The Military Establishment Is An Embarrassment To Itself
BY Herschel Smith
3 years ago
Four military officers who describe themselves as “researchers” at the Army’s highly respected Cyber Institute have published an article that adds to the growing concern about the ongoing politicization of the military. Published by the military’s National Defense University (NDU), their article purports to analyze the dangers of misinformation and disinformation and to advise the Biden administration about how to counter it.
The article’s authors all are military officers and at least two are professors at West Point. They say their article “is written in response to the Capitol insurrection.”
[ … ]
The Cyber Center authors’ thesis is that the “insurrection” at the Capitol building on Jan. 6 was a mortal danger to the country that was caused by disinformation, namely the idea that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or stolen. The “insurrection” spawned by this alleged disinformation then becomes the justification for the authors’ proposed government censorship (although they eschew the term) of free speech.
Uh huh.
What happened that ridiculous day wasn’t an insurrection. They will witness an insurrection if they attempt to confiscate firearms.
I have a suggestion. Perhaps these “professors” could focus on fire and maneuver warfare and go get a combat action ribbon (or whatever the Army calls that). Otherwise, they’re just wasting time.
As for the Marine Corps, what was once a respected institution now allows females into the infantry officer’s course at Quantico, and also allows females into the infantry battalions.
This piece at business insider discusses the U.S. Marines versus the Royal Marines, and why the USMC lost in mock battles recently to the Royal Marines.
They lost because they no longer know who they are. They began to change right before my youngest son got out (which was the reason for his having left), and he never looked back. Today they don’t know whether they are “Soldiers of the Sea,” an Expeditionary Fighting Force, cyber warriors, or what.
They got too heavy, and experimented with the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, an idiotic idea if I’ve ever heard one. I recommended at the time (beginning more than a decade ago) that the Marine Corps scale down the size of the force, focus more on pay, retention, specialized training, and air and sea insertion for special operations.
They have too many stupid people in the USMC today, and thus none of that advice obtained. So any comparison between the USMC and Royal Marines suffers from the USMC not knowing who they are or want to be, wanting to be too big and too heavy, treating its Marines like crap, being [stupidly] proud of the fact that they get the short end of the stick on training dollars from the DoD, and recruiting the wrong sort of people.
Among the “wrong sort of people” are females who believe they can do anything a male can do.
As for USMA at West Point, they were lost a very long time ago. If I were hiring today, I wouldn’t be any more impressed at a degree from the USMA than my local 2-year community college.
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On December 6, 2021 at 11:23 pm, George 1 said:
The military is rotting away. Anyone who is sane in any branch has left the service or planning to leave ASAP. They will be left with their “woke” officers and soldiers, who universally accept all of the lies. One of the biggest of which is that men and women are all interchangeable and women can do combat duties as well as men.
On December 7, 2021 at 2:22 am, Jimmy the Saint said:
“They will witness an insurrection if they attempt to confiscate firearms.”
Well, you say that…
– Government agents confiscating firearms after Katrina
On December 7, 2021 at 9:05 am, Bradlley A Graham said:
Uncle Sams Misguided Children.
It was a well used slogan in I was deployed but the sad truth is it has become the undeniable reality for today’s Corps.
On December 7, 2021 at 11:14 am, Nosmo said:
“Well, you say that…
– Government agents confiscating firearms after Katrina”
Katrina was in late summer 2005; today is year-end 2021. A great many people have learned a great deal in the intervening 16 years, especially about such things as “government and its agents.” I strongly doubt the response in 2022 would be at all similar to mid-2005 were government agents to attempt the same thing.
On December 7, 2021 at 2:46 pm, scott s. said:
The Marines are totally reinventing themselves. Getting rid of Armor and a lot of tube artillery and helos. They are reforming the 3rd Regiment here at K-Bay into a “Marine Littoral Regiment”. A key aspect is the Littoral Combat Team which consists of an infantry battalion and an anti-ship battery. The CONOPS is “It is designed to provide the basis for employing multiple platoon-reinforced-size expeditionary advanced base sites that can host and enable a variety of missions such as long-range anti-ship fires, forward arming and refueling of aircraft, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance of key maritime terrain, and air-defense and early warning.”
