Tag: Military Leadership

The Dumbest Military Orders

I have heard some really stupid orders given by military commanders……I never understood why someone would order a bayonet charge when the enemy still had bullets…….and these are the 10 dumbest orders issued……

Obviously, soldiers have amongst the most dangerous jobs in the world. When it’s not the enemy, friendly fire, weather, or disease that gets them, their commanding officers step in to endanger them through stupidity.

Now imagine being one of the soldiers under the commanders who ordered things this stupid:

10. Build Those Defenses… Backwards!

The War: Mexican-American War, 1846

The Leader: General Gideon Pillow

Pillow was appointed general because he was a friend with then President James Polk from when then practiced law together, so the likelihood he would do something really embarrassing was pretty high from square one. During the war, his most notorious mistake took place when he was stationed at a Mexican village called Camargo. There, he ordered entrenchments built, but had them built so awkwardly that the defenses were backwards, leaving his troops exposed to the enemy.

The incident would have been the most embarrassing incident of his career, but he seemed determined to top it. In 1847, Pillow wrote letters to Washington crediting himself with winning the war, rather than commanding General Winfield Scott; something so blatantly treacherous and false he was arrested for it. He was called back to active service during the American Civil War (luckily for the Union, he fought for the South). There, the most significant thing he did was lose a fortress with 12,000 soldiers to General Grant in 1862. In 1863, he managed to top even that by his actions at the Battle of Stony Creek: one of his subordinate generals found him hiding behind a tree instead of leading his soldiers. (Source: southernhistory.net)

https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-dumbest-orders-in-military-history.php

If you know of other equally stupid orders then please share….

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

To Fix Special Ops

I have been writing about the antics of our so-called “elite” troops……I should call them problems because it seems to be spreading at an alarming rate…..https://lobotero.com/2019/08/15/seals-have-a-problem/

I have been watching the steps being taken……https://lobotero.com/2019/09/13/closing-thought-13sep19/

The new commander has grab the bull by the horns so to speak and began his clean sweep with SEAL Team Seven……https://lobotero.com/2019/09/13/closing-thought-13sep19/

As I stated in the above post….a good start but why not begin with the SEAL Team Six?

There are lots of opinions as to how to fix this problem……

“How can something like this happen in 2017?”  asked the military judge Col. Glen Hines. He continued, “The question needs to be answered. If we don’t get to the bottom of it, this is going to happen again.” With this prediction, Hines suggests that the Melgar murder, shocking though it might be, was no aberration, but a symptom of a culture decayed from within. He’s probably right. How else to explain the recent spate of serious incidents in the special operations community, which run the gamut from war crimes and spousal murder to child rape and drug trafficking? Perhaps Hines was looking too at the rank and status of the individuals involved in Melgar’s murder, all of whom were highly respected leaders in elite units, including two members of the storied SEAL Team Six. These men weren’t outliers, but rather the type who attract emulation by peers and subordinates: “Kevin was a hero of mine,” commented one Marine special operator I know, before adding, “or was.” When such men commit an act that appears to outsiders to be off the scale, it suggests that similar behavior has up to this point been condoned, even lauded, by the culture to which they belong. And as Hines indicates, unless something is done to fix that culture, Melgar’s murder is likely to be just another waypoint in a descending pattern of illicit conduct in America’s special operations community.

How to Fix a Broken Special Operations Culture

I say forget the Space Force…..combine all these troops from all the services into one force and call it something like…the Irregulars Fighting Force (just off the top of my head)….that would eliminate any cross service rivalry and make cooperation more accessible.

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

SEALs Have A Problem

My first reaction is to say “NO SH*T”…..

I have been writing about their problems for a couple of years now….https://lobotero.com/2019/07/29/what-the-hell-has-happened/

Now the commander of the SEALs has recognized the problem in public…..

The commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command put the words “We have a problem” in bold font. “I don’t know yet if we have a culture problem, I do know that we have a good order and discipline problem that must be addressed immediately,” reads the July 25 letter from Rear Adm. Collin Green, the man in charge of Navy SEALs. The letter obtained by CNN and the New York Times orders commanders to bring forth problems and recommendations for how to ensure ethical and professional behavior following a series of embarrassing incidents, reports CNN. “This is our main effort and my top priority,” Green writes, noting the culture of the force “is being questioned … for good reason” as “some of our subordinate formations have failed to maintain good order and discipline.”

