Donald E. Vandergriff: Seven Wars and a Century Later, a Failed System
Donald E. Vandergriff: Seven Wars and a Century Later, a Failed System
About
the Author
Major Donald E. Vandergriff, USA, an armor officer, teaches military science at Georgetown University Army ROTC. Vandergriff began his military career with the United States Marine Corps, and has had extensive experience in the field with the Army. After he transferred from the Marine Corps to the Army National Guard, he initially served as a cavalry platoon leader in the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment (TNARNG). Upon entering active duty, he served in the Republic of Korea as a tank platoon, tank company executive officer and scout platoon leader for almost two years; at the National Training Center (serving both as an observer controller and in the OPFOR); and in the Middle East and Germany.
He has his undergraduate degree in education from the University of Tennessee, a graduate degree in military history from American Military University, and began his PhD studies in military history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Major Vandergriff has lectured extensively on military effectiveness and cultural impacts in the United States and Europe. He has also been the subject of several articles that deal with military effectiveness and military transformation, including features in the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker Magazine, The National Journal, Government Executive Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Army Times, Stars and Stripes, Norfolk News-Gazette and Pittsburg Star.
He currently lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with his wife Lorraine, and their three dogs and one cat. Vandergriff has always been athletically competitive, playing Rugby at the University of Tennessee 1982-1984, at Fort Irwin 1987-1990, in Germany 1993-4, and in Northern Virginia 1996-97. Vandergriff also participated in Iron Man competitions from 1987-1990, and was an avid snow skier. His current hobbies include Tennessee college football, military wargaming, mountain biking, hiking and his dogs.
To understand today's readiness problem confronting the U.S. military, it is necessary to take a close look at how the services - in this case, the U.S. Army - has managed its personnel for the past century. For the Army itself is firmly stuck in the past.
The current Army culture believes in and practices the Individual Replacement System (IRS), which can best be summarized by what one Army colonel recently told me: "I had a tank company in Germany, and you get a new guy, you want to put him in a tank knowing he's been trained at Fort Knox on this same tank. You put him in there and he'll fight the tank, because he knows what to do."
This cultural belief - which originated in the late 19th-century theory of management science known as Taylorism - has become deeply "hard-wired" in the policies and procedures of the Army in the more than a century it has been in place. It had enormous cultural prestige at the beginning of the 20th century when Secretary of War Elihu Root imported it into the War Department, and the service later adopted the IRS as the Army mobilization and replacement policy in 1912, six years before the United States entered World War I.
After-action reports in every conflict since World War I have documented the devastating impact of the IRS system on U.S. combat effectiveness, prompting the Army to implement personnel programs based on units rather than individuals. But the overall personnel system remains deeply flawed to this day.
In the Army's history from the Revolutionary War until today, there have been 11 attempts at manning the force by unit instead of individual replacement. Up until the 1898 Spanish-American War, the country's military strategy relied on a strong Navy as its frontline defense, backed by a small regular Army - to garrison and defend the frontiers and coastal fortifications - backed by a state militia system for mobilization in time of invasion. This was the only system our young and economically-strapped country was willing to accept.
Prior to World War I, the Army existed on a regimental system that recruited its soldiers throughout the nation by regimental recruiters of numbered regiments. In time of war, this system expanded through state militias, later the National Guard. It met wartime needs by also recruiting locally and appointing its own regimental officers. Rapidly promoted West Point graduates or bestowing higher rank on ambitious politicians - to the demise of that unit in combat - temporarily filled the command and staff needs of brigades and higher units. To the country, through the results of previous wars, this system worked fine, but the first industrial age war, America's Civil War, presented new challenges.
The large scope of the Civil War put incredible demands on the personnel system. The Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795 had earlier put 90-day limits on serving state troops, but the Union disaster at Bull Run in June 1861 woke up the nation to the new realities of war. Many laws were passed following Bull Run, including a three-year enlistment of state troops, enlargement of the regular Army, and screening boards to get rid of poor officers. But the Army failed to effectively sustain units during the war.
The Union and Confederate armies used different methods in their attempts to sustain units. The Confederates in early 1862 adapted a system similar to a European depot system: They kept the number of their regiments low, and fed in replacements from the same geographical region. The intermissions between campaigns were the equivalent of a program to periodically rotate units back from the line - and veterans had time to integrate the "newbies" into their units prior to the next campaign.
This kept their regiments stronger - and more effective - until the mid-summer of 1864, when the Confederacy literally ran out of replacements.
In contrast, the Union continually raised new regiments at the demands of governors who wanted to reward political patronage by providing supporters with regimental commands. As a result, several times during the war these new regiments would go through terrible bloodletting as both the leaders and the led experienced combat for the first time. Later in the war, the Union did ensure that the recovered wounded and sick were returned to the same regiment. But, the system was so wasteful that Gens. Ben Butler and William Tecumseh Sherman pleaded for its replacement with a "French depot system."
Thirty-three years after the Civil War ended at Appomattox, the United States went to war against Spain, and again, suffered from poor planning and personnel management.
As a result, President William McKinley appointed corporate lawyer Elihu Root as Secretary of War. Root misinterpreted Emory Upton's 1876 examination of the Prussian Army and translated this with an analogy that compared the big centralized corporations of the day with that of the German General staff.
Root's reforms established a weak Army general staff, which included centralized personnel management modeled on the personnel systems common to large corporations, particularly in the form of management policies evolving from industrialist Frederick Taylor, who advocated training individuals in specific tasks, which turned them into "cogs in a machine." By 1912, the War Department adopted the Individual Replacement System, with the military unit serving only as an administrative center.
At the beginning of both World War I and World War II, personnel experts advocated a unit rotation system at the division level (much like Germany's system). But the Army continued to favor the IRS system because of the emergency requirement to raise a large Army in a short time, the competition for manpower in other services, industry and agriculture, and the fact that the U.S. leaders recognized they could rely our allies to slow down or bleed the Germans while the U.S. military prepared for the conflicts.
When the Army finally entered combat in Europe in 1918, the bloody allied offenses allowed no time to rotate units. Instead, under the new IRS system, Gen. John J. Pershing and his staff broke up newly-arriving divisions as they disembarked in France, with individual troops then being fed into the committed divisions.
The Army again rediscovered the flaws in the IRS as early as the massive Louisiana Maneuvers in the American South in 1941. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had drawn up plans for a 200-division Army in order to rotate divisions out of line and rebuild them. But by mid-1943, he then decided in favor of 90 divisions supplied by IRS. Again the reasons were competition for critical manpower with other services, industry and agriculture.
In the Pacific, where there were pauses between battles, veterans could easily integrate replacements into divisions. It was in the European theater where soldiers suffered the most from the use of the IRS. There, the system kept veterans on the front for the "duration" - with some suffering severe trauma and nervous breakdowns, while replacements had little time for acceptance into experienced groups before exposure to combat.
After World War II, serious debate resumed on what type of personnel system would best prepare the Army for war while conforming to the democratic values of the nation. The Keane Board in 1946 - analyzing the lessons of World War II - was harshly critical of the IRS. The panel advocated a regimental system incorporating unit cycles consisting of cohesive units. But again, the Army kept the IRS and was still using it in 1950 when the Korean War erupted.
Korea again confirmed the fatal weaknesses of the IRS system as individual replacements were used to fill up under-strength units as they arrived. Gen. Donn Starry, commander of the Army Training and Doctrine Command during 1979-83 recalled, "The replacement (troops) would arrive with dinner and after a night against the Chinese, leave in body bags as breakfast arrived."
Still again, the Army and Defense Department had mobilized for combat, prosecuted a war and returned to a peacetime posture afterwards, without seriously reorganizing a consistently failing personnel management system. And 12 years later, we did it yet again in Vietnam.
Once the Army began deploying ground combat units to Vietnam in 1965, it not only employed IRS to support them, but used an "infusion program" which destabilized units even more. It was the worst of all worlds: By inserting newly-arriving soldiers in deployed units, and by scattering soldiers with similar discharge or transfer dates from their unit to different ones, the Army successfully destroyed unit cohesion - the irreplaceable combination of esprit de corps and individual soldier morale critical to success in combat.
Between the end of the Korean War and after the Vietnam War, the Army did experiment with various unit-based programs, from the platoon to the division level. They all failed for the simple reason that they focused on unit rotation and not unit cohesion.
Of all these unit-based systems, the Cohesion, Operations, Readiness and Training, or COHORT, was the most successful. As with past systems, it was a compromise - only enlisted personnel would be involved. Unlike other systems, COHORT had the support of many senior Army leaders who obtained the necessary policy and legal changes to make it possible. COHORT was a small part of an evolutionary regimental system that involved cohesive units, managed deployment cycles and affiliation with a regiment.
But despite the superiority of COHORT over IRS-filled units (confirmed by Walter Reed Army Research Institute studies from 1985-87) the traditionalists imbedded in the Army personnel system waited it out. By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, COHORT was dead.
Our soldiers fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraqi insurgents today are struggling under a deeply-rooted set of personnel manning policies that hampered, and sometimes even crippled, U.S. combat effectiveness at San Juan Hill, the French Ardennes, Normandy Beach, Chipyong-ni, the A Shau Valley, Point Salines and Mutlaa Ridge.
After a century and seven wars, you'd think the Army's leaders would have gotten it by now.
But they haven't. There are new studies being produced, but no actions.
Major Donald E. Vandergriff, an armor officer, is author of Path to
Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs. He can be
reached at vandergriffdonald@usa.net
