From New Look to Flexible Response

📖 The Scoop

"The decade after the Korean War was a turbulent time for the U.S. Army. It faced a burgeoning struggle for primacy with the Air Force and Navy, which seemed to fit better into President Eisenhower's New Look strategy and its focus on nuclear weapons. The personnel-intensive nature of ground warfare also put the Army in the crosshairs of the administration's efforts to rein in defense spending during a time of rapid and expensive technological change that took primacy in the budget. Army leaders sought to leverage their own research and development efforts to make their service a bigger player in the nuclear arena and to demonstrate their own forward-looking approach to future conflict. Many of those programs did not pan out because of the limits of scientific innovation or the weakness of the concepts themselves. As the largest and seemingly least glamorous of the military services, the Army had difficulty attracting enough quality personnel and continued to rely heavily on the draft. Although the service largely had completed racial integration, the Army's high proportion of major bases in southern states and its involvement in civilian desegregation struggles there kept it in the forefront of the ongoing national problem of racial discord. Notwithstanding those troubles, the U.S. Army not only formed a credible deterrent force against a potential major conventional conflict in Europe with the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact, but it also made significant and enduring changes that prepared it better for the war it would fight in Vietnam. The service quickly and wisely cast aside the failed pentomic structure and replaced it with a much more flexible system that could adapt to a mix of capabilities and a wider array of missions. It developed better, more capable helicopters and, equally significant, acquired them in substantial numbers and created an innovative, workable air mobile doctrine and a divisional organization to execute such operations. While the Army, not surprisingly, took the lead in advising and assisting the fledgling Army of South Vietnam, it also devoted considerable attention to the question of fighting a guerrilla war. Via doctrine, plans, formal schools, and training evolutions, it thus had more than a passing familiarity with that growing realm of conflict. From New Look to Flexible Response explains how the Army and its leaders maneuvered at the institutional level through this tumultuous period"--

Genre: History / Military / General (fancy, right?)