PPT Slide
What do you say to the critic who says what you're doing here is just building a peacekeeping force? “I say to him, Come out and watch that training, watch us fight. Watch us go into the urban combat. Bullets fly within five feet of one another as you're going into a city…. Come and watch us do combined-arms fighting with mortars and field artillery, and then tell me that I'm not doing combat." This sounds good on the surface, mixing just arty and mortars with motorized infantry does not make a complete combined-arms team. While watching the show it was obvious that the Soldiers were preparing for crowd control and civil disorder in peacekeeping ops and wore the lightest gear imaginable. How much did the transformation draw from the lessons learned with Task Force Hawk in Kosovo? "Task Force Hawk was one of the influences. If you look at the variety of operations that we conducted since the end of the Cold War--Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo--each one has some very similar characteristics." Most of them have "similar characteristics" alright. With the exception of Panama they were all peacekeeping ops. The half-truths abound!
During the PBS Frontline program, “Future Warfare”, MG Dubik, CDR of the first IBCT, was asked if the new wheeled brigades were designed for Peacekeeping? Below are his answers: