#commanding the absolute army would require so much logistics planning

[embrace-your-illithid]

Yes, I, too, will attack the Emperor and betray him deeply

By "attack him" and "betray him deeply" I am, of course, referring to the fact that I shall kiss him and we will then proceed to be evil together

As we should

[esprit-de-corps-magazine]

SITUATION REPORT: Canadian Army Commander Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre Shares His Vision Of The Future Army

Interview by David Pugliese

Earlier this year Esprit de Corps magazine interviewed Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre about his views on the state of the land force, its procurement needs and where he sees the service moving in the future. Eyre assumed the position of Commander of the Canadian Army in August 2019. He has served in a variety of command and staff appointments including command of 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, 3rd Canadian Division and Joint Task Force West, Deputy Commanding General – Operations for XVIII (US) Airborne Corps, and as Commander Military Personnel Command. He was also the first non-American Deputy Commander of United Nations Command, the multinational force supporting the Republic of Korea since 1950. The Canadian Army is the largest element of the Canadian Armed Forces, consisting of 23,000 full-time soldiers in the Regular Force; 19,000 part-time soldiers in the Reserve Force; 5,300 Canadian Rangers who serve in sparsely settled northern, coastal and isolated areas of Canada; and 3,300 civilian employees who support the Army. The following interview has been edited for length:

