The 10th Mountain Division is Not A Mountain Division

One of the most disgraceful aspects of the US Army and marine ground forces in 2006 is their amateurism. Many modern US Army battalions, brigades and divisions are disorganized without a workable chain of command, or any other of the trappings that a modern combat infantry division should have. The commanders of such unit are to blame for such ineptitude.

A modern US Army infantry division is supposed to have as a minimum, nine or more maneuver battalions (infantry, armor, and/or mechanized), four or more artillery and antiaircraft battalions, an engineer battalion, a signals battalion, an intelligence battalion and assorted Military Police, reconnaissance and logistics units.

The US Army’s 10th Mountain Division is a pale shadow of the above. First of all, its not a mountain division, none of the soldiers in the division have much more than basic infantry training. They don’t know anything about mountain warfare. Division headquarters is not located in mountainous Colorado. It is located in the flatlands of Fort Drum, New York.

The 10th Mountain Division is not organized like an infantry division. In fact it is organized like a civilian security company that dispatches individual rifle companies all over the world. The chain of command does not work in the 10th Mountain Division. In fact at any one time the division has approximately nine battalion commanders, four brigade commanders and several generals who at any one time are wandering throughout the world like so many gypsies.

The 10th Mountain Division is supposed to be a light infantry division with at least eight light infantry battalions. It is poorly organized and lightly armed, but that is not what light infantry means. Light infantry is supposed to be well-armed foot soldiers, able to move swiftly over rough terrain. Such a unit is supposed to have plenty of light machine guns, light mortars and RPGs. The 10th Mountain Division is not like that

The Light Infantry Battalion
The poorly organized US Army light infantry battalion is supposed to have a headquarters element, three rifle companies, a mortar section of six 81 mm mortars, and an antitank unit. The antitank unit has apparently been increased in size from a platoon of four TOW antitank guided missiles mounted on Hummers, to a company of twenty TOWs. Army Field Manual (FM) 7-91 (1987) listed the light infantry battalion as having "one antiarmor platoon consisting of two sections of two TOW systems each.” TOWs are ineffective wire guided missiles, too heavy for employment in Afghanistan or Iraq. The US Army has nothing comparable to the RPG, the world’s most effective, lightweight and multipurpose antitank weapon.

The US Army light infantry battalion has a personnel strength of 567 officers and men. They are in three companies and a headquarters element with weapons units. Each company has three rifle platoons with an HQ/weapons platoon. Each platoon has a headquarters and three rifle squads of nine men each. The equipment allocations for the light infantry battalion are:

Grenade Launcher, 40mm, M203 65
Machine Gun, Cal 50, Flex 15 too heavy for light infantry
Machine Gun, Grenade 40MM, MK-19 14 too heavy for light infantry
Machine Gun, 5.56 MM M249- 72….In the 10th Mountain Division, each battalion has 9 platoons, and each platoon has two light machine guns. That’s 18 light machine guns, where are rest? The 10th Mountain Division is supposed to have 6 light machine guns per platoon
Mortar, 60 MM 6 2 per company there should be six light mortars
Mortar, 81 MM, M252 6
AntiTank Set, Command Launch Unit 18 2 per platoon, not issued in the Middle East
Truck, Util, TOW Carrier, ARMD 20

Comparison of 10th Mountain Battalion to WWII Battalions
The 10th Mountain Division’s battalions can be easily outgunned and stomped by any properly organized light infantry battalion. If there was a time warp, and second-class Rumanian and Japanese infantry battalions from World War II fought against a modern 10th Mountain Division rifle battalion, it is obvious who would win.

Even second class foreign battalions were better organized sixty years ago than modern 10th Mountain Division battalions. For example, the Rumanian mountain battalion in World War II had 3 rifle companies; each company 3 platoons and each platoon 3 squads. It also had a heavy weapons company made up from 3 machine-gun platoons (4 Schwarzlose/ZB-53 heavy machine guns each mounted on pack mules) and one mortar platoon (4xBrandt 81.4 mm also on pack mules). The Rumanian mountain rifle platoon had one 60 mm Stokes Brandt mortar and 3xZB light machine-guns, one for each squad. The Rumanian mountain battalion could easily defeat a modern US light infantry battalion because it had more mortars and machine guns. If the Rumanians faced a battalion of the 10th Mountain Division, with no artillery or air support available to either side, the Rumanians would run over them.

