Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 216

Our plan for invading Cuba: The 82nd Airborne and the Marines take Havana, and the whole op is done in three months

Over the weekend I was looking through some handwritten
notes in the papers of Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, placed on-line by the National
Defense University. The document is undated and unsigned. The NDU catalog lists
it as created by Lemnitzer, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff early
in the JFK era, until Kennedy dumped him in favor of Maxwell Taylor. It looks
to me like General Lemnitzer wrote it or perhaps dictated it as he stewed in
retirement -- but perhaps not, because on the last page there is a reference to
"General Lemnitzer."

Anyway, on pages 43-44 (as handmarked; PDF lists it as pp.
45-46) of that document, I was surprised to see a summary of "CINCLANT's
operational plan for Cuba," which seems to have been ordered up after the
failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961. In summary, the American
invasion of Castro's Cuba would begin with an "Assault on the Havana [sic] by
the 82nd Airborne Division and one Marine regiment." The next day, the 3rd Armored
Cavalry Regiment and the 2nd Infantry Brigade would land. (Grasshoppers, what
is "the 2nd Infantry Brigade"? Doesn't ring a specific bell. Maybe the writer
mean "division"?) These units would be given 18 days to isolate and capture the
capital. Meanwhile, on D+14, the 2nd Marine Division would move toward
Santiago. (I don't understand the delay -- why wait two weeks? Surely not to
wait for available shipping and air cover.) Between the 24th and 34th
days, the two forces would link up.

And then, of course, there is that dose of sunny optimism
that ends all U.S. war plans, as if by law: "D+60 to D+90: withdrawal of U.S.
forces." Oh, sure.

If the American invasion had happened back then, more people
would know who Ted
Conway was -- he commanded the 82nd Airborne in 1961-62, and to my
knowledge is the only soldier in American history to rise from the lowest rank
in the Army to the highest and then
in retirement to get a doctorate from Duke.

When Castro buys the collective farm, which should happen
pretty soon, if Cuba descends into turmoil, I wonder if these plans will be
dusted off...

Fixing the Army (IV): Trim support branch generals, civilianize non-deployers -- and start mowing your own damn lawn

By "Petronius
Arbiter"

Best Defense department of Army affairs

Support

IMCOM should be
completely civilianized as it is totally non-deployable. 6 General officers in
IMCOM is somewhat disturbing. IMCOM GO in Korea is particularly disturbing with
22 installations and 17k Army personnel in all of 8th Army.

Establish one Army
Warfighting Lab under direction of TRADOC. Resource with a BG and appropriate
fiscal and personnel resources to have an impact. Eliminate TRADOC battle labs,
use resources saved to improve Soldier equipping and training. Yep, copy from
USMC. It works for them only because it is a point of emphasis by Commandant,
USMC. Yes, this is small growth in GO corps, but would well serve the Army and
the ability to focus on the CSA needs and priorities.

U.S. Army MEDCOM is a
huge and geographically dispersed command. Maintain The Surgeon General as a
LTG. But, there are 19 Medical Department (MC,MS, MSC, AN, VC) GOs on the rolls.
If my memory is correct there were 6 at the height of the Cold War. Not to pick
on the Veterinary Corps, but are there enough Vets in the Army to warrant a GO?
Or is it all about hope?

Reduce SJA GO-level
positions. Return TJAG of Army to MG. There are 7 JAG GOs serving now. At the
height of the Cold War there were 2 on active duty. There are no JAG commands,
so why so many GOs? The TJAG makes policy and personnel management decisions,
so why so many senior officers? Is this one of those decisions just to give
"hope" to those to keep them in the service?

Reduce Chaplain GOs
back to normal of 2. There are 3 GO Chaplains now. Why does USAREUR have a GO
Chaplain with only 4 brigades? There probably are not 40 Chaplains in all
USAREUR. This is only a small issue in the grander scale but an indication of
the real problem, too much hierarchy. Every GO has a staff and a staff is
adding to a smaller "tooth to tail" ratio.

Personnel living on
post maintain their own quarters area. Specifically, post support contracts
should not resource grass cutting. Save some money here. GOs provided for
accordingly and they should be.

Ensure that quarters
areas are again divided by rank; enlisted, NCO, SGM/CSM, junior officer, field
grade officer, senior officer and GO. Do not mix senior NCO and field grade
officers. They are not the same. An NCO is an NCO and a field grade is a field
grade. The Army is not an egalitarian society and can't function as one. Familiarity
does breed contempt. This issue varies from post to post.

Schneider's new book on T.E. Lawrence reviewed right here by a friend of the blog

I asked frequent commenter Tyrtaios if he'd be interested in reviewing the new book
on Lawrence. The game was not rigged -- I told him he could write anything he
wanted. But to my relief, he liked it.

