Is Our Army Again Optimized for Defeat?
Col. Rich Creed
Maj. Nathan A. Jennings
Thursday, May 09, 2019
On Dec. 8, 1941, Japan initiated a massive offensive to wrest the Philippine Islands from Allied control just seven hours after attacking Pearl Harbor. The defending U.S. Army and Filipino forces, which had focused on counterinsurgency operations since 1898, remained largely organized, trained and equipped for stability efforts instead of modern large-scale ground combat operations.
While the coalition featured two U.S. Army-led corps with 10 understrength Filipino divisions and a single American infantry division in reserve, the defenders lacked the organizational capacity to enable, employ and sustain integrated fires and combined-arms maneuver across deep and close areas. The hard-fought action, lasting from January to April 1942, resulted in the largest defeat and surrender in U.S. Army history.
The Battle of Bataan should be particularly relevant to the Army as it refocuses on large-scale ground combat operations in the wake of almost a generation spent focused on stability and counterinsurgency campaigns in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Those campaigns placed a premium on tactical decentralization and occurred at the same time as the transition to a modular force that in effect de-emphasized the importance of corps and divisions fighting as formations. The lack of peer threats and the demands of continuous deployments allowed the Army to accept risk in areas critical to success during large-scale ground combat.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/our-army-again-optimized-defeat