Esprit de Corps: What direction do you plan for the Canadian Army in the future? Eyre: The world is going to be a dangerous place so the demands being placed on the Army aren’t going to go down. If anything it will increase. I think we have a confluence of stressors happening on the global stage. You have the resurgence of great power competition. That’s always dangerous. You’ve got global climate change as well as an acceleration in technological change. You’ve got changes in demographics and the rise of populism. So all of these are creating stressors in the security environment. We can’t really forecast what the future is going to bring other than it will be pretty dangerous and uncertain. But I don’t see the role of land power diminishing. That’s the philosophy I’ve been sharing. It’s really underpinning where I want to take the Army. I’m calling it the Army modernization strategy. I want to carry on with a number of initiatives my predecessors put in place, really integrate them, tie them together and provide some priority. Right now one of our biggest limiting factors is one of resources and the most important one is people who can execute the change. That is where the prioritization comes in. Esprit de Corps: What areas will be prioritized? Eyre: In our modernization we’re going to look at a number of things. We’re going to look at readiness. So how do we get forces ready for operations? How do we increase the overall availability of forces? How do we train our forces? How do we bring in modern training techniques that really reflect some of the cutting edge learning procedures and systems out there? The second piece is the Reserves. We are going to continue to strengthen the Army Reserves, continue to reinforce them and make sure they will be really able to provide operational capability to the Army as a whole? The other areas are people, targeted investments, and concepts and capabilities. So do we need to take a look at how we’re selecting people for different positions? The targeted investment piece examines what capital investments should we put our efforts into. Concepts and capabilities is to look at the question of how we fight in this new environment. How does the Army maneuver in the space of just below the level of violent conflict? We also need to take a look at our force structure to make sure we have that right. Then we will look at what capabilities we need to flesh out in terms of being able to operate in areas like the Arctic because I believe that is going to be of increasing importance for the Army. Esprit de Corps: What’s your current assessment of the Army’s capabilities for the Arctic? Eyre: We have five challenges in this area. How do we get ourselves up there? How do we sustain ourselves? How do we move when we are there? How do we survive? And the final challenge is how do we fight? So where are we in all of this? Well, we have a ways to go. We’re not going to be able to get up there by ourselves so we need to work with the Air Force on that. In terms of tactical mobility we’re working on that. One of the equipment projects we have on the books is our Domestic Arctic Mobility Enhancement program, which is really a Bv-206 replacement. The survive piece concerns me. It’s really about the longer term survive and sustain up there. Our infrastructure density in the Arctic is very very low. What happens if we have to respond to something that is in between infrastructure nodes? These are the nuts we need to crack. The basic soldier skills are relatively easy. That’s stuff we have continued to focus on and at the soldier level I think we’re okay. It’s the higher-level concepts that support everything around that which need a lot of work. Esprit de Corps: Are there technologies that you are focused on or where you want industry to focus on to better support the Army? Eyre: We want to harvest ideas from industry. For instance, how would be get a land force up to an area that has no infrastructure? This is maybe where we refocus our parachute capability, much as it was the same as in the 1950s and 1960s. So our ability to rapidly get boots on the ground in the Arctic could be by parachute. So these are the types of ideas we are exploring. Esprit de Corps: Are there particular areas of interest when it comes to procurement for the Army? Eyre: As part of the modernization strategy I want to lay out project by project and by priority. We are going to be a LAV-based Army for the next two decades. So the question now is how do we protect these LAVs? My top priority is our C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) projects. How do we ensure they can take advantage of the huge amount of data that is out there and connect them to be able to operate in this modern environment. The second priority I would say would be ground-based air defence. We see the evolving threat from drones, from rockets, and other forms of indirect fire. We have to be able to protect ourselves. We need to look at Joint Fires Modernization. That’s somewhat tied to the C4ISR piece so we have to look at how we tap into the joint fires available, not only from the Air Force but from our coalition allies. We need to ensure we are interoperable and able to access the range of capabilities that are available. Another priority is figuring out how we sustain ourselves. So this is where trucks come in, and projects such as the Logistics Vehicle Modernization, as well as some of combat support capabilities such as modernizing our bridge and gap capability. There’s probably another 15 or so projects that would be just below this list I just gave you. Esprit de Corps: Many of these projects are farther out in terms of when they are expected to materialize. Can you advance some of these procurement programs? Eyre: We are pushing these ones as fast as we can and as fast as the investment portfolio allows for. These ones definitely have my attention. Esprit de Corps: Have you made any decisions on the requirements for ground-based air defence? For instance, will the system be outfitted on a LAV chassis? Eyre: We haven’t got that far into it. We know there will be a number of components that will be key, particularly the fire direction centre that can tap into all of the different sensors out there. That would gather information from not just our own sensors but joint and allied ones as well. Such a centre would also tap into other shooters. Conceivably one of our radars could pick up a target and that information goes through the fire direction centre and is connected to a navy asset which then fires a navy missile. That’s where we really want to go. We want to have the brains of this piece right. That’s where the C4ISR piece comes in. The network that will be so important. Esprit de Corps: Can you provide examples of where you want to go with C4ISR? Eyre: Interoperability is a huge piece. So as part of the Australia-Canada-Britain-US-New Zealand (alliance), we have some pretty intense Army interoperability forums where we sit down a number of times each year and talk about the specifications needed to drive the technical interoperability. So we are talking about the ability to put a battalion in each other’s brigades, a brigade in each other’s divisions and seamlessly share data back and forth. That is what we’re aiming for. Our projects will have a huge part of that. The other challenge with the C4ISR piece is changing the way we procure. So the spiral procurement – fielding a little bit of the capability at a time because technology is advancing so fast. We need to be agile to get these capabilities in the hands of our soldiers so what we’re fielding is not absolute. Esprit de Corps: But won’t you end up with an Army equipped with a variety of various systems doing the same role? Eyre: I told my staff I am fine with an asymmetric Army that is constantly fielding updated versions of equipment so we can keep that technological edge. If we fail, we fail and we revert back to the old systems. We have to take some risk because our potential adversaries are doing it. They are rapidly fielding new technologies. What we need to have is a culture of continuous change. We introduce new capabilities and learn very rapidly how to incorporate them and employ them. Esprit de Corps: Most big organizations have an aversion to risk. Won’t the challenge be that others might not feel the same way about accepting risk? Eyre: But if we don’t we’ll be irrelevant. We’re not the only ones wrestling with this. Every military in the west is facing this challenge. Esprit de Corps: What is your assessment of the current status of the Army procurement system? Eyre: I take a look at the projects currently in the pipe and I think back to times in the 1990s. Some of my predecessors would be somewhat jealous to see the number of projects now coming through the system. That being said, no Army in history has ever had all the equipment and all of the capabilities that it wanted, or in some cases, needed. But relative to certain periods of our history I think we’re doing fairly well. Could we do better? Absolutely. Esprit de Corps: I’m always puzzled when I see defence analysts claiming the Army is in dire straits when it now operates a wide range of modern equipment, including some of the most modern Leopard tanks, the new TAPVs and recently delivered upgraded LAVs. The Army, when it comes to equipment, seems to be in pretty good condition. Eyre: Yes, but you could probably notice the Canadian proclivity to look at our navels and beat ourselves up. Interview by David Pugliese Part 2 of the interview with Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre will appear in next month’s issue of Esprit de Corps.

