DoD Buzz: FCS, “Transformation” Wrong Path: Top Army Brain

[unhappycamper]

FCS, “Transformation” Wrong Path: Top Army Brain
By Greg Grant Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 4:21 am
Posted in Land, Policy

Two distinct groups are emerging in the Army with quite different views on the nature of future wars the U.S. is likely to fight and the decisions the service should make about future force structure and weapons. The first group is the Title 10 side that urges the Army to embrace the troubled Future Combat Systems program and new operational concepts built around dominant battlefield intelligence. The other side is represented by officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who think future wars will resemble the messy reality of the current ones.

In a new paper, Army Col. H.R. McMaster, definitely a member of the messy war group, calls for abandoning so-called transformation, which is intellectually rooted in the idea of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). McMaster, of 73 Easting and Tal Afar fame, is a highly influential soldier-scholar who is currently putting together a brain trust for Gen. David Petraeus to review U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.

McMaster says the widely held vision of a revolution in warfare, of light, agile high-tech forces destroying an adversary with pin-point precision weapons fired from stand-off distances, ran headlong into reality in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be a superlative stretch of reality to describe the brutal fighting in those wars as anything remotely revolutionary. Both have featured much less high-tech and much more high-firepower in fierce firefights, not at the stand off ranges preferred by U.S. soldiers but in engagements where combatants were separated by only a few feet.

He says the U.S. will fight future wars “against armed groups that employ tactics and strategies similar to those it is facing in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The Army’s “legacy” formations have figured prominently in the current fight and will again in future wars. He criticizes analysts and officers - calling out Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap and Lt. Gen. David Deptula - who “advocate a return to 1990s thinking” where high-tech surveillance, air power and precision weaponry deliver “effects” against the enemy from long range in an effort to avoid costly and protracted “boots on the ground” efforts. Those who have bought into the RMA orthodoxy make the mistake of defining future conflict “as we might prefer it to be,” McMaster says.

McMaster really lets it fly at both Air Force leaders who have been very vocal in pushing the notion that airpower is America’s true asymmetric advantage. “Deptula and Dunlap fail to consider the enemy’s ability to react and adopt countermeasures that complicate our ability to remotely deliver effects. One wonders what kind of remotely delivered capability might secure people from terrorists living in their midst, reconstitute a police force, or interdict concealed vehicle bombs aimed at crowded marketplaces.” Moreover, McMaster says, future adversaries, such as China, are developing weapons designed specifically to take out U.S. surveillance and IT assets.


Rest of article at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2008/10/22/fcs-transformation-wrong-path-top-army-brain/?wh=wh