Transforming the Force—From Korea to Today. Robert H. Scales, Jr. - Major General Retired - Interview

FA Journal, July, 2001 by Patrecia Slayden Hollis

Q As both a participant and historian, what did you learn front the post-Cold War transformation of the Army and how does that apply to the transformation today?

A First, I believe the premise of your question is incorrect--the process of the Army's transformation actually began with the Korean War and continues today. According to my research and as the thesis of my new book, the Army has been transforming for 50 years from a "big-war" Army into one shaped to fight limited, firepower-intensive wars. [The book is Three Paradoxes: An Essay on the Future of Land Warfare, being published by Rowman and Littlefield, Inc., and is clue out this fall.]

The Korean War was the first major American conflict in this century that was fought for limited ends. Unlike World Wars I and II, we no longer had a ''blank check'' to spend resources to achieve national objectives. The process has continued as each successive conflict has shaped and clarified, almost in a Darwinian fashion, how the American Army will have to fight in the future.

The problem was that during the Cold War from 1950 to 1989, our doctrinal focus always returned to the north German plain to the more sinister but more familiar prospect of fighting an unlimited war for national survival against the Russians. To its great credit, the Army quickly learned to modify its fighting methods to accommodate the new realities of limited liability wars.

For most western armies, fighting a limited liability conflict means they have limited resources to pursue their national objectives. And increasingly, beginning in Korea and going through Kosovo, part of limiting the cost of a conflict became limiting the loss of human life. For example, even the Russians in Chechnya had to accommodate this realization. They learned quickly that they could not afford to suffer huge tactical losses as the Russian people watched the conflict on television

This leads to the question: What does all this mean in terms of firepower? In the classical example, a commander balances his application of maneuver and firepower early in a campaign that is based on the norms of conventional war doctrine. Once the campaign evolves, he adds more and more firepower to limit the exposure of his maneuver forces to destruction, Americans in particular. The problem is that if the war lasts too long, the enemy adapts the way he fights to lessen the killing effects of firepower. Then the demands for killing power become so great that the firepower "tail" starts wagging the operational "dog," and the military force becomes ossified, resulting in stalemate. Stalemate is a condition no American force can tolerate.

Korea is a good example. In the early days of Korea, we applied doctrinally correct apportionments of maneuver and firepower-roughly two artillery battalions per maneuver brigade with some restricted use of close air support. We tended to approach operations from the Pusan Perimeter up to our withdrawal from the Yalu River in terms of corpsand division-level operations.

Now, "fast forward" to April 1951. The maneuver focus shifted downward as the firepower component escalated. Operations were at the battalion and regimental levels or lower and the apportionment increased radically-as many as 14 to 15 artillery battalions supported a single maneuver battalion. The point is we went through the doctrinal readjustment out of necessity when commanders realized they had to substitute firepower for manpower. Gradually, the infantry transitioned from a traditional big-war maneuver force, in the sense of closing with and destroying the enemy, into a force that found and shaped the enemy for the artillery and air power to kill.

Fast forward to Vietnam. In the early days, operations were multi-brigade and, in some cases, division-level and were supported by the doctrinal apportionment of artillery and close air support. But, again, the employment of maneuver changed and so did the apportionment of artillery.

The first Army leader to really understand this phenomenon was General William Depuy with his "find, fix, flush and finish" maneuver doctrine. When he took command of the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, the tactic was to put battalions of soldiers in the field to find platoons. Often the enemy had the upper hand, particularly if he found our infantry first. At best, these were "fair" fights at the tactical level. But Depuy understood that the American Army could not afford fair fights. The losses were simply too great.

My research shows that in the past 50 years, more than 70 percent of all combat deaths in close engagements were suffered by maneuver forces who were seeking to find the enemy. In Vietnam, General Depuy began to "find" the enemy with the smallest possible maneuver force--squads or platoons--and then "fix" the enemy's location without getting inside the lethal area of his organic small arms. Next, maneuver or firepower "flushed" the enemy out to be "finished" with killing firepower.

In a limited liability war where casualties have become our strategic center of gravity, we simply cannot afford bloody close engagements any more. We must achieve our objective quickly because the longer a war lasts and the more casualties we sustain, the fewer the options we have to maintain the initiative.