A great but forgotten general

Fri, 07/17/2009 - 10:33am

From the new issue of the Washington Monthly, here is my review of a good book:

General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for Modern War by Henry G. Gole

University Press of Kentucky, 364 pp.

In a better, fairer world, Henry Gole's terrific biography of Gen. William DePuy, with its epic sweep from World War II to the post-Vietnam Army, would be known as well as Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie.

DePuy was a consummate soldier who fought in Normandy in World War II and commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. Among military insiders, he is best known for his pathbreaking work to fix the Army after it was broken by Vietnam. As Gole, himself a veteran of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, puts it in this book, some admiring officers described him as "the greatest soldier of his generation, the most influential soldier since World War II." DePuy was a genuine American hero, but he is barely known to the American public, and that is a shame.

DePuy's defining moment was the horrific summer of 1944, when an amateurish American military learned lessons the hard way against the Germans. Forget about Saving Private Ryan, with its fantasy of a handful of American soldiers blocking superior German forces in improvised street fighting. The real deal was that the Army General Eisenhower threw into Normandy, for better or worse, was undertrained and all too often horribly led. Almost all the pre-invasion preparation was about getting to the beach, with little taught about what to do after crossing it. Many officers knew more about how to transport troops in trucks than about how to lead them in combat. Gole notes that even data from the previous two years of fighting Germans in North Africa and Italy was largely ignored.

The price paid was huge, and collected swiftly. "In the first six weeks of the battle in Normandy, the 90th [the division in which DePuy served] lost 100 percent of its soldiers and 150 percent of its officers," DePuy later wrote, with replacements arriving daily in battalion-sized batches. To the humiliation of the 90th Division, on July 23, 1944, one of its battalions, with 265 men, surrendered to fifty Germans with two tanks. DePuy described his own battalion commander in Normandy as being "as close to being totally incompetent as it was possible to be." As for his regimental commander, DePuy considered him "a horse's ass ... a disaster." 

DePuy, by contrast, was a natural combat leader, one of those gifted amateurs who rose to the top. He went into World War II a green lieutenant who had graduated from the state university in his native South Dakota. He emerged from the war having commanded a battalion and received a series of high combat awards. He was only twenty-six years old, but he had witnessed, as Gole writes, "the price of getting it wrong." His conclusions were that war is about battle and that the way to prepare for it is to train incessantly. He was, as another general says in the book, "an authentic tactical genius." He became a great trainer.

His record in the Vietnam War was mixed at best. He brought to it his belief in avoiding frontal assaults and instead in using the infantry to find and "fix" the enemy and then using artillery and aircraft to kill the enemy. This led him into conflict with then Maj. Gen. Frederick Weyand, who commanded the adjacent division, the 25th Infantry. Weyand focused on pacification, while DePuy looked to overwhelm the enemy with firepower, Gole writes. Gole pulls his punches a bit here, but quotes DePuy as saying there had been too much emphasis on counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War. I came away wanting to know more about Weyand's approach, which I suspect was the more appropriate one. (Indeed, Andrew Krepinevich, in his classic study The Army and Vietnam, reports that DuPuy was contemptuous of the Marine Corps' CAP program, which in retrospect was a productive road not taken.)

DePuy also carried on in Vietnam another even more controversial World War II tradition -- the fast, even brutal, relief of officers he deemed ineffective. During his year commanding the 1st Infantry Division, he fired an astonishing seven battalion commanders. This so bothered the chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, that during a visit to Vietnam late in 1966 he sat down with DePuy and his assistant division commander. "You are relieving too many battalion commanders," Johnson admonished. "You are supposed to train them."

The assistant division commander shot back, "General, I had the idea that you were going to train them and we were going to fight them over here and save soldiers' lives." That sharp response was exactly right: removal of commanders may worry other officers, but it reassures soldiers, because it sends the signal that someone around here knows what he is doing, and recognizes incompetence. Nothing demoralizes soldiers faster than suspecting they are being led by a buffoon. On the other hand, DePuy's hair-trigger firings gave him a reputation as an arrogant, unforgiving tyrant.

