From: TimF | 9/28/2018 4:15:36 PM | | | | True Story: A Marine’s Sniper Rifle Failed During a Shootout—He Called Customer Service. Yes, this is real.
by Task and Purpose Jared Keller “It’s probably one of the biggest highlights of my life, to be able to help a Marine unit during a firefight,” Cook told National Geographic.
The Barrett M107 .50-caliber long-range sniper rifle is a firearm made for the modern war on terrorism. Officially adopted by the U.S. Army in 2002 and boasting a 2,000-meter range, a suppressor-ready muzzle brake, and recoil-minimizing design, the semi-automatic offers “greater range and lethality against personnel and materiel targets than other sniper systems in the U.S. inventory,” in an assessment by Military.com . While Barrett’s reputation of “flawless reliability” has made the M107 the sniper weapon of choice, the rifle is just like any other essential tool: It often breaks when you need it most. And that’s apparently what happened to one Marine Corps unit pinned down in a firefight, according to one of Barrett’s longtime armorers. (This first appeared several months ago.)
Don Cook, a Marine veteran who’s been maintaining M107s for more than two decades, told National Geographic in 2011 that he one day received a call to Barrett’s workshop from a harried young Marine. During maintenance of the unit’s M107, the Marine had bent the ears of the rifle’s lower receiver; the next day, after engaging the enemy, they discovered the rifle wouldn’t fire consistently. Despite the unit’s lack of tools (and time), Cook knew exactly what to do. The armorer instructed the Marines to use the bottom of the carrier to bend the ears back down. Within 45 seconds, the weapon was firing properly. “Thank you very much,” Cook says they told him, then he heard a dial tone. They had a firefight to get back to.
“It’s probably one of the biggest highlights of my life, to be able to help a Marine unit during a firefight,” Cook told National Geographic.
Watch him recount the incident himself in this excerpt from Sniper Inc, the National Geographic documentary about the Barrett family and the story of the M107 (the story begins at 9:26). This article by Jared Keller originally appeared at Task & Purpose last month.
nationalinterest.org |
| The United States Marine Corps | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
From: TimF | 10/20/2018 11:36:53 AM | | | | How the Marines, Army are counting ‘out-the-door-now’ troops and increasing small-unit readiness By: Todd South
MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va., ? The director of a secretary-of-defense-directed task force is seeing potential for “generational” progress in both how the Marine Corps and Army is matching its manpower with readiness and deployment needs. And those moves could mean the end of noncombat related “busy work” and could give a true picture for commanders from the squad level up of just how many trained troops they have ready to go and who’s leading them. Joe L’Etoile is the director of the Close Combat Lethality Task Force. It is a group created earlier this year with the specific initial focus on giving Marine, Army and Special Operations troops at the squad level overmatch against any near-peer adversary or pacing threat.
