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[Marine]

US Military Doctrine and the Revolution in Military Affairs
DAVID JABLONSKY



Change resonates for the American military today as it seeks to come to grips with what the Soviet Union once called the Military Technological Revolution (MTR) and what is now considered a broader Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). "We are in the midst of a dramatic change in the relationship between technology and the nature of warfare," General William Odom has pointed out in this regard while concluding that no one fully understands that relationship. "Strategists must think about it, however, and try to uncover its inchoate ramifications . . . if they are to design an effective military doctrine and appropriate military capabilities for the coming decades."[1] That, of course, is easier said than done. Throughout history, the interaction of technology and war has been as much the result of the arbitrary and the accidental as the inevitable and the necessary.

What can help in all this is the knowledge that with change, there is usually continuity due to what Robert Heilbroner calls the "inertia of history." Inertia in this sense does not just mean resistance to change, but also what Heilbroner refers to as the "viscosity" of history--the tendency of people to repeat and continue their way of doing things as long as possible. Thus, despite the fact that the "normal" condition of man has been sufficient to warrant revolution, such occurrences are remarkable in history not for their frequency, but for their rarity.[2]

Nevertheless, "revolution" has been the key word in the wake of the Gulf War as a host of officials and analysts have attempted to explain the victorious outcome of that conflict. The war, former Secretary of Defense Cheney concluded in the official after-action report, "demonstrated dramatically the new possibilities of what has been called the `military-technological revolution in warfare.'"[3] This was matched by a study of the war conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which contained a chapter entitled "The Revolution in Warfare" that was almost rhapsodic as it contemplated a future of sophisticated battle management systems, space stations, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

In sum, the nature of warfare is changing. Although the revolution in warfare is still underway, its outlines have become clear. The effects of technology--in precision guided weapons, in stealthy delivery systems, in advanced sensor and targeting systems, in battle management platforms--is transforming and in fact already has demonstrably transformed the way in which armed forces conduct their operations.[4]

In 1993, the CSIS devoted an entire report to the revolution, "a fundamental advance in technology, doctrine or organization that renders existing methods of conducting warfare obsolete."[5]

The most enthusiastic response to the revolutionary aspects of the Gulf conflict has come from Alvin and Heidi Toffler, who see it as ushering in what they term Third Wave warfare. The First or agrarian wave was launched by the agriculture revolution 10,000 years ago; the Second or industrial wave, in the last 300 years by a combination of the Newtonian and industrial revolutions. The Third or post-industrial wave coexists with the other two waves, creating a trisected world, in which the First Wave sector supplies agricultural and mineral resources and the Second Wave cheap labor for mass production, while the Third Wave rises rapidly to dominance based on the creation and exploitation of knowledge.[6]

In this milieu, the Tofflers see the addition of a Third Wave war form as increasing the potential for heterogeneity in the wars the United States must prevent or fight. In other words, older warfare forms don't entirely disappear when newer ones arise, just as Second Wave mass production has not disappeared with the advent of customized Third Wave products. As a consequence, there are today approximately 20 countries with regionally significant Second Wave armies. And some of these as well as a few First Wave countries are attempting to gain Third Wave technology. The result is a wide range of military operations. At one end are the small, essentially First Wave civil wars and violent conflicts in poor or low-tech countries accompanied by sporadic terrorism and drug wars. At the other end is the Third Wave warfare presaged, in part, by the Gulf War. Somewhere in between and lapping at the successive wave, as it did in Kuwait, is the very strong residue of the large-scale Second Wave warfare.[7]

It is this combination of change and continuity that holds the key for the US military as it deals with the current revolution in military affairs. The major force for change in that revolution is technology. The major reason why the US military, and particularly the US Army, is prepared to deal with this force is the mix of continuity and change in the current doctrinal framework that will carry it well and effectively into the vortex of the RMA.

Doctrinal Change and Continuity

Clausewitz defined strategy as the use of engagements to achieve policy objectives--a definition that can be depicted as a vertical continuum of war (Figure 1). The Prussian philosopher's observations were based on Napoleon's revolutionary use of time and space which, nonetheless, still focused on the intra-battle maneuver of classical strategy. In the American Civil War, however, the dimensions of these two variables were stretched and rendered more complex by the interaction of technology with the elements of what Clausewitz had referred to as the "remarkable trinity": the military, the government, and the people.

Figure 1.

That interaction, as Grant illustrated in his use of operationally durable armies scattered throughout the eastern United States in 1864-65, could result in inter-battle maneuvers and thus in decisive operations and campaigns distributed in extended time and space. The result was something that went beyond the adjustment of activities to one another, which is the essence of coordination. It was in fact a process in which pressure in one area might result in simultaneous or successive results elsewhere. Over a century later it would be described as synchronization, a concept that could involve activities far removed from each other in time or space, or both, "if their combined consequences are felt at the decisive time and place."[8] That process was captured in a letter to Grant in 1864. "I think our campaign of the last month," Sherman wrote from Savannah, "as well as every step I take from this point northward, is as much a direct attack upon Lee's army as though we were operating within the sound of his artillery."[9] The larger lesson of the century, however, was captured by Paul Kennedy:

All these wars--whether fought in the Tennessee Valley or the Bohemian plain, in the Crimean Peninsula or the field of Lorraine--pointed to one general conclusion: the powers which were defeated were those that had failed to adapt to the `military revolution' of the mid-nineteenth century, the acquisition of new weapons, the mobilizing and equipping of large armies, the use of improved communications offered by the railway, the steamship and the telegraph, and a productive industrial base to sustain the armed forces.[10]

These doctrinal lessons were lost in subsequent years; and World War I would reveal the inadequacies of classical strategy to deal with the intricacies of modern warfare. It was that complexity, augmented by the lack of decisiveness at the tactical level, that after 1914 impeded the vertical continuum of war outlined in Clausewitz's definition of strategy. Only when the continuum was enlarged, as the Great War demonstrated, was it possible to restore warfighting coherence to modern combat. And that, in turn, required the classical concept of strategy to be positioned at a midpoint, an operational level, designed to integrate individual tactical engagements and battles in order to achieve strategic results (Figure 2). A military strategic level was added as another way station on the vertical road to the fulfillment of policy objectives. This left the concept of strategy, as it had been understood since the time of Clausewitz, transformed into:

the level of war at which campaigns and major operations are planned, conducted and sustained to accomplish strategic objectives. . . . Activities at this level link tactics and strategy. . . . These activities imply a broader dimension of time or space than do tactics; they provide the means by which tactical successes are exploited to achieve strategic objectives.[11]

Figure 2.

The Return to Basics

In the wake of Vietnam, the US Army returned to its traditional focus on Europe. During the previous decade, the Warsaw Pact had added impressive qualitative improvements to its already crushing numerical preponderance--a trend only magnified by new analytical and gaming techniques which emphasized the quantifiable components of combat power. Added to this was the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the violence and lethality of which came as a shock to an officer corps conditioned by years of low-intensity warfare in Southeast Asia. At the same time, an already demoralized army found itself without a peacetime draft and on the receiving end of a decade-long deficit in equipment modernization as well as a large manpower reduction. The result was "Active Defense," promulgated in the 1976 edition of FM 100-5, Operations--a doctrine that made a tactical virtue of what was perceived as a strategic necessity by translating NATO's politically driven requirement of forward defense into operational method.[12]

The criticism of Active Defense began even before the final result was published. The doctrine was attacked for a lack of offensive spirit and the loss of all the tactical imponderables like initiative and morale that accompanied such a spirit; for what was perceived as an overemphasis on firepower to the detriment of maneuver; and for the submergence of tactical creativity in a wave of attrition calculations. But the most telling criticism was that there was no operational content in the new doctrine, which promised at best, its critics charged, to defer defeat without any possibility of operational success. "In seeking to fulfill its doctrinal commitment to winning the first battle,'" Richard Sinnreich has pointed out, "the Army was accused of becoming so preoccupied with fighting the first battle that it forgot all about winning the last. For an Army traumatized by ten years of tactical success culminating in operational failure, no critique could have been more devastating."[13]

At the same time, there was renewed focus on Soviet doctrine, particularly the use of follow-on forces which were tailored-made, critics pointed out, against an Active Defense that was dependent on lateral reinforcement from less threatened areas in lieu of retaining major reserves. This impetus to extend the battlefield, however, required technology that could only be provided by the Air Force--an operative imperative that meant that a battle extended in time and space would have to be an AirLand Battle (ALB). The result was the promulgation of ALB doctrine in the 1982 FM 100-5, which brought the Army full circle back to the three levels of war as a doctrinal framework for "securing or retaining the initiative and exercising it aggressively to defeat the enemy."[14] As a consequence, there was nothing new in the motivation for creating combat coherence throughout the vertical continuum of war in that framework. It was simply the age-old combination of technology and doctrine as a means to return to basics--a return to the business of winning by an Army that was unwilling, in Sinnreich's words, "to stomach indefinitely a . . . doctrine which appeared to enshrine the draw as the objective of military operations."[15]

The 1986 FM 100-5 continued the focus of 1982, adding operational art as the method for working the operational level of war while continuing to emphasize the absolute dominance of the strategic level in the vertical continuum. It is an emphasis that has been renewed in the current manual:

Since wars are fought for strategic purposes, the doctrine addresses the strategic context of the application of force. Since battle is translated into strategic objectives by operational art, a major portion of the manual addresses the operational level of war. And since all operations must be based on sound tactics, a major portion of the text covers tactics.[16]

The other armed forces have followed the Army lead in terms of using the vertical levels of war as a basic doctrinal framework--so much so that the current JCS basic doctrinal publication bears more than a little resemblance to the 1986 Army manual.

The operational level links the tactical employment of forces to strategic objectives. The focus at this level is on operational art--the use of military forces to achieve strategic goals through the design, organization, and execution of campaigns and major operations. Operational art helps commanders use resources efficiently and effectively to achieve strategic objectives. It provides a framework to assist commanders in ordering their thoughts when designing campaigns and major operations. Operational art helps commanders understand the conditions for victory before seeking battle, thus avoiding unnecessary battles. Without operational art, war would be a set of disconnected engagements, with relative attrition the only measure of success or failure.[17]

The new Army doctrine has other strong ties to the past, retaining, for example, the orientation on offensive actions and the familiar tenets of agility, initiative, depth, and synchronization. To this, in response to the changing international environment, has been added "versatility," which "denotes the ability to perform in many roles and environments during war and operations other than war."[18] Operations other than war, or OOTW, can involve combat missions ranging from strikes and raids to peace enforcement as well as non-combat missions that could include disaster relief and civil support both at home and abroad. Force projections in such an environment might include entirely different successive missions for a unit, involving non-combat operations in wartime or actual combat in OOTW. The flexibility involved goes far beyond agility, which emphasizes faster physical and mental reaction than the enemy. That tenet, the manual concludes, applies to a boxer; versatility describes the decathlete. The US Army, like the decathlete, is capable of rapid realignment and refocus on widely divergent missions because of discipline and training.[19]

In all this, the vertical continuum of war remains as the doctrinal construct. The manual draws upon the 1986 contention that the levels in that continuum are not concerned so much with the level of command or the size of the unit as with the planned outcome. "The intended purpose," the current manual points out, "determines whether an Army unit functions at the operational level."[20] From this position, the expansiveness of missions under "full dimensional operations" poses no doctrinal problems for the underlying framework. "The levels of war apply not only to war but also to operations other than war."[21]

The Altered Framework

The framework provided by the vertical continuum of war is changing. The Gulf War demonstrated the coalition's ability to use new technology to strike simultaneously at all three levels of war with what were normally considered strategic capabilities. For Iraq, these attacks across the entire nation paralyzed its military effort, with Iraqi forces compelled to operate throughout the country as if they were within visual range of the coalition military, without any of the normal distinctions between rear, deep, and close operations. "All of this means," one analysis concludes, "that in future conflict the three levels of war, as separate and distinct loci of command and functional responsibilities, will be spaced and timed out of existence."[22] The CSIS report on the revolution in military affairs agrees that the revolution "clearly holds the potential to blur or permanently erase the distinction between tactical, theater, and strategic war."[23] But the JCS Doctrine for Joint Operations is more cautious, preferring a balance of change and continuity.

Advances in technology, information-age media reporting, and the compression of time-space relationships contribute to the growing interrelationships between the levels of war. The levels of war help commanders visualize a logical flow of operations, allocate resources, and assign tasks to the appropriate command. However, commanders at every level must be aware that in a world of constant, immediate communications, any single event may cut across the three levels.[24]

Figure 3.Figure 4.

Figure 3 is the familiar depiction of the vertical continuum of war, with the darkened center area representing the operational art required to ensure that the tactical events in area 1 form the military conditions at the operational level that will achieve strategic objectives in area 2. Figure 4 depicts the more balanced approach to the future reflected in the JCS description. The expansion and overlap represent a trend that began earlier this century with the advent of mechanization, the radio, and air forces. The checkered area demonstrates the future blurring of all three levels of war--the zone of integration and simultaneity. Finally, the darkened section is the traditional area of operational art focused on conducting events in area 1 to achieve the objectives of area 2. The increased sizes of areas 1 and 2 represent the larger operational interaction with both strategy and tactics made possible by technological advances. But at the same time, the diminishment of the darkened section's size also represents the technologically compressed decision cycle of the operational commander working at magnified tempo in extended space. That commander will be faced with a much more complex job: recognizing those simultaneous strategic and tactical events that directly influence strategy, and integrating them at the operational level into the full synchronization calculation that traditionally determined what tactical battles and engagements to join or forego.

The problems of the operational commander notwithstanding, the compression of the three levels has the potential to increase decisiveness in the vertical military continuum from the tactical to the national military strategic level, certainly against a technologically inferior opponent. But that decisiveness can be affected, as the JCS description also implies, by the communication-information revolution that has gathered speed in recent decades. The technology that has streamlined and compressed the vertical continuum also has added a horizontal dimension (Figure 5) that provides the potential for the military at any level of war to influence national strategy directly. In the age of CNN, future wars and OOTW will occur in real time for both the American people and their policymakers. That this development can have positive results against an enemy was illustrated by the Gulf War. But the more pernicious results in terms of less favorable events up and down that continuum has a long history, whether it be the dismissal of Churchill from the Asquith government after the operational defeat at Gallipoli, the decision of LBJ not to run for reelection as a result of Tet, or the effects of the tactical loss of US Army Rangers in Somalia on the tenure of former Secretary of Defense Aspin.

Figure 5.

All this means a growing complexity with shorter decision time for the operational commander. At the same time, the mid- and high-intensity war of the future will help to empty the battlefield even as that field expands in spatial and intellectual terms. At the tactical level, the individual soldier will be able to have a greater effect on events in this expanded battle space because of increased weapons lethality and an increased ability to direct accurately long-range precision fires. This, in turn, will offer more opportunities for the operational commander by increasing the connection between the tactical battle space and the operational area, whether it be the theater of war or the theater of operations. The result is a new JCS-approved approach to deep operations with a focus on functions, not forces.[25] Previously, air theorists tended to limit land attack to the area of actual combat between committed forces, with anything beyond the range of organic Army weapons belonging to the air commander. Now that tactical commanders may pursue battle objectives by using either deep or close combat operations as the main effort, battles and engagements far beyond the forward line of friendly forces can decide major operations and campaigns.

There is, of course, nothing new in the role that technology will play in terms of communications up and down the compressed continuum of war. "From Plato to NATO," Martin van Creveld has pointed out in this regard, "the history of command in war consists essentially of an endless quest for certainty."[26] But that certainty is not necessarily enhanced by the quantum leap in technology which may now inflict Clausewitz's "fog of war" on the compressed continuum. Shorter decision times occasioned by that compression and electronically gathered information mean less time to discover ambiguities or to analyze those ambiguities that are already apparent. Already in the Gulf War, the flood of new information from the battlefield caused air commanders to switch one-fifth of all missions in the time between the printing of centralized air tasking orders and actual aircraft takeoff. Moreover, there is also the danger that the military in the future will become overly dependent on the type of detailed and accurate information provided in training that just may not be possible in the melee of war. With the verisimilitude of computer simulators and war games increasing, the paradox is that soldiers in the future may find themselves all the more at a loss when reality differs sharply from a familiar cyberworld.[27]

Such communication trends in the vertical continuum also have implications for the national military strategy of US-based force projection. If, for example, US forces in the future require theater ballistic missile support in Southwest Asia, why send such missiles when ICBMs with conventional warheads that will soon approach accuracies of near zero circular error probable can do the job without tying up strategic lift? Moreover, if theater-based intelligence assets, command centers, and battle management platforms become vulnerable to opponents, one solution may be the establishment of such assets in the United States with real-time linkages to theater forces.[28] Such linkages were already in evidence in the Gulf War where communications technology subverted hierarchies up and down the continuum, even between the theater and the United States. That such developments could be inevitable as well as desirable was demonstrated by the NORAD staff in Colorado which relayed warnings of Scud launchings to both Riyadh and Tel Aviv. And in the same conflict, thanks to instant communications, much of the basis for CENTAF targeting came from the Air Force staff in the Pentagon, which kept up a flow of targeting information and proposals to the theater. This arrangement worked well for the undermanned and overworked air staff working for the CINC in Riyadh.[29]

All of this suggests even broader implications not only for such time-honored military principles as unity of command and delegation of authority, but for the shibboleth of jointness as well. It would not be the first technological influence on jointness. In ancient times, for example, the galley ship operating in sight of land in the Mediterranean was a joint extension of land operations that ended with the development of sails and other concomitant ocean-going capabilities. And the increasing overlap of functions among the services on the extended battlefield of the compressed continuum of war has an antecedent in the invention of the stirrup, which allowed the mounted warrior to use weapons and wear equipment heretofore associated exclusively with the foot soldier.[30] On a more modern note the image of service staffs providing input directly to a CINC's staff does subvert the intent of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act to make the warfighting theater CINCs semiautonomous, guided by only the broadest direction from the national military strategic level. On the other hand, as Eliot Cohen has observed, there should be some room in the future within the altered levels of war for the operational commander to deal directly with the individual services, "each of which can pool a great deal of operational expertise along with a common world view and an esprit de corps difficult to find among a mélange of officers."[31]

The instantaneous flow of information up the vertical continuum also means that flag officers at the theater strategic and even the national military strategic levels may have access to the same information, or even more, as the forward-deployed operational and tactical commanders. The temptation to move down that continuum will grow dramatically, particularly if augmented by the pressure of policymakers, already feeling the force of much of that information on the horizontal axis (Figure 5) exerted through the public. Direct political involvement in military affairs at all levels of war, of course, is not new. Clausewitz even advocated such involvement, pointing out that political leaders in the cabinet must become more knowledgeable concerning technical military affairs. And both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler regularly descended to the operational and tactical levels in World War II. Finally, there was the insistence of the White House during the Vietnam conflict on reviewing, often choosing, and approving air strikes on a daily basis.[32]

At the same time, as the Army Chief of Staff has pointed out, the integrative technology on the post-industrial battlefield will increase the tempo of action-reaction-counteraction and thus continue the necessity for initiative at lower command levels and for the concomitant decentralization of decisionmaking.[33] Many studies agree, foreseeing that combat units will become, if anything, more autonomous and self-sustaining, and that in the Third Wave military, like the Third Wave corporation, "decisional authority is being pushed to the lowest level possible."[34] If so, the picture of the small unit leader operating independently under a commander's intent in the nirvana of pure Auftragstaktik still will not be easy to create. Other images intrude: General Guderian ceasing to transmit by radio during the 1940 invasion of France in order to forestall interference by higher headquarters; helicopters containing battalion, brigade, and even division commanders and their staffs stacked in the air above a company-level fire-fight in Vietnam. All in all, as General Odom has observed, enhanced communication throughout the compressed levels of war is "an advantage that can just as easily introduce confusion and become a liability."[35]

Warfighting vs. OOTW

The technological compression of the three vertical levels applies to OOTW as well as war, the former primarily due to the types of missions and advances in communications, the latter to advances in weapons and equipment as well as in communications. Thus, a former high-level UN official could point out that in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, "you require political direction every time you move a sentry post."[36] It is this strategic dominance that allows the vertical framework to work as a doctrinal basis in both arenas. Actions at the operational level of war, James McDonough concludes in this regard, "are more likely these days to occur across the spectrum of peace, crisis, and war. Their commonality and their place in operational art is fixed by their focused pursuit of strategic objectives."[37]

The US military is currently producing a host of doctrinal manuals dealing with all categories of OOTW. This focus on OOTW is a direct result of the end of the Cold War--the long twilight conflict that kept attention on the core relationship between the superpowers and only occasionally on the periphery in the so-called Third World, a categorization of nation-states that even owed its origins to the bipolar nature of the international system. In that world, the absence of superpower war was not synonymous with global peace; nor was the absence of system transformation through war translated into global stability. Instead, recurrent violence in an unstable "peripheral" system occurred alongside a stable "central" system, with an estimated 127 wars and 21 million war-related deaths occurring in the developing world during the Cold War. Now, the United States and other Western industrialized democracies, comprising less than 13 percent of the global population, have turned their attention to that developing world, substantial parts of which are likely to be chaotic for the foreseeable future. As a result, the principal post-Cold War preoccupation of the United States in terms of OOTW has been peace operations despite the many other types of operations included in the OOTW category by current US military doctrine.[38]

Peace operations in that doctrine encompass three types of activities: diplomacy, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement.[39] Classical peacekeeping was a Cold War expedient that overcame some of the disabling aspects of the bipolar rivalry by relying on a token UN presence and the consent of opposing parties rather than on military effectiveness. This traditional capability was firmly grounded in Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which focused on pacific settlements of disputes. Where such settlements failed, the enforcement mechanisms under Chapter VII were designed to marshal the use of collective force among the global powers--all reminiscent of World War II. But the Security Council could not agree during the Cold War on any aspect of collective enforcement; peacekeeping thus evolved as an expedient, less powerful instrument which could be used within the zero-sum environment of the superpowers. This meant in turn that peacekeeping had limitations that proscribed its wider use--that forces acting under its charter, unlike combat units, could very seldom create the conditions for their own success. Those limitations, evolving from practical experience in the Cold War and now enshrined in current US military doctrine, include the use of force only in self-defense and, most important, the consent of all local belligerents. Peacekeeping forces, one analysis concluded, are like a referee whose success is dependent "on the consent of the players and their understanding of the rules of the game but never on the pugilistic skills of the referee himself."[40]

Since the end of the Cold War, a "second generation" of UN military operations has emerged under a rejuvenated category of peace enforcement which can include the protection of humanitarian assistance, the guarantee of sanctions, and the forcible separation of belligerents. In this environment, consent is not likely and there is an increasing need for more military power, effectiveness, and capability to exercise a wide range of military responses. Unfortunately, peacekeeping during the Cold War elicited a price for the United Nations' institutional competence in this regard. Consent in that era meant that there were no enemies, and with no enemies there was little pressure on the UN to be militarily effective. And with the stalemate in the Security Council, there was no incentive on the part of the member states to improve military competence. As a result, the Military Staff Committee was stillborn, and ad-hocracy in the absence of "lessons learned" became the order of the day for UN operations.[41]

For the US military, the goal is to modify and create technologies and force structures within the overarching doctrinal framework that add to warfighting effectiveness, while enhancing, or at the very least not diminishing, OOTW capabilities. Certainly in the conventional sense, for example, there is much to be learned in terms of strategic mobility and organizational effectiveness from humanitarian operations such as Provide Comfort in northern Iraq or Sea Angel in Bangladesh. The crossover becomes more explicit as the potential level of violence rises. "Since operations other than war do not necessarily exclude combat," the TRADOC commander has pointed out, "how to think about planning and executing those operations builds on the skills, toughness, and teamwork gained from the primary focus of our doctrine--warfighting."[42]

The value of this overarching framework was evident in the Somalia operation. At the tactical level, the American forces primarily dealt with their mission-essential and battle tasks, which included operations ranging from air assaults, patrolling, cordon and searches, and security operations, to those oriented on infrastructure repairs, civil affairs, and PSYOP. The operations were "synchronized," in the US division commander's description, at an operational level which "tended to be complex, with numerous players (joint, combined, political, and NGOs) involved and great uncertainty as to who the `good guys' were."[43] That notwithstanding, he remained sanguine about the crossover ability within the doctrinal framework: "Well-trained, combat-ready, disciplined soldiers can easily adapt to peacekeeping or peace enforcement missions. Train them for war; they adapt quickly and easily to Somalia-type operations."[44]

In such operations, technologies from the RMA will certainly play a role. Those contributing to information dominance will be particularly important, since a major challenge in many forms of OOTW is to identify the enemy. Some technologies may emerge in the areas of arms control verification and space-based communications; others may range from sensors to non-lethal and robotic weapons. The total effect of such potential trends suggests to the Tofflers "that the new, Third Wave war form may in time prove to be just as powerful against guerrillas and small-scale opponents waging First Wave war as against Iraq-style Second Wave armies."[45]

Technology, however, cannot completely bridge the gap between warfighting and OOTW in a period of declining resources. Stripping a division of major units to participate in a Somali-type operation is bound to have serious readiness repercussions. Even the long-standing Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) requirement in the Sinai requires extensive preparation for the mission and retraining upon completion. Moreover, there are still the questions concerning the psychological effects of prolonged peacekeeping operations on the warfighter's determination to kill and to win.[46] In the end, the rationale returns full circle to the tenet of "versatility" and the doctrinal priority based upon the primary national military strategic focus on regional conflict. "A professional, highly trained military with the human and industrial capital needed to remain ready for regional wars will be better able to gear up for a larger conflict than a military designed to fight lower-intensity wars."[47]

In all this, US military doctrine has attempted to accommodate change. For the Army, the "versatile" decathlete of FM 100-5, the major problem is not to harm agility in one event by overtraining in another. In the decathlon, this is avoided by judicious scheduling of events: the shot put, for instance, would not immediately precede or follow the javelin throw. No such scheduling is possible for the Army in the current environment, in which warfighting and myriad forms of OOTW can often make simultaneous demands across a blurred continuum of peace, crisis, and war. Still, it is a situation that, in varied form, the US military and in fact most militaries have faced in their histories. "We have to make war as we must," Lord Kitchener once commented, "and not as we should like to."[48]

The Way Ahead

When thinking in time, the key for the future is to recognize in the present those departures from the past--those changes--which divert or have the potential to divert familiar flows from accustomed channels. The pace of technological change is, of course, a departure from the past that has such a potential for warfare. For the military, which has little room for any illusions about the stakes, this is particularly important. "If you have lost a battle," G. K. Chesterton once noted, "you cannot believe you have won it."[49] There is thus a need for a constant comparison between the present and past coupled with a sensitivity to prospective breaks in the continuity that will allow change to be expedited or limited, countered or accepted--at the very least guided. That comparison indicates that military doctrine and its organizational concomitant will play a key role in such an effort concerning technological change. This is the essence of what has come to be called the Revolution in Military Affairs.