By "Tyrtaios"

Best Defense guest book reviewer

A noted fellow soldier and
countryman of T.E. Lawrence, Sir William Francis Butler, wrote: "The nation
that will insist on drawing a broad demarcation between the fighting man and
the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking
done by cowards."

Thus starts in part, the
preface of James J. Schneider's Guerrilla
Leader: T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, along with a crisp and pithy
forward by Tom Ricks, which will start the reader to understand that Lawrence's
strength wasn't his ability to fight a guerrilla campaign, but more
importantly, to lead one and how the man came to accomplish that, and a
chronicle of events in doing so.

Once I picked the book up, I
had to force myself to put it down and savor it. I found the book flowed very easily
and quickly from describing Lawrence as a child prodigy, to his early
characteristic of standing out from the crowd with a higher purpose, his
education at Oxford that reinforced, interestingly to be sure, learning over
solving the problem, to his early adventure in the pre-WWI Middle East, along
with his gathering notoriety as a most remarkable individual.

The reader will further be
provided with a concise description of the regional geo-political-military
back-drop of the period that Lawrence would find himself operating in, and
quickly move to Lawrence's most notable observations that would form his ideas,
and vision of organizing the Bedouin in the north into a cohesive
unconventional force, along with developing and lending to it, what I would categorize
as a combined arms dimension.

Having read extensively about
T.E. Lawrence prior, did I learn anything new reading Guerrilla Leader? Indeed, I was reminded by Schneider in his
closing pages, something I wished had been explained to me many years ago as a
younger man, something that vaguely nagged at me then, which caused Lawrence to
betray his values, but he must have later grasped. I will leave that part undisclosed
for the curious of you to find out, perhaps among those curious, that one
"dangerous man who dreams by day with open eyes and makes it possible," as
Lawrence tells us he did.

Schneider's Guerrilla Leader could easily replace
several books all at once that I've seen on the recommended military reading
lists for NCOs and commissioned officers alike, as well as those in mufti that
work beside the military or cover it. 

In closing, although I own
other works on Lawrence of Arabia, I have decided that Guerrilla Leader will take a position next to the man's own words
written in Seven Pillars of Wisdom on
my book shelf ... too late for me now, but for some ... perhaps not?

"Tyrtaios"
is a retired infantry Marine whose career spanned 28 years of both
enlisted and commissioned service, and included several tours of duty in the
Middle East and Africa.

Is counterinsurgency a Wall Street plot? The American Interest seems to think so

I've seen lots of nutty stuff about counterinsurgency,
mainly the badly mistaken Gentilian notion that it is soft-hearted handholding,
a belief that could only be held by someone who was not in Baghdad in the
spring of 2007. But I was surprised to see James Kurth, whose thoughtful
work I have enjoyed in the past, advance the theory that counterinsurgency is
what a nation does when its foreign policy is controlled by financial elites -- in
our case, Wall Street.

Here is the nut of his argument,
made in the November/December 2011 of the American Interest:

... the American experience in the first half of the 20th century suggests that a strong industrial sector will tend to think in terms of
big wars against great powers ... Conversely, the British experience in the
same era suggests that a strong financial sector will tend to think in terms of
small wars and imperial policing, since it calculates that only these wars will
provide an acceptable mix of costs and benefits.

(p. 13)

I didn't realize the same people who brought you the Great
Wall Street Debacle and Bailout of 2008 apparently are behind the
counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I think Kurth can only arrive at this conclusion about our
history by neglecting a big chunk of American military experience of the first
half of the 20th century, which began with the Army fighting guerrillas in the
Philippines and raiders along the Mexican border, and continued with the
Marines conducting small actions in Nicaragua and Haiti. In fact, the Marine
Corps summarized its experiences of that time in a terrific document called,
oddly enough, "Small
Wars Manual."

On the other hand, whenever something like this article
provokes such a strong reaction from me, it makes me wonder if there is a
kernel of truth in it.

Fixing the Army (III): Time to figure out whether the brigade combat team works, simplify unit names, and shutter V Corps

Our "tired old soldier" now turns to his recommendations for
how to improve the operational Army. I've been enjoying the
comments he has provoked, especially in his Friday post.

By "Petronius Arbiter"

Best Defense department of Army affairs

Operational

Re-examine the BCT. Is
it effective? What does the exhaustive, intensive rigor and analysis performed
by the analysis agencies really say? Are 2 battalions effective or should we
add the third at the expense of fewer BCTs? Does the cavalry squadron have a
function it can perform? What is best for the Army? But, more significantly
what does the analysis say, not what do the Generals say or think without
analysis? Modular BCTs can facilitate the ability to deploy but can they
conduct the warfight in FSO?

