is instructive. We got through it with brute force and ignorance, but it was a lot more painful than it should have been. The results are instructive as well. We qualified everyone on Table VIII reasonably well, but the Table XIIplatoon qualifications were much more difficult, primarily because none of the NCOs, and certainly not the LTs, had learned how to train to conduct mounted maneuver. They know how to train a squad to enter and clear a building or conduct a dismounted patrol.

Overall, I agree with the authors' point that the Armor corps will ultimately survive and thrive. However, it will require the active efforts of BN CDRs and S3/XOs with significant training experience to show a lot of young CPTs, LTs, and NCOs who are long on combat experience, but short on training experience, how to go about training a tank platoon or scout platoon. Somehow we have to rebuild the training capabilities of our junior leaders, something that we were very good at before we had to quickly train up for repeat combat tours.

I couldn't have put this better myself. As Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, this should probably be the number one focus of the Maneuver Center of Excellence.

The Combat Arm of Decision

I'm sure most of you have read Gian Gentile's latest at SWJ on the death of the Armor Corps. I don't intend to dissect the entire paper here, but I do want to talk about a couple of points.

Gian is absolutely correct that today's mechanized force does not know how to do a combined arms operation at the brigade level (he mentions division, but I'm not so concerned with that - I'm not sure what that would even look like). Now, being a cavalryman, I have no time or patience for breech operations - I'm more of a bypass, re-gas, haul ass kind of guy - but you older tanker folks know how hard a battalion/brigade-level obstacle breech is. If you think COIN is graduate-level war, a brigade breech is something closer to post-doc. And we don't train it anymore at NTC with live bullets like we used to. If I recall correctly, my brigade was one of the last to do it and that was back in 2004 sometime. Someday, somewhere, the U.S. Army is going to have to do that and we won't be prepared for it.

Gian is also partially correct on individual crew skills. I think that gunnery skills are important for tank and Bradley crews and it's true that we don't spend the time we used to on those skills. On the other hand, tank platoons are doing what they can to prepare their units for combat. Rest assured, the M1 series tank has been used quite a bit in Iraq. In 2008, one of my favorite tank platoon sergeants was slinging 120mm all over Sadr City when that area rose against the government again. And he and his platoon did it very well and played a big role in pacifying the area. I don't imagine he was the only SFC making sure his crews were ready for a big fight and I don't think that gunnery skills have eroded to the point where the Armor Corps is now dead.

Many of our readers will dismiss (or embrace) Gian's paper out of hand. I don't agree with all of it nor do I think all of it is accurate, but there are a number of points in it that need to be heeded. The Armor Corps is certainly not dead and is not nearing its demise. Yet. Hopefully longer dwell times will help bring competencies back to the level where they were and provide the time to train those skills required in today's fights.