Special Topics
User-contributed essays on diverse topics
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Sections
Alt.Mail
Special Reports
Branches of Service in the Modern World
This was inspired by a letter printed below.
What are the legitimate branches of service in the modern military? What are the proper service groupings? What do we owe tradition, and what needs to be rethought?
For example, strategic defense of the continent is the Army's job, and always was. The Coast Artillery was once a proud branch of service. The need for big shore guns to dominate the coastal waters is gone, but what of strategic air defenses? Missile defenses? Whose job is that?
Within the services there are missions to branches, but those are confused as well. Here is the letter that got me thinking about this.
There's been an argument going on within the Army for some time concerning whether there is only one infantry or there are many (mech, light, ranger, airborne) infantries. I am told that at least one general has been relieved for insisting that there is only one infantry (MG K.C. Leuer, 1988 - one fine trainer of infantry was KC), and that the techniques and equipment used fall under the heading of "mere".
Let me suggest here that there really is only one infantry...and it includes tanks, combat engineers, mortars, artillery forward observers and short range air defense as a minimum. I think infantry exists in any branch where purely moral factors become more important than technological ones. Anyplace where the soldier must "stand and be still to the Birkenhead drill" perhaps ought be considered "infantry". (This doesn't mean that citizen-soldier light infantry, with its cheapness and flexibility and sheer numbers, doesn't have an unusual importance, however.)
Other than that we developed our armor branch from cavalry, what else is there to make them cavalry? The Germans developed their first 7 panzer divisions from what amounts to the 7 motorized supply and service battalions in the 7 infantry divisions Versailles allowed them. It would seem unreasonable to say that 5th Panzer is an S &; S organization.
All the traditional cavalry missions are done, these days, mostly from the air or space...screeing, guarding, recon, raiding, pursuit. Armor must stand on the line and take it on the chin or grind forward using tiny gaps and dead spaces. They need courage and moral in a way very nearly indistinguishable from the grunts. (Though fighting in effect shoulder to shoulder in their tanks gives the tankers a certain moral advantage.) Their tactics and techniques above the level of gunnery in the attack are not those of cavalry but those of Stosstruppen.
Thoughts?
VTY
Tom Kratman
I will have some words on the subject presently, but discussion is now open.
Dr. Pournelle, Yours is a question I have pondered on occasion since I was employed by Uncle Sam as an Infantryman in the USMC. Really, what do we need with all of the services, and why do their roles seem to overlap?
One: the Air Force. I understand, coming out of the Army Air Corps, a need to consolidate the ranks and centralize the system, however, for most modern warfare, at least that currently projected by our Top Men in Washington, our Navy carriers pack enough punch. We have the Strategic Air Command, with billion dollar bombers, suppossedly unused due to the minor nature of current war. Also, we have the Silo's, which we aren't supposed to be using. Nice thought though, that we can be reasonably sure that our enemy will pay dearly for any strike against the US. I digress. The current thinking amongst the Army and Navy is lighter and faster, yet the Air Force still wants the bombers and missiles. Perhaps all we really need is just the SAC?
Can we perform the fighter and fighter/bomber roles with just the Navy?
Two: the Army. The current thinking with the Top Brass is Big Iron. However, they still maintain the rapid deployment special forces. Armor takes a long time to deploy, and use Desert Shield as an example. The 101st may be able to get there first, but they carry barely enough supplies to last past the time it takes to fold their chutes. We have pre-positioning ships, but at 20 knots flank speed, it takes a while to field all that armor. In the USMC we have a rapid deployable force that is supposed to carry enough supplies to operate for a period of time long enough to allow the heavier stuff to catch up. If we keep the USMC, why do we need the Army's rapid deployment forces?
Three: the Navy. What does the navy need with so many types of aircraft? I can understand some fighter support to protect the fleet, but there are enough fighter/ bombers and ground support aircraft within the Air Force to duplicate the roles performed by the Navy/ USMC carrier based aircraft.
