What do you think?
Rate this book
The Path to Victory: America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs
Citing President Eisenhower's farewell warnings about a "military-industrial complex," an analysis of the army's personnel system and its history argues for a revolution in human affairs, considers future combat requirements, and prescribes radical changes in national defense.
- GenresMilitary Fiction
288 pages, Hardcover
First published April 5, 2002
2 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 13, 2016
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, America invented the large corporation and also the business methodology to support the associated massed production lines: Scientific Management. Coupled with the focus on the individual that lies at the heart of American culture, this allowed the United States to achieve a rapid rise to global economic dominance. This, in turn, enabled the country to become the ‘arsenal of democracy’, exemplified by the ability to deploy more than a million troops to France in 1918, to fight two major wars in parallel during 1941-1945, and to shift forces to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia sufficient to (seemingly) obliterate the Iraqi Army in just one hundred hours in 1991. The twentieth century was therefore, in many respects, the American Century.
Just after the end of that century, Donald Vandergriff, then a major in the US Army, explored the impact of this thinking on the human side of the military. In part, he was driven to understand why an army that had for decades trumpeted the virtues of manoeuvre warfare actually seemed to practice attrition. He also wanted to discover why the most successful officers seemed to be the ‘courtiers’, who neither understood nor cared about studying the art of war. In seeking an explanation, he was forced to conclude that the very factors that had enabled that economic and logistical primacy also undermined the ability of the army to fight effectively.
In The Path to Victory, Vandergriff undertook a historical analysis, demonstrating how the principles of Scientific Management were brought into the US military at the very end of the nineteenth century by Elihu Root, as Secretary of War, and how these remained at the heart of the army’s approach throughout the subsequent decades. An interesting sidelight is how the army’s leaders repeatedly sought to adopt approaches and techniques from the Prussian Army, yet each time utterly failed to understand their philosophical and cultural basis, due to their reliance on French modes of thinking, and so implemented systems fundamentally distorted from the original.
The essence of this approach was that armies were fundamentally like machines, and that warfare could be managed as a series of individual mechanical and predictable tasks. This philosophy seemed to be well suited to the context of the US Army, where rapid expansion at the start of a major war inevitably meant that the majority of officers and men would have minimal professional experience and so would be dependent upon tight centralised control. In such a context, the bonds between leaders and led seemed of little importance. Instead, a business-like approach, where soldiers were seen as individual experts rather than as part of an interdependent team, seemed natural. The inevitable result was a centrally controlled attritional approach, where mass made up for manoeuvre and authority made up for leadership.
The second part of Vandergriff’s book presents a depressing sequence of failure and the resurgence of the established attritional culture. He shows how some commanders were able to understand that reliance on mass and firepower, based on technology, would not always be sufficient to secure victory. At several points over the following decades, they sought to shift the army towards policies more aligned to the development of combat leaders who would gain the trust and confidence of their men and to the establishment of units where the men knew and respected each other. In describing their repeated failure, Vandergriff shows yet again how ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and how the US Army remains caught in the vice-like grip of its history. This may allow the US Army to be unstoppable when faced with a conventional foe, but it leaves the force worryingly vulnerable against enemies adopting alternative approaches to combat, as was seen during the insurgency following the second Gulf War, or in situations where it may face opponents with similar levels of technology as well as numerical preponderance, such as might soon be the case with China.
Although written more than a decade ago, and updated in 2013, there is little evidence to suggest there has been fundamental change in the basic approach adopted by the US Army. Vandergriff’s book therefore regrettably remains as relevant today as when first published.
Just after the end of that century, Donald Vandergriff, then a major in the US Army, explored the impact of this thinking on the human side of the military. In part, he was driven to understand why an army that had for decades trumpeted the virtues of manoeuvre warfare actually seemed to practice attrition. He also wanted to discover why the most successful officers seemed to be the ‘courtiers’, who neither understood nor cared about studying the art of war. In seeking an explanation, he was forced to conclude that the very factors that had enabled that economic and logistical primacy also undermined the ability of the army to fight effectively.
In The Path to Victory, Vandergriff undertook a historical analysis, demonstrating how the principles of Scientific Management were brought into the US military at the very end of the nineteenth century by Elihu Root, as Secretary of War, and how these remained at the heart of the army’s approach throughout the subsequent decades. An interesting sidelight is how the army’s leaders repeatedly sought to adopt approaches and techniques from the Prussian Army, yet each time utterly failed to understand their philosophical and cultural basis, due to their reliance on French modes of thinking, and so implemented systems fundamentally distorted from the original.
The essence of this approach was that armies were fundamentally like machines, and that warfare could be managed as a series of individual mechanical and predictable tasks. This philosophy seemed to be well suited to the context of the US Army, where rapid expansion at the start of a major war inevitably meant that the majority of officers and men would have minimal professional experience and so would be dependent upon tight centralised control. In such a context, the bonds between leaders and led seemed of little importance. Instead, a business-like approach, where soldiers were seen as individual experts rather than as part of an interdependent team, seemed natural. The inevitable result was a centrally controlled attritional approach, where mass made up for manoeuvre and authority made up for leadership.
The second part of Vandergriff’s book presents a depressing sequence of failure and the resurgence of the established attritional culture. He shows how some commanders were able to understand that reliance on mass and firepower, based on technology, would not always be sufficient to secure victory. At several points over the following decades, they sought to shift the army towards policies more aligned to the development of combat leaders who would gain the trust and confidence of their men and to the establishment of units where the men knew and respected each other. In describing their repeated failure, Vandergriff shows yet again how ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and how the US Army remains caught in the vice-like grip of its history. This may allow the US Army to be unstoppable when faced with a conventional foe, but it leaves the force worryingly vulnerable against enemies adopting alternative approaches to combat, as was seen during the insurgency following the second Gulf War, or in situations where it may face opponents with similar levels of technology as well as numerical preponderance, such as might soon be the case with China.
Although written more than a decade ago, and updated in 2013, there is little evidence to suggest there has been fundamental change in the basic approach adopted by the US Army. Vandergriff’s book therefore regrettably remains as relevant today as when first published.
Displaying 1 of 1 review