Much of the early and some ongoing attention looked at equipment, from a better rifle or night vision to reducing the weight of body armor, helmets and batteries. But at the annual Modern Day Marine military expo in Quantico, Virginia, L’Etoile, a retired Marine infantry lieutenant colonel who previously served as senior adviser on readiness to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, pointed out behind-the-scenes changes that could have an even larger impact. That could end the decadeslong practice of grabbing bodies from other units to fill out the roster in the soon-to-deploy unit. Because ultimately, he said, that’s a losing game for the total force. “We have to get away from this Ponzi scheme of transferring people from one unit to another to make a unit whole,” he said. “Because if the balloon goes up, that unit you just cannibalized is now in the hurt locker.” L’Etoile told a sadly familiar story that many ground combat unit commanders faced during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that continues today: the ‘on paper’ readiness of a unit versus the actual readiness. “I’ve got scar tissue from this one, big time,” L’Etoile said. “The first time I took my battalion to Iraq I had seven 0311 sergeants out of the 27 I rated for my squad leaders.” The next time he deployed every one of his new infantry lieutenants was straight out of Infantry Officer Course and had arrived within 90 days of deployment. And 30 of those days were for leave, and another 30 the Marines didn’t have their equipment to train with. “I was doing flashcards to learn my lieutenants on the flight over,” L’Etoile said. But the retired infantry officer isn’t whining. That’s just the way it goes when you get the call and troops are needed. However, there are ways to do it better. When it comes to truly measuring ready manpower, he said commanders have two questions to answer. Those are, “assigned strength” and “on-hand strength,” meaning, how many people are assigned to the billets and spots on a unit roster and how many you actually have in those spots, ready to go. There are a host of reasons why those numbers don’t match, from non-deployable status to Marines or soldiers in schools training. But some of the more troubling are under the form of Borrowed Military Manpower in the Army and Fleet Assistance Program in the Marines. That’s when base commanders make a call for labor, be it gate guard, tax center assistance or lifeguard duty or handing out towels at the gym. Both the Marines and Army have begun serious efforts to reduce those jobs that are not increasing lethality, L’Etoile said. In addition, they’re reprioritizing nonlethal training. He’s not downing suicide awareness or sexual harassment/assault awareness. Those are important, and safety is important.
But new initiatives would give commanders more discretion to put lethality training at the top of the list, giving needed time to the nonlethal needs as that lethality training reaches satisfactory levels. The question lingers though, of how commanders have a clear picture of their actual strength, their “out-the-door-now” readiness? L’Etoile said both the Marines and Army have embarked on what he calls potentially department-level, “generational” change in measuring exactly that. The Marine Corps has recently began inputting detailed squad data into its readiness reporting system. As it gathers, low-, mid- and top-level, commanders can see in a glance where the 648 Marine Corps squads are, how many have sergeants serving as squad leaders who have completed the Infantry Small Unit Leaders Course and how many haven’t, what percentage of squad leaders are sergeants, corporals or lance corporals and more. On the Army side, “Objective T” is even more demanding, L’Etoile said. “At the end of the day it is what I consider the ‘Holy Grail’ of readiness,” he said. The goal is to match the manpower system to readiness. “So that you have your people when you need them for the training cycle,” he said.
marinecorpstimes.com |
| The United States Marine Corps | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
From: TimF | 3/27/2019 2:03:03 PM | | | | Maj. Bambi: Meet The Marine Who Was Disney's Famous Fawn July 31, 2015
Donnie Dunagan is a hard-nosed Marine, a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War who served for a quarter-century before retiring as a major. First drafted in the '50s and subsequently promoted 13 times in 21 years — a Corps record at the time, he recalls — Dunagan found the Marines a perfect fit. That is, so long as he could keep a secret.
A dark reminder of the past Dunagan left behind still lurked unspoken: He was Bambi.
As a kid, Dunagan did a brief stint as a child actor, and he was tapped by Walt Disney to be the voice of the lead in the 1942 Bambi, the now-classic animated film about a young deer learning about life in the forest. And not one of his fellow Marines knew.
"No chance!" Dunagan, now 80, tells his wife, Dana, on a recent visit with StoryCorps in San Angelo, Texas. "I never said a word to anybody about Bambi, even to you. When we first met I never said a word about it. Most of the image in people's minds of Bambi was a little frail deer, not doing very well, sliding around on the ice on his belly."
Now, imagine the man who was once Bambi as a commander in a Marine Corps boot camp, responsible for hundreds of recruits. Dunagan didn't want his recruits drawing any connections, mocking him or calling him "Maj. Bambi." So, he kept his mouth shut.
Of course, it got out eventually. Decades later, a Marine whom Dunagan had worked for several times, twice in combat, called him into his office in the early morning about a month before the two of them retired.
"I go in his office and he says, 'Dunagan! I want you to audit the auditors,' " Dunagan recalls. Swamped with other duties, Dunagan respectfully asked him: "General, when do you think I'm going to have time to do that?"
And, finally, the nightmare he'd harbored for years came true.
