The Path to Victory America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs by Donald Vandergriff Presidio, 376 pp., $34.95 LAST MONTH the United States Army brought approximately 3,000 troops of the Tenth Mountain Division back from Kosovo and 3,000 troops of the 101st Airborne Division back from Afghanistan. Both units had been deployed for about six months, and their rotation home was billed as strictly “routine.” So it was, but does this routine make any sense? Think about your own job. Would you become really, really good at it in just six months? By the end of that time, you might just be starting to feel comfortable. If you were in the Army in a combat zone, that’s precisely when you’d be withdrawn and sent to do something else. If you were in a non-combat assignment you might get two whole years–if you’re lucky–to master your job. Donald Vandergriff is disgusted with this bureaucratic practice, which he knows from years of firsthand experience. An active-duty major who gives every indication of passionately loving the Army, he has sacrificed his career by daring to criticize its faults. He is currently assigned as deputy director of the Army ROTC detachment at Georgetown University–not exactly a surefire route to the top–and under the “up or out” system the Army employs (an officer must be promoted or resign), he will be a civilian before long. As his parting shot, he has written “The Path to Victory,” a provocative book that is not always easy reading but that richly rewards study by anyone interested in our armed forces. Too many officers today, Vandergriff insists, are “courtiers” not “warfighters.” The zero-defects mentality discourages risk-taking and spawns officers who will never rock the boat. It seems unlikely that some great generals of years past–eccentrics like Vinegar Joe Stilwell or George S. Patton–could have survived for long within today’s bureaucracy. Indeed there has been an exodus of promising young officers in recent years. At the root of the Army’s problems, Vandergriff believes, is an impersonal system that goes back many decades. In the most interesting sections of this book, he traces the development of the Army’s personnel policies to the theories of Frederick Taylor, who believed that workers were interchangeable cogs in the industrial machine. Applying these theories in both world wars, the Army administered a battery of tests to each new soldier to give him an “occupational specialty.” To give an indication of the Army’s backward priorities, those with the highest scores were assigned “safe and comfortable jobs in rear areas”; combat was reserved for those who didn’t test as well, on the mistaken assumption that it didn’t take much brains to lug a rifle or fire a machine gun. The worst part of this system, Vandergriff argues, was the “individual replacement” structure: Soldiers were separated after basic training and sent off to fill vacancies in existing units. “New soldiers joined units made up of experienced men who had learned how to survive and work together. . . . Often the veterans did not want to know the names of the ‘newbies’ because they might not be around for long. Replacements either learned quickly how to operate with the unit in combat or they became casualties.” This approach flies in the face of all studies of combat effectiveness, which suggest that units made of men who know each other–men who have stayed together from basic training to the battlefield–are far more effective. When asked why they are willing to risk death, soldiers invariably cite neither patriotism nor promotion, but rather the simple desire not to let their buddies down. Yet the Army personnel system–fully institutionalized after World War II by George C. Marshall– created units of strangers. So much for esprit de corps. The Army’s shortcomings finally caught up with it in Vietnam. Jungle fighting and counterinsurgency are specialized skills, but by the time any soldier or officer learned the craft, his tour of duty was over. As John Paul Vann joked, “The United States has not been in Vietnam for nine years, but for one year nine times.” To its credit, the Army has tried to learn the lessons of Vietnam. Today it is not rotating individuals out of Afghanistan or Kosovo; it is rotating entire units. This may be an improvement but it still has major drawbacks: All the local knowledge acquired over the past six months is instantly lost. Whereas it may be true that any trained soldier can come in and drive a tank or fire a rifle, no stateside replacement can possibly be as good at interacting with local warlords or dealing with local customs. These kinds of skills can be gained only through experience that is almost impossible to acquire in today’s armed forces. The military establishment will argue against the alternative system–leaving some units “in country” for extended periods of time–on the grounds that the risks (and rewards) of combat should be shared equally. This egalitarian philosophy underpins the entire personnel system, with perverse consequences. “An average officer with twenty-five years of service will serve a year and one-half at each duty station, including schools,” writes Vandergriff. This non-stop transferring exacts a heavy toll on families. It is also costly, both financially and in lost combat effectiveness. No leader, no matter how effective, can hope to stay with his troops for long–he has to keep “punching his ticket” in desk jobs if he wants to win coveted promotions. Since Vietnam, the military has managed to avoid paying a high price for its mistakes, but Vandergriff warns that the unpredictable and changing face of battle–what he calls “Fourth-Generation Warfare”–will require a nimbler, more cohesive force. Toward that end, he recommends a host of reforms. He wants a reduction in the size of the bloated officer corps. He suggests a “regimental” structure in which a group of soldiers from one region of the country will stay together for an extended time. And he insists that the “up or out” mantra must be eliminated, thereby allowing competent specialists to remain in their jobs even if they have no hope of ever becoming a general. Vandergriff’s prescriptions complement those of Colonel Douglas MacGregor, another Army maverick, whose 1997 book “Breaking the Phalanx” advocated reforming a divisional structure that has survived essentially unchanged since Napoleon’s time. Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant-colonel, likewise assails his old service’s complacency with considerable gusto and verve in his brilliantly written new book “Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World.” It’s encouraging to see a few bold officers advocating such heretical notions. It’s less encouraging to see how they generally get ignored by the decision-makers in the Pentagon. Max Boot, editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, is the author of “The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.”
