Tanks, tanks, tanks! Bovington Tank Museum, the Chieftain and others.

THE 1929 CAVALRY DIVISION MANEUVERS
By Major George S. Patton, Jr., Cavalry
Cavalry Journal
1930

ARMORED CARS WITH CAVALRY
By Major G.S. Patton, Jr., Cavalry
Cavalry Journal
January 1924

“General Carbon, I think the battle is ripe. Direct the 2d Deathbolts to charge the enemy left.” By this simple order, Lieutenant General Alonzo B. Gasoline, seated at his green lit desk in the gas proof seclusion of his command car, loosed the two million pounds of petrol propelled hate on the
tottering flank of our doomed opponents.

But, how can a human Dictaphone describe the inspiring majesty of the sight which soon unfolded itself before our eyes on the screen of our radio motion picture projector, whose lens, high above us in the observation helicopter, commanded a complete view of the battlefield? As we gazed in haggard expectancy to the extreme right, our screen showed only the scorched hills, their blasted vegetation looming ghostly through the green haze of the gas clouds. In an instant, however, the line of our scout tanks appeared over the crest and dashed on the foe, while behind them, in perfect order, came the three ranks of our incomparable 2d Deathbolts. Long, solid lines of flame poured from their twin exhausts, attesting to the top R.P.M. of their engines, while the air above them frothed with waste oxygen from their fighting compartments.

Instantly the enemy guns spotted them; great geysers of sand and mud burst in their ranks. One, I noted, cracked open like a walnut, while it's doomed crew hurtled from it, only to sink like charred embers in the reek of the all-consuming gas.

Despite my staff training, the battle lust grew on me. Moved by an unaccountable impulse, I switched on the auditory microphone, so that the sounds of the distant battle were as clear to me as were its sights. On thundered the tanks. Shell fire was impotent to check those dauntless chauffeurs! The enemy, too, realized this and played his last card. From the charred draw on his left appeared the solid mass of his reverse tanks, charging straight at the now disorganized Deathbolts.

Pandemonium broke loose. To the tock-tocking of the whirling caterpillars, the roar of the guns, the shriek of the engines, and the all-pervading hissing of the gas was added the high, staccato hum of airplanes, as our supporting squadrons, flying low over the 2nd, squirted liquid fire into the eyeslits of the enemy.

All this takes long to dictate; but happened with amazing quickness. Nearer and nearer waddled theopposing lines, their rate of approach approximating fifty miles an hour. Could steel and rubber stand the shock? Then, with a slithering roar, they met. Sparks flew; track plates, shivered in a thousand fragments, filled the air. So terrific was the impact that many tanks simply exploded, completely dissipated by the shock. The chaos of the melee lasted a full minute. Then we saw the third line of the Deathbolts sweep through the ruck and on, over the enemy position, to VICTORY.

Shall such battles occur? In view of past experience, it would be a bold man who would deny this possibility; but a bolder, perhaps, who would look for its immediate realization. Yet, there are soldiers, men of high mentality and war experience, who dream of such battles. From these enthusiasts insane, perhaps on the one hand, the notions of mechanical warfare grade down to another class, to whom history and invention mean nothing and who banish all thought of mechanical achievements from their concepts of future wars. They, too, are insane. As ever, the truth lies between nearer, perhaps, to the lower than to the highest mark at least for our generation.

Let us examine, in the first place, how mechanics has affected, or may affect war; then by pruningour fancies with the heartless shears of Fact and Finance let us see how we may use some of the obtainable possibilities.

Ever since man banded together with the laudable intention of killing his fellows, his movements have depended on means of communication. War had depended on roads. From very remote times, man has used wheels to aid his progress or the progress of his stores. The improvement of the vehicle and of the road has only affected this with respect to the rapidity and volume of traffic, not with respect to the direction of movement. Roads are, then, a very restrictive influence.

No matter what sort of wheels he uses, if there are no roads, he cannot move. If the roads are poor, he is little better off than in his bull-cart days. For example, it is quite safe to say that had General Grant possessed all the trucks in the A.E.F., he nonetheless could not have supplied an army in the Wilderness Campaign much larger than the one he supplied with wagons. From a supply standpoint, then, wheels are no better than the roads. Ten percent of the roads in the United States are improved. Tactically the same is true, with this added consideration; that while wheels add to the mobility of troops on the march, they give no battle mobility. The cargo must dismount to fight, and that well out of range. Even rubber tires have not changed war beyond recognition.