On December 7, 2021 at 2:56 pm, bob sykes said:
I hope you don’t believe the situation at the Naval Academy or Air Force Academy is any different from USMA. They are all the same.
As to the Marines reinventing themselves, they are making themselves irrelevant to any future combat. On the other hand, their amphibious role, either over the beach or via air, is no longer possible anywhere on the Eurasian littoral. The Navy can’t get close enough (and survive) to launch air or missile attacks, and no amphibious assault group has any chance at all. If the Virginia’s can’t/won’t do it, it can’t be done.
On December 7, 2021 at 3:36 pm, Fred said:
Mr. Sykes, in the case of surface and subsurface missile attacks your statement is untrue. The US does indeed have seaborne first strike capability.
On December 7, 2021 at 3:57 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@bob,
The entire paradigm for beach landing was done at the end of WWII. It will never happen again en masse.
I advocated a new paradigm in which the USMC focused more on air insertion, stealth beach insertion of small units, etc., more like SpecOps.
Unfortunately, the USMC can’t get away from their old thinking, and refuses to consider distributed operations for the bulk of its force (i.e., less than company size, and preferably not less than battalion size with a full MEU).
On December 7, 2021 at 5:33 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Herschel
Re: “Unfortunately, the USMC can’t get away from their old thinking, and refuses to consider distributed operations for the bulk of its force (i.e., less than company size, and preferably not less than battalion size with a full MEU).”
My understanding is there is a pretty acrimonious debate, and has been for some time – about just what the USMC is supposed to be in the 21st century.
Amphibious operations on a large scale as in the Second World War are history now, although some did occur during the Korean conflict, such as when the Army and Marine Corps landed at Inchon on the west coast of the peninsula in September 1950.
Amphibious operations where the modern equivalent of Higgins Boats run aground on the beach and drop their ramps is an artifact of mid-20th century warfare. The modern battlefield is too lethal for such operations now, and too well-surveilled as well, by everything from satellites to drones and UAVs.
The Corps has always considered itself America’s “expeditionary force” – “first to fight,” as the Corps likes to say. But they have had competition for that role since WWII, first from the U.S. Army’s paratroops and Ranger Regiment, and also from the first special-ops forces, such as the army’s Joint Special Service Force, and for that matter, the Jedburgh Teams of the OSS. The U.S. Navy underwater demolition teams later became the SEALs.
Later still, the creation and institutionalization of U.S. Army Special Forces, and the formation of SOF-D “Delta Force” (or by whatever name they’re using this month). Finally, nearly forty years ago – the formation of JSOC.
These all cut into the traditional missions of the Corps – i.e., their role as America’s soldiers of the sea, a maritime-capable rapid-deployment force, the service tasked with fighting small wars and putting down insurgencies in foreign countries, and the nation’s special operations force from the sea.
The Corps adapted to these challenges by creating Marine Expeditionary Units, or MEU’s for short, which are self-contained amphibious task groups each containing about 2,200 men. An MEU contains various sub-units depending on its intended mission/role, but the idea is that they can be forward-deployed to global hot-spots as an on-call force in readiness. Or they can be combined with other MEU’s to form a Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF).
Over the years, the army and various other parties have sometimes challenged to existence of the Corps, asking why the nation needed a separate service which duplicated so many of the missions now done by army, navy or combined service assets.
Another commonly-raised question asks why the USMC needs their own aviation, artillery and armor assets. The answer to that question is that traditionally, the Corps trains as it fights. They debark ready to fight, whether it is a ship delivering them to the operational area or they arrive via other means.
In Korea, for example, Marine aviation assets punched way above their weight because they had trained with the ground units they were supporting in battle, and in many cases, the man on the other end of the radio was someone known to that pilot or ground commander. USMC tactical air assets were also tremendously useful because they had devoted the time and effort to ground-support missions. The USAF, the service supposedly tasked with such missions, is not always interested in getting down in the mud at low level and providing CAS.
Stripped of their aviation, armor and artillery, the Corps would probably evolve into something like the British Royal Marine Commando, an elite force to be sure, but one not capable of independent operation for very long without the support of larger, better-equipped regular army, navy or air force units.
