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They Want to Bring Back the Draft
Here is a breakdown of an article from the Parameters Autumn issue, an official US Army War College newsletter. Great stuff here. A basic premise:
An American Army still grappling with the lessons from Afghanistan must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to drive progress toward the creation of a force and strategic direction as forward-thinking and formidable as the one TRADOC built for the United States ahead of Operation Desert Storm. In fall 2022, a team of faculty and students at the US Army War College assembled around this call to action. The team believed the Russia-Ukraine War unfolding in front of them was a wake-up call for the Army across the traditional warfighting functions that also required a culture change across the Army’s education, training, and doctrine enterprise to embrace new lessons learned and to drive change across all echelons of the Army.
And what have they been learning?
Twenty years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, largely enabled by air, signals, and electromagnetic dominance, generated chains of command reliant on perfect, uncontested communication lines and an extraordinary and accurate common operating picture of the battlefield broadcast in real time to co-located staff in large Joint Operations Centers. The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts.
Guess what: Russia and China have all the capabilities listed above.
Or how about this?
How many cruise missiles do you need to take out all of the above?
The standard will be hard to achieve? Yeah, that’s a nice understatement.
We have lost the Soldiers initiative. It used to be the Soviets were envious of the Western military approach, which relied on the individual officers the ability to carry out mission objectives without a heavy hand of bureaucracy micromanaging the front line. Well, as we can see with the above photos, that management is happening.
From the article,
Mission command is not doctrine to be written, tested, and shelved. It must be lived, trained, rehearsed, and embraced as an integral part of daily operations and training in garrison and combat at every echelon. The advent of artificial intelligence affords the US military the opportunity to reimagine mission command and test it with virtual simulation environments. We cannot expect a brigade that micromanages garrison tasks to execute combat operations successfully at the attrition rate incurred in modern large-scale combat operations. Disciplined disobedience requires initiative both to provide and to understand the commander’s intent, end states, constraints, and restraints. Leaders and followers must be brilliant at the basics but must also be able to embrace change and think critically. Trust is the essential ingredient in mission command, but changing the Army’s organizational culture to encourage senior leaders to empower and support subordinates is an enormously difficult task that will require focused attention from senior Army leaders.
Enormously difficult? In WW2 the USA had 7(!) four-star generals. The current military has 44. Each one of those generals requires a host of lesser generals and colonels and the staff that goes along with it. None of those guys see a foxhole. All Western militaries have severe officer bloat. How many of those bloated officers can pass a basic training PT do you think? They are much too busy flying around in their own personal jet.
I have been told I am Putin’s Stooge for reporting the Ukrainians’ likely army losses. Well let’s see what the US Army is looking at planning for casualties if they go to war with Russia or China, shall we?
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks.
You see that? In one month’s conflict with, say, Russia/China, the US Army is planning on losing twice as many people than lost in ten years of Vietnam.
Saying the Ukrainians are taking 800 a day is the surest sign of being in bed with the Russians. Then why is the US Army worried about taking 800 dead a day?
Oh, and guess how they plan on solving this shortfall. You’re going to love it.
In addition to the disciplined disobedience required to execute effective mission command, the US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031. The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000. These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.
There you have it, people. The draft. They are now talking about bringing back the draft because of the enormous losses they will face against fighting a near-peer enemy.
I’m sure that will go over well.
The whole newsletter can be found here. Read it for yourself.
Published in General
My objection to this is that a conflict with RUS or CHN that goes on that long is very likely, IMO, to end up involving spicy sunshine.
And perhaps the U.S. military can solve the recruiting problem by focusing on, I dunno, killing people and breaking things. Instead of, say, social engineering of the LGBTQ+XYZ variety.
I was in all levels of “command and control” in the Air Force, including the testing, training, and transitioning to the techie digital stuff like what you see in the pictures. (I’m sure the cutting edge stuff I saw last in 1998 has since been replaced.) I have my own concerns, especially on the reliance on satellites with known orbits.
