Mobile Dispersed Warfare

If you are among those worried about the US losing its ability to fight conventional wars because of its emphasis on counter-insurgency or asymmetrical threats in recent years, don’t be. Seriously, DON’T BE! Within its arsenal of weaponry which is expanding constantly are tens of thousands of new smart weapons, like JDAMs, SDBs, Sensor Fuzed Weapons, Tactical Tomahawks, and BAT munitions, all of which will give the US a comfortable lead in defeating any land threat for the foreseeable future.

Back in early 2004 I wrote:

With a bridgehead now established, the landing troops will spread out into the countryside like swift Mongol cavalry in LAV’s, similar to the recent assault on Baghdad. Major cities and whole armies will be bypassed. Any force that mobilizes against it will be destroyed with long-range artillery armed with guided rockets, as well as air strikes. As each regiment is equipped with advanced communications and GPS, the entire process will be well coordinated despite the extreme distances involved.

 Despite the limited scope of the land battle against Saddam’s shrunken army after a decade of sanctions and bombings by the West, my conclusions were here we we seeing the future of warfare. The same precision targeting that made short work of Iraq’s whole fully conventional style army might well do the same to First World armed forces like our own.

For armies to survive in such an environment faced with weapons like those above, they would of necessity disperse and perform vast circular movements against an enemy power. Just as the machine gun and advances in artillery defeated the linear infantry formations in World War 1, so too would the new smart weapons doom the linear style weapons of today. Tank armies of necessity with close support from armored infantry to protect them from modern antitank arms, plus their extended supply chain are at terrible risk in a modern battlefield.

Here then is Col. Douglas Macgregor reaching the same conclusion:

Because defined, continuous fronts on the hypothetical World War II model do not exist today and because ubiquitous strike capabilities and proliferating weapons of mass destruction make the concentration of ground forces very dangerous, mobile dispersed warfare is the dominant form of combat we must be prepared to conduct.

It is laughable then to suggest as some of our leaders today, that the US needs to beef up its conventional forces. In this they seem to suggest we need to buy more old-style tanks, mobile artillery, and vast stockpiles of “dumb” shells to arm such equipment. The technology to counter such slower moving heavy divisions is changing constantly, while the older arms take decades to produce and arrive at the frontlines often obsolete before it enters service.