The U.S. Armed Forces

The United States armed forces must have seemed like easy meat to Saddam Hussein. Even if he aroused sufficient ire on the part of the United States to get approval for some sort of military action through a Congress that seemed to espouse pacifism as national policy, the force that would be deployed against him would not amount to much. The dictator had a lot of help in arriving at that conclusion. The American press and the public also underestimated the armed forces, as did Congress. There was superficially good reason for the Americans to worry: Vietnam had been an unmitigated disaster, which had invalidated much of the military philosophy upon which the armed forces had been built. Before and during the war with Iraq we heard continuously about "lessons learned from Vietnam." Once it was over, the end of the “Vietnam syndrome” was one of the constant themes in politics. The services exceeded all expectations except their own.

The Army represented the epitome of the Vietnam syndrome. While the other three services suffered from the same problems caused by the loss of that war, in the Army they were much more pronounced, the recovery process much more painful. When we went into Vietnam the Army was made up of draftees called up for two years. They were led by a relatively small core of professionals, men who made the military their life’s work. It was a peacetime army, and there were men — there were very few women at that time — who served their time and got out as PFCs, stolidly standing guard duty, pulling KP, and picking up cigarette butts, never seeing a shot fired in anger. They were grossly underpaid; the starting pay for a private in 1968 was only $95.70 a month, before taxes, and that of a sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank, with 20 years of service, was $601.20. But there were compensations: prices in the PX were within range of the low salaries, housing was provided, there were extra allowances for families, and, most importantly, there was the camaraderie and sense of belonging that made garrison life in 1965 not that different from garrison life in 1875. The military took care of its own.

Vietnam changed all that. Garrison life in 1975 was to be an entirely different proposition from a hundred years before. The Army’s catharsis was reported in excruciating detail by the press in the course of the war. New functions were introduced, along with new techniques and new ways of thinking. At the core, the shift was made from leadership to management. Under Robert McNamara, President John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, the assumption was made that a military force could be run like a business. Worse, the assumption was made that because it could be, it should be. Servicemen became the work force, and the “product” became dead enemy bodies.

McNamara was the president of Ford Motor Company when Kennedy picked him to take over Defense. He was not an expert in the military arena, but considered himself a specialist in managing large organizations. He installed a cadre of mathematicians, physicists, and economists, and the decision-making mechanisms they introduced were based on games theory and computerized techniques. A “rationalized process” required that goals be specified in a quantified way, such as the square miles of enemy territory that should be destroyed. Alternative methods would then be considered for accomplishing the mission — air, ground assault, missiles, etc. And finally a success criterion would be specified, or if there were several criteria they would be assigned quantitative weights or ranks. The mission would be simulated on the computer and the most likely successful alternatives would be presented to the policymaker. The “art of war” was replaced by Military Science.

The armed forces in Vietnam fought under just this sort of tight and artificial civilian control. War, we were periodically reminded, was too important to be left to the generals.^[5] Vietnam became a showcase for the effects of allowing amateurs to apply facile theories to the lives of thousands of men.

The armed forces in Vietnam relied too heavily on air power, often indiscriminately applied. There were too many funny hats and gadgets, outside the control of the field commanders but within their areas of responsibility. The effort was continually made to quantify what was basically unquantifiable — the percentage of the countryside that was “pacified,” for example, itself a slippery term. The importance of things that were quantifiable, such as the number of dead enemy or the number of weapons captured, was magnified disproportionately. Judgment calls — "are we winning," for instance — were to be avoided or else were subject to a party line. Most importantly from the strategic point of view, there was no clearly defined goal to the war other than propping up a series of South Vietnamese regimes that were neither understood nor liked by the American public. If a tunnel goes nowhere and there is a light visible, it is probably on fire.