In this revolution, the US military must be versatile and flexible in dealing as much with political and social change as with that occasioned by technology. This adaptability will prevent the development of a hunkering-down mentality as defender of the status quo. But it requires facing the issues of change and continuity head-on. In a similar period of complexity, medieval chivalry transformed itself into the disciplined professional cavalry that played a key role in European wars for 200 years. And the army of Frederick the Great reemerged at the hands of the great Prussian reformers from the disastrous encounters with Napoleon's revolutionary army to become one of the greatest war machines in military history. The efforts of the US military in the wake of the Vietnam conflict were no less momentous.

The 1993 FM 100-5 clearly evokes this theme of renewal in change and continuity, the essence of doctrine which "captures the lessons of past wars, reflects the nature of war and conflict in its own time, and anticipates the intellectual and technological developments that will bring victory now and in the future."[50] This interaction provides, in turn, a dynamic environment--"a context," the Chief of Staff of the Army points out, "within which the debate over evolving doctrine can continue."[51] The framework for that debate is the vertical continuum of war, a dynamic entity that "must be reflective of constantly changing strategic and tactical environments, and the operational art, whose job is to connect the two, must be responsive to all changes."[52] The debate will help ensure in the future against the doctrinal equivalent of what has been called "the dead hand of Napoleon," a reference to the persistence of Napoleonic tactics and strategy long after they were rendered obsolete by changes in weapons technology.[53] The debate will also keep the strands of change and continuity in balance as the Army prepares for missions in peace and crises as well as war.

The key to the Army approach is the retention of the three-level vertical framework of war, spawned as the result of an earlier revolution in military affairs that emptied the battlefield while it expanded the concepts of time and space. This doctrinal continuity maintains the focus on the primacy of the strategic level--all the more important because of the sociopolitical as well as technological changes that will accompany the RMA. In addition, there is a great deal of flexibility provided by the divorce of the framework from any particular size force and by its recognition that all power elements can play a role in the complex process of operational synchronization. It is a framework, in short, that accommodates OOTW as well as warfighting. And in fact, the increasingly compressed nature of the vertical continuum for warfighting is the normal state for many OOTW missions, in which it is almost a cliché that the actions of a soldier on point can have strategic and political results.

The flexibility in the doctrinal framework also provides room to examine the constantly shifting organizational tensions between coherence and dissonance, jointness and independence, and centralization and decentralization--particularly as they apply to the current Goldwater-Nichols structure, a rational organization designed for immediate response to a well-defined threat. Equally important, this flexibility allows for innovative give-and-take in the relationship of technology and doctrine. Too rigid a doctrine, as the French demonstrated prior to World War I, can impede an appreciation of military-technological changes. It is also important, however, that technology focused on immediate or near-term potential threats not hold back long-term operational concepts or R&D concerning technology focused further in the future. In the interwar years, for instance, the US armed forces developed new concepts of operation that were to prove successful against future peer competitors, despite the fact that national policy and sentiment rejected such efforts because there were no obvious threats to vital interests. For the Navy, the result was innovative doctrine on carrier task force operations and amphibious landings. Equally significant, all this took place at the Naval War College in an environment free from the tyranny of the "in box," and at a time when Japan was not a US enemy, when the budget for all the services together comprised less than one percent of GNP, and when the force structure for such concepts was nonexistent.[54]

Within the doctrinal framework, technology will cause warfare to become more, not less, Clausewitzian. To begin with, any society or group, whether trinitarian or non-trinitarian, has identifiable pressure points that a trinitarian state can reach and target without resorting to a First Wave response. Moreover, these Second or even Third Wave responses are normally applied as part of the larger employment of all elements of power, defined in terms of the trinitarian national state.

It is in this state-centric world that the technologically induced compression of the vertical doctrinal framework only shortens, and thereby strengthens the link of war to policy. With time compressed over extended space and with that immense space rendered comprehensible by a technological coup d'oeil, an entire theater can become a simultaneous battlefield where events, as in the days of Napoleon, may determine national destinies. In addition, the horizontal, real-time communication link to the vertical continuum of war only reinforces the interaction of the people with the other two thirds of the Clausewitzian trinity.

In the end, this horizontal aspect combines with the flexibility of the vertical doctrinal framework to complement, reinforce, and balance the political-military relationship at the highest level of the US government with the demands of American societal values. It is this relationship that has mitigated the natural tendency of the military to preserve its institutional values solely in terms of warfighting. Without that balance, the leavening influence of the public would not affect the process. And without the structure of the vertical continuum of war leading ultimately to the highest and most dominant political level of strategy, there could be no overarching doctrinal coherence.

How serious the adverse synergism of deficits in balance and the vertical continuum can be was illustrated by the Nazi Wehrmacht, which perceived that without swift decisive victory, other non-military factors would intrude, threatening the position of war as the autonomous domain of the military elite. This was the ultimate rationale for Blitzkrieg, which in fact was the opposite of doctrine, since success rather than design determined the priority of actions. That type of opportunism caused impromptu operations based on the belief that technology (Guderian) or superior war-fighting command capabilities (von Manstein) would make the ultimate difference in conflict. But cut off from the public and deprived of anything approaching a coherent strategic level of war, there could be no sense of operational purposefulness for the military other than to pursue its institutional goals almost exclusively. "We still failed to find any satisfaction in their achievements," von Manstein wrote of German tactical victories in 1941, "for no one was clear any longer . . . [about] what higher purpose all these battles were supposed to serve."[55]


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NOTES

1. William E. Odom, America's Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure After the Cold War (Washington: American Univ. Press, 1993), p. 47. "I believe we are in a revolution in methods of commanding soldiers and units in battle similar to the one that took place in the 1920s with the wireless radio and track-laying technology." Frederick M. Franks, "Full Dimensional Operations: A Doctrine For an Era of Change," Military Review, 73 (December 1993), 6.

2. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 193-97.

3. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, Final Report to Congress (Washington: GPO, April 1992), p. 164.

4. James Blackwell, Michael J. Mazarr, and Don M. Snider, The Gulf War: Military Lessons Learned (Washington: CSIS, July 1991), p. 21.

5. Original emphasis. Michael Mazarr, et al., The Military Technical Revolution. A Structural Framework (Washington: CSIS, March 1993), p. 16.

6. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993), p. 22.

7. Ibid., pp. 83-84.

8. Original emphasis. FM 100-5, Operations (Washington: GPO, 5 May 1986), p. 2-11.

9. Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 362.

10. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 181-82.

11. JCS Pub 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington: GPO, 1 December 1989), p. 264.

12. FM 100-5, Operations (Washington: GPO, 14 June 1993), p. v. See also Paul H. Herbert, "Deciding What Has to be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations," Leavenworth Papers, No. 16 (Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, 1988).

13. Richard Hart Sinnreich, "Strategic Implications of Doctrinal Change: A Case Analysis," in Military Strategy in Transition: Defense and Deterrence in the 1980s, ed. Keith A. Dunn and William O. Staudenmaier (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, 1983), p. 46. See also Alex Roland, "Technology, Ground Warfare, and Strategy: The Paradox of American Experience," The Journal of Military History, 55 (October 1991), 462-63.

14. FM 100-5, Operations (Washington: GPO, 20 August 1982), p. 2-1.

15. Sinnreich, p. 49.

16. FM 100-5, 1993, p. v.

17. Emphasis added. Joint Pub. 3.0, Doctrine for Joint Operations (Washington: GPO, September 1993), p. II-3.

18. FM 100-5, 1993, p. 2-9.

19. Ibid., p. 2-9. See Figure 2-1, ibid., p. 2-1. "Versatility is a prerequisite for a strategic Army, one that can move anywhere on short notice, whose units can pick up a mission previously absent from their mission-essential task list, as well as one they have trained for and perfected their abilities in over time, and bring home a victory." James McDonough, "Versatility: The Fifth Tenet," Military Review, 73 (December 1993), 14.

20. FM 100-5, 1993, p. 6-2. "The operational level is the vital link between nation--and theater--strategic arms and the tactical employment of forces on the battlefield." Ibid. See also ibid., p. 6-1.

21. Ibid., p. 1-3; see also JCS Pub. 3-0, p. II-2: "The levels of war . . . apply to war and to operations other than war."

22. Douglas A. MacGregor, "Future Battle: The Merging Levels of War," Parameters, 22 (Winter 1992-93), 42. See also ibid., pp. 38-40.

23. Mazarr, p. 27. See also ibid., pp. 19, 26.

24. Joint Pub. 3-0, p. II-2.

25. L. D. Holder, "Offensive Tactical Operations," Military Review, 73 (December 1993), 52.

26. Martin van Creveld, Command in War, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 264.

27. Eliot Cohen, "The Mystique of Air Power," Foreign Affairs, 73 (January-February 1994), 115.

28. Odom, pp. 51, 53; and Mazarr, p. 27.

29. Cohen, pp. 117-18.

30. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 286.

31. Cohen, p. 118.

32. Gordon A. Craig, "The Political Leader as a Strategist," in Makers of Modern Strategy, from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 481-509.

33. Gordon R. Sullivan and James M. Dubik, Land Warfare in the 21st Century (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, 1993), p. 19. See also Cohen, p. 115.

34. Toffler, p. 78. See also Alvin H. Bernstein, Director, Project 2025 (Washington: Institute for National Strategic Studies, 6 November 1991), p. 75.

35. Odom, p. 48. See also van Creveld, pp. 255-56.

36. Major General Indar Jit Rikhye lecture to the USAWC Advanced Course on Collective Security and Peacekeeping, 4 February 1994.

37. James McDonough, "The Operational Art: Quo Vadis?" in Maneuver Warfare: An Anthology, ed. Richard D. Hooker, Jr. (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994), p. 106.

38. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1989 (Washington: World Priorities, 1989). See also Charles W. Kegley, Jr., "Explaining Great-Power Peace: The Sources of Prolonged Postwar Stability," The Long Postwar Peace: Contending Explanations and Projections, ed. Charles W. Kegley, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 8; Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, "International Crisis and Global Instability: The Myth of the `Long Peace,'" ibid.; and Eliot Cohen, "Distant Battles: Modern War in the Third World," International Security, 10 (Spring 1986), 186.

39. Draft FM 100-23, Peace Operations, Version #6, January 1994, p. 1-1.

40. John MacKinlay and Jarat Chopra, "Second Generation Multinational Operations," The Washington Quarterly, 15 (Summer 1992), pp. 114-15. See also FM 100-23, 1993, p. 1-2. For the original criteria, see Brian Urquhart, "Beyond the Sheriffs Posse," Survival, 32 (May-June 1990), 198.

41. Mackinlay and Chopra, p. 116, see a continuum between peacekeeping and peace enforcement. The draft military doctrine on peace operations does not. "Because both are part of peace operations, it is often incorrectly assumed that they are part of operations. They take place under vastly different circumstances involving consent and force. Commanders must recognize these differences and develop different planning approaches for each of these operations." Draft FM 100-23, p. 1-3.

42. Franks, p. 10.

43. S. L. Arnold, "Somalia: An Operation Other Than War," Military Review, 73 (December 1993), 31-32.

44. Ibid., p. 35.

45. Toffler, p. 181. Mazarr, p. 53. But see ibid., p. 54: "The MTR can make only a limited contribution to irregular operations"; p. 10: "Clearly more work is needed on how to make MTR capabilities more relevant to irregular operations"; and pp. 54-55: "This study has argued that technologies, doctrines, and organizations designed to fight a high-intensity MTR war will have only limited application to most kinds of irregular operations." See also Joseph F. Pilat and Paul C. White, "Technology and Strategy in a Changing World," The Washington Quarterly, 13 (Spring 1990), 84.

46. Rikhye lecture, 4 February 1994, and Charles C. Moskos, Peace Soldiers: The Sociology of a United Nations Military Force (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). On the MFO, Lieutenant Colonel(P) William Martinez, USAWC 1994, and Lieutenant Colonel(P) Craig Pearson, USAWC, 1994, 2 March 1994.

47. Mazarr, p. 9.

48. Michael Glover, The Velvet Glove: The Decline and Fall of Moderation in War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), p. 43.

49. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986), pp. 255-56.

50. FM 100-5, 1993, p. v. "There are some major departures from the previous doctrine, but great continuity as well." Franks, p. 7.

51. Gordon R. Sullivan, "From the Editor," Introduction to Military Review, 73 (December 1993), 1. "History, after all, has proved that learning organizations are winning organizations." Ibid.

52. McDonough, "Operational Art," p. 109.

53. James J. Schneider, "Vulcan's Anvil: The American Civil War and the Emergence of Operational Art," Theoretical Paper No. 4 (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: SAMS, 16 June 1991), p. 22.

54. Paul Bracken, "The Military After Next," The Washington Quarterly, 16 (Autumn 1993), 172.

55. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 202. See also A. J. Bacevich, "New Rules: Modern War and Military Professionalism," Parameters, 20 (December 1990), 16-17; Michael Geyer, "German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945," Makers of Modern Strategy, pp. 528-81, 585; Dennis E. Showalter, "A Dubious Heritage: The Military Legacy of the Russo-German War," Air University Review, 36 (March-April 1985), 7, who concludes that in response to this strategic-operational disconnect, Hitler's field commanders responded "like short-money players in a table stakes poker game, concentrating on winning battlefield victories to demonstrate their virtu and avert the end as long as possible"; and Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), whose thesis is that military organizations will attempt to keep maximum independence from civilian leaders by structuring doctrine in such a way as to make it immune from political interference.


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Dr. David Jablonsky (Colonel, USA Ret.) is Professor of National Security in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, has an M.A. from Boston University in international relations, and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in European history from Kansas University. He is a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College and the Army War College. Dr. Jablonsky has held the Elihu Root Chair of Strategy and currently occupies the George C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies at the War College. His most recent book is Churchill, The Great Game and Total War (1991). His next book, Churchill and Hitler, Selected Essays on the Political-Military Direction of Total War, is scheduled to appear this year.


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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...94/jablonsk.htm

[Marine]

Reflections on Courage
HENRY G. GOLE

Dictionaries, even my Random House two-tonner, fail to get at the essence of courage. They tell us that courage is facing danger, difficulty, or pain without fear. Lord Moran writes in The Anatomy of Courage: "The mysterious quality we call courage is will-power, self-sacrifice, call it what you will, that inspires men to hold their ground when every instinct calls upon them to run away." Courage is victory over fear, not the absence of fear. Moran's book grows out of his experience as a medical doctor in World War I with an infantry battalion that took its regular turn in the trenches, "when my feelings as a man were at white heat"; his subsequent reflection employed "the cold scrutiny of an eye trained in measurement, behind which the scientific way of life, with its passion for exactitude, pruned and purged." As both actor and scientific observer, he brings a unique combination of emotion and intellect to his characterization of courage.

He also asserts that:

There is a limit to the number of good men any race can furnish. . . . The morale of all armies broke sooner or later. . . . A few men had the stuff of leadership in them, they were like rafts to which all the rest of humanity clung for support and hope . . . . All the fine things in war as in peace are the work of a few men . . . . The honor of our race is in the keeping of but a fraction of her people.

This observation hardly surprises, coming from the man who was for 25 years Winston Churchill's personal physician, who also has written of the great prime minister in his finest hours. Social Darwinism, the sun never setting on the British Empire, the thin red line, and the white man's burden--in brief, chauvinism, racism, and elitism--was the stuff of Moran's youth. But observations in the trenches taught him that duty's victory over fear is not the exclusive property of elites. Tommy and Jock, often semi-literate and sometimes larcenous, are also sometimes noble.

Lord Moran opines that courage can be used up. "A man's courage is his capital and he is always spending. . . . I affirm that men wear out in war like clothes." This was a departure from the prevailing notion that veteran troops are reliable and can be trusted, that green troops panic and need to be steadied if they were not to run. We have rediscovered in each war since 1918 that even our best warriors "wear out" and need to relax in a safe place to recuperate.

Only one of Lord Moran's observations collides with experience. He says, "A man of character in peace is a man of courage in war." As much as one prefers to believe that assertion, combat experience suggests otherwise. Some exemplars of virtue collapse under the stress of combat while some unsavory types, not ready for the salon now or ever, demonstrate both masterful military skills and readiness to lay down their lives for their friends. So, brave asocial types also emerge--to puzzle combat leaders and outrage moralists.

Lord Moran's reflections instruct us that measuring courage on a crude scale from coward to hero misses a critical point. Shell shock, battle fatigue, or post traumatic stress disorder--psychic damage whatever the current jargon--can be produced in most of us if sufficiently stressed over enough time. Modern war insures deep and sustained stress; a wounded or exhausted mind can be as debilitating as physical wounds. Every man has a breaking point.

For two brilliant commentaries on these propositions, see Pat Barker's novel Regeneration and Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam, the latter an analysis by a psychiatrist that chastises political and military leaders for how much they have forgotten about warriors since Homer wrote The Iliad. Barker blends her creative imagination and psychological insights with representations of historical figures of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. Her intellectually honest and beautifully crafted novel reveals the ethical dilemma of the physician as he recognizes that he makes sick men healthy to return them to duty and the bedlam of the trenches.

Respect for the Enemy

Admiring courage gives more pleasure to most of us than lamenting its absence. Literature provides spokesmen of "advanced" civilizations saluting qualities in a foe's barbarian warriors. Tacitus, a Roman patrician, wrote admiringly in 98 A.D. of uncorrupted barbarians in a manner suggesting incipient Roman degeneracy:

On the field of battle it is a disgrace to a chief to be surpassed in courage by his followers, and to the followers not to equal the courage of their chief. And to leave a battle alive after their chief has fallen means lifelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, and to let him get the credit for their own acts of heroism, are the most solemn obligations of their allegiance. The chiefs fight for victory, the followers for their chief. . . . A German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.

More recently Rudyard Kipling captured Tommy admiring Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Reviewing the British experience in fighting "The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese," Tommy concludes that Fuzzy-Wuzzy deserves special tribute for accomplishing with sword and spear (and a big heart and strong legs) what the others--indeed, what Napoleon with the best of European technology--could not: he "bruk" the British square. And further:

E's the on'y thing that doesn't care a damn
For the Regiment o' British Infantree.
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Sowdan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air
You big black boundin' beggar--for you bruk a British square.

The Zulus also "bruk a British square" at Isandhlwana on 22 January 1879. More than 2000 Zulus died in overrunning the defenders; only 55 of 950 Europeans survived, and some 550 of the 850 Natal Kaffirs led by European officers died in close combat. The battle is described in detail in The Washing of the Spears by Donald R. Morris, as is the subsequent battle of Rorke's Drift. Readers may recall from the beautiful and powerful film Zulu! that a relative handful of British troops held off thousands of attacking warriors in that action, which produced an unprecedented 11 Victoria Crosses. In the film, the defeated Zulus salute the British defenders by banging their short spears, the assegai, on their shields before withdrawing. Courage abounded among the Zulus and the British at Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift.

Models of Courage

Certainly in the Western tradition we associate courage with martial courage, particularly with mano a mano combat found in the various national epics--Beowulf, The Song of Roland, El Cid--from the biblical account of David defeating Goliath, and perhaps from The Red Badge of Courage and books like it that were popular 50 years ago. Beowulf takes it upon himself to pursue the bullying monster Grendel through murky depths and to defeat him in his lair. Roland fights a delaying action knowing that he will die to save the withdrawing main body. El Cid leads the liberation of his country from centuries of foreign domination. One hundred years ago British boys thrilled to George Alfred Henty's books focused on the ideal of manly virtue. Courage in the service of some noble cause gratifies--standing up to the bully, protecting the weak, sacrificing self for the tribe, and each of us has favorites, some widely shared, some idiosyncratic.

The inspiring words of the king on the night before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare's Henry V enjoy a special place. His "band of brothers" defines the bond among brave men prepared to die for a common cause. It appears most recently as the title of a combat gem, Band of Brothers, in which Stephen E. Ambrose captures the essence of an American airborne rifle company in combat, as he had for a British glider company in Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944, and most recently with Undaunted Courage, remarkable accomplishments for this gifted and prolific writer.

Small acts disguise courage. The tender, magical, short classic by Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose, depicts the good man quietly and naturally responding to the call of duty. The courage to accept one's destiny emerges from the words of those who already count themselves dead in The Last Letters from Stalingrad. In James A. Michener's The Bridges at Toko-ri, professionalism and brotherhood demand that the helicopter pilot die for his friend, an event from the war in Korea often--even routinely--reenacted in Vietnam by aviators who would not pull away to save themselves while comrades remained in extremis on the ground. David Donovan (a pseudonym) in Once a Warrior King reveals an aspect of courage motivated by compassion for the least among us while serving as a soldier-missionary in Vietnam before resuming his preparation for a civilian career. The villagers he protects, the members of his small advisory team, and his reaction to his personal demons as he reenters an ungrateful American society in 1970 ("It was the fashion on college campuses to be outraged about the war, whether one really knew anything about it or not"), find a controlled voice that gets to the places where truth resides.

The hypothesis that courage is a manifestation of love rather than some martial impulse is rudely contradicted by E. B. Sledge in With the Old Breed. Sledge describes the murderous hatred for the enemy shared by Japanese and American infantry that "resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred" and that caused both sides to decline taking prisoners and to defile corpses. Courage was required simply to lift one's exhausted body from a wet foxhole, to put one foot after the other, to endure one more day in some of the most brutal combat man has ever experienced. Rage, too, produces courage.

The Lonely Sea

Between 1 September 1939 and 8 May 1945, Germany lost 87 percent of its submarines that became operational--753 of 963 (Karl Doenitz, Memoirs). The chilling statistic is powerfully amplified by visits to two museums, each a few kilometers from the city of Kiel. One of them, the German navy's war memorial, is at the fingertip of an embracing right arm that reaches into the Baltic and contains Kiel Bay. The memorial contains large panels depicting friendly and enemy losses by year in the longest campaign of the Second World War. A Maltese cross signifies the loss of a German submarine; a red ship's fantail denotes a sunk Allied ship. (In the course of the war German submarines sank a confirmed 2759 merchantmen [14,119,413 tons] and 148 warships.) Two facts leap from the 1943 panel and the next two. First, the Battle of the Atlantic had reached its crescendo, and second, for the last two years of the war going to sea in a German submarine was tantamount to suicide.

On the drive back to the city of Kiel one could easily fail to notice the small sign and the secondary road leading to the modest submarine memorial. Somber stones form the memorial. One enters a room in which there is a visitors' book and emerges on the far side blinking in the daylight within walls creating the feel of a submarine. Left and right are bronze rectangles, each listing ten U-boats. The lower numbers start on the left. At the end of the aisle one turns right returning to the entrance to find the higher numbers of the newer boats of 1944 and 1945. Next to each boat sunk one notes its killer: Canadian corvette, British destroyer, American Liberator. Late in the war one or two of ten--or none--return. Reflection sobers. Imagination chills. Young men in those iron coffins felt the icy waters of the North Atlantic rush into the submerged boat as clanging steel compartment doors literally sealed their fate: death by drowning or suffocation. Of 39,000 men who crewed German submarines, 28,000 perished.

Herbert Werner's first-person account of his 1939-1945 experience in U-boats, Iron Coffins, ultimately as skipper of his own boat, should be read with Lothar Guenther Buchheim's novel, The Boat. Both succeed in suspending reality as the reader readily adopts the participant's perspective, joins the hunt, cringes in fear under depth charge and aerial attack, and enjoys some free time ashore between patrols. Buchheim's book is the basis of the excellent film of the same name that showed how cramped, stinking, and terrifying daily life on a German sub was. The austerity of German U-boats compared to American subs in the Second World War is striking, since in the Great War Allied troops admired the German trenches both for their relative comfort and superior fighting positions. See also Buchheim's excellent pictorial history, U-Boat War.

