DoD panel suggests multiservice peace units

[thedrifter]

Issue Date: December 15, 2003

DoD panel suggests multiservice peace units

By Vince Crawley
Times staff writer

Pentagon strategists say the Defense Department should take a lesson from Iraq and create multiservice ?stabilization and reconstruction? units ? one active and one reserve ? to focus on future postwar operations.
The plan calls for each unit to have about 13,000 people, most of them soldiers. Adding a Stryker brigade with attack helicopters for combat service support would increase the total to about 18,000 troops.

The division-sized units could deploy for a range of operations ? from unrest in West Africa to full-blown regime collapse in North Korea, a scenario in which U.S. troops would be tasked with rushing in to secure Pyongyang?s weapons arsenals.

The proposal was developed by the National Defense University in a study sponsored by retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the Pentagon?s transformation czar and one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld?s most influential advisers.

For months, Cebrowski has argued that the U.S. military has demonstrated primacy in pure combat operations but has done little to reach the next level ? morphing a battlefield victory into a lasting political victory.

In the past, large-scale warfare using slow-moving armies tended to overrun any sizeable enemy resistance. But today?s rapid, decisive operations use relatively small forces in quick campaigns, as shown in this year?s march to Baghdad. Yet the very haste of that battlefield victory has led to uncertainty as U.S. troops struggle to restore stability in the vacuum left by the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein.

At a high-profile defense conference Dec. 2, Hans Binnendijk of the National Defense University made public his 122-page study, sponsored by Cebrowski, outlining how U.S. peacekeeping units might be structured and deployed.

The Air Force has honed a strategy called effects-based operations, Binnendijk noted at the IFPA-Fletcher Conference in Washington, hosted by the U.S. Navy and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. In such operations, military planners seek the most critical targets that can destroy an entire enemy regime if precisely attacked.

?This is the opposite,? Binnendijk said of the postwar engineering problems faced by those who want to rebuild and stabilize. ?What do you have to create very quickly to build up a country??

The proposed new units for that task would be called Joint Stabilization and Reconstruction Commands, designed for long-term missions and using six- to 12-month rotations to support operations that might continue in some form for years. The heart of each command would be four Stabilization and Reconstruction Groups with roughly 2,500 personnel apiece. These S&R groups could be deployed independently on smaller operations or en masse for a war on the scale of Iraq.

Each group would focus on one primary and one secondary region of the world, developing cultural and linguistic expertise. They would fall in with the U.S. Central, European, Pacific and Southern commands.

Each S&R group would support an Army division or Marine Expeditionary Force. But the groups also could deploy in stand-alone operations in situations with a limited military threat.


http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/sto...PER-2456467.php


Sempers,

Roger