Thanks for the recommendations and all that further analysis. I found it illuminating.

None of this is to say that I know much of anything about the military.

There really is no perfect system for managing combat losses with regards to personnel.The Germans opted for unit cohesion, and dealt with the consequences. The US opted for raw efficiency, and a lot of those consequences flowed into the post-WWII military, individual replacement becoming the default for Korea and Vietnam–Despite it’s manifest negative effects on cohesion, training, and discipline.

Today, we’ve got kind of a hybrid system, one that sort of works, but whose characteristics are overall inimical to both the mental health of the troops, and the cohesion of the units. The US Army has this mentality that they’re running people through a massive training system, one that’s unconsciously mean to produce the maximum number of barely qualified mediocrities to man a mass-expansion Army that’s probably not going to ever materialize until there’s a severe change in the nature of war.

It’s amazing to observe the number of unspoken and unreviewed assumptions that a lot of this stuff is based on–The way they churn the commanders through, for example, is intended to result in the maximum number of young company-grade officers getting their career tickets punched, so that they’ll be available to fill out the manning rosters for some unconsciously assumed mass army we might need in the future. This is a vestigial “baseline assumption” of the personnel system, one that’s left over from the early Cold War and the post-WWII era. They’re doing what they think should have been done in the 1930s, in order to better prepare for the expansion of WWII. Only thing is, the whole idea is wrong for what we’re doing now, and entirely ill-adapted to current conditions.

The Army’s personnel system, with regards to officers, is designed to produce lots and lots of them, in order that we have enough of them to go around in case of another mass mobilization war. For that, you need a lot of mediocre officers that might throw up a few Pattons, so what we’re doing is in alignment with that reality. However, the wars we’re actually fighting, and with a small professional Army? The officer production/procurement/management system ought to be biased towards producing really proficient, high-quality experienced officers that can take on highly ambiguous situations like you find in counter-insurgencies. Ticket-punchers who do 12 months in command ain’t answering the mail…

Similar issues exist through the enlisted force, and for similar reasons. The Army has institutionalized mediocrity in the name of homogenization and keeping enough folks around to do another mass mobilization–And, again, that doesn’t suit current conditions.

On the micro level of things, this results in things like the frustrations I had as a squad leader trying to attain true excellence in machine gunnery–You’d train up your three-man team, and by the time you got them past the initial stages, you’d wind up having one or more of them leave the unit for reassignment, end-of-service, or re-purposing within the unit. If machine-gunnery could be ideated as being an A-B-C-to-Z affair, with progressive complexity of tasks for each letter, the situation was that you’d normally be caught in an endless cycle of doing A-B-C-D, and then having to start over again because the First Sergeant needed a new driver, and grabbed your gunner. So, select new guy, go A-B-C-D in the training sequence, and then the Assistant Gunner comes down on orders for Korea… Because of personnel management like this, you never get to the point where you’re training the more advanced and complex stuff, so as an NCO, you’re highly proficient at training the simplistic tasks and completely lost when it comes to things like planning and directing your guns for indirect fire–Because, you’ve never had the opportunity to do that.

Couple of good books out there, for background on how all of this came to happen: One would be by Geoffrey Perret, There’s a War to be Won: The US Army in WWII, which is a really good popular history that goes into a lot of depth for just why things were done the way they were, and why the decisions were made. There are a bunch of decent first-person accounts of Army life during the interwar years, whose titles I’d have to go looking for for you. A good overview of that period is to be found here: The Regulars: The American Army, 1898-1941, by Edward Coffman.

Thanks for that. That really put some meat on the bone. And gave me lots to chew on. End metaphor.

I think some of those points I encountered in academic and personal reading going back to the 90s, but your quick summary put it into an interesting perspective- less Old Army flaws unsolved, than Old Army flaws left over plus many, many more draft army and bureaucratic workarounds.

It’s a surprisingly comprehensive and clarifying frame for the entire military history of the Cold War, as it pertains to the US Army.

It starts to clarify for me the challenges faced after the decision to build a professional force. In retrospect, I guess it’s rather obvious that going from a frontier constabulary and occasional expeditionary force through mass conscript if relatively high tech armies, they were almost starting from scratch again in the 70s to build a large, professional, technologically enabled, mostly overseas force for every contingency. They had only a few of those pieces in place in the army’s own history.

Your comments on the replacement system are particularly interesting. I could certainly see where Marshall was coming from.

I don’t know if the US Army practised mainly unit replacement in WW1 but I am aware that Civil War units tended to go into battle and get slowly [or quickly] reduced in number, and eventually get replaced by fresh regiments including higher-numbered units from their home states. In that era, superfluous unit headquarters presumably were too few in officer complement to be a big deal since the shrinking units were at the regiment level. I have no idea whether this was better or worse for esprit de corps.

With WW2, I hadn’t realized the British followed the policy they did. I’m in Canada, and I assume we did the same. Although our army wasn’t in major ground combat until Italy from 1943 and France from June 1944. I know there was a manpower crisis in 1944, as with Britain and the US, but that was a bigger picture. I had thought the Germans followed a unit replacement policy, until they were stuck with a no replacement policy. Actually- I’m not so sure. They had the entire ersatz heer [usually- replacement army] command structure with unit parallels down to the battalion level at home, so I’m not sure how they operated in practice. I have read of critically damaged units rotating out, even back to Germany, but also of replacement drafts being sent to deployed units, so it must have been a mixed, wartime hybrid.

Would I be correct in thinking that the better solution, perhaps even with the conscript armies of the war, would have been unit replacement in the sense of pulling whole units off the line for larger-number of replacements and retraining together? Is that the sort of idea you were getting at? For the kind of army the US seems to want now and the kind of wars it has been fighting, it almost seems the inevitable solution and I can see where failure to operate that way would be demoralizing. Perhaps even more so than in a situation like WW2.

A bit of a tangent, but the other element that strikes me as significant was what they used to call Total Force- the full integration of the National Guard and reserves and the off-loading of entire capabilities to it. That seems to have paid off in terms of the performance of Guard and reservists in the field, at least overall, so all honour to those who served in these roles, but using reservists and Guard in prolonged overseas deployments in an ‘imperial’ setting was not what they had in mind in the 80s. And whether it has been good for the kind of ideal personnel system you are talking about I’m less sure.

Although I have seen at least one British commenter write of solving British manning problems through allowing departure and reentry into the regular force itself to give both officers and members flexible career options. That kind of system might mean less strain on actual reservists trying to keep day jobs, long term.

WWII posed an issue for the Army, and that issue was “How the hell do we build a force that wins, from nothing…?”. Some of the answers worked, some didn’t, and the unfortunate fact is that the Army tends to stop adapting and evaluating things once they’ve struck on what appears to be a winning line of effort. Historically, what you find is that when you go back and look, whatever the US Army did in the last victorious war is what they tend to keep right on doing… Until it quits working. Peacetime reforms don’t usually happen, unless someone like Elihu Root shows up to break the iron rice bowls. Those guys are vanishingly rare, because nobody puts people like that in charge of the US military, unless they’re Teddy Roosevelt.

The personnel system, with its emphasis on individual replacements vs. unit replacement after attrition, remained in place until the ’90s–And, vestiges of it still hang around, creating in-ranks turbulence that’s entirely inimical to building good units. That policy of treating individual soldiers as so many fungible cogs in the machinery is a result of policies going back to Marshall, who observed the way the Allies wasted experienced and trained officer manpower keeping units alive who had had their entire forces of enlisted combat manpower ground away to nothing–So, for WWII, he instituted the individual replacement policy, which kept him from having to worry about wasted vestigial headquarters, but which also increased anomie among the troops, and vastly complicated acculturating them to soldiering and their units. Deliberate choice, forced on him by circumstance–And, never re-examined by anyone in charge up until lately.

The Army is a vast and inertia-laden thing, institutionally. You know the old saw about “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM…”? Well, that’s the watchword for most changes in the Army–”Nobody ever got in trouble for doing that, so we’ll keep right on doing it…”. Never mind if it makes any bloody sense at all, with a long-service professional force of volunteers.

A lot of our personnel policies are flatly insane–The way we have failed to adapt to women in the Army is another whole realm of feckless stupidity. I will contend that the Army has not yet grasped the implication of putting boys and girls together resulting in f**king, which has a tendency to result in pregnancy and children. If it had, there’d be some common-sense policies that clearly laid out when and how such things were permissible, and those policies would look to the good of the unit and mission first. The way we do it now? LOL… Asinine. All the decision-making assholes running the show are afraid of looking like meanies to the little girls they’ve created in their minds in place of the actual women-with-agency they have serving, and the policies they create and enforce reflect that.

In a lot of fundamental ways, the Army is stuck in an atavistic mode of operation–The dichotomy between enlisted and officer is another example. During the days when there were clear class differences between the two, there was some sense in all the different privileges and social distance. Today? It’s positively inimical, because the enlisted force structure is where most of the actual institutional memory resides, and that isn’t ever tapped for input. The whole thing is still top-down driven, in terms of how it works, and there’s little to no flow from the bottom up. As wars increase in complexity, this ain’t a good thing–The guys out on the pointy end of things create solutions that never get institutionalized because they don’t have a pipeline into the formal institutional organs that think they run everything.

Case in point would be the way WWII was actually fought, out in the squads and platoons. The manuals said one thing, but actual practice? Much, much different. And, because all the guys who really knew what they’d done were discharged and cut free from the institution, when they went to do things like develop new small arms reflecting WWII experience, we wound up with things like the M14 and 7.62mm NATO, instead of an intermediate assault rifle combination.

Institutionally, the Army is still stuck on an awful lot of stupid…

Institutionally, the US Army has never really reconciled itself with the idea of being a standing army of what amounts to an imperial power. The draft era was particularly bad, in that they did not ever stop to think through the implications of moving from a mentality of “tiny peacetime army of professional cadre, ready to expand to mass wartime army”. Manning in the officer corps was particularly inimical, because a huge part of the rationale for the staff bloat we suffer from to this day stems from the idea that we need to keep massive numbers of officers available for expansion–Which only encourages a number of the syndromes we suffer from, in regards to ticket-punching and careerism.

Structurally, too–The entire training base is a remnant of WWII and draftee era thinking. Why do we have these huge institutional abortions under TRADOC, and why do we devote the mass of trained manpower to them? It would be better, in terms of creating a lot of experienced officers who’re familiar with the issues of training, to take and put initial entry training under the direct control of unit commanders the way it was before WWII. The way we do it now, with a huge institutional training base, is an artifact of the WWII crisis era, and was never re-thought the way it should have been.

I’d be interested if you cared to highlight deficiencies in the US Army that were present in the 30s and never repaired until the 80s.

I’m used to thinking of WW2 as having been a crucible getting rid of everything, although I’ve read enough to suggest that rot crept back in fast enough. Never read quite enough to get much sense of how, where, when or why, at least until the war in Vietnam itself, but presumably there were problems already before that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCeXkSDuxs

As for the Navy look at this article on the amphibious landing problem. We have a lot of useless overbuilt stuff that is of limited use but looks great and feeds the contractors. This is a very good read.

http://www.g2mil.com/Devo-Amphibs.htm

We should go back to building a LOT of the old school Landing Ship Assault. I, of course, would say we build them out of concrete in molds and mass produce them. Also I would add legs on sides so they could crawl up on the beach or any other shore. It could walk sorta like a centipede. Draglines. a little different but another model, move with the legs and set down on it’s base. Dragline video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NhAR_qJVZk

The front of the ship should look like this, sorta, but with more straight lines for mass production

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M80_Stiletto

This type boat comes from the Hickman sea sled tunnel hull (VERY FAST), it traps air under the hull. Hickman invented this. I’m told he was a genius but hard to deal with so it didn’t catch on.

https://www.gerrmarine.com/Articles/SeaSleds.pdf

If you look at the M80_Stiletto you could imagine something a bit straighter angles on the front like the Hickman with slab straight side. The front and rear would be ramps that come down. The legs could tilt the boat so that even low clearance trucks could load stuff inside. The sides and bottom resembling a Landing Ship Assault like the first link. So you would have maybe 8 molds for the bottom, (because the air tunnels would be different all down the bottom). 6 different molds for the sides, (2 front side molds, 2 rear side molds, 2 flat wall side molds). 3 different molds for the top, (a front, a rear and the middle) to build a 200 foot ship like the WWII tank attack. Once you have the molds you could produce these in quantity very cheap.

The reason you want a Navy is over “…40% of the world’s population lives within 100 km (about 63 miles) of the sea…”.

I’ve read much higher figures. If you included rivers you could go up in a boat it would be very high. Maybe 85% of the population or higher. If you’re going to invade something you need to be able to go where the people are.

I’ve thought a lot about these boats a lot. I could go into absurd detail. If fitted out correctly you could use a couple types for most any Navy use you would need and maybe add a 10,000 ft. model to land any plane you want on it. It would be a floating air-runway carrier. Anything you need you just drive up in the ship and mount on shipping container brackets. Fuel-drive in fuel tanks, soldiers-drive in shipping container troop sleeping quarters, food-food trucks. Very versatile. Now we build a bunch of special purpose things that don’t even do the job they’re supposed to most of the time. Why not have a 3,000 ship Navy and just rotate the equipment in them??? We could also rent them to the merchant marine.

Control requires that you actually be there, occupying the space in question.