So, Expeditionary Warfare Conference long ago in Panama City where the deputy commander TRADOC, as I recall, got up and talked. He talked about many things. I'll be damned if I can remember what his main point was but these were 3 charming little vignettes he wove into whatever he was talking about and they were truly wonderful
There was General Sherman and his knife reforms for the Army. Throughout the Civil War it had evidently bugged him that the troops had to carry so many sharp tools and he thought and the Army thought they could consolidate them and eliminate the load and the wear and tear on the infantry. He was the Chief of Staff of the Army after the War and he had a plan. He appointed a research team and told them to get to work. "Find the solution!"
They settled on trying to find a universal common knife that would replace the fish knives, gutting knives, skinning knifes, carving knives, bayonets, entrenching tools and all that and get it down to just one single knife to do all that sharp and pointy thing. Sort of like the Navy and Air Force getting together to build a common fighter design.....or even having the Marines climb aboard with common fighter known as the F-35abc.
Then there was the German Army and their fascination with long range artillery and the siege guns and how they took up whole railroad trains with an enormous cannon with a 121 foot long barrel and shells that weighed over 200 pounds with every shell numbered in sequence because each and every shell was different because the engineers knew the wear and tear of each round fired would wear down the lands on the barrels which meant each shell had to be just a little bit bigger in order to keep everything proper and ballistic....
The shells could be fired 81 miles and reach altitudes of 24 miles and flew so far over the horizon that the ballistic calculations had to incorporate the Coriolis Effect of the Earth. This was a masterpiece only Krupp could design and build and it was simply magnificent. Yes, yes, it was damned near useless but wow, the engineering!
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| The Paris Gun |
There was this tiny fire control issue. On it's first day 21 rounds were fired at Paris and Crown Prince Wilhelm who had been invited to observe asked the Vice Admiral in charge of the gun, "so, Max, what did we hit?" There was no answer for there was no way to observe the fall of the shot.
According to the Deputy Commander, TRADOC, a young officer leaped forward and declared that he would have the answer within 12 hours and indeed he did. He found a man to bicycle to the nearest French town and get the next issue of the Paris daily in the morning and the paper was full of the details where each of the shots landed. Such was the nature of war in the modern age.
And this all came to mind while reading the always enchanting Chant du Départ who recalled that day long ago when the new Army rifle used at Little Big Horn, was the 1873 Springfield Trapdoor Carbine with it's copper bullets which the Army had just approved for use and which, due to the economies imposed on an massively over-tasked and severely underfunded army of 25,000 men, meant that they had not bothered to fire more than a hundred bullets at one time out of the new rifles which meant that when the 7th cavalry was surrounded by every indian for a thousand miles and blazing away with their guns, the bullets made with a copper case which disastrously expanded when the gun was fired repeatedly for extended periods left many a round getting stuck in the barrel in the midst of battle and can you see the cavalry men surrounded by a zillion indians trying to use a knife that could double as an entrenching tool trying to dig those little bitty cartridges out of the barrel on their rifles....
I think the General's point was that innovations in weapons need to incorporate both adequate training, experience and doctrine for the employment of the weapons. His point might be that those tasked with equipping the Army with weapons for the next war had a clear duty to make sure that the men going into battle had weapons that worked, had been tested and operated under all operating conditions and had the training and the experience to make them work to specification.
I would have to say that I think that the Navy and the Air Force are showing a pretty clear and convincing case that they have successfully carried out the functions that the General was saying were/are so important in those brief interludes between wars and it remains to be seen if the Army has followed suit.
From what I know of the Army, I am not all that sanguine. You see I know a thing most don't know and that is that using modern satellite communications we can command and direct a naval war from anywhere on earth. There is not just no need to direct a war from some headquarters in Bahrain or an Air War from Qatar, the real operational cell is back in Tampa. The showpieces in the middle east were just for show.
I don't think ARCENT can do that from CENTCOM because I don't think the Army has even begun to grasp how deadly to it the drones are when they are free to seek out and kill every C4I node they can reach. The Navy and the Air Force don't need to put those nodes out there in fixed locations and so they don't. The Army doesn't know any other way.
Still, there's always fractional orbital bombardment, blowing the dams and mining 100% of the ports and harbors. Drop the bridges and blow the tunnels and the people will soon die of thirst and starvation. It's an old trick. I believe that last time it was used there was over a thousand years ago and you can still see the marks left from when the Mongols destroyed the canals and waterworks in Mesopotamia.
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| Steamer Far West at Little Big Horn |
The Far West was an amazing little ship and weapon system.
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