Tough, bright, and focused, DePuy probably was exactly the right person to lead the rebuilding of the Army in the early 1970s. He emphasized to his subordinate generals that he would hold them personally responsible to produce results -- which they knew, given his reputation in Vietnam, was no idle threat.

But there is an old military saying that every strength contains the seeds of its own weakness. That seems to have been the case with DePuy's hugely successful effort to reorganize, re-equip, retrain, refocus, and professionalize the post-Vietnam, post-draft Army. His approach, with its detailed attention to tactics and training, was a fine way to rebuild the Army in the late 1970s and early '80s. "We were tactical guys by self-definition and preference," DePuy said later. The effectiveness of the transformation was demonstrated in the short, purposely limited Gulf War of 1991, a conflict that seems all but forgotten now.

But his relentless focus on tactics and training has unfortunately proved to be a poor way to prepare the Army for Iraq in the 2000s. The Iraq War has not been about battle (nor was Vietnam, for that matter). It has been a war in which senior officers need not so much training, which readies them for the known, as education, which prepares them for the unknown. This is not a knock on DePuy, but on his successors, who grew complacent in the '90s, and failed to build on his solid foundation. The follow-on steps that should have improved the Army operationally and strategically were never taken. The price for that terrible lapse was paid in Iraq from 2003 through 2006, as the Army's honed tactics lacked competent strategic direction to make them lead toward a goal. Having solid tactics without a good strategy is like driving a Ferrari without a steering wheel.

On the other hand, the Iraq War also has become notorious as a conflict in which it is almost impossible for senior officers to be relieved. A little of DePuy's old-school insistence on accountability might have been hugely helpful.

Image: U.S. Army via Wikicommons

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COIN vs Battle

by GaryC on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 3:16pm

There was this bizarre guy called the War Nerd writing for a Russian site for awhile and he was very entertaining. His example of the only realistic way to fight an insurgency was the Boer war. The British finally put the entire population in concentration camps and then divided up the country among the prisoners who agreed not to play guerrilla anymore. After watching thousands of their women and children die of disease in the camps the Boers knew what would happen if they started picking off Brits with their Mausers again. I was impressed with this take on modern warfare and find myself wondering why any occupying army even bothers with trying to win hearts and minds after the bombs start going off. Has it ever worked? The Italians, Germans and Japanese surrendered and did not develop insurgencies, but our present areas of operation are different- they are like the Boers. DePuy sounds like a real professional, but when a population is aiding your enemy and politics or sheer numbers will not allow for a concentration camp style solution, professionalism is just professionalism and will not end the fighting.

Problems with approach

by Grant on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 5:30pm

There are many problems with the approach you suggest. The first is that both the U.K and the U.S are liberal democracies. You can only do that sort of thing for so long before it creates tensions at home, and there are legal questions that don't go away. The second is that it creates serious hatred and blowback among the people you conquered. It's one thing to win a war by gaining the support of the people, it's another to win by locking them up and letting them die en masse. The third problem is that it has been shown that insurgencies can be defeated without trying to kill as many as possible. Northern Ireland or Malaya mean anything to you? The fourth is that the concept of insurgencies was completely alien to the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. They were nations that had bet on conventional warfare and this was well before the nationalist and Marxist/Maoist insurgencies that would be the main form of warfare for the Cold War. The final problem is that other nations have tried the approach you suggest. The Cuban and Soviet governments learned that far too late in their own counterinsurgencies.

