Samizdata

Now I know we said this before but this really is the last Samizdata article on the subject for a while… unless of course someone sends us an article which is pure genius and covers new ground. Patrick Phillips gets the last word

I thought I might offer my two-cents worth in the controversy concerning our armed forces in Afghanistan. The original post by Mr. de Havilland concerning the utility of the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy aircraft carriers was true as far as it went. But it also read like someone from the Navy frantically trying to justify the Navy/Marine Corps budget and force-structure. There’s nothing really wrong with that (and the USN/USMC certainly requires no justification to me), but the analysis provided was highly selective.

When it became obvious that Afghanistan needed to be targeted for the Taliban’s role in supporting the terrorists, we had precisely three things in our military arsenal that could be quickly mobilized to “reach out and touch” that distant, land-locked country. They were Special Forces (predominately Army), USAF heavy bombers, and the Navy’s carrier aircraft and cruise missiles.

We promptly used the available resources — and to impressively good effect. After only a few weeks of preparation time, the Special Forces were in-country conducting reconnaissance and contacting the locals, the USN had grabbed control of the air and performed cruise missile strikes, and the heavy bombers began working their own special magic on the local landscape. The results have been uniformly (pun intended) unpleasant for the Taliban.

As the conflict in Afghanistan moves into its (hopefully) last stages, the USMC is serving its role of providing an extremely competent, highly transportable combined-arms force that will provide more direct muscle than Special Forces can provide. So Marines have seized control of an airstrip that was previously raided/scouted by Army Rangers.

What point am I trying to make here?

Teamwork. We needed all of the capabilities discussed here.

At various times, every force I’ve mentioned above have been declared superfluous by various “experts”.

Heavy Bombers? Don’t need them — their job can be done with cruise missiles and by smaller fighter-bomber aircraft.

Special Forces and Rangers? They dangerously strip too much high quality manpower out of the Army’s regular units.

Cruise missiles? Expensive, ineffective, destabilizing in terms of arms control.

Marines and aircraft carriers? Well, that’s already been discussed.

So while I appreciate the point that the Mr. de Havilland was making, I do think it needed to be expanded upon.

Patrick Phillips

I thought this was an interesting article in Government Executive Magaine (being a typical libertarian governmentophobe, this not my usual reading I must confess). It is essentially a US Army lamentation and paean to the USMC:

The fact that the Marine Corps was needed to extend into what most Army officers consider their service’s territory had some of them wondering where Army leaders were when the mission planning decisions were being made. “If this doesn’t raise questions about Army relevance then I don’t know what would,” said one infantry captain who says he is beginning to think he might feel more at home in the Marine Corps than in the Army.

and

“You’ve got to give the Marine Corps credit for trying to make themselves useful,” said Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for a New American Century and a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee. “At least they’re making some attempt to respond to what the country needs to have done. The Army just seems to be spending most of its intellectual effort trying to find ways to stay out of it.”

Ah, I love the smell of inter-service rivalry in the morning. It smells of…victory.

With thanks to Graham V. for pointing the Samizdata at Government Executive Magaine.

Eric L. Bainter takes a shot at starting an inter-service exchange of fire views

In referece to Perry de Havilland and his Samizdata post of 28 Nov entitled The USMC and Aircraft Carriers… don’t leave home without ’em , I can’t help but note the following:

1. It is probably not terribly hard to establish air superiority over a handful of helicopters and some aged Antonov transports…
2. Analysis of true cause-and-effect will take some time, but I note that it seems the things didn’t really seem to start breaking loose until the heavy bombers – i.e. the USAF – started hammering things.
3. There might have been secret efforts at present unknown, but at least by press accounts, the Marines were largely out of the war until their recent arrival in the Kandahar neighborhood. Aside from the recovery of the downed helicopter, Army and Air Force special forces, and CIA types, seem to have been the primary ground forces that aided the Northern Alliance, set ambushes in the south, and guided the bombing strikes.
4. During the transformation debate prior to this war(at least as recorded in the press), I don’t recall anyone really trying the eliminate either carriers or Marines, but there was consideration of how many carriers/marines/fighters/army divisions/everything else are required – and what is the best mix. The transformationalists (is that a word) were big on information fusion, UAVs, remote attacks, and all that – all of which have been successfully employed in this war so far.

So, I wish the best to the Marines (shoot, I’ve even informally recruited for them), and I hope they get their chance to clobber the terrorists, and I am glad the Navy had some carriers. But, I do not think the war in Afghanistan supports the general tone of Mr. de Havilland’s post, which I read as a blanket defense of the current Department of the Navy force structure.

Eric L. Bainter

… don’t leave home without ’em.

For many years, some elements within the US military have argued that due to the range of modern jet fighters and the advent of in-flight refueling, the era of the aircraft carrier is over. The resources for these vasty expensive assets would be better spent on the USAF. Similarly the US Marine Corps is a force without a mission. Why bother with seaborne forces when Rangers etc. can be flown to a target from land bases?

Well, as we can see, it was the USN F-18 and F-14’s that gained air superiority over Afghanistan, not the USAF… and it is the USMC, which is part of the Navy, that has been airlifted off aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers into a land locked central Asian theatre of operations. This was in fact the longest range combat helicopter insertion in military history.

Hopefully this will once and for all put paid to the idea that either large aircraft carriers or the US Marine Corps are a waste of resources. For strategic, operational and tactical flexibility, with the ability to respond to unexpected threats in unexpected places, the USMC and the aircraft carrier are the perfect tools.

What Dale writes is quite correct but it is just another manifestation of American ‘liberal’ media racism. When eighteen US Army Rangers dies that is horrifying because eighteen American lives are valuable. As Somali lives are irrelevent, who gives a damn if one thousand Somali irregulars got smoked? The important fact was that here was a chance to dwell on the negative aspects, namely American deaths. Regardless of the fact the US soldiers gave a fine account of themselves before being overwhelmed, why not just use this as an excuse to point out the US military are the bad guys yet again?

Whilst I do think the whole mission to Somalia was a noble but naive mistake from the outset, is it too much to expect the US media to realise it was actually a far from ignoble episode in US military history? I guess so.

Another example of US ‘liberal’ media racism was the reporting of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa. It as widely reported that twelve Americans died and almost as an afterthought, oh yes, about 300 or so Africans were killed plus nearly 4000 wounded. This need to be repeated again and again to people across the world who claim Al Qaeda only want to kill Americans.

Similarly as commented on by Opinionated Bastard (now is that a great name for a blog or what?), once it became clear most of the people on Flight 587 which crashed in Rockaway were not from the USA, media interest tailed off rapidly (no pun intended):

This is infuriating because the passengers on Flight 587 were almost entirely from the Dominican Republic. We get ’round the clock coverage of whatever civilian casualties may or may not have actually happened in Afghanistan, but when poor folks in our own hemisphere are suffering, it’s shuffled off to the back page.

I guess those people just did not count for much.