Relevance Of Gen. William E. DePuy, The

Army, Mar 2008 by Gole, Henry G

Old soldiers may find it hard to believe that Gen. William E. DePuy published his first article in ARMY Magazine 50 years ago, retired from active duty 30 years ago and died 15 years ago. His decision to publish most of his articles in ARMY causes one to pause and ask why. One answer is provided by Col. Lloyd Matthews, U.S. Army retired, former editor of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. Matthews was then-Brig. Gen. DePuy's briefing officer in 1965, when DePuy was J-3, MACV, in Vietnam, and was in daily contact with him. He admired DePuy as a man of action and a thinker, admired his lucid prose and eloquence, and maintained contact with him over the years. Despite a decades-long association, DePuy declined the frequent invitations of editor Matthews to publish in Parameters. He said that ARMY readership was precisely the target audience he wanted. And ARMY's circulation was much larger than that of Parameters.

There was another link connecting Gen. DePuy to ARMY Magazine and the Association of the United States Army (AUSA). It dated from 1956-59, when he served in the Office of the Chief of Staff, Army (OCSA) during the acrimonious fighting among the services as Army leadership chaUenged the wisdom of the massive retahation strategy of the 1950s. Upon arrival at his job in the Pentagon in 1956, he found "an amazing situation. Eisenhower was President, and massive retahation was the strategy. The Air Force was riding high. The Army was feeling sorry for itself." He might have added that missile-firing submarines and carrier battle groups also fit the strategy Uke a glove, predisposing the Navy to massive retahation.

Conversely, the Army was left out of the atomic age as the rifles, bayonets and hand grenades of infantrymen were relegated to the dustbin of history.

So, said DePuy, "We worked the interservice beat." He said he helped energize AUSA, which began in 1950. ARMY Magazine and AUSA were telling the Army story, which inclined him to publish his articles in ARMY.

Despite his skill as a writer, DePuy published only a few articles during his 36 years on active duty (1941-1977), all in ARMY Magazine. Nevertheless, he was a prolific writer for his entire Ufe. His letters, directives, lectures and analyses of a multitude of subjects are voluminous, but they were not available to the general reader until a scholar published many of them as "Selected Papers" in 1994.

After his second battalion command experience, where his focus had been on fraining squads and platoons, he published "11 Men 1 Mind" in Makh 1958.

After his work in OCSA in the late 1950s, as the flexible response strategy was emerging, his piece called "The Case for a Dual Capability," meaning conventional and nuclear capabilities in the Army, appeared in January 960.

His article, "Unification: How Much More?"-on the limits of "jointness" and the continuing need for the special skills and cultures of the Army, Navy and Air Force-appeared in April 1961.

The titles of the articles announce the A to Z of professional military concerns-rifle squad to nuclear sfrategy and the roles of the services-and reflect the range of DePuy's inquiring intelligence. He wanted to know how things work at all levels of complexity and was masterful in explaining what he learned. His reading and private study were extensive; he consulted professional colleagues, and he appeared at congressional committee hearings. Knowledge, clarity and personality combined to make him a supremely persuasive man.

In "retirement," DePuy pubUshed numerous articles and reviews from 1978-1990. That work reflects his mature thinking on issues of long-standing interest to him.

In 1978 he asked, "Are We Ready for the Future?" and answered: Exploitation of high-technology weapons and equipment to attain maximum combat power requires better organization, doctrine and training. We need smaller infantry and tank companies, he argued, and with a higher ratio of leaders to troops so that sophisticated-and expensive-weapons systems are brought to bear on the enemy more efficiently. That means smaUer, but more, battaUons. He concluded: "We cannot have the best man on a $200 typewriter while a less-qualified soldier operates a milUondollar tank."

His 1979 "Technology and Tactics in Defense of Europe" emphasizes the harmonization of tactics and modern weapons. "The gap between potential and actual battlefield performance has always been large and is growing." It must be narrowed, he wrote. "The challenge is to use technology most effectively on a dirty and disorderly battlefield." And it must be done with allies. He concluded this piece with an admonition he credits to Gen. Erich Ludendorff: "A strategical plan which ignores the tactical is foredoomed to failure." (The reverse is also true, as Ludendorff learned in the spring of 1918, when his many tactical successes faUed to produce sfrategic success for Germany.)

In "One-Up and Two-Back?" (1980), DePuy returned to a lesson from his World War II experience: learning and practicing a better way to penetrate enemy defenses. "We have had it backward aU along," he wrote, and referred admiringly to the German Hutier tactics of World War I and to Erwin Rommel's in that war, bypassing and infiltration being the preferred methods. When frontal assault is necessary, heavy suppression focuses where a small assault force then penetrates and opens the gap for exploitation. Tests and the combat experience of the Israelis in 1973 and the Germans in World War II confirm that wisdom. "Nine to 1 may be an extreme ratio, but that [suppression-to-assault ratio] seems clearly the way to lean."