Four: the USMC. Other than providing security for our embassies and the Navy, the only role they perform duplicates that done by the Army. This has been an argument used by the Brass in the Pentagon trying to pull the plug on the oldest fighting force in America.
Five: the Coast Guard. Can we do this with the Navy? In addition, each force, except the Coast Guard, maintains it's elite reconnaissance force, essentially a role that can be accomplished by only one. The main issue is each force has evolved to be self reliant, eliminating the need for joint forces operations. What am I missing, what do I have wrong? I like the idea of smaller, lighter, faster (and better). However, we do seem to be stretching ourselves a little thin. Congress closed a slew of bases when the Berlin wall fell, mostly Air Force, as I recall, but no forces restructuring or consolidation occurred.
George Laiacona III <george@eisainc.com> ICQ 37042478/ 28885038 "Now let me get this straight-you parried one blow with your shield, one with your sword, and the other with your head?" -Dr. Buen-Scheuk to a patient
I haven't time to address all these questions, so lets take an easy one first: the peacetime mission of the Coast Guard is constabulary, and that is not a role we want the Navy in. It's very easy to make the case for the Coast Guard as a separate service, and it ought to be under the Treasury where it was until the latest organizational imbecilities.
A second easy one is the roles of Marines and Army. For most of the history of the Republic, there was an understanding that the Congress owned the Army and the President owned the Navy. The Marines were powerful enough for quick reaction, rescuing citizens in foreign ports, and guarding US interests abroad; the President could deploy Navy and Marines without going to the Congress; but to fight a sustained effort he would need the Congress, and he would need the Army. This worked for a long time, and I see no reason why it would not work now. It is a good arrangement for a Republic, which is not afraid of its Navy; the Navy has always been volunteer, i.e. paid professional, and so has the Marine Corps; it is only recently that those services accepted conscripts.
The Army, on the other hand, always relied on conscripts for all but its permanent cadre, and this is to the good in a Republic. Citizen soldiers have been the defense of Republics for most of time, and Machiavelli among others concluded that a Republic could not endure without conscription: that a paid army would always be ruin, either by losing battles or by robbing the paymaster and becoming the government. History has seldom shown him wrong. Wealthy Republics are fairly rare in history, and those without conscription are pretty conspicuous by their absence. They have either fallen to enemies, or more likely become Empires.
The temptation to USE a large and powerful Army to Do Good is overwhelming, and hardly lacking in the current government. The result of Doing Good to people can be seen in Kossovo where we must now officially cling to the "massacre" stories although it is clear that far fewer were murdered prior to the NATO pacification than have been killed after, and the estimate of total murders including common criminality prior to the NATO intervention has fallen from 80,000 to a maximum of 2200 with the reality likely to be under 1,000, a murder rate comparable to many "civilized" nations not demonized by the New York Times and bombed into submission. It is not at all clear that the pacification with its minimum of 1500 civilian deaths did not kill more people than were murdered by everyone including family disputes and common criminals in the year prior to NATO's victory.
It is precisely because it is difficult to deploy a conscript army overseas without clear national interest and the consent of Congress that conscripts are preferable to volunteers if a Republic is to maintain a large standing army. Of course there is always the question of whether a superpower needs a large standing army as opposed to an extensive system of National Guards.
As to the Air Force, I have increasingly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do with it is abolish it, giving its components over to the Navy and the Army. While we are at it we can abolish the Department of Defense and return to cabinet level Secretaries of War and Navy, with service conflicts resolved where they should be, in the office of the Commander in Chief. The chief argument for an Independent Air Service as given by Hap Arnold and his people was that only Airmen could appreciate the importance of air superiority, and only Airmen could carry out an air strategy to achieve that.
It's no longer true if it ever was that only Airmen appreciate the importance of air superiority, and the monstrous strategic bombing campaign of World War II demonstrates that giving pure destruction control of its own power produces Dresden and Cologne but hardly real victory. Has most of the heavy bomber forces used in WW II been employed in support of the field army, the War in Europe would have been over in 1944 with far less destruction of Europe's infrastructure and far less habituation of the West to bombardment of civilian targets. We became inured to the air war against Kossovo by learning to live with ourselves after Dresden.
It turns out that the Airmen did not in fact appreciate air strategy at all: their strategic bombing produced little result, while a sideshow, the P-47 air interdiction strikes against the railroad system, was highly effective and contributed to ground decisions. Even so, the Air Force never learned that lesson, and to this day they want to fly fighters, and bombers, but never support the Field Army, and a career in Close Support will almost always terminate at Lieutenant Colonel or below; it's a dead end.
Yet as Fehrenback long ago observed, you can fly over the land, you can bomb the land, you can render the land uninhabitable, but you don't own it until you can stand a 17 year old kid with a rifle on top of it. If the purpose of war is control of territory and resources, and protection of the innocent, rather than extermination and sterilization, an Independent Air Arm is precisely what you do not want in control of the resources of modern destructive power.
Enough. I have probably offended everyone in sight already.
Hello,
There are two discussions going on at your site that are particularly relevant to a debate that is going on in the Army right now. Let me say I speak as a reserve army officer with eight years active service (10 years in the reserves) in tanks.
First, the armor discussion you have going on is interesting. The thickness of the armor worn by armored vehicles is a function of deployability rather than armor protection. Our heavy armored forces are tailored to fight Russians in the Fulda Gap as you know. One of your correspondents pointed out we had fifty years to prepare a battlefield. As a result, a heavy tank with limited range and ammunition supply like the M1 was ideal. So armor protection is a function of the battlefield rather than the weaponry encountered. The better the battlefield, the tougher the tanks can be.
Second, the discussion about the branches of service is very appropriate. Your point about Congressional control of the Army is precisely correct. A long time ago, I got to grouse about our heavy tanks to a journalist. I felt then that our heavy tanks made it difficult to deploy substantial forces quickly. I was right, as was proved in Desert Storm.
However, the real question is what kind of Army do we want? Our current forces are equipped and tailored to fight a conventional force threatening our Nato allies and South Korea. Despite numerous shortcomings the Army is configured to perform these missions. However, the inability of the Army to effectively intervene in our non-war with Yugoslavia, prompted the Army to begin a headlong rush to deploy 'medium' forces. A disturbingly precise analogy of the equipment used by these units is in your own "Go tell the Spartans." The army anticipates deploying medium division-sized units to a Kossovo style war. These medium units will be equipped with off the shelf technology and will be in place early next year.
The problem with medium units is not really the drastically reduced armor protection of the vehicles. Rather, they are a sea-change in the role of the Army. We are creating a tool ideally suited to foreign intervention. To use your phrase we are making ARMY units whose purpose can only be to "DO GOOD." These units are ONLY suitable for foreign entanglements-they are not defensive. These units will not be able to survive on a NATO battlefield and so cannot contribute to Europe's defense (also, the nonstandard parts and equipment will make the Army's logistic, personnel, and training systems more complex and unwieldy).
I believe that combined arms doctrine and joint training have been extremely good for the military. The downside is that there are no longer clear boundaries between which service will be used to intervene in which action. The old dictum about Congress owning the Army is less and less true as the Army builds roads in Honduras, picks up trash in Haiti, guards South Korea, and sits in the middle of a thousand year old ethnic feud in Bosnia.
Kipling would immediately recognize our new Army as that of an empire-not a republic!
Fred Dilger fcd_3@hotmail.com fcd@mindspring.com
The following is Michael K. Robel, LTC, AR, USAR evaluation of the proposed Medium brigades vs. the current heavy force from Jim Dunnigan's strategypage.com web site.
"Lessons Learned
As expected, principles for a lightly armored wheeled force are the same as for a heavier tracked force, but their employment is different. Lessons learned included:
-- The LAV series vehicle is vulnerable to 14.5 mm heavy machine gun fire out to about 1,000 meters, particularly if the shooter is stationary, hull down, and concealed.
-- The lack of the TOW on every LAV makes employing these units against a force with main battle tanks different as compared to BFVs. However, each platoon has four Javelin missiles, so this is somewhat mitigated.
-- The attacking medium force must make shorter bounds then a heavy task force. Massive overwatch fires are necessary. I overwatched the movement of single platoon with as many as seven platoons. Ensure the Assault Guns or Javelin’s are properly positioned. The Javelins must be dismounted.
-- The large amount of mortars is a plus, enabling a massive amount of indirect fire on the enemy. The medium Scout Platoon is more lethal than the heavy TF Scout Platoon, but the temptation to use it to fight is much greater, since they are not in HMMWVs.
-- Even more than the heavy force, finding or creating a flank is a necessity. The lighter vehicles are much more vulnerable on the flanks than is a heavy force, making being caught in a fire sack or against a mine field a real trap.
-- The US either needs a longer range ATGM or a countermeasure device to balance out the long-range fires of the OPFOR ATGMS. The AT-7 and AT-10s outrange the TOW and the M1A2 by at least 1,000 meters. In spite of my previous articles conclusions concerning the four versus three-company battalion, we should consider leaving the heavy units at four companies apiece."
Excellent points. Thanks.
The Anglo-Saxon countries, over the past 400 years or so, have rarely had conscript armies except during really major wars -- the World Wars, the American Civil War, and a few other instances.
Theoretically in the common-law tradition everyone was liable for 'militia' service, but this has generally been a pretty dead letter except in frontier situations -- the dismal performance of the American militia in the Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812 illustrating why. By the 1840's in the US, and far earlier in Britain, only a few select volunteer militia units were of any practical use, and the rest had pretty well ceased to exist. Nobody tried to call up the "unorganized militia" in the US in 1861, for instance.
(As an aside, the only Union force which did well at 1st Bull Run was a Regular Army brigade. About 1/3 of the officer corps "went South", but virtually none of the enlisted men and NCO's did. If the US had had a standing army of 50,000 men in 1861, instead of less than 15,000, the Civil War would have been impossible, or would have been over very quickly indeed, and hundreds of thousands of deaths avoided. The volunteer units had to 'learn by doing'; a substantial regular army could have crushed all resistance before they had a chance to do so.)
For the most part, the armies of Britain and the United States (and still more Australia, New Zealand and Canada) have been small forces of long-service professionals. And service in the enlisted ranks has traditionally been a very low-status occupation, regarded as the last-resort employment of no-hope types whose alternative was the workhouse. The old 'Indian-fighting' Army of the US had a huge chunk of foreigners in its ranks, usually over 40%, with the remainder heavily recruited from the urban poor. The British army took its men from rural and urban proletarians often driven to enlist by hunger, and from dispossessed Irish peasants. Those are the types of armies you want for the 'savage wars of peace'.
That's the type of force that conquered and held the British Empire, and pacified the American frontier -- in both instances eaked out with settler militias in areas undergoing settlement, and 'native scouts'. Even the army of British India had the same pattern, a small force of long-service professionals, albeit largely Indian in that case.
We go to "citizen armies" only in emergencies. The English-speaking peoples generally have had the advantage of living on islands -- North America is simply a big island, if you look at things on a world scale. You only need mass armies if you're going to be fighting long wars against an opponent of comparable strength; this is the fix most of the European countries have been in, particularly since the French Revolutuion, but we've been luckier.
With the end of the Cold War (earlier, in the case of the Brits) we've reverted to pretty well this pattern. As a percentage of GNP/population, the current American armed forces are only marginally bigger than they were in the late 1930's. We have no need of anything bigger.
Nor have these professional, 'mercenary' armies presented any political danger to speak of, despite being generally highly separate from and often contemptuous of the civilian society they served. General Wolesley, if you read his private diaries, had blood-curdling fantasies about being a second Cromwell and having Gladstone and other Liberal politicians flogged into polishing officer's boots, but they remained pure fantasies. So did "Little Mac's" Napoleonic dreams in 1860's America. The last time an Anglo-Saxon government had to worry about its own army in political terms was in the 1640's.
Instead we managed to conquer the more desireable parts of the world with a combination of a strong professional navy and expeditionary-force style armies of professional soldiers.
This comes under the general rubric of attacking strength, not weakness. It's much more profitable to fight your aggressive wars against backward members of other cultures, rather than slug it out with neighbors who have the same technological and organizational strengths you do.
Being surrounded by salt water helps, of course. In time of serious war, try you should try your best to end up as the paymaster and armorer of coalitions whose other members do the serious dying -- as Britain did in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the US did in WWII. My father, who was an officer in the Late Great Unpleasantness, remarked to me once that a joke was going around the British and British Commonwealth armies in 1942: Q: "What is happiness?" A: "Happiness is 3 million dead Germans floating down the Volga, each Fritz resting on a raft of 4 dead Ivans."
The single most important cause of the fall of the British Empire was that it broke this rule and became involved as a major combatant on the Western Front in World War One.
Increasingly, the European democracies are doing the same thing, since they no longer anticipate fighting prolonged conventional wars with industrialized opponents. The French and Spanish are in the process of abolishing conscription, for instance; if memory serves, so are the Italians. They're going over to small, volunteer armies designed for rapid-reaction work on the peripheries of the civilized world.
Unless you're planning on a big ground war with someone in your own league, why bother having a mass army?
There are too many points to cover there in the time I have. The professionalism of the US forces in 1860 wasn't high because no one understood the new weapons: the US Civil War was the test case that taught the world in some matters. Rifles that outranged artillery, trains and railroads, a large number of lessons to be learned all at once: including that mass conscript armies can be used.
As to Republics dominated by their own armies, it depends on your view, and who you look at. Including Reconstruction.
But no, there is no real need for a mass army of the WW II kind just now, and anyone beginning to create one along with the means to transport it will start alarum bells ringing. Certainly. But the Roman Empire wasn't created by mass armies of citizens, nor did the Republic change over to Empire through that means. My point about conscription isn't that it's a particularly effective way to make war, it's that a citizenry that won't defend itself has proven again and again to be vulnerable to SOMETHING. See Machiavelli for details. The purpose of universal conscription is partly to provide an armed citizenry, and partly to provide common experiences for all classes and IQ's; something whose value isn't entirely quantifiable.
No one I know of ever supposed that militias were more effective at fighting foreign wars than standing professional armies; it's the cost of those latter that is the concern, those costs being more social than economic. But we can certainly agree that if the goal is empire, one needs imperial forces. The question I raised was, is Empire the right goal for these United States of America? If so, we know how to bring that off fairly well. But the Empire isn't the Republic, and some of us remember what self government was like. I doubt anyone much younger than me has even the faintest notion of that. Or ever will again.
This next came at the same time as the first, so it's not in answer to what I just said.
One sea change in the way the US military is organized was the G-N Act back in the 1980's, which turned the Joint Chiefs from a snakepit of warring fiefdoms into something resembling a Supreme General Staff and funneled all military advice to the President through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
This change was long overdue, and the vastly improved level of general efficiency and (specifically) interservice cooperation vindicates it.
It's odd that it took so long. Surely one would think that the elementary principle of unity of command was well-known to everyone concerned!
There's ample precedent in the Mother Country; there was tremendous resistance to giving the British Army a general staff at all, and in the late Victorian period there might be up to seven different organizations (C-in-C's office, Horse Guards, Ordnance, etc.) fighting over who ran things -- not to mention the entirely separate role of the Royal Navy, which flatly refused to coordinate its planning with the Army right up to 1914.
If your goal is military effectiveness you have one kind of organization. If your goal is preservation of a Republic you have another. At the moment we have a structure ill suited either to Empire or Republic, but I make no doubt it will change.