I am not suggesting

by GaryC on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 8:07pm

Hi Grant. I was not offering a solution. My solution would be the same as DePuy; defeat the enemy in the field and then go home. Your first point is that liberal democracies can "only do that sort of thing for so long." I do not think the U.S. or U.K. should be putting whole populations in concentration camps. The Brits may have invented "the approach" but the Germans made sure everyone knows what it means in terms of murdering innocent people. Your second point about hatred and blowback only applies if the conquerers stick around; the Brits made it clear to the Boers they must honor the terms or the second time they visited would result in the end of the Boers. Then the Brits left- the Boers complied. I am also confused by your comment about winning a war by gaining the support of the people - the people you are at war with? Your third point is Malaya; I knew someone would muddy the water by throwing that in as an example. Ireland just does not count as an insurgency- not with so few combatants. The Malayan insurgents were actually aliens- they were chinese. The Malay population was on the side of the Brits. Your fourth point is also stretching the blanket; the Germans were fighting in the streets after the first world war, the Japanese were fighting insurgents in China well before the second world war started, and the Italians knew perhaps best of all about insurgents from dealing with the Sicilian Mafia. They all knew about fighting the occupier but chose not to fight the Allies. And as for the final problem; can you explain that a little better?

Could I say a word in defense

by Zathras on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 3:55pm

Could I say a word in defense of "Saving Private Ryan"?

The film doesn't depict a handful of typical American soldiers blocking German troops. It depicts American soldiers with experienced leadership delaying German troops for a few minutes before being overrun. All but three of the Americans get killed, and one of those gets through the battle by hiding from the enemy. The bridge the Americans were supposed to destroy is intact at the end of the battle, with only the arrival of American airpower and reinforcements preventing the Germans from crossing it. The command failure that left a handful of infantry alone at a river crossing known to be of vital importance is alluded to more than once.

I understand and sympathize with much of the criticism Hollywood gets for depicting military life unrealistically, but movies only do what they can do. If Steven Spielberg had set out to make a movie about the post-D-Day record of the 90th Division, it wouldn't have looked like "Saving Private Ryan," but he didn't.

Good points

by tom ricks on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 3:58pm

These are good points. I just worry that there are people who think that SPR is representative.

Polite dissent

by Grant on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 5:35pm

While he may have been a fine general for conventional warfare, I'm afraid I have to disagree with one point made on him and his heirs. It may have been foolish, but I do not think that it was the sole fault of his successors in the 90s that resulted in no serious counterinsurgency thought. If he had been an officer who wanted to repair from the damage of Vietnam then he should have also taken time to implement some of the known lessons on counterinsurgency instead of trying to forget it altogether.

Preparing the army for Fulda but please, do not mention the war!

by gtwickler on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 8:51pm

William E. DePuy:
“We didn't know how to do counterinsurgency very well, and we had white faces.”

On the bombing of North Vietnam:

It was the notion of gradualism and retaliation, one more turn of the screw. I personally thought it would be a token of U.S. resolve, and a sample of what we could do. I really thought it would impress them. I now think it just infuriated them. And we just kept doing it. We did more and more and more and more, up until the Cambodia invasion and the mining of the harbors and the B-52s over Hanoi, and it was never enough. We never quite grasped the fact that the North Vietnamese intended to win.”(...)
“When you're doing anything you think is important, there's a very high emotional content. It inhibits clear thinking-at least with me. When I was commanding the 1st Division, I was totally preoccupied with trying to find the 9th VC Division and the other main-force elements in my area. I was concerned about doing it better-more engagements, with more success and fewer casualties. It was a full-time job, learning how to do that. And you're very defensive. You only see the things you've been doing well, not the big mistakes you've made. We were all emotionally involved that way. We weren't as cool and detached as we should have been, and as we can be now. It's easy to be smart in retrospect. It's difficult to do it in the heat of the battle. I didn't do it too well. But I think I had a lot of company.

Excerpt from An Oral History ofAmericans in Vietnam 1945-1975 GENERAL WILLIAM E. DePUY

So after the Vietnam War, the US Army decided, in all it’s wisdom, to appoint the main architect of the failed attrition strategy as head of TRADOC. Which of course made sense, considering General Westmoreland’s promotion to Army Chief of Staff a few years before. Failure in command appeared to be the surest way to reach high positions in those days.

Under DePuy’s leadership, FM100-5, Operations, was published in 1976 and

the authors were driven by certain events and forces then at work:
* The Vietnam war-combat with light and elusive forces-was over.
* The defense of central Europe against large, modern, Soviet armored forces once again became the Army's main-almost exclusive-mission. (emphasis added)
* The Arab-Israeli War vividly illustrated the lethality of modem weapons and the high value of crew proficiency and the skill of tactical commanders.
* A decade of war was to be followed by a decade of intensive modernization. FM 100-5 and its first two offspring--71-1 and 71-2, the operating manuals for company and battalion commanders, responded to these influences along the following lines:
* The focus was mainly on combat in Europe.
* The accent was on armored and mechanized warfare.
* Soviet forces were recognized as the enemy and Soviet tactical doctrine became the immediate center of attention.
* Weapons characteristics, trends and applications were emphasized.
* Superior concentration of combat power in the attack and in the defense through good intelligence, quick decision and high mobility was described as the only solution for an
outnumbered force.(…) The generation of officers now in command, seasoned in airmobile environment of Vietnam, is especially well suited for such operations. Accustomed to open flanks, to operating on the basis of ambiguous intelligence, seeking the enemy and not the terrain, concentrating rapidly, and adapting constantly to the flow of events-these leaders have maneuver in their bones.
Let the critics relax. ( Selected papers of General William E. DePuy)

Ever since, history has proven that as long American forces could fight according to their preferred mode of operation, they would perform distinguishedly, allowing the critics to relax. As to the aforementioned generation of officers’ grasp of maneuver warfare or their adaptability in high-stress combat situations, well, their performance in general seems to be less satisfactory. How did General DePuy’s efforts at TRADOC prepare future generations of officers for the wars they (he?) didn’t want to fight?

“Remember – the enemy is not fighting this war as per French Army regulations”( Bernard Fall – Street without joy )

It seems that in the 70s and 80s, the Army (DePuy included) worked very hard to sweep all the lessons of the Vietnam War under the rug.

Nevertheless, DePuy did foresee

more encounters with low-signature forces taking passive measures to survive in the face of U.S. artillery and tactical air forces. Iranian revolutionary guards fall squarely in this category.(…) The record of modern armies against embedded forces is not encouraging. The Russians may have simply resettled most of the Afghans-removed the population in which the fighters would otherwise be embedded. Britain is credited with a huge success in Malaya. It did succeed, but it controlled the government; and the communist terrorists were ethnically Chinese, not Malayan.
The heart of prudence and cold realism suggests that U.S. combat forces should stay away from embedded forces. Any violation of this advice is almost certain to be militarily futile and politically ruinous.(…) This is not to say that the U.S. government should never try to help friendly countries faced with insurgency. U.S. intelligence, communications, training and logistic support (as in El Salvador) may well be in order as long as the magnitude and visibility of that effort does not cross the deadly threshold of "Americanization." That threshold, unfortunately, is very low.( Selected papers of General William E. Depuy)

The heart of prudence and cold realism also suggests that human beings, and especially politicians, hardly ever learn from past mistakes and tend to repeat them. Therefore a decent commander should at the very least prepare for such, unwelcome, future emergencies.

PS: COL David Hackworth identifies BG Hollingsworth, the 1st Infantry Division's ADC, as the driving force behind the the removal of all those battalion commanders.( David Hackworth - About face )

Thanks for this.

by Charlieford on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 9:26pm

Very interesting.

Another View

by Zathras on Sat, 07/18/2009 - 3:53pm

Sympathetic though I am to the critique of the post-Vietnam American military with respect to counterinsurgency, I think it ought to be remembered that the state of the Army in particular in the aftermath of the Vietnam withdrawal raised significant questions as to its ability to keep Soviet armored forces out of Western Europe.

That was, at the time, the Army's primary mission. If it couldn't accomplish that, its proficiency at other tasks, including counterinsurgency, would have been somewhat beside the point. Moreover, Vietnam was not the only wake-up call the Army got during that period. The 1973 Middle East war sent with brutal clarity the message that modern armored warfare could move so fast that mistakes made in the opening hours and days of conflict might not be recoverable. The urgency with which the Army emphasized fighting this kind of war to the exclusion of other kinds of war is understandable given this context.

Of course, fully fifteen years passed between the waning of the Soviet ground threat to Western Europe and the onset of the world situation we face today. During the 1980s and 1990s, the American military got many broad hints, from Grenada to Somalia and the Balkan wars, that the post-Vietnam reforms might need to be reformed again to account for new circumstances. Many of these hints were disregarded until years of battling the insurgency in Iraq made their impact felt. My point here is only that we could pile on an awful lot of responsibility on post-Vietnam figures like Dupuy for not doing a better job at preparing the military for fighting the wars we are fighting now, responsibility that more properly belongs to the generation of general officers who came after them.

Lost opportunities

by gtwickler on Sun, 07/19/2009 - 1:47pm

First of all, as Mr. Ricks mentioned DePuy’s insistence on accountability, I was wondering why this concept didn’t apply to the general himself. To me, it just doesn’t make sense to reward an officer responsible for a poorly devised “strategy”, with command of the Army’s main training and doctrine centre.
It’s common wisdom that a (military) organization, which consistently tolerates mediocre performance of its top leaders, sows the seeds of future defeat. This leads to the obvious conclusion that it wasn’t simply McNamara and DePuy in ’66, or Rumsfeld and Franks in ’03, but the system (stupid ;)).

You’ve mentioned the difficulties of the post-Vietnam period and the looming threat of a “hollow army” as mitigating circumstances for the Army’s main/sole focus on the Soviet menace. To a certain extent this makes sense, but then again, it’s also an easy way out. It was a period of major problems, but also great opportunities. There’s no substitute for losing, or risking to lose a war to revamp, rebuild and improve a nation’s military and set a new strategic course. I believe the US military basically lost an opportunity after Vietnam. Sure, they took a swing at Third Generation/Maneuver Warfare, but mostly with words, and according to the "Bill Lind school of thought", bungled it.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War was seen as a godsend by the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College, which used the war to focus attention away from low-intensity conflict and back to mid-intensity conventional conflict. The “Vietnam Syndrome,” which engulfed the United States in the mid-1970s, found the Army right in step as instruction on foreign internal defense at its service schools literally disappeared. For the Army, counterinsurgency became, as one general put it, a “fad,” something that was “all the rage” in the days of the New Frontiersmen but now should be forgotten in favor of the long-neglected big-war contingency in Europe.
Andrew Krepinevich The Army and Vietnam, p.272

So, apparently, the Yom Kippur war came as a welcome excuse to conduct business as usual and to modernize the Army, instead of revolutionizing its doctrine. It was no excuse however, to totally disregard the Vietnam experience:

As Lieutenant General Yarborough sadly observed, “We didn’t cope with irregular warfare in Asia…and, rather than recognizing that we didn’t learn our lessons, we are turning back again in the hope that the next war will be a conventional war.” Andrew Krepinevich The Army and Vietnam, p.274

The 1976 edition of FM 100-5 Operations, prepared under DePuy’s direction, did not mention counter-insurgency.
John Nagl Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, p.206

Of course, General DePuy is not solely to blame for the Army’s preoccupation with conventional warfare. In fact, it should come as no surprise that he (and the Army, for that matter) focused on what he knew best. He certainly didn’t “pull an Odierno”!
It’s the intellectual complacency that bothers me. Why did a military professional, who botched counterinsurgency in Vietnam, make no attempt to master the subject afterwards? If only to make sure that past mistakes would not be repeated. The generation of general officers that came after him (a lot of them DePuy protégés) also carry part of the blame, but they certainly didn’t drop the ball: you need to be in possession to do just that!

After reading John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, I was wondering what all the hubbub was about. To me, and I’m sure Mr. Nagl will agree to a certain extent, it seemed like old wine in new bottles. I suppose its main value lies in the fact that it appeared to carry the support of the Army’s top leadership and that it helped to bring the subject of irregular warfare back on the Army’s agenda. This in stark contrast to the reception of Krepinevich’s excellent The Army and Vietnam, written almost twenty (!) years before.

I conclude with one matter that puzzles me. In his writings and interviews General DePuy comes across as being particularly enamoured with the exploits of one Oberleutnant Rommel during the First World War and he frequently mentions Infanterie greift an , which is based on Rommel's experiences in that war. I would like to know whether DePuy has ever made attempts to incorporate the Stormtroop tactics into US Army infantry training and doctrine, and if so, why didn’t he succeed?

Great stuff!

by Charlieford on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 9:26pm

That line about strengths and weaknesses is great, and applies to other than military matters.

And this-- "It has been a war in which senior officers need not so much training, which readies them for the known, as education, which prepares them for the unknown." -- should be memorized by every administrator and teacher.

One sees that emphasis in Kilcullen, Mansoor, and Mullaney, but I don't get the sense there's much awareness of how "heady" war, especially COIN, has become. (Not knowing this literature real well myself until the last several years, it was a mild surprise to find how intellectually strenuous and creative these matters are in certain hands. Mullaney actually sounds like he's describing a Great Books program, not preparation for war.)

Do you know of anything else that hits on that same theme?

Yes

by tom ricks on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 10:37pm

I'd say the Army-Marine COIN Manual kind of hits the same theme.

strengths and weaknesses

by dougsamuelson on Sun, 07/19/2009 - 2:53pm

Eliot Cohen makes a similar point in _Strategic Command_, especially this quote from David Ben-Gurion: "The most dangerous enemy to our security is the intellectual inertia of those responsible for security."

Thanks!

by Charlieford on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 9:32pm

Very helpful.

Marine CAP or CAC?

by Tyrtaios on Sun, 07/19/2009 - 10:48am

"DuPuy was contemptuous of the Marine Corps' CAP program."

I wasn't aware of this, but considering General Depuy, although an intelligent warrior, was a linear thinking individual, in a war were we had more serving in support occupations than as infantrymen, fighting an enemy that chose were he wanted to be fixed and fight, that wouldn't surprise me.

Some in the Corps thought the same way that Depuy did, feeling that the CAP ate-up too many infantryman - odd considering not all were infantryman - every Marine being a basic rifleman back then - sort of. And let's not forget our Navy Corpsman that volunteered and served with the program as well.

What might be missed is: though in vogue now, the Corps' Small Wars Manual was pretty much ignored early on in Vietnam. However, one day someone at the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, under big LtGen Lew Walt (Chesty Puller trained) had an epiphany and remembered there was a document, based on sage experience in earlier small wars, that recommended the combination of Marine personnel with locals in operational formations within villages had previously been found to be successful.

My bet is you will see something similiar put into place in Afghanistan. It's about securing the population, not chasing insurgents all over the countryside based on poor intelligence.

One caveat however: the term CAP was originally CAC (Combined Action Corps). It was found out after much laughter by kids in the vills that CAC means penis in Vietnamese, and it was changed to CAP! : - )

Memories

by dont.tread.on.me on Sat, 07/18/2009 - 6:55pm

As an Army Brat I remember GEN DePuy's visit to our base in the early '70s. He had the post gym shut down for hours so he could do "PT"- a game of badminton. Needless to say, a less than memorable image for such a renowned leader...and many disappointed teenagers deprived of our basketball court.

Dupuy

by JDShepherd on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 10:41am

Hindsight, as the fellow said ...

To appreciate Dupuy's contribution, one must understand the state of the U.S. Army in the 1970s. As the colors of the last units came home from Vietnam (few units came home as such), the Army looked something like this:

- Senior officers as a group were perceived (by their subordinates) as out of touch, not particularly well-grounded in the art of war and addicted to "ticket punching".

- Junior officers were generally experienced in hands-on small unit operations, but were not well prepared - by training and basic education - for positions above company level. The level of understanding of counterinsurgency among junior officers was relatively low (if my contemporaries in the Infantry Advanced Course at Benning in 1972-73 are a representative sample).

- The corps of noncommissioned officers had been eviscerated by Vietnam. Casualties, coupled with the individual replacement system had created a shortage of physically capable, trained mid-grade (Staff Sergeant and Sergeant First Class level) leaders in the combat arms.

- Soldiers - largely draftees - found military life, after their initial training, to lack challenge and focus. Life in a unit was over-regulated - more concerned with accountability than activity - and training was prosaic and uninteresting.

Dupuy and his 'gang' undertook a number of actions whose impact is still being felt today:

- Training was a primary focus. The reforms of the '70s - instigated largely by Dupuy - changed the Army's focus from training for X hours on a subject to training to perform specific tasks. Commanders and trainers were permitted and required to analyze their real-world missions, figure out what their soldiers needed to know, and plan and conduct training at all levels aimed at developing the ability to complete their missions. This approach to training permeated the Army in the '70s and '80s and increased proficiency - and soldier job satisfaction - immensely.

- Hand in hand with training went the development of the corps of noncommissioned officers. For the first time, the Army, under Dupuy's leadership, put in place a multi-level system of courses designed to ensure that noncoms at each rank had a uniform grounding in the responsibilities inherent in their grade and military occupational specialty. The noncoms produced by this training system have, I think, been the pivot around which the Army swung in recent years in its reorientation towards counterinsurgency.

- Finally, Dupuy was instrumental in the establishment of facilities designed to measure the overall training achievement of battalions and squadrons in a realistic environment - with detailed analysis of what the units did right and wrong. This concept has proven flexible enough to support the change in orientation from 'kinetic' to more population-focused operations.

The argument that Dupuy didn't appreciate population-focused operations is perhaps valid. However, Gole makes the point that in Vietnam, Dupuy was given a much more conventional mission than some other units. His use of more 'kinetic' operations was a result more of his task than his preference.

I would add one final comment. Blaming Dupuy and his contemporaries for failing to promote the development of counterinsurgency doctrine in the '70s is the temporal equivalent of blaming Malin Craig (George C. Marshall's predecessor as Army Chief of Staff) for failing to prepare the Army adequately for Vietnam.

Lost opportunities, pt.2

by gtwickler on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 4:48pm

Mr. Shepherd, you make it sound as if General DePuy and his contemporaries inherited this “hollow army” out of the blue. May I remind you that a great number of these officers were the same men who led a well-trained (for conventional warfare) and confident Army into the Southeast Asian quagmire, around 1965. With a seasoned NCO-corps and a lot of combat-experienced senior officers, some of whom having two major wars under their belt. More than seven years of wasteful warfare gutted that Army.

I believe that General DePuy carries a lot of responsibility for the way the US Army operated in those initial war years. There were alternatives to his approach, but DePuy didn't want to hear any of it, and instead derided USMC efforts at population security. Official internal criticism of the way the Army conducted this war was not tolerated, let alone appreciated. DePuy’s way clearly didn’t work and he should have retired for having failed at his core business. That’s accountability.

Maybe DePuy should be lauded for his efforts to rebuild the Army. He certainly launched some good initiatives and had a knack for selecting talented officers.
But has the Army, as a whole, really mastered Maneuver Warfare, one of his goals? I believe not. Too bad, because a lot of the elements that characterize Maneuver Warfare, such as decentralization, surprise and flexibility, are also useful in a counterinsurgency environment.

Furthermore, the exclusion of counterinsurgency in FM 100-5 was a conscious decision and didn’t happen by accident. It was like republishing the Holy Bible and leaving out Pentateuch! DePuy didn’t have “to promote the development of counterinsurgency doctrine in the '70s”, if only he had cared to listen to the troops that fought in Vietnam and learned from both his and their experiences. Or taken a trip to a local library and dusted off some old history books. The basics were right there, up for grabs. General DePuy could have laid the groundwork for a learning institution that, at the very least, acknowledged counterinsurgency so that a new generation might have taken it from there. He chose not to do it.

As to the Malin Craig analogy: I’ve read that General Craig, as a junior officer, served in the Philippines, China and the Spanish-American War, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew a thing or two about “irregular warfare”!