XBradTC

On this day in 1969…

Also, as for us, we’re …

But not headed quite so far away.

My first job as a general was to write Certain Victory, the Army’s official story of the First Gulf War. My mission was the first of its kind: Deliver an operational history immediately after the war, drawn from the views of soldiers who had fought there. Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, the Army Vice Chief of Staff at the time, told me to produce a printable version in one year. Volumes like these normally take at least a decade or more, but Peay wanted to get our message out ahead of the mountains of popular chronicles in the works. We also knew the Air Force was writing a similar book on the air war. We knew what they were going to say and how popular their message would be, so we were committed to being both first and factually right.

Most of the team working on Certain Victory had participated in the campaign, but they were not writers or historians. Their firsthand experience with ground truth was, in my opinion, the chief reason why our work became a classic. My team had complete authority to talk to every soldier in the Army. We swam through hundreds of thousands of operational and personal memoirs and spoke to virtually every senior commander, many of them still in theater. I exercised my general officer authority to declassify documents that would have taken decades had we followed the standard practices of the day.

Vietnam Generation Vindicated

Our first conclusion about the war was personal, not operational: The clear success of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.’s “Great Wheel” maneuver of moving hundreds of miles across the desert to attack the Iraqi army flank finally ended the stigma of Vietnam and vindicated my generation. The Army that emerged from the blowing sands of Kuwait and Iraq was new and proud and confident—maybe too confident, as subsequent events would suggest.

via Winners and Losers From First Gulf War: ‘Great Wheel’ Was Operational Genius, but Strategic Consequences Were a Failure | ARMY Magazine.

Left unspoken, but certainly implied is the disastrous role GEN Colin Powell had in convincing President Bush to stop the ground war before the Republican Guard was destroyed.

Here’s a pretty good documentary showing the C-17 in action.

I have stated several times before in this column that Moscow’s secret war in eastern and southern Ukraine is having a devastating impact on Russia’s armed forces. It not only throws into question the results of the successful military reforms that former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov carried out in 2008-2011, but it is doing so much more quickly than I would have imagined possible. The site Gazeta.ru published a sensational investigation reporting that dozens of soldiers from the 33rd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade stationed in Maikop left their military unit last fall and now stand accused of desertion. The contract soldiers claim they had to leave the Kadamovsky training area due to inhuman living conditions and pressure from superiors to go serve as volunteers in the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics in Ukraine. As expected, the Russian military command vehemently denied everything. However, even official data indicates that the Maikop Garrison Court convicted 62 soldiers in the first half of 2015 on charges of “leaving their units without permission,” but convicted only about half that number, 35, on the same charges in the four years between 2010 to 2014. What could have caused such a surge in desertions? It is also worth noting that the 33rd Brigade was formed in 2005 by presidential decree and was intended to become an elite mountain unit.

via War in Ukraine Ruined Russian Military Reform (Op-Ed) | Opinion | The Moscow Times.

I don’t know the bona fides of the paper or the author, but it is certainly a plausible argument that the low level war with Ukraine is causing great distress in the Russian Army.

From the ashes of the USSR, and after disastrous campaigns in Chechnya, the Russian army strove  mightily to transform itself into a  professional military, much like ours. While it still relies on conscription, a growing percentage were, in recent years, contracted enlisted soldiers, much like ours. But the strain of combat is apparently not as well endured in the Russian army as the American. Life is tough in Russia under the best of circumstances. Fighting a war with little popular support doesn’t help.

A number of soldiers complained their unit commanders are discouraging the wear of multiple camouflage patterns in formation, and the word has gotten to the SMA.

Sergeant Major of the Army Dan Dailey had a message sent this week to all command sergeants major reminding them that — during the several-year transition from the old Army Combat Uniform to the new one — there can and should be mixing of uniforms.

“Commanders continue to hold the discretion to dictate the duty uniform, but they should be comfortable with allowing multiple uniforms to be worn within their formation during this transition period,” according to the message, sent via Dailey’s executive officer, Sgt. Maj. Joe Parson Jr.

Soldiers were able to begin buying the new Operational Camouflage Pattern as of July 1 at 13 U.S. posts as well as South Korea and Japan. Over $1.4 million of the new gear was sold on day 1, according to an email from Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jesse Stalder.

via Unit leaders erroneously crack down on mixed camo.

I sincerely doubt it was company grade officers. Rather, this sort of asshattery is the province of First Sergeants and Sergeants Major.