RE: The Demise of the Marines?
July 26, 2014 at 8:58 am
(This post was last modified: July 26, 2014 at 9:17 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(July 25, 2014 at 4:57 pm)Chuck Wrote: We should do less occupation. It has not worked out well for us since 1945.We don't engage/forego conflicts based upon our win/loss record. Nevertheless, agreed, we should occupy less, with a smaller force. Fire all non-combat arms, non intel (civilian contractors do their jobs anyway). The we'd have a smaller force....and we wouldn't be sending cooks and accountants out on armed patrols.
I suppose the flipped side to that coin (the army being so stacked with non-combat arms) is that after combat arms have taken an area...army doctors, army cooks, army this and that's try to keep things running for the people who's c&c we've just smashed. That's something that I doubt Brown and Root wants to do at the price point of a soldier. They're in the business of $50 bowls of corn flakes, and the folks in warzones generally don't have $50.
@DBP
Those "makework" jobs are the majority of jobs in our armed forces (US). It's not even that they are make-work jobs so much as that they are actually the only jobs they've received adequate training for. There's alot of support and logistics behind every boot on the ground. Trouble, recently, is that we've been paying contractors to do those logistics so we try to extract our money's worth from an army plumber by dressing him up like an infantryman and hoping for the best. This was brilliant strategy on the part of people who want to siphon more funds into the service (we have to pay the plumber to patrol....and then pay a civilian plumber to fix pipes). Probably not the best way to win a war though, eh?
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