Mystics & Statistics

Dupuy’s Verities: The Advantage Of The Offensive

Union assault on the “Mule Shoe” salient, 12 May 1864, by Thure de Thulstrup (1887) [Wikimedia]

The seventh of Trevor Dupuy’s Timeless Verities of Combat is:

An attacker willing to pay the price can always penetrate the strongest defenses.

From Understanding War (1987):

No matter how alert the defender, no matter how skillful his dispositions to avoid or mitigate the effects of surprise or the effects of flank or rear attack, a skillful attacker can always achieve at least a temporary advantage for some time at a place he has selected. This is one reason why Napoleon always endeavored to seize and retain the initiative. In the great battles of 1864 and 1865 in Virginia, Lee was always able to exploit his defensive advantage to the utmost. But Grant equally was always able to achieve a temporary superiority when and where he wished. This did not always result in a Union victory—given Lee’s defensive skill—but invariably it forced Lee to retreat until he could again impose a temporary stalemate with the assistance of powerful field fortifications. A modern example can be found in the Soviet offensive relieving Leningrad in 1943. Another was the Allied break-out from the Normandy beachhead in July and August of 1944.

The exact meaning of this verity is tricky to determine, as the phrase “willing to pay the price” does a lot of work here. History is certainly replete with examples of Phyrric victories, where the cost paid for battlefield success deprived the attacker of any clear benefit. (The U.S. Civil War Battle of Chickamauga in 1863 would be an example in line with Dupuy’s description above.) Perhaps “willing and able to pay the price” would have been a better of way stating this. And, of course, no attack is guaranteed to succeed.

What Dupuy had in mind here is probably best understood in the context of two other of his verities “Offensive action is essential to positive combat results” and “Initiative permits application of preponderant combat power.” Even if the defensive may be the stronger form of combat, the offensive affords certain inherent potential advantages that can enable attackers to defeat the strongest of defenses if conducted effectively, sufficiently resourced, and determinedly pressed.

Japan’s Grand Strategy And The Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) (III)

[Nippon.com]

Modern air forces require significant capital investments (surpassed only by naval capital investment requirements) and also require significant technological capability. Both of these aspects of modern military power require a strong economic foundation for support. Japan has a long history of investing in its own military industrial capability.

During the Meiji era (1868 to 1912), Japan economic doctrine was summed up in a motto: fukoku kyōhei, meaning “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces.” This phrase actually comes from an ancient Chinese book named Zhan Guo Ce (“Strategies of the Warring States”), from the 5th – 3rd century B.C. period of the same name in Chinese history. This is an excellent example of how for both Japan and China reference their own historical experiences to inform current decision-making.

The post-World War II Japanese body politic had lived through the devastation of war and became focused on economic recovery. The original motto was thus shortened to eliminate kyōhei (“strong army”), leaving only fukoku (“enrich the country”). The resulting single-minded focus paid dividends as the Japanese “economic miracle” enabled it to become the first Asian nation to “catch” the West (see image above). This policy is sometimes referred to as the “Yoshida Doctrine.” Coined in 1977 by Masashi Nishihara and summarized by Professor Sugita of Osaka University, the main elements of the doctrine are:

  1. Japan ensures its national security through an alliance with the United States;
  2. Japan maintains a low capacity for self-defense;
  3. Japan spends resources conserved by the first and second policies on economic activities to develop the country as a trading nation.

In December 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced “Abenomics”, a multi-faceted approach to revive Japan’s sluggish economy and to restore Japan’s geopolitical influence as a counterbalance to China’s rise. Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have re-invoked the term fukoku kyōhei, acknowledging that a strong economy and a strong military will be needed in this endeavor.

Japan’s Grand Strategy And The Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) (II)

Hypothetical occupation zones for post-war Japan had the Allies decided to divide the country. [Pinterest]

In previous posts, I have explored the political and strategic context for the role of the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF). Now I will look at the political reasons why the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) is restricted in its operating concepts and capabilities.

After the Pacific War (which for Japan lasted from 1931 to 1945), the devastation of the war and backlash against militarism became conventional wisdom among Japanese. At the Moscow Conference of December 1945, the Allies agreed that since Japan had fallen to the United States, that country would be allowed to conduct the post-war occupation. (Hungary had fallen to the Red Army and thus was occupied by the Soviet Union alone.) This decision saved Japan from a division like Germany or Korea, although the Soviets still had plans for a Japanese communist state (see below). The map above is a hypothetical division of Japan, developed by a wargamer.

