{"id":57122,"date":"2016-02-15T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T16:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2016\/02\/15\/commentary-war-makes-victorious-armies-stupid\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T00:14:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T00:14:03","slug":"commentary-war-makes-victorious-armies-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/commentary\/2016\/02\/15\/commentary-war-makes-victorious-armies-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary: War Makes Victorious Armies Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\u00a0<br\/><br\/><br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Twenty-five<span class=\"rte rte-comment\">25<\/span> years ago, late in the afternoon of Feb. 26, <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">February <\/span>1991, 260 American soldiers with 19 tanks and 26 Bradley fighting vehicles in the two lead cavalry troops of an 1,100 man armored cavalry battle group charged out of a sandstorm and caught the rear guard of Iraq\u2019s Republican Guard Corps in the open desert along the North-South grid line referred to as &#8220;73 Easting.&#8221; \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Taken by surprise, the numerically superior, full-strength, 2,500-man Iraqi brigade with T-72 tanks in defensive positions supported by mines, artillery and infantry with anti-tank weapons was swept away in a battle of annihilation. Attacking American soldiers lost one<span class=\"rte rte-comment\">1<\/span> dead, six<span class=\"rte rte-comment\">6<\/span> wounded and one destroyed Bradley. <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">Armored Fighting Vehicle.<\/span><br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Americans in Washington <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">, DC <\/span>were surprised. A chorus of television pundits, academics and retired Army generals had warned that American soldiers would suffer heavy casualties. Retired Army Chief of Staff Gen.\u00a0Edward Meyer actually declared that war with Iraq would produce 10,000 to 30,000 US\u00a0casualties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The generals commanding Army forces in the Middle East worried that Meyer was right. They had not seen action since Vietnam and they irrationally inflated the Iraqi Army&#8217;s fighting power. They should have known better.<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> The courageous and intelligent performance of American soldiers in battle of 73 Easting was testimony to the superior combination of training, technology\u00a0and human capital that the US\u00a0Army&#8217;s post-Vietnam leadership, Gens.\u00a0William DePuy, Paul Gorman and Donn Starry, began building in the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span class=\"rte rte-comment\">General <\/span>DePuy, the commander of Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), was the principal\u00a0force driving change. DePuy saw warfare through a different lens. He had led an infantry platoon from Utah Beach through the Battle of the Bulge in WW II.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> DePuy acknowledged the US\u00a0Army\u2019s defeat in Vietnam, but he knew the US\u00a0Army had to change its focus to fight a capable opponent like the Soviet armed forces. Israel\u2019s sobering experience in the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria reinforced DePuy\u2019s conviction that the Army needed a new warfighting doctrine to guide investments in human capital, organization, and technology. The battle of 73 Easting was DePuy\u2019s crowning achievement.<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Sadly, war often makes victorious armies stupid and Desert Storm was no exception. Twenty-five<span class=\"rte rte-comment\">25<\/span>\u00a0years later, DePuy\u2019s Army is in ruins. Thanks to a series of multibillion-dollar acquisition failures like the sprawling $20 billion <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">Dollar <\/span>Future Combat System, the Ground Combat Vehicle\u00a0and Armed Aerial Scout, the US\u00a0Army is caught in a modernization death spiral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The outcome is an unfocused, single-service acquisition plan designed to upgrade 1980s vintage platforms and weapon systems or selectively replace systems inside the old structure on a one-for-one basis with comparable, more expensive versions of existing aircraft, tanks, trucks and guns.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Any closed system evolves toward a state of entropy and the US\u00a0Army is very, very closed. Closed systems also breed fear of the kind of change in organization and technology that Gen.\u00a0DePuy and his successors embraced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The idea of moving the US\u00a0Army out of the industrial-age structure based on single-service self-sufficiency into an organizational design based on integrated, joint operations or service interdependency remains anathema to the US\u00a0Army. The critical need for an Army composed of self-contained independent battle groups that operate on land the way the Navy\u2019s ships operate at sea within the framework of joint, integrated ISR, <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">(intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), <\/span>strike, maneuver and sustainment is stubbornly and myopically resisted.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> As a result, the opportunity to pursue full-spectrum rapid prototyping of powerful new operational capabilities \u2014 organizing construct, human capital strategy and equipment,\u00a0not just the technology \u2014\u00a0is lost. Instead, the Army clings to brigade combat teams, in uneven states of readiness, dependent <span class=\"rte rte-comment\">\u2014units in uneven states of readiness\u2014<\/span>on division and corps headquarters and support structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1991, the US Army stripped out several divisions to field full-strength brigades and divisions in Saudi Arabia before engaging the enemy. In today\u2019s come-as-you-are war-fighting environment, this is a non-starter.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Like the other services, the US\u00a0Army\u2019s organization for combat should not be viewed in isolation from its &#8220;corporate overhead.&#8221; The fact that four Army four stars \u2014 George Marshall, Douglas\u00a0MacArthur, Dwight\u00a0Eisenhower and Henry Arnold\u2014 could command and effectively employ 6 million American soldiers in WW II while today\u2019s shrinking Army of 490,000 needs six<span class=\"rte rte-comment\">6<\/span>\u00a0four stars to manage the force, should alert the politicians in both parties to the Army\u2019s problems.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> Breaking open closed systems is never pleasant, but it must be done. The Army\u2019s passion for rewarding officers who reinforce their bosses\u2019 prejudices and beliefs makes the task even more challenging. \u00a0If nothing is done, Americans will end up much like Mark Baum, the hedge fund manager in the &#8220;The Big Short.&#8221; \u00a0Baum was horrified to discover that widespread fraud in the mortgage market would precipitate an economic collapse on a national, even global scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If nothing is done, Americans will be equally horrified when they are surprised not by victory, but by defeat.\u00a0\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/><strong>Douglas Macgregor <\/strong>is executive vice president of BMG LLC, a decorated combat veteran, PhD and author of five books. His newest book, &#8220;Margin of Victory,&#8221; will be available in June 2016 from Naval Institute Press.\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/><br\/> \u00a0<br\/><span class=\"rte rte-comment\">Colonel (ret) US Army<br\/> Executive Vice President<br\/> Burke-Macgregor Group LLC<br\/> Reston, Virginia<br\/> 703-975-6954<br\/> www.burke-macgregor.com \u00a0\u00a0<br\/> \u00a0<br\/> This communication may contain Privileged and \/ or Confidential Information. It is not for use or disclosure outside Burke-Macgregor Group LLC without written authorization. If you are not the intended addressee indicated in this message, or agent authorized to conduct its delivery, you may not copy or deliver this message to anyone. Please notify the sender as soon as possible and delete this message and destroy any record of it or its attachments in their entirety<\/span>.<br\/> \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to a series of multibillion-dollar acquisition failures, the US Army is caught in a modernization death spiral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":115249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":66,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[66,33,17],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2218],"class_list":["post-57122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-home","category-opinion"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"VNGAE3H7GRC6NCNF72YOU2FA4A","arc_canonical_url":"\/opinion\/commentary\/2016\/02\/15\/commentary-war-makes-victorious-armies-stupid\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Commentary: War Makes Victorious Armies Stupid - Defense News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thanks to a series of multibillion-dollar acquisition failures, the US Army is caught in a modernization death spiral.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/commentary\/2016\/02\/15\/commentary-war-makes-victorious-armies-stupid\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Commentary: War Makes Victorious Armies Stupid\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Thanks to a series of multibillion-dollar acquisition failures, the US 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