10 August 2008

The new kind of war

The exert below is taken from the Reuters report posted on Yahoo News:

Potentially widening the conflict, the leader of Abkhazia, a second pro-Russian breakaway Georgian region, said on Sunday he had ordered 1,000 troops to push Georgian forces out of part of his territory and called up reservists.
Georgia quickly denounced what it termed "new aggression" prepared by Moscow in Abkhazia, a strip of land along the Black Sea coast which broke away from Georgian control at about the same time as South Ossetia.
In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was profoundly concerned over mounting tensions in Abkhazia.
Russia's navy also entered the conflict, deploying a small group of ships off Georgia's Black Sea coast. There was no official comment on their mission but the Interfax news agency said they would prevent weapons and military equipment reaching Georgia by sea.

As we discussed in the begining of ILE, the US may infact face a change in the type of wars it will be called upon to fight. As we shift our military to a lighter, more adaptable, modular force, it maybe just what is needed to fight these small scale regional fights. Or are we to become a perminent peacekeeping force. The fight between Russia and Georgia is threatening to expand to yet another province.

I think we should stop what we're doing in ILE and W200, and take a real world look at the conflict happening right now under our noses. I understand that this potentially could become a classified exercise, but its time for ILE to stop being a dinasour and live up to its claim of being a higher learning organization. What better use of our time and energy then to analysis the present conflict and come up with options that many of our piers ourside of the school house are most likely facing. The school has an oppertunity here to do some real learning, to take young field grade officers and get them to analysis a real senerio. I challange the school house to step up and be the adaptive, learning organization that they claim to be.

1 comment:

George said...

I agree.

About 10% of the US Army majors are in ILE, adding nothing to current operations. Don’t get me wrong, I fully support the military education program, and feel it is an important part of our strength, but with the critical growing shortage of officers in the US Army, perhaps a different method of schooling is in order.

Can the majors in ILE prepare for the future while supporting current operations?