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175  10  The Other Class Stars Fell On In his inaugural lecture to the class of 1926 at Leavenworth, Commandant MG Edward King summed up the philosophy behind the army’s schools. The schools’ mission was utilitarian: train the largest possible number of officers for potential command and staff duties in an expansible army, instruct them in accordance with a uniform doctrine, and drive home the primacy of the command function. He used football as an analogy. A team “composed of individuals, indoctrinated in teamwork and led by a real leader, will beat a team of hastily assembled stars.” The quarterback is the commander; he gives the signals. All the other specialized players know their roles. “Each player is presumed competent else he would not be in the team.” The art of command involves the proper use of staff, but the command function is indivisible. A commander “must, first of all, have character.” His staff furnishes advice and frees him from administrative details, but most of all a commander must be decisive; he must lead. “An army is happy under a strong commander ,” King posited, “but not under a soviet committee.”1 The Leavenworth approach was quintessentially American, a reflexive hybrid of John Dewey and Frederick Winslow Taylor. Americans are leery of elitism, especially pertaining to the military. Americans think of their society as an egalitarian meritocracy. Consistent with this view, Leavenworth trained the “average middle.” The War Department fought off all attempts to raise the intellectual bar by inaugurating entrance examinations. Somehow or other, a Grant or a Pershing always rose to the top without recourse to systematic theoretical education. Americans are also pragmatic. They pride themselves on their ability to improvise solutions and devise new methods derived from a realistic assessment 176  BEETLE of the elements of a problem. Americans have little faith in programmatic formulas. Their attitude is “just tell me how to do it” and “let me get on with it.” Leavenworth emphasized how-to training, the application method. At Leavenworth, officers were not taught; they learned by doing. Schooled according to a uniform methodology, they became interchangeable parts. King’s gridiron comparison was particularly apt. The 1923 FSRs provided a detailed prescription for succeeding in combat based on extant means and conditions. The field regulations provided the playbook. Leavenworth inculcated teamwork; it brought together officers from chiefly the combat arms but also from the technical and support services for a period of one or two years and taught them the playbook and the fundamentals of the game. There was only one way of doing things. Doctrine described the best means of waging a frontal attack to achieve penetration; it detailed the requirements for performing a flanking movement. All the combat arms and supporting services had specified roles. And the army team believed in the controlled ground attack. The quarterback called the plays; he commanded because he demonstrated a superior understanding of the game plan and possessed the right intangibles —the will to win and the character to inspire. If a player lacked the skills, drive, or personal temperament to get the job done, he was replaced. If the offense could not move the ball, the lineup was shuffled or a player came off the bench. Worst case, one changed the quarterback . The Army of the Potomac went through a number of commanders before Lincoln found his general, but once he did, the war ended within a year. The army’s pragmatism can also be seen in Leavenworth’s various manifestations during the interwar years. The army confronted a number of hard realities. The 1920 NDA created the framework of the expansible army. In the event of another war, the army needed enough trained officers to staff the corps areas, the War Department, and the mobilization agencies, as well as to train and eventually command a mass army. The officer corps proved far too small and was stretched much too thin to fulfill that mission in addition to its other tasks—maintaining some measure of readiness and defending American overseas possessions , to name but two. But given the meager resources available to the War Department, the officer corps was too large for any orderly passage through the sequential army school system. Finally, the skewed demographics of the officer corps—overaged senior officers and the junior officer hump—bedeviled army planners, and the situation was complicated by the promotion policy. The army wrestled with these problems, [3.141.100.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 10:54...

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