We must now consider a more advanced wheel the caterpillar tread. With such, we are not bound to roads and have, therefore, a great increase in mobility to the battlefield and on it. To move and feed great armies over roadless lands, we need but caterpillars. To augment our horse borne squadrons with armored comrades, we need but caterpillars. To place our heaviest guns how and where we will, we need but caterpillars. BUT one can almost hear the snipping of those fateful shears, Fact and Finance. Have we got the numbers or the types? Will we afford them? I have no brief against roadless tractors, nor do I hold with the churchman like conservatism too common in all armies; hence, I am willing to admit that the time may conceivably come when, in the immutable cycle of military endeavor, we shall see small professional armies of highly trained mechanical soldiers, operating simple, yet powerful machines, again dominate the battlefield as did their prototypes, the heavy cavalry of the armies of Belisarius and Narses. Or, again, we may see the roadless machine, with all its apparent potentialities, sink to a position analogous to that occupied by the submarine, which but a few years since was so touted as the future mistress of the sea. Who may hazard a guess?

From the standpoint, however, of practical soldiers of an economic nation; remembering, too, that we have a vast plant on different lines ready to our hand, it seems better to follow the maxim of Disraeli to “Compromise.” Nor is this all. Should our enthusiasm for the novel and the mechanical carry us too fast, we might conceivably find ourselves in the situation of the lobster who, having in his haste for new glories sloughed off his old armor, finds himself forced to seek the seclusion of some rocky cave until his new plates have hardened. A cave for a nation our size is hard to find, and a soft-shelled America might find many with an appetite for its unprotected abundance.

In seeking for the compromise above referred to, we shall endeavor to see how we may utilize certain mechanical means now existing and within the means of our limited financial resources. It would be interesting to pursue this study to all means and for all branches of the service. This, however, were over long for such an article, and, further, presupposed a general knowledge far greater than that possessed by the writer.

We shall then simply confine ourselves to the cavalry for the arm, and to the armored car for the mechanical means, regretfully snipping off the tank from this discussion because, at the present time, THERE IS NO TANK AVAILABLE FOR ISSUE IN THIS COUNTRY WHICH CAN KEEP UP WITH ANY UNIT OF CAVALRY.

It is true that an armored car such as we contemplate does not exist either, but it can be easily and cheaply constructed from existing motor vehicles, limited armor plate, and machine guns. It is simply an assembly proposition, not one of manufacture.

The armored car contemplated here is not one of those armored forts miscalled cars in Europe. They are too heavy, too expensive, and have unnecessary gun power. Such assault machines may be useful, but not for cavalry. For our purpose, we desire an armored car consisting of a stock chassis of some commercial two-ton truck, thus insuring an abundant and ubiquitous supply of spare parts; the engine, gasoline tank, driver, and gunner to be protected by armor capable of stopping rifle fire at one hundred yards; pneumatic tires, and de-mountable disk wheels, with one air-cooled machine gun, preferably with all-round fire. There should be no roof to the gun compartment and no protective floor to this machine. It is realized that such simplicity will arouse the ire of every inventor. Unfortunately, inventors don't have to fight in the things they make. Every ounce of extra weight put on an armored car or tank reduces it's fighting strength many percent.

The question may then be asked; Why use armor at all? It is an apt question. The British light car patrols were unprotected Fords, mounting one machine gun. They did excellent service. The protection above referred to would make these cars much more formidable than the Ford without greatly reducing it's mobility. The expectation of life of the crew would be very high. We base this assertion on fact. On inspecting many tanks (British, French, and American) just after battles, we have frequently been unable to find even a single hit. The reason seems to rest on the following facts; Battle is not very dangerous, that is, the fire in battle is nothing like the fire of the target range; fire is a great defense. If you shoot rapidly at a man, with fair accuracy, he loses interest in his aim. Troops do not like to fire at tanks (or armored cars) at short range, because they somewhat erroneously think they will be destroyed. At long range, their fire is not effective and their bullets have little penetration. Movement! A quail is not doomed to death because he has no armor, neither is a destroyer. An armored car with cavalry is a land destroyer.

There is no gainsaying the fact that an inch and a half of steel all around would be comforting. A No.2 field range would also be most handy to a cavalry soldier caught at meal-time far from camp. Both are unattainable comforts and for the same reason, weight. To add further emphasis to a point apt to arouse controversy and also to accede to our national penchant for voting, it is confidently asserted that if men who have fought in tanks in action were asked to voice an opinion, they would willingly dispense with fifty percent added protection in order to secure five percent added mobility.

