Of course, there were problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Gulf War (1991). There were serious problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Vietnam War (1965-1973), so not surprising, the problem had not been corrected, and the same problems existed 20 years later. In the Vietnam War, the 82nd Airborne Division pretty much threw away most of their records. According to Don Hakenson, Director, Center of Unit Records Research, Records Management and Declassification Agency; in the Gulf War, 86% or 87% of the battalion daily journals were not preserved (see War by Numbers, page 146).
This became a big issue when the “Gulf War Syndrome” became an issue. People became suspicious that U.S. soldiers had become exposed to hazardous materials or chemical weapons. Yet, when the Veterans Administration and others tried to figure out where the units were at the time, they found that the records no longer existed for many these units. In many cases, they could not determine where the unit or the people were during operations. Many of the records had simply been thrown out.
The Gulf War Syndrome was not a small issue. It has been estimated that 250,000 U.S. veterans were afflicted. It was a case where record keeping briefly became a major issue. Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome
Since the 1960s, there has been serious gaps in U.S. record keeping. There still was in 1998 when we conducted a survey of the subject for the U.S. Army. We have conducted no other surveys since then, but gather that corrective action has been undertaken.
Soldiers of the British 51st Highland Division take cover in bocage in Normandy, 1944. [Daily Record (UK)]
While Trevor Dupuy’s concept of combat effectiveness has been considered controversial by some, he was hardly the only one to observe that throughout history, some military forces have fought more successfully on the battlefield than others. While the sources of victory and defeat in battle remain a fertile, yet understudied topic, there is a growing literature on the topic of military effectiveness in the fields of strategic and security studies.
Anthony King, a professor in War Studies at the University of Warwick, has published an outstanding article in the most recent edition of British Journal of Military History, “Why did 51st Highland Division Fail? A case-study in command and combat effectiveness.” In it, he examined military command and combat effectiveness through the experience of the British 51st Highland Division in the 1944 Normandy Campaign. Most usefully, King developed a definition of military command that clarifies its relationship to combat effectiveness: “The function of a commander is to maximise combat power by defining achievable missions and, then, orchestrating subordinates into a cohesive whole committed to mission accomplishment.”
Defining Military Command
In order to analyze the relationship between command and combat effectiveness, King sought to “define the concept of command and to specify its relationship to management and leadership.” The construct he developed drew upon the work of Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American business consultant and writer who is considered by many to be “the founder of modern management.” From Drucker, King distilled a definition of the function and process of military command: “command always consists of three elements: mission definition, mission management and mission motivation.”
As King explained, “When command is understood in this way, its connection to combat effectiveness begins to become clear.”
[C]ommand is an institutional solution to an organizational problem; it generates cohesion in a formation. Specifically, by uniting decision-making authority in one person and one role, a large military force is able to unite subordinate units, whose troops are not co-present with each other and who, in most cases, do not know each other. Crucially, the combat effectiveness of a formation, as a formation, is substantially dependent upon the ability of its commander to synchronise its disparate efforts in order to generate collective effects. Skillful command has a galvanising influence on a military force; by orchestrating the activities of subordinate units and motivating troops, command is able to create a level of combat power, which supervenes the capabilities of each of the parts. A well-commanded force has properties, which exceed those of its constituent units, fighting alone.
It is through the orchestration, synchronization, and motivation of effort, King concluded, that “command and combat effectiveness are immediately connected. Command fuses a formation together and increases its determination to fulfil its missions.”
Assessing the Combat Effectiveness of the 51st Division
The rest of King’s article is a detailed assessment of the combat effectiveness of the 51st Highland Division in Normandy in June and July 1944 using this military command construct. Observers at the time noted a decline in the division’s combat performance, which had been graded quite highly in North Africa and Sicily. The one obvious difference was the replacement of Major General Douglas Wimberley with Major General Charles Bullen-Smith in August 1943. After concluding that the 51st Division was no longer battleworthy, the commander of the British 21st Army Group, General Bernard Montgomery personally relieved Bullen-Smith in late July 1944.
