The Echo of Battle

By John

Another outstanding book review from Colonel Hank Foresman USA (and a fine VMI man). Thanks Colonel!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Echo of Battle; The Army’s Way of War; By Brian McAllister Linn; Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2007; 312 pages, with index and notes.

This is an important book for all professional Army Officers to read, contemplate, and discuss. This book is about how the military and particular the Army thinks of war. This book is a history of the Army, the development of its Operational Doctrine, and how doctrinal development has created complimentary and conflicting cultures with the Army. The author, Brian Linn, identifies the three cultures, which have shaped the ethos of the Army as being the Guardians, the Heroic, and the Manager.

There is old adage, that the Army prepares itself for the last war. The author, quotes General John Galvin, former SACEUR who stated, ‘When we think about the possibilities of conflict we tend to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war. . .a combat environment that is consistent and predictable. . .one that fits our plans, our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas. We arrange in our minds a war we can comprehend on our own terms, usually with an enemy who looks like us and acts like us. This comfortable conceptualization becomes the accepted way of seeing things. . .until it comes under serious challenge as a result of some military event—usually a military disaster.’1

For the United States Army our operational doctrine has been devised to fight the war we wanted to fight, not the war we ended up fighting.2 Clearly our experiences in Afghanistan and in Iraq after the defeat of Sadam Hussein have caused our military and in particular the Army to focus on fighting a different type of war—counterinsurgency and not the war our forces trained to fight at NTC, JRTC, and CMTC.

By understanding the ying and yang of the three subcultures in the Army, one begins to get an appreciation for how the Army operates and more importantly why it operates as it does. As mentioned there are three sub-cultures that have influenced the Army. Each has characteristic setting it apart from the other sub-culture. The Guardians core belief was that war was both a science and an art. As a science it was governed by principals, when followed not only allowed the Army to anticipate or predict the outcome of a battle or campaign. Only those who had mastered the Science of War could practice the Art of War. The Guardians are the oldest sub-culture in the Army and as a group shaped the early Army by guiding our nation to a belief that only through strong coastal defense could the United States firmly resist an invading Army. The early guardian adherents were those Corps of Engineer officers who shaped the early Army and built massive redoubts along the Eastern and Gulf Coast such as Fort Monore in Virginia and Fort Sumter and Moultrie in Charleston. Today’s Guardians are often those who advocate that only through the development of ballistic missile defense can the nation truly be safe. Our enemies however do not confine the influence of the Guardians to the Army, as clearly the United States Air Force, and those who advocate the need for protecting our frontiers from hostile actions are rightful heirs to the guardian culture.3 The second group, which Linn identifies, is the Heroic culture, in short the Heroic culture “reduced war to the simplest terms—as armed violence directed towards the achievement of an end.”4 The heroic sub-culture is noted for its ability to separate the essential from the trivial, to adapt, to be flexible in transition from one form of warfare to another. The example the author cited was of George S. Patton, Jr. who went from being an advocate of mechanized warfare, to a crusty cavalryman, and back to being the greatest practitioner of maneuver warfare during World War II. For the heroic sub-culture, war was an art not defined by fixed rules and formulas. The last sub-culture, which Linn identified, was the Manager. The manager learned the lessons of the American Civil War and the German Wars for Unification that the entire might of the state must be mobilized, synchronized, and organized to fight the nations war. Efficiency, and management were their guiding principals. World War II was the ultimate test and ascendency of the manager sub-culture as it required leaders of vision to be the “Organizer[s] of Victory”5 While the sub-cultures exist within the Army, he notes that most military officers possess or ascribe to aspects of each of the sub-cultures and can be clearly identified as belonging to one of the sub-cultures. Likewise he notes that the existence of the sub-cultures within the Army leads to disharmony, rather they often work hand in hand in shaping the ethos of the Army.

Linn further notes that while each sub-culture have a rational for their way of war, likewise each has a rational for failure. For the Guardians failure can ascribe to the inability of civil representatives to listen to their advice and to support their scientific rational approach to fighting the war. The heroes will blame the enemy for not fighting honorably and their military and civil leader for lacking the resolve to win. The managers will place blame on the technical failures of the guardians, the romanticism of heroic and the failure of civil leadership to support the army as required. What I found interesting about Linn’s explanation of how the sub-cultures view failure was the consistent theme among all three, that somehow the civil representatives failed the Army.6

Having served in the Army thirty plus years, Linn’s book was an eye opener for me. Through his careful examination of the Army’s history, he help explain and amplify what I have experienced during my career. When I entered the Army in 1976, General William DePuy, the then TRADOC Commander and guiding force in the writing of FM 100-5 Operations (1976) was the guardian advocate of the “Active Defense.” According to DePuy and FM 100-5, the United States Army could defeat the Soviet horde through a defense in depth, which would chew up the 1st Echelon Soviet Combined Arms Armies and allow for the United States and its NATO Allies to defeat the Soviet Union. While reflecting the pragramtic realization of a post-Vietnam Army FM 100-5 focused the Army on waging what I have previously referred to as “grand wars” while operations such as counter insurgency and foreign internal defense were exercised from being part of the core missions of the Army.7 For DePuy and a whole generation of officers, these missions were not for conventional army and were left to the Special Operation Community. DePuy and others were firmly exercising the memory of Vietnam from the collective psychie of the Army.

While DePuy’s vision of the core mission of the Army resonated well throughout the force, in reality the “Active Defense” was referred to by most second lieutenants as being nothing more that a means of dying in place. The “active defense” was not popular as a operational doctrine, and as result by the early eighties it was replaced with what became known as the “Air-Land Battle.” The drafting of operational doctrine was done under the leadership of General Donn Starry, then TRADOC Commander, and a dashing cavalryman. The heart of soul of this doctrine was the synchronization of a Air and Land Campaign in which bold offensive ground operations would stop the 1st Echelon of the Soviet CAA, while the Air, both Army and Air Force would attack in depth to destroy the follow on echelons of the Soviet CAAs. “Air-Land Battle” was a heroic document, for the guiding principles was that through Agility, Initiative, Depth and Synchronization the Army could and would defeat the Soviet hordes on the plains of Germany. Like DePuy before him, Starry saw the core mission of the United States Army as fighting grand wars.

Concurrently with the publication of “Air-Land Battle” Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, articulated the so called Weinberger doctrine that made it clear that the United States military would not be committed piece meal, without clear national interest, and without a clearly defined National Strategic end state. This was political statement that the military and in particular the Army would not be committed to operations like Vietnam or the Lebanon without clear linkages to vital interest of the United States.

While Air-Land battle focused the Army on defeating the Soviet Hordes on the German plains, it acknowledged that the Army could and may have to fight smaller wars in terrain less suitable for large mechanized forces. Referred to in Air-Land Battle as Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) it was seen as being the purview of not the mechanized Army but rather the Light and Airborne Forces. MOOTW, or as it became later known as Operations Other Than War (OOTW), was never embraced by the Army in a collective manner.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the underpinning of the Army Operational Doctrine the defeat of the Soviet Horde evaporated in a instant. The Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact dissolved as one nation after another in the former Eastern Bloc turn its gaze westward and not eastward. For the Army it was left searching for a mission, and revisions to FM 100-5 in the period 1992 thru 2003 merely tinkered around the edges of Air-Land Battle, except that heroic characteristics so evident in the 1982 and 86 versions were gradually deemphasized and the guardian tradition of scientific warfare dominated. Staffs spent hours determining correlations of forces in order to justify various Courses of Action recommended to a Commander. The Military Decision Making Process was a very rational, scientific approach Commander’s and Staffs to plan military operations and fit nicely within the framework of the guardians.

For the Army, after the its quickly won war against Iraq in Desert Storm, this period also marked a period of retrenchment from Europe, dwindling budgets and cuts to the force. Rather than looking forward to see the changes wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Army hung on to the Status Quo Ante Bellum and focused its attention of doctrinal energies towards grand wars. It also saw the Army committed to various troubled spots throughout the world, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo to name a few. What the Army experienced in these deployments was not what it had trained for. It found itself involved in stability and peacekeeping operations, or in the parlance of FM 100-5 OOTW and it was not prepared, organized, or intellectually agile to understand the shifts in the dynamics of war.8

When viewed in the context of the evolution of doctrine over the last thirty years, the recent publications of the FM 3-0 Operations (February 2008) is the first revolutionary and not evolutionary Operational Doctrine since the first publication of Air-Land Battle in 1986. But it also highlights the struggle within the Army, as each of the sub-cultures, the Guardians, the Heroic, and the Managers attempt to shape the Army in their age. For the time being the Heroic sub-culture has the upper hand, and seems to be working hand in hand with the managers to ensure that the Army has the trained, ready, and equipped forces to meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. But this does not mean the Guardian sub-culture is not alive and well. The ethos of the Army has been shaped over the years by the struggle between the sub-cultures which have shaped the Army—and the future will see this struggle continue as the Army is shaped by the events of the moment linked to the past.

Linn’s book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the history of the Army and how doctrine has shaped the Army. One of the lessons from this book is the Army has changed over time, but not without a struggle.

Henry J. Foresman, Jr.

21 May 2008

May 26, 2008 08:42 PM Books

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://op-for.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1737

Comments

Sir or Ma'am,

I found your website (http://op-for.com/2008/05/the_echo_of_battle.html) and was trying to click on other links. It keeps saying that the internet explorer could not display this page. I tried that about us, home, and VMI links.

Alexander Samms · May 27, 2008 06:17 AM