Letters

From the March 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

An analogy to 20th century medicine is in order. We have heart transplants and other miraculous interventions. Yet while these have saved lives and restored health, they have contributed little to improvements in life expectancy. The largest contributions have resulted from clean water, improved nutrition, and campaigns against endemic diseases. In the new century, the most important medical advances may well be similarly undramatic.

T.A. Heppenheimer
Center for Space Science
Fountain Valley, CA

Tactical Reality

Kudos to REASON and Thomas Hazlett for his column "Hayek's Heroes" (December). As a former "grunt," I readily recognize the need for military decisions to be made by the man on the spot, as opposed to commanders and doctrine whose perceptions are only loosely based on reality. The soldier, by contrast, has plenty of reality (sometimes too much of it) and uses his knowledge, training, and perceptions to impact that reality.

The column brought to mind two quotes from The 11th Special Forces Group Field Order of Battle Handbook:

"The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis." --an unnamed German general

"One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine." --from a Russian document

Kurt Schneider
Austin, TX
[e-mail]

I am afraid that I cannot agree with Thomas Hazlett on Hayek and D-Day. I certainly agree with his larger point about dispersed information and our debt to Hayek on that score. I even agree that application of this principle is especially effective on battlefields. Unfortunately, I do not think that one can say that the democratic Anglo-American armies applied this principle while the totalitarian Germans did not.

Indeed, Stephen Ambrose's work notwithstanding, the generally well-established consensus among military historians is exactly the opposite, i.e., that it was (unfortunately) the Germans who showed far more initiative on the battlefield. Certainly the Germans had cumbersome and bad command arrangements for the Normandy campaign, and Hitler did hamstring German operations with restrictive orders. But at the battlefield level, the Germans were far more flexible than we.

In fact, the major debate among historians about the Normandy campaign is why it took the Allies so long to break out, and what this says about the relative quality of the German and Allied armies. It would be nice to believe that democracies inherently produce better soldiers. Unfortunately, this is simply not true.

Paul Johnston
Ottawa, Canada
[e-mail]

As a Marine Corps infantry officer (now serving in the Reserves), I agree wholeheartedly that the strength of current U.S. doctrine is our acceptance of decentralized decision making. The junior officers and noncommissioned officers are empowered to take whatever actions they deem appropriate to accomplish the "Commander's Intent." Rather than being told what to do and how to do it, subordinate leaders are told what the commander envisions as the desirable "end state of the battlefield" and are set loose to accomplish it.

I have one minor complaint, however, concerning Mr. Hazlett's portrayal of the Wermacht as representing centralization of command and the U.S. Army representing decentralization of command. I think he's painted the two armies with too broad a brush. While the German division and corps commanders indeed found their hands tied by the sometimes baffling dictates of Hitler, at the battalion and company level German junior officers and NCOs had at least the same degree of autonomy as their American counterparts. In fact, it was official German doctrine that the leader on the spot could disobey orders when the situation called for it.

In my opinion, we owed our victory at Normandy more to high-level blunders by the German command combined with their low-quality troops than to our own good, small-unit tactics and decentralized decision making.