No more Army adviser brigades or amphib ships? This proposed report could radically change how...

Wow! The inability to define a long term or even a mid-range national military strategy is why we waste so much money training, equipping, resourcing, facilitating a revolving door of doctrinal principles for each service branch to focus on. The SFAB concept is not even 5 years old. Perhaps the Senate Armed Services Committee would like to re-evaluate the elimination of several Heavy Brigades that existed to counter the near peer conventional threats of Iran, Russia, Syria, and China? The whole "we can do more with less in the Force XXI Modular BCT" concept totally sucked and played a significant role in degrading the Army's OPTEMPO and readiness posture.

This stuff is a never ending circle. When I was preparing to enter the Army out of ROTC, I was telling one of the CPTs that I was planning on requesting the 82d airborne. He was a mech infantry guy, and said "do yourself a favor and stay away from Ft Bragg." At the time (1977) the priority thing for the Army was Mech Infantry in Europe to fight the Warsaw pact, and light infantry, and even worse airborne infantry was considered obsolete. So I went to the 82d. :)

Then in the 80s, we had Grenada and Panama, and the Cold War was winding down, so the Army created the Light Infantry Divisions designed to deploy quickly with minimal vehicles and aircraft needed. All of a sudden light was in, and mech was out. Armor and mech infantry units were scheduled to be deactivated. Then the first gulf war happened, and the heavy units were saved and light units were deactivated. Heavy back in, and light was out.

And so it goes, back and forth forever. When we go heavy the Army decides we need a light, easily deployable force. Then we go light, and we need a heavier more survivable force.

I knew someone who worked at the Army Concept Analysis Agency that looked at far future requirements. He said it was all politically (Army politics) motivated. The example he gave would be the senior Army leadership would tell them to determine wha sort of house you need to build on an island 20 years from now. So they would do their analysis, and say "the island will be underwater in 20 years, so instead of houses you need to build boats. (This was decades before the climate change debate and was an analogy, not an actual prediction). But the Army leadership, would come back and say "we don't care what your analysis shows, just give us bigger and better houses". Of course houses really referred to tanks and fighting vehicles. So the studies were manipulated to give the leadership what they wanted all along, based on their biases based on what worked for hem as they grew up in the Army

Do we need to add extensive tactical depth... for short term - or do we need extensive operational depth for mid/long term? Are those the same areas we can focus on with current structures?