Forget "distributed warfare". That's a smoke screen...instead think DARPA's Mosaic Concept as the new hotness...

 I've been irritated beyond belief after reading that Congressman's article.

A US Congressman is claiming that the US is all but done militarily against the Chinese unless we get our act together by 2025?

We see a MASSIVE lurch in concepts by the US Marine Corps with the (we now know to be fake fig leaf) that it's designed to ensure the relevancy of the Marine Corps going into the future?

We see an all hands on deck push by even the Army to participate in the sea battle?

The idea that a dispersed and distributed force could actually defeat a naval force that is peer level using such simplicity just didn't make sense.

There had to be more.

Quite honestly I've been irked and pissed because none of it made sense.

Warnings were issued since the Obama administration.  Surely if I knew this then so did the folks at Quantico.

So how does a dispersed force "compete" (God I SO HATE THAT TERM used as a military concept) against a peer adversary?  There has to be more to it than just that.

A little digging led me to DARPA's Mosaic concept.  

More to come (much to read) but it appears that AI, electronic warfare, what some would call attacks on critical infrastructure and exquisite command and control to take advantage of it.

What has the Marine Corps been working on?  Command and control.  They've been talking much about EW/Cyber.  Attacks on naval shipping by missile and lastly a whole lot about dispersed forces.

Make no mistake, my complaints are still valid.  Small forces are extremely vulnerable.  We're in essence putting our conventional forces in the same position as Special Ops.  They will be extremely vulnerable to combined arms attack.

Dispersed forces theoretically will cause targeting problems.  As a reader said what would you rather lose...a Burke or a Light Amphibious Warship?  An LPD or LAW.  A carrier or a LAW.

The same applies to our Marines ashore.  Would you rather lose a Company Landing Team or a Burke?  An MLRS battery or a LAW?

In the Pacific if every thing works right we will see Marine (and now Army units) destroyed.  They will be small units.  They will be ravaged horribly, but according to the butcher's bill (and I guess the stakes if conflict were actually to occur with China) it'll be worth it.

This leads me to the last point of this rambling post (forgive me...I'm still raging).

That term I hate.  COMPETE.  The other one too.  Gray zone competition.

The Marine Corps and a bigger part of the Army than anyone wants to admit will all be praying that we stay at that stage.

Peer warfare with China will be bloody.  The "competition" or gray zone phase is being emphasized because if thing turn hot alot of American mothers will be weeping, Mosaic warfare or not.