2023/06/03

The American Way of (Land) War

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Take it with a grain of salt, but here's my view on the American Way of (land) War. It's based on indications collected over about 25 years of paying close attention to international military affairs:

 

The U.S.Army has a personnel system that's still showing its roots in "latecomer to World War has to quickly build an army". The training of officers is not only relatively brief (extremely green 2nd Lt compared to a German 2nd Lt), but everyone gets moved around from job to job so often and in an uncoordinated fashion. A battalion may conduct individual, small unit, unit and formation tactics training in sequence, but by the time they're mid-way in formation training they'd have many of those men who participated in the small units training already replaced.

The result is that from 2nd Lieutenant up to Lieutenant Colonel hardly anyone is trusted to be very competent or even competent in a well-rounded way. 

U.S.Army doctrine was thus built with mistrust in the one-the-spot decisionmaking of officers. Preferably everything has to be planned in advance or be cast into SOPs (standing operating procedures, British would call it 'drills' at the lower levels). But they don't trust their officers' quality much, so there's an extreme task division. Every staff officer other than commanding officer and chief of staff is responsible for a small window of tasks only. Now almost everyone is focused on a myopic view of the land war, but of course you can't be done with your job after an hour of work per day, so they work a lot more, plan a lot more in their highly task-divided way. The extreme task division also leads to extreme demands for communication between the officers, and of course there have to be comprehensive briefings (there are 'powerpoint ranger' non-officers who are specialised in overloading powerpoint slides with graphics).

Everything is thus a big deal that needs thorough planning by a huge staff. Almost nothing seems as if it could be decided by a commanding officer and one or two officers who ride in his car on the spot, within a few minutes.


It's fine to be able to plan things in detail in advance, to rehearse, to have SOPs for common scenarios. Every good army had those, there are opportunities to make good of those. There are problems if you become extremely in favour of planning, though:

"No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force." Moltke the Elder, 1880
A second problem is that planning much in decisions where quick decisionmaking on the spot is possible is simply too slow.

A third problem is that focusing doctrine (thus training) on planning and extreme task division leads to unpreparedness for the necessary on-the-spot decisions in actual warfare.

A fourth problem is that Americans are gifted communicators; in part due to their huge numbers they can convince others that something is the way it ought to be done or even the normal way. They can do so even with ludicrous nonsense, such as their insane and wholly debt-financed overspending on the military.

The American Way of (land) War is not super-competent; it's an adaptation (coping method) to the by design modest competence of their troops.

This crap creeps through NATO into allied armies, in part by officer exchanges, officer training by the U.S.Army, NATO standardisations (such as tactical forms; there's a detailed NATO standard form for who gets to blow up a bridge on whose demand, for example), "interoperability". Allied armies are being led by senior officers who are naturally inclined to have a whole court of bootlickers a.k.a. a large staff and over time these foreign senior officer corps trend towards emulating the American approach. I suspect this effect was the worst on the British, Canadians (due to no language barrier) and the small & poor armies in NATO (due to more direct training and admiration), though I have but anecdotal evidence for this.


A land war can be fought the American way. That's slow and requires overwhelming resources superiority, involves much firepower (especially air support). It gets the job done against a conventional opposing force if there's enough time and enough resources. Just about every approach to land warfare other than African 19th century witchdoctors handing out bulletproofing drinks would succeed against a conventional opposing force with enough time and resources on hand.

An American army sergeant, captain, colonel, general may very well with great experience tell about how much time, effort, personnel, planning, synchronization and training a certain action requires. He/she/it may very well be right - within the context of that one armed service (and possibly their marines, too). The only ones who have a comprehensive understanding are scholars who looked at how such an action was done in the past by different armies, and how it would be done by different armies today. So take my opinion with a grain of salt, but you should also take the 100% self-confident proclamations of army insiders (including retired ones) with a grain of salt, for their horizon is usually very close. And better don't fall for appeal to authority routines; military history shows that terribly many generals are highly self-confident and strong on opinion, but also incompetent.

Land war can be fought and won they American way, but it's not the best way unless a nation has the exact same set of limitations, and you're going to argue as a member of a minority if you bring this up in the anglophone internet.


S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

 

P.S.: It's about the same on U.S. Navy ships save for personnel rotation being organised along their months-long tours overseas.

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16 comments:

  1. It's a fair assessment and albeit a very accurate one. I think this happens when you fought a low-intensity war for an extended amount and you are afforded the safety of large command center without the need for fast decision-making that is resulted from a life-or-death conflict. It also need to be noted that civilian (real or perceived) casualties plays a big role in the survival of a combat operation and often the one crucial deciding factor of promoting a combat officer. It creates high level of micro-organization and risk averse culture that is counterintutive with winning wars.

    I think the Army and the Navy would find it extremely disturbing when their way of war is threaten in any peer conflicts and often paralyzed in the face of broken down communications and conflicting orders. It's a disappointing state of affairs but it's likely not gonna be changed until a real war is upon us. Last time this happened (WW2), the US military managed to flush out these people and replace them with combat-oriented officers before it was too late. Hopefully, this will happen again before it's too late...

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  2. Is this also why they give NCOs so much power?

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    1. The most senior NCO of a platoon has usually years more experience than the platoon leader (2nd Lt or 1st Lt) in the U.S. armed forces.

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    2. "Is this also why they give NCOs so much power?"

      What is your issue with this? Check the German Wehrmacht in 1944, it was quite common that NCOs led companies in infantry units. And it was already observed and commented on in WW1 that a platoon led by a reserve officer should have an experienced NCO....

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    3. I have no issues with that. I just asked.

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  3. "The U.S.Army has a personnel system that's still showing its roots in "latecomer to World War has to quickly build an army". The training of officers is not only relatively brief (extremely green 2nd Lt compared to a German 2nd Lt), but everyone gets moved around from job to job so often and in an uncoordinated fashion."

    But the issue of "green" officers/OCs predates WW2. So maybe the issues observed during the expansion of the US army before WW2 is only a symptom, the expansion is, however, not the reason for the issue.

    In Jörg Muth's "Command Culture" the underlying differences between German and US officer training, esp. of officer candidates, are discussed in depth.

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    1. "Latecomer to World War has to quickly build an army" also applies to WW1, maybe the issue started at that time.

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    2. "Latecomer to World War has to quickly build an army" also applies to WW1, maybe the issue started at that time.

      The issue was the quality of West Point graduates, they were not well trained as platoon leaders but were "of course" promoted to 2nd Lt. upon graduation, their German counterparts were much better trained as platoon and were of course not promoted upon graduation but only when performed well in a unit. This differences predate WW1.

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  4. "U.S.Army doctrine was thus built with mistrust in the one-the-spot decisionmaking of officers. Preferably everything has to be planned in advance or be cast into SOPs (standing operating procedures, British would call it 'drills' at the lower levels)."

    In the German army this was called "Normaltaktik" after 1888, the decision for "Auftragstaktik" happened around 1905. The US army copied a lot from the French army after 1918.

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  5. Based on actual evidence from recent decades you are a bit optimistic on the ability of the US army to prevail after all in any kind of conflict. And you miss one important point: absolute lack of coherence in the ranks.

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  6. "there's a detailed NATO standard form for who gets to blow up a bridge on whose demand, for example" - well, it's not a bad idea to have a really clear way of detailing who blows a bridge and when. An extreme example of it all going wrong is the 1813 Battle of Leipzig, when a French general delegated responsibility to a colonel, who somehow delegated responsibility to a corporal, who blew the bridge at the wrong time, stranding 30,000 French troops on the wrong side of the Elster.

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  7. I heard that before GW2, they recognised the moving of people was an issue (literally people were moved out of units the day before deployment in GW1 and a replacement appear the unit had not worked or trained with).
    Therefore, on deciding to go with GW2, most unit transfers were postponed, the person still got the promotion/pay-rise on paper but remained with the unit for the duration of the war.
    If this is true, was widespread or just some elements of the military I was never able to confirm.

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  8. Everything you said was true. Some of the problems go all the way back to the American Civil War. That is where the initial bad habits began. Because of the relatively easy victories in the Spanish-American War, WWI, and WWII, those bad habits just sank further and further into concrete. But it was the last year of the Korean War where they were really institutionalized into written procedures and are now nearly impossible to change. We will have to lose a war badly before any real change will occur.

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  9. I also think a big problem with the US military is that you have five branches that all overlap with responsibilities and duties that creates massive amounts of waste and complexity. Look at how the US Army has it's own aircraft and ships, the Marines having their own entire pocket army until recently (ground forces + ships + aircraft), and the US Navy having it's own aircraft wing (which I agree with) and it's own ground forces, and finally the Coast Guard might as well be a second navy at this point; and I not even talk about state militias and the National Guard!

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