ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

The Army has long had a need to deliver precision indirect fires. Yet recent political debates have spotlighted that need to the point that “precision fires” are suddenly becoming part of the public lexicon—debated on the OpEd pages of local newspapers, summarized in television sound bites and discussed over the radio airways.

Ironically, one of the U.S. Army’s lesser known battlefield systems, the M7 Bradley Fire Support Team (BFIST) vehicle, has been setting new standards of precision target location and controlling precision indirect fires for the last few years. To summarize it for...

Since their invention in the first half of the 19th century, binoculars have played a critical role in many tactical military operations. It has only been in the last decade, however, that U.S. Army binoculars have been optimized to meet the unique needs of individual
warfighters.

“Before 2000, the Army considered binoculars to be a ‘one size fits all’ type of item,” explained Barbara Muldowney, deputy product manager for Individual Weapons within the program executive office—Soldier. “And that’s pretty hard to do. But after 2000, the Army decided that they needed mission-specific binoculars.”

Br...

Human intelligence (HUMINT)-gathering at the unit level in Iraq isn’t a 007-style enterprise. It’s plugging away, day after day, collecting bits and pieces of information—some big, some small—and trying to piece the local puzzle together; meanwhile, passing all the chunks up the chain so somebody else might fit them into the bigger picture. A quilt is made from scraps.

And it isn’t throwing a towel over your head and sneaking behind the lines. Heck, in Iraq, when the rear bumper of your vehicle passes the gate, you ARE behind the lines.

Tactical HUMINT teams (THTs) go deliberately about their...

We now return to the question of whether in the information-worshipping age of today, anti-intellectualism in our military has at last made its grudging exit.

My purposes in this two-part article are to trace the origins and manifestations of this anti-intellectual bias within the American military tradition.

“September 11 is one of those moments in history that toughens a generation,” 1st Lt. Jarat Ford remarked on the night that American air strikes began against the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in Afghan­istan. It was his 25th birthday, and the Apache pilot and 
platoon leader in Company B, 1st Battalion, 1st Aviation Regiment 
(1-1 Aviation) was spending it at a former Soviet airbase in northern Poland and thinking about the war being waged 3,000 miles away. Approximately 80 U.S. Army Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook heli­copters were parked in straight ranks on grass aprons that flanked...

“Of the day that all of this began—Tuesday, September 11—I have many memories,” SMA Jack L. Tilley told the soldiers, Army civilian employees and Army contractors who were seated in two rows inside Conmy Hall at Fort Myer, Va. “But few are as strong as what I saw in the hallways and on the grounds of the Pentagon in the minutes and hours following the attack.”

The soldiers and civilians were there to be honored for their actions done and wounds incurred when an airliner slammed into the west side of the Pentagon.

“Looking back on it,” SMA Tilley continued, “I saw exactly what I...

In his book Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, respected military historian Russell F. Weigley tells an interesting story about Gen. George C. Marshall, the World War II Army Chief of Staff and someone who wielded almost complete control over the promotion of general officers, and Col. James A. Van Fleet. Although Van Fleet had performed brilliantly in the European theater as commander of the 8th Infantry Regiment at Utah Beach and his senior field commanders had submitted his name to Marshall for promotion to briga­dier general more than once, Marshall kept rejecting the recommendation. As the story...