The greater Japanese empire, however was divided among the Allies, with many natural choices, such as the former British colonial possessions being returned (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.), former French colonial possessions being returned (Indochina), South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands going to the Soviets, and Taiwan and the Pescadores returning to China (although which China became a key question in 1949). Notably, Korea was divided into North and South, with the Soviets in control of the former, and the other Allies (primarily the US and UK) managing the later.

In Japan, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur governed and imposed a new post-war constitution, which came into force in May 1947, and is technically an amendment to the original Meiji-era constitution of 1889. Article 9 of which reads as below:

(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

As early as 1946, however, planners in the the Joint Staff, under the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), began to consider the re-armament of Japan, anticipating a Soviet attack against Japan. The actual Soviet war plan to attack Hokkaido on August 24th 1945 was published by the Wilson center in 2015, and some say that strategic nuclear deterrence was what saved Japan from the same fate as divided Germany.

In March 1948, when Washington considered starting peace treaty negotiations with Japan, Under Secretary of the Army William Draper stated that the War Department was generally in favor of Japanese rearmament. In response to an inquiry by the secretary of defense, the JCS stated: ‘Solely from the military viewpoint, the establishment of Japanese armed forces is desirable’ to offset ‘our own limited manpower.’

The American vision of an unarmed and pacifist Japan, as rapidly enshrined in the constitution, was nearly dead on arrival, as international events unfolded rapidly in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s:

  • 1947, March – President Harry Truman addressed Congress and the U.S. public, announcing the policy of containment, and establishing the Truman Doctrine.
  • June 1948 – the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin, resulting in the famous airlift.
  • October 1949 – Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China were defeated by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Red Army, founding the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
  • June 1950 – North Korea, a Soviet satellite state since 1945, invaded South Korea, fracturing the post-war territorial division.

Thus, by 1950 when John Foster Dulles was appointed to begin negotiating a peace treaty with Japan to conclude the American occupation, he and most other American policy makers had come to see Japan as very important to the defense of American interests and democracy in the Far East.

  • September 1951 – The Treaty of San Francisco was signed, establishing peace between Japan and many Allied nations, but notably not the Soviet Union, China as Republic of China (Taiwan), or People’s Republic of China (mainland), or North nor South Korea.
  • September 1951 – The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was signed on the same date, but entered into force in April 1952. This ended the military occupation, restored sovereignty to the Japanese government, but also clarified the ongoing US military presence in Japan, originally the Far East Command (FEC) from 1947 until 1957 when the United States Forces Japan (USFJ).
  • March 1954 – The original Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, “contained provisions that permitted the United States to act for the sake of maintaining peace in East Asia and even exert its power on Japanese domestic quarrels.” (Wikipedia)
  • October 1956 – The Soviet Union and Japan signed the Joint Declaration, a bi-lateral agreement short of a peace treaty. This normalized relations between the countries since the Soviet Union did not sign the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco. This agreement breaks news today, as Japan and Russia are currently moving towards a peace treaty.
  • 1958 – The U.S. Air Force (USAF) handed over airspace responsibility to JASDF. Threats to Japanese airspace were dealt with in the same way that they were in the U.S. prior to the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, much like they were by the British in 1940 (see Dowding System), by manual means. It would be more than a decade until Japan had its own version of SAGE, known as Base Air Defense Ground Environment (BADGE) in English, and 自動警戒管制組織 (jidou keikai kansei soshiki) ”Automatic Warning and Control Organization” in Japanese. [More on this in a future post.]
  • January 1960 – Two key documents were updated, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, and the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement. To alleviate the unequal status, removed the provision to intervene in Japanese domestic quarrels, included articles to delineate mutual defense obligations, and U.S. obligations to pre-inform Japan in times of the U.S. military mobilization. The ratification of this treaty was greeted with widespread protests by the Japanese public, who opposed nuclear weapons in Japan, and were concerned about being on the front line in a possible nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union.

Japan’s Grand Strategy And The Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) (I)

Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) F-15 at Chitose Air Base, Japan in 2014. [Suga/Wikimedia]

In the previous post on Japan’s grand strategy, I observed its focus on the maritime domain and connectivity with the Indian Ocean. Much seaborne trade flows through this region, especially oil supplies for industrialized countries in East Asia, including Japan and China. These sea lines of communication (SLOC) extend far beyond Japan’s sovereign territory.

I also noted that the Japanese home islands required attention as well, as challenges to airspace sovereignty are ever present, even as they ebb and flow with the geopolitical situation of the times (see statistics through 2017).

To the student of military might, it may seem strange for a nation to project power in the maritime domain but to have a more reserved attitude towards projecting power in the air domain. After all, it has been well demonstrated and accepted that air power can be highly effective in the maritime domain, as evidenced by:

The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, employing 21 obsolete Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea. The attack struck the battle fleet of the Regia Marina at anchor in the harbor of Taranto. “Taranto, and the night of 11–12 November 1940, should be remembered for ever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.” — Admiral Andrew Cunningham, British Royal Navy

The infamous attack on the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet at anchor on 7 December 1941 involved the notable use of naval aviation by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 1st Air Fleet (Kidō Butai), “[A] revolutionary and potentially formidable instrument of sea power.”  — Gordon Prange.

The Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by land-based bombers and torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy off the coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941.

This ability to rapidly project power over great distances from the air contributed to the general state of surprise that the Allies found themselves (summed up nicely here):

The technological superiority of Japanese aviation, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse, and Japan’s rapid advance and dominance of the air shocked everyone. Japan was not only technologically superior in the air, its ability to support, replace, and move air assets was far superior to the Americans and the British. General Percival, the British commander in Malaya, was surprised that the Japanese were able to bomb Singapore in the first days of the war despite the fact that their nearest airbase was seven hundred miles away. He would soon profess his amazement at the performance of Japanese aircraft and their ability to launch coordinated attacks on targets all over Malaya.

Even after aerial defeats at Midway, the Marianas, and after the devastating strategic bombing campaign by the U..S Army Air Forces (USAAF), the Japanese were able to field effective air units, such as the 343rd Kōkūtai (Naval Air Group), with veteran pilots, led by experienced commanders such as Minoru Genda (more about him later), using excellent fighter aircraft; the N1K-J Shiden Kai / “George”. In these limited situations, the balance of aerial combat was not so lopsided as the headline numbers suggest (here is an excellent thesis on the complexity in these ratios). These air defense efforts, however, where too little, too late for the Japanese, but they illustrate capabilities which would re-emerge after the war, and especially in military alliance and rearmament with the US.

So, after having innovated the use of air power in the 1930’s and clearly demonstrating this to the world in the 1940’s, why is today’s JASDF relatively circumspect, especially relative to the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), as Japan gradually moves into a more assertive foreign policy (as discussed previously)?

Some Useful Resources for Post-World War II U.S. Army Doctrine Development

This list originated in response to a Twitter query discussing the history of post-World War II U.S. Army doctrine development. It is hardly exhaustive but it does include titles and resources that may not be widely known.

The first two are books:

Benjamin Jensen, Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army (Stanford University Press, 2016)

Jensen focused on the institutional processes shaping the Army’s continual post-war World War II efforts to reform its doctrine in response to changes in the character of modern warfare.

Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Routledge, 1997)

In an excellent overview of the evolution of operational thought through the 20th century, Naveh devoted two chapters to the Army’s transition to Active Defense in the 70s and then to AirLand Battle in the 80s.

There are several interesting monographs that are available online:

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam (NDU Press, 1986)

Paul Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations (Combat Studies Institute, 1988)

John Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: the Development of Army Doctrine 1973-1982 (TRADOC, 1984)

John Romjue, The Army of Excellence: The Development of the 1980s Army (TRADOC, 1997)

John Romjue, American Army Doctrine for the Post-Cold War (TRADOC, 1997)

A really useful place to browse is the Army Command and General Staff College’s online Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). It is loaded with old manuals and student papers and theses addressing a wide variety of topics related to the nuts and bolts of doctrine.

Another good place to browse is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), which is a huge digital library of government sponsored research. I recommend searches on publications by the Army’s defunct operations research organizations: Operations Research Office (ORO), Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), and the Special Operations Research Office (SORO). The Combat Operations Research Group (CORG), particularly a series of studies of Army force structure from squads to theater HQ’s by Virgil Ney. There is much more to find in DTIC.

Two other excellent places to browse for material on doctrine are the Combat Studies Institute Press publications on CARL and the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s publications.

Some journals with useful research include the Journal of Cold War Studies and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

If anyone else has suggestions, let me know.

Diddlysquat

This blog post is generated as a response to one of Richard Anderson’s comments to this blog post:

Validating Attrition

Richard Anderson used to work with me at Trevor Dupuy’s company DMSI and later at The Dupuy Institute. He has been involved in this business since 1987, although he has been away from it for over a decade.

