Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

84 • Maneuver Forces: The Army and Marine Corps After Iraqcapabilities and the proliferation of WMD make the concentration of largeconventional or unconventional forces very dangerous, if not impossible.• Surrounded on two sides by the world’s largest oceans, 95 percent of all U.S.exports and imports move by sea, making the maintenance of U.S. naval andaerospace supremacy a precondition for American prosperity and survival. 11This strategic condition constrains the size of maneuver forces in expeditionarywarfare, Army and Marine.• Any enemy attempting to defend a beach will be targeted and destroyed fromthe air. The more likely scenario involves area denial operations that capitalizeon sea mines and unmanned systems to protect critical approaches from thesea, while dispersed enemy forces (nonstate or state actors) defend from positionsinland. Thus, the Marines are much more likely to conduct operationslike the Army than they are to re-enact an Inchon landing.• In the 21st century “adaptive hybrid opponents” employing both conventionaland unconventional organizations and tactics with access to sophisticated technologyare causing Army and Marine missions and organizations to converge.Where it makes sense to do so, American defense planning should capitalizeon the convergence. This includes the use of maneuver forces in homelanddefense.• The single-service command and control structures of the past along with themaneuver forces’ tactical organizations for combat – Army/Marine Corps ExpeditionaryForce, division, brigade and battalion – are not strategically relevant.“Flattened” integrated, Joint C2 is vital if initiative has any chance of workingat the lower end of complex modern military organizations. 12 Every additionallink in the chain of command reduces the effect of an order by the process oftransferring information; and by the additional time needed to pass it on.Centralized, single-service, top-down controlled maneuver forces on the WW IImodel will not defeat decentralized conventional or unconventional forces organizedfor mobile dispersed warfare. 13 (Figure 1 on the next page.) Mobile dispersed warfare,whether waged by guerilla fighters in Afghanistan or Latin America or conventionalforces from Asia or Europe demands Joint C2 structures that accelerate decision cyclesand integrate the functions of maneuver, strike, IISR, and sustainment across servicelines on the operational level of war. What is not needed is the kind of convoluted C2Americans have in Baghdad – roughly one general officer, plus his staff and securitydetail, for nearly every maneuver battalion in Iraq.