The Kevlar Legions: An Alternate Post-Cold War Organizational History of the US Army/Marine Corps

Unfortunately that does not address the scale of battles the Marines did fight. I lived through the 'debate' from the mid 1970s through the 1990s & cant begain to count the number of times we wee told the Marines would never again fight on a scale of (pick one) company, battalion, brigade. How ironic for Lind & his fellow travelers that the war the Marines went to in 1991 was exactly that they predicted was least likely. While mix and precise number of th "redundant' HQ can be debated to infinity replacing those senior master sgt & officer TO line numbers with E-2 & E-5 drastically reduces the flexibility. The ability to task organize HQ, keep staff training up, and fill unanticipated needs means the redundancy is not as fat as suggested. Think nerve tissue. To use Desert Shield again the ability to asorb the large number of IRR activated - mostly E-2 thru E-5 depended on the ability to draw on unused staff for expanding unit cadres from E-6 upwards. To illustrate a slightly different situation the MEF Artillery Cmd/Staff group had been dropped circa 1972 as the Marines departed Viet Nam. In Desert Shield the absence of a MEF artillery cmd group was sorely & swiftly felt & it was revived. A effort to fill it out with reservists was unsatisfactory as the refined skills needed at that level were not obtainable by reservists. I know. I was involved as a reservist in trying to create that specific command element out of the 14th Marines hide circa 1995-97. Drawing off of existing redundant HQ allowed better staffing this specific 'uneeded' cmd element.

Like I wrote I lived within this debate for twenty plus years & was as often as not part of the currents eddys of the tests and experiements. Some of that worked, & some did not.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this, but I've definitely taken what you've said into consideration as you've raised good points. I think the crux of the matter is that no force will be perfect, and I think that

I'm excited to see this finally being posted. I've been giving my version a lot of thought lately, but don't know if we've talked about it for a bit.

Here's the latest thing I've posted on here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/an-alternate-new-world-order-beta.261010/

Right! Finally!

In all seriousness it is about bloody time. Those conversations were what, 5 years ago? I'm not going to leave this one in the dustbin, lack of recent updates notwithstanding. I am making progress. I swear.
 
Matt, do you mind if I drop some info in here? I'm digging through my files and trying to figure out what the most current version of my Army org chart is. I just found my list of all National Guard infantry regimental history, for example.
 
Well, it's been quite a while for the update. And since most of the crew that's interested in this sort of thing have probably seen me engage, quite heavily at times, with BKW and his materials I figure I owe you all an update on what's going on.

I have a rough idea of where I'm take every thing to about 2000. I had it all on a nice little thumb drive so I could bring my research materials home and back to work. Well, long story short my dog literally ate my home work. Over the summer my puppers decided to eat the thumb drive and I lost literally years worth of research. Such is life. The good news is I remember most of my research, so I've been reconstructing it. And putting it in the cloud, well away from doggy teeth. Work goes on.
 
Unfortunately that does not address the scale of battles the Marines did fight. I lived through the 'debate' from the mid 1970s through the 1990s & cant begain to count the number of times we wee told the Marines would never again fight on a scale of (pick one) company, battalion, brigade. How ironic for Lind & his fellow travelers that the war the Marines went to in 1991 was exactly that they predicted was least likely. While mix and precise number of th "redundant' HQ can be debated to infinity replacing those senior master sgt & officer TO line numbers with E-2 & E-5 drastically reduces the flexibility. The ability to task organize HQ, keep staff training up, and fill unanticipated needs means the redundancy is not as fat as suggested. Think nerve tissue. To use Desert Shield again the ability to asorb the large number of IRR activated - mostly E-2 thru E-5 depended on the ability to draw on unused staff for expanding unit cadres from E-6 upwards. To illustrate a slightly different situation the MEF Artillery Cmd/Staff group had been dropped circa 1972 as the Marines departed Viet Nam. In Desert Shield the absence of a MEF artillery cmd group was sorely & swiftly felt & it was revived. A effort to fill it out with reservists was unsatisfactory as the refined skills needed at that level were not obtainable by reservists. I know. I was involved as a reservist in trying to create that specific command element out of the 14th Marines hide circa 1995-97. Drawing off of existing redundant HQ allowed better staffing this specific 'uneeded' cmd element.

Like I wrote I lived within this debate for twenty plus years & was as often as not part of the currents eddys of the tests and experiements. Some of that worked, & some did not.

Desert Storm really did a number on U.S. military organizational thinking. Your point is 100% valid, it's just that a Desert Storm-scale contingency was the least likely post-Cold War operation. The only aggressive state which could deploy multiple corps in open terrain was...Iraq. Maybe North Korea. There's definitely some lessons, such as if you deploy a MEF headquarters it needs to be able to coordinate fires, but the Army especially picked up some very bad ideas there. It was pointed out, I forget by who, that only two times in the 20th century did Army forces fight as divisions and not as brigades/RCTs, and that was the Kasserine Pass and Kuwait. Desert Storm validated a lot of the questionable decisions of the 1980's Army and provided ammo to silence anyone who suggested that maybe there was a better way to do things. It's one reason I thought about making the POD for my timeline sometime in the late 1980's so the Army wouldn't have as much institutional inertia in favor of 1980's foolishness.

The Marines, I think, in the 1990's didn't plan to refight Desert Storm as much as the Army did. They dropped a lot of their heavy artillery immediately afterwards despite the lessons you talked about here. My impression, which is based mostly on assumption, is that the Marine Corps only reluctantly added all their heavy forces as a way to stay relevant in the 1980's and happily shed it when the Cold War ended.
 
Hey folks, I've created an appendix thread in the Test Forum while I work more on the TL when I can. The mainline thread will continue, and I do plan to make progress over the summer while I look for a new job. But for the time being we can get into some of the nuts and bolts there, especially since I don't need to write the formal chapters out there.
 
Okay folks, it's get real time.

I've clearly lost a lot of time on this one. It just sort of slipped away. Right now I do have a plan:

I'm going to spend the next couple months plotting out, and continuing my research. However, come the new year I will be on a regular posting schedule. As of right now, I'm planning two chapters a month. There will probably be a new thread at that point, but I want to keep this active through most of next year.
 
The Marines, I think, in the 1990's didn't plan to refight Desert Storm as much as the Army did. They dropped a lot of their heavy artillery immediately afterwards despite the lessons you talked about here. ...

I was in the artillery in those years and am unaware of any 'heavy artillery dropped'. The 203mm M110 howitzer had been dropped in the mid 1980s when the M198 howitzer replaced it and the M114. The old 175mm cannon had been eliminated even earlier in the 1970s. There was a reorganization of the battalions in the 1990s, but if anything was dropped it was invisible to me. We were still training in that era with the expectation of taking on a MLRS type weapon. In the interim the US Army retained a battalion of those to be made available to the Marines if needed. We often had Army artillery liaisons officers in our exercises representing MLRS support.

Beyond that the reconfiguration of the HQ 14th Marines to provide a MEF artillery CP was a obvious commitment to reviving a 'corps' level artillery group.

The bulk of the training we did, at all the levels I observed were preparation for fighting the NKPA. From 1992 that was the emphasis. The exercise maps were Korea, or terrain resembling Korea, the Red arrows and units on the maps were NKPA style formations, & usually labeled that, the operations were what we expected fighting the NKPA. So no, we were not preparing to refight DS. We were preparing to finish the Korean war. That was very much the case when I retired in 1997. A big part of that fight was large scale use of artillery. The tenor of the exercises was shoot often and in large concentrations.
 
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