The Grey Beard Brigade
by L. Scott Lingamfelter
10.16.2025 at 06:00am
If you are like me, a soldier in the United States Army from 1973 to 2001, you have likely been disappointed with the Army’s drift over the past three decades. It was not an exclusive downward slide. The same has occurred in the Army’s sister services. In that span of time, physical fitness and appearance standards declined. The skill sets required to engage in conventional war, now characterized as large-scale combat operations (LSCO), have atrophied alarmingly, the fancier name notwithstanding. Likewise, the readiness of our forces during years of counterinsurgency (COIN) wars degraded as combat formations—corps, divisions, brigades, battalions, and companies and batteries—were hollowed out and refashioned to accommodate the frequent rotation of fighting forces in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the process, we gutted key Army branches like the artillery, air defense, and engineers, to bolster the need for manpower in bespoke Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) that were combat centerpieces during COIN operations. Indeed, the Army unwisely eliminated both division and corps artillery formations, which were essential to combined arms capabilities in LSCO. This was mindless. Indeed, a huge blunder.
Even now, that illogic continues as the Army’s armored cavalry, aviation assets, and special forces are being defenestrated to account for the manpower needs of other branches. That is a poor way to address manpower, and sadly, it is consistent with the decomposition of combat power and skills in the wake of the COIN years.
Moreover, weakening the contribution of critical army branches fails to recognize that the Army fights with combined arms, which contemplate the synchronization of essential capabilities to create the necessary impacts to overwhelm the enemy on the battlefield. That combat principle has not changed. It remains sound doctrine. Indeed, if anything, it has been reconfirmed by what we are seeing—or should have seen—in Ukraine as that country struggles fighting a war of attrition for its survival against a Russian invasion.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/16/the-grey-beard-brigade/
