Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights [Hardcover]

Douglas A. Macgregor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0275981924 | ISBN-13: 978-0275981921

Are we prepared to meet the challenges of the next war? What should our military look like? What lessons have we learned from recent actions in Afghanistan and Iraq? Macgregor has captured the attention of key leaders and inspired a genuine public debate on military reform. With the dangerous world situation of the early 21st century-and possible flashpoints ranging from the Middle East to the Far East-interservice cooperation in assembling small, mobile units and a dramatically simplified command structure is essential. MacGregor's controversial ideas, favored by the current Bush administration, would reduce timelines for deployment, enhance responsiveness to crises, and permit rapid decision-making and planning.The Army is the nation's primary instrument of land warfare, but what capabilities can the Army field today, and what is the Joint Commander likely to need tomorrow? Stuck with a force structure that hasn't changed since Word War II, as well as an outdated command system, today's Army faces potential failure in a modern war. Without a conceptual redefinition of warfare as a joint operation, a new military culture that can execute joint expeditionary warfare will not emerge. New technology both compels and enables evolution of the armed forces' organization. MacGregor's visionary plan to integrate ground maneuver forces with powerful strike assets is the foundation for a true revolution in military affairs, and has sparked heated debates in policy and military circles.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Colonel Macgregor is to the Information Age joint military what Billy Mitchell was to airpower and what Liddell Hart, Fuller, DeGaulle and Guderian were to armored warfare. He understands what has to be done, understands the principles for creating a 21st century joint military, and has outlined a practical guide to America's next quarter century of military effectiveness. Every citizen who cares about national security should read this book and every professional who wants to be competent in the information age MUST read this book."-Newt Gingrich Former Speaker of the House of Representatives

Book Description

MacGregor argues for a tight integration between air and ground forces to change the way that our armed forces organize their capacity to fight.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Praeger (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0275981924
• ISBN-13: 978-0275981921
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #804,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Path to relevance for the 21st Century Army, November 3, 2003

By 

Samuel P.N. Cook (Radcliff, Kentucky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (Hardcover)

In recent internal memorandum to the top brass of the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, expressed deep reservations about our progress in the war on terrorism. He challenged the uniformed leadership to speed up transformation, writing "It is not possible to change DOD [Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror." Of all the branches of the military, the Army has been the most reluctant to restructure itself to meet the post cold war security environment's demands.

In Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights, Colonel Douglas MacGregor examines the Army's failure to transform itself and forge a truly effective force to carry its burden in the war on terror. Instead of delaying transformation, he argues, the war on terror makes structural reform all the more urgent. MacGregor maintains that recent Army attempts at transformation, relying on the Stryker and a distant Future Combat System, fail to address the heart of the Army's problem: its anachronistic and cumbersome organization on the tactical and operational levels. MacGregor, however, spends the majority of his book proposing a solution to the problem: an immediate re-organization of the Army's combat units; and the fielding of currently available technology that will quickly address its tactical and operational needs.

MacGregor's ideas are not new. A Gulf war veteran who fought in the battle of 73 Easting, Colonel MacGregor went on to command 1-4 Cavalry at Ft. Riley. While serving there, he recognized the need to re-structure the Army to meet the post cold war demands. He likened the new world order to the American frontier in the late 1800s, which required not the mass infantry formations of the Civil War, but a flexible, expeditionary force based easily deployable, mounted formations. MacGregor's first book on transformation, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century, laid out in detail his path to structural reform of the Army, emphasizing truly independent, self-contained Brigade sized units; elimination of the Army Divisions, and the formation of Joint Task Forces (roughly the size of a Corps) which integrate all services under a single command structure. Although his ideas received a lot critical acclaim, they went nowhere with the conservative Army leadership.

In Transformation Under Fire: Revoluationizing How America Fights, MacGregor argues that the "war transforms armies." Now, more than ever, the Army must finally shed its industrialized warfare skeleton, and adapt to the realities of Information Age warfare. The Army's essential structure has remained unchanged since the end of WWII, while the end of the cold war necessitates that the Army transform into "an irresistible offensive-maneuver force against a fleeting, mobile enemy." While the Army has recently recognized the need for transformation, he points out, it has sought technological solutions at the expense of addressing the fundamental question of organization for joint warfare.

