 Good day. I'm Colonel Jerry Morlock, the Director of the Combat Studies Institute. You're about to use a video series which our instructors have prepared for the sole purpose of approving your presentation of M610, the Evolution of Modern Warfare. We've taken care to make the course that you teach as similar to the one taught at Fort Leavenworth as possible and choose to add these tapes to your libraries in order to give you every advantage as you prepare to teach this new course. These tapes are similar to the weekly train-up sessions which we utilize to prepare our instructors here at Fort Leavenworth. My intent for the tape sessions was to provide you insights and tips on ways to approach the lessons of M610 that were not available in the instructor notes. I've drawn various instructors, military and civilian into the sessions based upon their specific expertise and historical background. They were asked to just talk to the lesson structure and content, giving you some additional information on the historical context and differing views on how to approach the lessons. These tapes will provide you a wealth of knowledge and direction that will significantly improve your readiness to teach our new history course. One word of caution regarding how to use these training tapes. They are not designed to be substituted for your instruction during the individual lessons of the course. As instructor preparation tapes train the training material, if you will, they are inappropriate for direct instruction to students and are not intended for that purpose. Our intent with these tapes is to improve your ability to lead the student seminars by sharing tips and advice from some highly qualified experts. The Combat Studies Institute stands ready to provide whatever additional expertise or assistance that you may require and we've included the institute's phone, mail, and email contact information on the tape if you should need it. Good luck with the Evolution of Modern Warfare course. Have a good time. Good morning again from Fort Leavenworth. My name is Sergeant First Class John Broome. I'm one of the instructors in the Combat Studies Institute here at the Command and General Staff College. To my right is Dr. Mike Perlman, another one of our instructors and also one of the course authors for your M&S 610 course. Today we're going to talk about lesson number nine, the evolution of modern warfare, the interwar years, 1919 to 1939. Our approach to talking about this subject for you today is first to deal with some specific approaches to this particular class in terms of ways to go about teaching it. And the second piece we'll talk about for a little bit is we'll try and give you some information and some suggestions for places you might want to go to take a look at some other reading to give yourself a little bit more of a background and an understanding of this very complex period. I think there's two principal ways to go about teaching this class. The class structure has got what Mike? Naval doctrine, amphibious doctrine, air power theory, and mechanization. And there's two ways to couple those three things together. The first would be to take a U.S. kind of focus and building off a widely and discuss the role of the American military in peacetime and how it changes in peacetime, how we're sort of ignored. And the second way would be to deal with each one of the theoretical changes in terms of how armies in general change. Or didn't change. Or didn't change. Really, I guess the focus is to say, the problem of this lesson is that it's not simply an American topic, it's not a European topic, it's really in a sense a global topic. We're talking about the U.S. Army, we're talking about the Armed Forces. We're talking about European Armed Forces. We're talking about the British Commonwealth. We're talking about Japan. And perhaps we could even bring in China. What we've got here among virtually all these participants, with the exception of Japan, is the trauma of World War I and how virtually everybody wants to say, we don't do that blank anymore. Four years of glassly attrition warfare in which it's very difficult to determine who's a winner or if there's a winner. The winner in World War I is the guy who hits the canvas after the loser. And what we've got here is these alternatives about how to prevent this. And what are the complexities? I wish this lesson were a lot simpler than it is, is that the political and geographical situations of countries like the United States and Britain is much different than Germany and France. The United States and Britain, strategic bombing, will have a higher priority for simple reasons. Among them, America has the best and Britain has the second best anti-tank ditch in the world. When the Americans have got the Atlantic Ocean, the British have the English Channel, the Germans don't. Neither do the French. And neither do the French. And therefore, strategic bombing, which is also politically compatible with the Americans and the British is not wanting to have, quote, their soldiers in foreign territory. Continental Europe makes this thing more compatible. But this thing gets cut in all different ways, which makes there is no one generalization or two generalizations fit all, which maybe of some benefit for historians or us who study it is we've got to muddle through this process, which is good because the people who are living it at the time have had to muddle through it and