The U.S. Army has very little initiative on the lower levels

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Dunlap shares this quotation from a captured German field order:

The U.S. Army has very little initiative on the lower levels; gains and advances are almost never exploited immediately, and our forces may counter-attack with good effect in a majority of cases. The enemy (us) is very unimaginative, depends upon weight of equipment for advance and seldom makes any move except as a result of higher order.

Dunlap notes that this is because “men with stripes spent much of their time keeping their noses clean, if they wanted to keep the stripes.” He would prefer a system of advancement through merit and intelligence:

Intelligence tests should carry more importance than anything else, for from here on in, wars are going to depend a lot more on brain than on brawn.

Comments

  1. Kirk says:

    Here I have to disagree with Dunlap. Taking what the Germans had to say about our performance is of some value, because it tells you what the enemy thought, but the reality is that the Germans were speaking as much to their own morale and propaganda as we were when we called the MG42 an inferior MG.

    I’d agree that whatever German officer wrote that probably had a piece of the truth, but I’d also be willing to bet money that officer never dealt with a US unit like the First Special Service Force. While a significant fraction of the US forces may have been what he described, not all were.

    And, the other problem to note is that the German tactical system depended on using low-level troops with small arms in order to deal with things, while the Allies basically used low level infantry units to fix the enemy and blast the crap out of them with supporting arms.

    TL;DR–The German officer writing this really didn’t grasp why they were losing the war. The US tactical system was not predicated on what the German one was, and while that’s perhaps a critique of the US Army’s skill-at-arms, it’s also irrelevant. Utterly so. The Germans may have had tactical primacy with their infantry skills, but that’s like possessing moral superiority in a bar fight where you’re outnumbered ten to one: You’re still gonna lose.

    Likewise, Dunlap’s fetishization of “intelligence” and “intelligence testing”. German audacity and initiative came about through simple cultural features of their military that encouraged these things, while the US military discouraged them, in a lot of cases. In this regard, intelligence is a non-issue; you put the smart guys out there in front of a commander who’s focused on control, control, control, and they’re still going to perform the same as a dumb guy in front of the same commander. Works that way all up and down the chain–You set up a system that demands initiative, audacity, and aggression, then reward it, that’s what you’ll get. The US Army, to a degree, did the exact opposite.

    Still won the war. Just wasn’t elegant enough, I guess.

    Although, a bit more “excellence at the art of war” might have been a bit more economical of lives, in the long run.

    Isegoria really ought to do review of There’s a War to be Won by Geoffrey Perret. Bunch of pertinent stuff in there, that explains the why and the how, along with the background decisions, which were basically to pursue institutionalized mediocrity just good enough to win.

  2. Alistair says:

    Kirk,

    Good points; the Allied system was different to the Germans, not necessarily inferior. It may have even been a better choice for the Allies given their relative strengths and weaknesses.

    The best tank is the tank that works for your way of war, (including industrial base and polity, etc). And hold-’em-and-blast-’em worked, after a fashion, killing Germans at a economical rate by democratic armies which were more casualty averse, even if it yielded few episodes of operational brilliance.

    There’s a lot of contemporary German bellyaching in WWII: “If only we had their resources!”; yeah, well, if they had any grasp of strategy at all Germany wouldn’t have got itself into a fight with the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th largest economies on the planet whilst cunningly allying itself with 6 and 7. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat, as Sun Tsu said.

  3. Kirk says:

    Something has been bothering me, about a bunch of this sort of thing: The assumption is that you can adopt all this sort of thing by simply talking about it, and putting on the right funny hat.

    The reality lays in things a lot deeper than we presume, in the very cultural roots of things.

    In the German army culture, which partook of the surrounding civilian culture, the NCO was a far different beast than in the US Army, or in the UK. For whatever reason, the NCO had higher status in the army and in civilian life. After a career in the army, a German senior NCO would expect to move laterally into an equally high-level civil service job, perhaps postmaster in some small town somewhere in Germany. In the UK or the US, that simply didn’t happen, veterans set-asides be damned. The German NCO had a social status and a weight that outclassed anything in the US or the UK systems, the same as with the French. Because of that, the Germans got by with fewer officers, because they had NCOs who were “bought in”, and who were far more powerful in the scheme of things than our own. This translated into a different set of operating characteristics for their army, and allowed more flexibility and all the rest. There were simply more “empowered leaders” than in our own, despite the smaller numbers of commissioned officers. In the US or UK systems, a lot of the time you weren’t going to see tactical decisions being made by the NCOs–The idea that they would was so unusual that when a sergeant took command of things in a crisis, the usual response was to make him an officer! German army, that might get you identified as a potential officer candidate, but a field promotion to officer wasn’t happening unless the unit had virtually disintegrated around you–You would go back for a thorough training period before you were allowed to assume the duties of a commissioned officer. US practice? Yeah; here are your bars, there’s your platoon… Good luck!

    Vastly different cultures, both in civil society and in the armies. In the German army and civilian life, once you earned senior NCO rank, you were essentially a “made man”. In the US or the UK, you hit senior NCO rank, and when you got discharged or retired, you could take that and a nickel to buy a cup of coffee.

    You can adopt the forms, but without adopting the underlying cultural practices and support structure, you’re not going to be able to emulate a system like that.

  4. Isegoria says:

    I can’t promise I’ll get right to There’s a War to be Won by Geoffrey Perret, but it’s been added to The List.

  5. Paul from Canada says:

    “For whatever reason, the NCO had higher status in the army and in civilian life….”

