The Army in 2020

Original sub-title was
A Study in Unpreparedness

My first book of the new year is T. E. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness.  As you can see from the photo, that title was changed in later editions to This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History.  The latter title, while sounding more palatable to sensitive American ears, misses the intent of the author, which was to expose how the nation, from its highest office holders to its officer corps to its NCOs to its lowest privates, were totally, disastrously, unconscionably unprepared for Korea.  The amazing thing, as I read it, is how similar this unpreparedness in Korea was to previous unreadiness in World War II, to later lack of preparedness in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Operations ENDURING FREEDOM and IRAQI FREEDOM, and other operations.

Beginning late last year, the Army began conceptualizing what it may be called upon to tackle in the year 2020, what the operational environment will be like, and what capabilities we will need.  As I read Fehrenbach's clear eyed account of where we have been, and knowing something of how little we have been prepared for the intervening conflicts between then and now, I'm not too confident that we will be all that much better a preparing ourselves in 2020 than we have been in wars past.  Indeed, Mr. Fehrenbach's closing comments on America's future, written in 1963, are perhaps even more applicable now than they were then.

"A 'modern' infantry may ride sky vehicles into combat, fire and sense its weapons through instrumentation, employ devices of frightening lethality in the future -- but it must also be old-fashioned enough to be iron-hard, poised for instant obedience, and prepared to die in the mud."

"The lesson of Korea," he wrote, "is that it happened."