I also prefer the all-volunteer military over conscription. Our problem is Congress doesn’t treat it with the laws of supply and demand. Take away pay and benefits and you reduce the supply of volunteers. Increase benefits for illegals and you gain illegals. The left has determined our priorities, entitlements get 12-14% of GDP while defense gets 3-4%, a role reversal that happened in 1972. Unwilling to make the all-volunteer force a priority, they prefer to make it no longer an option. I bet they will include college exemptions and keep their children in college.
Generally, I would be against drafting women but because women have claimed entitlement to enter all career fields, then I say draft them, too, until this feminist madness ends.
As far as the ready reserve goes, as a retired “regular” officer, we both could be recalled to active duty. At 70, neither of us would be recalled to our former career fields but I wouldn’t put it past them to use retirees to fill menial staff positions so they could deploy young bucks. A lot of my career field slots have transferred to guard units over the years. Expect guard and reserves to be treated as active duty (like they are today).
OT, but I was a MWD handler in the USAF. I came off IRR literally a month before the call-ups for Gulf I. I wouldn’t put it past them to call y’all up to do admin work. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they called me up to be a kennelmaster.
I can’t find an Internet source for this fact, but I read in a book last year that the entire basement-level floor of the Pentagon is devoted to cybersecurity now. The same book said that the military academies have been actively recruiting young people with advanced computer skills for several years now.
The book was about ethics and excellence, and two of the authors have had a lot of experience in working with the military academies. It has been a challenge to work with so many young people whose life’s experience was online, rather than through the formerly typical achievement path of family, church, school, and town.
The military branches, including the academies, see a whole generation of people all at once so they see trends differently from the way the rest of us do. It’s an interesting view of cultural change.
But I am confident that the leaders in these institutions–not the guys who show up on CNN but the real leaders–know where we are going in both war and peace.
A strategic shift in the balance of power has occurred in the culture war between the leftist State and the conservative Americans, who are now reduced to a resistance movement. It bears some similarities (as well as some differences).
Similarities: The enemy has
This is why isolated pockets of resistance, like a sheriff or police commander unexpectedly refusing to enforce an aggressive new law, without
are the best we can muster for now.
The “basement-level floor” also stretches underneath a parking lot. I couldn’t tell you which one because I was so twisted around when I reached a secure office that I didn’t know which side of the 5-sided puzzle palace I was under so I asked. Was told I was under a parking lot. That was 1998. I have no idea what goes on there now. Heck, I don’t even remember which office I visited 25 years ago.
I can say a modern C2 setup has an advantage, its airlift requirements are far more realistic than what we all needed and thought we would get back in the day.
My day:
We will have no choose but to draft women to begin with, as it is codified law now that women “must” be treated the same as men in all circumstances, for women are just as good – if not better then men – in all things. That will last right up to first contact when we have a forward operating base, which will have a large if not “all” female contingent – overran. No quarters will be given, and those female solders who were not killed in the initial attack, will be rounded up, raped, then killed. This is what happen in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. The Israeli’s had developed and deployed all female rocket and artillery units after the 1967 Six Day War. The Israeli’s believed that these positions would be far enough behind the front battle lines to be safe from any direct fire, thus freeing up males solders to take up front line combat duties. This could only work if the enemy advance could be stopped, In 1973 the Egypt and Syria were not stopped and they quickly overran these forward positions. When word got back to the Israeli command, front line combat units fall back to retake lost positions and protect any other units that had not been overran. This almost cost the Israeli’s the war and, according to some sources, almost force the Israeli’s to use their one of three “secret” nukes.
“WAR IS HELL. There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.”
-General William T. Sherman,
I agree with Red. If they need to recruit, they need to make it more enticing.
As far as those sorts of causality rates, they won’t need to replace soldiers because the American people will demand the war ends.
There is no way the Government can sell enough Americans on drafting Americans to go fight for nothing.
I don’t get the implied surprise: “If we end up at WWII-scale war with Russia or China, we’ll have to re-instate the draft!!” Well, duh. There’s not exactly a shock factor here.
