DOCTRINE THAT WORKS
Dr. Douglas V. Johnson II
Strategic Studies Institute
I recently spent a morning talking with a scholar who is researching material for a
book on the U.S. Army’s willingness to learn about war above the tactical and operational
level. His thesis echoes, to some degree, Dr. Antulio Echevarria’s monograph that
concludes that there is an American Way of Battle, but not an “American Way of War,” as
Russell F. Weigley’s well-studied book suggests. This scholar was asking for evidence to
identify change points in the development of U.S. Army thinking about war during the
decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
I suggested that the 1973 Arab-Israeli War was one of those points because it gave the
Army a tangible event that was re
levant to a key national security objective: the defense of
NATO Europe. That war allowed the Army to put Vietnam behind it. It signaled that
Russian military technology had caught up with and in some ways surpassed western
military technology. That technology, in the hands of—from an American perspective—
ill-trained Arab conscript armies could be enormously effective, particularly in the tactical
defense. Three years later, FM 100-5, Operations, emerged from the pen of General William
DePuy, reflecting General Donn A. Starry’s analysis of this remarkable war. That field
manual tacitly recognized the insufficiency of American materiel to do much more than
fight an Active Defense. Properly, it did not address that the same Army was still
recuperating from its Vietnam-inflicted wounds and was struggling to become a real All-
Volunteer Army—something it had always wanted since the days of Emory Upton. Active
Defense also fit the NATO defensive philosophy. In short, it was comfortable at the time,
even though its apparently defensive orientation was anathema to American Army
officers who actually had studied their profession. Starry must be credited for making a
major attempt to correct that deficiency as he continued to insist on the development of an
‘historical mindedness’ in the officer corps.
The publication of FM 100-5, 1982 edition, changed things. That manual revived the
centrality of offensive action and recognized the growing reality of the Big-Five in the
reequipping of the Army, giving it the potential to conduct offensive operations at the
tactical and operational level. The AirLand Battle concepts that underlay the 1982 edition
of FM 100-5 frightened NATO Europe, partly because it demonstrated this offensive
character which was so at odds with the basic concept upon which NATO rested its
existence. But it made the U.S. Army happy, and the years that followed demonstrated
that the U.S. Army could revive itself and recreate itself as a genuinely professional
military force without equal in the tactical and operational realms. Operation DESERT
STORM validated the AirLand Battle concept, the Big-Five reequipping choices, and the
Training Revolution that had taken hold during those two preceding decades.
Then hubris set in. It was evident at nearly every level in the institution. Read U.
S.
Army doctrine today, and you will see a struggle to trump each successive set of