The same can be said of Japanese World War II infantry battalion with 1,000 soldiers. They used pack mules to haul their heavy loads. Compare that battalion, outlined below, to a 10th Mountain Division battalion.

WWII JAPANES RIFLE BATTALION WEAPONS
Rifle 6.6mm, 9 1/4 pounds, 2,850meter effective range, 10rpm, 686 in the battalion
Heavy Machine Gun 7.7mm, 122 pounds, 3,300meters effective range, 250rpm, 8 in battalion
Light Machine Gun 6.5mm, 20 pounds, 2,850meters effective range, 150rpm, 25 in battalion
Battalion Howitzer 70mm, 468 pounds, 3,700meters range, 10rpm, 2 in battalion
Grenade Discharger 50mm, 10 ¼ pounds, 40-666 meters range, 10 rpm, 22 in battalion

Source: CINCPAC CINCPOA Bulletin #55-45, 15 March 1945, Japanese Infantry Weapons.

The Light Rifle Company
The basic combat unit of a division should be a battalion or regiment. In the 10th Mountain Division, it is an under strength rifle company. A 10th Mountain Division light infantry company has five officers and one hundred, twenty-five men. The key weapons, besides small arms, are supposed to include; six light machine-guns, 5.56 mm, two 60 mm mortars, and six light anti-armor guided missiles (ATGM). These are now equipped with Javelin. The company has a company headquarters (HQ) platoon, three rifle platoons, an antitank section and a mortar section of two 60mm mortars. Tenth Mountain Division rifle companies carry no antitank weapons in Afghanistan. It is a very weak unit, more comparable to a company of civilian police.

The leadership of the 10th Mountain Division is incompetent. That is why there are so many problems in the unit. The 10th Mountain Division has totally fragmented its units. In Afghanistan, it commits platoons or individual companies to Vietnam-style search and destroy missions. Just like in Vietnam, a light platoon or company is helicopter-lifted into some Afghanistan valley and that night is returned to base.

The deployment of 10th Mountain Division tactical units is outrageous. Each man carries at least a 90-pound pack on his back and wears body armor. As a result, the troops stagger along at 10,000 feet elevation wheezing and blinded by fatigue. At least five percent of every unit falls out from exhaustion or injury during every operation.

The light troops advance at a snail’s pace without light mortar support, too few light machine guns, and no RPGs. A small gang of Afghani thugs, composed of three snipers, four light machine guns, 4 RPGs and six light mortars, would wipe them out easily.

10th Mountain Division Training
As it was during the Vietnam era, the leaders of the 10th Mountain Division require little training of their troops. Most of the time, soldiers are languishing in their bases where the men wrestle with their officers and NCOs. They play sports a lot, have a daily run and work out with weights. They have lots of fattening food and ice cream every day. Such an atmosphere maintains immaturity among the personnel and such troops are prone to panic. The 10th Mountain Division has a too high percentage of traumatic and posttraumatic stress syndrome. The unit’s “combat veterans” actually have very little exposure to combat.
10th Mountain Division training is abysmal. Combat units go to the rifle range periodically. Sometimes they do SWAT type training in abandoned buildings. That’s it! They are NOT taught machine gun tactics, light mortar tactics, assaults on mountain strongholds, laying and defusing booby traps, calling in artillery fire, ambushing, raids, reaction to ambush and/or the tactics of withdrawal under pressure. There is plenty of time available for training, but no officers are available who know what to do.

It’s a Leadership Problem
The commander of the 10th Mountain Division was in charge of Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. That operation was a total failure. The inept generals and colonels of the 10th Mountain Division have demonstrated no understanding of the concept of battlefield intelligence. They don’t know how to locate enemy supply lines or bases. The division’s generals and colonels are living in the future. They’ve never heard of using pack animals to carry heavy loads in mountains. In the 10th Mountain Division, infantry soldiers are used as pack mules. 10th Mountain Division units are as bad as the worst units fielded during the Vietnam War.

In October 2002, a “brigade” (a collection of 2-3 battalions) of the 10th Mountain Division was employed in an assault exercise at the Urban Readiness Training Center in Louisiana. The 10th Mountain Division troops were supposedly “veterans” led by “officer veterans of combat operations in Afghanistan.” Yet the unit’s company, battalion and brigade commanders demonstrated that they had no idea how to maneuver their units. Their units were wiped out to the last man. The performance of the 10th Mountain Division leadership was unbelievably inept.

There are many professional soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division that we can be proud of. However, many of the conventional colonels and generals in command, are unfit.

-Breaker McCoy