Task Force Hawk is THE story for the US military today. It is all about how the Army failed to move and deploy a unit of Apache Helicpters 800 miles in Europe to Kosovo. The issue - a culture based on bigger is better - where every threat has to be countered = no effectiveness. The main link takes you to some excellent interviews with very senior Army folks such as the Chief of Staff who are aware of their problems but are having a tough time getting the right things done. Many Chiefs have tried in the last 20 years as well. Maybe only the crisis of war can tip the system to reform.
"The Task Force Hawk experience underscored how little the US Army, by its own leadership's candid
admission, had done since Desert Storm to increase its capacity to get to an emergent theater of operations rapidly and with sufficient forces to offer a credible combat presence. Shortly after the Gulf War, the Army's leadership for a time entertained the thought of reorganizing the service so it might become more agile by abandoning its structure of 10 combat divisions and opting instead for 25 "mobile combat groups" of around 5,000 troops each. Ultimately, however, the Army backed away from that proposed reform, doing itself out of any ability to deploy a strong armored force rapidly and retaining the unpalatable alternatives of either airlifting several thousand lightly armed infantrymen to a threatened theater within days or shipping a contingent of 70-ton M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks over the course of several months."
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