The Death of the Armor Corps

COL Gian Gentile is over at Small Wars Journal talking about The Death of the Armor Corps (PDF)

I have also heard reports from the field that the operational army has Armor (19K) Non Commissioned Officers as high as the rank of Staff Sergeant who have never qualified on a M1 Tank. Too, when was the last time that a heavy Brigade Combat Team has done a combined arms, live fire exercise integrating all arms at Brigade level? Do the Armor, Artillery, and Infantry Branches even have the collective knowledge to know how to do one anymore? My own experience as a Cavalry Squadron Commander returning from a combat deployment in Baghdad a few years ago mirrors these kinds of stories where I had lieutenants who had never qualified on a Bradley and a Squadron that didn’t know collectively anymore how to run a Bradley Gunnery Range. Such skills may seem insignificant but they are not because they indicate the collective knowledge and competency (or lack of it) of a tactical level combined arms formation.

Look, this has been coming for a while. THe bottom line is that you still need the tanks, and you still need to use them correctly. Where the COIN world involves a lot of agencies - USAID, NGOs, USDA, DOJ, State, etc - the world of warfare belongs to one agency: Department of Defense. That's it. They're the only ones who 'own' the world of battle. If you neuter them in the name of today's fight, you've screwed yourself for whatever comes next.
Tanks are relevant, useful, powerful, and important. They are also expensive to own, maintain, train, deploy, and employ, and that's bothers people in the budget- and manpower-concious world of today. You're not going to climb the Hindu Kush in an M1A1, but it would be very useful overwatching the road in/out of Marjah, with 10x thermal sights looking out to 4000m and a hell of a whomp along.


The guys over at Kings of War have their thoughts on what this means beyond COL Gentile's initial concerns.

1) What is counterinsurgency? Because the concept can be understood in so many ways, even training that is ostensibly for counterinsurgency can be entirely unrelated to its stated aim, something alluded to in a previous post.

2) How is one to measure extant counterinsurgency capabilities? In the amount of hours devoted to counterinsurgency in specific curricula, or in the conduct of effective counterinsurgency operations in theatre? Is a military only good at counterinsurgency once it succeeds in counterinsurgency operations? Given the difficulty of such operations, this represents a potentially open-ended commitment to train for and study counterinsurgency.

And if the conduct of operations is the chosen metric, how does one separate the tactical or operational performance of various units from the broader political context in which such operations take place, and which in many cases determine their level of success, however defined? Put differently, is failure in a counterinsurgency campaign due to a lack of relevant training and education, or due to factors very much beyond the control of military academies and training centres?

3) The size of the US military in particular means that evidence both for and against a greater emphasis on COIN can readily be found. Anecdotal evidence is particularly convenient in this regard, and in my own research, I have been struck by how attempts to reconcile such ‘evidence’ can lead to very contradictory, almost schizophrenic, findings. One person will cite almost constant attention to stability operations in training and education; another will complain that the focus was on Fulda Gap-type manoeuvres, with little emphasis on the ‘human terrain’ or other ‘non-military’ aspects of ongoing campaigns. The sample space is just too big.

By: Brant