Thoughts on Force Protection From a Father

Eight years into the Global War on Terrorism, and four years after my son died in Iraq with eight other men when a roadside bomb detonated under their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, I've had time to think about how the war was fought. Specifically, the thing called "Force Protection" which supposedly guards the lives of our troops overseas.

I think the concept is a contradiction in terms. You send a military force into a country to fight the enemy. Its protection lies in its intrinsic military strength and the match of force type to threat, nothing else.

Bush, Rumsfeld and company did it completely bass-ackwards, when it came time to put more troops in Iraq in 2004. They took reservists and Guardsmen who were given a lick and a promise in the way of training in the summer of 2004 at Fort Hood and other training depots (they never got their full span of training at Fort Irwin's desert warfare training facility) and sent them into a hot war, through streets they did not control in vehicles which turned out to be inadequate to what by then was a known enemy tactic.

Of course, I want to know how terrorists obtained a seemingly endless supply of artillery shells to make into roadside bombs when the Iraqi Army was supposedly beaten.

Those troops should have been intensively trained over a long enough period to assure their combat capability. We should, as a longer term consideration, rethink our Army's "big-unit" fixation. Big tanks, big armored personnel carriers, and big units don't win the day as often as small, fierce, rapid units such as the US Marine Corps Marine Expeditionary Units.

In fact, it strikes me that for the anti-terror mission, the Marine Corps is a MUCH better fit of force to threat than the US Army.

Whether we:
- push the current trend of "jointness" to a unified military service in which MEUs are the predominant arm of our land forces (with transfer of National Guard formations to the training and supply structure that serves the MEUs, and integration at every level of doctrine, supply and equipment between active, reserve and Guard elements);
- simply enlarge the Marine Corps to the point where it can once again serve to protect American interests abroad unaided by the Army, or
- gut the Army's training and doctrine to bring them into line with the Marines' much more effective use of manpower to control enemy territory by patrols on foot backed by light armor;
we HAVE to learn from our mistakes in Iraq.

I don't sleep well these days. I named my son "Armand," after his grandfather, my father, who also served in the US Army during the final days of World War II in Europe. Those of us with a smattering of the Classics know that I sealed his fate in the act of naming him "arms-bearer."

I raised him to respect and love his country, and was proud when he signed up with the National Guard. His mother and I went to Fort Sill for his Basic graduation exercises, and we were flushed with pride that our son had become a tough, professional soldier.

And it all pushed him into Iraq where he could die after ill-conceived error after error on the part of the people who were making the calls. Armand's death followed a prior roadside bomb detonation under his squad's Bradley (which left all hands unharmed) by two weeks, so the decision-makers can't claim ignorance of the specific nature of the threat he faced.

My son died because Army troops were laagered within walls instead of out in the field controlling the territory. He might still have died then, but at least it would have served a military purpose. I can't see one in the circumstances of his actual death.

If he had died in the street, his weapon at the ready, able to defend himself and his team-mates, in the Marine Corps, I think I might get more sleep.