In Iraq, the front line is everywhere

Via the indispensable Yankeedoodle at Iraq Today, we find this interesting article by Phil Carter in the NY Times. Phil argues that the Great Armor Crisis is due to the US military fighting a conflict in which there are no front lines with equipment designed for support behind the front lines.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the military has slowly recognized that its fundamental assumptions about warfare are being rendered obsolete. In Somalia, American troops faced guerrillas adept at trapping military convoys in ambushes in urban areas. In Bosnia, partisans on both sides used land mines to great effect, making every road a potential hazard. And now in Iraq, the insurgency has transformed the battlefield into one that is both nonlinear and noncontiguous, with sporadic fighting flaring up in isolated spots around the country.

Simply put, there are no more front lines. In slow recognition, the Army purchased light armored vehicles in the late 1990’s for its military police to conduct peacekeeping, and more recently spent billions of dollars to outfit several brigades with Stryker medium-weight armored vehicles, which are impervious to most small arms and rocket-propelled grenades and can be deployed anywhere in the world by airplane.

But the fact that there is no longer a front line also means there aren’t any more “rear” areas where support units can operate safely. Support units must now be prepared to face the same enemy as the infantry, but are having to do so in trucks with canvas doors and fiberglass hoods because Pentagon procurement planners never expected they’d have to fight. Remember that Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the Iraq invasion’s most celebrated prisoner of war, was a supply clerk with a maintenance company.

Americans who have never served in the military may not realize the scale of the problem. Napoleon’s army may have marched on its stomach, but ours requires a juggernaut of mechanics, medics, logisticians and truck drivers carrying everything from ammunition to underwear to keep moving. As a general rule, these support troops outnumber combat soldiers by about seven to one.

Phil has additional commentary on his own article on his blog, Intel Dump.

However, there remains a giant elephant in the room: equipment. The Army’s “MTOE’s” — “modified table of organization and equipment” — have not changed much, except for organizational changes such as the move to create “units of action” that are more flexible and modular. Unfortunately, these units still contain much of the same flawed equipment allocations, such as light-skinned vehicles with no armor to protect the crew and too few crew-served weapons for force protection. These MTOEs were drawn up a long time ago. Though they have been revised many times, they have not been changed to incorporate the new realities of warfare. That’s a real problem, and it’s one that must be fixed.

For more detail on the problem, visit Noah Schachtman at Defense Tech, here and here. Those posts point out the issues involved in acquiring new equipment and armor kits for equipment already deployed. Considering the unexpected levels of wear and the enormous resupply effort required for simply keeping the equipment already in Iraq running, one wonders how the addition of some 12,000 troops, many light infantry (i.e. no armored vehicles – the 82nd Airborne currently deploying is an example) will affect the current crisis. More troops mean not only more possible targets for the resistance, but also far more supplies.