Thanks for the link Paralus!
I don't quite know what to make of this.
McGregor is starting to rub me wrong.
It seems like every couple of years he wants to reorganize the US Army and now he's doing it in such a way as to affect the way the other services do business.
My biggest problem with this is that he keeps reinventing the wheel and I'm not sure that we're seeing bigger bang for the buck than using the old Division standard. AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT! His concept is evolving back to the Division!
I'll chew on this some more but one thing "change agents" always screw up is the fact that once change is implemented they must give these "living, breathing" systems time to absorb the change before they move forward. The US Army just made the change to the Brigade Combat Team and now McGregor is pitching the Army Combat Group. I think its much too soon.
Sidenote: I just remembered why this concept seems so familiar. Its just a butched up Regimental Combat Team!
Macgregor Transformation Model (MTM: 19 November Briefing With Backup Slides by Douglas Macgregor, PhD; Retired U.S. Army Colonel
I don't quite know what to make of this.
McGregor is starting to rub me wrong.
It seems like every couple of years he wants to reorganize the US Army and now he's doing it in such a way as to affect the way the other services do business.
My biggest problem with this is that he keeps reinventing the wheel and I'm not sure that we're seeing bigger bang for the buck than using the old Division standard. AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT! His concept is evolving back to the Division!
I'll chew on this some more but one thing "change agents" always screw up is the fact that once change is implemented they must give these "living, breathing" systems time to absorb the change before they move forward. The US Army just made the change to the Brigade Combat Team and now McGregor is pitching the Army Combat Group. I think its much too soon.
Sidenote: I just remembered why this concept seems so familiar. Its just a butched up Regimental Combat Team!
A few observations. It is a "no brigadier general left behind act". A jobs program for stars. I would stay with the BCTs and replace the AFVs with something that can swims. Other than that. I will take it. It isn't perfect but it might be OK. The Puma, even though it is non-amphibious, is big step in the right direction to see off the filth that is the Stryker, Bradley and M-1.
ReplyDeleteIn the 17 years since Breaking the Phalanx was written, Big Army has gone from Vuono's division tweaks to Shinseki's Interim Force to Units of Action with small BCTs to the larger BCTs which restored a maneuver battalion to the BCT. Oh, and the battalions might or might not have four companies. In my opinion, MacGregor has been the consistent one and Army has learned the hard way that its experiments have proved too light, undermanned and with too little armor to be effective.
ReplyDeleteThis is no "no brigadier left behind" since brigadiers currently command the BCTs and there are more BCTs than there would be battle groups. Plus, his other publications have consistently talked about merging commands and reducing overhead.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/127016974/Secretary-of-Defense-Hagel-Brief-19-February-2013-Final
http://www.scribd.com/doc/124875942/Colonel-Macgregor-s-GAO-Presentation-12-December-2012
And he is constantly trying to involve the other services into joint commands that are plug-and-play rather than single-service because large deployments are likely going to require joint service involvement.
While MacGregor might not be perfect, his model makes a helluva a lot more sense than Big Army's plans of killing of BCTs. to get under 450K
the only thing consistent about McGregor is that every couple of years he's pitching a new plan. don't forget that the concept of the original Brigade Combat Team was to be highly deployable. it was light on Armor for a reason. it was suppose to be the Army version of the MEU.
Deletenext this joint shit is just that. bullshit. the combatant commander will decide which units he wants and will get supplied whats available. for the Army to decide that they're going to streamline the process is admirable but just full of it...and themselves.
this is a bid to make the Army more relevant in an age of austerity without having to do the really hard thing.
instead of trying to reorganize...again, what they should be doing is taking a hard look at the BCTs they already have and seeing if they meet the needs of the nation.
more middleweight forces aren't what we need. more light infantry is the ticket but that would mean giving up some toys.
again, go and get a copy of his 'Transformation under Fire'. His battle groups size haven't changed, (even though the platforms have been updated from RAH-66, Tracer FCT, Crusader arty).
DeleteHe places an emphasis on Joint commands because his rationale is that no large-scale conflict that requires mulitple BCTs is going to be an Army-only show. He wants Air Force, Navy, and Marines to bring their expertise, and even command, the Joint Commands. That's right, an Admiral or USMC Three-star commanding half a dozen Army battle groups.
what I like is that it cuts the command echelons which in turn frees up money and makes the organization flexible.
Divisions are too large (attractive targets for WMDs) and BCTs aren't big enough. His research discovered that a big factor in air transport of Army units was the arty and shells. The Battle Groups size are calculated to put the most teeth up front in tanks, IFVs, etc and to leave behind the pallets of arty shells because we aren't fighting the Battle of the Bulge, we've got more precision fires.