His comment was: “Keep fighting the good fight Chris, but it remains an uphill battle.”

It is an uphill battle. For a brief moment, from 1986-1989 it appeared that the community was actually trying to move forward on the model validation and “base of sand” type issues. This is discussed to some extent in Chapter 18 of War by Numbers (pages 295-298).

In 1986 the office of the DUSA (OR) * reviewed the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency’s (CAA) casualty estimation process in their models. This generated considerable comments and criticism of how it was being done. In 1987 CAA, with I gather funding from DUSA (OR), issued out the contract to develop the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB). I was the program manager for that effort. That same year they issued out the contract to study Breakpoints (forced changes in posture) which I was also involved in.

So we had the army conducting an internal review of their models and finding them wanting. They then issued out a contract to validate them and they issued out a contract to examine the issue of breakpoints, which had not been seriously studied since the 1950s. This was at the initiative of Vandiver and Walt Hollis.

After that, everything kind of fell apart. The U.S. defense budget peaked in 1989 and the budget cuts started. So, even though the breakpoints study got a good start, there was no follow-on contract. The ACSDB ended up being used for a casual top-level validation effort that did not get into the nuts and bolts of the models. All the dozens of problems identified in the internal DUSA(OR) report resulted in no corrective action taken (as far as I know). Basically, budget was declining and maintaining hardware was more important that studies and analysis.

There was a resurgence of activity in the early 1990s, which is when the Kursk Data Base (KDB) was funded. But that was never even used for a validation effort (although it was used to test Lanchester). But funding was marginal during most of the 1990s, and the modeling community did little to improve their understanding and analysis of combat.

The nature of the missions changed after 9/11/2001 and The Dupuy Institute ended up focused on insurgencies (see America’s Modern Wars). Budget again started declining in 2009 and then sequestration arrived, killing everything.

The end result was that there was a period from 1986-1989 when the U.S. modeling community appeared to have identified their problems and were taking corrective action. Since 1989, for all practical purposes, diddlysquat.

So…..30 years later…..I am still fighting the “good fight.” But I am not optimistic. Nothing is going to happen unless people at senior levels fund something to happen. For the price of a Stryker or two, a huge amount of productive and useful work could be done. But to date, having an extra Stryker or two has been more important to the army.

For this year and next year the U.S. Army has increasing budgets. If they wanted to take corrective action….now would be the time. I suspect that bureaucratic inertia will have more weight than any intellectual arguments that I can make. Still, I have to give it one last try.

 

* DUSA (OR) = The Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). It was headed by Walt Hollis forever, but was completely shut down in recent times.

Paul Davis (RAND) on Bugaboos

Just scanning the MORS Wargaming Special Meeting, October 2016, Final Report, January 31, 2017. The link to the 95-page report is here:

http://www.mors.org/Portals/23/Docs/Events/2016/Wargaming/MORS%20Wargaming%20Workshop%20Report.pdf?ver=2017-03-01-151418-980

There are a few comments from Dr. Paul Davis (RAND) starting on page 13 that are worth quoting:

I was struck through the workshop by a schism among attendees. One group believes, intuitively and viscerally, that human gaming–although quite powerful–is just a subset of modeling general. The other group believes, just as intuitively and viscerally, that human gaming is very different….

The impression had deep roots. Writings in the 1950s about defense modeling and systems analysis emphasized being scientific, rigorous, quantitative, and tied to mathematics. This was to be an antidote for hand-waving subjective assertions. That desire translated into an emphasis on “closed” models with no human interactions, which allowed reproducibility. Most DoD-level models have often been at theater or campaign level (e.g., IDAGAM, TACWAR, JICM, Thunder, and Storm). Many represent combat as akin to huge armies grinding each other down, as in the European theaters of World Wars I and II. such models are quite large, requiring considerable expertise and experience to understand.

Another development was standardized scenarios and date set with the term “data” referring to everything from facts to highly uncertain assumptions about scenario, commander decisions, and battle outcomes. Standardization allowed common baselines, which assured that policymakers would receive reports with common assumptions rather than diverse hidden assumptions chosen to favor advocates’ programs. The baselines also promoted joint thinking and assured a level playing field for joint analysis. Such reasons were prominent in DoD’s Analytic Agenda (later called Support for Strategic Analysis). Not surprisingly, however, the tendency was often to be disdainful of such other forms of modeling as the history-base formula models of Trevor Dupuy and the commercial board games of Jim Dunnigan and Mark Herman. These alternative approaches seen as somehow “lesser,” because they were allegedly less rigorous and scientific. Uncertainty analysis has been seriously inadequate. I have demurred on these matters for many years, as in the “Base of Sand” paper in 1993 and more recent monographs available on the RAND website….

The quantitative/qualitative split is a bugaboo. Many “soft” phenomena can be characterized with meaningful, albeit imprecise, numbers.

The Paul Davis “Base of Sand” paper from 1991 is here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N3148.html

 

Engaging the Phalanx (part 7 of 7)

Hopefully this is my last post on the subject (but I suspect not, as I expect a public response from the three TRADOC authors). This is in response to the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6). The issue here is the “Base of Sand” problem, which is what the original blog post that “inspired” their article was about:

Wargaming Multi-Domain Battle: The Base Of Sand Problem

While the first paragraph of their article addressed this blog post and they reference Paul Davis’ 1992 Base of Sand paper in their footnotes (but not John Stockfish’s paper, which is an equally valid criticism), they then do not discuss the “Base of Sand” problem further. They do not actually state whether this is a problem or not a problem. I gather by this notable omission that in fact they do understand that it is a problem, but being employees of TRADOC they are limited as to what they can publicly say. I am not.

I do address the “Base of Sand” problem in my book War by Numbers, Chapter 18. It has also been addressed in a few other posts on this blog. We are critics because we do not see significant improvement in the industry. In some cases, we are seeing regression.

In the end, I think the best solution for the DOD modeling and simulation community is not to “circle the wagons” and defend what they are currently doing, but instead acknowledge the limitations and problems they have and undertake a corrective action program. This corrective action program would involve: 1) Properly addressing how to measure and quantify certain aspects of combat (for example: Breakpoints) and 2) Validating these aspects and the combat models these aspects are part of by using real-world combat data. This would be an iterative process, as you develop and then test the model, then further develop it, and then test it again. This moves us forward. It is a more valued approach than just “circling the wagons.” As these models and simulations are being used to analyze processes that may or may not make us fight better, and may or may not save American service members lives, then I think it is important enough to do right. That is what we need to be focused on, not squabbling over a blog post (or seven).

Has The Army Given Up On Counterinsurgency Research, Again?

Mind-the-Gap

[In light of the U.S. Army’s recent publication of a history of it’s involvement in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, it may be relevant to re-post this piece from from 29 June 2016.]

As Chris Lawrence mentioned yesterday, retired Brigadier General John Hanley’s review of America’s Modern Wars in the current edition of Military Review concluded by pointing out the importance of a solid empirical basis for staff planning support for reliable military decision-making. This notion seems so obvious as to be a truism, but in reality, the U.S. Army has demonstrated no serious interest in remedying the weaknesses or gaps in the base of knowledge underpinning its basic concepts and doctrine.

In 2012, Major James A. Zanella published a monograph for the School of Advanced Military Studies of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (graduates of which are known informally as “Jedi Knights”), which examined problems the Army has had with estimating force requirements, particularly in recent stability and counterinsurgency efforts.

Historically, the United States military has had difficulty articulating and justifying force requirements to civilian decision makers. Since at least 1975, governmental officials and civilian analysts have consistently criticized the military for inadequate planning and execution. Most recently, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reinvigorated the debate over the proper identification of force requirements…Because Army planners have failed numerous times to provide force estimates acceptable to the President, the question arises, why are the planning methods inadequate and why have they not been improved?[1]

Zanella surveyed the various available Army planning tools and methodologies for determining force requirements, but found them all either inappropriate or only marginally applicable, or unsupported by any real-world data. He concluded

Considering the limitations of Army force planning methods, it is fair to conclude that Army force estimates have failed to persuade civilian decision-makers because the advice is not supported by a consistent valid method for estimating the force requirements… What is clear is that the current methods have utility when dealing with military situations that mirror the conditions represented by each model. In the contemporary military operating environment, the doctrinal models no longer fit.[2]

Zanella did identify the existence of recent, relevant empirical studies on manpower and counterinsurgency. He noted that “the existing doctrine on force requirements does not benefit from recent research” but suggested optimistically that it could provide “the Army with new tools to reinvigorate the discussion of troops-to-task calculations.”[3] Even before Zanella published his monograph, however, the Defense Department began removing any detailed reference or discussion about force requirements in counterinsurgency from Army and Joint doctrinal publications.

As Zanella discussed, there is a body of recent empirical research on manpower and counterinsurgency that contains a variety of valid and useful insights, but as I recently discussed, it does not yet offer definitive conclusions. Much more research and analysis is needed before the conclusions can be counted on as a valid and justifiably reliable basis for life and death decision-making. Yet, the last of these government sponsored studies was completed in 2010. Neither the Army nor any other organization in the U.S. government has funded any follow-on work on this subject and none appears forthcoming. This boom-or-bust pattern is nothing new, but the failure to do anything about it is becoming less and less understandable.

NOTES

[1] Major James A. Zanella, “Combat Power Analysis is Combat Power Density” (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2012), pp. 1-2.

[2] Ibid, 50.

[3] Ibid, 47.

Historians and the Early Era of U.S. Army Operations Research

While perusing Charles Shrader’s fascinating history of the U.S. Army’s experience with operations research (OR), I came across several references to the part played by historians and historical analysis in early era of that effort.

The ground forces were the last branch of the Army to incorporate OR into their efforts during World War II, lagging behind the Army Air Forces, the technical services, and the Navy. Where the Army was a step ahead, however, was in creating a robust wartime historical field history documentation program. (After the war, this enabled the publication of the U.S. Army in World War II series, known as the “Green Books,” which set a new standard for government sponsored military histories.)

As Shrader related, the first OR personnel the Army deployed forward in 1944-45 often crossed paths with War Department General Staff Historical Branch field historian detachments. They both engaged in similar activities: collecting data on real-world combat operations, which was then analyzed and used for studies and reports written for the use of the commands to which they were assigned. The only significant difference was in their respective methodologies, with the historians using historical methods and the OR analysts using mathematical and scientific tools.

History and OR after World War II

The usefulness of historical approaches to collecting operational data did not go unnoticed by the OR practitioners, according to Shrader. When the Army established the Operations Research Office (ORO) in 1948, it hired a contingent of historians specifically for the purpose of facilitating research and analysis using WWII Army records, “the most likely source for data on operational matters.”

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, ORO sent eight multi-disciplinary teams, including the historians, to collect operational data and provide analytical support for U.S. By 1953, half of ORO’s personnel had spent time in combat zones. Throughout the 1950s, about 40-43% of ORO’s staff was comprised of specialists in the social sciences, history, business, literature, and law. Shrader quoted one leading ORO analyst as noting that, “there is reason to believe that the lawyer, social scientist or historian is better equipped professionally to evaluate evidence which is derived from the mind and experience of the human species.”

Among the notable historians who worked at or with ORO was Dr. Hugh M. Cole, an Army officer who had served as a staff historian for General George Patton during World War II. Cole rose to become a senior manager at ORO and later served as vice-president and president of ORO’s successor, the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC). Cole brought in WWII colleague Forrest C. Pogue (best known as the biographer of General George C. Marshall) and Charles B. MacDonald. ORO also employed another WWII field historian, the controversial S. L. A. Marshall, as a consultant during the Korean War. Dorothy Kneeland Clark did pioneering historical analysis on combat phenomena while at ORO.

The Demise of ORO…and Historical Combat Analysis?

By the late 1950s, considerable institutional friction had developed between ORO, the Johns Hopkins University (JHU)—ORO’s institutional owner—and the Army. According to Shrader,

Continued distrust of operations analysts by Army personnel, questions about the timeliness and focus of ORO studies, the ever-expanding scope of ORO interests, and, above all, [ORO director] Ellis Johnson’s irascible personality caused tensions that led in August 1961 to the cancellation of the Army’s contract with JHU and the replacement of ORO with a new, independent research organization, the Research Analysis Corporation [RAC].

RAC inherited ORO’s research agenda and most of its personnel, but changing events and circumstances led Army OR to shift its priorities away from field collection and empirical research on operational combat data in favor of the use of modeling and wargaming in its analyses. As Chris Lawrence described in his history of federally-funded Defense Department “think tanks,” the rise and fall of scientific management in DOD, the Vietnam War, social and congressional criticism, and an unhappiness by the military services with the analysis led to retrenchment in military OR by the end of the 60s. The Army sold RAC and created its own in-house Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA; now known as the Center for Army Analysis).

By the early 1970s, analysts, such as RAND’s Martin Shubik and Gary Brewer, and John Stockfisch, began to note that the relationships and processes being modeled in the Army’s combat simulations were not based on real-world data and that empirical research on combat phenomena by the Army OR community had languished. In 1991, Paul Davis and Donald Blumenthal gave this problem a name: the “Base of Sand.”