Serious scholars will want to compare the Doenitz Memoirs, written from the top of the German naval hierarchy, to the Buchheim and Werner accounts to note the degree to which perspective shades interpretation of the same events. For example, Werner regards the provision of constant mid-ocean Allied air cover to convoys by accompanying small aircraft carriers as being the beginning of the end of the German submarine offensive threat in May 1943. Doenitz, when he was informed in 1974 that the British had broken the German "Enigma" cipher and decrypted signal traffic between his headquarters and his U-boats, said, "Well, now you historians will have to start right at the beginning again!" Until then he had credited British radar and sonar for Allied success in hunting down his U-boats, particularly from 1943 until the end of the war. Revision continues.

A new book, Clay Blair's Hitler's U-Boat War, The Hunters, 1939-1942, challenges the general acceptance of Winston Churchill's contention that the Battle of the Atlantic was a near-run thing. Churchill said: "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. . . . The Admiralty, with whom I lived in the closest amity and contact, shared these fears." The distinguished university professor at Temple University and authority on World War II, Russell F. Weigley, credits Blair in this book and in the second, due to be published in 1997, subtitled The Hunted, 1942-1945, with demolishing "myths that have been with us for many years." The first volume "explodes the theory that the U-boats ever created a severe crisis for the Allies or a serious likelihood of British defeat."

Submarine warfare in the Pacific lacks the tragic dimension one finds in the Atlantic. Essentially the American submarine offensive gathered momentum against the Japanese after addressing two problems: torpedoes and tactics. The Japanese started the war with torpedoes that worked; they sank ships. US subs deployed thousands of miles, skippers risked all to close with the enemy, and American torpedoes failed to kill targets. The torpedoes improved in the course of the war, but even in 1945 sure kills became misses as torpedoes passed under their targets. (Note that Admiral Doenitz in a memo of 9 February 1942 also remarks on German torpedo failures, specifically noting that they passed under targets six to nine feet too deep, a problem that began in 1936.) American tactics improved as younger officers replaced conservative elders. Essentially the younger men fought on the surface unless in immediate danger.

Three accounts present a clear picture of their war in the Pacific in the Second World War: a novel, a memoir, and a historical evaluation. Since its publication, Edward L. Beach's novel, Run Silent, Run Deep, has been the standard against which American submarine books have been measured. The barely disguised memoir begins in the waters of Long Island Sound days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and ends in September 1945. Beach keeps us reading and soaking up service lore. His pride in his service--and this applies to all the submarine books, German and American--comes shining through. He probably spoke for countless thousands in his reference to "that brave period between 1941 and 1945 when so many of us unwittingly realized our highest purpose in life." This is not the place to debate "The Good War" thesis, but a student of World War II is struck by the almost theological ring of "our highest purpose in life," phrasing that captures the essence of America's messianic mood. Many of those who lived World War II regretted never again sharing that sense of national purpose; for them it would forever be "the war."

A companion piece, and arguably a superior work, is Eugene B. Fluckey's Thunder Below! The subtitle tells us what the book is about: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II. It is a compelling record of the courage, leadership, initiative, and skill of the author and the competence of his admirable crew. In crisp prose, Fluckey takes us through five combat patrols from 28 April 1944 to 7 August 1945, during which he was the Commanding Officer of the USS Barb. A 1935 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who retired a Rear Admiral, Fluckey earned the Medal of Honor and four Navy Crosses on those five patrols, honors unequaled by any American warrior. He departed from the methods of older submariners conditioned by peacetime restrictions, particularly their practice of remaining submerged for much of their patrols. His daring was matched by his technical and tactical skills, and his decency is revealed when he says that he is proudest of not losing a single man. Landlubbers will note that the Navy Cross is the equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross. The man writes almost as well as he fights.

Before his last patrol, Fluckey gets home to Annapolis and takes the 13 women of the Submarine Wives' Club to the North Severn Officers' Club for dinner and dancing. Five of the women knew they were widows. Fluckey remarks:

I knew four others were widows, but they had not yet been notified. Damn the war! Already over half my submarine school classmates were buried in steel coffins at the bottom of the ocean. The horror those women had yet to face brought tears to my eyes as they danced with their eyes closed, dreaming of dancing with their husbands. I was struck with the thought that I was dancing on skeletons. I bit my lip and listened to their loving babble.

A backdrop to these personal accounts is provided in Clay Blair's Silent Victory, a two-volume history whose subtitle states the subject: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. It is particularly strong in putting the issues that mattered to the warriors, such as the grossly defective US torpedoes and questions of tactics, in the context of strategy. The maps, photos, appendices, and index are useful to general readers and scholars. Finally, to place submarine warfare within the context of America's total maritime effort, see Samuel Eliot Morison's very readable The Two Ocean War, A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War, a tight summary of a much longer work of interest to scholars, his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.

Of the many World War II accounts of surface combat at sea, two novels stand out. The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, captures the essence of the convoy system from the perspective of the shepherds, the destroyers and corvettes charged with the responsibility of escorting their flocks through the U-boat wolfpacks in the raging North Atlantic in the first half of the war. The Ship, by C. S. Forester, dramatizes an important event--a fleet action in which an outgunned British fleet in the Mediterranean puts itself between an essential Allied convoy and a superior Italian fleet--that unfolds in a single plot within a day. Suspense builds as ship and crew respond as parts of a single body guided by a single mind. The battle reflects great credit upon the Royal Navy of 1940 and reminds the reader of Britain's 400-year debt to the senior service, which had made it possible for the island nation first to maintain its distance from the Continent and later to sustain a worldwide empire. Hard men conditioned to discipline and pride characterized the Royal Navy; readiness to die distinguished it.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

A sample of five books by four authors captures the feel of the war in the sky over Vietnam. The perspectives are those of the helicopter pilot who became the general purpose deliverer of goods, services, firepower, and people, thereby supplanting the famous "deuce-and-a-half"--the two-and-a-half-ton truck--of World War II and Korea; and the forward air controller, FAC, who in his low- and slow-flying bird was the link between the grunt under the dense triple canopy and the driver of the fast mover whose speed made it difficult to see what was happening on the ground, or even to sort out friend from foe. Then there is the pilot of the high-performance, high-speed bird who did two difficult and dangerous jobs: provide close and personal support of infantry in contact in South Vietnam, and conduct long-range strike missions in North Vietnam in an air defense environment that made the missions near-suicidal.

Robert Mason, author of Chickenhawk, was a newly minted Warrant Officer and helicopter pilot at 22--ripe maturity among the chopper hot-rodders, some still in their teens. Mason went to Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1965, flew over 1000 combat missions, and served as an instructor pilot at Fort Wolters, Texas, before leaving the Army in 1968, in his own words, "a failure." Bad memories became bad dreams and led to too much booze and too many drugs. In 1981 he was charged with smuggling marijuana, sentenced to four years in prison, and released in 1983 on appeal.

Chickenhawk is one of the best books to come out of Vietnam, for at least two reasons. Mason gets to the heart of the matter by showing clearly what it was like to be in the middle of the evolving helicopter tactics and techniques, in which fragile machines put grunts right on their targets and hauled away their broken bodies, often under direct enemy fire. Great risk characterized all aspects of helicopter operations--combat assaults, medical evacuations, gunship support--and Mason did it all. Besides getting the combat story right, Mason serves fellow veterans by honestly reporting his struggle with personal demons that never learned the war was over: "I hope that these recollections of my experiences will encourage other veterans to talk."

Two extraordinary books by US Air Force forward air controllers came out of the war: Vietnam Above the Trees by John F. Flanagan, and A Lonely Kind of War by Marshall Harrison. Then-Lieutenant Flanagan (he would retire as a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve) flew the 0-1 Bird Dog (the uninitiated often call it a Piper Cub) in support of the Korean Tiger Division and the American troops of the 1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne Divisions in l965 and 1966. The highlight of his tour was flying for Project Delta, a Special Forces unit that conducted extremely hazardous reconnaissance missions in Vietnam. Small teams, usually three Americans and three Vietnamese, were inserted into likely areas of enemy activity, meaning that the teams typically found themselves by design in the midst of the enemy and totally reliant upon aviation for insertion, for fixing their location in dense jungle and difficult terrain, for engaging locally superior forces with air or artillery fires, and for extraction--often under hostile fire. Courage is contagious. Flanagan's admiration for the recon men of Delta compelled him to take great risks for men who became his brothers. His personal code allowed no alternative to putting it all on the line; his religious convictions were reinforced by the values of the US Air Force Academy and capped by the example of dedicated Delta men who went all the way every time. Identification with brave soldiers affected his appreciation of his profession, arousing in him a contempt for military bureaucrats who get in the way: rear-echelon commandos, assorted feather merchants unfamiliar with the smell of cordite, and bumblers cluttering up an otherwise perfectly good battlefield. There is a Candide-like discovery of how the world works as he joins Bill Mauldin's Willy and Joe and all combat soldiers who have found themselves unable to communicate with others wearing the same uniform.

Similarly, then-Major Harrison, who served three combat tours in Vietnam, bonded with the hard-core soldiers of the MACV Studies and Observation Group (SOG) who conducted cross-border operations "over the fence" in Cambodia and Laos. He should have known better. "I had been on the intelligence staff at Headquarters, USAF. I came complete with a wife, three children, and a well-mortgaged home in the Virginia suburbs." Despite the appurtenances of middle-class respectability, Harrison was as susceptible as young Flanagan to the magnetism of the brothers in arms. He flew an OV-10 Bronco--an improvement over the Bird Dog, but a light bird vulnerable to ground fire--from a tropical paradise complete "with sagging tents and rain-rotted hootches . . . a strong miasma of burning feces . . . hordes of mosquitoes" and mud that was "on you and in you." But the soldiers "whipped up sharp salutes as if they were doing it because it was their idea, not because they had to." And when he entered the SOG operations center staffed by Special Forces sergeants, "You could almost smell the excess testosterone they generated." He liked the primal accounting so unforgiving in its scorekeeping, so much so that he did dumb things like making an unscheduled landing on a dirt road under fire deep in Cambodia without air cover--not a FAC's job--for a simple reason: he would get the recon men out or die with them. He was hooked.

To understand "the excess testosterone," see also the justifiable paean, SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam by John L. Plaster, who served three tours with SOG in Vietnam. Plaster is another fighter-writer capable of creating in the reader the heightened awareness that characterizes intense close combat, falling off mountains, and jumping out of perfectly good aircraft.

Be it known that your scribe loves FACs and the fast-mover jocks they controlled as much as Harrison and Flanagan loved Delta and SOG men. On 5 November 1966 a chubby little grandfather, whose combat flying went back to World War II, put himself in a cone of enemy ground fire, the more effectively to direct fighter bombers on an NVA regiment ill-disposed to me and my American and Montagnard playmates making a single rope river crossing. There is no doubt the FAC risked his life to save ours. He survived, and so did most of us.

Finally to high-performance aircraft--in this case the "Thud," the F-105 Thunderchief--and Jack Broughton, who drove the Thud "Downtown" and has written two books that make America proud of her warriors and writers envious of his skill: Thud Ridge and Going Downtown: The War Against Hanoi and Washington. Narrative skill, technical knowledge, professionalism, and concern for his men pervade both books. In Thud Ridge the fire-breathing, true-believing, lemme-at-'em fighter jock is prepared to go anyplace, anytime, to do anything the American people and their President want done. His narrative takes us with him and his tigers who flew out of Thailand to risk all over North Vietnam. Broughton takes the non-aviator into the cockpit with him to feel the complexity of driving the sophisticated bird, the danger from literally all sides, and the growing frustration of a commander losing friends to enemy fire and to American stupidity. In Going Downtown the enemy becomes American political and military leadership rather than the foe in Hanoi.

In his introduction to Thud Ridge, Hanson Baldwin says of the men who flew north, "They risked their lives to the enemy, their careers to the politicians." The political decision not to destroy the Haiphong docks and a key bridge over the Red River at Hanoi early on ensured that friendly air and ground forces would have a difficult and dangerous time locating relatively small packets of enemy war materials hidden in difficult terrain or wending their way south through Laos dispersed under triple canopy jungle. Essential war materials--food, fuel oil, trucks, bulk materials, ammunition, weapons, and heavy equipment--could have been destroyed while stacked in the open or in dockside storage. The decision for incrementalism or gradualism led to pilot and aircraft losses as Russia and China provided massive aid and Moscow helped Hanoi "to establish the most sophisticated air defense system ever tested in war." As the United States upped the ante, the foe had already scurried to prepare successfully for the next level of intensity. Brave pilots paid the price with their lives, by being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton, or both.

Colonel Broughton's scathing criticism of political leadership and military bureaucracy might be written off as the usual warrior resentment of all but his band of brothers. Certainly he does not get high marks for political correctness: "The civilian bean counters with the shiny loafers didn't even know where Downtown was . . . . Those in control would not listen to those who were doing the fighting . . . . His ass really did belong to Uncle, and in this one, Uncle wasn't very concerned about it . . . . Gradualism robbed air power of its effectiveness by violating the principles of concentration and surprise. . . . American air losses over North Vietnam were astronomical and unacceptable." And he names names.

The West Point graduate--a veteran of 25 years of dedicated service; former commander of the Thunderbirds, the elite US Air Force demonstration team; graduate of the prep school for generals, the National War College; survivor of 216 combat missions, 102 of them over North Vietnam and the rest over Korea early in that war--is very angry with political authority. But far more painful and intense is his conviction that he and his comrades were betrayed by his beloved Air Force, whose birth he had witnessed. He asserted that has-beens or toadies dictated operational techniques; Air Force leadership failed to tell political leadership that two-bit targets were not worth the risk of multimillion-dollar birds and crews; pilots who had flown desks too long were malassigned to the Thuds, and those lacking the courage to go Downtown were allowed to opt out of combat while keeping their wings; a multitude of headquarters overlapped, and paper-shufflers vastly outnumbered shooters. And loyalty had become a one-way street.

Had "management" displaced "leadership" in the 1950s as the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies replaced Horatio at the bridge as the model of the modern Major General? Had the evangelists of airpower oversold that arm? Did the Strategic Air Command's focus on the Soviet Union leave the US Air Force ill-prepared for the mission in North Vietnam? Didn't the United States fight a limited war against an enemy engaged in total war? Was the United States confused at the policy, strategic, operational, and tactical levels? One hesitates to shrug off Broughton's broadside as warrior rage.

Broughton set out to tell us what it was like to go Downtown, but his operational account spills over to the big picture. Recently released papers of Lyndon Johnson record his doubt about what to do in Vietnam. His most trusted advisor was Robert McNamara, whose published mea culpa, after 30 years of silence on the subject, reminds the graybeards among us of McNamara's arrogance in the 1960s as he reveled in humbling the generals and admirals and substituted efficiency for effectiveness. By his own admission, he sent tens of thousands of young Americans--and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese of all ages--to their deaths for years after he realized that the war could not be won. He lacked the courage to tell his President the truth.

The dead and maimed of the war in Vietnam had no King Henry to say to McNamara what Shakespeare had Henry say to the disgraced Falstaff, who behaved dishonorably in combat (Henry IV, Part II, Act V, Scene V):

I know thee not, old man . . . .
. . . I banish thee, on pain of death--
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,--
Not to come near our person by ten mile.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambrose, Stephen E. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; Touchstone edition, 1993.

________. Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985; Touchstone edition, 1988.

________. Undaunted Courage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Barker, Pat. Regeneration. New York: Dutton, 1992; Plume, 1993.

Beach, Edward L. Run Silent, Run Deep. New York: Henry Holt, 1955.

Blair, Clay. Hitler's U-Boat War, The Hunters, 1939-1942. New York: Random House, 1996.

________. Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.

Broughton, Jack. Going Downtown: The War Against Hanoi and Washington. New York: Orion Books, 1988.

________. Thud Ridge. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969; New York: Bantam Books, 1985.

Buchheim, Lothar Guenther. The Boat. Trans. Denver and Helen Lindley. New York: Knopf, 1975; Bantam Books, 1975; Das Boot in the original German, R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1973.

________. U-Boat War. Trans. Gudie Lawaetz. New York: Knopf, 1978.

Doenitz, Karl. Memoirs. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990; original German, AthenaeumVerlag Junker und Duennhaupt, K.G., 1958.

Donovan, David (pseud.). Once a Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam. New York: McGraw-Hill, Ballantine Books, 1985.

Flanagan, John F. Vietnam Above the Treetops: A Forward Air Controller Reports. New York: Praeger, 1992.

Fluckey, Eugene B. Thunder Below! The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Forester, C. S. The Ship. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944; New York: Bantam Books, 1954, 1964.

Gallico, Paul. The Snow Goose. New York: Knopf, 1941.

Harrison, Marshall. A Lonely Kind of War: Forward Air Controller, Vietnam. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989; New York: Pocket Books, 1990.

Kipling, Rudyard. Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses. London: Methuen, 1894

Mason, Robert. Chickenhawk. New York: Viking Press, 1983; Penguin Books, 1984.

McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.

Michener, James A. The Bridges at Toko-ri. New York: Random House, 1953; Fawcett Crest, 1991.

Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Cruel Sea. New York: Knopf, 1951.

Moran, Charles McMoran Wilson. The Anatomy of Courage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967; London: Constable, 1945.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 15 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947-1962.

________. The Two Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

Morris, Donald R. The Washing of the Spears; A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.

Plaster, John L. SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Schneider, Franz, and Charles Gullans, trans., Last Letters from Stalingrad (New York: Morrow, 1962; Signet, 1965; originally published by C. Bertelsmann Verlag, now Sigbert Mohn Verlag, in 1954 as Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad.

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991; Athenaeum, 1994; Scribner, 1995.

Sledge, E. B. With the Old Breed, at Peleliu and Okinawa. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981; Bantam Books, 1983; Oxford Univ. Press, 1990.

Tacitus, Cornelius. The Agricola and the Germania. New York: Penguin Books, 1975.

Werner, Herbert. Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.

The Reviewer: Colonel Henry G. Gole, USA Ret., served two tours in Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group, one of them with MACVSOG, and was an enlisted infantry soldier in Korea during the Korean War. He later taught at the US Military Academy and the US Army War College. He is a graduate of Hofstra University; holds master's degrees from Hofstra, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Stanford University; and earned a Ph.D. at Temple University.


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Review Essay
On CD-ROM: 20th-Century Military History
FRANK J. STECH
© 1997 Frank J. Stech
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, multimedia CD-ROMs are like a box of chocolates; you never know what's inside until you bite into one. All multimedia CD-ROMs (Compact Disc, Read-Only Memory) are hybrids: in differing degree they show a family resemblance to books, encyclopedias, documentary films, plays, news broadcasts, museum visits, and computer games. CD-ROMs tell their story with a mix of text, photos, art, video, animation, sound and music, and interactive control.

Some CD-ROMs are "random access," like an encyclopedia or a smorgasbord, to be dipped into to find and explore a particular topic or favorite items. Others are "linear," like a book or a banquet, to be experienced from a defined start through to the finish, with perhaps an occasional diversion along the way. Others are for "grazing" and encourage random, leisurely sampling, browsing, and wandering, like an inviting museum or a street of restaurants in a city. Still others are "interactive," like a video game; they go nowhere until the viewer takes the controls and becomes involved.

Most CD-ROMs are index-friendly, so that searching and cross-referencing are a snap and oceans of text information can be trawled efficiently. They have to be that accessible; CD-ROMs store over 600MB (megabytes) of data--think of holding all 15 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary in the palm of your hand. Photos, art, sounds, and video are less easily indexed and searched than is text.

The technological tidal wave sweeps this hybrid of multimedia style even further. Many CD-ROMs (although none of those reviewed here) now integrate World Wide Web links to Internet sites that provide related information. A CD-ROM item on strategy, for example, could be only a mouse click away from the Army War College's home page on the Web.

A CD-ROM can be very different from a book, museum, documentary, broadcast, or teleplay, which, as traditional media, are basically linear experiences. CD-ROMs can be multidimensional, non-linear, and deeply layered. Just as a battlefield terrain walk provides the visceral feel of the ground, a CD-ROM--perhaps encompassing interactive visual and audio displays of World War I trench systems--can provide an emotional and intellectual sense of the shape of historical times, places, and events. CD-ROMs offer a multimedia opportunity to understand at several levels, to experience opposing perspectives, to see things against varied backgrounds.

The armchair strategist or military historian can now pursue his or her interests with the aid of multimedia CD-ROMs on a growing list of topics. This essay reviews seven titles dealing with 20th-century warfare. One looks at the great generals. Another addresses World War I. Three treat Word War II--one from a worldwide perspective, the others from the perspectives of the Pacific and European theaters. The last two of the CDs cover the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944. The cost of the CD-ROMs reviewed here ranges from $10 to $15 each, remarkably inexpensive considering the sheer volume of material each contains.

• The Great Generals of the 20th Century. This and the next three titles, produced by FlagTower Multimedia, provide a standard for other CDs to match. Sold separately or as a set, these four titles offer an outstanding introduction to the potential of multimedia for military subjects. They also provide useful audio and visual historical materials for research. Their lack of full-text indexing and their nonstandard file formats make them less useful for reference. Overall, as aids to making the personal computer a tool for learning and teaching, the series offers extraordinary value for the price.

The greatest strengths of the FlagTower CDs are their well-designed interfaces, outstanding narrative content, and superb production qualities. Each CD--FlagTower calls them "interactive documentaries"--can be viewed as a self-running documentary video, offering graphics, film clips, and first-rate narration to tell the story. The viewer can interrupt the narrative to view text, maps, graphic displays, more images, and video. The CDs all begin with an overview of the interface, introducing and explaining all the controls. The interface controls are highly creative, but standard; once you understand the controls for one disc, the others work exactly the same, but each CD has a unique stylistic theme (The Great Generals CD, for example, uses a compass, maps, and medals as icons for the controls).

There are shortcomings: the impressive interface demands careful installation; 8MB of RAM (Random Access Memory) are required, and your video driver may need to be updated. Sources for the history texts are not detailed, and there are few citations. The text cannot be copied (except as a graphic) so extra search capability cannot be added through use of a separate software program that could index the CD's text content. Few photos and videos are captioned, although all audio clips seem to be identified, if not completely sourced. The well-designed user manuals are slightly too large to fit inside the CD "jewel" cases.

The FlagTower production values are superb, comparable to the quality of the Battlefield documentary series seen on many Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television stations. Musical backgrounds and sound effects enhance the drama. Still images are panned and zoomed in video mode, providing outstanding visual appeal (a technique familiar to viewers of Ken Burns' outstanding historical television documentaries). Three-dimensional graphic models of trench defenses or armor tactics are used like interactive museum displays. The pace, timing, and transitions of the narratives reflect the best cinematic techniques.

The narrative content of the FlagTower titles reveals careful and detailed research on each subject and outstanding organization. For example, the generals who are the subjects of this CD are described individually, with a resume, battle experience, pressures of command, broadcasts, and the general's "public face." Behind each of these topics are deeper layers of information. During the narratives, interactive buttons appear, offering details on the general's biography, technology's effect on warfare and the general's story, battle visuals providing graphic explanations of the general's operations or tactics, personalities important to the general's story, battlefield narrations from a soldier's perspective, and fact sheets covering key events. This outline is followed for 15 generals: for World War I--Haig, Hindenberg, Foch, and Allenby; for World War II--Guderian, Rommel, Montgomery, Zhukov, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, and Slim; for the postwar era--Giap, Sharon, and Schwarzkopf. In addition, four mini-documentaries deal with common themes regarding generalship: the life of a general, behavior in combat, reactions under pressure, and the dealings of generals with the media. Each of these essays is outstanding. All officers would do well to view the essay on generalship and the media, a key, if sometimes unsettling, relationship throughout this century and one likely to be just as vital in the next. Each of four titles in the FlagTower series on War in the Twentieth Century includes extensive material on the role of the media.

Taken by themselves, the narratives describing each general seem too brief (uninterrupted, the voice tracks average about ten minutes for each general). To get the full benefit, one must stop the flow with the control buttons and take the interactive excursions. In participating, an impression grows of the significant strategic role each general played, the influences on him, his thinking and sensitivities, and the intricacies of his personality. The details are in the detours, and insights come with these excursions. Of course, one can fault specifics in each general's history. Patton's ivory revolver handles, for example, are mislabeled as pearl. With 15 generals to cover, none of the treatments has the depth of a good biography or memoir. In its way, however, the CD experience is better than simply reading. The viewer who opts to take the excursions controls the depth of his study and can choose to delve into details. The viewer reassembles text, image, and voice, actively participating in reconstructing each general's portrait. It feels like perusing a very good intelligence file while being briefed on an opponent commander. Even as complex a figure as Douglas MacArthur takes shape as the contents of file and brief spread across the screen.

For any course on 20th-century military leadership, this CD is a captivating aid for students, an outstanding tool for instructors. The CD will add enjoyment to the reading of a memoir or biography of these figures. One hopes the military academies give this CD, rather than a marshal's baton, to every cadet to carry in his or her knapsack.

