View Full Version : Army only has two two combat ready brigades?
If Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno were to receive an order to deploy thousands of troops into a combat situation, he would be hard-pressed to comply. That’s because the U.S. Army reportedly only has two combat-ready brigades right now.
“Even the ones headed to Afghanistan are qualified for the trainer and adviser mission, not combat,”*Defense News reports....
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/21/army-chief-of-staff-reveals-his-greatest-fear/
FlagDayNCO
10-22-2013, 08:56
I agree our Army has been reduced well below what any of us would call "Combat Ready", but the definition has changed many times in the recent decades.
When I joined in 1988, my first Line Company had almost 200 hundred men. When I left AD in 1992, three line platoons was reduced to two line platoons. A squad went from 10-13 men, reduced to 7-9 men.
The Department of Army big wigs claim our fighting capabilities, our lethality, has increased per Soldier, so we don't need as many war fighters.
I think this guy is part of the DOD and DA program to convince America they need their money back from the budget cuts/ reductions.
His words: “There is going to come a time when we simply don’t have enough money to provide what I believe to be the right amount of ground forces to conduct contingency operations,”
Everything is about money, for sure, but that has become America's cure-all. Money. I also just caught "Contigency Operations"... Don't they say "WAR!" anymore?
How about saving a few Billion Dollars by not increasing the General Officer staffing? How about purging these Generals that are in bed with DOD Contractors for lucrative design contracts.
I know we need to modernize the force, but not at the expense of boots on the ground. That is what really matters, regardless of the missions.
Combat ready?
What the fuck does that mean anymore anyway? SHARPS, IO, IA, Ethics Training, Human Trafficing, SSD, On-line NCOES, langugage training, OPSEC, command climate surveys, MEDPROS etc etc etc...
...and dont fucking come up short on that shit because it is briefed to the boss. All that shit has to be done before are are deployable. "All weapons zero and qualification complete" doesn't show up as a "traffic light" on my AKO portal so it cant be all that important.
Now back to the meat of the discussion, how combat ready does Molly need to be when her platoon is just defending the TOC against insider attacks? She isn't doing the find-fix-finish or pressure-pursue-punish...
...shes getting on a Roshan and asking someone to drone strike the civilians that the tAliban is using for cover.
So again, if your Roshan still has 'minutes' on it, how 'combat ready' do you need to be?
But we sure do have time to make sure women can be infantrymen, SF, etc.
But we sure do have time to make sure women can be infantrymen, SF, etc.
If 49 pushups, 59 situps, and a 15:08 on the APFT produced a 210 instead of a 270 then so be it.
...but thats not the game we are playing. Instead we have made training and readiness a subjective process. Objectivity has been diluted. One need only to crack open a copy of 350-1 and see how many of the mandated training requirements are resident on a deployed unit.
Then see how many of those same soldiers are green on MEDPROS