Historically every war starts with the turnover of the high command because they are incapable of transitioning from peacetime priorities to wartime necessities. There are a few that make the transition Douglas MacArthur and George C Marshall being two examples of 4-star generals before WWII that would have success in WWII (and afterward), but, for the most part, successful peacetime officers (especially O6+) do not make good wartime leaders. This isn’t just a US phenomenon, but rather universal.
That being said, our current bloat of “professional” officers, especially at the O6 and above level is so detrimental to our ability to be effective warfighters that I doubt that we even have a clue as to how bad things have gotten. Worse yet, in a nuclear world, the time that can be used to get rid of the inept and allow the effective to replace them may not exist. By the time we realize that the woke corps of current buffoons that inhabit the Pentagon couldn’t fight for a ticket to a drag show the core of our fighting forces may be destroyed. Few countries truly want to get into a long fight with the US for fear that, like in WWII we will unleash a wave of production that will swamp them, but if the Chinese want to take Taiwan and manage to destroy the two carrier groups that we would surge to defend them (or at least the carriers), then the Chinese, like the Japanese in 1941 think that the US will to fight would dissolve. The problem is…they, unlike the Japanese might be right.
Thats not what they are talking about though. In order to maintain current manpower levels, they will need to reintroduce conscription.
Instead of you know cutting down commitments like massive bases in places like Niger.
I have been listening to the book The Cost of Loyalty. Its way worse than the normal problems of peacetime armies. They have wiped out of the idea of accountability. Its pretty scary.
I am sorry to say all satellites have “known” orbits. We track them, “they” track them. Once something is launched it eventually has a known orbit (courtesy Mr. Newton) . We track stuff down to the size of a bolt, and a few of our assets have the ability to slightly alter their orbits to miss intentional or unintentional debris.
Should a nation start a kinetic satellite destruction campaign, then access to low earth orbit will be eliminated for generations.
I’ll be my normal simple-minded self and offer the observation that those who make decisions, those in power, have expressed nothing but contempt for the young men whom they expect to do the fighting and dying at their whim. I hope those young men return the contempt and simply say, “My immediate enemy is the one who wants to get me killed regardless of his citizenship.”
I don’t think it will be generations. It will be bad. I believe in the injenuity of people like you to solve it in a decade or so.
It was this fact that triggered the talk about ORS — Operationally Responsive Space — a while back.
I didn’t want to joke about a giant space vacuum cleaner with a magnetic maw.
To late!
I probably should have worded it differently = “because orbits are known.” I’m concerned with the current desire to shift from airborne to space surveillance.
I gave this a Like even though I prefer to refer to you (and me) as “thinking simply about things that are, in fact, simple”.
Rather than “simple-minded”, which as you know carries an inapplicable and pejorative meaning.
;-)
I the very early 2000s after the Middle East unpleasantness there were Congressional/Senate hearings about the effectiveness of national systems in providing “support to the warfighter”. That buzzword phrase got thrown about a lot for a while. Then came the discussions about the differences between strategic and tactical systems and how the various branches of the military wanted “organic” assets. August 6th was the anniversary of my ninth year out of that cluster***k, so I don’t know what, if any, decisions were made.
I was involved in some of that in 1990s re theater vs tactical missile defense. Had trouble getting other commands to cough up some funding for one project but then when four of these systems were fielded, they suddenly wanted them. Saw debates re theater/tactical and treaties with Russia. We solved some problems revising procedures. Services rivalries Majcom rivalries… some things never go away.
That is a completely different argument, here is a suggestion:
Looks stealthy, good for Mach 10, not Mach 10.2…
I was speaking specifically of ISR systems, but your point probably applies there as well.
Surveillance systems are part of the loop. “Time critical (theater) targeting” depends on planning, surveillance, detection, and operating procedures that factored into ATO planning. I was involved somewhat in integrating inputs from strategic systems to counter theater threats in pre-launch, launch, boost, ballistic, and terminal stages. I was not involved in strategic defense.
Just out of curiosity, does the acronym “TENCAP” ring a bell?
Yes. But I don’t remember what it stood for.
Update:
Looked it up. Now I know why it sounds familiar.
.
Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities. I don’t care to say more.
I updated my comment above.