Airsea Battle Analysis

1264 Words6 Pages
FORT BELVOIR: The intellectual ice is beginning to break. You could see it at the Fort Belvoir Officers’ Club on Tuesday afternoon, where the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) hosted a three-day, tri-service conference on “Strategic Landpower.” The US Army is wrestling with how to stay relevant once large-scale counterinsurgency in Afghanistan comes to an end. The Marines are going back to their roots — amphibious warfare — and they’ve got a piece of the hot concept called AirSea Battle. The Navy has little to worry about with the Pacific pivot highlighting the importance of the service’s global reach — and they’re central to AirSea Battle. The Air Force is still trying to figure out its real future but AirSea Battle gives the…show more content…
(While most comments were not for attribution, all the individuals in this article gave me permission to quote them by name). “Very few people understand what you do,” he told the conferees. “We need to be able to tell senators, journalists, presidents, civilians, why are we doing this, why is this important, why does this deserve a defense dollar in a tight environment.” While this week’s conference was co-sponsored by the Marine Corps (cautiously) and by Special Operations Command (enthusiastically), it’s the conventional “Big Army” that has the most at stake. While the entire military is taking budget cuts, now painfully compounded by sequestration, only the Army faces an existential crisis. With the nation swearing off large-scale counterinsurgency “forever” (for the second time since Vietnam) and no hostile conventional army on the horizon, what does America need large ground forces…show more content…
Foreign engagement missions are enough to justify SOCOM’s 18,000 operators — indeed, SOCOM is overwhelmed and wants the big Army to help out — but Congress won’t fund hundreds of thousands of conventional soldiers to do engagement missions alone. Conversely, if the Army’s mission is purely to “kill people and break things,” many policymakers would argue that’s done more safely and effectively from the air, not by putting thousands of young Americans on the ground. If combat power and human factors are not inseparable, then you might as well rely on small SOCOM teams for engagement, rely on drones, cruise missiles, and stealthy strike aircraft for lethal action, and slash the regular Army to the bone. Indeed, just last week the Army Vice-Chief of Staff, Gen. John Campbell, told me that “there’s talk about bringing the Army down to levels that are pre-World War II.” That’s why the Strategic Landpower project is putting together a case that you need substantial, combat-ready, people-savvy forces on the ground, able to conduct operations and gather intelligence amongst the local population, instead of trying to do it all from 50,000 feet in the
Open Document