"He looked at me, pulled his glasses down like some kind of college professor. There's a big, red, top-secret folder that he got out of some safe somewhere that had my name on it. He pats this folder, looks me in the eye and says, 'You will audit the auditors. Won't you, Maj. Bambi?' "
When Dana asks him how his life is different from the way he might have imagined, Dunagan points out that all the wounds he suffered in service, all the honors he's earned along the way, still haven't changed a thing.
"I have some holes in my body that God didn't put there. I got shot through my left knee. Got an award or two for saving lives over time," he says. "But I think I could have been appointed as the aide-de camp in the White House, it wouldn't make any difference — it's Bambi that's so dear to people."
No matter how he tried to escape it, that voice from his past always found him.
"But I love it now — when people realize, 'This old jerk, he's still alive and was Bambi.' And I wouldn't take anything for it, not a darn thing for it."
Newspaper clippings of young Donnie Dunagan from the early '40s. npr.org |
| The United States Marine Corps | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
From: Neeka | 10/15/2019 3:46:36 PM | | | | Loganville Master Sgt. Mark Allen dies
Allen earned Purple Heart in Afghanistan in 2009
Editor's Note This story has been rewritten to better reflect the incident that led to Allen's injuries.
Robbie Schwartz
Retiring master sergeant
From left, Shannon Allen looks on as a hat is placed on her husband, Master Sgt. Mark Allen, by Brig. Gen. John King, director of Joint Staff, Georgia National Guard. The hat was part of the promotion and retirement ceremony Saturday, Aug. 10, 2013.
Posted: Sunday, October 13, 2019 10:49 am | Updated: 5:26 pm, Mon Oct 14, 2019.
David Clemons | The Tribune | 8 comments
LOGANVILLE, Ga. — Retired Master Sgt. Mark Allen, who was severely injured in Afghanistan, has died.
Visitation will be from 4-8 p.m. Thursday at Tim Stewart Funeral Home, 670 Tom Brewer Road, Loganville.
The funeral will begin at 11 a.m. Friday at the First Baptist Church of Snellville. Burial will follow at Corinth Memorial Gardens in the Youth community.
Allen spent 21 years in the U.S. Army and the Army National Guard. He retired in 2013 upon receiving a Purple Heart.
Allen was shot by a sniper while on foot patrol in Afghanistan in 2009, and required three years of care at a military hospital in Florida. He was left unable to walk or talk, and in need of 24-hour care.
Colleagues said Allen was searching for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had left his post in eastern Afghanistan. Bergdahl was captured and held for five years until released in a 2014 prisoner swap.
The community rallied around the Allen family when he returned home. Volunteers built a playground for Allen’s young daughter and did landscaping, and helped buy adaptive jackets for other soldiers who had been wounded.
Allen is survived by his wife, Shannon; son, Cody; and daughter, Journey.
waltontribune.com
|
| The United States Marine Corps | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
From: TimF | 4/2/2020 7:20:41 PM | | | | Don’t Go Too Crazy, Marine Corps Mark Cancian January 8, 2020 The Marine Corps is embarking on a 10-year restructuring to align itself with the National Defense Strategy, but in doing so, it risks ignoring the last 70 years of its history. The commandant, Gen. David Berger, is sensibly seeking to move the Marine Corps away from its two-decade-long focus on counter-insurgency and toward the great power competition that the country’s leaders foresee as posing the greatest threats in the future. However, the commandant and other Marine Corps leaders are hinting that as part of this transition, they would eliminate capabilities for sustained ground combat that allowed the Corps to fight in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Shifting strategic emphasis is possible without hobbling the Marine Corps in the conflicts that it is most likely to fight.
