The Enemy (Jack Reacher, #8)

by Lee Child

“We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We’re speed bumps, that’s all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that’s the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can’t airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that’s the good news. Because you don’t just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you’re looking at a six-month buildup, minimum, and that’s working right around the clock.” “During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit,” I said.

This all makes se sense. Does military have smaller lighter tanks mow?

aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the distance.”

So scary

“Same thing as happened with the Navy in 1941,” Simon said. “Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split. We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armored vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds of dinosaurs.”

Has that been done ?