This is not to say the intentions weren’t good. The war was fought to keep one country — South Vietnam — from being absorbed up by its hungry neighbor to the north. North Vietnam was seen as a Chinese-Soviet puppet at the time the war heated up, and it was believed that if South Vietnam went into the clutches of the Reds, so too would go Cambodia and Laos, and probably Thailand. This was the much-derided, now discredited domino theory. As anyone who has been to Cambodia or Laos can attest, the derision and discredit are undeserved. Thailand did manage to get away, but its own insurgency at times seemed like it was getting critical.

Nor is this to say that the antiwar groups were correct in their assessment of an "illegal, unjust and immoral war."  Assisting the Saigon regimes was no more illegal, unjust or immoral than had been assisting South Korea, Greece or for that matter France and Britain. Far from being particularly corrupt or despotic, the Ky and Thieu regimes especially were about typical for the region and better than some.^[6]  A good deal of South Vietnam's political instability stemmed from attempts to please the Americans by loosening controls in the middle of a war whose basic nature required the infringement of civil liberties to preserve the state.

What happened to the U.S. Army at the unit level in those years was a sin and a shame. U.S. troops were flooded into Vietnam, eventually reaching a strength of over a half million. Rotations — that is, assignments into and out of the war zone — were done individually, rather than by unit, which did away with cohesiveness. Assignments were for a single year, not long enough in practice for officers or NCOs to gain deep experience. Officer training courses were opened at most major posts and young men with high school diplomas who met the minimum requirements were invited to attend. Similar programs were introduced for NCOs by 1968.^[7]

The war came to resemble a meat grinder, with young men dumped in one end and the dead — almost 50,000 of them — and maimed coming out the other. With no end in sight, the army of draftees folded. The unofficial theme of the troops became a popular song of the time entitled "We Gotta Get Out of this Place." By the time the last U.S. troops were finally pulled out there was little discipline and less cohesiveness in the Army. The Marines were in almost as bad shape. There were comparable, though not quite so intense, problems in the Air Force and the Navy. “Fraggings” (removal of a commander by the use of explosives) and small-unit mutinies had become almost common. The military as a whole had fallen into disrepute with the public and with its members.

Some of the disrepute was deserved. The North Vietnamese were, simply put, not very good soldiers. They were sloppy, they were poorly disciplined, and they quit easily. The U.S. had dealt with their like in the Philippines in the early years of this century and had put down the guerrilla war there with fewer men and much more primitive equipment, but with a lot more application and a lot less civilian interference. Going back a few years before that, a few regiments of Indian fighters would have made minced meat of the Viet Cong. Good soldiers or bad, however, what mattered was not that the U.S. beat them in every battle, but that they won the war. General William Westmoreland made the Ten Best Dressed list; General Giap wore ugly clothes and knew how to fight a war of attrition.

The ten years beginning with the Army reorganization of 1973 were the aftermath of Vietnam. The armed forces were broken and they needed fixed.

The draftees were left out; there was too much public opposition to the draft, anyway. That predicated a volunteer army, and a volunteer army predicated higher pay to attract the men and women who would fill the ranks. The Women’s Army Corps was done away with and women were integrated into most non-line units — those which would not come into direct contact with the enemy. That increased the available pool of manpower. Spartan open-bay barracks gave way to dormitory-style accommodations, which made things more bearable over the long haul. Even the mess hall became the “dining facility” and cooks were forbidden to try and feed troops the peculiarly nauseating Army hash that had caused generations of draftees to miss or lose meals.

The armed forces were also down-sized. Without the need for the huge army kept in Vietnam, there were reductions in force that were painful and in many cases loud. From a high of 1,432,000 in 1970, the Army dropped to 762,000 ten years later. The Air Force, Navy and Marines saw similar, not quite so drastic drops. Units were restructured. And the slow process of rebuilding cohesiveness began.

Things did not improve overnight. Dope was one of the great plagues of the 1970s, and the armed forces became ruthless in their application of surprise urinalysis, the hated “piss test.” The reestablishment of discipline was pursued in parallel with controlling dope. The racial tensions that had surfaced in Vietnam were addressed, often clumsily but with good intentions. Any whiff of discriminatory behavior in anyone, officer, NCO or enlisted, became a career killer. Things overall became tighter, the requirements more stringent. The troops were given a higher standard of behavior — and they were expected to live up to it.

And throughout the entire process there was increased emphasis on professionalism among the officers’ corps. The duds were weeded out quickly. Then the mediocre. Then the merely above average. By 1980 officers were in general getting to be damned good.

One of the most hilarious satires in the movie “Animal House” was the ROTC commander, Niedermeyer, the smug, pettily sadistic elitist, with his horse and his garish, chrome-plated helmet. At the close of the movie, the “whatever happened to...” titles told us that Niedermeyer had gone on to be killed by his own men in Vietnam. The portrait was certainly overdrawn, but there were Niedermeyers to be found, and too many of them. The services have always attracted a certain percentage of men like this, drawn by the privilege and status of the officers’ corps, but without any sense of dedication to the soldiers entrusted to them.

A typical platoon leader, a 22-year-old lieutenant, commands 30 people and is responsible for around $1 million worth of equipment. That is much too much of an investment to allow a dilettante to play with. In the Army’s view the people are more important than the hardware, and the hardware is damned important. Good officers and good NCOs must feel about their subordinates much as parents feel about their children. They guide them, teach them, discipline them, respect them, agonize over their problems and even love them. Firing the Niedermeyers wherever they could be found was one of the best moves the services made.

Elsewhere at the movies, there were Rambo and his imitators. These were bitter, often muscle-bound men, loners who took poorly to discipline. Officers and others in authority were stupid, usually duplicitous, hidebound and in many cases brutal. In the fantasies of the screen, the Rambos went back to Vietnam again and again, freeing POWs and wiping out hundreds of stick-figure Vietnamese. When Vietnam began to run a little thin, they started going to (usually unnamed) countries in the Middle East and wiping out hundreds of stick-figure terrorists, or to (usually unnamed) Central American countries and wiping out, depending on the political orientation of the producer, hundreds of stick-figure guerrilleros or hundreds of stick-figure running-dog lackey government troops. After awhile, the heroes didn’t even have to be muscle-bound. In the movie “Iron Eagle,” the “Rambo” character was a high-school kid, who stole an F-15 and wiped out the entire stick-figure air force of an unnamed Middle Eastern country, together with its Khaddafi-esque leader.

“We’re a bunch of heroes,” the movies told the public, “and we’da won in Vietnam if they’da let us.”

We would probably not have won with the tactics shown in the movies, particularly the part where the hero stands out in the open, in front of God and everybody, making absolutely no use of available cover, wiping out Bad Guys and ignoring the thousands of bullets flying at him. We would certainly not have won with the level of discipline depicted. Give General Schwarzkopf an army of Rambos and he would lock himself in a closet and refuse to come out. They probably import those movies and run them on comedy nights in Hanoi theaters.

Tactics and discipline go together. Along with weeding out the Niedermeyers and the Rambos, so did the armed forces address doctrine. The inability of tactical commanders to translate success on the battlefield to theater-level success was a problem that had to be addressed. The armed forces went back to renew its acquaintance with the basics of the profession, to study Clausewitz, Jomini and the other classics. They also read up on the moderns: de Gualle’s thinking on armored warfare of the 1930s, and Guderian’s application of that thinking in the Second World War. Officers studied in detail the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. And they studied in even more detail the doctrine of the Soviets, considered the most likely opponent in any major war of the future. Military Review became an interesting, sometimes contentious, journal to read.

The tactics that were actually used in Vietnam had called for attritting the enemy, causing him to take casualties to the point where he gave up the fight. Wars of attrition take a long time, and they cause a lot of casualties on both sides. Expending thousands of men might sometimes be necessary, but usually it shouldn’t be.

The primary emphasis of Field Manual 100-5, Operations, published in 1976, was on “active defense.” This was war of maneuver, the kind of warfare Marlborough and Wellington and Guderian had practiced and that Clausewitz had written about. In theory, in a properly executed war of maneuver battle need never even be joined; once the enemy’s supply lines have been cut or he has been forced into an otherwise untenable position, victory has already become moot; it is “all over but the shooting.”  Maneuver warfare is as different from war of attrition as a game of chess is different from a fight with cudgels.

