Early battles in Korea began with the application of doctrinally correct proportions of firepower to maneuver inherited from the Second World War:
Very quickly, however, field commanders increased their demand for artillery and air power to support ever more compact and self-contained assault forces. What began as traditional dismounted infantry assaults in 1950 soon became elaborate tank, infantry, and firepower intensive demonstrations intended to gain the objective with minimum cost in lives.
During the Battle of Soryang in the spring of 1951, twenty-one battalions of artillery fired over three hundred thousand rounds in five days in support of a single push by X Corps. Two years later, at Pork Chop Hill, nine battalions fired over thirty-seven thousand rounds in less than twenty-four hours in support of a single regimental assault. As the weight of firepower increased, the densities of infantry formations decreased in proportion. By the winter of 1950-51, General Ridgway conducted most of the Eighth Army counter attacks at regimental level. That spring, Ridgway consistently used nothing larger than company teams to spearhead his advance to the Han River.
Similarly in Vietnam commanders learned quickly and adapted a European style, maneuver- centric method of war to match the realities of limited war in constricted Asian terrain. Close combat units gradually increased the proportion of supporting fires and lessened the exposure of lead elements moving into contested areas.
General William DePuy, commanding the First Infantry Division in 1966-67, realized quickly that artillery and tactical aircraft were responsible for most enemy casualties. His casualties, on the other hand, came principally from three sources: enemy mortars, concentrations of enemy small arms fire delivered against infantry units in set-piece ambushes, and mines. His common sense solution was simply to use much smaller infantry units to locate and fix the enemy, usually squads or platoons, and then orchestrate a varied medley of supporting firepower systems to do most of the killing.
Once the enemy was located, the infantry’s task was to stay out of the killing zone, avoid decisive engagement and pull back just far enough to allow effective delivery of ordnance, but not so far as to allow the enemy breathing space to disengage and escape the firepower trap. The old infantry adage “close with and destroy the enemy” became simply get close enough with as few forces as possible to “find, fix, flush and set up the enemy for destruction by fire.”
DePuy was among the first to grasp the fact that modern firepower technology and the imperative to win at lower cost together were sufficient to cause a shift in the relationship between firepower and maneuver. In later years he was fond of saying “On a battlefield increasingly dominated by lethality, if you can be seen you can be hit, if you can be hit, you will be killed.” Whether traditionalists liked it or not, DePuy believed that the balance had in fact shifted to the point that firepower systems, not infantrymen, had now become the central instrument for achieving decisive effect on the battlefield. To DePuy, the doctrinal maxim that firepower supported maneuver may well have been reversed.
About the only senior American commander to come out of Korea with his reputation intact was Ridgway.