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Originally Posted by delta13soultaker
Yep. That's why we'll be hurting the next big high intensity war we fight (China). The insurgent battles have gontten us away from training for the huge manuever battles with chemical/nuclear threats. High intensity battles involve many perishable skills that are being forgotten.
I'm not mad yet though. Our learning curve is fast. And our military is still far far finer than the society it protects can even begin to deserve.
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And I was going to burn all my AIR-LAND BATTLE pubs in the stove this winter. Maybe I ought to keep them for my son.
MBTs are just one round in the mag. Arty has been getting the short end lately. I only dropped into one FOB (Balad?) where I found cannon-cockers bragging about jerking a lanyard. Mostly they are on force protection and convoy security. They even got some 13Bs cleaned up enough to stand outside the Amb's office at the Embassy Annex.
Combined arms, dolloped out into self-contained blocks that can be assembled and disassembled at need from RCT to corps is something that's going away in our current shadow divisions. They should keep warfighting some of the old scenarios at Leavenworth, so we have command staff ready for continental war.
At the local level my old bunch is teaming up with tanks but in a 2X2 company configuration. Holy Hegel that freaks me! I'm used to doing everything in threes.
I love arty and tanks. They are masters of destruction. They humble me and my little rifle. I saw the inside of a reinforced concrete building (they weren't all mud brick) that some DAT crew had fired a sabot through. If nothing else, I would have died of fright if I had been in there. And even though I was not impressed with some recent close rocket and mortar hits from them other people, years ago our 155s had me spittless when our 113 broke down while crossing the impact area during a Combined Live Fire Exercise.
As a new private, I was told that a tanker wouldn't leave his machine to take a dump. Well I had been hearing a lot of stories (box of grid squares) but sure enough, within a week we came busting through the brush and there was an M60 crewman, facing the turret, heels hooked over the front of the glacis, squatted down with his arm around the gun tube and his coveralls undogged. And that is why we need to keep tanks and tankers. They are constant. They crap like birds on a perch and they run down range, coaxing and main gunning the crap out of stuff that a grunt (crunchie in DAT lingo) wouldn't want to have to deal with.