KAIGUN - the Coming Downfall of the United States Armed Forces

The military of the United States is dying by degrees. It is not being killed by a foreign enemy, but by "Victory Syndrome" - the belief that their winning formula needs no modification. Since the final end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the US military has been on a roll. The officers of the time fully understood the reasons for the ultimate disaster in Vietnam, where the military won (mostly) on the battlefield but ultimately lost the political/public relations war, and set out to fix the problems as they moved up the rank ladders, eventually becoming the military's leaders of the last thirty years.

They did this in a number of ways: by ending the Draft and increasing enlistment standards, increasing and streamlining research and development on new weapons systems (...at least, compared to the process in the 1960's and '70's), re-focusing the bulk of the Army on fighting a "major-war" opponent while retaining most of the special-operations lessons of Vietnam. It was expensive - and became far more so when the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, CA and the later "Low-Intensity" facility at Fort Polk, LA came online - but it worked. Similar programs were pursued by the other military services.

It worked so well, that for more than 25 years, the United States never suffered a significant defeat on the battlefield; the problems occurring in several operations, like the invasions of Grenada and Panama - were swept under the rug as "teething troubles".

Then came Operation Gothic Serpent.

Popularized by the book and subsequent movie "Blackhawk Down", Gothic Serpenteliciteda warning that all might not be well in the Army. Careful study of the operation revealed serious mistakes at most command levels above that of the squad. Gothic Serpent was written off as well, however, as an aberration.

Fast forward to March, 2003. Under a cloud of international suspicion - and occasional outrage - the United States led a tiny coalition into battle to topple Saddam Hussien from his throne. Militarily, the outcome was never in serious doubt.

But things did not go as smoothly as expected:

• Despite a quarter-century of preparation and limited opposition, "Dunkirk Drag" (the pause caused by assault units out-running their logistical train) turned out not to have been solved after all.
• A battalion of 36 Apache attack helicopters - operating according to well-established, 20+ year-old doctrines - was so badly shot apart by the "incompetent Iraqi Republican Guard" that the battlion was rendered "combat-ineffective" for over a month; only the Apache's robust design saved more crews from being shot down and killed or captured.
• The port of Umm Qasr remained blocked for far longer than necessary, due to a lack of port-operations units in the USMC and USN units deployed there. These units previously existed (the author served in one), but they had long been broken up, and their component pieces 'farmed' out to other units.
• In the aftermath of the military collapse of the Hussein regime, looting and rioting ravaged the country; neither provisions nor plans were made for how to control the civilian population, reestablish order and commence a coherent rebuilding process in the aftermath of Hussien's defeat.
• Rather than assemble a coalition of local leaders to form a government after the Ba'ath Party's evisceration, US authorities imported Iraqi exiles in what local Iraqi's have described "coming in on the back's of American tanks."
• Ultimately damning, the reasons repeated vigorously for going to war proved to be - at best - criminally- incompetent mistakes...and at worst, out-right lies.

And these are just the most salient points.

Then, in one of the most blindingly stupid - there is no other word for it - decisions of the last hundred or so years, the "Coalition Provisioning Authority" (CPA; who thinks of these names?) decided to disband the Iraqi Army. To understand the depth of stupidity in this decision is vital to understand why Iraq is in the state it is in, today.

In "disbanding" (versus "discharging") the Iraqi Army, the CPA threw c.250,000 armed, uniformed and trained troops out into the street - most with no pensions, and not much more than the clothes on their backs, if they were that lucky - many of whom had done both the smart thing, and what was asked of them: they sat it out. Many Iraqi Army troops had either deserted when the invasion went in, and many more had simply surrendered in place. The Coalition effort would have been significantly more expensive had they opted to fight. http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/world-wars/894-last-stand-tawakalna.html

To add stupidity to a heavy-handed chopping blade, the invasion force had been so severely paired down during the furious planning work-up to the invasion (a planning arc that threw out carefully designed and rehearsed warplans developed over a ten-plus year period) due primarily to the interference of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor, "Cobra II", Pantheon, 2006 and Thomas E. Ricks, "Fiasco", Penguin Press HC, 2006), that there were no troops to spare to "police up" (in military-speak) the vast amounts of small (and not so small) arms littering the countryside. When the "stay-behinds" (military-speak, again), the survivors of the Ba'ath Party, the Republican Guard and the so-called "Saddam Fedayeen" simply walked into schools, mosques, hospitals, etcetera, and took away whatever weapons they wanted.

The punishing effect of these weapons would be felt later.

However, that was in the future. On "The Day", at the "boots-in-the-dirt" level, American troops proved to be reasonably competent, far more so than in all previous US wars, at least at the beginning; tactical platoon-, company- and battalion-level operations against "military and/or paramilitary forces" were conducted to near-perfection.

But, when it was a simple matter of protests, there was no change in style - little thought had been given to training troops in crowd control techniques, since the military had been planning on more than thirty companies of crowd-trained Military Police. Predictable results ensued: as vastly greater force was applied than was warranted by the situation, guerillas were handed propaganda ammunition of the highest caliber, complete with ready access to internet outlets.