Rather than transforming to meet the nation's needs, the Army is trying to "do what it wants to do." MacGregor explores the global trends that require a radically different approach to national security issues by the military. Globalization has severely disrupted social structures in much of the developing world, and brought America plenty of new enemies in all corners of the earth. The complete dominance we enjoy in world power has forced our new enemies to resort to unconventional attacks to inflict harm on United States interests. This requires a radically different approach from our Armed Forces. The current administration has developed pre-emption as the national security strategy to deal with emerging threats; such a strategy requires early decision in a crisis. The Pentagon has switched to an "Effects-based" strategy, that emphasizes rapid victory in conflicts by rapidly striking the enemy's strategic center of gravity. The Army's current attrition warfare structure does not position it to conduct rapid, decisive operations in support of the "Effects-based" strategy.

MacGregor goes on to sketch out an operational re-organization into Joint Force Headquarters, which integrate Army maneuver capabilities with strike capabilities of the Air Force and Navy. The Army would re-organize its core service capabilities into specialized modules that would support the Joint Task Force mission. By cutting out the Divisional structure and merging all branches of service at the Joint Task Force level under a three star General, the armed forces would have an organization capable of executing operations in a truly joint fashion with much reduced command decision cycles. MacGregor argues that army must create "network centric" organizations immediately. Combat Groups (roughly a brigade sized unit with all of its support assets organic) would be capable of independent, dispersed mobile warfare, rather than tightly scripted, coordinated mass maneuvers favored by divisions and corps. To forge truly effective combat groups, MacGregor urges training cycles based on unit manning concepts currently under consideration by Army leadership.

MacGregor reserves his last chapters for the upper echelons of the Army and what must change to effect true change. He calls for re-alignment of our combat power, shifting troops away from cold war bases to forward bases that enable power projection and expeditionary warfare. He calls for returning units to the United States and rotating them through forward bases to provide forward capabilities to the national leadership. Additionally, he argues for significant stream-lining of the Army's command structures in Europe and Korea. MacGregor goes on to advocate a new, stream-lined Army command structure to equip the new force, eliminating such headquarters as TRADOC and merging others. Bureaucracy and entrenched interests are the main impediments to effective, rapid transformation. MacGregor goes on to lambaste the Army promotion system that rewards officers who are "yes-men," while punishing officers with bold, forward-thinking ideas. As an example, he points out that selection for General requires the unanimous consent of all 17 General Officers on the board; essentially, a Colonel who aspires to serve at the higher ranks must keep his nose clean and not upset anyone with bold thinking. Finally, he takes the Army to task for remodeling existing Brigades, divisions, corps, and armies with new systems, while passively waiting for technology that is ten years in the future; instead, they should be restructuring now, using existing technology to carry the Army through the battles of the next fifteen years.

MacGregor's book is in the best tradition of military theorists, whose ideas transformed armies to meet the challenges of WWII: Hans von Seckt, Liddel Hart, Charles De Gaulle, and Heinz Guderian. MacGregor presented the first coherent view of how the information age should transform the way we organize for war. The question now remains whether the U.S. Army will heed his calls for true reform, or continue to cede more and more of its missions to the Marine Corps, which has embraced expeditionary warfare. MacGregor takes to task the leadership culture that stifles change; but more importantly, he sketches out a realistic, immediate path to true transformation that will vault the Army out of exile at the Pentagon and back into the forefront of the nation's struggles in the ongoing war on terrorism.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On target & useful--a master speaks, February 12, 2005

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (Hardcover)

I hold this author to a higher standard, for he is in the top rank of perhaps 10 people who really know what they are talking about with respect to transformation. I believe he is the single most important mind behind the Army's recent transition from 10 divisions to 40+ brigades as the basic form of organization. Where he falls short (and remember, this is a master who in falling short is still light years ahead of the others) is in not going far enough: in not carrying his ideas out to inter-agency collaboration and multi-national inter-agency planning and coalition operations.

He also fails to properly put the failings of the US Navy and the US Air Force in context. The US Navy today is a disgrace, largely incapable of moving anything or getting anywhere at flank speed, and the US Air Force is even worse off--incapable of lifting what needs to be lifted, when it needs to be lifted, in the distances and quantities that need to be lifted. Without a chapter on this joint "sucking chest wound," the author's otherwise brilliant work loses much of its potential at the SecDef level.

This is a very serious book, not an essay. It is packed with substantive information, it is well-documented, and the footnotes are as useful as the main text.