Having described our weapon, let us by a series of concrete examples demonstrate its usefulness.

With a reconnoitering detachment; Such a detachment varies in size from a platoon to a squadron, and precedes by, perhaps, a day's march, large masses of cavalry. It acts with patrols covering its immediate front and, on advice given by them, secures information of the enemy main body. The detachment itself advances by bounds, securing it's local protection by an advance guard, etc. Suddenly, the point of the advance guard of our reconnoitering detachment, advancing as described, tops a rise and is fired on by enemy cavalry, who at once retire to the cover of the next rise, some thousand yards to our front. Lacking an armored car, our point must form as foragers and gallop the distance to where the enemy disappeared. In so doing it may sustain casualties from fire; in any case it will fatigue its horses. Were an armored car present with the main body, it could come up in short order, and, moving at speed and with comparative immunity, solve the situation as to the condition of the next ridge. At the same time, it's normal position with the main body would in no way add to the visibility of the point while en route.

There is, of course, the bogy of a concealed gun on the ridge in question, which, placed there by the supernatural acumen of the enemy, will blow the car to bits. Would it do less to the members of the original point? Or are the lives of four men in a car more worthy of protection than those of eight men on horseback? Do we find isolated guns with small cavalry units? Of course, there is danger, but that is the common condition of war.

With the last situation cleared up, the march resumes. Shortly, from the right front, comes the sound of distant firing. The commander of the detachment remembers that “Knowledge is power.” The speediest way to get the knowledge is to send the car. Again, it may be hit; so might a mounted patrol on the same mission. In fifteen minutes the car has made the round trip of six miles to the patrol and returns with a full report, perhaps also a corpse for identification Shortly after this, the detachment approaches a hill situated a mile and a half to the left of its route, rather too far for a security patrol to go; yet the map shows that from the hill a good view can be obtained. Again, the car goes quickly to the hill and has a look and rejoins the column without difficulty.

Next, on topping a long rise, the point gets its first view of the Red River, a mile to its front, and on the white road, half a mile beyond the bridge, sees about a platoon of probable enemy advancing at a brisk trot. Clearly, the possession of the bridge is vital to the continuance of themission. The car, rushing at thirty miles an hour, reaches the bridge and delays the enemy until the main body arrives, and is ready to charge if he is still in a nasty mood. During the course of the day the reconnoitering detachment finds itself more and more cramped by the enemy cavalry. Finally, it's patrols can make no progress, and a regiment of the enemy has been definitely located. Here is a case where the cavalry mass in rear must intervene and remove the obstacle, so that the reconnoitering units may progress. The pack wireless is put up, but there is too much “static.” A motorcycle messenger might be used, but in enemy country he may be sniped. The armored car will be safer and fully as quick.

At eight a.m. the next day the 1st Cavalry arrives with Troop A, 1st Machine Gun Squad, and the 1st platoon Armored Car Troop No.1 (three machines) attached. By ten a.m. the enemy is met, and attack, using combined action, had been decided upon. The pivot of maneuver will consist of the advance guard and Troop A, 1st Machine Gun Squad, which will attack along the axis of
movement.

The best fire position is a little rise occupied by the point. Just as the machine guns move toward it, a troop of the enemy cavalry gallops for the position. The armored cars, however, reach it first and hold the enemy in play until the machine guns are established.

The 2d Squadron moved under cover by a road to attack the enemy left; perhaps the cars precede it to insure the occupation of the departure position; roads permitting, they might even follow the charge, or else they might be held to lend fire strength to the pivot of maneuver, and, in the event
of a successful envelopment, might later move up rapidly along the axis to join in the pursuit.

Many other situations suitable for the use of armored cars with cavalry can be imagined, such as in parallel pursuit, speeding ahead to harass the enemy and delay him until the cavalry can cut him off.

In raids they would be useful for pivots of maneuver, distant reconnaissance, messages, transporting explosives, etc.

For delaying actions in rolling or wooded country, armored cars will be most valuable. But to be useful in any of the above capacities, the car must be mobile, practical, and simple of repair, not a costly, hypothetical monstrosity.

