Edward H. Carpenter

Military Officers on Women in the Infantry: Five For, One Against

by Edward H. Carpenter | 13 September, 2014 | Featured

Contenders for the Marine Corps Association's Major General Harold W. Chase Prize, ($3000, publication, and a plaque) are supposed to "propose and argue for a new and better way of “doing business” in the Marine Corps. Authors must have strength in their convictions and be prepared for criticism from those who would defend the status quo." Therefore it came as a surprise to many military professionals when the 2013 winner was Marine Captain Lauren F. Serrano, whose winning essay was an opinion piece that called for maintaining the status quo and excluding women from the infantry. But in the...

In Search of a New Warrior Ethos

by Edward H. Carpenter | 27 July, 2014 | Featured

It’s not often that a Marine officer writes a book that goes head-to-head with a title currently listed as “Commandant’s Choice” book by the Marine Corps, but in this case, I had little choice but to lay down the sword and take up the pen in order to debunk the honor-bound, shame-based relic of dead cultures espoused by Steven Pressfield’s 2011 monograph, which the current Commandant has made mandatory reading for all Marines. Unfortunately, Pressfield’s book is a rambling mixture of Laconophiliac hero worship, Eastern mysticism, and pop psychology, and the “Warrior Ethos” it proposes is...

The New Blitzkrieg, Part II

by Edward H. Carpenter | 9 July, 2014 | Featured

As I wrote a few days ago, a new pattern of warfare is emerging in the Middle East and Africa. This “new blitzkrieg” isn’t really new, but it is asymmetric warfare at its best, pitting swarms of fast-moving, lightly armed fighters operating as a network against hidebound hierarchies of Western-trained and equipped “professional soldiers”. These state forces have a bad track record of crumbling under the tempo of swarming, networked attackers; and the only thing that has proven capable of stemming the tide is early airstrikes followed with a robust military “prop-up and mop-up” campaign, as...

The New Blitzkrieg

by Edward H. Carpenter | 3 July, 2014 | Featured

A new version of maneuver warfare is being utilized mainly by Islamic fundamentalist forces to seize territory from government forces trained, equipped and organized along the Western model. This “new blitzkrieg” relies on lightly armed fighters mounted on “technicals” – 4x4 trucks with heavy machine-guns, light cannons, or automatic grenade launchers mounted on the vehicle. Here are some key factors we should be thinking about in order to potentially combat these forces in the future. This isn’t new. The exact same tactics were used by the Taliban in 1994 to seize massive areas of...

Apples & Oranges & Women in the Infantry

by Edward H. Carpenter | 6 February, 2013 | Featured

As the military grapples with how to implement the reversal of the decades old ban on women in “combat” specialties, one of the data points that many people are using (especially in and around the Marine Corps) is the performance of the only two female Lieutenants to have attempted to complete the Infantry Officer’s Course at Quantico. The first dropped out on one of the first days of training during the grueling Combat Endurance Test; so did 26 of her male classmates. The other female Lieutenant made it about one-third of the way through the course before being sidelined by a debilitating...

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