By PHILLIP CARTER
New York Times
12 December 2004
UNDER questioning from an American soldier wanting to know why he was forced to use "hillbilly armor" on his truck, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could only admit to his troops that they lacked the right stuff: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
Many are taking the exchange, along with alarming new statistics on military preparedness from the House Armed Services Committee, as proof that the Bush administration has failed to give soldiers in Iraq the equipment they need to face combat. Actually, the problem runs much deeper than the current administration: it stems from the Pentagon's uneven effort over the last decade to turn a cold-war military into a force able to meet today's challenges.
For 40 years, Army doctrine centered on what's known as a linear battlefield. Combat units line up shoulder to shoulder across a broad front to face the enemy, which organizes its units in much the same fashion. Support units operate in relative safety in the rear, with only the occasional enemy infiltration to worry about.
Under this model, trucks in logistical units can afford to do without armor, and their drivers can make do with just an M-16 rifle; there's no need for Kevlar door panels or .50-caliber machine guns because the enemy is taken care of by combat units at the front. This was the way the Army won World War II.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the military has slowly recognized that its fundamental assumptions about warfare are being rendered obsolete. In Somalia, American troops faced guerrillas adept at trapping military convoys in ambushes in urban areas. In Bosnia, partisans on both sides used land mines to great effect, making every road a potential hazard. And now in Iraq, the insurgency has transformed the battlefield into one that is both nonlinear and noncontiguous, with sporadic fighting flaring up in isolated spots around the country.
Simply put, there are no more front lines. In slow recognition, the Army purchased light armored vehicles in the late 1990's for its military police to conduct peacekeeping, and more recently spent billions of dollars to outfit several brigades with Stryker medium-weight armored vehicles, which are impervious to most small arms and rocket-propelled grenades and can be deployed anywhere in the world by airplane.
But the fact that there is no longer a front line also means there aren't any more "rear" areas where support units can operate safely. Support units must now be prepared to face the same enemy as the infantry, but are having to do so in trucks with canvas doors and fiberglass hoods because Pentagon procurement planners never expected they'd have to fight. Remember that Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the Iraq invasion's most celebrated prisoner of war, was a supply clerk with a maintenance company.
Americans who have never served in the military may not realize the scale of the problem. Napoleon's army may have marched on its stomach, but ours requires a juggernaut of mechanics, medics, logisticians and truck drivers carrying everything from ammunition to underwear to keep moving. As a general rule, these support troops outnumber combat soldiers by about seven to one.
As Americans found out this week, the more enterprising of these soldiers find ways to improvise armor, diving into Kuwaiti scrap heaps or cannibalizing damaged American vehicles. Some, like the soldiers of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, refuse their missions entirely, risking court-martial instead of facing combat with broken or unarmored trucks. Others simply drive on, with blind (and some would say foolish) faith in their equipment.
None of these approaches are acceptable. The Army (and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps) must reshape its entire force, front to back, to fight the noncontiguous, nonlinear battles. Every vehicle must have sufficient armor to protect its crew; every convoy must have the right mix of light and heavy weapons to protect itself; every unit must be equipped with night-vision goggles and global positioning systems; every soldier must have the skills and training to fight as an infantryman.
One of our military's great strengths is its ability to learn from its mistakes — when things go wrong for a platoon or company, its soldiers and officers put together reviews to make sure it won't happen again. On the larger scale, that system has broken down: the Pentagon has had more than a decade since the cold war ended — and 20 months since the fall of Baghdad — to identify and fix these problems to protect its support troops. There is no excuse for its failure to do so.
Phillip Carter, a former Army Captain, is a lawyer in Los Angeles.
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Citation: Phillip Carter, "How the Front Lines Came to the Rear," New York Times, 12 December 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/opinion/12carter.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position
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