Then, in April of 2004 - as had been predicted as early as December of 2003 by Joe Vialls (giving credit where it is due) the Iraqi city of Fallujah exploded in the aftermath of the savage ambush and murder of four American "security contractors", and the gory display of their charred corpses from the girders of one of the city's bridges.

Now, Dirty Little Secret's© started coming out. Taken from a popular series of non-fiction books by author, combat simulations creator and strategic consultant James F. Dunnigan from the 1980's and -90's, "DLS" are not so much classified information, as information that is "in the public domain", but is not generally well-known.

In Iraq, contractors of all sorts were having a field day: "security consultants" (a.k.a., "mercenaries") were guarding anything and everything - usually oil-related - and were making extraordinary amounts of money doing so; other contractors were being given large-dollar contracts to do everything from rebuilding infrastructure to training the new Iraqi Army.

And how was the future Iraqi government going to pay for all of this? By mortgaging the Gross Domestic Product of their country for the next several generations...Of course, the people who signed off on this were the ones "riding in on the backs of American tanks."

Then came the news that the US Army had had to contract out such basic support services as cargo-hauling through a war zone and providing meals other than MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), among other things. Part of the Army's problems during the "April Surprise" turned out to be that many of the foreign contractors were refusing to haul loads into battle-zones, and the Army was having trouble taking up the slack.

Then came manning and equipment issues. The US Army was so short-handed and infantry-poor, that its armored/tank crews had to conduct dismounted patrols on their own...and, because of a lack of rifles in the inventory (according to the Pentagon), their troops were using Iraqi AK-47's, as all they had was one M-16A2 rifle and four M-9 Beretta pistols per tank.

As employment by guerrillas of "Improvised Explosive Devices" (IEDs), the new term for "booby trap", became more and more frequent it was revealed that Army "Hummers" (the vehicle that replaced the Jeep) were failing at a staggering rate, as the up-armoring kits being sent to Iraq were being fitted to the vehicles without the manufacturer-recommended upgrades to the suspension being performed, first.

The Hummers were also the only vehicle available for convoy escorts...something that the Army had apparently forgotten in the years since Vietnam. This would not have been so terrible a problem, but for the fact that it was not corrected immediately:

Gun Trucks 1
Gun Trucks 2

And again, these are merely the most salient points.

While some of these issues have been corrected, many of them persist, right through the seemingly-endless grind of the war in Afghanistan. Now, in addition to the above problems, ever-darker issues are bubbling to the surface: things like Abu Ghraib, repeated accusations of massacres and random shootings of Iraqi civilians, among many others.

So.

What does all of this have to do with the title of this article, and what exactly does the title refer to?

"Kaigun" is the most common term in English used to refer to the WW2-era Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN).

The IJN, at the beginning of WW2, was a navy without peer. Until the American industrial-base shifted into high gear, the IJN was capable of hammering any fleet that challenged it into scrap metal. Despite the popular perception, the IJN rebounded effectively from its defeats in the Coral Sea and at Midway - the United States simply out-produced Japanese industry in turning out ships, planes and men. The US Navy - by its own admission - opted for a lot of 'good enough' pilots and crews over a much smaller number of exceptional pilots and crews (as the IJN did).

The result was the ultimate (and rapid) destruction of the IJN, as they were increasingly unable to recoup their losses fast enough, coupled to an inability to grasp the distances of the Pacific Ocean, resulting in a terrific over-extension of resources.

To sum up, the IJN in WW2 can be described in four words: "Tactically Supreme - Strategically Incompetent".

As of this writing () the US military is, by its own words, badly over-extended; it's equipment is being attrited by wear at a frightening rate; it's troops are dispirited, disheartened and abused by the so-called "healthcare system" that is supposed to care for them after their injury in service, as their new President seeks to increase the operations tempo on the one hand, while watching the economy - the military's sole source of funding - wither on the vine.

With recruitment down (who wants to risk their life in a war they don't see ending?), there are increasing rumblings from inside the Beltway that a reinstatement of the Draft may be inevitable: .

But still, there are no real changes in sight.

Tactically, the US Army and Marine Corps are virtually unchallenged when it comes to "bayonet-to-bayonet" combat, but there is little knowledge of how to "win the peace" after defeating an enemy in the field; the US Navy and Air Force - also virtually unchallenged in their respective arenas - can only bring to bear winning combat force by cutting other potential theaters to the bone...

...Meanwhile, the "leaders" who started this mess (including here the ones who voluntarily abrogated Congress' powers over declaring war on a country) are not seeking resolution, but continue to "Wag The Dog"© - threatening war with numerous countries - all while taking no time to fix effectively the problems that are increasingly hindering combat operations...and while the vultures circle.

All it will take is a nudge in the right place - two or more countries starting a war with the US (or, vice-versa) - and the US will be bargaining for the safe return of most of its military forces, as the supply system collapses, stranding troops in places that have been killing armies for millennia.