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We must not forget that the tank was not developed to defeat the tank. It was developed in World War I to defeat the machine-gun and to penetrate layered defenses in torn terrain. The ultimate goal was to  to restore mobility to the infantry, punch holes in the defense, and unleash cavalry to exploit those holes. The chore remains virtually unchanged since the British deployed tanks at Cambrai in 1917. The tank enables maneuver. But as the British learned in the mud of the Western Front, the tank restores maneuver to the battlefield only when coupled with all arms—fires and aviation—including that which air forces bring.

via www.thestrategybridge.com

COL Donahoe's article is correct. You have to have heavy forces to win the heavy fight.

Unfortunately, he does gloss over a critical strategic issue here, particularly in light of how the article leans heavily on a Baltic scenario.

The threat of US heavy armor weeks in the future in the Baltic is far less a deterrence than US Infantry in the Baltic right now.

That is, let us look to, say, Crimea. Let's argue for the sake of argument that the US was willing to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea. Russia was able to mobilize and deploy its forces in about 48 hours, executing a coup de main.

Had US light forces been there, those forces might not have been able to do more than fight a delaying action, and that at high cost.

But the strategic calculation of actually engaging US forces is different that the US threatening to deploy forces later. And there simply is no way the US can move an ABCT to points in Eastern Europe anywhere near as fast as Russia can move its forces.

So if we wish our forces in Europe to have any real deterrent effect, they must either be forward deployed into critical strategic areas, or so more deployable (and thus light, and thus vulnerable) as to be more agile than Russian forces.

The United States Army will soon begin distributing a weapon system introduced in 1946. The M3 Carl Gustav rocket launcher will bolster the firepower of rifle platoons, giving them a much-needed edge.

Developed by Bofors (now Saab), the Carl Gustav is a lightweight, man-portable recoilless rifle. Recoilless rifles are like a cross between an artillery gun and a bazooka: While they have propellant at the base of the projectile like a rocket, the propellant doesn't burn beyond the barrel, meaning the projectile flies unpowered like a bullet or artillery shell. Unlike artillery, propellant gasses are directed backwards, counteracting the weapon's recoil and making it "recoilless". The weapon is referred to as a "rifle" due to the spiral rifling in the barrel, which stabilizes the projectile. 

via www.popularmechanics.com

Rangers and SOF have been toting the Carl Gustav for years, but now each rifle platoon in IBCTs will have one issued.

We posted a couple weeks ago about the results of the Sullivan Cup competition, for excellence in Tank Gunnery. Here’s some B-Roll footage of the crew from the North Carolina Army National Guard that won the competition. 

That ought to keep some of the resident C-DATs happy for a while.

In June of 1864, Major  General William T. Sherman was leading his army on a campaign from Chattanooga, Tennessee on the march across the South that would eventually see the destruction of Atlanta.

Interestingly, Sherman’s initial objective was not Atlanta, per se, but rather the destruction of Confederate  General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee.

Sortieing from Chattanooga, Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi would attempt to engage the  Army of Tennessee along the mountainous route from Chattanooga to Atlanta.

Johnston was sorely aware that his outnumbered army could be destroyed by Sherman’s more powerful forces, and so fell back on a series of strongly fortified positions. 

Sherman was aware that his strength advantage could be easily squandered by frontal assaults upon such works, and repeatedly sought to unhinge Johnston’s positions by turning the flanks. The hope was to catch Johnston as he fell back from such a position, but before he could establish another.  But Johnston succeeded each time in avoiding a decisive engagement.

Finally,  in late June, as Johnston held strong positions around Kennesaw Mountain, just outside Marietta, some 17 miles northwest of Atlanta, Sherman attempted a direct assault upon a position. His forces were repulsed with significant losses.

However, a demonstration by one of his subordinate units again managed to turn Johnston’s flank, and Johnston again, seeing his defenses unhinged, fell back once again.  Sherman’s tactical defeat at Kennesaw quickly became an operational level victory. Johnston fell back across the Chattahoochee River.

With the last significant defensible terrain on the route to Atlanta abandoned, Confederate President Jefferson Davis relieved Johnston of command, replacing him with John Bell Hood. Hood’s task, the defense of Atlanta, was, however, an impossible one, and the city would fall to Sherman in about two months.

In 1850, in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain, 14 Presbyterian men formed Midway Presbyterian Church, serving the rural farming community of the western part of Cobb County, Georgia.  Almost a century later, about a mile up the road from the church, my father would grow  up on a small farm, and attend Midway each Sunday.

He grew up, and left Cobb County, and spent a lifetime traveling the nation and the world. He married an Alabama girl,and for over 50 years, they were man and wife, best friends, lovers, and a team that while often separated by many miles, were inseparable in love. Upon his passing in 2007, my father was laid to rest in the small cemetery behind the sanctuary, near his father and mother, and his firstborn daughter, who died in infancy.

Yesterday, my father’s wife, my mother, Mae “Pogo” Barie was laid to rest beside her husband and best friend. The rain poured upon us, briefly, like the tears of the mourners. And then, when the moment came to commit her remains to the earth, the sun broke through, shining with the promise of hope and life everlasting.

Someday, I too will grow old, and pass from this mortal coil. And I too will be laid to rest in this small, old cemetery.

And I can think of no better spot for my final repose.

Cold Lake, Alberta is a major RCAF operating base, and has some of the best military airspace in North America for training. 

The statute of limitations appears to have expired on some low level flying back in the day, featuring some CF-5 Freedom Fighters operating out of Cold Lake. Toward the end, there’s a bit of CF-188 Hornet action, but for the most part, it’s F-5s low enough to really get the heart rate going.

When I was stationed at Illesheim, Germany, a former Luftwaffe base, it made a convenient target for various NATO forces to practice air raids against. And I recall one pleasant spring day walking to the mess hall when suddenly half a dozen Canadian Hornets appeared from all around the compass at high speed and very, very low level. It must have taken an entire 20 seconds for the raid package to appear, strike, and disappear.

The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine is now in its 25th month. What began as a relatively bloodless superpower intervention in Crimea and morphed into a proxy “separatist” insurrection in the Donbass region has turned into a two-year-long, real war. Despite repeated attempts to negotiate an effective cease-fire, the struggle in Ukraine has involved the largest-scale battles in Europe since the end of World War II.

Like the Yom Kippur War 40 years earlier, the Russo-Ukraine War is a natural “test bed” and insightful glimpse of what is to come on future battlefields. What follows are 10 of the most critical lessons the U.S. Army must learn from this conflict as it emerges from 15 years of counterinsurgency operations and turns its attention once again to a near-peer threats.

via www.armymagazine.org

This is your "must read" of the day. Go read the whole thing.

A soldier who should've been firing blanks hit an Apache helicopter with live rounds last week during training at Fort Irwin, California, an Army spokesman confirmed on Tuesday.

The soldier, with 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, was augmenting the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment for the exercise, Fort Irwin spokesman Ken Drylie said. The cavalry regiment provides opposing-force personnel for rotations at the National Training Center.

via www.armytimes.com

This story surfaced yesterday, but I sat on it until I could get a wee bit more information.

There's two phases to each rotation at Ft. Irwin, the force-on-force that uses blanks, then the large scale live fire exercise.

This incident took place during the force-on-force, and no one should have had any live ammunition at all. Where the ammo came from is going to be a focus of the AR15-6 investigation.

We're first and foremost glad that no one was injured in the incident. But we're also rather troubled that it happened in the first place. Obviously, the brunt of the blame falls on the soldier who shot at the Apache. But it also means we have to ask what was going on in the unit that the first line supervisors didn't catch on to live ammo floating around, and the company level leadership that let first line supervisors get away with not knowing there was ammo floating around.

I'm not calling for everyone to be relieved, but I am saying that this unit needs to take a long, hard look at the standards, and what is actually going on in the unit.