Actually more light infantry is not the ticket for either the Army or the nation. You can always pull infantymen out of Bradleys and Strykers and say "Walk towards the sound of the guns young man!" but you can't pull a Stryker or Armored formation out of your ass at the last minute.
ReplyDeleteWhen the Army gets serious about warfighting, look first to the Artillery branch. They were the first to embrace non-lethal targeting as a core discipline, they were the first to embrace cross training to "red leg infantry" and they were the first to address the problems that the War on Terror had caused them (losing critical capabilities in our formations like Fires Brigades and DIVARTY which provided institutional expertise for junior leader development outside of TRADOC).
your problem should be resolve..
ReplyDeleteThere's some serious echos of the failed Pentomic concept here, which I don't think is necessarily bad. I've been wondering for awhile if modern C3 and logistics capabilities make a lot of the thinking there worth revisiting. Plus the two battalion BCT was just stupid; the amount of combat experience backing up a triangular arrangement is enormous; so I'm not impressed with the amount of thinking that went into forming BCTs in the first place.
ReplyDeleteyeah, some of the Pentatomic, but also some element of WWII Combat Commands formalized. Even the Army concedes the two battalion BCT was stupid. It was supposed to be part of the Farcical Combat System concept and also assumed with a recon battalion, you'd know where the enemy was and you wouldn't have nasty surprises. dumb assumption.
Deletehowever, with the drawdown to 420K (because The Grand Sequester is not ending), Big Army is being dumb all over again with talk of shrinking down BCTs, going back to two maneuver battalions, increasing drones in lieu of ISR troops, basically unlearning everything they learned the past ten years.
Meanwhile, they haven't broached the idea of antiquated Army/Corps/Division echelons and all the manpower tied up in preserving them even though we aren't fighting WWII again.
i guess we agree to disagree. first if you have multiple brigades engaged in combat then you're in essence rolling out a division. second if you have two or three brigades engaged in combat then you're rolling with a regiment.
Deletethis combat group is just another hybrid organization that is being touted as the optimal combat unit, supposedly capable of independent action but by the very design, structure etc of the US Army WILL NEVER BE SO!
i'm trying to be as civil as possible but the Army needs to wrap its head around the fact that if it goes to war then it is automatically a joint mission set.
thats why Germany and Korea are such Army staples.
You don't have to move. you get to defend a piece of real estate. lets call this what it is. the US Army is trying to develop an organization that is light enough to deploy quickly, yet robust enough to survive against a peer opponent.
THIS AIN"T IT!
I think when you're proposing an organization with 114 M1s and when even your "light" reconnaissance strike group is equipped with Puma IFV (30 - 40 tonnes depending on the armor set), cutting weight to deploy quickly is not one of your goals. That's why I think this is clearly different than some of the previous efforts that, as you rightly point out, were sacrificing capability against a peer opponent for deploy-ability.
DeleteAs for "independent" action, that depends a lot on what you mean by "independent" This organization is also reminiscent of the Israeli use of "Combat Forces", equivalent to large brigades which, like this proposal, bore a great resemblance to the Pentomic concept. Israeli units have also fought large battles clumped into divisions, but with the primary element being the brigade with divisions acting more like a small corps HQ, variable order of battle that changes continually based on circumstances, than like what we think of as a division with a fixed TO&E. These brigades were not "independent" in the sense of being expected to fight alone, but they were "independent" in the sense of being able to be deployed and sustained on their own and being the prime maneuver element.
Does this organization really mark a big improvement over a division with 3 brigades? That's a good question and one worthy of debate, but I would argue it is clearly better than a 2 battalion BCT and that the arguments you are making have applied well to some other US Army concepts but not necessarily this one.
Since 1947 when the Army Air Corps was taken from us every war became a joint fight for the Army. This was reemphasized with the Goldwater-Nichols act for very good reasons. However those restrictions placed on the Army mean that we have to have another service provide aircraft. There is no way around that. Want to send 3,400 paratroopers on a one way trip halfway around the world? Need C-17s to do that. We could have done it with J-27s, but the Air Force made sure that they kept a monopoly on transport aircraft available to the Army through budgeting shenanigans.
ReplyDeleteBut even before that we've played well with the USMC, in WWI Soldiers and Marines fought together, the 2nd MarDiv and the 2nd Infantry Division have an interesting history that brigades from each have served under the others HQ. First in WWI and then in Iraq.