Some people in the ‘Corps want to see the USMC become something like the Royal Marines, but the danger is that if the USMC goes down that road, they risk being modified right out of existence entirely. If the Corps becomes a de facto special ops command only, sure as the sun rises, the question will then be asked why the nation needs the Marines at all, when they already have the SEALs, Rangers, Army Airborne, Army Special Forces, USAF special ops, and so forth.
I suppose my point is that rather than modifying the Corps to become more like the army, we ought to be changing the army to be more like the Corps, or at least like the Corps has been at its best over our history as a nation. Along with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Marine Corps has delivered the best bang-for-the-buck of any of our services. They consistently have done more with less than anyone. Until recently, as well, the Corps was the service which most-jealously guarded their hallowed traditions and ways of doing things.
On December 7, 2021 at 8:38 pm, Bill Buppert said:
I think we should reduce the USMC, leave all the bases we occupy planet-wide and come home and make the DoD take the second “D” seriously for CONUS and Alaska (give Hawaii back to the indigs, please).
My idea of embassies and consulates is a computer terminal in a kiosk in a strip mall in a foreign country so we can bring these “white shoe” collectivists home to work at McDonalds or a car wash where their true skills will be better honed. I lost brothers in Benghazi thanks to these Foggy Bottom vermin.
Here’s a great examination of the lunacy and strategic deficit disorder that Commandant Berger suffers from:
https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2021/06/whats-wrong-with-commandant-berger.html
My youngest son left the Marines in December of 2020 and says they are broken at the local and existential level.
America needs to be realistic that its days as a global hyper-power are not numbered but over and protect the “near abroad” as a hegemonic interest.
The Pentagram has a whole host of failures to atone for from the F35 to the Ford to the LCS to the Zumwalt to the KC-46 to the Bradley and thousands of other broken programs our unborn children will be paying for as they rot or rust in a depot somewhere having served the purpose of laundering vast amounts of fiat currency to the military-industrial-government complex.
These communist reprobates in the service academies and the Pentagram haven’t lost their way, they do what their institutions incentivize them to do: worship and nurture the Deep State.
On December 7, 2021 at 10:58 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Bill B.
Re:”America needs to be realistic that its days as a global hyper-power are not numbered but over and protect the “near abroad” as a hegemonic interest.”
Eminent British historian Niall Ferguson has argued for years now that America ought to benefit from the lessons of the nation of his (Ferguson’s) birth, namely Great Britain. Britain was a global empire before the U.S. and entered its decline phase sooner.
Like individual people – nations and empires have a life cycle. They are born, grow into maturity and perhaps a period of dominance and stability, followed by decline into obscurity or even extinction, before the cycle starts all over again.
It isn’t a question of “if,” but of “when” your nation/empire will experience such a decline. The U.S. reached its peak as a global superpower in or around 1960, according to many historians. If that estimate is correct, then we are a full sixty years past our peak, and ought to make adjustments on that basis. Yet, the Washington foreign policy establishment and the DOD/Pentagon act as if Ike is still president and things are just as they have always been.
Given the fact that nations/empires must decline, the question then becomes how to manage it in such a way as to make the transition as smooth and painless as possible.
To use an analogy with an aging and beautiful film-star: Some women attempt to fight age tooth-and-nail, getting face-lifts, using make-up by the cubic yard and otherwise attempting to fend off Father Time. Whereas others age gracefully and in such a way that you almost don’t notice it. The same is true of nations/empires – you can age gracefully or make a fuss about it and make it more-difficult than it has to be…. but either way, the inevitable is going to happen.
You’ll notice I have not touched upon the morality/ethics of various courses of action. That’s by design; that’s not a discussion I want to get into right now, except to say that we agree about a great deal in that area, I suspect.
The “crash” at the bottom of that decline can be either relatively easy and bloodless, or it can traumatic, difficult and painful. Unfortunately, due to the utter fecklessness and amorality of this nation’s ruling class, it looks like the latter is going to happen.
Financially, the present system isn’t sustainable – and it will remain only as long as the reign of the USD and the petrodollar last. When the curtain falls on the dollar and its long post-war status as the reserve currency of international trade, the U.S. government will be forced to confront its essential bankruptcy and that will force a dramatic contraction of our vast network of overseas bases and commitments. Once that happens, it is only a matter of time before a whole lot of our overseas bases resemble Bagram AFB today in Afghanistan. How long before the weeds bust through the runway and the desert reclaims her own?