Retired Navy SEAL Eric Deming brought his concerns to Green on Monday. “I got two boys that are old enough, I wouldn’t even let them be part of [the force],” he tells CBS News. An entire SEAL platoon was sent home from Iraq after allegations of sexual assault and unauthorized drinking. Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, accused of war crimes, was convicted of unlawfully posing with an enemy corpse. And two SEALs were implicated in the 2017 hazing death of a Green Beret just months after members of SEAL Team 10 were found to have used cocaine in April 2018. Green says addressing such issues is necessary to “recalibrate our culture and regain our credibility.” The head of all special operations forces, Gen. Richard Clarke, is expected to address ethics in his own letter to the force, per CNN.

Recognizing the problems is not a solution…it can be a good beginning but progress must be made.

Then ask…is it a problem that can be corrected?

I have even heard rumblings that the SEALs should be abolished…and I have read an opinion on this questions…..

I recently saw this question posed on Quora and it made me think. Let me start by answering with my opinion, which is NO. But . . .

It’s interesting to look at the history. Marcinko ended up in Federal Prison after he founded Red Cell. I’ve met the man, did booksignings with him, and even was asked to co-write some of his fiction, which I declined. I just didn’t agree with his leadership philosophy as set out in Rogue Warrior. Essentially it was “Do it MY way” not the Navy’s way. His rules took precedence over the legal rules. To me, that was a recipe for disaster which is bearing fruit now.

I’m not certain but I’ve heard that Admiral McRaven who commanded SOCOM and was a SEAL was assigned to 6 and asked to be transferred out due to the slack command culture.

Should the SEALS be abolished?

I hope that the SEALs find a solution……as long as we continue our adventurism and interventions worldwide we will need the SEALs at full capacity and at the ready.

After writing this draft news came out that the head of the SEALs has ordered an investigation…..

The head of U.S. Special Operations Command is initiating a comprehensive review of all Special Operations Forces culture and ethics, according to a memo he sent to commanders Friday evening.

“Recent incidents have called our culture and ethics into question and threaten the trust placed in us,” Gen. Richard Clarke wrote. The review will focus on recruiting, how new SOF members are selected, how leaders are trained and grown, how the force is educated about ethics and how ethical failures are addressed.

The review comes after a string of high-profile incidents involving Special Operations Forces, which include the Navy SEALs, the Green Berets and the Delta Force, among others.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/head-u-s-special-operations-forces-demands-review-culture-after-n1041456?cid=public-rss_20190812

This is a long time coming….hopefully this will help the SEALs change the course they have been traveling.

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Managing War

I am an antiwar person and I have studied conflicts, management and resolution….my hatred for war came from my 2 and half years in Vietnam in the late 60s early 70s…..

I look at the institution of war….and yes it is an institution especially now when we are fighting the same war for 18 years……

War is controlled (managed) by several ways……a quick look at the parts of the management……

Military commanders and their staffs rely on a variety of conceptual models to assist in their planning for and conduct of operations. Civilian defence thinkers and academics also employ the same tools to help illustrate their ideas. Among the those used are the Phases of Operations and the Spectrum of Conflict. While there is no standard design for each, they do have a certain style. In the U.S. system, the phases of battle model generally begins at Phase 0, which represents the period of shaping for the coming campaign, and ends at Phase 5, which covers enabling civil authority. Visual depictions of the Spectrum of Conflict usually place non-warfighting operations on one side and progress through increasing graduations of levels of violence and risk to the other side, culminating with nuclear war. Between these two extremes, war can be divided into a multitude of categories.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2019/01/22/the_war_cycle_a_model_for_managing_war_114128.html
 
The problem is that our generals in their education at the War College are taught Clausewitz, the Master of War……this is a Prussian from the 19th century…and war has moved well,beyond the days of cavalry charges and massive troop encounters….
 
A couple of things of Clausewitz……
 
Clausewitz book, On War, is the bible of warfare instruction…..we need to stop teaching his theories and start thinking in 21st century tactics…..
 

I am not insisting that Clausewitz does not provide valuable lessons. But by focusing on Clausewitz we miss important discussion that should be brought to military education. This leads me to the purpose of this article, for which I have two primary goals. First, to point out specific things which Clausewitz got wrong and reasons why we should stop teaching On War. Think of it like moving from a devotional reading of The Bible to a historical critical examination of it. Second, to identify what we should start teaching more of in all military education.

