Fw: Forgetting The Lessons Of History

["Don Greenlaw" <dgreenlaw@cox.net>]

Forwarded. How true this is.

Semper fi,
Don Greenlaw
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Sent: Monday, January 09, 2012 9:51 AM
Subject: Fw: Forgetting The Lessons Of History




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 Sent: Monday, January 9, 2012 12:41 PM
 Subject: Forgetting The Lessons Of History




 Subject: Forgetting The Lessons Of History

 Part of the downsizing risk not often mentioned: not enough time to ramp 
up in numbers and training on sophisticated systems to a combat proficiency 
level before engagement. The DoD/Administrationâs âplanâ is to continue to 
develop and field at the expense of troop structure, operational and 
training dollars. As the article below emphasizes, there needs to be a 
better balance between continued development of things and retention of 
trained personnel in numbers needed to accomplish missions.

 The following Article hits the mark.  We are destined to repeat ourselves 
again....  Was present for the portions spoken in the article from 1969 
forward.  In 1996 I was tasked with work "savings" (AKA, downsizing portions 
of manpower structure, halting programs already in execution and POM'd, et 
al.) from 224K to 174K to see the Corps grow again, resize for SWA, then OEF 
and OIF, and now again, then the recent DOD game to get ahead of the game by 
offering "savings" only to be sliced repeatedly and chipping away 16k here, 
25k more there.  The expected result is to save a dollar (today) only to pay 
3 or 4 fold to build back up in the future.

 S/F, Max

 --------------- 
 Washington Post
 January 6, 2012
 Pg. 15

 Forgetting The Lessons Of History

 By Robert H. Scales

 Here we go again. President Obama made the same mistake Thursday in
 announcing his new military strategy that virtually all of his
 predecessors have made since the end of World War II. He said:

 "Moreover, we have to remember the lessons of history. We cannot afford
 to repeat the mistakes of the past - after World War II, after Vietnam -
 when our military was left ill-prepared for the future. As commander in
 chief, I will not let that happen again. Not on my watch."

 Unfortunately, Obama's plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of
 history. Some facts: Harry Truman seeking to never repeat the costs of
 World War II reduced the Army from 8 million soldiers to fewer than half
 a million. Without the intervention of Congress, he would have
 eliminated the Marine Corps entirely. The result was the evisceration of
 both land services in Korea, a war Truman never intended to fight.

 With Dwight Eisenhower came the "New Look" strategy that sought to
 reduce the Army and Marine Corps again to allow the creation of a
 nuclear delivery force built around the Strategic Air Command. Along
 came Vietnam, a war that Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
 never wanted to fight. But by 1970 our professional Army broke apart and
 was replaced by a body of amateurs. The result was defeat and 58,000
 dead.

 After Vietnam, the Nixon administration broke the Army again. I know. I
 was there to see the drug addiction, murders in the barracks and chronic
 indiscipline, caused mainly by a dispirited noncommissioned corps that
 voted with its feet and left. Then came Jimmy Carter's unique form of
 neglect that led to the "hollow Army" of the late '70s, an Army that
 failed so miserably in its attempt to rescue the American hostages in
 Iran.

 The only exception to this very sad story was the Reagan years, when the
 land services received enough funding to equip and train themselves to
 fight so well in Operation Desert Storm. Then tragedy again as the
 Clinton administration reduced the ground services, intending to rely on
 "transformation," a program that paid for more ships and planes by
 reducing the Army from 16 divisions to 10. In the George W. Bush
 administration, Donald Rumsfeld continued a policy that sought to
 exploit information technology to replace the human component in war.
 Had it not been for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Army would have
 gone down to fewer than eight divisions.

 So, here we go again. The Obama administration will reduce its
 long-service, professional land force to pay for something called "Air
 Sea Battle," a strategy that seeks to buy more ships and planes in order
 to confront China with technology rather than people. This strategy
 shows a degree of a-historicism that exceeds that of any post-World War
 II administration. So much for remembering "the lessons of the past."

 Here's what the lessons of the past 70 years really teach us: We cannot
 pick our enemies; our enemies will pick us. They will, as they have
 always done in the past, cede to us dominance in the air, on sea and in
 space because they do not have the ability to fight us there. Our
 enemies have observed us closely in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have
 learned the lessons taught by Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Saddam
 Hussein: America's greatest vulnerability is dead Americans. So our
 future enemy will seek to fight us on the ground, where we have
 traditionally been poorly prepared. His objective will be to win by not
 losing, to kill as an end rather than as a means to an end. And we will
 enter the next war again tragically short of the precious resource that
 we have neglected for six administrations: our soldiers and Marines.

 The writer, a retiredArmy major general, is a former commandant of the
 U.S.Army War College.