• World War I. FlagTower's disc on "the war to end all wars" compares favorably to the recent six-hour PBS documentary on The Great War, offering far more details and background material. Like the television series, World War I has footage of elderly survivors (one yearns for these old soldiers' names) describing life waist-deep in mud, amidst corpses. With black humor warriors treated skeletons as old friends (as indeed, they were). Siegfried Sassoon's poetic descriptions provide captions for the ghastly scenes from the trenches. The survivors capture our sympathies while the images confirm the horror of this macabre conflict, a nightmare for modern soldiers schooled in mobility and Liddell Hart's indirect approach. Themes covered in the main narratives (each about 25 minutes, if uninterrupted), in addition to the compelling "soldier's life," include an introduction to the conflict, accounts of battles, technologies and tactics, the home fronts, and conclusion. Behind the main narratives are interviews with eminent historians on the five principal belligerent countries. Icons provide paths into a portrait gallery, key personalities, a map room, and "the armory"--data and displays on major weapons.

There are surprising and enlightening details beneath World War I's buttons and icons. How effective, for example, was the first widespread use of battlefield psychological operations? Under these horrific conditions, very. At Caporetto on the Italian Front, German propaganda induced more desertions than the Italians suffered in casualties. Germany, which defines armored warfare in the Second World War, cannot produce a workable tank in the first. How could soldiers living in mud holes withstand weeks of heavy shelling, then gas and tanks? Three-dimensional schematics show how effective elaborate trench killing zones became.

The CD displays the abundant ironies of the war. In 1914 Europe was, despite four decades of stability, ready to explode, as Moltke predicted, "over some dumbkopfig business in the Balkans." A dreadnought naval race helps cause a war in which surface fleets play but a minor role, while submarines outweigh battlewagons in the scales of naval strategy. Fears of the offense generate thoughtless, near-instantaneous war declarations, followed by years of defensive stalemate. The depth of hatreds, both personal and continental, among nations whose leaders are blood relatives, still stuns after 80 years. Toward the end, as World War I shows dramatically, alienation from the inescapable presence of death in "No Man's Land" ruined all but the British and American armies. Mutinies in over 50 divisions brought the French army to its knees. Uprisings among the Russian troops fueled Lenin's revolution. Revolt on the home front ended German will to fight on in trenches that were over one hundred miles from Germany's borders at the Armistice. Europe's nations, having committed to murder each other, turned warriors into cynics, fascists, and revolutionaries. Rather than a war to end all war, this war became causus belli for the next war, and nearly a war to end all sanity. War's madness is shown memorably in World War I.

• World War II. The two-disc World War II is by far the most ambitious and impressive of the titles reviewed. An introduction and a general account of the war provide two of the five main menu selections. "Theaters of War," another menu, offers accounts of western and eastern Europe; the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean theaters; and Asia. Other menus deal with themes (such as the Holocaust) and the well-designed index. These main selections can be browsed by topics, or by using a timeline to scan events grouped by a particular period. Supplementary screens appear during these narratives for topics including air, land, and sea weapons; art and propaganda; famous broadcasts; eyewitness accounts; medical problems and advances; profiles of key figures; descriptions of key military units; the role of technological breakthroughs; tactics and strategy; life on the home fronts; and miscellany. Well-known weapons are profiled in a format rather like baseball cards--performance data, photo, and description.

Interesting vignettes are nested among the main narratives; for example, the first specially-built aircraft carrier (Japanese, in 1922), the strides made in plastic surgery for Royal Air Force (RAF) crew injuries; the interwar evolution of a theory of bombing civilians; an interview with Oxford Professor Norman Stone on the origins of the war (Stone's conclusion: a world war was unlikely had Hitler not come to power).

Coverage of the military details of the war is basic but thorough. Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of Russia) is described in detail, but not the deception operations that preceded it. Electronic warfare came into its own in this war, but is hardly mentioned. On the other hand, Special Operations also came into their own, and World War II covers many of the better-known raids: footage of the German glider-borne shaped-charge attack on the Belgian fortress Eben Emael is particularly valuable; Doolittle's raid on Japan is narrated; text panels deal with Bruneval, St. Naizaire, the raid on Rommel, and other classic SpecOps. Like most overview histories, the essential facts are here, but subtleties of real operational significance are sometimes overlooked. That Doolittle's raid tipped Japanese Admiral Yamamoto into the decisive battle of Midway is noted. The unintended consequences of other raids are missed. The airborne raid on Bruneval, for example, netted a German Würzburg radar set for the British Boffins to examine. The real victory was less obvious: the Germans reacted by doubling or tripling the barbed wire around all coastal radar sites, which British photo-interpreters immediately noted and added to the order of battle.

The basic framework of World War II is historical: what happened, why, and how, with what results. The CD smoothly integrates accounts of conflict that encompassed three-quarters of the earth. The narratives provide over ten hours of broad analysis, as well as details of the war's geopolitical and military dynamics. World War II would serve well on the syllabus for an undergraduate modern history course. The documentaries are as encompassing and dramatically produced as those of Battlefield or Victory at Sea. FlagTower's outstanding multimedia production does justice to the defining event of the century.

• War in the Pacific. This FlagTower disc provides more details on the Pacific theater than the overview provided in World War II. The main sections of War in the Pacific cover the inevitability of war, the conflict itself, technology of war, the media war, and reflections on war. Fact sheets provide maps, data on media figures and productions, equipment specifications, personnel, and miscellaneous dispatches.

The Japanese decision to initiate war and the US decision to use the atomic bomb to end it are described in documentary supplements to the section on "the conflict." Another supplement addresses the setting of strategic priorities and the Allies' decision to put "Europe First." Other sections address the victories of Japan and the United States.

New weapon technologies were essential to operating over the great distances of the Pacific, a story told in the "technology of war" section. Separate documentaries deal with the air war, carriers, amphibious forces, submarines, codebreaking, and the development of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.

The "media war" section provides a detailed and engaging comparison of American and Japanese cinema treatments of the Pacific war, as both entertainment and propaganda. Separate documentaries explore US and Japanese censorship and the wartime cinema in both countries. Film excerpts underline the importance of using graphic, emotional media to support a total war. Film representing Doolittle's raid, for example, was used to portray the heinous Japanese treatment of the downed flyers. Japanese war film footage, rarely shown in postwar Japan, provides interesting insights into Tokyo's efforts to sustain mass support in the face of mounting evidence of imminent defeat. Westerners (and Japanese who emulated them) were shown as morally and spiritually corrupt--shades of propaganda from today's fundamentalist states.

• World War II Encyclopedia--The European Theater. As it provides a British view of World War II, this CD from Softkey International reflects the large role played by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in its production. The CD reminded me of the multimedia displays in the IWM itself, and the CD experience is a little like a tour of the IWM collections and archives. While subtitled European Theater, the CD's graphic materials also cover British operations in the Pacific, Africa, and Mideast.

The CD's best features are its interactive multimedia timeline and the reproductions of the IWM's war art. One uses the timeline by sliding or clicking on a year scale to display events on a particular date in text, photos, videos, and historical audio clips (mostly BBC broadcasts) that explain the unfolding events of the war in Europe. The material has a decidedly British point of view; the war in Russia, for example, rates hardly a mention. Like the displays in the IWM itself, the material emphasizes how the war came about, including strategy in the broadest geopolitical sense, and how the war affected the average Briton on the home front as well as the battlefront. This "Briton's eye view" of the war is the CD's strongest perspective, and also one of its major shortcomings. There are five items on Rommel (whom the average Briton views as something of a demi-hero), but nothing on Guderian or Kesselring, far more significant military figures. In the middle of the treatment of the Western Desert one finds a photo and caption of the Home Guard, to reinforce the human perspective. The CD's presentations lack historical depth, but are strong on the human look of war. Treatments of military tactics and operational art are virtually absent.

The CD's integration of materials is outstanding. For example, the text describing British reaction to Pearl Harbor is accompanied by a Churchill broadcast and a photo of the PM (in his Royal Navy uniform) with Roosevelt. Stacked behind the display are more texts, audios, videos, and photos (indicated by icons) with detailed captions. The timeline display provides pointers to additional screens on subjects from that date. Simply following the timeline provides an engaging multimedia documentary of the war crafted entirely out of contemporaneous materials, rather like following the war in the daily papers and on the wireless. One can also use a detailed index to find other materials.

The text and graphic captions are searchable via key words. Authors and historical sources are not indicated, although archive codes suggest the materials are from IWM collections. Texts and captions are sometimes puzzlingly brief, confusing, or flat wrong. For example, captions describe, without explanation, the "German liberation [sic] of Poland," the "defeat [sic] of the Russians at Stalingrad," and "the [German] liberation [sic] of the territories." Brevity afflicts other items. Dennis Babbage describes the German Enigma coding machine operation, for example, but without diagrams or images the audio narrative is incomprehensible. There are only four maps, from German war diaries. This CD does not attempt to provide the military "big picture," but it excels in presenting the artist's view of war. The IWM collection of military art is outstanding, with reproductions of more than 300 paintings, drawings, and posters. One painting alone was worth the price of the CD: Keith Henderson's Air Gunner in Turret, a stunning and haunting graphic, magnificently evocative of RAF night combat.

The more than 800 photos include an extensive collection of propaganda materials from both sides and extremely high-quality photos of the war leaders. All the art and photos can be displayed full-screen with a mouse click, and their resolution is excellent. The lack of photos of military equipment, however, was disappointing. There seems to be almost an aversion to photos and diagrams of the war materials that are the IWM's most conspicuous holdings. The IWM's collections are outstanding (its air museums are unique) but there are precious few photos of any of this on the CD.

This CD provides only fragments of these fabulous collections and displays, a disappointingly abbreviated memento. But the CD is far less expensive than a trip to Great Britain to visit the museums, and it offers a variety of uniquely enlightening materials and perspectives.

• The Simon & Schuster D-Day Encyclopedia. The first of two D-Day CD-ROMs reviewed, the D-Day Encyclopedia blends well-written texts by world-class historians, engaging video clips of notable participants reminiscing, audio oral history clips, and splendid archival photos. The D-Day Encyclopedia is good enough to be an instruction aid for college students or junior officer instruction. Very much a quality production, the CD-ROM is worthy of its title "encyclopedia."

This CD's strongest feature is outstanding historical scholarship, reflected in the first instance in the credentials of its two editors: David G. Chandler and Brigadier General James Lawton Collins, Jr. Chandler, head of War Studies at Sandhurst, is president emeritus of the British Commission for Military History and the author of volumes on World War II and the Napoleonic Wars. General Collins landed on Utah Beach, commanding the 957th Field Artillery Battalion. He also served in Korea and Vietnam, and he headed the Defense Language Institute. A former Army Chief of Military History, he authored studies of the Vietnam War and edited The History of World War II.

The CD's histories and biographies were provided by 142 of the most notable historians of World War II; both the Allied and Axis sides are well represented. A sample of these world-class authors, less citations of their many well-known works, includes: Stephen E. Ambrose; Stephen Badsey, senior lecturer at Sandhurst; Martin Blumenson, historian at the Naval War College, the Citadel, and the Army War College; Alfred Price, RAF officer, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Jürgen Rohwer, formerly a Kapitan in the Kriegsmarine, and Earl F. Ziemke, professor at the University of Georgia. The variety and quality of the D-Day Encyclopedia's writers add balance and objectivity to controversial subjects. For example, John Terraine's account of Normandy close-air support reflects the influence of British Field Marshal Montgomery, whose principles of air-ground coordination deserve a salute by American soldiers and airmen. The Field Marshal, never popular with Americans during the war, fully anticipated what we today call Air-Land Battle doctrine.

One expects a D-Day history to provide quality accounts of the amphibious, airborne, and ground operations, and they are here. But one can also find real depth on less obvious topics--for example, detailed biographies of hundreds of World War II leaders, or how strategic air power contributed throughout the buildup to the Normandy operations. The biography, for example, of Brigadier General Frederick L. Anderson, US Army Air Force (the original for the Gregory Peck figure in the film Twelve O'Clock High) reflects the air leadership shifting from strategic to operational tactics as Eisenhower orders the softening up of the invasion targets. There are full explanations of Operation Pointblank, the Oil Plan, the Transportation Plan, and other dynamics of the strategic air campaign. The writing throughout is excellent; each item identifies its author and sources.

Words, as military historians know well, are keys to strategy. The histories on this CD capture the nuances. For example, the USAAF's bombing strategy turned on one general's single phrase. Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris, head of Bomber Command, had persuaded Winston Churchill to ask Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference to order the Eighth US Air Force to join the RAF in night operations and stop their costly daylight bombing. The Eighth's commander, Major General Ira Eaker, summoned to make the USAAF rebuttal, stressed "round-the-clock" bombing. Churchill, captivated by Eaker's phrase, withdrew his opposition to the Americans' daylight bombing. Eaker's Americans continued to fly days; Harris's RAF, the nights.

The same high quality applies to the video clips of D-Day participants recounting their memories of the campaign. Colonel Hans von Luck, then commander of the 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, 21st Panzer Division, recalls the G

[Marine]

Considerations for US Strategy in Post-Communist Eurasia
PAUL H. HERBERT


With the collapse of communist and Soviet power in Europe, the slow but steady political and economic reform of the 27 successor newly independent states (NIS), and the impending admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of new members, the United States has a real but fleeting opportunity to realize significant strategic gains in post-communist Eurasia in the years to come. Wise policy in pursuit of these opportunities requires recognition of the region's complexity.[1]

The United States has two overriding and closely related regional interests, one immediate, the other long-term. The immediate interest is that the former Soviet Union's weapons of mass destruction and related technologies not threaten the safety of the United States nor that of our allies. Any loss of control over those weapons and any proliferation of them to other states would constitute a potential threat. The longer-term interest is that the region's vast human, natural, and material resources not be dominated by a single power whose values and interests are inimical to ours. Both of these interests can be described in positive terms by stating that the United States has a long-term interest in the integration of all 27 NIS into the cooperative community of secure, free-market democracies.

A Region of Diversity and Change

Our policies in pursuit of these interests must be carried out in a region that is nothing if not diverse. The NIS can be regionally grouped as shown in Figure 1 below. While some such aggregation is necessary to preclude dealing at the strategic level with 27 discrete states, it is also conditional at best. At worst it can lead to false generalizations or assumptions that can undermine strategic analysis and policy. For example, Central European states whose national histories are centuries old might well object to the connotation of youthful inexperience in the term "newly independent." The Baltic states and Romania are determined to assert their identity as Central European. Despite its historical, cultural, and linguistic ties to Russia, Ukraine likewise seeks an independent identity as a neutral Central European state. Classifying Romania and Moldova as Balkan states is geographically inaccurate. It also might imply to some Moldovans an historical and cultural tie to Romania inconsistent with their strong desire for independence. But neither is Moldova Russian, or Ukrainian, or Caucasian.

Regions of Newly Independent States (Populations in Millions)
Central European (Total = 64.6)
Czech Republic (10.4)
Hungary (10.3)
Poland (38.5)
Slovakia (5.4) Old Russia (Total = 211)
Belarus (10.3)*
Russia (148.6)*
Ukraine (51.8)*
Baltic States (Total = 8.0)
Estonia (1.6)
Latvia (2.7)
Lithuania (3.7) The Caucasus (Total = 15.5)
Armenia (3.3)*
Azerbaijan (7.1)*
Georgia (5.4)*
Balkans (Total = 64.5)**
Albania (3.3)
Bosnia-Herzegovina (4.6)
Bulgaria (8.8)
Croatia (4.7)
FYROM (Macedonia) (2.7)
Moldova (4.5)*
Romania (23.2)
Serbia (10.7)
Slovenia (2.0) Central Asia (Total = 53)
Kazakhstan (17.2)*
Uzbekistan (22.1)*
Kyrgystan (4.4)*
Tajikistan (5.4)*
Turkmenistan (4.2)*
* Members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (see map at Figure 3).
** See map of Balkans at Figure 2.
Figure 1. Newly Independent States, Grouped by Region.

The populations of most of these states are also quite mixed by ethnicity, language, religion, and culture, compounding the difficulty of national cohesion within currently recognized borders. Many states (e.g., Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Tajikistan, Ukraine) have significant minorities whose ethnic, historical, and cultural identity is toward another neighboring state. The largest such minority is the ethnic Russians. The collapse of the Soviet Union left an estimated 22 to 25 million ethnic Russians living within the NIS, some of them third- and fourth-generation residents. Their status ranges from fairly thorough assimilation, as in Kazakhstan, to ostracism as an unwanted remnant of Soviet domination, as in the Baltic states. Their plight has deep resonance within Russian society. Russia has asserted a national interest in their welfare, which, in turn, its neighbors find threatening. Compounding these difficulties is the movement throughout the former Soviet space of what can be described as ethnic refugees, that is, persons of certain ethnic origins forcibly removed from their homelands by Joseph Stalin's regime who are now attempting to return. The number of such refugees has been estimated at nine million.[2]

If national identities are not entirely clear, neither are the borders themselves. The collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe has reawakened historical disputes over borders that go back to the Congress of Vienna or earlier, while some successor states to the Soviet Union, especially in Central Asia, are bounded by administrative lines drawn specifically to divide powerful ethnic groups. Unsettled questions of territory, nationality, and citizenship have significant implications for political stability, economic development, and security, as recent and ongoing conflicts in Armenia, the Balkans, Chechnya, Georgia, and Tajikistan clearly illustrate.

The NIS also differ dramatically from each other in terms of the transitions they are making, and it is here that policymakers must be very careful to perceive important differences. There are at least five transitions taking place in each state. No two states are at the same point in all five, which makes each state's transition unique. The five transitions taking place are from communism to something else; from command to market economies; from underdevelopment to modernity; from domination to independence; and from global or regional power to a lesser status for the near term.

Political Change

The political change from communism to something else varies widely among the NIS. No two states began with the same experience under "communism," which varied significantly from country to country and from time to time. Hungary's "goulash communism" was significantly different from Nicolae Ceaucescu's cult of personality in neighboring Romania, for example. Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia steadfastly pursued his own brand of communism independent of the Kremlin, and Albania just as steadfastly maintained its brand independent of Tito. The Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics accepted communist slogans and labels and Russian apparatchiki from Moscow, while maintaining some of their traditional ways of life, including the importance of clan relationships in local political arrangements.



Figure 2. The Balkan States (shown in white in original).

During the same period, we in the West so long equated "not communist" with "democratic" that we tended to perceive the collapse of communism as the prelude to the inevitable emergence of democracy. The simultaneous collapse of both communist and Soviet power has indeed opened the gates to Western and democratic influences. But it has also allowed other political values to emerge; meanwhile communism, as the Russian elections show, is by no means extinct. So exactly what kind of political structures will develop in any given state remains to be seen.[3]

Economic Development

In many countries, political development will parallel economic development, and here the variety is as great as the conditions are daunting. Because under communism products did not have to compete, every state inherited an outmoded and near-obsolete industrial plant. Soviet and satellite industry was heavily skewed toward defense and does not now easily convert to consumer or domestic production. For ideological and security reasons, central planners scattered industries widely. Thus the Slovak Republic is the heir to factories that built aircraft fuselages, while Poland built the wings, and Ukraine built the engines. No one satellite state built the entire aircraft. In Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Russia, the Soviet government built many medium-sized cities, each for the sole purpose of housing workers for a single defense enterprise that is now defunct. The workers and managers who emerged from communism brought with them little or no experience in free-market techniques. Under communism, there existed no body of business law to protect investors, owners, managers, workers, or customers, nor is there now a legal culture by which people expect fair treatment under known and impartially applied laws.

National responses to these conditions have not been uniform. Poland's "shock therapy" (by which the government rapidly divested itself of almost all state-owned enterprises while encouraging foreign investment and writing laws to protect business) caused massive dislocation and discontent, but now seems to be bearing the fruit of a rising gross domestic product and standard of living. By contrast, Bulgaria has yet to privatize its huge state enterprises and thus endures the triple disadvantage of low foreign investment, high government debt, and unemployment and worker discontent. The Czech Republic hopes to become a competitive producer through a strategy of privatization, modernization, and defense conversion. Less-developed states like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan look to resource extraction as the engine of their developing economies, while still others, such as Georgia and the Baltic states, hope to benefit from the transshipment of goods through their territories.

These economic conditions have political and international repercussions. Privatization schemes in the absence of effective laws invite corruption and organized crime. Foreign investment brings with it highly visible hallmarks of foreign culture which is not always welcome. The image of foreign investors and local entrepreneurs enriching themselves through privileged acquisition of former state properties, service sector businesses, and mineral extraction--while once productive arms factories and their work forces lie idle--is ripe for exploitation by nationalist ideologues. Workers must work, and so governments are under intense pressure to pursue inflationary spending practices that inhibit development and foreign assistance, notably from the International Monetary Fund. Russian arms sales to China, India, Iraq, and Iran, and nuclear assistance to Iran and Cuba, can be seen in part as acts of economic desperation; by exporting what it can to the only people who will buy the product, Russia seeks to keep a hard-pressed sector of the economy afloat.

Underdevelopment to Modernity

A third dimension of change is from underdevelopment to modernity. It is fair to call nearly all the 27 NIS "underdeveloped." They all are characterized by a standard of living and quality of life far below what should have been possible given their potential. Despite impressive scientific, industrial, and military accomplishment due to concentrated government effort, and the provision for most citizens' very basic needs, the societies under communism did not prosper and advanced only fitfully and slowly.

The degree of initial underdevelopment and the degree of progress toward modernity since the collapse of communism vary greatly from country to country. Countries with a cohesive population, a nascent middle class of intellectuals, a relatively modern infrastructure, relative confidence in their security, and close proximity to developed sponsors have made great strides: Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Estonia are among this group of states. Countries without such good fortune--Slovakia, Georgia, Armenia, and Tajikistan--are much further down the scale. Whether the bulk of its people see modernization as exhilarating, threatening, or simply impossible depends largely upon a state's position on this difficult scale.

From Domination to Independence

A fourth important dimension of change is the transition from domination to independence. Here again, despite very general similarities, the transition is unique in every case. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Central Europe did in fact grant to the non-Soviet and Baltic states their long-desired independence. These countries are able to hark back to a pre-World War II national existence against which their postwar experience can be seen as a long, painful, but temporary interruption. They are again nation-states, and they have embraced their national identities with gusto in a profusion of flags, symbols, slogans, and songs. Nevertheless, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania feel constrained by their Russian minorities, their proximity to Russia, and Russian rhetoric that implies only halfhearted acceptance of their independence.

For other countries the situation is more problematic. Clearly, the national identity and independence of the Balkan states is still very much an open question, with Slovenia alone having made the transition relatively peacefully and with no immediate threat currently visible. Belarus has no tradition of independence, nor does Ukraine. Despite considerable domestic opposition, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko openly seeks complete reintegration with Russia, while Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma just as vigorously pursues complete independence. Georgia, with a centuries-old national identity founded on religion and ethnicity, enjoys only de jure independence. Russian peacekeeping troops enforce the de facto separation of Abkhazia from Georgia, and several thousand more Russian soldiers occupy key points throughout the country and patrol Georgia's southern border with Turkey. Under the mantle of peacekeeping, Russian forces likewise patrol the separatist Transdniester region that splinters Moldova; they also play a direct role on the government side in what amounts to an ethnic civil war in Tajikistan.

For most of the former Soviet republics, the Baltic states excepted, the issue of true national independence poses a dilemma. They face both centrifugal and centripetal forces relative to the former capital in Moscow. On the one hand, they genuinely relish their independence. Their memory of the Soviet Union is painful on two counts, first, that it was communist and second that it was Russian. Communism required subservience to an all-powerful center in Moscow and to a stifling orthodoxy that stunted economic growth, repressed local tradition, culture, and religion, and enforced through terror a depressing and impersonal sameness on nearly everyone. Because of the central role played by Russia and Russians in this system, the non-Russian republics equate their sad experience with Russian domination and are therefore highly suspicious at best of Russian intentions toward their nations now.

On the other hand, these states cannot escape either their history or their geography. Their Soviet experience is not regarded as universally bad. In the minds of many, it provided a far greater degree of social justice than appears to be the case in capitalist countries. The states have strong economic, cultural, political, and security links with Russia and with each other. Russian is the one language spoken by nearly everyone throughout the region. Nearly all significant real property is of Russian manufacture. They are important trading partners for each other. They have common security interests with regard to China, India, and the Middle East. For all these reasons, many of these states seek close cooperation with each other. Some degree of regional reintegration is probably inevitable.

No institution illustrates these tendencies more than the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), formed in 1991 from the remnants of the Soviet Union and embracing 12 former socialist republics (see Figure 3). The member states have widely divergent notions of what the CIS should be. Russia takes the maximalist position that it should be a very strong organization that includes security, defense, and foreign policy dimensions, and the elimination of customs barriers. Russia tries to differentiate between CIS internal and external borders and claims an interest in helping member states patrol their external borders.



Figure 3. The Commonwealth of Independent States (shown in white in original).

With the probable exception of Belarus, no other member seeks such close integration. For every step toward integration, some members take a step back. Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgystan recently signed a treaty calling for greater economic cooperation and integration. But Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan almost immediately thereafter joined with Uzbekistan to create a combined peacekeeping battalion and offer it for use worldwide, significantly not under CIS control but only under United Nations auspices. Likewise, these Central Asian states have formed their own trade association and have invited Turkey to participate in their discussions. Nearly every former Soviet republic denounced the Russian Duma's non-binding vote in March 1996 to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Union illegal. Economic cooperation, but not political union or military alliance, seems to be the desire of most CIS members.