    The Germans had an interesting attitude towards non-coms. There was a thing called “Unteroffiziere mit Portepee”.. Literally, non-commissioned officer with a sword knot. Basically feldwebel or above, an augmented warrant officer if you will. There was a distinct idea that a senior non-com was a crucial step and place between the rank and file and the commissioned ranks, rather than the distinct division between the two we have in the west.

    It is like the resistance in the air-force for non-commissioned pilots. As in individual pilot flying say, close air support, there was nothing in the nature of my duties that was enhanced by the anointing of a commission.

    The Germans had a certain amount of pragmatism. They certainly had social classes and class consciousness, but they were far more realistic in the application.

    An interesting aside was the R.A.F. in WWII. Aircrew were generally supposed to be officers, to the point where radio operators and gunners were often commissioned, but sheer demand meant that suitable candidates (i.e. middle and upper class), weren’t available, so N.C.O.s were given the same job and duties, and commission or not, was a matter of social class, not of competence or education.

    For example, in the Battle of Britain, you had pre-war reservists who were pilots in the R.A.F. reserve, who had the skills, aptitudes, education and motivation to be pilots, but not the connections or class to be commissioned. Thus you had a flight of fighters, which had a Sgt-Pilot as a member, and a Flt-Lt. as another member, each equally useful or useless, in terms of skill and capability.

    “The best tank is the tank that works for your way of war, (including industrial base and polity, etc)…”

    Nick Moran (aka the Chieftain), goes into this in GREAT detail. The Germans could never leave well enough alone, and a particular tank might go thorough a dozen upgrades and variations, but there would also be variations within a production run of the same model, as pistol and loading ports were removed or added, and certain fitting changed half way through a production run.

    A German Tiger or Panther had a lot of cutting edge technology (torsion bar suspension for example), but it made a mess of production.

    We knew the Sherman was not the best and fully iterated design possible. The rear engine, front final drive necessitated a drive shaft through the tank that caused it to have a higher silhouette than was desirable, but the Grant/Lee from which it was derived was already in production, and a decision had to be made at some point to stop refining, and to start mass production, design compromises be damned Which we did.

    “…And hold-’em-and-blast-’em worked, after a fashion, killing Germans at a economical rate by democratic armies which were more casualty averse, even if it yielded few episodes of operational brilliance.”

    In this regard, I think Montgomery is underrated. He was definitely pedantic and unimaginative compared to his contemporaries, but he succeeded when he stuck to that formula.

    Operational brilliance could also cause disaster. He is criticized for example, for the slow followup and pursuit after El Alamien, but it must be remembered that all the victories against Rommel that involved and aggressive pursuit had turned into a humiliating reverse. Better to let an opportunity for massive victory slip by than the risk of a humiliating reverse.

    Market Garden was an example of where he was tempted to take the big risk for the big reward, and found the reverse of the medal. The higher the risk, the higher the reward, but also the higher the cost when the gamble fails.

    Montgomery had his style formed when he was fighting in North Africa before the Americans came in. He had limited resources and manpower, and had to husband his resources. After Normandy, the British had to disband and consolidate units because of manpower constraints.

    Patton was a great General, but I wonder how much of his technique and flair was BECAUSE he had the resources. I wonder if he would have done as well if he had been fighting in the western desert in 1940-41 with the same paucity of resources British Generals had to face at the time.

    “…There’s a lot of contemporary German bellyaching in WWII: “If only we had their resources!”; yeah, well, if they had any grasp of strategy at all Germany wouldn’t have got itself into a fight with the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th largest economies on the planet whilst cunningly allying itself with 6 and 7. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat, as Sun Tsu said.”

    Well said!

    You would be a fool not to play to your strengths. If German, you HAD to substitute quality for quantity. If you were the allies, why bother fighting fair? Why send a man when you could send a shell?

    It is a bit like the last remnants of the aristocratic cavalry tradition decrying the advent of the firearm. You mat have a moral argument to make, but at the end of the day, who wins? Pragmatism over emotion and nostalgia.

    “…intelligence is a non-issue; you put the smart guys out there in front of a commander who’s focused on control, control, control, and they’re still going to perform the same as a dumb guy in front of the same commander. ”

    I will re-iterate what I said on another thread. Culture Matters!

  6. Paul from Canada says:

    Incidentally, going back to the British schizophrenia about rank and class, one of the prime movers in “The Great Escape”, was George Harsh.

    He was a middle class kid who, inspired by Leopold and Loeb, he and some friends committed and armed robbery that went wrong, and he was sentenced to death for murder, but was reprieved due to his age and strenuous work by his family, and ended up on a Georgia chain gang. He was eventually paroled after saving a fellow inmates life.

    When war broke out, he went up to Canada, and enrolled in the R.C.A.F. as an enlisted man, training to be a bomber gunner. He topped out of his class, and the top six got to go to officer selection, so he was commissioned.

  7. Isegoria says:

    Who knew that Bruce’s recommendation would lead to 89 posts?

  8. Bruce says:

    Not me, but since 1947 I bet Dunlap’s book has led to 8900+ articles in gun magazines by guys with a column to fill and hard-used copies of Ordnance Goes to War chained to the office shelf. Too bad it’s in the gun nut ghetto; he was a sharp all-around observer and a good clean writer.

  9. Isegoria says:

    Bruce, what do you mean by “not me”? Because the comment that sent me looking up Dunlap’s book had your name on it, your email address attached to it, and came from your IP address…

  10. Bruce says:

    Sure, I made the recommendation, but I was a little surprised at 89 posts!

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