Re-encumber the
divisions and the corps. It followed good military logic in a time when we had
to separate divisions, BCTs and Corps in order to meet the requirements to
deploy multiple headquarters to meet many real military needs. But, hopefully,
those requirements are in the past. Time to get divisional supervision again on
brigades and be able to bring to bear concentrations of fires, sustainment and
support.

Return to branch
specific maneuver
battalions. The Combined Arms Battalion is difficult (some would say
impossible), at best, to train and to support. Few, if any, commanders or
senior NCOs are versed or prepared to be responsible to train and understand
the multitude of weapons platforms or systems that exist in those
organizations. The problem starts here at the battalion level, not below. Here the
old phrase, "you never know what you don't know," comes to mind.

What does V Corps do
in Europe? Is it a Corps Hq or not? Somehow V Corps and USAREUR just seem to be
over supervision for 4 maneuver brigades that remain in Europe. Besides the center
of gravity of activity has moved from the Western/Eastern plains of Europe to
the Mediterranean a long time ago, and our military, not just the Army, just
has not seemed to adapt.

Restore unit
designations that make sense and are understandable. We know what an artillery
unit is and does. We don't understand what a Fires unit is and does. That goes
double for Maneuver Enhancement, Maneuver Support, Maneuver Sustainment,
Battlefield Surveillance Brigade, Sustainment, et al. There is no commonality in
like-type organizations that make it simple to know what one is or does.

Armor officers should
not command Infantry forces just the same as Infantry officers should not
command cavalry forces. Return Stryker Infantry battalions and brigades to
Infantry commanders. Stryker battalions and brigades are our Army's largest and
most complex formation of Infantry and as such should be commanded by
experienced Infantry commanders who understand and comprehend the variety of
weapons systems in those organizations. The issue is not that armor officers
aren't good, they just aren't experienced enough to maneuver the dismounted
force on the ground, or the weapons systems in an infantry organization. While
we are at it, we should re-educate ourselves that a Stryker organization is an
organization that provides mobility and some small firepower to a dismounted
organization. That is why they were created. For sure, the Stryker is not a
tank, or even a small tank. There will be a tendency of armor officers to treat
them as a tank and the outcome will not be good.

War coming in the Middle East?

How big a concern is Israel's growing insecurity? Will it
lead it to go to war? The
U.S. government is turning
some screws on Iran, and Israel continues to fret in public.
I've heard talk of an attack coming but I don't understand what Israel might
gain from doing so, especially because it isn't clear that air strikes could
really take apart much of the Iranian nuclear program, or even do as much
damage as Stuxnet
did. On the other hand, with Egypt, Libya
and Syria in turmoil and Iraq about to be stripped of any air defense
capability...

Meanwhile, in Iran, satellite imagery shows stepped-up
activity at an alleged nuke site. And Ahmadinejad's
press guy was arrested.
I wonder if that is the Middle Eastern political equivalent of fish and birds
sensing an imminent earthquake.

Fixing the Army (II): Let's downgrade 4-stars and end the regimental system

By "Petronius Arbiter"

Best Defense department of Army affairs

Institutional

Downgrade all Army general-level
commands to LTG commands. CSA and VCSA would be only 4-star generals in the
Army. Army Generals serving in COCOMs could be 4-star. Doing so would help
empower the CSA as the commander of the Army. The Army is roughly 60 percent
the size it was in the Cold War, but with near-same institutional structure and
greater rank structure. If there is concern that 3-star corps commanders could
not work for 3-star major commanders, it worked well in WWII. There just needs
to be a pecking order of 3-star generals. They will know and they will
understand and being the professionals they are they will work together. This
would greatly assist in streamlining the Army structure. For every star there
is a needed staff of military and civilians to provide staff work. This
reduction would greatly streamline the Army and would make it more efficient,
taking out layers of bureaucracy.

Downgrade existing
Army special staff billets from LTG to MG, example Dir Army budget to MG, etc.
Leave principle Assistant Chief of Staff, G1 to G8 alone. Other services may
have to do same in order for Army to compete in the Pentagon.

Now that the National
Guard Bureau has a 4 star seat on the JCS, insist that the NG replace "U.S.
Army" on the uniform with "Guardsman." They are now close to the 6th service. As
such, reduce or eliminate Title 10 support to the NG. All NG budgetary and
personnel issues should be Title 32.

Refer to Soldiers by
rank and not pay grade, not all Sergeants are Sergeants; PV1/2 are Privates,
SSGs are Staff Sergeant, MSGs are Master Sergeant, etc, and LTCs are Lt Colonel
and Colonel (06) are Colonel. Refer to no one as a pay grade. It is
disrespectful to do so. No professional wants to be called by or referred to as
a pay grade.

Expedite soldier
valorous awards so that heroism is recognized rapidly. Over three years to
award a MoH is absolutely ridiculous, especially in this information age with
fast moving communications. Sgt. Basilone, WWII USMC, along with three others,
received his MoH 7 months after his action while still serving in the area of
operations and they had no internet. The latest USMC award of the MoH took two
years to approve. Even that is too long. If it is the veracity of the action
that they are concerned about, I think history will tell you that war stories
get more questionable with age. Go with the witness statements at the time of
the action, not months later. They will be more accurate.

Assess the necessity
for the manning of the Acquisition Corps (AC) with senior officers as is
currently staffed. May be wrong here but the AC seems terribly top heavy. This
must be a product of industry only wanting to deal with GOs or senior officers,
otherwise lower level officers could easily accomplish the task. Do all those
contracting GOs count in the AC and what do contracting commands command?

Acquisition Corps
(AC) officers should not be the requirements generators for developing systems.
A tanker should develop a new tank rather than an AC officer who wears Infantry
brass from a long ago experience. An AC officer wearing MI brass should not be
the principle developer for Infantry weapons systems. There are many, many
examples of how this should not be done. Knowledge and hands-on experience are
the key ingredient in developing new materiel, not knowledge of programmatics. Build
in the programmatic experts into the system but not at the requirements
generation level.

What does the
regimental system do for our Army? Either give it a function or eliminate it. It
means little to most Soldiers. Only value I see is to give some old General,
Colonel or Sergeant Major some honorary position in his waning time.

Since 75th Ranger
Regiment is not an Infantry Regiment do not allow Infantry personnel in that
organization to declare 75th Infantry as a regimental affiliation. But, if we
eliminate the Regimental system from a personnel perspective, don't have to
worry about this. This may only be applicable to officers as most enlisted men
in 75th Ranger Regiment stay in that organization until they are very senior.

Re-instill drill and
ceremonies so that units can at least have confidence in unit abilities to
conduct a pass in review at ceremonies. Oh, and when supervised properly, it is
a tremendous discipline builder and junior NCO developer, but most officers don't
know that. It is a great way to instill confidence in NCOs and discipline in Soldiers.
A lost trade I think . . . unfortunately, and still needed.

Settle on a uniform set and let it alone. There are great frustrations in the
Army the last several years over this. In particular, the combat uniform has
seen 4 versions in 10 years and they still can't get it right. The dress
uniform is a real joke, especially the Class B uniform. Even the GOs gripe
about it. 2 CSAs agocould have stopped it but he did not. His predecessor
made so many horrific decisions about everything, especially uniforms, that the
Army has been unstable ever since. I guess the bottom line on uniforms is there
are no standards. Think CSA Dempsey was on his way to fix all those items but
he was there only a very short time. He would have fixed it.

A good new book on Lawrence of Arabia

James Schneider of the School of Advanced Military Studies
at Ft. Leavenworth has written a really interesting book on Lawrence of Arabia
titled Guerrilla
Leader. I liked it to much I wrote a foreword for it. I actually did
the writing while I was in Berkeley, California, last spring, which seemed an
appropriate location to meditate on loony old T.E.

Basically, Schneider looks at Lawrence as the guy who
figured out how to wage guerrilla war in the industrial age. He also has the
insight that the very thing that make Lawrence capable of doing what he did was
his great empathy-and that is also what made him vulnerable, leaving him a
cracked and empty man at age 31.

It's a good read. More to come soon in Military Review.

Budget crunch? Or, who in the defense establishment is paid $1.5 million?

Nope, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But yes, the
coach of the Navy football team gets that salary. The Air Force coach makes
$889,000, USA
Today reports. By comparison, the Army coach is practically on food stamps,
getting just $610,000. (On the other hand, that still works out to more than
$200,000 per Army win, so far this season.)

(HT to JW)

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: One bad ass handler and his jumping war dog

By Rebecca Frankel

Chief Canine Correspondent

This
video has been circulating around some Military Working Dog groups and I
thought it worthy of space here. Here's the brief note that went with the post,
titled "no leg ski diving, with my dog" -- as I saw it last week:

"I am still rocking!
For those who haven't heard, I was blown up, with my MWD, Axe, Feb 17th of this
year. I lost both of my feet, and was back to work in July. ..."

Aside
from documenting an incredible free fall where you actually get a full view of
the dog on a jump, this is emotionally moving footage. Without any fuss it
shows the strong bond between this handler and his dog. There's little else I
can say that would better complement the triumph and joy on display. So just
watch.

A
note: Back in May when FP ran
the epic "War Dog" photo essay after the Osama bin
Laden mission, a fair few readers wrote in concerned that the military dogs
parachuting out of planes were being either being forced or were too frightened
or ill quipped to handle the experience unscathed. For anyone still worried,
pay careful attention to the dog in this video. He's having the time of his
life.