They're Breaking My Army

There's a great discussion over at Phil Carter's Intel Dump, specifically about LTC Paul Yingling and his recent assignment as the commander of an artillery battalion. Command of any battalion, specifically one with troops as opposed to a garrison command, is always a good thing for upwardly-mobile leaders. However, Yingling's battalion is going to Iraq to conduct detention operations. Fred Kaplan says this is the Army's backsliding from SecDef Gate's challenge to West Point to "create an environment where candor is encouraged." So is this a good thing or not?

Phil says that this is a good assignment and a challenging mission, and we have to wait to see whether this is a punitive assignment in response to Yingling's former outspoken statements about the Army leadership. FDChief has a running response in the comments that I think is a pretty good counterpoint.

Are [the detention missions] legitimate missions for an artillery battalion?

No.

What they are are CS/CSS missions that should be performed by MP-constabulary/infantry/logistics-mobility units that the Army just doesn't have. The fact that FA units are being square-pegged into them is another sign that the Army is tapped out for useful bodies. Note that I say useful, since there are probably scads of boots walking around the Five-Sided Happy Farm who could be doing this stuff but are gainfully employed lobbying Congressmen for the FCS and similar Cold War goodies that - despite the fact that the realities on the ground in the Middle East are such that FA units are being cannibalized into ersatz MPs, grunts and convoy escorts - the Army is unwilling to let go.

For my money, I agree with you Phil, that this assignment says little or nothing about the fate of the officer involved. But it speaks volumes of the state of my branch. While I understand that the current thinking is that we will never need the kind of FA assets we used in WW2, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq War 1, IMO if that's the case we need to be honest about it and have the "Restructure the Force" argument now, rather than hiding from it.

Elaine Grossman notes in this article that the Field Artillery branch is starting to get very concerned about its future.

“The once-mighty ‘King of Battle’ ” is a “dead branch walking,” write the active-duty colonels in the five-page document obtained by National Journal. With “growing alarm,” they describe “deterioration” in artillery readiness to perform its most basic missions. In training, “firing incidents [occur] during every rotation”; “crew drills are very slow, and any type of [disorder] halts operations”; and, absent instructor intervention, “most” cannon platoons would have fired in unsafe conditions, the memo says.

It's certainly a challenging time in our Army, and it's going to take years to repair all the degradation that has occurred in our combat units.