Let’s first look at what Clausewitz got wrong.

https://taskandpurpose.com/just-say-no-to-clausewitz

What got me to thinking about this was so,ething I read in The American Conservative……

The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers, men such as Col. John Boyd USAF, Col. Mike Wyly USMC, and Col. Huba Wass de Czege USA, each of whom led a major effort to reorient his service. Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please.

Such a moral and intellectual collapse of the officer corps is one of the worst disasters that can afflict a military because it means it cannot adapt to new realities. It is on its way to history’s wastebasket. The situation brings to mind an anecdote an Air Force friend, now a military historian, liked to tell some years ago. Every military, he said, occasionally craps in its own mess kit. The Prussians did it in 1806, after which they designed and put into service a much improved new model messkit, through the Scharnhorst military reforms. The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf an old-model messkit—the mass, draft army of the First Republic—and put it back in service. The Japanese did it in 1945, after which they threw their mess kit away, swearing they would never eat again. And we did it in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in four new wars. So far, we’ve had the only military that’s just kept on eating.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/an-officer-corps-that-cant-score/

All in all the US is working on outdated instruction….the education of our military people is as bad as the education of our citizens.

1949–Revolt Of The Admirals

Yep that time again…..an IST history lesson…..I try to find cool stuff for my readers to help them become more informed and hopefully entertained…..

There were coups waiting to happen….Aaron Burr comes to mind and then in 1933 and those that did not appreciate the policies of FDR…..in this case it is the grandfather of Bush, Prescott Bush…..

https://lobotero.com/2018/11/15/lets-go-to-1933/

World War Two has been won….now the country is trying to downsize from the massive war machine that is still around……1949 a step was taken that kinda pissed off a bunch of admirals……

The spark that set off the Revolt of the Admirals in 1949 was the cancellation of the Navy’s supercarrier, the CVA-58 United States, within a few days of the laying of the keel.

The situation was already primed to ignite. The Navy in the postwar period had become apprehensive, then alarmed, about the impending unification of the services under a single Department of Defense. The rise of the Air Force was a challenge to naval aviation.

No foreign nation posed a threat to the United States at sea. With its traditional role thus diminished in importance, the Navy feared that it might be relegated to minor functions.

The nation’s strategic focus was on atomic weapons, which were in the domain of the Air Force. At the Key West conference in 1948, the mission of strategic air warfare had been assigned to the Air Force. The Navy was determined to roll back that decision and gain at least part of the atomic mission.

To do so, it needed a “supercarrier” that could launch large bombers. It also had to discredit the Air Force’s B-36 bomber, which was performing the mission the Navy wanted. Cancellation of the CVA-58 in April 1949 sent the Navy to battle stations.

http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2018/July%202018/The-Revolt-of-the-Admirals.aspx

Now let’s take a look at the situation and the events that followed……

In the summer and fall of 1949, hearings of the House Armed Services Committee crackled with tension as U.S. Navy admirals went before Congress to defy their civilian leadership. America and its allies stood transfixed as a parade of famous admirals demonstrated fierce opposition to service unification, displayed hostility and contempt for the civilian leaders of the Defense Department, and condemned cuts made to the Navy budget. Unsettling headlines such as “The Navy Boils Over” and “Bradley Accuses Admirals of Open Rebellion” drifted through the nation’s newspapers for weeks.[1] Known as The Revolt of the Admirals, this episode has been described as “the most flagrant challenge ever hurled by top-ranking American military men at the civilian leadership of the United States.”

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/12/12/i_am_the_monarch_of_the_sea_114023.html

There you go……a bit of history that is not taught and is seldom remembered……and then the old professor came along……

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

Really Bad Military Leaders

This history lesson could turn into a graduate dissertation….so to limit the size of the post we will talk about military leaders of the firearms era….

On August 16, 1812, General William Hull of the U.S. Army surrendered Fort Detroit to an inferior English force.  American forces numbered about 2,100, while the combined English and Native American forces only numbered just over 1,300.  Hull was court-martialed, convicted and sentenced to death.  Luckily President Madison gave him a reprieve.  History is full of military blunders and dunderheads,

read on……

https://www.historyandheadlines.com/10-really-bad-military-leaders-firearms-era/

Allow me to expand this post a bit…..

