Strategic mobility has evolved for hundreds of years, most famously characterized by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s words about when to get there and with how much. Not until the application of the railroad to military needs, did any large scale...
This monograph discusses an often forgotten aspect of low-intensity conflict (LIC), tactical airpower. LIC is an environment, not a mission, and as such is often misunderstood. The US view of conflict is primarily Eurocentric and the subtleties of...
This paper discusses Army requirements for deep operations and the TACAIR problems associated with and the systems available to support deep operations. The monograph first examines Army manuals from battalion through corps level to identify the...
The purpose of this monograph is to evaluate the doctrinal concepts underlying the U.S. Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual and the U.S. Army's Security Assistance Force (SAF), determining whether they are applicable today against a Maoist-led...
Since World War I, the field artillery has been faced with a dilemma: the delivery of immediately responsive close support fires vs. the delivery of massed artillery fires to destroy or neutralize interdiction and counterfire targets. The first...
Ground, water, and air methods of invasion add flexibility and strength to the United States' offensive capability. This monograph is designed to examine the current feasibility of large scale joint amphibious operations. It seeks to answer two...
This monograph offers a way of thinking about counterinsurgency tactics. There are five salient propositions that bind the paper. First, tactical success in a Phase II insurgency (such is the nature of the Salvadoran insurgency) is defined as the...
This monograph examines the criticality of the operational end state to the conduct of operational warfare through a theoretical and historical analysis from which conclusions concerning current doctrinal treatment of the operational end state are...
In 1932 J.F.C. Fuller published a book entitled Lectures on FSR III (Lectures on Field Service Regulations, Vol. III). In this book, Fuller presented a vision of future war that was shown to be highly accurate by later events. This vision was based...
This monograph analyzes the Iran-Iraq War from its inception in September of 1980 through the Iranian Faw Counteroffensive of February 1986. It uses the precepts of operational art to examine the performance of the belligerents in this prolonged...
Using the historical case study method of examination, this monograph reviews the interrelationship of national power, strategy, and operational plans. It surveys the national power, strategic goals, and war plans of five countries prior to the...
Perhaps one of the most controversial theories proposed by the l9th century military theorist and historian, Carl von Clausewitz, was the proposition that the defense, not the offense, was the stronger form of war. This is the second of two...
This monograph examines the concept of operational maneuver from a theoretical and historical perspective. It suggests a framework for the development of operational maneuver concepts. The monograph first defines the terminology associated with...
This monograph examines the concept of a mutual tank-free zone for the European Central Region and tests its validity as a possible operational concept for NATO. The discussion assesses the military implications of the concept and its usefulness as...
Chaos is acknowledged as an integral part of battle, and future battles will be no different. At a time when the United States Army is feverishly striving to master its ability to synchronize the effects of modern weaponry on the battlefield, the...
This monograph examines the adequacy of the current rear operations command and control (C2) doctrine at theater army that is contained in FM 90-14, Rear Battle. Specifically, this study seeks to determine if the TAACOM commander is the best choice...
This monograph examines the Army’s future operational level logistic support in an effort to determine whether or not the Army can successfully execute its Objective Force transformation without an aerial-based sustainment and distribution...
Although the integration of Blacks into the Army is a success story worth emulating, U.S. Army statistics indicate that Blacks do not participate evenly across officer career fields. In particular, Blacks are under-represented among the combat...
In recent years a plethora of comments have appeared praising the impressive combat effectiveness of the pre-1945 German Army. Many of these comments have attributed a large measure of the Germans' tactical success to the concept now referred to as...
This monograph examines the value of doctrine and compares various approaches to doctrinal development. The paper is based on the premise that US Army doctrine changes so rapidly that there is no common understanding of our basic doctrine. The...