COUNTERSTROKE AT SOLTSY - Strategy & Tactics Press

Did you Know
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The “America First Committee”
was an isolationist lobbying
group organized in the US shortly
after war broke out in Europe
in 1939. At its peak, just prior to
Pearl Harbor, the committee had
850,000 members, all dedicated
to keeping America out of World
War II. Among some of the more
prominent were: future presidents
Gerald Ford and John F.
Kennedy; ex-president Herbert
Hoover; authors Sinclair Lewis,
Henry Miller and Gore Vidal;
architect Frank Lloyd Wright;
historian Charles Beard; poet
e.e. cummings; aviator Charles
Lindbergh; and media pundit
H.L. Mencken.
The US Army presently deploys
over 10,000 computers at brigade-level
and below.
During the June 2005 reenactment
of the naval Battle of
Trafalgar, held to mark its 200th anniversary, some 150 sailing
ships from over 35 countries
converged in the waters of the
English Channel. In order not to
offend any participants from nations
whose forebears had been
on the losing side of that great
Nelsonian victory (namely the
French and Spanish), the British
sponsors of the event referred
to the two sides only as the “red
team” and the “blue team.”
From May 1917 through November
1918, when the Allies’
trans-Atlantic convoy system
between the US and Europe was
in force, there were 1,134 such
groupings containing a total of
16,693 merchant vessels. Despite
the threat of German U-boats,
fully 99 percent of those ships
made it across unscathed.
An emerging school of thought
among today’s military strategists
holds that by 2025 the main
causes for war will be natural
resource acquisition and control.
Between now and then, world
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population is expected to increase
from 6.3 to 8 billion, and
fully 80 percent of that growth
will take place in countries least
capable of supporting it. Water
and energy are expected to become
the two most fought over
resources.
Judging by the basic assumptions
used to govern Pentagon
wargames these days, two new
factors have been added into US
planning for future campaigns in
the War on Terror. First, this war
is now expected to take up to
eight years to be fully resolved.
Second, neither Republican nor
Democratic administrations are
seen as being willing to mobilize,
or even inconvenience, the
nation’s citizenry and economy
for war. That means all plans
must take into account that
large-scale reinforcements will
likely not be available should
something go wrong, while
at the same time allowing for
campaigning across time spans
too long to make for easy control
of outside variables.
An emerging hot spot in the
War on Terror is the sparsely
settled tri-border area shared by
the South American nations of
Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
In the past few years the Mid-
East terrorist groups Hezbollah,
Hamas and Jemaah Islamiyah
have all set up cells there. Their
main activities are arms and
drug trafficking, counterfeiting,
money laundering, software
piracy and selling forged travel
documents.
We need writers for this FYI column.
If you can write tight, pithy articles of
no more than 2,000 words on interesting,
obscure, or otherwise little known
aspects of military history, contact the
FYI editor, Ty Bomba by emailing him
at:
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FYI
For Your information
The US Army presently has
51,000 personnel assigned at
brigade-level and below whose
main task is collecting and
analyzing intelligence data. By
2011 that number is planned to
increase to 66,000.
During the next 12 years the US
Army will spend an estimated
$18 to $20 billion on new trucks.
According to the main planning
document for that spending,
titled “Tactical Wheeled Vehicles
Strategy,” all future truck purchases
must be at least “armor
ready.” That is, even if they
come off the assembly line unarmored,
they must be so designed
as to readily accept “protective
kit upgrades” in the field, should
that become necessary.
As of September 2004, the
defense of the greater Washington,
DC, area has been entrusted
to the Joint Forces Headquarters
- National Capital Region
(JFHQ-NCR). Headquartered at
Fort Lesley J. McNair, within the
city, the new command organization
has approximately 4,000
personnel immediately available
to defend the capital and the
surrounding counties, organized
as follows:
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