Energy is a central element in the related issues of economic development and national independence. Russia is the key supplier of oil, natural gas, and nuclear technology to almost all its neighbors, whether CIS members or not. The dependency of its neighbors is magnified by the depletion (as in Romania) or absence (as in Ukraine) of indigenous resources; the environmental drawbacks to coal, as in Poland; and the strong need for low-cost energy sources in each of the developing economies. As Western technology, investment, and business practices take hold, Russia will become a more important energy exporter, enjoying both the influence that comes with supplier status and the sorely needed foreign currency and credits that come with energy sales.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, several NIS are now potential competitors with Russia for the energy export market. Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan all hope to benefit directly from the exploitation of the Caspian Sea and other oil and natural gas fields. Iran, Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Armenia are in competition for the pipeline routes that will carry those resources to ports and the international market. A pipeline through Kazakhstan to China is under consideration. With a growing economy and lacking easily accessible indigenous energy resources, China will be very interested in the energy potential of Central Asia. Thus far, these states have asserted their interests largely through diplomacy and the creation of international consortiums in which US and other Western companies have played a major part.

The stakes in this development are great indeed. In addition to the obvious economic benefits, energy suppliers have tremendous influence on the international scene. They can affect world markets. They have a powerful influence over energy-dependent customers. The possession of lucrative oil fields and pipelines can foster independence, domination, or both. A powerful neighbor may attempt to dominate a state whose energy resources it covets. Those same resources may provide to other powerful actors an interest in the state's continued independence, as the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War so aptly illustrates. This is not to say that the exploitation of energy resources in the former Soviet Union will necessarily lead to military conflict. No state in the region has the military capability, political will, or financial resources for such conflict at present. However, in the development of their energy resources, many of the NIS and other countries have important interests as well as rich opportunities for both cooperation and confrontation.

Changes in Relative Power

The fifth and final transition--changes in the relative power of the former Soviet states--has been most dramatic for Russia, where a sense of national humiliation attends both the loss of empire and the nearly universal rejection of an ideology widely associated with Russia. If there is a national longing for greatness in Russia, there is also an awareness that for the moment, Russia's power and influence are not great. In other former Soviet republics, elation at independence is balanced to some degree with a similar sense of loss. Ukrainians may wonder aloud whether the sacrifices made to give up their nuclear weapons have been appreciated and compensated as they consider French nuclear testing, the enlargement of NATO, and feeble international assistance with the Chernobyl cleanup. Kazakhstan may have similar misgivings, while Belarus's quirky president has tried to hold his 18 remaining SS-20s hostage against NATO enlargement. Yugoslavia stands almost universally condemned and isolated for her aggression in this century's fifth Balkan war.[4]

Because one pole of the bipolar world collapsed, too much emphasis can be placed on the apparent loss of power and prestige and its presumed psychological consequences. No successor state enjoys the power or prestige of the old Soviet empire. However, each successor state, with the possible exception of Russia, enjoys far more influence as an independent nation than it ever did as a mere part of the old empire. Russia, liberated from the crushing economic burden of maintaining that empire, is the sole heir of the empire's nuclear weapons and retains the old Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council. Russia enjoys a certain degree of respect, so far not entirely eroded by the war in Chechnya, for its role in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia's shaky transition to democracy captivates the world's attention and ensures continued Western assistance with economic recovery. As a member of the Council of Europe, Russia aspires to convert the G-7 into the G-8. Most important, Russia shares with the other successor states an unprecedented degree of engagement with the rest of the world.

Opportunities for the United States and for Europe

These widely varied conditions provide both opportunities and risks for the United States, and call for a well-balanced, flexible, and long-term strategy focused on three distant goals: democracy, development, and integration. The collapse of the Soviet threat in Europe was one of the most momentous geopolitical realignments of this century. It allowed the United States and its allies to shift attention and resources to domestic needs while consolidating democracy and stability in Europe and pursuing engagement in other parts of the globe where the need is great. A return to anything like the Cold War in Europe--for example, a "cold peace" between an enlarged NATO and a brooding, partially reintegrated, nuclear armed, and uncooperative Greater Russia--would be a tremendous strategic setback.

By contrast, there is an alternative future that goes well beyond the mere absence of the old Soviet threat. That future includes integration of the former communist states of Europe with the West; a working partnership with a secure, prosperous, and democratic Russia; and further integration of the remaining NIS through multiple international organizations.

An American policy that can foster such a future will rest on several fundamentals. First, Russia is key. That state will be a significant regional economic and military power within the next generation, one that aspires to "greatness," meaning an international role as well as a regional role. Russia has legitimate security interests in Europe, the Caucasus and Middle East, Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, and the Pacific. Russia's success in the transition to democracy and a free market, assurance of its own security through transparent defense cooperation with its neighbors, and engagement as an active partner of the West--all are of tremendous strategic importance to the United States.

Second, some degree of reintegration of the former Soviet republics is not only inevitable but probably in the best interests of some republics; the United States should not reflexively oppose such an evolution. The process of reintegration must be peaceful, voluntary, and democratic. Reintegration that respects sovereignty, fosters trade and development, reassures mutual security, and promotes democracy and international cooperation is not to be feared in the West. A CIS that really is a commonwealth and really has independent member states could be an important partner. Russia's greatest challenge is to show its neighbors that reintegration as described above is possible; it will likely be a long, hard sell. The United States and its Western allies, and Western security organizations which the United States does not lead, can meanwhile play an important, constructive role as trusted third parties, encouraging and assisting the normalization of international relations among the former Soviet republics, including reintegration where that is desired.

Third, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains central to American interests in Europe and must be preserved as a working organization of like-minded democratic states. Its intended enlargement presents considerable difficulties and will require extremely careful management. To deny NATO membership to those Central European states who earnestly seek it and who meet the requirements could alienate them for generations. It could well forestall their evolution to democracy and relegate them to a nonaligned buffer zone between Western Europe and Russia that would present a constant source of fear and instability. Although an enlarged Alliance would present significant challenges in terms of consensus decisionmaking and the viability of Article V guarantees, it is nonetheless politically imperative, especially now that it has been publicly and repeatedly proclaimed as policy.

The key to NATO enlargement is to achieve it without sacrificing future Russian partnership. To do so requires taking account of Russian domestic political realities and strategic considerations. Domestically, any Russian government must respond to the popular perception of NATO enlargement as "moving NATO tanks to our borders." Years of communist propaganda equated NATO with earlier and real threats to Russia from the West. The lingering suspicion is exploited by a variety of Russian politicians. It must be countered by clear and convincing evidence that an enlarged NATO does not pose a military threat to Russia. Strategically, Russians fear that an enlarged NATO will place a defensive shield over historical antagonists who then will be able to pursue hostile policies with impunity. The response here is engagement and cooperation between the Alliance and Russia on matters of mutual interest. Some progress has been made: management of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and Russian participation in the Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina are examples. As the new government stabilizes following the Russian elections and President Yeltsin's recovery from surgery, NATO could take a positive step forward by offering that government a formal structure of consultation with NATO as the Alliance evolves and enlargement takes place.

Fourth, the United States enjoys considerable influence at the moment and must use it constructively. The euphoria that attended the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War has given way to more sober assessments by all participants. Initially disappointed over the absence of a new Marshall Plan for post-communist Europe and frustrated with the early results of reform and the slow pace of integration, the 27 NIS are developing a more realistic determination to build their countries anew largely on their own.[5] There is little reflexive hostility to the West and considerable admiration. They look to the United States and the West for security and economic assistance and inspiration. The United States, while carefully prioritizing its commitments, must remain engaged and involved and meet these expectations to the best of its abilities. Nothing could be more damaging to the long-term prospects for a new community of cooperative democracies in Europe than the sense of abandonment that would attend any significant disengagement by the United States in the near term.

Finally, the United States must not be deterred by the appearance of temporary setbacks. The complexity of transitions taking place means that our goals are necessarily long-term. Democracy will not bloom overnight in any of the NIS, nor will peaceful or just solutions be found to every one of the region's manifold challenges. Each state has its own notions of its interests which are not always--or even necessarily--compatible with our own. However, not only is the Cold War over, but the end of the Cold War is over. The people of the former Soviet empire are now actively rebuilding their societies, for better or worse. The United States is not in the position of dominance that it enjoyed in the reconstruction of postwar Germany and Japan and so must pursue other, more conservative strategies. But our goal should be similar. A democratic, free-market, integrated, and cooperative community of nations embracing our former foes of the Cold War is possible and most assuredly in the security interests of the United States.



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NOTES

1. This article is based on the author's experience as the Senior Army Fellow to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies at Garmisch, Germany, for academic year 1995-96. The Center's College of Security Studies and Defense Economics conducts two five-month courses annually, each for about 75 military and civilian officials of the post-communist NIS. The courses seek to demonstrate how the Western democracies manage security affairs and thereby to encourage democratic reform in the NIS. As a student and classmate in one course, and a faculty member for another, the author had a unique opportunity for extensive dialogue with important leaders from almost all 27 NIS. This experience was supplemented during his fellowship and since with travel to Albania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

2. Francois Heisbourg, "Population Movements in Post-Cold War Europe," Survival, 33 (January-February 1991), 31-44.

3. For a provocative essay on the differences between democratization, modernization, and Westernization, see Samuel P. Huntington, "The West: Unique, not Universal," Foreign Affairs, 75 (November- December 1996), 28-46.

4. Yugoslavia here means the current federation by that name, comprising Serbia and Montenegro.

5. Recent elections across Central Europe emphasize this pragmatic trend: "Seven years after the fall of communism, millions looking for better lives across this region simply took advantage of an opportunity that democracy gave them. They voted for change." ("Across Eastern Europe, Voters Are Choosing Any Kind of Change," The Washington Post, 12 November 1996.)


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Colonel Paul Herbert (US Army) is Chief of the Strategic Concepts Branch, J-5, the Joint Staff, in Washington. An infantry officer and graduate of the US Army War College, he holds a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University. He was the 1995-96 Senior Army Fellow to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...ing/herbert.htm

[ghostgovt]

August Tuesday 31st 2004 (00h33) :
LETTER FROM RET. MARINE CSM AND RET. MARINE MAJOR
74 comment(s).
As a military family with a combined total of 57 years of active service in the U. S. Army, myself, son, and daughter-in-law have accumulated over 80 combat medals, one or more of us have served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Kosovo, Bosnia, and three of us served together during Desert Storm. My son recently returned from the Iraq War, his third war, and, being fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments, applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status.

Six days later he was under investigation for making "disloyal comments" about George Bush...which amounted to saying in general conversation with other soldiers that "Bush should have never started the war" and "Bush is no military leader." He was charged under Article-15 and was denied an attorney and could not cross-examine the case against him. His 14 years of military service up to this point was flawless, he was an excellent soldier, and in spite of numerous superiors who testified in his favor, he was demoted and sentenced to 45 days of extra duty.

His crime involved nothing more than expressing his personal political opinion as guareeteed under the Bill of Rights, the very document that he had risked his life defending. Our government claims to be fighting for democracy, however those who risk their lives for democracy are being denied their basic rights of freedom of speech and opinion. My friends, the Bill of Rights and democracy are dead under the Bush Administration. This is only a sampling of what will happen if this administration is re-elected.

For generations we have been a loyal and faithful military family, however with this recent action taken against a member of our family, we will no longer encourage military service to our future generations. In other words, we are going to do the same thing that Bush, Cheney, Wolfovitz, and most members of congress do, WE AIN’T SERVING NO MORE!!

The Iraq War was based on lies and exaggerations, poor intelligence, a mass deception with no rhymne nor reason for invading Iraq. For those who still have kids and loved ones in this illegal war, our blessings and best wishes go out to you. We pray for their safe return. It is refreshing to see an organization like Military Families Speak Out because our active service members are silenced by the system and need all the voices that can be mustered.

Charlie C. Carlson II
Command Sergeant-Major USA Ret.
Dot Diehl-Carlson
[Ex-Major USA Vietnam Vet]

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3117

[Marine]

August  Tuesday 31st  2004 (00h33) :
LETTER FROM RET. MARINE CSM AND RET. MARINE MAJOR
74 comment(s).
As a military family with a combined total of 57 years of active service in the U. S. Army, myself, son, and daughter-in-law have accumulated over 80 combat medals, one or more of us have served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Kosovo, Bosnia, and three of us served together during Desert Storm. My son recently returned from the Iraq War, his third war, and, being fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments, applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status.

Six days later he was under investigation for making "disloyal comments" about George Bush...which amounted to saying in general conversation with other soldiers that "Bush should have never started the war" and "Bush is no military leader." He was charged under Article-15 and was denied an attorney and could not cross-examine the case against him. His 14 years of military service up to this point was flawless, he was an excellent soldier, and in spite of numerous superiors who testified in his favor, he was demoted and sentenced to 45 days of extra duty.

His crime involved nothing more than expressing his personal political opinion as guareeteed under the Bill of Rights, the very document that he had risked his life defending. Our government claims to be fighting for democracy, however those who risk their lives for democracy are being denied their basic rights of freedom of speech and opinion. My friends, the Bill of Rights and democracy are dead under the Bush Administration. This is only a sampling of what will happen if this administration is re-elected.

For generations we have been a loyal and faithful military family, however with this recent action taken against a member of our family, we will no longer encourage military service to our future generations. In other words, we are going to do the same thing that Bush, Cheney, Wolfovitz, and most members of congress do, WE AIN’T SERVING NO MORE!!

The Iraq War was based on lies and exaggerations, poor intelligence, a mass deception with no rhymne nor reason for invading Iraq. For those who still have kids and loved ones in this illegal war, our blessings and best wishes go out to you. We pray for their safe return. It is refreshing to see an organization like Military Families Speak Out because our active service members are silenced by the system and need all the voices that can be mustered.

Charlie C. Carlson II
Command Sergeant-Major USA Ret.
Dot Diehl-Carlson
[Ex-Major USA Vietnam Vet]

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3117

Golly gee, if he had as much Military service as he says he does he should have known he would get his butt in a crack for saying something like that.

And if his Daddy was a Command Sergeant Major in the United States Army ought to know there ain't no such thing as free speech when it comes to bad mouthing your chain of command.

By the way ghost, he would have been charged with insubordination, I never heard of something called "disloyal comments".

[Marine]

Chief Master Sergeant Frances M. Arnold was born on 20 November 1928 in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. She enlisted in the United Stated Air Force in May 1952 where she served for six years.

While in the Air Force she became the Administrative Supervisor in her shop. This was during a time when women were a minority with little or no representation, but she was still able to attain the rank of Staff Sergeant. After her discharge from the Air Force, SSgt Arnold spent a short time in the Air Force Reserve and enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in February 1969 as an Administrative Specialist.

During her long and distinguished Air National Guard career she accomplished many Texas “firsts”. Because of her innate ability to lead and influence people, she was appointed First Sergeant in Headquarters, Texas Air National Guard and then promoted to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant.

She was the first female Chief Master Sergeant in the Texas National Guard and Air Reserve Forces. Recognizing her leadership potential and management qualities she was then selected by the commander to be the first Senior Enlisted Advisor for the Air Guard in Texas – a first for a female. During her tenure as the Senior Enlisted Advisor, she fought many battles for all enlisted personnel.

In recognition of her dedicated service to the State and Nation, she was awarded the Air Force Good Conduct Medal, the Texas Outstanding Service Medal and many other state and federal awards. Chief Master Sergeant Frances Arnold stands out in the minds of many members of the Texas Air Guard as being a real-life legend in breaking ground for all enlisted personnel as well as for all females serving in the Texas National Guard.

[ CONTENTS | NEXT ]









The Hall Of Honor
is sponsored and maintained
by Gary Butler

[Marine]

William N. Hensley was born on 14 August 1918 in Pasadena, California. He graduated as the valedictorian of his class at Cumberland University at age twenty. He taught at Cumberland until he was old enough to take the Texas bar exams in 1939, which he passed with the highest grade ever achieved.

He enlisted in the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps in 1937. He was commissioned in 1941 and received his pilot rating. He was called to active duty immediately after Pearl Harbor, and by 1944 was promoted to Major.

He was shipped to Guam where he commanded the 16th Bombardment Squadron and led bombing missions against Japan, flying 105 combat hours and receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, numerous other awards and decorations and was credited with participating in four major campaigns. He was released from active duty in 1946.

On 1 January 1947 he became the District Attorney for Bexar County and the same year he helped to organize the 182nd Fighter Squadron as its commander.

His unit was called to active duty during the Korean Conflict and he underwent F-84E training at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. While enroute back to Langley from San Antonio, his plane crashed and burned just north of Houston, Texas on 10 May 1951. His dedication to duty and faith was symbolized by a small Bible and Texas flag found in his pocket at the scene of the crash.

He was honored with the naming of the Hensley Hanger of the 149th Tactical Fighter Wing, Kelly Air Force Base, dedicated to his memory.

[ PREVIOUS | CONTENTS | NEXT ]









The Hall Of Honor
is sponsored and maintained
by Gary Butler

[Marine]

Chief Master Sergeant James D. Johnston was born in Temple, Texas on 28 May 1930. He attended Alamo Heights High School in Alamo Heights, Texas, and in 1948 joined the Texas Air National Guard as a member of the 182nd Fighter Interceptor Squadron. He attended a 26 week technical training course at Fort Francis E. Warren, Wyoming, where he graduated with honors.

In 1956, he was assigned as an Automotive Mechanic in the 149th Fighter Group, Texas Air National Guard. In 1957, he was reassigned to the Ground Equipment shop, where he served as foreman from 1960 – 1979. In June 1979, he was reassigned as Transportation Foreman. On October 2, 1986, he became the aircraft mechanic general foreman, and shortly thereafter was promoted to grade of chief master sergeant. He retired from the Air technician Program after 32 years service in 1985. Thereafter, he served four years on the Senior Enlisted Advisory Council, TXANG and two years as the State Senior Enlisted Advisor.

Sergeant Johnston was a member of the Alamo RAMS serving as treasurer, vice president, and on the board of directors. He is a charter member of the Air Force Sergeants Association, as well as a member of Alamo Chapter of Air Force Association. He is also an active Life Member of National Guard Association of Texas and the Masonic Order. He has served on the board of directors for the Security Services Federal Credit Union for 17 years.

In recognition of his long and dedicated service, Sergeant Johnston was awarded the Lone Star Distinguished Service Medal, the Korean Service Medal and numerous other state and federal Awards. Among his civilian awards is the Minuteman Award from the National Guard Association of Texas.

Chief Master Sergeant Johnston is the epitome of a citizen soldier. His dedication to his community and his loyalty to his state and nation serve as a shining example for his fellow citizens and future Airmen of Texas Air National Guard.

[ PREVIOUS | CONTENTS | NEXT ]









The Hall Of Honor
is sponsored and maintained
by Gary Butler

[Marine]

Chief Master Sergeant Mata was born in San Antonio, Texas on 29 October 1925. He attended Lanier High School, graduating in 1941, after which he began his military career in the U.S. Army on 6 January 1944.

He served in Central Europe and the Rhineland from 30 October 1944 to 10 June 1946. On 25 June 1946 he was released from active duty and continued to serve in the Enlisted Reserve Corps.

He enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard on 22 March 1948 and was assigned to Detachment C, 236th Air Service Group at Brooks Air Force Base. On 10 October 1950 his unit was mobilized for the Korean War. After serving in Japan and Korea, he was released from active duty and returned to serve with the 136th Supply Squadron at Brooks Air Force Base.

During his service with the Texas Air Guard, he played a key role in the modernization of his unit’s logistic program and in leading the unit to exceptional levels of achievement resulting in the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award with Oak Leaf Cluster and three awards of the Air Defense Command “A” Award. He was always a role model to his unit and was widely respected and admired as a leader of men. In addition to his accomplishments at unit level, he served on numerous National Guard Bureau logistics committees as well as a member of the Texas National Guard Association Board of Directors and Legislative Task Force. He retired 57 October 1985 as a member of the 149th Resource Management Squadron.

In recognition of his 37 years service to his state and nation spanning two wars, Chief Mata was awarded the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, Good Conduct Medal, Air Reserve Forces Meritorious Service Medal with six Oak Leaf Clusters, the Lone Star Distinguished Service Medal and numerous other awards and decorations.

[ PREVIOUS | CONTENTS | NEXT ]









The Hall Of Honor
is sponsored and maintained
by Gary Butler

[Marine]

30 years after war's end, U.S., Vietnam focusing on mutual interests
Submitted by: American Forces Press Service
Story Identification #: 200552111446
Story by Ms. Donna Miles



WASHINGTON (April 29, 2005) -- Thirty years ago, the last U.S. helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, marking the official end of the Vietnam War.

The decade-long conflict left 58,000 Americans and an estimated three million Vietnamese dead, and for the next two decades, relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam remained at an impasse.

But 30 years after the war's end, the two countries have reached an unprecedented level of cooperation, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Marine told participants at the March 17, Texas Tech 5th Triennial Vietnam Symposium in Lubbock, Texas.

This cooperation extends to security, trade and investment, health, education and culture.

Marine delivered his assessment two weeks before the frigate USS Gary arrived in Ho Chi Minh City for a five-day port call, the third Navy ship to visit Vietnam since the war's end.

The visit marked the 10th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries and a warming of military relations between the former foes.

"Now we must put aside the past, and I think we should look forward to the future," Vietnamese Col. Bui Van Nga told the Associated Press during the frigate's visit.

Marine said the United States and Vietnam are putting their differences aside to find common ground in a wide range of issues, including counter-terrorism and regional stability.

"Vietnam and the United States stand together in opposition to the global scourge of terrorism," Marine said, noting that Vietnam has become an active participant in regional counter-terrorism efforts.

Vietnam also shares U.S. opposition to the development and spread of weapons of mass destruction, he said.

As a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors, Vietnam has publicly called on North Korea to honor its commitment to give up its nuclear-weapons program. "This is of no small significance considering the traditionally close ties between Hanoi and Pyongyang," Marine said.

"Both countries (the United States and Vietnam) desire peace in the Asia-Pacific region and believe that there can be no economic growth and prosperity without a stable security environment," he said. The two countries also share a mutual interest in seeing that strong regional institutions address security challenges, such as international crime, drugs and environmental threats, he said.

A bilateral agreement signed by the two countries last year lends American expertise to Vietnamese law enforcement agents working to stem the flow of drugs into and through Vietnam, Marine said.

"We are hopeful that by building bridges this way, we will be able in the future to expand our cooperation to include more direct cooperative efforts to shut down drug traffickers and other criminal organizations," he said.

But as the two countries look toward a more cooperative future, Marine said, they're helping heal old wounds by working together to find answers to the fate of missing service members in Vietnam, including 1,800 from the United States.

"As we mark the 30th anniversary of the end of the war, we must not forget those on both sides who made the ultimate sacrifice during the terrible conflict," he said. "The best way to do this is to remain steadfast in our efforts to achieve the fullest possible accounting of our missing personnel from the Indochina conflict."

Cooperation in this endeavor enabled the United States and Vietnam to move relations forward on other fronts and remain a top priority, he said.

Marine said he regularly urges the Vietnamese government to maintain its cooperation and to take concrete steps to allow full access to all archival records, renewed joint activities in the Central Highlands, and a concerted effort to conduct underwater activities.

"Right now, there are teams spread out across Vietnam conducting investigations and recovery activities," he said. He referred to five recovery teams, two research and investigative teams and an investigation team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command that deployed to Vietnam in early March.

The Defense Department announced the most recent success in this effort April 12. Two Army officers missing from the Vietnam War since 1971, Col. Sheldon Burnett and Chief Warrant Officer Randolph Ard, were positively identified and their remains were returned to their families for burial.

Four former North Vietnamese soldiers were instrumental in identifying the site where the two officers' OH-58A Kiowa helicopter went down near the Laos border, defense officials said.

"I want to thank the dedicated men and women -- both American and Vietnamese -- who work so hard to find answers for the loved ones of these soldiers," Marine said of the overall POW/MIA recovery initiative.

As these efforts advance, Marine acknowledged, areas remain in which the United States and Vietnam still don't see eye-to-eye, including Vietnam's human rights record. He vowed that the United States would continue pushing Vietnam to improve on progress slowly being made.

But these differences aside, Marine said, the two countries have come a long way since the fall of Saigon 30 years ago and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations just a decade ago.

"When one considers how far apart the United States and Vietnam once were, how implacably against each other we were -- and it wasn't that long ago -- I believe it's a testament to the efforts in both countries to build bridges, foster communication and create an atmosphere of trust and understanding," he said. "I can assure you that these efforts will continue."


http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...light=2,vietnam

[Marine]

United States Marine Corps

Press Release
Division of Public Affairs
Headquarters, U. S. Marine Corps
Washington, D. C. 20380-1775
Telephone: 703-614-4309 DSN 224-4309 Fax 703-695-7460
Contact: American Forces Press Service

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Release # 0624-03-0532
June 23, 2003

Joe Collins: Career Officer, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary

WASHINGTON--By Casie Vinall
Special to American Forces Press Service

When the Army commissioned Joseph J. Collins as a second lieutenant in 1970, the Long Island, N.Y., native never dreamed his service career would take him to the top echelons of the Pentagon.

"I was just your standard typical M-1, A-1 infantry officer," Collins recalled of his early days in uniform, referring to the old model military rifle. Over the next 28 years, along with command and staff positions in infantry and armor units, his military career encompassed teaching at the United States Military Academy and the National War College. He also served as chief speechwriter for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as an Army staff officer for NATO and Central European issues.

Retiring in 1998 as a full colonel, Collins began a new life in the civilian world. Or so he thought.

Beginning with a research job at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and as a consultant for media organizations such as ABC News Radio, Collins began settling into the private sector. But as it turned out, Uncle Sam wasn't yet finished with the retired officer. He was en route to a job at National Defense University when the Defense Department called him back to service in February 2001.

"The deputy secretary asked me to come back and help him with his confirmation, which I had previously told him I knew how to do and that I could be useful, and I haven't found the door yet."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz asked Collins to serve as his special assistant. Shortly thereafter, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appointed Collins as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. His duties range from addressing congressional inquiries on war crimes to coordinating the shipment of Sesame Street programs to Afghan schoolchildren.

By definition, Collins explains, stability operations are "military operations outside of combat, which usually take place in a post-conflict situation." The joke around the office, he added, is that "stability operations are operations in unstable places."

In many ways, he noted, his office is the "junk drawer of OSD Policy" due to the number of miscellaneous activities that fall into this category. The umbrella for stability operations encompasses everything from noncombatant evacuations to civil-military relations, humanitarian mine action, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance.

"Most of the conflicts we're engaged in today are taking place in areas where there is a full-blown humanitarian crisis going on," he noted. "Today, by definition the people in a belligerent country are considered not to be enemy, but are considered to be innocent."

War and recovery are inseparable, according to Collins. War, humanitarian assistance and reconstruction "go on almost simultaneously." Each year, he added, the Defense Department provides humanitarian assistance to the tune of about $50 million worldwide.

The Defense Department, however, is not the nation's lead organization for humanitarian affairs, he stressed. The military works in conjunction with the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, which are, in
turn, supported by international organizations associated with the United Nations and by nongovernmental organizations.

"The U.S. military arm for getting involved in all of this," he said, is primarily the military's civil affairs units, which serve as a connection with outside organizations as well as providing assistance independently.

The Coalition of Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, for example, has coordinated projects involving over 150 schools, benefiting 230,000 students; 40 medical facilities, benefiting more than 3 million people; and 600 wells, all the while, employing 40,000 Afghans.

Afghanistan has been of special interest to Collins long before he became involved with stability operations there. He said he developed an intense curiosity about the country in the late 1970s and studied the history of the Afghan people to better understand how they came to be where they are now. In the 1970s, prior to the Soviet invasion, he said, Afghanistan was a poor, but developing country.

"It had roads. It had airports. It had industries. It had colleges. It had connections with the outside world," he said. "There were foreign schools in Afghanistan. Many Afghans went to study abroad. Some stayed there and some took the information home."

Although his Afghan study began as a hobby, Collins eventually produced a dissertation focused on Soviet policy in Afghanistan. He did not realize just how integral being an "Afghan watcher" would be in his future role as deputy assistant secretary.

After the events of 9-11, Collins said, "it became clear that Afghanistan had become a failed state and, in effect, had become the captive of a terrorist group, the al Qaeda. In many ways, under the Taliban, Afghanistan was a wholly-owned subsidiary of an international terrorist group." To confront global terrorism, "we were going have to start in Afghanistan."

"The reconstruction of Afghanistan, which is in many ways, the construction of Afghanistan," Collins said, has been generally positive, but perhaps not as quick as some would like. Considering how many years Afghanistan had been at war and how long the country was under Taliban rule, he said, "we've made a lot of progress in the first year and a half of reconstruction." On the flip side, he added, much more needs to be done.

Collin's focus has now expanded to stability operations in Iraq. Even though torn by the Iran/Iraq war and recovering from the recent regime change, the more-developed Iraq is in a better state than Afghanistan, he said. One key difference between the two is the higher degree of education and wealth due to oil resources in Iraq, which gives it "the potential to sort of pull itself up by the bootstraps."

From infantry officer to Pentagon official, Collins' career has taken him from the halls of academia to the frontlines of world conflict. For most of the journey, his interest in international affairs has been a mainstay.

"There hasn't really been a distinct interruption between the kinds of things I looked at when I was a soldier, a strategy guy working in the Pentagon, or teaching international politics," he said. "The businesses we're in - humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction - these are all part and parcel of the business of national security."

(Casie Vinall is an intern working for DefendAmerica.mil in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.)

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[Marine]

BLT 1/4 conducts nonlethal force training
Submitted by: 11th MEU
Story Identification #: 2005106215447
Story by Staff Sgt. Sergio Jimenez



MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., (Sept. 29, 2005) -- The following is a photo essay of the Interservice Nonlethal Individual Weapons Instructor's Course here, Sept. 29. The purpose of the course is to train Marines to properly handle, disperse, disrupt or influence crowds and individuals during missions or situations when lethal force is not the first option. Some examples include holding back a crowd of hungry civilians at a food distribution site during a humanitarian mission or demonstrations of civil disobedience, said Capt. Gregory S. Rooker, Force Protection Officer, 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...8D?opendocument

[Marine]

LVS’ get facelift
Submitted by: Blount Island Command
Story by: Computed Name: Gunnery Sgt. Michael Reed
Story Identification #: 20051011077




AL ASAD, Iraq(Oct. 1, 2005) -- Our Marines are our most precious asset, as the improvised explosive device (IED) continues to be the number one cause of all coalition casualties, the Marine Corps is relentless in it’s efforts to provide better protection for Marines, as is the contact armor installation team (AIT) here, who began installing the Marine Armor Kit (MAK) to all Logistics Vehicle Systems (LVS) Sept. 20.

“When I heard that a Marine I recruited while on recruiting duty, hit a double stacked IED while driving a HMMWV,” said Staff Sgt. David Hinesbey, a Brunswick, Ga., native “it impacted me personally, and I wanted to contribute in the armoring process.”

It was incidents like this that compelled the Marines from Marine Corps Logistics Command to take part in the armoring process, so instrumental toward saving Marines lives.

“Knowing that if the vehicle had not had it (MAK), she would have died,” said Hinesbey, Source Chain Management Center, Albany, Ga.

The contact team here is part of the 23 Marine and nine Civilian Marine contingent from within Marine Corps Logistics Command sent to augment organizational level armor installation efforts. The 32 member team was divided into four contact teams, and is embedded with the 2nd Combat Logistics Group (FWD), and 2nd Marine Division units, to conduct armor installations here, Camp Fallujah, and Al Taqaddum.

There is 253 LVS’ in-theater to be armored. The AIT here has completed the installation of 20 MAKs since starting their first just 10 days ago. Through trial and error, the team has streamlined the installation process enabling them to armor two LVS’ each night.

According to Staff Sgt. Charles J. Cooke, AIT, SNCOIC, the team’s workday begins roughly at 6 p.m., and ends around 6 a.m., so as not to interfere with the supported units daily operations. This also allows for the staging of vehicles during the day, in preparation for armor installation at night.

“The Al Asad contact team has an incredible amount of leadership, initiative, and desire towards mission accomplishment,” stated Chief Warrant Officer-3 Bobby W. Sisai, AIT, officer-in-charge. “Having four SNCOs, gives them an advantage over the other contact teams.”

The majority of LVS’ to be armored are located here, and in the out-lying forward operating bases (FOBs) explained SiSai. “Currently there are two contact teams operating here, once the FOBs receive the MAK, Hinesbey and his team will travel to Al Qaim, Korean Villiage, and Blue Diamond to complete the installation on LVS’ there.”

The MAK consists of 3/8 inch armor providing 360 degree cab protection, 2 inch ballistic glass windshields, as well as side windows, and an air conditioning system.

These Marines despite their diverse occupational backgrounds, have come together to support one specific cause, their fellow Marines.

http://www.marines.mil/marinelink/mcn2000....4c?OpenDocument

[Marine]

Foreign Military Training Unit activates
Submitted by: 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (Anti-Terrorism)
Story by: Computed Name: Cpl. Sharon E. Fox
Story Identification #: 200510795715





MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. --(Oct. 7, 20205) -- The Marine Corps will activate a new unit here Tuesday, in front of Building H-1. The Foreign Military Training Unit, part of the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (Anti-Terrorism) will be the first of its kind in the Marine Corps.

The mission of the FMTU is to provide tailored basic-military- combat-skills training and advisor support for identified foreign military forces in order to enhance the tactical capability of coalition forces in support of the Commander, United States Special Operations Command and the Geographic Combatant Commanders’ Theater Security Cooperation Plans.

“Basically we train foreign military [personnel] in support of SOCOM,” said Col. Peter Petronzio, commanding officer of FMTU.

But even a unit with one basic concept, has many moving parts.

“Some of the challenges we’ve faced, like any new organization, is getting equipment, manning our unit, synchronizing time tables of manning with equipment, and just getting people to understand who we are and what we do,” said Petronzio. “We’re eager to get our message out [to the public], and that’s probably our biggest challenge. There are a lot of folks out there that either don’t understand us or have a very old perception of us. We just hope they will be able to understand our purpose.”

The concept of the FMTU is more than a year old but according to Petronzio, there wasn’t much done with the general concept until just a few months ago, when a commander was assigned and a vision was created.

“Through support from the 4th MEB (AT), we have the baseline facilities needed to be a working unit and we have an operational headquarters that is working hard and doing some great things,” said Petronzio.

More than 25 percent of the estimated 430 Marines and sailors have checked into the unit.

“We’ve already started on cultural training and have 11-man teams receiving their baseline training and ready to move into mission-specific training. We hope to have the remainder of our teams started on training by next year and are slowly building our capabilities as we get more people and equipment, added the Beverly, Mass., native.

Some of the baseline training the Marines are participating in include an Enhanced Marksmanship Program course and basic room-to-room house clearing techniques using EMP skills and techniques.

Every FMTU Marine will go through a 5-month training period with the unit, said Petronzio. It will cover basic-infantry skills, additional skills to be an independent operator, and constant cultural and language reinforcement.

“The FMTU is critical because we want to operate in ‘Phase zero’, Global War on Terrorism-relevant countries. We want to be ahead of the power curve on the GWOT,” said Petronzio. “If you can send a small group of Marines into a country to help stabilize its ungoverned areas to train them to do for themselves early and often, then you preclude the need five or 10 years down the road to have an expeditionary force go and straighten the situation out.”

The commander is quick to emphasize that the FMTU is a great, cost-effective way of helping nations help themselves. “We have to focus on those ‘Phase-zero’ places,” says Petronzio. “We need to help them help themselves.

“The big difference for us is that we’re going to focus our attention on those regions of the world relevant to what’s going on today. My personal opinion is that for too long the Marine Corps has conducted random acts of training in countries with no follow up and no continuous progression. The world has changed a lot in the last few years and I think now we need to focus our efforts.

“We’re doing great things, working extremely hard, and getting good Marines. Our hope is to have many non-commissioned officers that have done their deployed time in an infantry battalion. Hopefully they are mature beyond their rank, have a language skill, operate independently, and think outside the normal parameters of a squad or fire team. Many times that Marine will be the only one of his team in any particular country. He needs to be able to operate in an austere environment and make sound and timely decisions on his own. That’s basically what we’re looking for.

Petronzio’s expectation in the next year or two is that the FMTU will relieve the operational tempo of SOCOM and its special operation forces, and heavily engage in those phase zero countries. “We will have a significant contribution to get ahead of the power curve, ahead of the bow wave of this global war on terror. We’re investing small forces now so we don’t have to invest large forces later.”


http://www.marines.mil/marinelink/mcn2000....42?OpenDocument

[Marine]

Chapter XII: Holding the Road to Bataan
On 30 December 1941 the Philippine Commonwealth reaffirmed its faith in the future with the inauguration of President-elect Manuel Quezon at a brief ceremony on the island fortress of Corregidor. Across the bay, the American and Filipino troops were making ready for their last stand before withdrawing to Bataan. Despite Quezon's brave inaugural words, the future of the nascent republic never appeared darker.[1]
Almost all of the troops on Luzon were now north of Manila. The North Luzon Force stood on the D-5 line, from Bamban to Arayat, in front of San Fernando and the road leading into Bataan. (Map 8) Fifteen to twenty miles long, this line was the shortest of the five defensive lines used by General Wainwright's forces. Guarded on the left (west) by the steep heights of the Zambales Mountains and on the right by the rugged 3,367-foot high Mt. Arayat and the twenty-mile-long Candaba Swamp, it was susceptible only to frontal attack by the Japanese force moving south from Tarlac along Route 3.

Ten miles south of Bamban, the west anchor of the D-5 line, an unimproved road, Route 74, branched off from Route 3 to the southwest to give access to Bataan. The main road into the peninsula, Route 7, began at San Fernando, ten miles father south. Troops north and south of San Fernando would have to pass through that town to get to Bataan; only the left elements of the troops on the D-5 line would be able to use Route 74.

General Homma's main striking force was not aimed at the D-5 line, but at Manila. This force, which had broken through at Cabanatuan on the 30th, was moving rapidly down Route 5, east of the Candaba Swamp. Once it reached Plaridel, where a road led westward to Route 3, it would be only a short distance east of the two bridges at Calumpit. If the Japanese secured Plaridel and the bridges quickly enough, they would cut off the retreat of the troops still south of Calumpit and, by gaining a position west of the Pampanga River in the rear of the D-5 line, compromise the execution of the withdrawal into Bataan.

General MacArthur had foreseen this contingency as soon as the Japanese had broken through at Cabanatuan and had quickly sent reinforcements from the North and South Luzon Forces to hold Plaridel and the road to the north as far as Baliuag. Defending Plaridel was as essential to his plan for withdrawal to Bataan as holding the D-5 line. Possession of this barrio meant that the Calumpit bridges over which the forces east of the Pampanga must pass to get to San Fernando were safe. The task of the forces on Luzon was, then, twofold: to hold in the north along the D-5 line and on the east at Plaridel. Failure to


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Map 8: Holding the Road to Bataan

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hold long enough at either point spelled the doom of the entire plan.


MOUNT ARAYAT, looking west.
The Defense of Calumpit
For the defense of the Calumpit bridges MacArthur placed every unit that could be spared east of the Pampanga. From the South Luzon Force came the 51st Infantry (less 1st Battalion) and the 75-mm. guns of Colonel Babcock's SPM provisional battalion, both stationed at Plaridel. The 194th Tank Battalion (less Company C) was posted at Apalit, on the west bank of the Pampanga two miles above Calumpit, in position "to insure the exit" of those forces east of the river. If necessary, the tank battalion was to move to Bocaue, between Manila and Plaridel, to reinforce Company C, part of the South Luzon Force, which was to hold that barrio "until the extrication of North and South Luzon Forces was insured."[2] At least one company of the 192d Tank Battalion was in the Plaridel-Baliuag area.
The 91st Division, retreating down Route 5 from Cabanatuan, reached Baliuag at daybreak of the 31st. It was joined shortly by elements of the 71st Division--the 71st Field Artillery and the 71st and 72d Infantry--which had been ordered there the night before by General Wainwright. The 71st Division units took up positions north of Baliuag and the 91st Division went into reserve south of the town.


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Before 1000 Wainwright's headquarters warned the two divisions that they would have to withdraw from Baliuag in time to clear the Calumpit bridges, nine miles away, by 0400 the next morning.[3]
At approximately 1000 that morning, General Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff, telephoned Jones, commander of the South Luzon Force, and placed him in command of all forces east of the Pampanga. In effect, this made Jones commander of the troops holding the Calumpit bridges. Sutherland ordered Jones to hold the bridges until the 1st Brigade (PC) had passed over and warned him that all troops would have to be west of the Pampanga River by 0600 of 1 January, for at that time the bridges would be blown. Apparently General Wainwright was not informed of the change in command.[4]

The Fight for Plaridel
The defense of the Baliuag-Plaridel area was of the greatest importance. Baliuag, a town of rambling houses and nipa huts scattered along Route 5 and the north bank of the Angat River, commands the approaches to Plaridel, six miles to the south. Plaridel is located at the intersection of Route 5 and several secondary roads, two of which extend along opposite banks of the Angat River to Route 3 and the Calumpit bridges, some eight miles to the northwest The South Luzon Force and those elements of the North Luzon Force in the area would have to pass through Plaridel and along these secondary roads to cross the Calumpit bridges. South of Plaridel lay the invader's route to Manila.
General Tsuchibashi, 48th Division commander, was fully aware of the importance of Calumpit and the Baliuag-Plaridel area. On the 30th he had ordered two tank regiments and a battalion of infantry to advance from Cabanatuan to the Angat River and cut the route from Manila to San Fernando. This force, led by Col. Seinosuke Sonoda, commander of the 7th Tank Regiment, and assisted by a company of engineers to repair roads and bridges, was marching unopposed down Route 5 toward Plaridel on the night of the 30th.[5]

On the morning of 31 December an advance detachment of Colonel Sonoda's force reached the outskirts of Baliuag. The engineers, protected by tanks, attempted to repair the bridge across the stream north of the town, but were met by fire from the 71st Field Artillery. Shortly after, the enemy tanks were brought under fire by a platoon of Company C, 192d Tank Battalion, which lay in concealed positions below the stream. The Japanese broke off the action and withdrew to the east where they effected a crossing around noon. It was at this time that the 91st Division left its reserve position below Baliuag and started for Bataan, leaving the 71st Division elements along in the town.[6]


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By 1330 the Japanese tanks had reached the eastern outskirts of Baliuag and were awaiting infantry reinforcements before making an all out assault against the town. Meanwhile, the 71st Infantry prepared to pull out of Baliuag in accordance with orders. The two infantry regiments and the engineers left in buses around 1400, but the artillery regiment remained behind.[7]
At about this time General Wainwright arrived at Jones' command post in the Plaridel schoolhouse. The North Luzon Force commander, unaware of the fact that Jones now commanded all troops east of the Pampanga, ordered him to take up positions for a close-in perimeter defense of the Calumpit bridge. Jones informed Wainwright of his orders from Sutherland and explained that he intended to hold the enemy at Baliuag rather than at the bridge. While Jones and Wainwright were talking, General Stevens, 91st Division commander, entered the command post, followed a short time later by a South Luzon Force staff officer who announced that the 71st Division had moved out of Baliuag. Jones then ordered Stevens to stop the 71st and put it in position west of Plaridel, along the road leading to Calumpit. Wainwright left soon after for his own command post.[8]

Stevens' efforts to halt the withdrawal of the 71st Division infantry elements proved futile. By 1500 the main body of Sonoda's mechanized force was standing in front of Baliuag and it was perfectly evident that the Japanese were massing for an attack. Deeply concerned over the effect of an attack on the untried 51st Infantry, Jones ordered two platoons of Company C, 192d Tank Battalion, to cross the river and attack the enemy concentration at the east end of Baliuag. The tanks were to be supported by about a half dozen of Colonel Babcock's 75-mm. SPMs which were to fire on Baliuag and its northern approaches when the tanks broke off the attack. After a hasty reconnaissance, Babcock placed his guns on the dry, baked fields a few thousand yards west of Baliuag and sent a forward observer to a position 500 yards west of the town. For communications with the tanks Babcock had a radio-equipped scout car of Company C.

At about 1700 the tanks of Company C, led by Lt. William Gentry, moved out to the attack. As the two platoons approached the enemy, the covering artillery fire, presumably supplied by the 71st Field Artillery, lifted. A bitter fight ensued. The American armor made a shambles of that part of Baliuag in Japanese hands. The tanks rolled through the streets, firing into bahas, smashing through the nipa huts as if they were so many toy houses, and scattering hostile infantry right and left. A brief but wild tanks-versus-tanks action followed. In the fading daylight American and Japanese tanks chased each other up and down the narrow streets, while enemy foot soldiers, in a futile gesture, fired small arms at the tankers. The SPMs and artillery remained idle, unable to fire for fear of hitting their own tanks. When Company C finally broke off the action, it had knocked out eight Japanese tanks with little loss to itself. As the tanks pulled back, the SPMs and


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artillery opened up n Baliuag and continued to fire until 2200 when Fowler and Babcock pulled their men back to Plaridel and then west across the Pampanga. The last of the tanks crossed the Calumpit bridge at about 0230 on 1 January.[9]
Holding the unimproved road from Plaridel to Calumpit was the untried 51st Infantry. When at 0300 the 1st Brigade (PC) cleared the Calumpit bridge General Jones sent his chief of staff to Plaridel with orders for the 51st to withdraw immediately. The retirement began at 0400, 1 January. Meanwhile, the Japanese had entered Baliuag and were pushing cautiously toward Plaridel. At 0400 they were close enough to hear the sound of motors as the 51st Infantry began to pull out, and immediately rushed forward to attack. Firing into the truck column the Japanese hit the rear-most vehicles but inflicted no damage. Lacking motor transportation they were unable to follow. Colonel Stewart pushed ahead rapidly and crossed the Pampanga with his 51st Infantry at about 0500 on the morning of the 1st, the last unit to cross the Calumpit bridge.[10]

"Blow the Bridges"
What the Japanese could not accomplished on the ground they might have accomplished with their air force. On 31 December the highway and railroad bridges spanning the Pampanga at Calumpit presented to the Japanese air force the most inviting target since Clark Field. Heavily laden with dynamite charges for rapid demolition and protected by only two gun batteries of the 200th Coast Artillery (AA), the bridges were extremely vulnerable to air attack.[11] Indeed, like marriage, in Shaw's classic definition, they combined the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
The Japanese failed to take advantage of this opportunity for a decisive blow from the air. The 48th Division urged that the Calumpit bridges be bombed and there were heated discussions over this question, but the view of Col. Monjiro Akiyama, 14th Army air officer, that the destruction of the bridges would prove of little value, prevailed. The 14th Army's order of the 30th, therefore, directed the 5th Air Group simply to attack the retreating enemy and to make an effort to destroy the bridges west of Lubao, just above the base of the Bataan peninsula.[12]

Even with this limited mission, the Japanese air forces made only a desultory effort. Col. Harry A. Skerry, the North Luzon


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Force engineer and the man directly responsible for blowing the bridges, later wrote that he was "amazed" by the "weak air efforts" the Japanese made and "the few planes seen in the sky, despite the previous almost total destruction of our air force and the resulting enemy air superiority."[13]


CALUMPIT BRIDGES spanning the Pampanga River
At about 0500 on New Year's Day, as the 51st Infantry cleared the Calumpit bridge, General Wainwright asked Generals Jones, Stevens, and Weaver if all their units were safely across. He received affirmative replies from these three, but Colonel Skerry pointed out that a platoon of demolition engineers under Lt. Coo. Narcisco L. Manzano (PS) was still on the road south of Calumpit. Nothing had been heard from Manzano since the previous noon, and Colonel Skerry requested that destruction of the bridges be delayed as long as the tactical situation permitted, to enable Manzano's group to escape. Wainwright assented, but all final preparations for demolition were made and orders were issued to fire the charges at 0600.

It was still dark. There was no Japanese air bombardment or artillery fire, but from the south came the sounds of rifle fire. The nervous Filipino troops fidgeted in their positions and stared apprehensively across the river. At 0545, when there was still no sign


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of Manzano's detachment, Wainwright extended the time for blowing the bridges to 0615.
As dawn broke, the noise of enemy rifle fire from the south increased. General Wainwright, unaware that the main Japanese force was pushing toward Manila and that less than a regiment had been sent toward Calumpit, believed that this fire presaged a major Japanese effort to cross the Pampanga. Blowing the bridges would place the deep, unfordable river squarely in the path of the advancing enemy and give the Bataan force time to prepare for defense. Wainwright then made his decision; Manzano and his men would have to reach Bataan by other routes. he turned to his engineer. "Skerry," he said, "we cannot wait any longer. Blow the bridges."

The covering force withdrew to a safe distance, the explosives were checked, and at 0615 the charges were detonated. The air was filled with a roar and a rushing noise, a flash lit up the sky, and the Calumpit bridges disappeared in a mass of falling debris. In front of the defenders flowed the deep Pampanga; to their rear lay San Fernando, where the road to Bataan began.

The D-5 Line: Bamban-Arayat
By the first day of the new year the bulk of the American and Filipino forces had escaped from the enemy pincer movement designed to trap them on the plain before Manila. Calumpit had been passed successfully and the troops from the south had side-stepped the Japanese and withdrawn in good order across the Pampanga. MacArthur's men no longer faced the main strength of Homma's 14th Army, which was pushing rapidly toward Manila.
San Fernando, nine miles north of Calumpit, was as vital to the successful completion of the plan of withdrawal as Plaridel. Not only did the South Luzon Force have to pass through it before turning southwest to Bataan, but almost the entire North Luzon Force would funnel through that town also.

Thirty-five miles northwest of Manila, and strategically second in importance only to the capital, San Fernando is an important road and rail junction. It is there that Route 7, the main road to Bataan, joins Route 3. The troops from Calumpit would have to travel northward along Route 3 to reach San Fernando; those on the D-5 line would withdraw south along this road and Route 10. At San Fernando both groups would pick up Route 7 for the final lap of their journey to Bataan.

The 21st Division on the west flank of the D-5 line was the only unit which could escape into Bataan without going through San Fernando. At Angeles, midway between Bamban and San Fernando, it would leave Route 3 and follow Route 74 to Bataan. All other units north and south of San Fernando would reach Bataan via San Fernando and Route 7.