If you are ever in Paris then I recommend a visit to the Louvre, a top notch museum…think Mona Lisa, The Thinker, Gaugin, van Gogh, etc…..

But the site has not always been a museum……in the past it has been a fort and a palace…..

Pairing a priceless permanent collection with a captivating history, it is no wonder why Paris’ Musée du Louvreis the most visited museum in the world. Though it is renowned for its role as a major arts institution, it has not always exhibited masterpieces during its 800 years of existence.

Before housing famous sculptures and paintings, the Louvre was home to France’s kings and queens. And prior to its stint as a palace, it was a fortress intended to protect the city of Paris from invasions. Here, we explore the museum’s unique history, tracing its fascinating evolution from medieval castle to world-class art museum.

https://mymodernmet.com/louvre-history/

That is the history lesson for the time being….you know more is to come…..

Class Dismissed!

Those Great Generals And Some Not So Much

Warning:  History lesson to follow!

History is full of generals and their exploits…..Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Kamal, Hindenburg, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Montgomery, etc……..some are celebrated while others are hated or mocked…….

World War One is no different….the most talked about general was the UK’s General Haig…..the “Butcher of the Somne” as he was fondly called by his men…..and it is not a term of endearment…..he will be more known in the UK than here in the US…..WW1 is barely a memory in the collective collection of thoughts about WW1……

Visiting the Somme battlefield in northern France is largely a matter of going from one Commonwealth Graves Commission cemetery to another. The graveyards are everywhere, some of them very small, comprising only a handful of white Portland marble stones, many bearing the inscription, A Soldier of the Great War / Known unto God. One sees so many of these cemeteries and so many stones—along with the vast memorial at Thievpal bearing the names of some 70,000 British soldiers whose bodies were never recovered—that after a few hours of it, you feel numb. Overwhelmed.

The magnitude of the battle still stuns the imagination. The Somme was an epic of both slaughter and futility; a profligate waste of men and materiel such as the world had never seen. On the morning of July 1, 1916, 110,000 British infantrymen went “over the top.” In a few hours, 60,000 of them were casualties. Nearly 20,000 of these were either dead already or would die of their wounds, many of them lingering for days between the trenches, in no man’s land. The attacking forces did not gain a single one of their objectives.

http://www.historynet.com/field-marshal-sir-douglas-haig-world-war-is-worst-general.htm

World War One has many stories like Haig’s…..so many plans and so many failures.

Road Map To Success

WE as a country are fighting many wars around the world….and most of them are with non-state entities…ISIS, Taleban, AQ, et al……..and the way the world is shaking out this will be the future of warfare, at least as it looks today.

Our State Department (what’s left of it) and the Pentagon needs to find a doable strategy for these types of conflicts……

If, as President Obama asserted, “ideologies are not defeated by guns,” but by “better ideas,” then how should the U.S. military be used to help achieve strategic success in the growing number of protracted, irregular conflicts with ideologically-motivated violent non-state actors (VNSAs)? In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, and many more countries around the globe, VNSAs, motivated by religious, political, ethnic and other status-quo-challenging ideas, have been remarkably resilient, perseverant, and influential. By surviving and rapidly recovering from punishing attacks by the United States and its partners—while continuing to carry out violent agendas against local, regional, and even global adversaries—these VNSAs can credibly claim that they are succeeding strategically. With broad, ambiguous long-term strategic objectives, and an open-ended, evolving path to strategic success, the United States has generally conducted limited military operations intended to disrupt and degrade such VNSAs, followed by the hopeful but indefinite objective of “ultimately defeating” them. In view of the VNSAs’ resilience, persistence, and ideological basis for conflict, the path to strategic success for the United States has remained elusive. Although its military has achieved tactical and operational successes against such adversaries, the U.S. government has struggled to define, much less achieve, strategic success. If military success is not sufficient against ideologically-motivated VNSAs, then how can the United States achieve strategic success and what is the military’s role?

Source: Winning Indefinite Conflicts: Achieving Strategic Success Against Ideologically-Motivated Violent Non-State Actors | Small Wars Journal

Plus we are, as I have said, fighting a multi-domain war……fighting around the world……and this appears to be the way forward for the foreseeable future….we need a plan and we need a good workable plan……

U.S. Army leaders today wrestled with the challenges of equipping and supplying soldiers in what the service sees as a multi-threat battlefield of the future.

To Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the Army has grown too dependent on contractor support to sustain its combat units, a practice that has led to bad habits over the last 15 years of war.

Source: Army Leaders Search for Answers to Multi-Domain Battle | Military.com

What got me on the road to this post was something that I read in the news awhile back…..I watch conflicts around the world and the way they are fought and resolved…..and the report I read was a bit disturbing……

Donald Trump’s administration is considering a military proposal that would designate various undeclared battlefields worldwide to be “temporary areas of active hostility”, the Guardian has learned.

If approved, the Pentagon-proposed measure would give military commanders the same latitude to launch strikes, raids and campaigns against enemy forces for up to six months that they possess in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Source: Pentagon wants to declare more parts of world as temporary battlefields | US news | The Guardian

To my way of thinking this is a free ride to attack and kill with little or no oversight.

As SecState Tillerson made sure to point out……he has made it clear the diplomacy is out of the question….if that is out what then?

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday that “all of the options are on the table,” including the use of military force, to deal with the threat of North Korea and its ever-escalating weapons program.

Tillerson, making his first trip to South Korea since taking over as America’s top diplomat, visited the demilitarized zone along the border with North Korea on Friday, according to the Associated Press. He said preemptive military action against North Korea, which recently conducted a ballistic missile test, could be necessary if the repressive regime’s weapons program rises to a level “that we believe requires action.”

If diplomacy is a failure then all options are NOT on the table.

You want something to fear then I give you above for a bit of contemplation.

But it will fall on deaf ears….for most are too narrow minded to think past the headline of the day from the “Ignorati”.

War: Symmetry Is Not Everything

The war brow beating continues…….

Inkwell Institute

Subject:  Armed Conflict/Military Action

A lovely word….”symmetry”….it means to be pleasingly equal…..but this is not about architecture or paintings or some math equation….nope….this paper will focus on armed conflict….war if you will…..

Since antiquity there has been a belief that an army must equal or have an advantage over the opponent…..during the Cold War it was painfully obvious of this belief…..we called it the Arms Race…..where the US and the USSR spent billions upon billions to keep step with each other in the weapons department….with the fall of the Soviet Union that tactic was NO longer needed for the US was the dominant power in the world and we could relax the race for bigger and better weapons of destruction….since they would NO longer be needed as a deterrent to the Soviets…..

Source: Strategy, Military Tactics and Weapons: Asymmetric War and the New Geopolitics | Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

The days of a D-Day style invasion and the Blitzkrieg are gone…..history has shown us that an invasion is two things…..lots of destruction and allows extremists to gain a much needed foothold.

Recently “asymmetrical” warfare has a new name….”Hybrid Warfare”…..I guess it is easier to remember than the “A” word.

I also read an excellent piece  written on the site “War On The Rocks”…….

In trying to separate hybrid warfare from the classical bins of conventional or irregular war, I prefer to use Frank Hoffman’s definition, “a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the same time and battlespace to obtain [a group’s] political objectives.” There are other definitions out there, but you will find they are not being applied correctly to analysis of Russian tactics. Unfortunately, what Russian hybrid warfare is, and how it works, varies dramatically depending on what article, report, or PowerPoint brief you are reading. The more we have talked about it, the less we understand it as a useful concept or framework for looking at Russian actions.

Source: Russian Hybrid Warfare and Other Dark Arts

The days of massive assaults like Normandy are long gone…..time for the military to consider a new way of fighting, if fight they must, their numerous wars……so far all their efforts are dismal failure…..and a colossal waste of time, resources and cash.

War is changing…..either adapt or die!

ISIS: We Have A New Plan (Again)

I have been criticizing the Obama admin for their lack of  workable solution to the conflicts we are now fighting…..the problem as I see it it is that the “planner4s” have this “old school” military mind that cannot deal with the wars of the 21st century…..asymmetrical wars…..

As always the US has a new plan, much like the old plan, to find the step that will assure of a victory……so far these plans look more like stumbles than steps…..

Below is an op-ed I wrote for my friends over at Ace News Room….a very good site for those newshounds that want to know what is happening beyond the crap fed to them by their media sources……

Source: ISIS: We Have A New Plan (Again)

Comments are greatly appreciated…..please let your thoughts be known………