The Plan
Berger’s guidance has been widely discussed, so there is little need to repeat it here. The guidance lays out many bold goals and concepts, though the only specific change explained is that the Marine Corps will no longer use a requirement of two Marine expeditionary brigades and 38 large amphibious ships for force structure decisions. In a recent War on the Rocks article, Berger is more specific. He writes that the Marine Corps is “over-invested” in such capabilities and capacities as the maritime pre-positioning force, manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms, manned ground transportation, traditional towed artillery not adaptable to high-velocity projectiles, manned ground reconnaissance, and short-range mortar systems.
Although the National Defense Strategy talks about great power “competition,” the department’s focus is on preparing for conflict. The Defense Department’s FY 2020 budget overview makes this point by stating that it “executes the [National Defense Strategy] by reprioritizing resources and shifting investments to prepare for a potential future, high-end fight.” Berger is particularly focused on China. He asks, for example, if the Marine expeditionary force that commands Marine Corps units in the Western Pacific will “be able to create a mutually contested space in the South or East China Seas if directed to do so.”
There is uncertainty about exactly what Berger’s guidance means for programs and forces. Berger’s guidance and his subsequent statements imply that the Marine Corps will divest itself of tank units and perhaps other armored vehicles like amphibious tractors, light armored vehicles, and armored trucks (such as Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), reduce long-distance ground logistics, and cut artillery on the theory that long range, precision and new capabilities can substitute for mass.
The Wartime Risks
These changes would indeed prepare the Marine Corps for the great power conflicts, particularly in the Western Pacific, that strategists focus on. The problem is that great power wars are not what the United States has fought since the end of World War II. During the Cold War, the fear of massive casualties in an East-West conflict and the possibility of escalation to nuclear weapons meant that great powers, then the United States and the Soviet Union, were extremely careful to avoid direct confrontation. Instead, both became involved in regional conflicts. Thus, the United States fought in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1965–1975), and Desert Storm (1990–1991).
John Vrolyk recently made a similar argument that “insurgency, not war, is China’s most likely course of action.” He argued that the Marine Corps should not divest itself from capabilities geared toward low-intensity conflict. This article broadens that argument to look beyond insurgencies and include wars against regional and local powers and their armies. Dan Gouré of the Lexington Institute made a similar argument in apocalyptic terms. He argued that because “what has primarily occupied the Marine Corps over the last seventy-plus years are crisis response and low-to-medium conflicts against smaller regional powers,” it needs a full-spectrum amphibious capability.
These critiques arise from the same concern. If the National Defense Strategy is successful in that it leads to the deterrence of China and Russia, then this history is likely to continue: avoiding great power conflicts and fighting regional and counter-insurgency conflicts. Yet, a Marine Corps that is custom-designed for distributed operations on islands in the Western Pacific will be poorly designed and poorly trained for the land campaigns it is most likely to fight.
Such a Marine Corps will lack the firepower to take on armies armed with armored vehicles and artillery. The Iraqi army, for example, had hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles, so the Marine Corps had to create its own mechanized task forces to counter them and win in Desert Storm. Although there has been a longstanding argument that tanks are obsolete on modern battlefields, armies are not moving in that direction. The U.S. Army, having done extensive wargaming, added two armored brigades. The Russians have also modernized their armor. Even in counter-insurgency fights like Hue City and Fallujah, armor support gave friendly infantry a major advantage. Leaving infantry to face tanks alone — even infantry with enhanced equipment and training from the Close Combat Lethality Task Force — would be highly risky and not the “best chance for victory“ envisioned by then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
A force optimized for operations on small islands will also lack the mobility to operate over the wide battlefields seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. On Guadalcanal in World War II — a classic island forward operating base in an anti-access/area denial environment and perhaps a model for future operations — the operations area was a semi-circle 15 miles across. In Iraq, by contrast, the Marine Corps’ area of operations stretched 200 miles along the Euphrates River valley. During Operation Desert Storm, the Marine Corps repositioned itself 100 miles into the desert before attacking 40 miles through Iraqi defenses to the outskirts of Kuwait City. Finally, a Marine Corps optimized for island campaigns could lack the logistics to sustain itself in a long fight. The war in Korea lasted three years, Vietnam seven, and Iraq eight. All required extensive fortifications and bases and long lines of supply.
The risk is twofold. First, since the national command authorities will use the tools that they have available, they will employ the Marine Corps in whatever conflict that arises regardless of the Marine Corps’ capabilities or design. Overspecialization will waste lives until the Corps can adapt and risks mission failure if adaptation is too slow. It is the phenomenon that bedeviled the Army in Vietnam, where Andrew Krepinevich argued the Army was “a superb instrument for combating the field armies of its adversaries in conventional wars but an inefficient and ineffective force for defeating insurgent guerrilla forces.” The fact that the U.S. Army of 1965 was designed to fight Soviet tank armies in Europe did not stop President Johnson from sending it to Vietnam to fight insurgents and a regional power (North Vietnam).
Second, the Marine Corps does not want to be in a position where it cannot go to war without Army support for tanks, heavy firepower, logistics, and mobility. That undermines the Marine Corps’ expeditionary nature, which has traditionally been its most useful feature. Indeed, the Marine Corps has long claimed that “one call gets it all,” that the ground-air-logistics-command elements of the Marine Corps can be combined to meet any threat that arises. Though this may be a slight exaggeration — the Army provides niche capabilities like psychological operations units and theater-wide logistics to all U.S. forces, not just the Marine Corps — the point is valid: The Marine Corps has been able to deploy and fight a wide variety of adversaries using its organic capabilities.
The problem with relying on the Army for support beyond these niche and theater-wide capabilities is not a lack of faith on the Army’s part but a lack of capability. The regular Army is at the smallest size (480,000) since the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s. It will need all of its scarce rapidly deployable capabilities just to support itself.
These capabilities are scarce because the Army has 52 percent of its total force in its reserve components. This reserve component includes a disproportionate amount of the Army’s support and logistics capability as a result of a deal in the 1970s whereby Gen. Creighton Abrams, then Army chief of staff, built three additional active-duty divisions by putting most support into the reserve components. As a result, the Army cannot deploy more than about a division without calling up large numbers of reservists.
Marines may remember the Army’s Tiger brigade supporting I Marine Expeditionary Force in Desert Storm. That was a helpful reinforcement but resulted from a unique circumstance. As the regular Army shrank from its Cold War level of 770,000 to its post-Cold War level of 484,000, the Tiger brigade’s parent division (the Second Armored Division) was in the process of being deactivated, so the brigade was an “orphan” that could be sent to support I MEF. The brigade deactivated after the war.
Today the regular Army remains at that low personnel level and there are no independent combat brigades. All such brigades are an integral parts of Army divisions. Indeed, although the Army programs forces for theater-wide logistics — port operations units, fuel distribution, long-haul trucking — that it provides to all services, it does not program forces for other kinds of support that the Marine Corps might need. Any such support would have to be taken from Army units that rely on it.
Relying on jointness to force the Army to provide units is a thin reed upon which to rest war plans. Absent specific direction by the secretary, one service does not need to build capabilities desired by other services. Of course, a secretary of defense or combatant commander could override Army force planning and direct that Army units support the Marine Corps rather than the Army, but that is a lot for the Marine Corps to ask, especiallyseems unlikely in the early stages of a war.
Any Army support for the Marine Corps, if provided at all, will likely come from the later deploying elements of the Army’s reserve components after the Army’s own needs have been met. These units will require 90 days or more to activate, muster, train, and deploy; their equipment is often incompatible with that of the Marine Corps; and unit quality is uneven. The resulting delay and coordination challenges are the antithesis of a rapidly deployable Marine Corps.
Consider Hedges
There is support in the National Defense Strategy for hedging. Although the strategy does, indeed, emphasize great power competition, it also acknowledges other threats: “The Department will sustain its efforts to deter and counter rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, defeat terrorist threats to the United States, and consolidate our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”
Further, the commandant’s guidance emphasizes that “The Marine Corps will be the ‘force of choice’ for the President, Secretary, and Combatant Commander – ‘a certain force for an uncertain world’ as noted by Commandant [Victor] Krulak. No matter what the crisis, our civilian leaders should always have one shared thought – Send in the Marines.” Maintaining a broad set of capabilities is consistent with this vision. (Interestingly, Berger’s article has more of a great-power conflict flavor and less of a force-in-readiness flavor than his original guidance. It is unclear whether this intentional.)
Many of the changes the commandant is talking about are sensible regardless of the conflict: Facilitating sea denial by adapting rocket artillery leverages existing systems and builds on a historical Marine Corps capability for defense of forward naval bases. Increasing precision strike helps in all tactical engagements. Moving the Marine Corps toward unmanned and less expensive aviation systems takes advantage of a technology in which the Marine Corps has fallen far behind the other services. Whereas the Air Force has 284 armed drones, the Marine Corps has three. Adding smaller but more numerous amphibious ships reduces vulnerability in wartime and allows forward-deployed amphibious forces to meet more combatant commander commitments in peacetime. “Seek[ing] the affordable and plentiful at the expense of the exquisite and few” accommodates a defense budget that may have peaked. “Demanding superior performance and enforcing high standards” reinforces the Corps’ reputation for individual excellence.
What changes then should the Marine Corps avoid?
The first is overspecialized training. The Marine Corps should keep training to fight “in every clime and place,” even if the balance moves toward distributed operations on Pacific islands. To do this, the Marine Corps should retain both its cold-weather training center at Bridgeport, California and its desert training center at Twentynine Palms. If necessary, both could operate in a part-time status with contractor caretakers when inactive. It would be tempting to close the facilities, arguing that they do not fit a Pacific island campaign, but the Marine Corps should not forget history. From 1950 to 1953, just five years after the World War II battles on tropical islands, the Corps had to fight three winter campaigns in the barren mountains of Korea for which cold-weather training was essential. Similarly, the extensive maneuver and firing areas of Twentynine Palms were essential in preparing Marine Corps units for the 1991 and 2003 operations in Iraq.
The Marine Corps should also avoid completely eliminating capabilities. Although the new guidance implies such eliminations, this creates gaps that might need filling in future conflicts. Instead, the Marine Corps should maintain an extensive toolkit as a hedge against an uncertain future. The reserves can provide a useful mechanism for doing this. Traditionally, the Marine Corps reserves have been structured nearly identically to the active-duty force with a division, air wing, logistics group, and command headquarters. However, it is the only service that does this. The other services use the reserves to provide capabilities that are few or nonexistent in the active-duty force.
Thus, the Marine Corps could put capabilities into the reserves that don’t fit well with a western Pacific great-power strategy, but that would be needed for other kinds of campaigns. Using tanks as an example, the Marine Corps could reduce the number on active duty to one company per division but keep an enhanced battalion of six companies in the reserves. Personnel managers will whine that they cannot sustain the skill base with such a small active-duty community, but the other services have figured out how to do this, and the Marine Corps can also.
Similarly, long-haul trucking on active duty could be reduced but enhanced in the reserves. Trucks are easy to maintain in the reserve component because of the overlap with civilian skills, and they are inexpensive to operate.
Other capabilities — light armored vehicles, heavy engineering, artillery, and whatever the Corps wants to thin out on active duty — could also move to the reserves.
A Plea to the Planners
Marine planners are now devising a new force structure through a process of analysis and wargaming. The initial results of their work will appear in the FY 2021 budget, but most will be rolled out in the spring of 2020 for incorporation in the FY 2022 budget. These planners should not get so caught up in the new strategy that they miss the lessons of history: The Marine Corps fights more regional wars than great power wars. Yet, if structured wisely, the Marine Corps can have it both ways: It can realign toward the new strategy while still hedging against other threats that have historically been more likely.
warontherocks.com |
| The United States Marine Corps | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |