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I don’t think we should get rid of the Marines because the Marines have a clear, we will destroy the enemy damn it all culture, that would be hard to fit into the Army. They’re a shock force, know it and embrace it. We need that and the type people who join that willingly. I’m not saying there’s not a lot of people like that in the Army just that it’s not THE FUNCTION(I want to make clear I’m not insulting the Army. The Army just has a different way of doing things. Much slower but grinding the enemy to dust in the process).

We were told, after a lengthy session with our Group commander that we would never go anywhere without the time to make up for our lack of training, and that all of our missing equipment would be made good if we ever did get deployed. That was a promise he made us, based on what the nice people from FORSCOM told him, when he’d raised similar issues about readiness and training.

In January, 2003, we were told we had two weeks to get our shit on the boats, and that we were going to war. I still don’t know how the hell we pulled that off, but it was basically 14 days of 18-hour workdays and an insane amount of work. In the event, our equipment wound up at sea and sitting in the Med for several months because Erdogan’s party wouldn’t let us use the northern route into Iraq.

What everyone misses about all this “Oh, we’ll never do that…” thinking is that, sometimes, you wind up doing just “that”, and you have to pull it out of your ass. Had Big Army let us do what we thought was right, and kept prepared for deployment, we’d have been a lot better off–But, the planners “knew better”, and didn’t think they’d need us. All I can do is laugh–The guys on the line had a better handle on the realities than all the “smart guys” in the Pentagon.

You can plan all you like, and project until the cows come home, but when necessity speaks, you answer. And, you’d better have your act together. I fear that an awful lot of the people running things in the US military are relying on wishful thinking and fantasy, rather than cold-hearted pragmatism.

You and I can’t think of a scenario where we would need to put heavy combat forces ashore somewhere within a few weeks notice, but the sad fact is, the universe is more than capable of coming up with one, and it’ll come from clear out in left field.

Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq were generational events. They also showed just how slowly the accumulation of heavy divisions proceeds. Months in those case, and it was able to occur only because of Hussein’s negligence. He should have hammered the Airborne from day one.

So, as long as heavy, combined arms warfare is unlikely, our leaders will roll the dice and short the Army. And even then, there would have to be a very large investment in shipping.

P.S. It ought to be clear that a land invasion of Iran is completely beyond our capabilities, although we might be able to secure a strip of Iran along the Strait of Hormuz.

Fundamental problem for the Army would be the culture clash trying to integrate fixed-wing combat assets into the force. Also, budget… The Army is a perennial last-place winner in the annual budgets.

The root of the problem is the same sort of parochialism we had to deal with back in the day when the Army had all of its separate branches as nearly autonomous elements within itself, constantly jockeying for power, prestige, and budget. That was somewhat fixed periodically throughout the 20th Century, but the vestiges of that BS are still hanging around with us–You can trace out dozens of examples, over the years. The ones I’m most familiar with are between the Engineer Branch and the rest of the maneuver forces. We identified a need for a mobile excavator that could keep up with the armored forces sometime around 1944. Various designs were put forward over the years, but we didn’t get the damn thing until the late 1980s when the M9 ACE was finally procured and deployed. And, having had to trail that mobile HAZMAT site around the NTC for a couple of years, I’m here to tell you that we didn’t get much out of the exercise. When it comes to earthmoving, there is no substitute for a D7 bulldozer except a D8 or a D9.

That whole delay thing was not due to us not needing the capability, but to pure politics and budget. The Engineers didn’t have the money, and the maneuver guys didn’t think it was important enough to help pay for, soooo… Not until the M1 came in did we get them. And, of course, the usual comments came in from the ignoramuses out in the peanut gallery of the press, who decried the M9 as “scandalous”, because they thought a tank should be able to magically dig itself in. Astounding ignorance of the issues was on display, which isn’t surprising since most of those loons knew slightly less about the Army and mechanized warfare than my dog does.

Same issue with putting the Combat Engineers into Bradleys. They wanted us to “pay” for those by way of giving up slots in the manpower pool to the Infantry, and the problem was that while you might be able to economize on bodies in a mech infantry outfit (something I’m of the opinion that you can’t, but…), doing so in the Engineers basically means you’re not going to be doing much in the way of actual, y’know, combat engineering. Which is kind of the point of those units…

Irony with that? In 1986, I was a Corporal in a wheeled Corps-level support Combat Engineer battalion. Our MTOE was 11 men, so when we went to do a mission, I generally had around 8-9 dismounts to do it with, once you subtracted the driver and the usual attrition losses you had for medical, schools, or other reasons. By the time I was a Sergeant First Class, and serving as an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center, most of the freakin’ platoons I was the O/C for were showing up with significantly fewer available dismounts, because “reasons”. It was ironic to note that where I’d have been given similar or more complex missions as a Corporal, we were now tasking a 2nd Lieutenant, a Sergeant First Class, several Staff Sergeants, and a random number of Sergeants to do the same mission with even fewer dismounts than I’d had… Oh, and they had, minimum, four APCs, a HMMWV, and a truck to haul around and man, as well. Whole thing was ‘effing ridiculous, especially when I noticed that with all that supervision, the average platoon got less done and with much worse documentation (critical, when you’re laying and recovering minefields…) than the standards I’d been held to as a Corporal all by my lonesome self.

So, yeah… Put the A-10 under the Army, and you’re gonna see some shit. Mostly, bad shit.

We badly need to go through the force structure with fire and sword, and do some significant reworking. The branch model for the military is insane; it ought, instead, to be wrapped around mission and environment. What works in a ground role does not work in an aviation role, or in a naval one.

Then, too, we have the problem of inter-service rivalry and competition. It’s better than it was before, but any of that is intolerable. The idiocy of ruling that the Army can’t operate fixed-wing combat aircraft is only one of the issues–The amount of sheer stupidity that is commonplace and acceptable just because “…that’s how we’ve always done it…” is staggering.

Don’t even get me started on the accounting BS. Give me ten minutes in charge of the Pentagon, and the budget process, and I could save us billions of dollars a year, if not more–All by the simple expedient of doing away with the annual budget “spree” to use up funds so they aren’t taken away the next year. Granted, a good deal of that is Congress and the way the Constitution handles budgeting the Army and Navy, but… Still, it’s enormously wasteful and counterproductive.

The Marines are awesome. They’re also an unnecessary redundancy.

One navy. One army. One Air Force. One Space Force (maybe). But all that plus an extra really small army? That’s just nuts$$$.