In reviewing Bullen-Smith’s performance, King concluded that
Although a number of factors contributed to the struggles of the Highland Division in Normandy, there is little doubt that the shortcomings of its commander, Major General Charles Bullen-Smith, were the critical factor. Charles Bullen-Smith failed to fulfill the three essential functions required of a commander… Bullen-Smith’s inadequacies are highly suggestive of a direct relationship between command and combat effectiveness; they demonstrate how command can augment or undermine combat performance.
King’s approach to military studies once again demonstrates the relevance of multi-disciplinary analysis based on solid historical research. His military command model should prove to be a very useful tool for analyzing the elements of combat effectiveness and assessing combat power. Along with Dr. Jonathan Fennell’s work on measuring morale, among others, it appears that good progress is being made on the study of human factors in combat and military operations, at least in the British academic community (even if Tom Ricks thinks otherwise).
We, of course, have never examined the other sides records for the Gulf War (1990-91). We have included in our various combat databases over 20 division and battalion-level engagements from the Gulf War. These were all assembled for us by C. Curtis Johnson, former VP of HERO and author of something like eight books.
At the time he was working for a project that had collected the U.S. Gulf War records. So he had access to the U.S. records of the various engagements, as was able to assemble the U.S. side. He had to assemble the estimates of Iraqi strength and losses based upon the U.S. intelligence records and a little educated guesswork. There are real problems in using intelligence estimates to determine the other side’s strength and losses. I can point out a number of cases where loss estimates were off by an order of magnitude (I discuss this in depth in my Kursk book). Still, as we had overrun most of the units involved, taking their records at the time, then it appears that these were reasonable and the certainly the best estimates that could be made at the time. Because the records Curt was working with were classified, and our database is unclassified, he could not leave a record of how he developed these estimates. There were, of course, also problems with the U.S. records, but that is the subject of another post.
Now, our engagements could be improved upon by a careful examination of the captured Iraqi records, which is why this caught our attention:
Needless to say, this means that for all practical purposes, the 20+ engagements in our database can never be cross-checked or improved upon. It is the best that can be done.
A rare photograph of the current Russian Navy aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov (ex-Riga, ex-Leonid Brezhnev, ex-Tblisi) alongside her unfinished sister, the now Chinese PLAN Liaoning (former Ukrainian Navy Varyag) in the Mykolaiv shipyards, Ukraine. [Pavel Nenashev/Pinterest]
Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read is a round-up of blog posts addressing various aspects of naval air power. The first set address Russian and Chinese aircraft carriers and recent carrier operations.
There is a file of captured records for the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong, having political officers and a command structure, actually did keep records. The North Vietnamese Army also kept records. During the course of the war, some of these records were captured and are in a file at the National Archives. I don’t know of anyone who has used them. I did glance at the file, and there was no finders guide and nothing was translated. There did not appear to be much order to the file. I would have needed someone fluent in Vietnamese to help me (which is actually easy to find in Northern Virginia…for example General Nguyen Ngoc Loan ended up owning a Pizza restaurant in Springfield, VA).
** EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT ** South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, fires his pistol, shoots, executes into the head of suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street Feb. 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)
In the mid-1990s I did meet with Americans who had worked with the Vietnamese in trying to locate missing U.S. servicemen. They stated that the Vietnamese were very open and interested in researching and discussing the war. They felt that they would be receptive to a joint research project on Vietnam and would be willing to open their archives for us. As we had had access to the Soviet military archives since 1993, this looked like a fairly attractive next adventure for us. Unfortunately, we could not get anyone interested in funding research on insurgencies at that time. It was not something that U.S. had researched or analyzed since 1973.
Needless to say, after we got involved in insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, I again floated the idea to the Army of doing a joint research project on Vietnam. They listened to me a little longer, but in the end, there was really no interest in analyzing the insurgency in Vietnam. I am not sure why. It has the virtue of being one of the few insurgencies where the insurgents kept good records. This would allow us to do analysis based upon two-sided data. There was certainly something that could be learned from this.
Of course, one of the problems with studying Vietnam is that U.S. Army record keeping at that time was grossly substandard. It was the poorest quality records from the U.S. Army that I had ever observed. The files from most of the units were very scant. Sometimes it was difficult to even determine the units strength and losses. Some divisions were missing almost all of their files (like the 82nd Airborne). For the 1st Brigade, 5th Mechanized Division on the DMZ, we could not determine the tank strength of the unit. There was no periodic strength and loss reports for armor. For the assault helicopter battalion my father commanded, there was only a battalion newspaper and few other files. You could not tell what aircraft the unit had, nor their status or strength. It was embarrassing.
We did actually flag this problem to the active duty army of the time and they ended up giving us a contract to examine the state of current U.S, army record keeping, which is discussed in this post:
My father was a forward observer in Korea. In 1953, him and another U.S. soldier were camped out in a foxhole between the lines. It was nighttime and they were making dinner.
The U.S. command had requested that its soldiers should try to capture some Chinese soldiers. As added incentive, the people who captured one would get a three-day pass to Japan. This was a pretty good incentive for those living out in the field. So the two foxhole buddies were sitting making dinner and of course talking about what they would do on their three-day pass to Japan, assuming they could capture a Chinese soldier.
Suddenly, a Chinese soldier stuck his head over the rim of the foxhole. They saw him, yelled “There is one” and immediately leaped for him. The poor Chinese soldier took off running. They ran for a mile or two through the “no mans land” between the lines (which would became the DMZ) and eventually the two larger American’s were able to run him down and capture him.
Now, they were in the middle of the (soon be called) DMZ, in the middle of the night, dragging along a captured Chinese soldier, and not quite sure where their foxhole was. Furthermore, in their haste to get him, they forgot to grab their guns. For the two unarmed Americans dragging a Chinese prisoner through the dark, it was a very long and tense walk back to their foxhole.
They did get their three-day pass to Japan.
Note: This is a story told to me by my father many years ago. It was not written down and I have never checked the veracity of it. I have no doubt that it is mostly true, but one cannot rule out a little exaggeration for the sake of a good yarn. We do not know what became of the Chinese soldier.
Not much to say about captured records in the Korea War as I have never checked on them. I assume there must be some taken from North Korean and Chinese units and they are files away somewhere. My father did capture a Chinese soldier during the Korean War.
Oddly enough, there not been much done in the world of quantitative analysis on the Korea War outside of the work that ORO (Operations Research Office) did in the 1950s. We have never done any significant work on the Korean War. In the late 1980s we did explore conducting some analysis of Korean War battalion-level combat. As part of that effort Trevor Dupuy and I went over to the National Archives at Suitland and pulled up some U.S. Army Korea War records. They appeared to be quite complete. There were a couple of French infantry battalions attached to the U.S. Division and we appear to have good strength and loss data for them also.
Later, in 1989, Trevor Dupuy arranged with China to conduct a joint research project. It was funded by OSD Net Assessment (Andy Marshall). Trevor Dupuy really wanted to do some two-sided analysis of combat with the Chinese Army in Korea, but apparently getting access to the Chinese Army records was still too sensitive at that point. So, instead, they arranged to do a joint research contract on a more general and less sensitive theme like perceptions of each sides intentions during the Korean War. But then in June 1989 the Chinese government rolled over the student protestors in Tiananmen Square with tanks. That ended all joint research projects for many years.
We never got back to trying to conduct a joint research project on combat with China. Instead in 1993, we started a research project on Kursk using Russia records.
Trevor Dupuy did mention that the Chinese informally told him that the United States often overestimated the size of the Chinese forces they were facing, and often underestimated the casualties the Chinese took. I have no idea how valid that is.
Anyhow, this is an extended discussion of captured records originally inspired by this post:
A paratrooper from the French Foreign Legion (1er REP) with a captured fellagha during the Algerian War (1954-1962). [Via Pinterest]
Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read is a compilation of posts addressing the question of manpower and counterinsurgency. The first four posts summarize research on the question undertaken during the first decade of the 21st century, while the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies were in full bloom. Despite different research questions and analytical methodologies, each of the studies concluded that there is a relationship between counterinsurgent manpower and counterinsurgency outcomes.
The fifth post addresses the U.S. Army’s lack of a formal methodology for calculating manpower requirements for counterinsurgencies and contingency operations.
At the end of World War I, the United States made sure they had access to the German military records in their treaty and sent a research team over there to review and copy the pertinent records. At the end of World War II, we just took everything. The allies gathered together all the material, in part because of concerns over war crimes, and eventually the entire collection was shipped back to the United States.
In the 1960s, the United States decided to repatriate the records back to Germany. Before they shipped them out they decided to copy the entire collection of German World War II records and place them on microfilm. This was a massive effort done by government contractors that took several years. Like all good government contracts, towards the end, this one was behind schedule, so they were having to cut corners by choosing not to copy things that they felt were not particularly relevant. So, the originals records are now in the archives in Freiburg, Germany (a nice little town about as far away from the old East German border as you can get). There are copies on microfilm of most of the German records, sometimes in disorder, in the U.S. Archives II in College Park, Maryland (near Washington DC). The British also have microfilm copies of portions of the German records collection that they captured over at the Public Records Office in Kew (London). The UK collection is a fraction the size of the U.S. microfilm collection, and as far as I know has nothing additional in it.
But, there were some records that were not copied by the U.S., but it is not much. For example, for the Kursk Data Base, I did the German research from the U.S. record collection. There were 17 German divisions in the offensive in the south in July 1943. I made a detailed listing of the records I have reviewed and sent that list to Dr. Arthur Volz over in Germany. He then went to Frieburg and tried to locate additional material on strength and losses from those files. About the only additional material he located was the panzer regiment files from the 11th Panzer Division, which were either not in the U.S. archives or I overlooked when I did my research. That was it. Overall, the original copying effort was pretty exhaustive.
There was one major gap for a long time. For a couple of decades, many of the original German situation maps were in the U.S., but no longer accessible. There were supposed to be copied and sent to Germany, but there was a budget issue. Meanwhile one researcher was handling them so poorly that they canceled access so as to protect them. They have finally copied them and sent the originals back to Germany.
There are also no real Luftwaffe files. Most of the Luftwaffe files were placed on a train and when the order came down from Hitler to destroy everything….these weenies actually obeyed the order and burned all their records. There are also major gaps in the German records after July 1944. Every six months, the German army units wrapped up their records and sent them back to their central archives. Because the war ended in May 1945, many of the records for July-December 1944 never made it back to be filed. Same for the 1945 records. This is why the QJM (Quantified Judgment Model) was originally developed from Italian Campaign Data from 1943 through June 1944.
Anyhow, this is an extended discussion of captured records originally inspired by this post and started with the discussions below.
John Conger recently reported in Defense One that the tax reform initiative championed by the Trump administration and Republican congressional leaders may torpedo an increase in the U.S. defense budget for 2018. Both the House and Senate have passed authorizations approving the Trump administration’s budget request for $574.5 billion in defense spending, which is $52 billion higher than the limit established by the Budget Control Act (BCA). However, the House and Senate also recently passed a concurrent 2018 budget resolution to facilitate passage of a tax reform bill that caps the defense budget at $522 billion as mandated by the BCA.
The House and Senate armed services committees continue to hammer out the terms of the 2018 defense authorization, which includes increases in troop strength and pay. These priorities could crowd out other spending requested by the services to meet strategic and modernization requirements if the budget remains capped. Congress also continues to resist the call by Secretary of Defense James Mattis to close unneeded bases and facilities, which could free spending for other needs. There is also little interest in reforming Defense Department business practices that allegedly waste $125 billion annually.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats were already headed toward a showdown over 2018 BCA limits on defense spending. Even before the tax reform push, several legislators predicted yet another year-long continuing resolution limiting government spending to the previous year’s levels. A bipartisan consensus existed among some armed services committee members that this would constitute “borderline legislative malpractice, particularly for the Department of Defense.”
Despite the ambitious timeline set by President Trump to pass a tax reform bill, the chances of a continuing resolution remain high. It also seems likely that any agreement to increase defense spending will be through the Overseas Contingency Operations budget, which is not subject to the BCA. Many in Congress agree with Democratic Representative Adam Smith that resorting to this approach is “a fiscal sleight of hand [that] would be bad governance and ‘hypocritical.’”
Are tax reform and increased defense spending incompatible? Stay tuned.
John Conger recently reported in Defense One