No, bearing in mind our remarks as to wheels and their limitations, it is evident that our armored car must of necessity pertain to a cavalry force of such a size that some portion of it will always be on a road. This limits the permanent attachment of cars to cavalry brigades and higher units. A
suitable unit for a brigade would be an armored car troop of nine cars divided into three platoons of
three cars each.

They should be permanently of the cavalry, imbued with its spirit, ready to accept losses, and they must always remember that their duty, in common with that of all cavalry, is to CLINCH AND DESTROY.

*The Editor may be pardoned for recalling an occasion on which the author of this military fantasy did, himself, bring back an important corpse on his unarmored car, for identification.

HOW THE U.S. MILITARY LEARNED TO LEARN IN WORLD WAR I: LESSONS FROM THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES
MICHAEL SHURKINAUGUST 22, 2018
COMMENTARY AEF

Is there an “American way of war?” To answer this question, one would do well to start with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I, often rightly said to be America’s first modern war. The AEF exhibited both good and bad traits. To begin with the bad: One finds arrogance and the conviction of superiority vis-à-vis America’s allies and enemies, along with the assumption that they had nothing to teach U.S. forces. The good: Notwithstanding the initial arrogance and conservative institutional culture, some commanders and their men displayed an ability and willingness to learn, especially at the operational and tactical levels. Most importantly, they recognized that in fact America’s allies had a great deal to teach the U.S. military. Rather than let their self-confidence close their minds, they saved it for assertiveness on the battlefield.

Central to appreciating the Great War as fought by the AEF are two facts. First, the violence was extreme. Fifty-three thousand Americans were killed within a relatively short span of time. The first fell in November 1917, but Americans were not heavily involved in the fighting until the late spring of 1918 and were never more than junior parties compared to the British and French armies. Even then, most of the killing took place in the period that began in mid-July with the Second Battle of the Marne. In fact, almost half (26,000), lost their lives in the final Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on Sept. 26, 1918 and still ranks as the largest and deadliest battle in American history.

Second, the U.S. military had no idea what it was doing. It had no real experience with modern warfare and didn’t learn much about it from the experience of the belligerents who had entered the war earlier. The United States therefore joined the battle largely with the same innocence the others had possessed in August 1914. Worse, it refused to learn when given the opportunity. As Mark Ethan Grotelueschen documents in his terrific study of The AEF Way of War, American officers visiting the front largely saw what they wanted to see, which was validation of their institutional assumptions about how war should be fought and their conviction that the U.S. military was superior to those of the Europeans. General John J. Pershing and many of his lieutenants clung to romantic 19th century notions about warfare. Among these was the belief in the sufficiency of rifle-armed infantry and the conviction that the American rifleman in particular — through his skill, certainly, but above all thanks to his great character and spirit — would do what the British and French had failed to do: break the Hun. The implication was that the allies were lacking in character and were almost unmanly in their taste for trenches and the various accoutrements associated with trench warfare, chief among them machine guns and massed artillery, but also grenades and mortars.

The story of the AEF, then, is about how rapidly and how completely some of its commanders and, of course, thousands of soldiers and marines (it was a joint force), learned — despite their own initial ignorance and the larger Army’s intellectual handicaps. On his own, Pershing might never have understood the war he helped to win. His contributions arguably lay in his political and organizational skills, his ability to create and lead a vast military built essentially from scratch. However, as Grotelueschen has ably documented, a number of his division commanders and lower-ranking commanders caught on. They, with help from British and French advisers, and in some cases in defiance of their superiors and even their orders, learned in weeks and months what the allies and the Germans had figured out over the course of three years of horror. Today, the AEF serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of remaining beholden to old ideas, and an optimistic reminder of the benefits of being willing to learn from allies and adapt, even in the face of outmoded institutional thinking.

Baptism by Fire: Learning Modern Warfare

What was “it” that the Americans had to learn? The problem in World War I, the reason the two sides found themselves locked in a murderous stalemate, was firepower. Modern rifles, machine guns, and above all artillery rendered suicidal the kind of open field maneuvers British, French, and German commanders dreamed of in 1914, and that Pershing still did in 1918. One simply could not survive above ground. Even if one broke through the enemy’s lines, it was still nearly impossible to exploit breaches once the forward troops were out of range of their side’s artillery. At any rate those advancing troops largely lacked the ability to communicate with those guns that were in range. Thus: defenders could mass their own fires, smash to pieces advancing forces, and push them back nearly to the point of departure.

Armies on the Western Front had to learn to fight differently from what their doctrines and field manuals advocated at the beginning of the war. They had to learn to eschew closely formed columns or waves and use terrain features for cover. They also had to learn true combined arms combat, which meant figuring out how to remain in contact and work closely with artillery while integrating organic firepower — mortars, hand grenades, and rifle grenades — into smaller units. The armies had to incorporate and bring forward far more machine guns than any of them originally had on their tables of organization. Automatic weapons, the importance of which armies underestimated before 1914 (or 1918, in the Americans’ case), suddenly became critical. Up until that point, it seems institutional culture and the cult of the rifle and the bayonet had blocked the full adoption of these weapons. The armies also had to learn to give up on the fantasy of the big breakthrough in favor of incremental advances carefully coordinated with artillery.

The British, French, and Germans all figured this out, learning and evolving, however slowly. Military theorist and historian Paddy Griffith has shown how, by 1917 if not earlier, the British Expeditionary Force had largely figured “it” out and was already fighting a very different kind of war, sometimes with the support of superior officers, sometimes despite their opposition. The force learned to attack using more fluid lines, dispersed units, and far greater quantities of firepower. It learned to mass barrages and then have its men hug the rolling curtain of fire. It learned to flow around strong points and have others mop them up. Bruce Gudmundsson and Timothy Lupfer have documented how the Germans, for their part, developed similar methods which they referred to as “infiltration,” “assault,” or Sturm tactics; the troops schooled in these methods were Sturmtruppen (which is how the first true assault rifle, the German Sg44, earned the moniker Sturmgewehr, or “assault rifle” — the weapon dates to the Second World War but arguably has its conceptual roots in the tactical thinking of the First). The French did the same, as Michel Goya ably describes in his new history of 1918. According to Goya, France fielded in that year a profoundly different army than it had in 1914, one that truly combined arms at the lowest echelons and had mastered challenges such as keeping infantry in communication with artillery and using aircraft to keep both informed while also providing close air support. Ultimately, the great lesson for the French could be summed up by General Philippe Petain’s assertion that “Artillery conquers; infantry occupies.” The rifleman with his big battle rifle and bayonet mattered little. Artillery and other fires, rather than being auxiliaries to the infantry, became the focus. If anything, it was infantry that supported them.

Given all this, it was no accident that the German offensive in the spring of 1918 achieved as much as it did and restored an unprecedented degree of movement; it was no accident either that the counter-offensive launched by the allies, Americans among them, did so well. As for why it took so long for the three great European armies to achieve this level of proficiency, Griffith offers a compelling explanation: The rate of attrition in the armies was so great as to inhibit the accumulation of institutional memory. There were simply not enough survivors in veteran units to pass on hard-won knowledge, and it took time for units to acquire the skills needed to perform the tasks they increasingly understood to be necessary.

A Slow Learner Enters the War

The Americans who began pouring into France at the end of 1917 were largely unaware of this new form of warfare, due in part to senior commanders’ unwillingness to learn from the belligerents as well as an inexplicable sense of exceptionalism and an imagined innate superiority of the young country over the old. Once in France, most American units were taken under the wing of the French army (the rest by the British), which tried to teach what it could. Sometimes these lessons ran contrary to the preferences of American commanders who, according to Grotelueschen as well as Kenneth Hamburger, feared the foreign advisers might pollute the men with their ideas about trench warfare. Both studies describe a tug of war in the training camps between the French, who wanted to teach trench warfare, and AEF headquarters, which clung to other ideas.

Once in battle in the spring and summer of 1918 American officers defaulted to the old-school, infantry-centric approach favored by Pershing. This amounted to lines of infantrymen with fixed bayonets advancing on enemy positions with little in the way of artillery preparation prior to the attack, light fire support, and inadequate communications with supporting artillery. On the defensive, men were expected largely to rely on guts and the firepower of their Springfield rifles. The hope was for a breakthrough and a rapid resumption of maneuver warfare rather than static fighting.

Remarkably, though, AEF units learned fast, sometimes within days and weeks. Writing of Belleau Wood and subsequent fighting at Vaux, Grotelueschen comments that “what began in June and July with a futile bloodbath of inexperienced Marines in the wheat fields” next to Belleau Wood “ended with well-orchestrated combined arms attacks that annihilated enemy garrisons with relatively little cost in American life.” Americans learned to disperse and hug the terrain. Perhaps more importantly, they learned not to operate without massive fire support, close coordination with artillery, and ample supplies of mortars, rifle grenades, Chauchat light machine guns, and field guns. Thanks to French trainers (and French-supplied guns), American gunners mastered the art of carefully planned barrages, rolling barrages, and box barrages; commanders, for their part, learned to value these things and make them central to their plans and operations. Finally, they learned to keep the gunners connected to everyone else, so that they knew where to aim and where not to. When Americans did not have enough of their own supporting forces, they learned to borrow them from the British and French, which also meant learning to interoperate with them. The Americans also discovered the power of aircraft — again borrowed above all from the French, for the U.S. military as of late 1917 effectively had few aircraft and even fewer ideas what to do with them. They also learned to work with tanks — British and French tanks, often with British and French crews. Patton rolled to battle in a French tank. This is not to say that by November 1918 the entire AEF had mastered modern warfare. Morever, the skill level probably varied significantly from one division to another as fresh new divisions joined the fight alongside veterans. But they were fighting better, and differently.

As Grotelueschen and others have shown, in some divisions, it was the commanders themselves who adapted, while in others the commanders preferred to fight by the book, while their subordinates used what wiggle room they had to adapt and fight differently. Often the difference had to do with the quantity and kind of fire support allocated for attacks: The fast learners wanted more guns on hand to fire more rounds, and for longer periods of time; they wanted rolling barrages, and they wanted the guns to work closely with infantry. For example, General John Lejeune, of the United States Marine Corps, when he commanded the 2nd Division, became an artillery enthusiast and interpreted his orders liberally to have more fire support at his disposal and use it extensively. The AEF inspector general at one point criticized him officially for not fighting according to doctrine. Ultimately, instead of showing the British and French how it was done, as Pershing had expected, the AEF, with commanders like Lejeune leading, learned to fight like the British and French.

That character and spirit Pershing valued so much did help, however. The British and French really were tired. What they needed, and what Pershing provided, was a vast army of eager optimists. The innocent Americans proved ferocious from the moment they first saw combat, even if they fought rashly, like the marines who first assaulted Belleau Wood. (For a rich discussion of how the AEF fared in combat particularly in the first half of 1918, see Terrence Finnegan’s ‘A Delicate Affair’ on the Western Front: America Learns to Fight a Modern War in the Woëvre Trenches.) In July at the Marne, the Americans’ grit may in fact have saved the day, for they held their part of the line against all odds and contrary even to good sense. But it was not until members of the AEF learned to combine their bravura with British and French savoir faire that the American military became formidable.

Conclusion

For today, the lessons of the AEF’s experience are several. First is the danger of being beholden to accepted ideas and being unwilling to learn from what should have been evident truths. Technology had changed, quickly, but ideas had lagged behind. This delay cost the lives of thousands of many young British, French, Germans, and, arguably, Americans. The second is the danger of being unwilling to learn from one’s allies. The American military was convinced of its superiority even though it had no reason to think it knew any better than the British or French. But the more open the Americans were to their allies’ wisdom, the better they fought and the less they suffered. This brings us to the third lesson, which is the importance of being willing and able to learn. AEF units learned, but largely despite their top commanders. One can only imagine how much better Americans would have fared had their leaders encouraged learning and adaptation rather than discouraging it, and had each new division, upon entering the line in the summer and fall of 1918, not had to climb so steep a learning curve. As good as the AEF had become by November, it still had a lot to learn, and the casualty rates need not have been as high as they were.

In more recent conflicts, one can point to specific instances where U.S. forces might have done better had they been less arrogant or more willing to learn from others. David E. Johnson, my colleague at the RAND Corporation, has argued that many American lives might have been saved had the U.S. Army bothered to learn German armored doctrine before it invaded Normandy. In Vietnam, Americans made efforts to learn from the French experience in Algeria and Indochina, although one can debate how well they applied those lessons or if they learned the right ones. In any event, they failed like the French.

Today, it is safe to say that the U.S. military generally believes it has little to learn from its allies. Although it is serious about cultivating interoperability, the focus tends to be on working together, not necessarily on learning from the others. The “American way” is usually taken to be the gold standard, and America’s partners are expected to accommodate themselves to it. One French liaison officer stationed in the United States recently complained to me of what he said was the penchant of American commanders for telling their audience that the U.S. military commanders were the best. No doubt this is intended to inspire pride and esprit de corps. But even if it were true, the officer suggested, might it not be more prudent to assume otherwise and try to learn?

Michael Shurkin is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation