US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation

From Vietnam to Iraq

Richard Lock-Pullan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135765040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation examines how the US Army rebuilt itself after the Vietnam War and how this has affected US intervention policy, from the victory of the Gulf War to the failure of Somalia, the Bosnian and Kosovo interventions and the use of force post 9/11.

Richard Lock-Pullan analyzes the changes in US military intervention strategy by examining two separate issues: the nature of the US Army as it rebuilt itself after the Vietnam War, and the attempts by the US to establish criteria for future military interventions. He first argues that US strategy traditionally relied upon national mobilization to co-ordinate political aims and military means; he subsequently analyzes how this changed to a formula of establishing militarily achievable political objectives prior to the use of force. Drawing on a vast body of material and on strategic culture and military innovation literature, Lock-Pullan demonstrates that the strategic lessons were a product of the rebuilding of the Army's identity as it became a professional all-volunteer force and that the Army's new doctrine developed a new 'way of war' for the nation, embodied in the AirLand Battle doctrine, which changed the approach to strategy.

This book finally gives a practical analysis of how the interventions in Panama and the Gulf War vindicated this approach and brought a revived confidence in the use of force while more recent campaigns in Somalia, Kosovo and Bosnia exposed its weaknesses and the limiting nature of the Army's thinking. The legacy of the Army's innovation is examined in the new strategic environment post 9/11 with the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

1
THE US ARMY AND AMERICAN STRATEGIC CULTURE

To understand the US Army’s strategic thinking after the Vietnam War, it is first necessary to understand the nature of its social sources. This chapter will outline the main characteristics of the US Army’s strategic thought and self-understanding as a product of national culture, establishing its identity and tactics. The constitutional position of the Army provides the basic structure within which the Army’s thinking and identity has developed, and this will be examined before going on to see how this legacy changed and evolved over the period to the Second World War. The second section examines how the war was the culmination of a process that saw the Army embodying the militia tradition with an identity as the nation at war. Its tactics and understanding of strategy was a product of this understanding. The final section examines the pressures on the traditional identity which were brought with the start of the Cold War and the development of the first major US standing army, and how this related to the political understanding of strategy in an age which saw the arrival of nuclear weapons. The contradictions between these demands will be seen as the root of the strategic problems the US had in prosecuting the Vietnam War and shaped how the Army perceived the war and its lessons.

The nation’s Army

Analyst Carl Builder observes that the Army has ‘not shown any particularly strong affinity for strategy’.¹ This is not unique to the US Army. As Ken Booth observed in 1978: ‘the study of strategy and participation in strategic-decision making has not been professionally relevant for any military establishment until quite recently.’² Additionally, the US has a reputation for not having indigenous strategic thinkers beyond the Navy’s Alfred Thayer Mahan and air power advocate Billy Mitchell, which itself is reflective of the fact that the US was primarily a sea power rather than a land power prior to the Second World War.³ Fundamentally, the United States did not develop and nurture a tradition of excellence in strategy because it did not need one.⁴ However, even with the lack of US strategic tradition, the Army has to have some form of strategy so that it can make decisions,⁵ and the concept of strategic culture can help to see how thinking is institutionalised, codified and perpetuated.⁶ As the military historian John Keegan explains:

an army is… an expression of the society from which it issues. The purposes for which it fights and the way it does so will therefore be determined in large measure by what a society wants from a war and how far it expects its army to go in delivering that outcome.⁷

Keegan, by highlighting the relationship between society and warfare, outlines the importance of the original society for the nature and character of an army and its strategic thinking. For the US Army, the American Constitution, historical legacy and its nature as a citizen’s army provided the implicit strategic understanding.

Essential to strategy is the co-ordination of the military means and the political ends, and for the US that relationship is formalised in the Constitution.⁸ The kind of armed forces that the US possesses was outlined at the moment of the violent establishment of the United States as it threw off its colonial masters.⁹ The Constitutional Convention’s outcomes established an ‘abiding congruence of purpose’ between America and its army.¹⁰ This was seen in the Convention’s concern with the Cromwellian ‘man on horseback’, and they looked to minimise the risk of despotism and a coup. It also reflected the innovative political nature of the Revolutionary War.¹¹ The Constitution places many checks and balances on the military to avoid the fate of its European forebears, and Dave R.Palmer gives one of the better summaries of the convoluted solution that was developed.

The United States could maintain armed forces in peacetime, but only if funded by Congress. The president would command the military, but Congress would write the rules. State authorities would command the militia, but would meet standards of readiness set by Congress. The commander in chief would wage war, but only after Congress declared it. The president would end wars, but only with the approval of the Senate. The commander in chief would deploy military forces, but Congress would determine their size and shape. The president would appoint and commission officers, but with the consent of the Senate. The president would command the militia when they might be federalized, but the states would appoint militia officers and oversee the training of the units. The federal government could field regular forces, but the states would retain authority to direct the militia.¹²

The American Constitution broke with the European tradition and placed the Army and its recruitment and training under federal and state chains of command. This gave the Army a distinctive identity compared to its European contemporaries, focused as it was upon the centrality of the Constitution and divided and separated among the executive and legislative powers. The role of commander in chief was symbolically invested in the presidency, rather than in the sovereign, and it is the Constitution itself that is the referent for the identity of the Army. Hence an American officer is commissioned into the Army to ‘support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic: [and] … will bear true faith and allegiance to the same’.¹³

The integration of state and federal forces made the involvement of the legislature vital, thereby stopping the Army from simply being the political instrument of the head of state. Additionally, it relied on national support as it is made up of the mobilisation of the nation’s citizens. As an Army Chief of Staff put it in 1994:

The soldiers of America’s Army are citizen-volunteers who serve in either the active or reserve components: volunteers who serve the Nation in every state, city and town in the United States. We are the Army of a democratic nation and our institutional core is selfless service to the Nation as prescribed by the Constitution.¹⁴

The remarkable consistency of thought over the 200 years between 1794 and 1994 concerning the identity of the Army, shows the strength of this tradition and forms the understanding that lies behind the historical development of the US Army.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Army’s relation to society was one of isolation and neglect. The Army’s prime mission during the bulk of this period was securing the frontier and fighting the indigenous population. This era was punctuated by the War of 1812 (1812-14) and the Mexican War (1845-47) in which it was not the regulars but the militia and volunteers respectively who formed the main force.¹⁵ In both cases, non-regulars were quickly demobilised when the conflicts terminated. The small standing army was thus supplementary to the volunteers and state-raised militias. It was the Civil War that brought in the massed armies of the North and South.

The Civil War was a decisive episode for the Army and the nation’s strategic culture. It was fought in the Napoleonic tradition, relying on mass armies meeting at decisive points and destroying the opponent’s forces at their centres of gravity.¹⁶ As Michael Howard says, in the American Civil War it was the logistical aspect of strategy that was most important, and this has influenced all subsequent US military strategy.¹⁷ US Army General Donn A.Starry supports this logistical/ resource basis by observing that in conscript armies there is always a tendency to look on manpower as a virtually free resource, one that, if provided in sufficient numbers and properly supplied, is the best way to win. He argues that ‘it is an idea that has dominated US military thought, at least until the advent of nuclear weapons, but which dies hard’.¹⁸

The Civil War brought the evolution of the massed army idea but it did not bring prestige for the Army.¹⁹ After the war the American Army as a professional body was isolated, reduced and rejected. It was ‘unseen, unpopular, or unknown. Northerners were disinterested in it, southerners disliked it, westerners no longer needed it. In 1877…the officers and men of the United States Army went a full year without pay.’²⁰ Paradoxically, the very isolation of the military after the Civil War was the chief prerequisite for the initial development of army professionalism, as it was withdrawn from civilian society and turned inwards upon itself. It was to bring about the emergence of the first forms of military professionalism.

The years between 1860 and the First World War saw the emergence of a distinctive American professional ethic, with the American officer regarding himself as a member no longer of a fighting profession only, to which anyone might belong, but as a member of a profession which, if not accepted as learned, could still be intellectually demanding, and whose students were students for life.²¹

The trend to professionalisation was not allowed by the US culture to become an isolated professionalism. For example, the indecisiveness of the Civil War meant that a way to minimise its horror was to emulate the Prussian example and gear the society to war. However, any desire for a ‘quasi-military elite’ faded after the Civil War in the face of the triumph of the American liberal ‘laissez-faire’ ideas.²² The US in 1865, as later in 1918 and 1945, had a hasty demobilisation. It was not to be revived until the excitement of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The primary American concern was civilian, to such an extent that military professionalism itself was questioned, while attempts to transcend societal limitations ‘have not usually had happy endings’.²³ The most famous example was Emory Upton, whose book The Military Policy of the United States²⁴ ‘was almost a catalogue of mistakes, defeats, wasted expenditures, and unnecessary casualties arising from the voluntaristic, amateurish, civilian-dominated American way of war.’²⁵

Upton, after his experience of the Civil War with its purchase of commissions and the civilian interference in the war, prized the Prussian model of military professionalism. He attacked civilian domination of the military, and focused on developing military professionalism, initially by writing and reforming the tactical manual of the Army.²⁶ Upton’s regard for the Prussian model had developed after General Sherman sent him to Europe and a world tour in 1875–76 to study various militaries. His ideas were not adopted in his own time and he committed suicide with his seminal work unpublished, though they were eventually taken up in a revised form by Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of War (1899–1904), who published Upton’s work in 1904.²⁷

Root adopted Upton’s institutional reforms, leading to the establishment of a general staff in 1903 and the revision of the militia tradition.²⁸ This abolished the role of the president as the direct commander in chief, and the authority would be exercised by, or in the name of, the secretary of war, through a chief of staff. Crucially, the nature of the reforms, and the motives for their adoption, were not as Upton originally envisaged. The organisational nature of the reform was not modelled on his Prussian example, as Root utilised large-scale business organisation thinking and adapted it to government, emphasising executive leadership and the efficacy of clear lines of accountability and authority. As Paul Hammond wrote in 1961, the consequences of the 1903 Act ‘are still with us’,²⁹ and it was seen as the root of the later business managerialism of Robert McNamara.³⁰ Additionally, the reforms were not used to develop a separate military caste but to reinvigorate society and foster rugged individualism. President Theodore Roosevelt supported Root’s approach, ‘not so much interested in its institutional aspects as in its effectiveness in cultivating military “habits” within the American population’.³¹ Upton and Uptonianism, therefore, came to stand as a symbol of a military reinvigorating the nation’s society, whilst ‘pure’ Uptonianism, based on the German model, faded with US entry into the First World War. Upton would have been surprised at the ability shown by the democratic government during the war. To American nationalists such as Leonard Wood, the controversial Army Chief of Staff³² and one of Roosevelt’s ‘Rough Riders’,³³ it was no surprise.

General Wood saw the identity of the Army clearly in relation to the people and the nation. ‘You the people make war; the Government declares it; and we, the officers of the Army and Navy, are charged with the responsibility of terminating it with such means and implements as you may give us.’³⁴ To further this he revived the citizen-army model and established the famous Plattsburg training camps.³⁵ While they aimed to develop preparedness as part of an interventionist movement against President Wilson’s professed reluctance to be involved in the First World War, the camps initiated broad social and political implications, reviving citizen-soldier values within American society.³⁶ Wood’s viewpoint is neatly summarised by the collection of speeches he published in 1915, The Military Obligation of Citizenship³⁷

The influence of Wood’s movement is shown by one of the recruits to the training camps. Henry Stimson, at the age of 48, enrolled in 1916.³⁸ As Secretary of War under President Taft (1911-13), Stimson had followed Root’s institutional changes based on Upton’s ideas and fully...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE US ARMY AND AMERICAN STRATEGIC CULTURE
• 2: THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE US ARMY
• 3: THE ALL-VOLUNTEER ARMY
• 4: INNOVATION IN US ARMY DOCTRINE
• 5: THE INFLUENCE OF ARMY THINKING
• 6: INTERVENTIONS: Panama, the Gulf, Somalia
• 7: RETURN TO THE GULF
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY