Task Force Smith and the Problem with “Readinessâ€
T.S. Allen and Jackson Perry | July 17, 2020
In the rainy predawn darkness of July 5, 1950, two US Army rifles companies reinforced by six howitzers—about four hundred men in all—dug in on a saddle-shaped hill straddling a highway just north of Osan, South Korea. The hill was an outstanding north-facing defensive position: to this day, a soldier on that hill can see eight miles of the crucial strategic road that bends northwest, towards the city of Suwon, today known as the home of Samsung, but in 1950 famous for the ancient walls of Hwaesong Fortress that surround it. Two weeks before, communist North Korea, with Soviet support, had crossed the 38th parallel and invaded America’s partner South Korea. The American soldiers entrenched on the hill, called Task Force Smith after their commander, Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith, were about to become the first American soldiers to see ground combat in the Korean War.
The US Army remembers Task Force Smith vividly. “No more Task Force Smiths†has been a mantra since the 1990s. T.R. Fehrenbach’s 1963 book This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, which includes a detailed account of the battle, is a perennial feature of military reading lists that was recently recommended by former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Fehrenbach writes that Task Force Smith had “neither arms nor training†and that due to stingy defense spending and poor leadership, its defeat was inevitable. The Army constantly invokes the legacy of Task Force Smith as a justification for “readiness,†its catch-all term for preparedness for any war, which of course requires big budgets.
https://mwi.usma.edu/task-force-smith-and-the-problem-with-readiness/
