The BG News August 24, 1994

The BGSU campus student newspaper August 24, 1994. Volume 77 - Issue 2https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/6713/thumbnail.jp

Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on August 3-5, 1993, and held at JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overview, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. More than 100 technical papers, 17 exhibits, a plenary session, several panel discussions, and several keynote speeches were included in SOAR '93

Street fighting: lessons learned from the Battle for Hue for 21st century urban warfare

Increasing urbanization in a global setting of political and economic instability indicates that urban warfare may well be the major conflict scenario of the 21st century. The United States armed forces are not currently prepared to meet that challenge. The last major urban conflict involving the American military was the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War. As part of the Tet Offensive in 1968, Communist forces seized control of Hue and held it for nearly a month. Having undergone intensive tactical training for their mission, the enemy, solidly entrenched in buildings of various kinds, offered fierce resistance to the American and South Vietnamese troops who tried to reconquer the city. U.S. Marines bore the brunt of the fighting. Untrained and unequipped for street-fighting, they encountered immense difficulties in clearing Hue. Faulty intelligence, command and control problems, and a lack of proper equipment made the experience a nightmarish one and the human cost was considerable: 147 Marines and seventy-four soldiers lost their lives, while a combined total of 1,364 were wounded. Only through raw determination, superior firepower, and adaptive leadership were the Marines able to prevail. The Battle of Hue offered critical lessons for subsequent military planners. Later conflicts in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan suggested that Hue might be more relevant than expected for contemporary warfare. As a result, the U.S. armed forces have made significant strides toward correcting deficiencies in the areas of doctrine, training, and equipment. However, they remain under-prepared for urban warfare because they are still not training as a joint and combined arms team across the full spectrum of operations. This is in large part due to continued shortfalls in training infrastructure and lack of equipment. U.S. armed forces must continue to maximize urban operations training at every level in order to validate doctrine, learn how to fight, and develop specialized equipment for urban operations

In Harm\u27s Way: The Continued Relevance of the U.S. Navy\u27s Forward Presence Mission in the Post-Cold War World

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States Navy has seen the fleet shrink from nearly 600 ships in 1988 to 320 ships in 1999, with a planned reduction to 305 ships by 2004. While the fleet has been reduced by nearly 50 percent over the last decade, the deployment of U.S. naval forces has continued at near-Cold War levels. The result is a mismatch between the national security requirements that naval forces are called on to support, and the forces available to meet those requirements. Some have suggested that the traditional forward presence mission of the Navy-Marine Corps team is no longer relevant in the post-Cold War environment. Others suggest that virtual presence through space surveillance and global air power can replace the physical presence of naval forces. Still others have advocated a return to an isolationist policy, forgoing military presence altogether. Although U.S. naval forces are no longer required to counter the threat of Soviet aggression, possible peer or near-peer competitors, such as Russia and China, combined with emerging regional powers, require that the United States maintain forces in areas near U.S. interests. This thesis will examine the continued importance of maintaining a strong naval presence in the three principal areas of U.S. interest--the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Northeast Asia--and the inability to meet U.S. national security requirements with proposed alternatives to forward presence. Also covered will be new systems and operational concepts of the Navy-Marine Corps team, and their importance to the forward presence mission

U.S Naval Strategy in the 1990\u27s

The decade of the 1990s represents a distinctive period in American naval strategic thinking. Bounded on one side by the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 and on the other by the beginning of the era of the global war on terrorism after 11 September 2001, these were years in which the U.S. Navy of the 1990s found itself faced with a dramatically altered strategic situation. For the first time in at least four decades, the U.S. Navy had neither a peer nor a superior naval adversary; further, no credible naval adversary could be discerned in the foreseeable future.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1026/thumbnail.jp