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This lesson is hopeful because there is evidence that the US Army has gotten smarter over the past century. We learned from the stosstruppen of 1918, whose teachers learned from the Boers: the answer to men operating beyond audible control is to teach them to make decisions; the answer to lack of resolve is to train individual riflemen to protect each other by use of cover and suppressive fire; the answer to indiscipline is practice; and the answer to lack of motivation is to open the combat infantry only to those who view arms as a serious profession, deserving of the same dedication to skill-building and pride of accomplishment as, say, plumbing or carpentry.

Keep the Mavericks
When serving as the American military observer with the Prussian Army during the Franco-
Prussian War, Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan was asked by a high Prussian officer--very possibly the
great Helmuth von Moltke himself--how he thought the US Army would do against the
Prussians, to which he replied, "Grant, if given the armies of the Potomac and the Tennessee,
would land in Lisbon and capture Berlin in six weeks."⁴⁸

The second lesson is more somber. Why did the US lose its lead in the state of the infantryman's art? Think back to Morgan Smith's brigade at Fort Donelson. The US Army had modern infantry assault technique in hand fifty years before anyone else. We either misplaced it or deliberately threw it away. Either way, the phenomenon cries out for explanation. The point is not that we re-learned the techniques from the Germans, who learned from the Boers. After all, so did everyone else. It is not that we ignored our own theoreticians. Again, other countries did the same. It is not even that Europe and Asia were blind to the lessons of the Civil War. The point is that we turned our backs on those lessons after having bought and paid for them.
Long stasis in technique is so uncommon in history that the rare examples spark curiosity: Thales of Miletos's atomic theory, Gregor Mendel's genetics. Clearly, something was unique about the US Army between 1870 and 1885--something which England, France, and Germany, for instance, did not share.
My sobering hypothesis is that America at the time went through a period of weak civilian- military interaction.
Instead of fighting the tendency of militia (National Guard or Reserve) units to degenerate into social clubs, Upton's Army worked around it--they simply avoided integrating weekend warriors into combat. Conscription was eliminated and a professional army put in place. The Army turned inward, "cultivating professional skills while expecting the worst from a society that does not understand the military and quietly nursing a grudge against politicians who misuse and then

48_{Nofi p. 149.}

F.W. Sweet CW50024

abuse them for failing to deliver." Narrow dedication to improved training and organization coexisted with mistrust towards politicians' attempts to control operations. The result was loss of civilian-military contact.⁴⁹

Human resource development lost variation. Officers were promoted up or out, with few opportunities to remain at company or low field grade level. General officer candidates followed a ticket-punching series of assignments and commands which bred homogeneity of outlook. Career paths in Upton's army left so little room for individuality that neither von Moltke the Elder, who never commanded more than a company, nor Leonard Wood, who joined as a 25 year old doctor, could have reached field grade.⁵⁰

As they slid from reform to orthodoxy to calcification, Upton's Army inadvertently expelled the unruly mavericks who insisted on finding their own path. Creative brilliance departed with them. The problem is that teams of like-minded men work smoothly together as long as stability reigns, but they can all go down together when their world suddenly changes. Private industry recognizes this danger and guards against it.⁵¹

The hypothesis is sobering, of course, because the scenario seems familiar.
In conclusion, I offer one last quote which I came across while researching this paper. Mercy stops me from naming its author, but it is from a Military Affairs article cited several times. The sentence reads:
There is doubtless little of a practical nature to be learned in the thermonuclear missile age from
the way men advanced against fire one hundred years ago.

-- End --

49_{Cohen, Making do with Less or Coping with Upton's Ghost.-- This paper was presented at the War College's Sixth Annual Strategy Conference on 26-28 April 1995. Germany's General Staff also enjoyed relative freedom from civil government control, but it retained strong ties to the public through conscription and its expansible cadre army.} 50_Ibid.
51_{For references, see anything by Pete Drucker or Tom Peters.}

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Copyright © 1999-2002. ConsimWorld.COM. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Web Masters are encouraged to link directly to this page, this URL is not subject to change. For general site information: kranz@consimworld.com

Copyright © 1999-2002. ConsimWorld.COM. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Web Masters are encouraged to link directly to this page, this URL is not subject to change. For general site information: kranz@consimworld.com

Copyright © 1999, 2000 ConsimWorld.COM. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Web Masters are encouraged to link directly to this page, this URL is not subject to change. For general site information: kranz@consimworld.com