| Well now, it seems entirely possible that the US may have to fight
a conventional war against the Russians (and possibly the Iraninans)
and that means you can no longer depend on the fact that on a warrior-for-warrior
basis, a handful of SEAL Team Six members can pull off battlefield miracles,
because no matter how elite your spec ops are, you can't pit twelve
guys against four thousand and expect them to win.
It's with all of this in mind that Washington is beginning to assess
whether the US could hold its ground against Russia in a conventional
standoff. According to retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, American
forces would get "annihilated." Here's more, via Politico:
For those villagers eagerly snapping pictures on the side of a road
in the Czech Republic in late September, the appearance of the line
of U.S. “Stryker” armored fighting vehicles must have seemed more like
a parade than a large-scale military operation. The movement of some
500-plus soldiers of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment from Vilsack in Bavaria
to a Hungarian military base was intended to strengthen U.S. ties with
the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian militaries and put Russia’s Vladimir
Putin on notice.
But not everyone is convinced. “This Stryker parade won’t fool anyone
in Moscow,” says retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. “The Russians
don’t do many things well, but they have been subverting, destabilizing,
invading and conquering their neighbors since Peter the Great. And what’s
our response: a small unit of light armored trucks.”
Viewed by many of his colleagues as one of the most innovative
Army officers of his generation, Macgregor, a West Point graduate with
a Ph.D. in international relations (“he can be pretty gruff,” a fellow
West Point graduate says, “but he’s brilliant”), led the 2nd Cav’s “Cougar
Squadron” in the best-known battle of Operation Desert Storm in February
1991. In 23 minutes, Macgregor’s force destroyed an entire Iraqi Armored
Brigade (including nearly 70 Iraqi armored vehicles), while suffering
a single American casualty. Speaking at a military “lessons learned”
conference one year later, Air Force General Jack Welsh described the
Battle of 73 Easting (named for a map coordinate) as “a stunning, overwhelming
victory.”
In the wake of the battle, however, Macgregor calculated that if his
unit had fought a highly trained and better armed enemy, like the Russians,
the outcome would have been different.
In early September he circulated a PowerPoint presentation showing
that in a head-to-head confrontation pitting the equivalent of a U.S.
armored division against a likely Russian adversary, the U.S. division
would be defeated.
“Defeated isn’t the right word,” Macgregor told me last week. “The right
word is annihilated.” The 21-slide presentation features four battle
scenarios, all of them against a Russian adversary in the Baltics —
what one currently serving war planner on the Joint Chiefs staff calls
“the most likely warfighting scenario we will face outside of the Middle
East.”
“Macgregor scares the hell out of the Army,” says a senior Joint Chiefs
war planner. “What he has proposed is nothing less than the dismantling
of the Big Green Machine, getting the Army to embrace a future of lighter,
more agile forces than the big lumbering behemoth which takes forever
to spool up and deploy. I’ll bet the armor and airborne guys are furious.
Reform my ass: Macgregor has walked into the zoo and slapped the gorilla.”
Yeah well, the US has already "walked into the zoo" and slapped the
Russian grizzly bear. It sounds to us like Macregror may have a battle
plan that actually isn't a joke, which means it will be promptly dismissed
by The Pentagon.
After all, it's all about covert ops these days. And that's working
so well for Washington in the Mid-East. Why fix something that isn't
broken right?...
Read full story here
http://www.politico.eu/article/inside-the-pentagons-fight-over-russia-us-eastern-europe/
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