Art, Music, and Creative Writing homework help
You will prepare and submit a term paper on The United States Army Transformation. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length. Increasing demands upon and exhaustion of ground forces in Iraq, Guerilla and cyber warfare, counter-terrorism, changing threats, mounting operations in mountainous areas and caves where the US Army has little experience, the challenges of insurgencies, the non-fearing combatants too eager to give up their lives as an honor, increasing number of natural disasters on the West Coast, and so on. The operational failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have particularly highlighted the need to enhance the effectiveness of stability operations. Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor examines two fundamental assumptions distorting army transformation: The illusion of perfect situational awareness and the misguided belief that rapid deployment of forces has priority overprotection and firepower. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite unparalleled intelligence assets, most of the fighting on the ground was characterized by the participants as resulting from meeting engagements-battles in which American forces unexpectedly bumped into the enemy. 1 (Mcgregor, 2004) This is hardly a demonstration of a perfect awareness of the situation! In Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan too, organizing for the stabilization and reconstruction force was ad hoc (Johnson, 2005). Furthermore, it can be claimed that the US Army actually nurtured the insurgency against itself due to its own indecision on the ground in Iraq. Also, what the army does after it arrives in a theater of crisis or conflict is much more important than how fast it gets there. (Mcgregor, 2004) He also mentions the limitations of strykers for close combat in urban and complex terrain. The US Army has a lack of understanding of historical and cultural contexts of many of the areas of operation. Even at home, the US Army demonstrated its incapacity to develop an effective communications network in a disaster scenario as during .Hurricane Katrina. The problem actually was to integrate numerous other organizations and agencies into its normal military network (Epperly, 2006), which hitherto had been a closed one.