Posted Response To DoD Buzz Article Critical of Army Planning

Here is a response I posted to the article below:

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/07/24/army-planning-for-last-war/

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I have a good friend and colleague who is being redeployed. Like myself, this guy is a history buff. As we talked the other day, I spotted on his bookshelf this very interesting book on the post-Korean War Army, a book written by Bacevich in the mid-80s:

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/books/Books%20-%201980%20to%201989/Pentomic%20Era%20-%20July%2086/PENTER.pdf

“The Pentomic Era: The US Army Between Korea and Vietnam”

This book is a classic. It is filled with quotes from heavy hitters like William DePuy and Jack Cushman, from a time when those men were field grade officers. Change the names and the circumstances, it could be front line news as to what is happening to the U.S. Army today.

We do need to understand why it is that the U.S. Army is particularly subjected to each stroke of the electoral cycle, and why it is forced to engage in radical transformative ventures, why it is compelled to continuously redefine its business model. No other army in the world does this. The Marine Corps and the Air Force do not have to wage a continuous battle to justify their existence – or their acquisition programs. They do not junk their doctrine and rewrite it from scratch every 8-10 years.

Part of it, I believe, is that the U.S. Army is always overextended; part of it, I think, stems from an intrinsic American dislike of standing armies. And then there is our national tendency, only partly muted since WWII, to fall into military disrepair and unreadiness during times of (relative) peace. How would we mobilize if we needed a much larger army ever again ? This is not a new problem. The Army’s end strength in the 1950s fell into the 800K range for only 14 divisions of 11K men apiece. Pathetic force generation…just pathetic. But then, this was an army of draftees. Conventional ops ? No, that was outmoded Cold War thinking – the Army was to break with the past, with the last war. The Korean War. We would never be fighting a war like that again.

What the record shows is that in the 50s, the Army went over the top in designing a force supposedly optimized for high intensity conflict, under Eisenhower’s New Look, with SecDef Charles Wilson foreshadowing Rumsfeld and Gates in browbeating the Army leadership. Replace the Crusader, the AGS, and the FCS MGV with the T113 (the prototype M113) and the story is the same. Megabucks for missiles (the latest fad in the inventory), pennies for ground combat vehicles.

After Kennedy’s election, the pendulum swung towards low intensity conflict. Many of the arguments the Army made to counter the New Look came back to haunt it during the 60s. It was only after the Vietnam debacle, under the leadership of Abrams and Depuy, that the Army rediscovered its center. Nonetheless, the strategic tension remained, as many of us well recall; Bacevich reveals himself in the 1986 book to be as pro-LIC as he is today. He actively opines that the US should have declared itself to be an international police force on the model of the Roman imperium back in ‘55.

I do find it difficult to fault the Army leadership for this situation; Truman and Eisenhower ended the careers of Douglas MacArthur and Matthew Ridgeway. Bush and Obama ended the careers of Shinseki and McKiernan: what, pray tell, has changed ? Conclusion: while Goure’s premise is correct, his evaluation of the problem’s cause is flawed.

In a proliferated world, what makes us think there is no room for pentomic divisions ? If anything, we should reflect that the pentomic era’s operational motto of flexibility, mobility and depth prefigured our Air Land Battle tenets of agility, initiative, depth and synchronization – words that I now understand to have been buried at Fort Leavenworth.

There are warriors in the ranks of the generals. Men of common sense and toughness, the Tex Goodspeeds of my generation. The Army of the Future awaits their lead, when all this has played out.

Klotzen, nicht kleckern.