they played for much higher stakes than we did. Yeah, the survival of their countries, their physical well-being, maybe their own lives, certainly the lives of their subordinates. So it's, to say this, we've got to almost be situation-specific. Well, let's go through each one of the topics and kind of examine some of the issues we can bring out. The first one is the development of naval doctrine and that will be based primarily off of the widely reading. Which would then it would have an American focus. It will have an American focus. And there's two major issues with that, actually three. The first one is the whole background of the Washington Treaty and the limits on American naval power along with everybody else's. That's kind of the background piece and then there's two issues of change. And that is amphibious warfare doctrine and aircraft carrier doctrine and how those two developed during this period. And again, each one of those is situationally dependent. I don't think there's a great deal of resistance to the development of amphibious doctrine either in the Marine Corps or the Navy because they simply realize if they're going to go to war in the Pacific they have to be able to do this in one way, shape, form or another. Of course there's a giant gap between development of doctrine which may take three kernels in a room somewhere and the development or the governments particularly in a democracy fielding the necessary stuff. Yeah, I mean doctrine doesn't execute itself as somebody said we fielded the VGTs. Of course without the doctrine as a basis when things really hit the fan as in the late 1930s we'd be thrashing around trying to get an intellectual handle about what to do. These men who performed a great service and obscurity in the 1920s and the 1930s at least gave the country a direction about what it had to do when it finally paid attention and maybe this is the function particularly in the 1930s in an isolationist country of the great benefit that these Pete Ellis and the rest of these only now known historians at the time dying of obscurity performed for the country at least because they gave us that doctrine when the country became serious it at least had a direction about how it would what it would do if it became serious. Right, it thought through the problems. They thought through the problems they saw now obviously you can't do it in great minutia. 1943 in terror we found all types of problems in execution which is where the rubber hits the road and where things become important such as shore to ship communications. But at least we had the focus and of course there's a terrible cost for experience where you find out it's these little things the devils and the details but they got the orientation while we'd been off the boat. Paul Arbor, if we said, my God, now what, let's fund the Rain Corporation in a report in six years anyway. And the second piece of the doctrine kind of issue with the Navy is the rise of the aircraft carrier and now with that one there is a tremendous debate and struggle within the American Navy and for that matter within the British Navy and to a lesser extent the Japanese forces a real struggle between the battleship guys and the aircraft carrier guys and it's not really clear coming out of the 1930s which one is going to be the war winner. So I'm sure experts in this topic can debate after the fact what's the war winner. There will be in retrospect people who are typical particularly in general downplay the function of the battleship in the war. Remember there is nothing that begins in World War II for the United States no operation of any significance that doesn't begin with an amphibious invasion and aircraft and battleships are absolutely crucial for softening up the battlefield giving fire support for amphibious invasions. I'm sure the gun club can make a good case after the fact that along before the fact that we won the war these things will go on and on forever. And aircraft carriers are of all this combat power but particularly in the United States it's a very exposed weapons system. Our carriers in World War II are made with teakwood decks not steel decks. No expert and it'll be a shock to you I'm sure what do you call this nautical engineering but a teakwood deck not only makes light bearable on an aircraft carrier because you're not living constantly at 110 degrees but also allows you to have twice as many plates as a steel deck. The problem is this is a highly vulnerable system particularly in combat when you're bringing all that fuel oil upon the deck and a couple of hits on the deck will create secondary explosions is what happens to the Japanese aircraft carriers at Midway which are also built on teakwood decks and therefore you've got this extraordinary jewel I don't think there's anything comparable is it in conventional warfare in which you'd have so much it is it's the magazine it's the line of departure it's all this enormous combat power congested and highly vulnerable makes this war really there's some downsides about aircraft carriers they're the premium to ballerina have got to spend as much time worrying about them being hit or more so than using it and many operations in the Pacific are essentially geared and operations rejected on the grounds that you're getting too heavily exposed aircraft carriers you know unlike anything else those things go down it takes three to four years to rebuild them and you don't have them again for the rest of the war that's it this thing becomes well like any substantive issue there is no right or wrong and these guys are coming in groups with very difficult issues in the 1920s everything you can say for the aircraft carrier I'll come up with just a good argument for the battleship after the war too let's do it right now the doctrine for the aircraft carriers evolves they initially start out as as an adjunct to the fleet an aid to the fleet they're working as reconnaissance aircraft and then finally spotters and one of the reasons for that decision is that there's no radar yet the battleships themselves can fire further than they can see so how do you adjust the fire at that point if you don't have any radar well you put an airplane up there and where can you get enough airplanes to do this for a fleet you gotta build an aircraft carrier and then as soon as these guys start flying and start reading stuff like Billy Mitchell and do hay and start thinking about wait a minute we don't just have to look for the bad guys we can bomb the bad guys and so the aircraft carriers doctrine and role evolves over time um but it is a very very interesting set of tensions between the two and then you get to the point of well what happens if the other guy does manage to get through your carrier screen through the aircraft carrier screen that you've got out there looking for so the carrier is a screen for the battleship the carriers are going to be screening for the battleships and even when you get to the point where they begin to think about aircraft carriers as attack aircraft carriers as launching out to hit the enemy if that's all you've got are the aircraft carriers and you miss the enemy fleet then their battleships are going to get into the middle of your carriers and it's going to be real ugly so you gotta have this balance between the aircraft carriers that give you the reach and the battleships that give you the punch and the aircraft carriers that lend protection to the fleet at a distance and the battleships that lend the shield to the fleet at close range you gotta balance all of those issues out and that's what the American Navy and the British and the Japanese were struggling with during the 1920s and 30s you know, what's the role and then what's the ratio between these forces Wigley brings out some of those issues in his writing air power theory though which plays right back into that aircraft carrier piece is a whole another issue when we start talking about the rise of strategic bombing which is the second major topic in the lesson and you alluded to the role that air power will play in the United States and in Britain well particularly strategic bombing because the geographical positions of the United States and Britain which have geographical protection the idea that perhaps then using these natural borders of ocean that if necessary we can stand off and beat an opponent from the air with the hope that it's sold by the aircraft now with the bombers which is, remember this is new it's been tried and I guess some Zeflin bombing of the Germans on London but it's never really been put to the test and these individuals want to sell their product that hasn't really been test marketed and therefore and frankly to sell anything in the world there has got to be exaggeration I mean if anybody were on we always discount what anybody says 50% to begin with so if these people were giving you very very somber what I would say worst case pessimistic analysis of their capabilities you discount that and have to begin with completely discount them so they are going to naturally probably argue that they're war winners by themselves virtually by themselves and I want to say that this is a conscious deception it's so easy to deceive ourselves first but there is no hard daddy to either to discount them and obviously they are putting great faith in what they're doing and there's other things I'm not sure in the British system but in the American system is where the Army Air Force is still a branch of the Army now nobody is being funded but at least the Air Force can claim we've got martyrs because they are taking off in these terrible planes trying to land in these terrible airfields with virtually no communications they've got semi wartime casualties during a peacetime environment which you know at least I know you're in the armor thing your thing doesn't work kick the treads you get those guys don't work it goes down you've got two more martyrs there come Friday night so they are particularly going to be perhaps over enthusiastic saying we got the war winner because life for them being underfunded is far more dangerous than this for anybody else although the Air Corps was funded more than the rest of the Army was because of that strange attraction the Americans have for the New Gizmo and the Flyers were romantic and they were romanticized you don't want to say romantic not on television don't leave that one go but they became idols they became idols for the public well the war okay but I'm not sure they were necessary military Flyers obviously the closest thing we really had to a national hero in the 1920s is Charles Lindbergh obviously but the whole aviation industry as a whole was the focus of a whole lot of attention and from that comes interest and from that will come some political clout behind it as well but there are argument which is extraordinarily attractive in the backwater of World War I which is saying we don't need four years of living like a mole in trenches gas warfare we can get this thing over with a relatively small band it's very popular in America and Britain which doesn't have large conscript armies a small band of highly motivated knights of the round table volunteers which means Joe Sixpack the slugs like me don't have to go into the service and they can win it in a relatively short time and this was very big in the US with precision bombing precision bombing by planes of the 1933 variety give me a break but anyway is then getting this thing over fast and by the way even the United States precision bombing means we'll find some sort of bottleneck industry and take out the one key industry and then the whole thing collapses just collapses and doesn't this beat the argon for us we're done the zone I'll tell you it sounds a lot like that again it should pass if it sounds too good to be true well now the original air power theorist Julio Duhay from Italy it's interesting that this theory comes out of Italy first although the Americans and the British are playing around the edges he's the first one to get it published a couple interesting comments to make about Duhay first is that he writes a theory that's held up fairly well for the last hundred years not hundred years but the last 80 years that air power and air superiority can be pretty decisive and he talks about the impact of that and although it's never really quite been fulfilled people will argue that Desert Storm was coming pretty close to proven it etc etc and not only that but the Air Force guys it Desert Storm at least sits on retrospect now we can prove Duhay's theory is correct what we have promised now sure we were important in World War II but it proves out to be that if we had delivered what we had promised there had been no need for a D-Day operation there'd only be a few guys going ashore collecting mass surrenders now we can do it and therefore there becomes this great tension within Desert Storm of come on give us two or three more days at Baghdad they're about to surrender when the U.S. Army ground forces are arguing now sure you made an extraordinary contribution but you've now got to go into tank plunking give us close air support which is of course with the army the real army has always been the function of the Air Force whether they know it or not but he builds this theory off of five or six years of experience whereas if you go back and you look at the naval theorists Alfred Thayer Mahon, Julian Corbett they're building theory based on thousands of years of experience if you look at the great theorists the folks in this course are going to examine Jomini and Klauswitz they too have got this huge database to work from this couple thousand years of land warfare Jomini is projecting he's got a new weapons system and he is making a theory on what I project the western systems will be able to do not as of now but in the future and of course there will be anybody he'll be talking about what the weapons system can do but of course and this is natural anytime something becomes nearly that good as I projected there will be just as much if not more energy and economic investment in coming up to a counter to that weapons system I mean alright I'm getting to the point where I now can perform as promised it'll shock the rest of the world to come up with a counter in the case of the British radar to protect themselves and air defense so there's a whole lot of issues we can bring out as we talk about air power and air theory and then there's of course the true love of my life the whole mechanization issue that says something about your life the guys like JFC Fuller, Liddell Hart Adna Chaffee here in the United States De Gaulle the famous Guderian name that everybody seems to associate with the development of the Panzer Force and here again there's a lot of tension between the conservatives who are going yeah tanks are really nice they're great for trench warfare but we're not going to do trench warfare any more so they're not going to be real important Interesting way you mentioned these theories I think you just mentioned five names only one being a German there are lots of the differences between ideas and a national commitment to practice the ideas the British who if forced to go back to the continent with much preferred strategic bombing Fuller and somewhat harder our prophets who are much more honored abroad than they are in Britain De Gaulle is an unknown colonel virtually a kind of an irritant to the French general staff whose career is about to explode and die the minute the French win the battle of 1940 guess what he's saved by the Germans Chaffee or else even in the United States he's a great disciple Patent spends his life as he would say in captivity to the Dobois it is the infantry which runs World War I excuse me World War II the Fort Benning Mafia George Marshall and Omar Bradley Eisenhower his disciples this is the difference between here in theory and in practice in Germany which pays far less virtually no attention to strategic bombing their weapon of choice is the Stucka Died Bomber to give close air support to armor is Germany's geographical position is guess what if we don't win the close battle there is no other battle and therefore the ideas which are worldwide anybody can choose them none of this stuff is private it's the Germans who choose to make this national policy while these other things are ideas of theorists but there will be no commitment behind this doctrine I guess well you know the French much better than I do it'd be interesting why because they have the same geographic and political let's say the problems that the Germans have the Germans however for whatever reason decide that maybe because they lost World War I is that they will have to take the Guderian seriously while the French have their own equivalent in Degas who is in effect turned out to exile they go into World War II with a static defense a heavy and relatively non-mobile tanks infantry team no deep strike I guess figuring that even that you know we won World War I it was winning ugly it was certainly nothing to be proud of in the history of warfare there's no elegance there but it worked it was horrible but we survived it and any repeat the Germans will crack before we do they are relatively small nation in the midst of the world we win ugly wars of gross national product because we get the English as an ally they get the Americans as the ally we have the Russians are now the Soviet Union on the other side sooner or later the elephant crushes or the ponderous heavyweight even if he's a plug crushes the world class lightweight just out of mass well we can look at the case of Britain and France in particular since they're the ones that the reading will focus on let's go back to the French for just a minute there's some things that set the French apart from the Germans in terms of their strategic position the French took tremendous losses in the first World War virtually half of the adult male population was wounded in one way or another killed or wounded during the first World War the worst ones were in taking the tactical offense right exactly every time they'd launch out on the offense in World War I they were just massacred so they developed a very careful technique toward the end of the war of very limited defences a lot of preparation very very methodical approach to the battle that will be their tactical approach as they go into World War II even more so in a sense that if it's in World War I and World War II is that well in World War I the French had lost the last war to the Germans 1870 they have territory to liberate to take back this is the impulse they have to take the offense in World War II in 1939-1940 they want to protect what they have it is the Germans who have the political and strategic necessity to take the offense so the French could say less than learn World War I is that he who takes the offense it's just not a three to one disadvantage who'd also want eight to nine to one disadvantage taking the offense let's sit back in effect to the point that we even have tanks it's to get us to the point of battle very heavy ponderous tanks going about the speed of straight like infantry three minutes an hour and if we can hit the Germans and head on or they can hit us rather when we take our firing positions we're going to stack them up like cordwood I guarantee it well there's some domestic and diplomatic pieces to why the French end up with this defensive doctrine they've got a population of 40 million the Germans have 80 million so if France tries to fight Germany by herself she's lost she doesn't have the industrial capability on her own she doesn't have the population base on her own so she has to draw in allies it would look much better if I'm on the self-defense rather than taking the offense to find this appropriately absolutely but the French also figure that it's going to take some time to bring those allies in and who are the two key allies the British and the Americans who vow up through 1938 that we're never going to go to Europe again another one I guarantee and they also have small professional armies so if they're going to come to the continent the French are convinced that the situation will be bad enough that yeah they will they need time to mobilize it took the British two years to mobilize Kitchener's armies from 1914 to 1916 before they could put them in mass on the continent it was about the same time period for the Americans if we declare war in April of 1917 we really start fighting in August of 1918 in a big way but even then there's not a whole lot of Americans involved yet and it's going to be the spring of 1919 before that huge American force is ready that was the prediction so we need two years if we're the French we need two years for our allies to mobilize we have to hold the line for two years from that flows the Maginot Line then domestically you have the whole issue of the revulsion against the war the split between right and left the inability to develop a major national consensus a war exhaustion small year groups that leads to a desire to save money to economize on the army which eventually will lead to two year terms of service 18 month terms of service one year terms of service and finally six month terms of service they're training soldiers and releasing them in six months and therefore what they can train them for even at the best is to get yourself in a bunker with a slit out the middle and pull triggers this was considered as you say France has got enough problems in the world with Germany and they make even worse by politicizing their military defense posture in other words what is politically correct and the left in France paranoid is left in some other countries which I will not name such as the United States which sees two army officers together and they think there's going to be a coup is that they do want to quote get in all the Joe six packs rather than having this band of brothers in the armor yes which can then do these deep strike operations which obviously takes a career commitment and a career of training is considered politically incorrect it's far more compatible to a have a people's army yeah for the for the for the socialists and to the left very strong communist party in France the fascist German and Italians find this elite band of warriors to be far more politically acceptable absolutely and it would be but it's something we face we face in the United States mm-hmm I wish it didn't exist that we could we could argue military doctrine on military merits instead of the political or what is domestically compatible but by the time I grow up and face reality the British also have some interesting problems is as they look at developing an armored warfare theory or technique and that that is the imperial situation that the idea of the elite band of brothers would perhaps work in Britain with their tradition of an all volunteer professional long service force but who the opponents in the colonial war the colonial the colonial empire that Britain holds has to be defended and for that and kept pacified and for that you need bayonets on the ground but for mechanized warfare what you need is armored cars light stuff tanks by the way who is the most likely opponent that the U.S. ground forces will fight for 1919 in these contingency planning through 1938 John you tell me Mexico I mean how heavy do you have to be for that and this is the advantages that the Germans have a national commitment they're not talking about going to the Falkland Islands they know who their opponent is going to be it's going to be France they're not likely opponents it's going to be a case of death out of them but just like if you look at the Mexican border in the 1920s and 30s it's a very rugged area it's not very well developed there's not much of a road network there's virtually no railroad to support a major logistical kind of operation so what do you need horse mounted cavalry wagons the kind of stuff that can go on its own that big a gas cup so with the British the northwest frontier of India the Afghanistan Africa and this is of course the argument for them the strategic bomber boys in both countries is that guess what well we cannot defend in these huge frontiers huge frontiers and do this with ground forces therefore I've got the solution for your problem and that is war against modern industrial nations with strategic bombing while the army kind of serves as the constabulary off on the frontier against the Mexicans in occupying the Philippines and doing that kind of thing so there's a number of different kinds of issues to approach here with this lesson just to summarize real briefly I think Mike disagrees with me but I think there's a way to approach this lesson from an American focus even though we're talking about a lot of stuff going on in different countries I agree with you there's a way to approach it from an American focus to an army terrible lesson but you could certainly do it that way my reason for thinking about looking at it that way is we've had an army of 700,000 or more since the late 1940s and a lot of us that have been in the army for a while look at that as that's the normal way for the American military to be structured is a large organization and everything else this is a very good point by looking at the interwar period not solely American focus a more American focus than the lesson seems to indicate is possible we can see that that 40 year period from 1950 to now is the exception in American history rather than the rule and that the rule is how do you innovate with no money how do you develop doctrine when nobody cares how do you keep a professional army focused on what its job is when the government wants you to do everything else run the CCC etc etc etc that's the reality of American military history that is what we have had to contend with rather than living high on the hog like we have for the last 40 years the 1990s may look a lot more like the 1930s or the 1920s that's the 1950s or 60s so there's that approach of examining these issues granted on a worldwide basis but looking specifically at the American experience of what it means to us there's that method there's also the method of taking them topic by topic and dealing with them what's going on with the naval stuff what's going on with the air stuff and what's going on with the mechanization piece now for background reading you could always go to JFC Fuller's writings himself Liddell Hart Julio Duhay the Air University publishes Command of the Air and you can get it from the guys down at Maxwell Air Force Base Billy Mitchell's writings are available in some libraries Pete Ellis didn't write very much there's a new biography on Pete Ellis that's fairly recent if you look at the analysis piece of other people looking at this period and analyzing it there has been a flood of information and I can't even begin to give you the short bibliography if you're really interested in it go ahead and drop us a line at CSI we can come up with a quick reading list for you but there's a wealth of information out there now are we trying to turn you into historians? we don't need the competition thank you and on that note it's been a lot of fun thanks much and good luck teaching this class bye bye