Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations

Leavenworth Papers #16

by Paul H. Herbert, Gerald T. Bartlett (Foreword)

This study provides more than just a background to current doctrine. It demonstrates that a well-conceived doctrine is critical to the Army and the nation, describes why doctrine is so difficult to formulate, places doctrine at the center of peacetime professionalism, and admonishes the Army not to become complacent about the contents of its field manuals.

Leavenworth Paper No. 16 illuminates the problems inherent in creating new doctrine and provides readers with a better understanding of our Army's vigilance concerning doctrine.

131 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1988

Reviews

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so interested in reading this monograph that I spent hours searching for a PDF version that I could print out (the "official" PDF version available on the CSI website has the print function disabled & controlled by code key; my eyes are getting so bad in my old age that my distaste for reading on a screen is rapidly becoming an actual disability). This interest was for two reasons- one was the fact that in the late 1980s, when I was finishing high school and actively considering my options for enlisting in the army, I developed a pronounced uneasiness at what I perceived (even with my relative ignorance of the comparative merits of U.S. & Soviet-bloc weapons systems in those pre-internet days) as both an extreme over-emphasis on the primary NATO mission (i.e. preventing the well-known "Fulda Gap" scenario), coupled with an alarming tendency to ignore the then extreme technological limitations inherent in what essentially were partially modernised 1950s/1960s platforms like the M60A3 MBT, which at that time was still standard in the U.S. Army. The second reason was that even then I thought that the wholesale discarding of essentially all lessons learned during the Indo-China conflict, along with practically the entire body of knowledge gained in Light Infantry & Irregular Warfare during the previous 100+ years, not to mention the nearly simultaneous evisceration of the capability to conduct the original Special Forces mission set (particularly in the area of languages!) was ill-advised at best, and could at worst end up having fairly tragic consequences in the not too distant future. When I was a small boy, my father had given me his copy of FM 21-75 Combat Training Of The Individual Soldier And Patrolling (the 1962 edition), which I read with interest and have re-read many times since. I still believe now that the lack of emphasis on the basic infantry patrolling skills taught in FM 21-75 cost U.S. forces dearly during the early days of the Afghan & Iraq Wars, and that the attitudes which had originated partially in General DePuy's concepts for the FM discussed in this monograph were an important causal factor in this. It appears that I was on the right track, and if that was true of me as a teenager in 1988, it is no wonder that there was widespread resistance to General DePuy's doctrine throughout the army immediately upon its attempted promulgation. A bit dry at times, but nevertheless fascinating reading ...

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read on the development and thinking about Army doctrine during the post Vietnam period. Anyone who scoffs with hindsight about how the Army threw away our Vietnam experience to focus on the enemy we wanted (Soviets) should read this.

This short read details the huge internal, external, and international implications that provide context to how the Army fights.