At first, given organizational inertia, the concept of active defense was translated by the Army into something that resembled maneuvering in place. But for all its shortcomings, and they were many, it was a point of departure, and the 1976 manual reflected a good deal of study, especially of the 1973 war. FM 101-1, The Army, followed, defining the Army and clarifying its missions and principles of warfare, and expanding the theoretical foundation for land warfare.

The thinking that had gone into 100-5 evolved rapidly, through what were called the Corps Battle, the Central Battle, the Integrated Battle, the Extended Battle, and finally the AirLand Battle, spelled as a single word to emphasize the interdependence of the two arms of service. The 1982 edition of FM 100-5 represents the formal adoption of a concept that had evolved and been field tested on maneuvers over the course of six years.

With the doctrine evolving, so also could evolve the organization and equipment design that would enable the “new” type of warfare, and the training that would implement it. Just as important, though not addressed in as much detail in the early stages, was the reorganization of communications systems and logistics. AirLand Battle is an adaptation and extension of the Soviets’ Combined Arms doctrine, with a good deal of very original thinking thrown in. It calls for integration of all services involved into a single coordinated and cohesive structure.

Desert One, the abortive raid into Iran to rescue the American hostages in 1979, was the catalyst that turned the planners’ attention to communications and the practicalities of integration — achieving truly joint operations. Everyone had a hand in the Desert One pie and the operation was a fiasco.

In 1982, Britain fought a campaign in the Falklands that was watched with interest and admiration by the Americans. Significantly, the professional British force beat hell out of the Argentine conscripts. The amateurs couldn’t stand up to a professionally trained and motivated force. Operations of the air, land, and sea arms were tightly integrated and each was used — seamlessly, to outside observers — to support the other.

Grenada, in 1983, was an American success; enough of the bugs that had infested the command structure had been ironed out to allow a reasonably smooth operation against a simple objective. There were still some faults remaining, notably in intelligence and in the conflict between organizational structure and task organization. General Norman Schwarzkopf, then commander of the 24th Infantry Division, was the deputy commander of the Grenada invasion; in the Kuwait Theater of Operations, the intelligence support was detailed and superbly integrated into planning; and task organization took precedence over structure.

Panama, six years after Grenada, was more complicated, the integration of forces smoother and more earnest, the objective wider. It provided a live fire test for much new equipment and for what was by now minor debugging of the theory that made it all work.

In both Grenada and Panama the press missed the real story: the troops performed with competence and skill, professionals now and not amateurs. The planning that went into each action resulted in efficient operations and very low casualty rates — 18 in Grenada and 23 in Panama. Only in Lebanon, where the Marines had been sent to provide a “presence” and not to fight a war, were the casualties high, 264 dead, 241 of them the result of a single car bomb.

And after each action, the military planners did their homework: they learned from their mistakes and did their best to correct them.

Much has been written about the superiority of the allies’ technology, and how well it performed in the Gulf War. The communications system that will provide the warning of a SCUD launch to a Patriot crew is phenomenal. The missile launch has to be recognized, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, and the message has to be delivered to the launch site literally in seconds. But the trust and reliance placed on a single crew, headed by a lieutenant, to identify its target and launch its very expensive missiles, are just as phenomenal. Without this kind of people, the equipment is useless. The Iraqis had some of the latest and best equipment, but they had a poorly motivated, conscript army, and by the end of the war the equipment was scrap.

Saddam Hussein coldly miscalculated the competence of American officers, probably because our own press was so fond of portraying them as incompetent “brass hats,” bureaucrats in green or blue suits. He coldly miscalculated the competence and dedication of American troops, probably because the last time our own press had taken a close look at them had been in the mid-70s, when there was a high percentage of drugheads and undesirables. And he coldly miscalculated the capabilities of American military doctrine to apply massive, integrated force aggressively and in many cases brilliantly.