[elizabethleslie7654]

The Iran Attack Part III: America’s Burden

check out this awesome jewelry I got hot with free shipping

Tweet

by Tom Shackleford

This is the final article in a series about a potential conflict with Iran for the benefit of Israel. The first article described the fraught situation that currently prevails in the Middle East. The second examined why the panicked mentality in Israel and its partner Saudi Arabia make a conflict with Iran involving the US highly probable, barring a successful Russian attempt at prevention. Now, let’s examine what might be expected of this ill-fated war.

Why must the US be involved?

Israel’s late President Shimon Peres disclosed to the Jerusalem Post in 2014 that he had dissuaded Netanyahu from ordering a preemptive airstrike on Iran. Peres considered it a defining accomplishment of his presidency. He halted the madness by explaining that “the consequences would be catastrophic.” This didn’t come out until last year because he requested that the story be withheld until after his death. Unsurprisingly, it also emerged later that the Saudis secretly offered for the Israelis to overfly their country on the way, during which time Saudi tanker aircraft and rescue helicopters would be airborne to assist. That strike never happened because it would have accomplished nothing of long-term value at a tremendous cost. What the Israelis require is for their golem, Uncle Sam, to deliver comprehensive devastation to the Iranians. Nothing short of that would be a satisfactory solution to Israel’s national security crisis.

What Form Will it Take?

First consider logistics. Iran is more than a few times larger than Iraq, both in population and geography. In order to carry out the Neocon plan for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, nearly a year of buildup was required. The military capability to perform a similar operation in Iran simply does not exist. Moreover, the Bush administration went in hastily. To do so, it had to discard senior voices of reason who clarified precisely why invading Iraq would be a disaster. Some explained how a Shi’a vs Sunni conflict would be unleashed, among other catastrophes. They were invited to hit the road. I attended a bitter lecture by one of these men a couple years after the fact. His description of the foolishness of people with the fate of so many in their hands was disturbing to say the least. It seemed consistent with the facile papers they put out.

The US Central Command makes plans for all sorts of contingencies within its zone of operation. The original plan from Cold Warriors for occupying Iraq rightly involved far more soldiers. The Neocons (often Jewish academics) figured that they could just topple Saddam, introduce democracy, and things would turn out fine. The US Army Chief of Staff, Eric Shinskei , didn’t agree with this naïve outlook. He was forced out.

He was eventually justified by a very painful lesson for the US Army. They will not agree to make that mistake again on an impossible scale. Thus, an attack on Iran would involve an air campaign. There would also be a cyber-warfare component, probably targeting assets like the electrical grid. This has already been attempted by the US and Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities using the Stuxnet Virus, but it ultimately failed to stop the program.

Iran’s nuclear program is nothing like Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power program. Decades ago, Saddam paid the French, who designed the facility specifically to be unable to produce weapons material, to build a reactor that his people couldn’t dream of constructing. The Israelis responded with a combination of murders and a surprise airstrike on the facility. It was destroyed in 1981, and that was the end of things. That won’t work with Iran. Iran’s program is largely the result of their nascent native capabilities. Mossad has already murdered Iranian scientists, but that only slowed things down.

Iran is 17th largest country in the world at 636,372 square miles. They’ve dispersed their nuclear development facilities in the center of the country, buried under mountains. Assuming these facilities could be over-flown, multiple, stacked, direct hits by bunker-busting bombs would have to be achieved to destroy them. That’s never happened in real life before. Even then, that would be a temporary setback for an enraged Iranian populace. The only way to stop a nuclear program (a secondary objective) and stop the provision of Hezbollah (the primary objective) would be to gut Iran and bring down its government. Thus, expect a devastating and extensive campaign.

Ever wonder why we’re not leaving Afghanistan even though the situation there is hopeless, and this fact has been public knowledge for more than a decade? Well it happens to be positioned on the Eastern border of Iran. Our aircraft carriers are marvels of industry. But, the reality is that they’re gigantic targets. It’s really just a question of how many supersonic cruise missiles are fired at them at once. If enough are coming, accompanied by torpedo salvoes, then they don’t stand a chance. This is especially true in a confined space like the Persian Gulf. American military infrastructure in Afghanistan is critical for defeating the Iranians.

Tensions are high, and the rhetoric is hot enough already. However, it’s still Christmas season. The Neocons are busy trying to sell this strike on Iran to Trump, but even they aren’t reckless enough to recommend it immediately. No President in his right mind would want to say to the American people: “Merry Christmas, here’s a new war.” Moreover, wars are always best started before an election and better yet, not concluded before the next one.

Look at George H.W. Bush. He launched Operation Desert Storm on January 17th, 1991, safely after the holiday season. Unfortunately for him, it wrapped up a bit over a month later on February 28th. His popularity at that time neared 90%. That was all over before he lost to Clinton in 1992.

His bumbling son didn’t repeat that mistake. Iraq was invaded in March of 2003, right in time for his reelection campaign. The fake cowboy then gave the nauseating “Mission Accomplished” speech after his carrier-landing stunt that May. Troops were still in Iraq and the disaster hadn’t yet become readily apparent by the time ballots were cast in 2004. He was reelected. It would be hard for any competent politician not to take notice of this contrast. Their advisors certainly won’t. So, if something is going to happen, it will be before the 2018 midterms.

Many analysts have concluded that Hezbollah, Israel’s primary target, wouldn’t be prepared for the next conflict until 2019. An attack on Iran would absolutely involve retaliation against Israel by Hezbollah. This is yet another factor making a strike most likely to be carried out before November of 2018. If conflict is inevitable, Israel needs that to happen before Hezbollah is ready for it.

A full scale invasion is not viable and the military has paid a heavy price for Bush’s idiocy in Iraq. They won’t go along with that course of action again on a much larger scale. Even if they did, we would have at least a year of warning while logistical preparations are made. The American public has no stomach for that. So, an attack on Iran would most likely come out of the blue and after Christmas, probably as close to the midterms as possible. AIPAC can easily deliver whatever congressional support is required. However, the press will have a tough job selling a war that nobody wants launched by a president for whom they’ve stirred up fervent hatred.

In the meantime, the Russians are probably attempting to use their considerable influence with both parties to mediate some sort of stalemate. It’s also likely that they would sell Iran more weapons and ECM equipment to deter the entire endeavor if an attack appeared imminent. This isn’t the Russia from 15 years ago. Their S-400 mobile AA mobile and cruise missile capabilities are much better and cheaper than what our military-industrial complex has been producing. These systems pose a dire threat to US forces. That’s another reason why Washington would launch a surprise attack before the Russians got wind of what was about to happen.

Consequences

A war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is even more contrary to Russian and Chinese interests than the overthrow of Assad. Sure, Israel demands that the US destroy Iran. That was the same story in Syria. It didn’t work because the world is different now. This is all taken into account in the nebulous world of America’s bipartisan foreign policy makers. It won’t matter. No decision that they make has anything to do with the interests of ordinary Americans.

What happens if we open Pandora’s Box? Nobody knows for sure except that it would be extremely bad. The US imports over 7 million barrels of oil per day in order to function. A war that halts or inhibits shipping in the Persian Gulf is likely to lead to domestic shortages and price spikes. Plenty of Americans would die as well. Since it would also be a direct attack on the interests of Russia and China, they won’t respond favorably. They have multiple avenues of economic and financial retaliation that would be devastating. Iran has a population of 80 million. If even a small percentage fled, that would mean millions of more invaders for Europe.

Unfortunately, the consequences of war for the people of the US and Iran have little to do with any of this. Israel feels like it has a gun pointed at its head. It needs Uncle Sam to push it aside. Whatever price the goyim pay in that process is worth it. Sooner or later, we’ll fight our last war for Israel. Maybe this will be it.

Tweet

MY FAVORITE ACCESSORIES

from LIZ FASHION FEED http://ift.tt/2BO5dDO via IFTTT