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Mar. 27th, 2003
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Mar. 27th, 2003 11:42 pmSo if you follow the evolution of military crap you'll be aware of Donald Rumsfeld being a major proponent of the new "objective force" military theory. The idea is a smaller, faster, lighter, technologically advanced army that subcontracts out all the scut work to civilian contractors(some marketing crap about it) rather than a large, heavy tank focused, army that does everything for itself.
The army predicts in ~30 years it should be ready and good to go, so in the mean time to try to get something like it they are creating a thing called the Interim Brigade Combat Team. Sort of the objective force with off-the shelf currently available stuff, rather than M1 tanks they drive wheeled tank-like things called "strykers". The ICBT's are still in beta and not slated to go gold until this summer and not tracked to be fully deployed until 2k7 or so.
Kind of a pity because it looks like they're going to be needed in Iraq soon. But until then we've got our current set up, which is perfect for a maneuver war in the trackless desert of western Iraq (see Gulf War I), unfortunantly someone told Saddam this and he's decided to instead fight us in the canal crossed swamps of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, falling back from there into the dense urban areas.
The thing is, Rumsfeld's been trying to push his smaller lighter thing, even with our existing force which is resource intensive, clumsy, and all the reasons we're trying to go to the new warfighting models. To accomplish this there are a lot of reports that he's short sheeting the people in the field. A guy on CNN was talking about how Rummy wouldn't sign-off on an extra mechanized brigade Franks wanted for this war plan, and this article talks about reports that Rummy wants Franks to attack before the 4th ID gets unloaded and set up to support the existing forces (another two if not three weeks minimum).
The army predicts in ~30 years it should be ready and good to go, so in the mean time to try to get something like it they are creating a thing called the Interim Brigade Combat Team. Sort of the objective force with off-the shelf currently available stuff, rather than M1 tanks they drive wheeled tank-like things called "strykers". The ICBT's are still in beta and not slated to go gold until this summer and not tracked to be fully deployed until 2k7 or so.
Kind of a pity because it looks like they're going to be needed in Iraq soon. But until then we've got our current set up, which is perfect for a maneuver war in the trackless desert of western Iraq (see Gulf War I), unfortunantly someone told Saddam this and he's decided to instead fight us in the canal crossed swamps of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, falling back from there into the dense urban areas.
The thing is, Rumsfeld's been trying to push his smaller lighter thing, even with our existing force which is resource intensive, clumsy, and all the reasons we're trying to go to the new warfighting models. To accomplish this there are a lot of reports that he's short sheeting the people in the field. A guy on CNN was talking about how Rummy wouldn't sign-off on an extra mechanized brigade Franks wanted for this war plan, and this article talks about reports that Rummy wants Franks to attack before the 4th ID gets unloaded and set up to support the existing forces (another two if not three weeks minimum).