Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

CHAPTER 4MANEUVER FORCESThe Army and Marine Corps After IraqCol. Douglas Macgregor (U.S. Army, ret.)and Col. G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.)During the Cold War, the U.S. Army and Marines were designed to deploy and fightfrom bases in the United States, from allied territory or from the sea to protect U.S.vital strategic interests. Over time, Army and Marine forces evolved into single-servicewarfighting structures organized, trained and equipped to defeat enemies like thoseAmerica fought in World War II, with occasional, unrewarding excursions into socalledlow-intensity conflicts.Today, those warfighting structures have reached block obsolescence. The strategicconditions that created them no longer exist. Today’s single-service structures are toorigid and too complex to provide maneuver forces with the strategic agility they needto operate in settings where combatants and noncombatants are mixed, where thedestruction of infrastructure and cultural assets is unacceptable, and where critical,time-sensitive, informed decisions must be made on the spot without waiting forpermission from generals remote from the scene of the action.These rigid, anachronistic force structures have created serious problems insidethe Army and Marines that additional manpower and more money will not solve.These problems arise from single-service, World War II-style organizations for combat,inventories of aging, broken equipment thanks to unaffordable and mismanagedmodernization programs, heavy operational dependence on fixed bases in Iraq andAfghanistan, disjointed rotational readiness policies, and, most importantly, an exodusof young talent out of the ground combat formations.The situation inside the Army and Marines is made worse by a lack of leadershipfrom the Department of Defense and Congress on defining genuine threats toAmerica’s vital strategic interests. Since 2001, basically anything could be and wasclaimed as an existential threat to the United States when none existed – China, Iran,Venezuela, Cuba, Islamist terrorists, and, more recently, a resurgent Russia. The nextadministration must clearly define what it sees as real threats and determine the rightmixes of military capabilities to deal with them. Once those two steps are taken, theadministration will find it must move the Army and Marines away from long-termoccupations of foreign territory – operations that locals and the rest of the world seenot as counterinsurgency, but as colonial warfare – and toward expeditionary warfarewith defined, attainable military objectives, and homeland defense.This paper argues that the nation needs maneuver forces organized and equippedto expand the nation’s range of strategic options – forces capable of conducting joint,