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Seasoned Vet
 
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quote:
2) Steal an idea from the Marines and after say 10 jumps award a new (and different) set of wings. This way there is a distinction between the 5-jump chumps and those who know what a night Mass-TAC 'stepping into complete darkness wearing 65 lbs of parachute and 85 lbs of equipment' is like.
How about this: When you graduate BAC you get bright red wings. When you get 10 jumps, you get to wear the traditional silver wings.[ ]
That way anyone can see who a 5 jump commando or a cherry jumper is.
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Anti-social
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quote:
Originally posted by Delta_6
How about this: When you graduate BAC you get bright red wings. When you get 10 jumps, you get to wear the traditional silver wings.[]
That way anyone can see who a 5 jump commando or a cherry jumper is.
How about something along these lines...
[E5][abnwing][EIB]
1/508th Abn Inf, 82nd Abn Div 81-83 1/4th Inf (Mech), 3rd Inf Div (USAEUR) 83-84 SGT\EIB\Recondo "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho Marx
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Regular Joe
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LOL That his hilarious!
"Lets kick this pig"
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Seasoned Vet
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Does the ACS ABSOLUTELY have to be an American? Wouldn't that count as employment and enable me to get a green card? I'll do it! All the afore-mentioned changes would assuredly take place, as would a few more that I think you fellas would approve of.
But I get a piper. Or the Darth Vader theme song gets played whenever I enter a room. One of the two.
Make The Voices Stop!
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Stare Master
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From Scarborough and Gertz last Friday.
quote:
Army chief
Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, the highly regarded deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, came back to his old haunt, the Pentagon, this week.
One source said he was scheduled to pop in for a visit with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Gen. Abizaid is most often mentioned as the next Army chief of staff, replacing Gen. Eric Shinseki, who steps down next week after a four-year term.
Insiders say Mr. Rumsfeld met Wednesday with his top advisers about senior job placements — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers and consultant Stephen Herbits.
The Army also is losing its vice chief, Gen. John Keane, who is retiring.
He has agreed to put off departure until a successor to Gen. Shinseki is in place.
The appointments come at a crucial time in Army history. Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff believe the Army has been too slow to get on the transformation train.
Mr. Rumsfeld fired Thomas White as Army secretary and picked the harder-nosed James Roche, the Air Force secretary, as the next Army civilian boss.
Some insiders suggest Gen. Abizaid may want to stay at Central Command and succeed its chief, Gen. Tommy Franks, who is retiring this summer after victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One officer frequently mentioned as Gen. Franks' replacement is Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, who is deputy commander of U.S. European Command. A fighter pilot by training, Gen. Wald was the Air Force's top officer at Central Command during the early stages of the Afghanistan war and ran the air campaign from Saudi Arabia.
Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf, traditionally has been led by an Army or Marine general.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ and the American GI. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom.
"History teaches that when you become indifferent and lose the will to fight someone who has the will to fight will take over." COLONEL BULL SIMONS
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Hard Charger
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lets pray that someone with balls gets the job,someone like Gen Grange
MIKE LANSAW
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Anti-social
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Latest in the Army vs Rummy saga...
Nation & World 6/16/03
We have met the enemy. . .
Why the Army's big win in Iraq could mean trouble inside the Pentagon
By Mark Mazzetti
If the victors are meant to reap the spoils of war--not to mention the bragging rights--then someone needs to tell the U.S. Army. Troops from the nation's largest military service dashed hundreds of miles through the Iraqi desert, reaching Baghdad in just three weeks. Vice President Cheney called it "one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted." But not many Army generals are in the mood for chest thumping. Quite the opposite, in fact: Army officials insist that the Iraqi military was a hollow shell and that the outcome was never in doubt.
The generals are not being modest. With the war over, the Army's mission has shifted from pummeling enemy troops in Iraq to protecting its flank from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Billions of dollars are at stake. Rumsfeld is already hard at work on an official review of the war, and the generals suspect that he will use the exercise to tear down the Army they built. They fear that the service could end up a victim of its own success: It took only one of the Army's heavy divisions to take down Saddam Hussein's regime, and Rumsfeld's blueprint for future wars might demand they do it that way again. "Rumsfeld is like the football coach who is so confident of victory that he puts only 10 players on the field to prove a point," says one Army official. "Our fear is that he's going to play the whole season like this."
Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has preached the gospel of military "transformation," which, translated from bureaucratese, means the use of precision-guided weaponry, special operations forces, and long-range air power to defeat enemy forces. That, however, used to be the mission assigned to hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground forces. The question, then, is what to do with all that infantry and armor. As the Pentagon studies the lessons learned from Iraq, many defense experts believe Rumsfeld finally has the clout to remake a military still organized as it was during the Cold War. "All of the dynamics are pushing the Army towards real change," says one joint strategic planner for the Pentagon. "Rumsfeld's going to take on the Army first."
Army officials see Iraq as the exception, not the rule. The dash to Baghdad stretched supply lines to their breaking point. Despite the wholesale dismantling of Saddam's military, generals still argue that Rumsfeld's determination to keep the invasion force small put U.S. troops at unnecessary risk in the event something went wrong. And, they add, a larger force would have allowed the United States to bring order to the chaos of Iraq after Saddam's regime toppled. "It should come as no surprise to anyone," says Thomas White, who was recently ousted by Rumsfeld as Army secretary, "that it takes far more people to win the peace than it does to win the war."
Cleanup crew? What's at stake, potentially, is the Army's historic mission as a combat force. Most observers doubt that Rumsfeld will make drastic cuts in the Army's size, currently at 490,000 troops. That's because the force is already straining to meet a range of war-fighting and peacekeeping commitments around the globe. Ever since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the Army has kept busy, primarily with peacekeeping operations such as those in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq. Familiar threats remain: Washington still relies on 37,000 troops to defend South Korea from North Korea's million-member military, though last week the Pentagon announced it would redeploy those now in the demilitarized zone.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the Pentagon relied more than ever on air power to dispatch third-rate militaries. Thousands of Army troops were used in the post-conflict phase. Rumsfeld may now push to transform large parts of the Army into a glorified constabulary force, which defense expert Andrew Krepinevich defines as "unglamorous troops called in to clean up after the party's over." Such troops might deploy to war zones at the same time as combat troops, so peacekeeping operations might begin right away to avoid a repeat of the disorder in postwar Baghdad.
The war in Iraq also bolstered the case for remaking the way the Army is structured. The 3rd Infantry Division, the lead attack element in the ground war, took on Iraqi troops not as a single division but as three smaller combat teams. Firepower typically controlled at the division level, such as heavy artillery, was integrated into the smaller units. Based on that experience, the Pentagon may try to reorganize the U.S. Army into smaller, brigade-size groups of about 3,000 soldiers, rather than massive 15,000-person divisions. The leaner units would be modeled on Marine Expeditionary Units and would be expected to deploy more quickly to global hot spots. Doing away with cumbersome headquarters staff and pre-positioning equipment close to the battlefield would make the units more agile.
That strategy dovetails with Pentagon plans to overhaul the basing of American troops around the globe. Rumsfeld intends to take forces from large permanent bases in Germany and South Korea and move them into smaller "hub" bases closer to emerging threats.
Incoming. As he remakes the Army, Rumsfeld may also try to cash in some big-ticket weapons, including the troubled Comanche helicopter and four Stryker Brigades, the mobile units of wheeled vehicles the Army sees as an alternative to heavy armor. But after some heavy Abrams tanks were disabled by rocket-propelled grenades in Iraq, some Rumsfeld allies say the Stryker vehicles are too vulnerable. "It's too heavy to be an airborne system, and it's too light to be a heavy combat system," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, a civilian panel that advises Rumsfeld.
The Army must face these challenges without a soldier at the top, since no successor has yet been named to Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who retires this week. Shinseki and Rumsfeld have had a famously frosty relationship, and several Army officials say that with Rumsfeld at the helm, the post of chief of staff is not exactly coveted. As one Army officer puts it: "Anyone who steps into the job is going to have to be pretty damn thick skinned."
[E5][abnwing][EIB]
1/508th Abn Inf, 82nd Abn Div 81-83 1/4th Inf (Mech), 3rd Inf Div (USAEUR) 83-84 SGT\EIB\Recondo "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho Marx
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