Even if the enemy did not impede the march to Bataan, the roads over which the tired soldiers must travel to reach the peninsula would present many obstacles. From Calumpit north to San Fernando, and from there south to Bataan, the road was packed with a "solid stream of traffic," military and civilian.[14] Vehicles of all types--cars, buses, trucks, artillery, and tanks--filled the center of the road. In some places, there were stretches of several miles


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where the vehicles were lined up almost bumper to bumper. On each side was an endless line of pedestrians, mostly civilians fleeing from the invading army.


SAN FERNANDO, looking northwest. Route 3 from Calumpit runs diagonally through the photograph; Route 7 leading to Bataan is in upper left. Zambales Mountains are visible in background.
The enemy air force could hardly be expected to overlook so obvious and inviting a target on their way to other, more important military missions. The primary objective of the thirty-two light bombers of the 5th Air Group that day was ammunition dumps, but the Japanese pilots reported that they also dive-bombed American vehicles and "motorized units."[15] Colonel Collier noted that "hostile bombers, with the rising sun glistening on wing tips, flying at low and high altitudes, crossed and recrossed the road."[16] But he saw no dive-bombing or strafing attacks. "Had the bombers struck the jammed columns with bombs and strafing," he wrote, "out withdrawal into Bataan would certainly have been seriously crippled."[17]

Since 30 December General Homma had been strengthening his forces in front of the D-5 line. By New Year's Eve he had on Route 3, in and around Tarlac, the entire 9th Infantry Regiment, the Kanno Detachment (3d Battalion, 2d Formosa), 8th Field Artillery (less one battalion), two batteries of the 22d Field Artillery, and a battalion of the 48th Mountain Artillery. The mission


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of this force was to drive south toward Bataan.[18]
Along the D-5 line stood two Philippine Army divisions, the 11th on the right and the 21st on the left. Between the high ground on each end of the line the terrain was flat, the vegetation consisting of cane fields and uncultivated grassland. As the troops reached this position they began to clear fields of fire and, when they could get the wire, erected-barbed-wire entanglements.[19]

The 21st Division held the left (west) portion of the flatlands along the south bank of the Bamban River from the Magalang-Concepcion road to the Zambales Mountains. on the right was the 22d Infantry; to its left was the 21st Infantry, with the 3d Battalion on the right and the 2d Battalion on the left. Along the front, between the two battalions, were two high multiple-span steel bridges (one railroad and one highway) fording the Bamban River. The engineers had destroyed both bridges, but the river, practically dry at this season of the year, presented no obstacle to advancing infantry and only a slight one to vehicles. To strengthen the river line, therefore, Company C, 23d Infantry, was posted on the high ground north of the Bamban River and west of Route 3, in position to dominate the road and railroad south of the town. The 21st Field Artillery was in general support.[20]

The wisdom of placing Company C in this position was soon confirmed. At about 0130 New Year's Day, a Japanese force mounted on bicycles and estimated as of company size was observed pedaling down the road from Bamban toward the destroyed bridge between the 2d and 3d Battalions, 21st Infantry. The enemy troops were part of the Kanno Detachment, which had been caught in the open by American tanks at Zaragoza two days earlier. Their reception at Bamban was no less warm. As the Japanese cyclists advanced along the short stretch of road paralleling the river east of the bridge, Company C delivered a punishing fire in their midst. After some minutes of confusion and milling about, the surprised and badly hit Japanese force retreated, having suffered thirty-five casualties. Company C gained an assortment of bicycles, swords, and miscellaneous equipment, as well as a wounded Japanese noncom. Since he spoke no English and no one present understood Japanese, he proved useless as a source of information. By the time he had been evacuated to the rear he had died of his wounds.[21]

By 0900 the remainder of the Kanno Detachment had reached Bamban. The infantry soon began an attack against the river line and Company C; the artillery joined in the action about noon. That afternoon the fighting was brisk, with heavy shelling on both sides and with Japanese aircraft participating in the action. But all efforts by the Japanese to cross the river met with failure and Company C was still in position late in the day.

At division headquarters reports of Japanese troop movements south from Tarlac


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to Bamban had been received earlier in the day, once scout noting "that one of our own tanks was being driven around Tarlac to the hilarity of the enemy troops."[22] These report were accurate. The 9th Infantry and supporting troops were moving forward to reinforce the Kanno Detachment. As the Japanese came within artillery range they were brought under fire by guns of the 21st Field Artillery. Although suffering losses in personnel and equipment, the 9th Infantry by 1600 had joined the Kanno Detachment on the north bank of the river.
But the Japanese for some inexplicable reason failed to attempt a crossing. At nightfall the 21st Division began to move out, Company C wading the shallow Bamban to rejoin the division. The entire division withdrew down Route 3 to Angeles, then turned southwest along Route 74 to Porac. The enemy followed cautiously and it was not until 1130 of the 2d that the Kanno Detachment reached Angeles. The Japanese now had possession of the Clark Field area.

It was now the turn of the 11th Division to extricate itself and withdraw into Bataan. This division had recently been strengthened by the return from the Cagayan valley of about 1,000 of its men, drawn largely from the 12th and 13th Infantry Regiments. Its sector of the D-5 line extended from the Magalang-Concepcion road eastward to the Pampanga River. On the right (east) was the reorganized 12th Infantry, holding a front from Mt. Arayat to the Pampanga River and the town of Arayat. It was in position to guard against an unexpected Japanese advance toward San Fernando along Route 10, which connected Gapan on Route 5 with that town.

The western portion of the 11th Division line, from the Magalang road to Mt. Arayat, was held by the 11th Infantry under the command of Col. Glen R. Townsend, who had led the Cagayan valley force. At Magalang a north-south road from Concepcion branched off, one section leading to Angeles on Route 3 and another to Mexico, a few miles northeast of San Fernando. The 2d Battalion, 11th Infantry, was posted across the Magalang road, a few miles north of the town and directly in the path of a Japanese advance from Concepcion. The 3d Battalion extended the line east to the mountains, and the 1st Battalion, recovering from its hard fight at Zaragoza on the 30th, was in reserve.[23]

Early on 1 January General Brougher, the division commander, ordered Colonel Townsend to withdraw his 11th Infantry, starting at 2000 that day. The regiment was to retire along the Magalang road through Mexico and San Fernando to Guagua, about fifteen miles from Bataan.

While the 11th Infantry was preparing to move, an enemy force estimated as a reinforced battalion of infantry with artillery support was pushing south along the Magalang road from Concepcion. At 1630 this Japanese force attacked Townsend's line. Maj. Helmert J. Duisterhof's 2d Battalion, composed of Igorot troops, bore the brunt of the assault. Despite repeated attacks, the Igorots, supported by two 75-mm. SPM


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guns, held firm, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. A Japanese attempt to outflank the 11th Infantry line by pushing elements through dense fields of sugar cane met with failure. At 2000, the appointed hour, the 11th Infantry broke contact and began its withdrawal, passing through the 194th Tank Battalion in position east of San Fernando. By 0200 of the 2d the regiment had reached Guagua. During the night it was joined by the 12th Infantry and remaining elements of the 13th Infantry.[24] With the successful withdrawal of the 11th Division, the troops on the D-5 line had made good their escape through San Fernando. Meanwhile the remaining troops south of that town were doing the same.
Escape Through San Fernando
The blast that destroyed the Calumpit bridges in the early hours of 1 January signaled the end of the South Luzon Force. Its mission completed, the force moved on to Bataan where General Jones rejoined the 51st Division. At the same time General Stevens of the 91st Division and General Weaver, commander of the tank group, went on to San Fernando to join their units.[25]
When the debris had stopped falling at the Pampanga crossing, the covering force of 71st and 91st Division elements, originally organized by Stevens, returned to its positions along the river bank. A second force, the 3d Battalion of the 23d Infantry, with a battery of the 21st Field Artillery, moved into position near Apalit, about 4,000 yards to the north on the west bank of the Pampanga. The mission of this battalion, led by Maj. Charles A. McLaughlin, was to "assist in delaying the enemy advance on San Fernando," by preventing a hostile crossing before 2000. In support of both forces was the tank group, posted just below San Fernando.[26]

Late on the morning of 1 January the Japanese reached Calumpit. The Tanaka Detachment (2d Formosa, less 3d Battalion, and a battalion of the 48th Mountain Artillery) had moved cautiously from Plaridel during the night and now faced the covering force across the wide, unfordable Pampanga. The sight of the Japanese at such close proximity was extremely disconcerting to the poorly trained Filipino troops. Their nervousness was increased by the sight of the Japanese bombers which passed overhead that morning on their way to bomb installations on Bataan.

During the day the Japanese made numerous attempts to push a force across the swiftly flowing Pampanga, but to no avail.[27] The covering force on the river line pulled out for San Fernando during the afternoon, followed that evening by McLaughlin's battalion. The remnants of the 71st and 91st Divisions which constituted the first of these forces were "so badly disorganized and in need of equipment" that they were sent directly to Bataan. McLaughlin's battalion


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rejoined the 21st Division at Porac on the morning of 2 January. The last elements to pass through San Fernando were the tanks. Reaching the town at 0200 on the 2d, after all the others had left, they found it to be "truly a ghost town." The tankers gave the order to blow the bridge across the San Fernando River and in the darkness moved down Route 7 toward Guagua and the American line being formed there.[28]
The Japanese did not cross the Pampanga until the afternoon of 2 January when at 1600 the Tanaka Detachment finally got its artillery over the swiftly flowing river. Once across, Colonel Tanaka moved forward rapidly and by 1830 had reached San Fernando. There he made contact with the Kanno Detachment which had pushed down Route 3 from Angeles.[29]

In the few days from 30 December 1941 to 2 January 1942 the North and South Luzon Forces had completed successfully the most complicated and difficult maneuver of the campaign thus far. They had held at Plaridel and along the D-5 line. A part of the force had crossed the Calumpit bridge, marched through San Fernando, and down Route 7 toward Bataan. Another part had withdrawn from the D-5 line, along the flat grassland west of Mt. Arayat to Mexico and San Fernando to join the others retreating down Route 7. The remainder had moved down Route 3 to Angeles and then along Route 74 to Porac. Everywhere the enemy had been held and the route of escape kept open until the last unit was on its way into Bataan.


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Footnotes
[1] Quezon, The Good Fight, pp. 227-35. General MacArthur and High Commissioner Sayre also spoke briefly and feelingly at the ceremony. MacArthur's speech is printed in Hunt, MacArthur and the War Against Japan, pp. 48-49.
[2] Prov Tank Gp Rpt of Opns, p. 14.

[3] NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 13; USAFFE-USFIP Rpt of Opns, p. 39; ltr, Selleck to Board of Officers, 1 Feb 46, sub: Reinstatement of Ranks; ltr, Col Fowler, CO 71st FA, to author, 30 Apr 49, OCMH; Capt Albert W. Erickson, 71st Inf (PA), pp. 2-3, and Bentz, 92d Inf (PA), pp. 1-2, both in Chunn Notebooks.

[4] Jones, Diary, p. 16. These instructions were passed on to General de Jesus, commander of the 1st Brigade (PC), for his was the only unit not yet in position to clear Calumpit rapidly.

[5] 14th Army Opns, I, 84; statements of Col Moriji Kawagoe, CofS 48th Div, 9 Mar 50, ATIS Doc 56354 and of Maj Makoto Nakahara, Opns Officer, 48th Div, 13 Mar 50, ATIS Doc 56372, in Interrogations of Former Japanese Officers, Mil Hist Div, GHQ FEC, II.

[6] USAFFE-USFIP Rpt of Opns, p. 39; NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 13; Prov Tank Gp Rpt of Opns, p. 14; ltr, Fowler to author, 30 Apr 49, OCMH.

[7] USAFFE-USFIP Rpt of Opns, p. 39; ltr, Fowler to author, 30 Apr 49. Official reports do not record the fact that the 71st Field Artillery remained in Baliuag. This fact is established by the artillery commander, Colonel Fowler.

[8] General Jones was unaware that the 71st Field Artillery was still at Baliuag. Interv, author and Falk with Jones, 1 Nov 49 and 6 May 50. See also, Jones, Diary, pp. 16-17; NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, pp. 13-14; USAFFE-USFIP Rpt of Opns, p. 39; ltr, Fowler to author, 30 Apr 49, OCMH; MacDonald, Supplement to Jones Diary, p. 15.

[9] The account of this action is based on the following sources, many of them in conflict with each other: Prov Tank Gp Rpt of Opns, p. 14; ltr, Weaver to author, 30 Jan 50; Jones, Diary, p. 17; interv, author and Falk with Jones, 31 Oct and 1 Nov 49, 24 Jan 50; ltr, Maj Curtiss (forward observer for the 75-mm SPMs), To Whom It May Concern, 50 Jun 45, copy in OCMH; Collier, Notebooks, II, 78-80; Lt Col Thomas Dooley, The First U.S. Tank Action in World War II (paper prepared for Advanced Officers Class No. 1, The Armored Force School, 1 May 48), p. 12; ltr, Weaver to Wainwright, 20 Nov 45, copy in OCMH; 14th Army Opns, I, 84.

[10] Jones, Diary, p. 17; 14th Army Opns, I, 84; ltr, Col Skerry, NLF Engineer, to Lt Col George A. Meidling, 4 Jun 49, Comment 9. Col Skerry's comments, altogether numbering twenty-one, pertain to Chapter II of Compat Engineer Operations, a projected volume in the Series Engineers of the Southwest Pacific 1941-1945. These comments were sent to the author by Colonel Skerry and are on file in OCMH. They are hereafter cited as Skerry, Comments on Engineer Hist, with appropriate number.

[11] Interv, author with Gen Sage, 28 Feb 51; USAFFE-USFIP Rpt of Opns, p. 39.

[12] Statements of Cols Kawagoe, CofS, 48th Div, and Akiyama, in Statements of Japanese Officials on World War II, GHQ FEC, Mil Intel Sec, I, 19, II, 134.

[13] Skerry, Comments on Engineer Hist, No. 9, p. 5; interrog of Lt Col Hikaru Haba, Intel Officer, 14th Army, Apr 47, Interrogations of Former Japanese Officers, Mil Hist Div, GHQ FEC, I.

The account of the blowing of the bridge is based on Colonel Skerry's Comment 9; Wainwright, General Wainwright's Story, p. 44; and interv, author with Jones and Sage, 28 Feb 51.

[14] Collier, Notebooks, I, 73-74.

[15] 5th Air Gp opns, p. 43.

[16] Collier, Notebooks, I, 74.

[17] Ibid., 76.

[18] 14th Army Opns, I, 64, 71-72.

[19] Mallonée, Comments on Draft MS, 8 Jan 52, OCMH; ltr, Townsend to Ward, 8 Jan 52, OCMH; Central Luzon, Allied Geographical Sec (AGS) GHQ SWPA, Terrain Study 94, I, 48; Skerry, NLF Engineer Rpt of Opns, p. 9.

[20] Brief Hist of 22d Inf (PA), p. 2; Mallonée, Bataan Diary, I, 106; O'Day, 21st Div (PA), II, 14.

[21] The account of 21st Division operations at Bamban is based upon O'Day, 21st Div (PA), II, 15; Brief History of 22d Inf (PA), p. 4; Opns of 21st Inf (PA), p. 2; Richards, Steps to a POW Camp, pp. 7-8; 14th Army Opns, I, 65, 84; ltr, O'Day to Ward, 14 Jan 52, OCMH.

[22] O'Day, 21st Div (PA), II, 15.

[23] NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 12; Townsend, Defense of Phil, OCMH; 11th Inf (PA), Beach Defense and Delaying Action, pp. 21-22, OCMH; Capt Liles, 12th Inf (PA), p. 13; Chunn Notebooks.

[24] Ltr, Townsend to Ward, 8 Jan 52, OCMH; O'Day, 21st Div (PA), II, 15. See also ltr, Col Miller to Ward, 31 Dec 51, OCMH. There is no Japanese confirmation of this action.

[25] Jones, Diary, p. 17; Skerry, Comments on Engineer Hist, No. 9, p. 10; Miller, Bataan Uncensored, pp. 122-23.

[26] NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 14; Skerry, Comments on Engineer Hist, No. 9, p. 10; ltr, McLaughlin to author, 14 Jun 49, OCMH; Mallonée, Bataan Diary, I, 113; O'Day, 21st Div (PA), II, 6.

[27] NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 14; 14th Army Opns, I, 65, 84; USA vs. Homma, p. 3055, testimony of Homma.

[28] NLF and I Corps Rpt of Opns, p. 14; Mallonée, Bataan Diary, I, 114; Miller, Bataan Uncensored, p. 124; Prov Tank Gp Rpt of Opns, p. 15; Dooley, First U.S. Tank Action in World War II, p. 13; ltr, Miller to Ward, 31 Dec 51, OCMH.

[29] 14th Army Opns, I, 84; USA vs. Homma, p. 3055, testimony of Homma.

[Marine]

Force Requirements in Stability Operations
JAMES T. QUINLIVAN


Military requirements for the post-Cold War environment are the central question of a large, somewhat disorganized, debate. The concept of conducting frequent and extended "peace operations" has produced a significant effort to understand both their political context and their military requirements. One category of peace operations, interventions to restore and maintain order and stability, continues its prominence as current news and as a recurring theme in nightmare visions of the future.

It is sometimes difficult to anticipate the force size and the time required to restore and maintain order in a failed or failing state. The force size is driven by two demographic revolutions of the last decades: dramatic growth in the populations of troubled states, and the movement of a considerable portion of that population to the cities. The movement from rural to urban settings is so significant that the populations of some cities exceeds that of many states. The duration of such operations is affected both by their inherent difficulty and by the implicit need in most cases to recreate internal forces of order. Duration adds another dimension, defined by the force available to conduct the intervention and the duration of each unit's stay in the region.

This article investigates the numbers required for stability operations, both for entire countries and individual cities, and explores the implications of those numbers for deployment, rotation, readiness, and personnel retention.

Army Field Manual 100-23, Peace Operations, defines the general concept of "peace operations." Within the broader category, "peace enforcement" is further defined as

the application of armed force or the threat of its use, normally pursuant to authorization, to compel compliance with sanctions or resolutions--the primary purpose of which is the maintenance or restoration of peace under conditions broadly defined by the international community.[1]

Within the general definition of peace enforcement, "restoration and maintenance of order and stability" are those peace enforcement activities in which

Military forces may be employed to restore order and stability within a state or region where competent civil authority has ceased to function. They may be called upon to assist in the maintenance of order and stability in areas where it is threatened, where the loss of order and stability threatens international stability, or where human rights are endangered.[2]

In this article, the term "stability operations" refers to operations in which security forces (combining military, paramilitary, and police forces) carry out operations for the restoration and maintenance of order and stability.[3]

The Problem of Numbers in Stability Operations

There are no simple answers to the question of how many troops are required for any sort of military operations. However, the purpose of stability operations--to create an environment orderly enough that most routine civil functions could be carried out--suggests that the number of troops required is determined by the size of populations. This section discusses the general rationale for such an approach, illustrates the range of force numbers that have been used in military operations that seem to correspond to the definition of stability operations, and suggests implications for current population sizes in operations now described as peace enforcement.

From the start, practitioners of counterinsurgency have been clear in stating that the number of soldiers required to counter guerrillas has had very little to do with the number of guerrillas. As Richard Clutterbuck wrote of Malaya in 1966,

Much nonsense is heard on the subject of tie-down ratios in guerrilla warfare--that 10 to 12 government troops are needed to tie down a single guerrilla, for instance. This is a dangerous illusion, arising from a disregard of the facts.[4]

Conversely, a "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency campaign places the focus on the people, the military consequences of which are requirements for population control measures and local security of the population. Population control measures and local security both demand security force numbers proportional to the population. The static forces that protect the population from insurgents and cut off any support the population might provide to them are essential to the campaign. Consequently, in any stability operation it is almost certain that the force devoted to establishing order will be both larger in numerical terms than the forces dedicated to field combat and more aligned to political aspects of a "heart-and-minds" concept of operations.

This requirement for forces other than in the jungle or its equivalent is a general condition. Over a range of stability operations in which opposition has not progressed to the stage of mobile warfare by main force units, the size of stabilizing forces is determined by the size of the population and the level of protection or control that must be provided within the state. Simply generating forces does not guarantee success. Forces in a stability operation serve a broader political-military approach than simply countering or eliminating insurgencies. The ability to generate forces for a stability or peace enforcement operation is a most necessary condition for success--for even successful political strategies in such situations have a military component. The generation of forces is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving stabilizing objectives.

This proposition is illustrated rather than proven through some historical examples, each of which is described briefly below. Figure 1, below, shows historical cases of forces devoted to particular stability operations.


Figure 1. Security force numbers used in past stability operations.

The figure relates force size to population, showing the security force size per thousand of population. The figure portrays a range of situations, from enforcing the laws in a generally ordered society to situations of maintaining order where the rule of law has collapsed. The numbers shown are simply the aggregated number of police and army (the "security forces") used in particular cases to achieve results that do not always equate to "victory" or "success." The cases are suggestive rather than definitive, but they provide a sense of scale for the resources required in various situations.

• Force ratios of one to four per thousand of population. At the low end of the force requirement scale are the police present day-to-day in generally peaceful populations such as the United States. Overall, the United States is policed at a ratio of about 2.3 sworn police officers per thousand of population. If the ratio is calculated to include the civilian support apparatus of police departments, the ratio increases to 3.1 law enforcement personnel per thousand.[5] Similar numbers are found in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) and other European countries.

There are applications of numbers of this scale to military stability operations. The occupation of Germany immediately after the surrender used nine US divisions in the American Zone. In October 1945, policy changed and the operation shifted to a "police-type" occupation. This change led to the creation of the United States Constabulary (organized as a single large division) charged with the internal security of most of the American Zone of Occupation. The constabulary was created on the basis of one constable for every 450 German civilians (2.2 per thousand).[6] The force was entirely adequate to its limited objectives of enforcing public order, controlling black market transactions, and related police functions.

The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) deployed about 20,000 security forces (16,000 troops and 3600 civilian police) for a variety of duties that included supervision of the cease-fire and voluntary disarmament of combatants, supervision of about 60,000 indigenous police to provide law and order, and administration of a free and fair election. In a population of roughly 9.1 million, the UN force had a force ratio of about 2.2 per thousand of population. By itself, the UN did not have a presence outside of large population centers nor a plausible capability for coercion, control, or protection of either the combatant factions or the civilian population.

• Force ratios of four to ten per thousand of population. A number of operations have used security and military forces at such force ratios:

Ongoing operations in India's Punjab state against Sikh militants deploy a security force of about 115,000 (regular troops, paramilitary security formations, and police) to secure a population of about 20.2 million, giving a force ratio of 5.7 per thousand.[7] The counterinsurgency campaign in the Punjab has been denounced as routinely violating human rights by causing hundreds of disappearances and summary executions. In the face of some popular support for the insurgents, even such a harshly punitive campaign has required large forces to protect and coerce.[8]

In 1965, the United States intervened in the Dominican Republic to stave off an incipient civil war. The United States deployed soldiers and Marines to separate the protagonists and assumed responsibility for stability in much of the country, particularly the capital. Peak deployment of US forces brought 24,000 to stabilize a population of about 3.6 million, giving a force ratio of about 6.6 troops per thousand.[9]

• Force ratios above ten per thousand of population. Force ratios above ten per thousand have been mounted in stability operations. In 1952 the British forces in the Malayan Emergency deployed close to 40,000 regular troops from Britain and the Commonwealth as well as the regulars of the Malay Regiment itself.[10] At the same time, the police force had 29,800 regular police together with 41,300 special constables,[11] for a total full-time security force of more than 111,000. With a population at the time of 5,506,000, the British generated a force ratio of about 20 per thousand of population. If the Home Guard force of 210,000 (1953 strength, not all of whom were either armed or active at any given time) were added to the previous figure, the force ratio would be even higher.

In Northern Ireland the British government deployed for more than 25 years a security force of around 32,000 (including both British military forces and the Royal Ulster Constabulary) to secure a total population of just over 1.6 million, giving a force ratio of about 20 per thousand. The British have recently reduced their military forces as part of an ongoing peace process.

Implications of Force Ratios Based on Population

These population-driven force ratios have a number of implications. For total populations, they imply that stability operations could demand large numbers of peacekeeping forces. For urban populations, they suggest that initial commitments could also be large. Finally, these ratios indicate that long-term commitments might be difficult to sustain without exacting unacceptable tolls on readiness or retention.

Implications for Entire Populations

The populations of countries in the underdeveloped world have expanded markedly relative to the population of the United States. More particularly, the populations of Third World countries have expanded even more dramatically relative to the size of the American military.

Figure 2, below, shows the population of various states on the framework used in Figure 1 to illustrate the historic force requirements for stabilization operations.


Figure 2. Security force size as a function of force ratios and current populations of representative countries.

The figure suggests two implications. First, very few states have populations so small that they could be stabilized with modest-sized forces. Second, a number of states have populations so large that they are simply not candidates for stabilization by external forces. Between the two extremes are countries large enough that only substantial efforts on the part of great powers or substantial contributions from many states could generate forces large enough to overcome serious disorder in such populations. Consider, however, that even many of these countries have populations so large that relatively modest per capita force deployments would entail moving, sustaining, and employing tens of thousands of troops in what the Army calls a "bare-base environment." The more rustic the environment, the larger the logistics tail needed to sustain the force.

Implications at Smaller Scales, Problems with Cities

Some might propose avoiding the problem of total populations by dealing with entire countries a little at a time in some updated version of an enclave or oil spot approach. But the current sizes of starting points or regions in too many states create problems comparable to operations that undertake to deal with the entire state. If we assume that among the first operational tasks of a stabilizing force is securing the capital, entry ports, and principal cities, we must bear in mind that many of those cities are now so large that they themselves constitute major problems for stabilization.

Country
Population
(millions)
Capital
Population
of Capital
(millions)
Capital's
Population
as percent
of total

Columbia 34.0 Bogota 5.0 15%
Cuba 10.9 Havana 2.2 20%
Dominican Republic 7.6 Santo Domingo 1.3 17%
El Salvador 5.0 San Salvador 0.4 8%
Guatemala 10.3 Guatemala City 1.2 12%
Table 1. Populations of Capital Cities as Percentages of Total Populations.
(Estimated populations circa 1993. Source: Europa World Yearbook, 1995.)

In interventions before World War II, the populations of countries in which the United States intervened were such that a small landing force of Marines and sailors often could secure the entry port. The populations of those ports and of the capital cities were generally small and in need of protection from the rural insurgents whose activities motivated the American intervention. Today that situation has changed significantly: capital cities and entry ports now have large populations frequently numbering over a million and, rather than being centers of stability on the fringe of disordered interiors, such cities are now more likely to be the center of disorder.

The problem of numbers is illustrated in the table above, giving the populations of some Caribbean and Latin American countries and their capital cities. Not only are the capitals heavily populated in absolute numbers, but many also contain a sizable percentage of the entire population of the country.

Beyond the absolute numbers of people in such cities, the cities themselves have developed in ways that complicate military operations. Much of the population of Third World cities lives in densely packed squatter settlements on the fringes of the core cities. As we discovered in Somalia, these aggregations of people in flimsy but densely packed shelters, clustered in areas without designed road access, are extremely difficult to patrol or control.[12]

The problem of numbers in the capital city or principal entry port presents an intervening power with a situation quite different from that of a traditional insurgency: Unless the capital city is quickly brought under both control and visible order, the credibility--locally and globally--of the intervention as a force for stability drains away together with whatever political legitimacy the intervention possessed. Therefore, establishing control over the large populations of such cities must be a major objective at the start of any operation, from which the conclusion is that any intervention force must have large numbers at the outset of operations.

The Problem of Numbers for Sustained Operations

The requirement for forces may extend well beyond the anticipated conclusion of an intervention. The United States tends to expect that the forces of other nations will replace American forces soon after initial operations. If such expectations are not met, American military forces can face substantial and long-term commitments. To sustain a force in a stability operation for any length of time, other forces must be available--either preparing for deployment to the operation or recovering and retraining from deployment. The ability to sustain an intervention force depends on the total number of available force units of the desired kind, the number of such units committed to the operation, the time required for training and deploying for the mission, and the time needed for recovery and retraining for the units' conventional missions.

All recent peace operations have relied on infantry-heavy units, either pure infantry or mechanized infantry. Other types of units, such as military police, civil affairs, and psyops, have carried out critical functions, but in manpower-intensive situations such as stability operations there has been simply no alternative to drawing on infantry for the bulk of the force. Other units--engineers, aviation, artillery--can provide support as in regular operations where appropriate, or with proper training they can substitute for infantry. Furthermore, in bare-base regions, the logistics support force requirement will be substantial.

Table 2, below, shows the total numbers of infantry battalions and other units available within the existing force structure for both the Army (active and reserve) and the Marines (active).

Type of Unit Active Army Army Reserve or
National Guard Active USMC
Infantry battalions 42 56 24
Mechanized infantry battalions 26 42 -
Non-divisional Military Police companies 49 110 -
Terminal Operating companies 4 4 -
Table 2. Total 1995 Force Inventories for Some Representative Units.
(Source: Program Analysis & Evaluation Directorate, OCSA, US Army.)

There is an intimate connection between the total force size, the numbers deployed to an operational tour, the length of an operational tour, and the time before a unit or an individual next faces an operational deployment.

In Vietnam, American soldiers and Marines had operational tours as long as 12 or 13 months. In recent history, Western governments have been unwilling to impose such protracted tours. European countries and the United States now generally accept that units will conduct intervention operations in six-month increments (or less). Pure peacekeeping tours such as the US peacekeeping operations in Sinai and Macedonia have been six-month deployments. The same has held true for Marine deployments on presence operations. Commitment to peace enforcement operations, where the prospect of active combat is one of the conditions of the intervention, may develop a shorter rotation cycle.


Figure 3. Time between deployments determined by the fraction of the force deployed.

Figure 3, above, shows the time between operational tours as a function of the total fraction of the units (or personnel) of the given type deployed to the operation compared to the duration of the operational tour.[13] The time between operational tours is an important measure of the effect of the operation on the entire force in two ways:

It defines the total time available for training, both that training required for the unit's stability role and the retraining required to prepare the unit for its original mission upon completion of the intervention operation.
Over a sustained period, it represents the time available for relief between intervention operations for the now relatively large portion of the enlisted force which has chosen the military as a profession.
The general character of Figure 3 shows that, with short operational deployments, the time to next deployment rapidly decreases with the fraction of the force deployed. With one-fifth of the force deployed on this or related operations, the time until the soldier's next deployment is 16 months (with four-month operational deployments) or 24 months (with six-month operational deployments). With a third of the force deployed, the time to next deployment plummets to eight months (for four-month operational tours) or 12 months (for six-month operational tours).

These tour lengths have important implications for readiness and quality of life. If units have only a little more than a year for a cycle of retraining to original role, maintaining skills within their original role, and then training to special deployment tasks, it seems unlikely they will have time to progress to highly integrated combined arms training. This will affect even units that are not deployed; for example, an armored brigade that has had its mechanized infantry battalion deployed to an operation will not be able to train at brigade level or even be able to train battalion task forces by cross-attachment of mechanized companies to armor battalions.

The combination of force ratios, current populations, the size of existing infantry forces, and the implications for rotation can be astounding. Force ratios larger than ten members of the security forces for every thousand of population are not uncommon in current operations (Northern Ireland, or even Mogadishu). Sustaining a stabilizing force at such a force ratio for a city as large as one million (or for a country as small as one million) could require a deployment of about a quarter of all regular infantry battalions in the US Army. With current force sizes this means that within two years, every infantry soldier in the US Army would have been cycled through an operational deployment and many would have started on second deployments to the operational area.

The human consequences are potentially more grave. It is sobering to realize that, at a minimum, any extended commitment to a particular operation could mean many individuals would expect a deployment to that operation every year. It is difficult to predict the full range of effects on family life caused by frequent absences of military family members and their frequent exposure to combat-like conditions. While some might imagine that success in such ventures could breed praetorian ambitions in the military, this is hardly the most likely outcome of frequent returns to combat-like short tours. Those with experience of the Vietnam decade see such commitments leading to retention problems and the attendant increases in training costs, as well as the wearing away of the professional force so painfully established since the mid-1970s.

Implications

In the past decade, as civilian populations in underdeveloped states have exploded, the size of American and allied military forces has declined significantly. Interventions to restore and maintain order and stability place military forces squarely at the juncture of these two trends. As practiced in recent decades, intervention operations are troop-intensive, with the forces required related closely to the size of the populations in the failed or failing states.

The populations of many countries are now large enough to strain the ability of the American military to provide stabilizing forces unilaterally at even modest per capita force ratios. Many countries have populations so large that the United States could participate in their stabilization only through multilateral forces that bring together major force contributions from a large number of countries. And we must finally acknowledge that many countries are simply too big to be plausible candidates for stabilization by external forces.

If a stability operation must be sustained for an extended period, the rotation of forces can have a pronounced effect on the readiness of the rest of the force for other military missions. At the same time, the troops may face repeated deployments to combat-like tours for what appear to be less-than-vital national interests. The effects on retention and ultimately the professionalism of the force seem likely to be adverse.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOTES

1. US Army, FM 100-23, Peace Operations, December 1994, p. 6.

2. Ibid., p. 7.

3. This expression reuses the early doctrinal term "stability operations" which is no longer a part of the lexicon. As defined in 1967, "stability operations" was that type of internal defense and internal development operations and assistance provided by the armed forces to maintain, restore, or establish a climate of order within which responsible government can function effectively and without which progress cannot be achieved. US Army, FM 31-23, Stability Operations--U.S. Army Doctrine (Washington: GPO, 1967). The term is relevant to this article in that it provided analytical and logical continuity between the conditions under which earlier operations were conducted and our present concepts of peace enforcement.

4. Richard L. Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 42-43. See also the discussion of such "tie-down ratios" in Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 81-83.

5. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Crime in the United States 1993, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States 1993 (Washington: GPO, 1994).

6. Earl F. Ziemke, The United States Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944-1946 (Washington, GPO, 1975), p. 341.

7. Interview with Punjab's Director General of Police, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, Jane's Defence Weekly, 23 January 1993, p. 32.

8. Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 1994: Events of 1993 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), pp. 162-63. Amnesty International, An Unnatural Fate: "Disappearances" and Impunity in the Indian States of Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab (New York: Amnesty International, 1993).

9. Lawrence A. Yates, Power Pack: U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965-1966 (Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, 1988).

10. Noel Barber, The War of the Running Dogs, The Malayan Emergency: 1948-1960 (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971), pp. 156-57.

11. Federation of Malaya, Federation of Malaya Annual Report, 1953 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1954), p. 223.

12. Problems of urban insurgency are overviewed in Jennifer Morrison Taw and Bruce Hoffman, The Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to U.S. Army Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, MR-398-A, 1994).

13. The fraction deployed may be different depending on whether it is calculated on the basis of units or personnel. The fraction of personnel of a certain type deployed will be smaller than the corresponding fraction of units deployed because of the additional personnel slots for such personnel in other than TO&E units.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


James T. Quinlivan is Director of the Arroyo Center at RAND, in Santa Monica, Calif. The Arroyo Center is the Army's federally funded research and development center for policy analysis. The author is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and has an M.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an Engineer's Degree in Operations Research from UCLA.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Paramet...995/quinliv.htm

[ghostgovt]

We lost a good Marine

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/26/obit.adams.ap/

Don Adams of 'Get Smart' dead
'Would you believe?' actor was 82

Monday, September 26, 2005; Posted: 3:46 p.m. EDT (19:46 GMT)

Get Smart
Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 and Don Adams as Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart."
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LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Don Adams, the wry-voiced comedian who starred as the fumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s TV spoof of James Bond movies, "Get Smart," has died. He was 82.

Adams died of a lung infection late Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his friend and former agent Bruce Tufeld said Monday, adding that the actor broke his hip a year ago and had been in ill health since.

As the inept Agent 86 of the super-secret federal agency CONTROL, Adams captured TV viewers with his antics in combatting the evil agents of KAOS. When his explanations failed to convince the villains or his boss, he tried another tack:

"Would you believe ... ?"

It became a national catchphrase.

Smart was also prone to spilling things on the desk or person of his boss -- the Chief (actor Edward Platt). Smart's apologetic "Sorry about that, chief" also entered the American lexicon.

The spy gadgets, which aped those of the Bond movies, were a popular feature, especially the pre-cell-phone telephone in a shoe.

Smart's beautiful partner, Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon, was as brainy as he was dense, and a plot romance led to marriage and the birth of twins later in the series.

Adams, who had been under contract to NBC, was lukewarm about doing a spy spoof. When he learned that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry had written the pilot script, he accepted immediately.

"Get Smart" debuted on NBC in September 1965 and scored No. 12 among the season's most-watched series and No. 22 in its second season.

"Get Smart" twice won the Emmy for best comedy series with three Emmys for Adams as comedy actor.

CBS picked up the show but the ratings fell off as the jokes seemed repetitive, and it was canceled after four seasons. The show lived on in syndication and a cartoon series. In 1995 the Fox network revived the series with Smart as chief and 99 as a congresswoman. It lasted seven episodes.

Adams never had another showcase to display his comic talent.

"It was a special show that became a cult classic of sorts, and I made a lot of money for it," he remarked of "Get Smart" in a 1995 interview. "But it also hindered me career-wise because I was typed. The character was so strong, particularly because of that distinctive voice, that nobody could picture me in any other type of role."

He was born Donald James Yarmy in New York City on April 13, 1923, Tufeld said, although some sources say 1926 or '27. The actor's father was a Hungarian Jew who ran a few small restaurants in the Bronx.

In a 1959 interview Adams said he never cared about being funny as a kid: "Sometimes I wonder how I got into comedy at all. I did movie star impressions as a kid in high school. Somehow they just got out of hand."

In 1941, he dropped out of school to join the Marines. In Guadalcanal he survived the deadly blackwater fever and was returned to the States to become a drill instructor, acquiring the clipped delivery that served him well as a comedian.

After the war he worked in New York as a commercial artist by day, doing standup comedy in clubs at night, taking the surname of his first wife, Adelaide Adams. His following grew, and soon he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan and late-night TV shows. Bill Dana, who had helped him develop comedy routines, cast him as his sidekick on Dana's show. That led to the NBC contract and "Get Smart."

Adams, who married and divorced three times and had seven children, served as the voice for the popular cartoon series, "Inspector Gadget," as well as cartoon character Tennessee Tuxedo. In 1980, he appeared as Maxwell Smart in a feature movie, "The Nude Bomb," about a madman whose bomb destroyed people's clothing.

Tufeld said funeral arrangements were incomplete.

[Marine]

Junior Marine is experienced beyond what rank implies
Submitted by: MCB Hawaii
Story Identification #: 2005107202119
Story by Sgt. Joe Lindsay



MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER, TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. (Oct. 7, 2005) -- The shrapnel burning in his legs most likely came from a hand grenade, he figured, considering the fighting was so up close and personal that day in Fallujah. He couldn’t really be sure. It might have been from an rocket-propelled grenade, mortar, or who knows what other kind of homemade bomb some insurgent had put together in his basement. The media and military called these tools of death improvised explosive devices, but it didn’t really matter to him what label they were given or even what exactly it was imbedded inside of him, piercing his flesh.

All that mattered was that he stayed with his men and continued the fight.

Thus began the story of Lance Cpl. Justin Snyder, 21 at the time, and just barely old enough to have a beer. He was squad automatic weapons operator with 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, based out of Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Kaneohe Bay, and he was in the most fierce close-quarters battle that the Marine Corps had faced since Hue City in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

Hawaii seemed a far away place. His home and family in Las Vegas, further still. While other American youths his age were paying money to have pieces of ornately designed shiny metal stuck through their noses, tongues, and belly buttons as the latest youth rite of passage back in states, Snyder was getting paid to have rusty metal fragments tear through his flesh in a far different rite of passage that Marines have been experiencing since 1775.

“I’d always run my mouth about, ‘If you’re an able-bodied young American, then you should join some branch of the service,’” said Snyder, a fire-team leader with Charlie Company, 3rd Platoon, as he sat with an M203 grenade launcher attached to his M-16A2 service rifle in the frigid high desert of Hawthorne, Nev., during a recent training exercise as 1/3 gears up for yet another combat deployment, this time to Afghanistan. “Basically, I was all talk, so I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and here I sit. That’s that.”

Sometimes, though, that isn’t always merely that.

“I’m not sure Lance Corporal Snyder truly understands the impact and importance he has to not only his squad and platoon, but also to his company, his battalion and to the entire Marine Corps as a whole,” said 1st Sgt. Gerard Calvin, first sergeant, Charlie Company, 1/3, and a native of Richmond, Va. “He is a ‘Been there; done that; got the T-shirt Marine,’ and just watching the way other Marines gravitate to him speaks volumes for the respect he commands just by his presence.”

According to Calvin, even though Snyder’s rank of lance corporal may be considered a junior rank, there is nothing junior about this Marine.

“Circumstances have turned him into a seasoned vet,” said Calvin, who is preparing to make his third combat tour to Afghanistan. “You can see the intensity and confidence in his eyes, and the Marines around him are drawn to that. Even as a lance corporal, he is a proven leader of Marines. Any leader worth his salt, and I don’t care what their rank is or how long they’ve been in the Corps, can learn from Marines like Lance Corporal Snyder.”

Gunnery Sgt. Paul Davis, company gunnery sergeant for Charlie Company and an Iraq veteran said he couldn’t agree more.

“Lance Corporal Snyder knows what the unknown is like,” said the Laurens, S.C. native. “On its face, that statement might not seem to make sense, but believe me, to those who have been under fire, it does. He has proven that he will keep attacking with rounds whizzing by his head, and that even when wounded, he will keep going. He is an example to all Marines that intestinal fortitude is as powerful a device as any weapon issued to us. I’m proud to have him in Charlie Company, and I am proud to serve with him.”

For his part, Snyder, despite his combat experience and numerous accolades, said he would never rest on his laurels.

“I lost a lot of good friends, good Marines, in Fallujah,” said Snyder. “I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure as much as our guys come back from Afghanistan as possible, hopefully all of them, while still getting the job done that we are being sent over there to do.”

Because of his past experience in Afghanistan, Snyder said the mountain combat training 1/3 received earlier at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif., and the desert field operations they are currently conducting at Twentynine Palms during the combined arms exercise phase of their training, is so important.

“I’m out here putting what I know to use and also learning a lot of new things,” said Snyder. “You’ve always got to keep learning in the Marine Corps. The day you stop learning is the day it’s time to pack your bags and get out.”

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf...CF?opendocument

[Marine]

1/5 returns from tour in Iraq
Submitted by: MCB Camp Pendleton
Story Identification #: 2005106111640
Story by Cpl. Tom Sloan



MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (Oct. 6, 2005) -- The excitement intensified for the Marines and sailors as their convoy of white busses carried them closer to the camp here during the early-morning hours of Sept. 28.

The men knew what awaited them on the parade deck, which made them all the more eager to get there.

The warriors had spent the last seven months fighting against terrorism and for the freedom of others.

For seven long months, they’d been conducting stability and support operations in volatile Ar Ramadi, Iraq, and wanted desperately to see and embrace their loved ones.

More than 1,000 Marines and sailors with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment returned home from war. Family members and fellow Marines met them on the parade deck and gave them a hero’s welcome.

The homecoming marked the unit’s third deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom since military operations in Iraq began in March 2003.

“This feels great,” said Cpl. Richie L. Gunter, with Company B, as he hugged his wife, Jenny, for the first time in seven months. “I’m so happy to be home and with her again.”

This was the 31-year-old Woodland, Calif., native’s third Iraq tour with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, and it would be his last.

“It’s a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” he added, referring to the fact that he’s now finished fighting.

Gunter is scheduled to leave the Corps in April, after which he plans on going to work for his father-in-law on his tomato farm.

The Marines conducted countless missions in the Al Anbar capital city in an effort to quell the insurgency and restore its infrastructure, explained Lt. Col. Eric M. Smith, the infantry battalion’s commander.

“Everyday Marines were out there doing heroic acts,” said the 40-year-old Marine leader from Plano, Texas. “Ramadi required a consistent level of action.”

The endeavor was often difficult and dangerous, Smith said, requiring his Marines to operate day and night.

“The Marines were selflessly devoted to the mission, and their actions were tireless,” he continued. “The important thing to remember is Ramadi has an ambient level of violence. We had to operate in a city with a healthy level of insurgency and also watch out for the well being of the civilian populace.”

Smith said fighting insurgents in Ramadi, which has fully operating hospitals, schools and markets, was a unique task for his Marines. It required them to be equal parts warrior and diplomat, he explained.
He said it was difficult to fully prepare yourself for a mission as difficult as Iraqs, but that they did they’re best and were helped by the training they did receive.

“There’re lots of different types of Iraq. We had to be good Marines.”

First Battalion, Fifth Marines also trained several hundred members of the Iraqi Security Forces to fight the city’s insurgency during the deployment.

“We stood up and introduced a company of ISF into Ramadi,” he said. “They’re living in the city and are conducting operations against the terrorists.”

According to Department of Defense officials, a competent force of ISF who are capable of providing security to Iraq without assistance is the ticket home for the U.S. military. “It was a milestone for us,” officials said.

The insurgents’ preferred weaponry came in the form of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which they placed on roads throughout the city and used to target convoys.

Insurgents also attacked Marines with small arms fire.

The biggest engagement was in May when 20 insurgents attacked Marines at an entry control point.

“That gunfight resulted in us killing 13 insurgents,” Smith said. Marines captured the other seven, he said.

The infantry battalion suffered its own losses during the deployment.

Fifteen Marines and one Navy corpsman were killed while fighting terror on the urban battlefield.

“We left 16 good men behind and 125 were wounded, some of them severely,” Smith said. “It humbles me to know that these men were willing to sacrifice such things for the good of the mission. They fought and died for our brother Marines.”

Smith said it hurts him that he wasn’t able to bring home all his men.

“You can’t make (their death) right with them or their families,” he said. “You feel unfulfilled returning home without them.”
Smith said leading a battalion in combat was his ‘solemn duty.’

“It was my obligation, my duty,” he said. “I was surrounded by 1,000 brave men and America has a significant debt of gratitude to pay to these men. They’re no different from the men who fought in World War II and saved the world. There’s no difference in the Marines who attacked down central Ramadi and the Marines who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima. It’s the same level of heroism. Marines are Marines, and they carry on the warrior tradition.”

Editor’s note: Cpl. Sloan deployed with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, serving as the unit’s combat correspondent. Sloan is a native of Coleman, Texas.

http://www.marines.mil/marinelink/mcn2000....A2?opendocument

[ghostgovt]

This is the part that gave me chills [The marine guy says "Oh no, we've gotta go in and get it."]


http://www.petdance.com/nr/interviews/hell-on-wheels.html

Naked Raygun interviewed in
Hell On Wheels

The following is taken from Greg Jacobs' excellent book Hell On Wheels: A Tour Stories Compilation. It's got tour stories from a zillion different (mostly punk) bands, from All to X, with stops in the middle for Mary's Danish, Butthole Surfers, Dwarves, Superchunk and L7.

I broke it up into paragraphs, as the original in the book is just one big stream of text, which is hard enough to read in the book, but would be harder onscreen. Parenthetical comments are direct from the text.

Pierre Kezdy was interviewed by Greg Jacobs at the Casbah in San Diego, CA.

Pierre: This is when John (Haggerty) had just quit Naked Raygun, so we had a new guitar player, Bill Stevens [sic]. Our regular roadie couldn't make it, so I got this marine friend of mine to do it. He's a total marine! We had to do some special gig in New York. The roadie and Bill drove out with the van. We all, the rest of us (in the band) flew out. (After the show) everybody else except me the roadie and Bill Stevens drove back. We figured, "Ah "expletive deleted" you know, New York to Chicago, 17 hours, we'll just go right through."

So we get out of New York, it's about 5:00, and the roadie says, "I gotta get something to eat, I'm "expletive deleted"in' hungry." I go no, let's just keep driving. And he has to stop at a gas station in "podunk" Pennsylvania. And this place was ancient, it was from the 1930s. He looks through the dusty old menu and he sees stromboli on there. He has to have a stromboli. So he orders his "expletive deleted"in' stromboli. It literally took two-and-a-half hours to make this stromboli. We just sat in this "expletive deleted"in' gas station and they kept saying: "Oh, it's coming, it's coming." Two-and-a-half hours at this gas station for this stromboli. So finally we got back on the road, we kept driving and we got tired, so we pull over at a hotel.

The next morning we get out, get right on the Ohio State Turnpike and I'm driving the van. All of a sudden just hear this explosion, and smoke starts pouring through the dash. White smoke starts pouring through the dash, and I thought, "White smoke... it must be a radiator host." So I pull over to the side of the road. We pile out of the van. And the smoke is starting to come out the front now. We were thinking, ""expletive deleted", a little radiator host?" And then we though "Oh jeez, I hope it's not on fire!" All three of us looked down below the fan and as soon as we looked down flames shoot out from underneath the van. All theses semis pull over; they've got their fire extinguishers out, they couldn't put it out. We start hauling our gear out, throwing it down the dith, so we had drums rolling down the ditch, amps rolling down the ditch. We were trying to get everything out.

Now the smoke is turning black, the flames are up in front. We were all trying to pull all of our personal "expletive deleted" out of there but the smoke got too bad, and the big amps were still in there. I said ""expletive deleted" it, just it burn." [The marine guy says "Oh no, we've gotta go in and get it."] He "expletive deleted"in' goes in there. So I figured if he's going in there, I'm going in there too. Luckily the wind direction changed towards the front of the van. We got the amps out. When the two amps were out, flames started shooting out the back. The guitar player says, "I left my leather jacket in there." What does the marine do? He says, "I'll go get it." "expletive deleted"ing flames were shooting out of the van, he jumps in there, grabs the leather jacket and comes out totally unscathed. By then, the fire department showed up and they just let the thing burn. The fuel line was feeding the fire. It burned to a crisp.

Then I called Jeff (Pezzati the singer), he had already gotten back and he was at work. He had all the insurance papers and stuff. I said, "Jeff guess what?" He said "what?" I said "The van burned!" And he goes, "just get it fixed and drive back, you know, put it on your credit card or something." And I said, "No you don't understand, the van is toast!" He goes, "Well stay overnight somewhere and get it fixed and come back." I said "You don't understand; the van is "expletive deleted"ing gone!" There was literally nothing. All the tires burned, everything burned. It was just a metal hull sitting on the highway. It took Jeff 5 minutes to realize that the van was gone. Plus, we had 1,000 T-shirts that were not insured, so we lost about $5,000 in shirts. That was pretty hairy!