The underlying theme in this book is that the Chief of Staff of the Army will not succeed until he breaks the back of the cultural mafia that persists--like the horse cavalry of old--in focusing on big units and expensive platforms. While the author is among the foremost and earliest proponents of small, fast, and many, it is clear to me that he does not consider the current Army to be moving in the right direction--a direction that he makes clear could lead to our achieving a sufficiency within months rather than years.

Perhaps the most revolutionary underlying theme in this book is that of how to deal with information. The author may well be the most intelligent helpful commentator I have read in this respect. On page 102 he focuses on the fact that "Command centers where information is collected and transmitted should not be information monopolies," and he focuses throughout on the urgent need to use "commander's intent" (a concept of operations pioneered by Marine Corps Commandant Al Gray) and fluid lateral information sharing to increase situational awareness and agility at the tactical level.

Published in 2004 and not doubt polished in 2003, this book gives the US Army a failing grade for the future while noting that it could--with application and innovation, get back to the Honor Roll within months, rather than years.

I am a Marine and I discount the "hate and discontent" from disgruntled Marines writing reviews against this book. There is a big difference between Marines from the sea carrying out largely amphibious missions, and soldiers (and increasingly in today's army, contractors at a ratio of 1:1) in for the long haul. We need a 450 ship Navy, a 2 Berlin Airlift Air Force, a 45+ brigade Army, a 3 MEF USMC, a doubled Coast Guard, a tripled State Department, and a whole new focus on inter-agency and multinational armies and related peacekeeping cadres. It is not enough to fix Army--we need a grand strategy for using all of the instruments of national power over a 100 year timeframe. In this context, the book gets an A for giving Army the slap in the face it needs right now, and a C+ for missing the larger picture within which the Army, no matter how transformed, will fail because everything else in the USG is failing when it comes to coordinated sustainable inter-agency operations. Theater commanders and Army ground forces cannot win the war alone, nor can they make peace on their own.

One final word of praise: the author is an honorable man of great moral courage who speaks his mind in the public interest. Within the book he has harsh things to say about ticket-punching careerist officers, and think tank harlots who give their masters what they want, not what they need to hear. I salute and will follow any man such as this. We need more like him.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Way Forward, December 1, 2010

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Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (Paperback)

This is a stand alone book, but it builds on the work Colonel Macgregor did in his earlier book. "Breaking the Phalanx." The first book dealt with tactical and operational issues of command and control (C2) and force structure in the Information Age. This book builds the case that information technology enables the creation multi-service, joint military commands and operations. And that the threat environment of the 21st Century makes the use of joint commands a necessity.

As in his previous book, Macgregor demonstrates his understanding that Command, Control, Computers, Communication, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Systems. C4ISR Systems are information driven and allow battlefield awareness to be pushed to the top of the command structure while allowing decision making to pushed down to the tactical level of a command structure. This is brought about by the fact that functioning C4ISR systems simultaneously provide near real time information (situational awareness) to all levels of a military force.

This availability of information allows force structures to be both more flexible and to execute rapid maneuver warfare using dispersed tactical units. Also Macgregor believes that common or at least inter-operable C4ISR Systems make joint operational commands feasible. He argues that warfare in the 21st Century will require multi-service joint operations using small mission oriented modules of air, ground, and naval units. Again such joint operations are made possible by sharing a common and timely information base.

Perhaps most importantly, Macgregor discusses the cultural change that must take place among the Officer Corps of the U.S. Armed Forces to take advantage of the transformational opportunity offered by information technology, especially the ease with which information can be transmitted and processed. He is especially concerned to break the culture of what he refers to as the garrison mentality which encourages risk aversion, strict adherence to command hierarchies, and discourages initiative and creativity especially by junior officers. The qualities found in wartime combat leadership he feels should replace that of peacetime garrison thinking which now pervades the armed forces.

In the end Macgregor builds a good case for the fact that military transformation is not about new technology, but is cultural and structural change in response to new technologies or new threats to national security.

Most of Macgregor's ideas especially about cultural change have proved too radical for the Army, although the Army is replacing its divisional structures with the smaller, "more agile" brigade group concept. What is surprising is the resistance of all the services to adopting a single compatible C4ISR system that would all for inter-operability and make joint operations a reality. This resistance is caused by parochialism, lack of effective leadership by the Joint Chiefs, and the simple fact that the services don't really want to conduct joint operations.