Dempsey's not so smart -- and he may be wrong about the utility of mass formations

By Robert Goldich

Best Defense guest
respondent

I've gone in the other direction regarding Gen.
Dempsey.

A bit to my surprise, given how much he was praised before he became the
CSA by people who I really respect and admire, I am becoming increasingly
disenchanted with him.  

I see official remarks and documents that seem to me to be nothing more
than a stringing together of contemporary pop phrases in military-strategic
affairs, dispensing conventional wisdom. There seems to me to be a lack
of intellectual rigor in his published statements of policy. I found his
first CJCS reading list to be amazingly puerile, filled with that most
suspicious of categories of written material, best sellers on general
booklists. And while as an historian I'm suspicious of excessively
precise historical analogies, I'm also concerned that excessive soft-peddling
of rising Chinese truculence and expansionist probing will encourage a Chinese
Sparta to indeed threaten us Americo-Athenians. Gen. Dempsey should recall
that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, or
at least willing to try in times of crisis.

Unlike Tom,
I'm very concerned that by incessant remarks about how "mass formations" won't
be necessary. We'll play into the hands of adversaries who decide that they
aren't equally dubious about their utility.  

Perhaps we can modify the alleged
statement of Trotsky to read: "You may not be interested in conventional war,
but conventional war may be interested in you." I don't think we're as
bad off as the British Army in 1914, because we have a very large reserve force
by comparison and a much greater diffusion of fairly recent military service
within the general male population (and, of course, a growing number of younger
women). But there's no question that for a prolonged conventional
conflict beyond a certain unpredictable level, an AVF is always going to have
less trained mobilization potential than  larger draft-fed force that
generates a lot of recently-trained individual reservists. There are
always tradeoffs.

And this doesn't even touch on industrial mobilization. As far as I
can tell, nobody but nobody in officialdom is thinking about this (if they are,
they're quiet about it). Trained manpower can always be generated a lot faster
than the material to equip it. If we had had to put the very large ground
forces we had in action from mid-1944 to mid-1945 into the field in 1942 and
even 1943, as well as being much more poorly trained, they would have had a lot
of inferior weapons.  

Robert L. Goldich retired from the Congressional
Research Service in 2005 as its senior military
manpower analyst. Currently
he is consulting and drafting an A-1 book on the history of conscription.