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The Echo of Battle: The Army's Way of War

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The central theme of this book is that the professional officer corps of the U.S. Army has been guided by three basic concepts that affect their thinking even today. The author identifies these concepts as "Guardian", "Heroic", and "Manager" which he then explains through examples and exposition. He traces them from the creation of a professional U.S. Army after the War of 1812 to the present.

The Guardian concept was the basis for the Army's strategy for the defense of the continental U.S. that was later expanded to include U.S. overseas possessions. As originally conceived (circa 1820-1821), this strategy was to be executed by the construction of harbor defense fortifications along the Eastern seaboard. It later included the Western seaboard and finally U.S. overseas possessions. According to Linn this harbor centric strategy continued up to WWII, but was hampered by the failure of Army planners to allow for the enormous changes especially in naval technology and later the development of military aircraft. Linn maintains that although the emphasis on harbor defense is long past, the concept that U.S. Army strategy should focus the defense of the continental U.S. is still the guiding influence of Army planning, which should surprise no one.

Coexisting with the Guardian Strategy were two doctrines which also guided Army thinking. What Linn calls the "Heroic" concept maintains that leadership, esprit, and raw courage are the most important factors in winning battles is the first such doctrine. The second is what he calls the "Manager" which classifies success in war and battle as based on scientific management principals following scientifically derived formulas. Although Linn attempts to treat the two as mutually exclusive, in practice they clearly are not. His "Heroic" doctrine clearly is applicable to tactical and operational level military operations while his "Manager" doctrine makes sense at the strategic level. Neither is incompatible with the "Guardian" strategy. Again Linn maintains that the Heroic and Manager concepts continue to guide the thinking of the professional officer corps today.

This is a small book, but it tackles an interesting subject and provides a unique look at the factors influencing past and current U.S. Army thinking. Yet it contains some odd lapses, for example the first post-graduate Army school was the (Coast) Artillery School established at Fort Monroe, Va., in 1824 not 1868 as Linn appears to believe.

Brian McAllister Linn has written an excellent book -- not on America's wars, but on how military theorists have interpreted the lessons of their wars, and then developed ideas on how the "next war" would be fought and what needed to be done to prepare. At root Linn argues that while many historians focus on the relatively few years of actual conflict in order to determine an American "way of war," he argues, "that the Army's way of war has been shaped as much or more by its peacetime intellectual debate as by its wartime service....In short , the army's peacetime thinkers, as much as its wartime commanders, have defined the service's martial identity, identified as its mission, determined professional standards, and created its distinct war of war."

Linn concludes that while the officer corps shares a unifying ethic and ideology, it has never shared a unifying philosophy of war. In fact the author argues that the Army's thinkers generally fall into three groups with a differing approach to war. First are the Guardians, who said the war was an art and science, but that the art succeeded primarily through the application of science. The second group is the Heroes (read George S. Patton); they believe success in war depends on the human element and they reduced war to the idea of it being armed violence directed towards the achievement of an end. The last group is called the managers (read George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower); this group believes superior administration, resources, and detailed planning secure victory.

Linn's historical approach is to analyze the writings of a variety of military authors and theorists IN BETWEEN WARS and then explore how the various groups interpreted previous wars and developed recommendations on what needed to be done to prepare for their version of what war would be. In other words this history is more a review of military thinking vice a review of war. In this sense the book makes for interesting reading simply because it is not a traditional approach to analyzing how the US Army fights. At the same time I believe Linn does make pretty good argument that if you want to understand how the Army fights, you need to know how it prepared.

The only issue I have is that I believe his intellectual framework for grouping military thinkers is a bit simplistic. Although intellectually you may be able to group them, in practice no single approach is a war winner; it is the mix, depending on a given situation, that leads to success or failure. Although one may prefer a Patton to an Eisenhower, it's doubtful WWII could have been won without the successful combination of the two (and many others).

The bottom line is that I would recommend this book to anyone studying how the US Army fights, in addition to more traditional war and battle histories, in order to have better understanding of an American way of war.

It is always refreshing when an author tackling a topic takes a fresh tack or introduces a new perspective.

Brian Linn has done just that, in his book The Echo of Battle. This history of the U.S. Army is not a battle history, reminding the reader of the Army's actions from Valley Forge to the march to Baghdad, with stops at Gettysburg, Meuse-Argonne, Bastogne and the Ia Drang. Instead, he views the Army as an institution, and tries to identify what elements have remained constant over its 200+ year history, and as it has evolved, along with the nation it defends.

To that end, Linn suggests that there are three broad strands of thinking within the Army---Guardians, Managers, and Heroes. Each, he notes has its strengths, but also its weaknesses, and more importantly, its blind spots. These blind spots, often tied to bureaucratic origins and perspectives, are remarkably constant and consistent over the course of the Army's history. Reality is bent to fit the procrustean bed of each strand's perspective, rather than compelling each to reassess its shibboleths and received truths.

As a result, the Army repeatedly goes through similar fits and starts of reform, and often makes similar mistakes. The current debate about whether the Army should focus on counter-insurgency or high-intensity combat is not a new one, but instead a replaying of a longstanding argument among the strands.

Linn's volume provides much food for thought, and complements more traditional battle histories of the Army. It is a valuable addition for anyone interested in studying the military as an institution.

The subtitle of Dr. Linn's book is "The Army's Way of War" has echoes of Russell Weigley's "The American Way of War," but this is a better, far more important book. Not to detract from Dr. Weigley, a fine historian, but his book was a product of its Vietnam era time. His book was largely a simple survey of military history and his conclusion, that warfare by the United States has always involved with massed firepower, was overly simplified.

Echoes of Battle, on the other hand, is a valuable study of the intellectual strands of the US Army's doctrines from the War of 1812 to the Global War on Terrorism. Carved into chapters loosely based on the interwar periods between each of the country's major wars (his chapter on how the army dealt with the introduction of nuclear weapons is particularly masterful), it describes how the Army's intellectuals interpreted the war they had just fought and how they used these lessons learned to prepare for the next one. In doing so, he finds three intellectual traditions: the Heroes, the Managers and the Guardians. This is a useful shorthand for intellectual chains of thought which have persisted for 200 years.

Brian Linn is one of the Army's secret weapons in the War on Terror. I met Dr. Linn at a conference sponsored by General Petraeus, who used Linn's studies on counterinsurgency for the field manual he wrote. Linn's The Philippine War is destined to be the standard work on that war for the next century, and his earlier case studies of how the Army responded to insurgency in four different Philippine provinces were better learning tools than any law or business school case study.

The book introduces us to a raft of leading military thinkers who have been lost to history, at least to general readers. It also has revelations about famous figures of history (I was surprised, for instance, to find out how completely George Patton had turned his back on armored warfare after 1918, becoming a tireless advocate of horse cavalry).

There are a few quibbles I have with him. He doesn't mention Fox Connor, Eisenhower's mentor and a leading military intellectual in the 1920s; I would have liked to know what he stood for. Also, although Dr. Linn does an admirable job of dispassionately describing the strengths and weaknesses the three schools of thought, his distaste for the war in Iraq leads him to be overly harsh and unfair in his discription of Ralph Peters' writings. He also says that non-military aid programs are "understaffed and underfunded," but anyone who has spent time in the Middle East since this war began as I have will know that the problem isn't with the size of the efforts, but with the inefficiencies and bloated waste of the USAID programs which have stymied us. But this doesn't detract from the overall value of this excellent work.

In many respects, the Army's academic tradition is the best and strongest of any intellectual institution in the country today. The army protects its dissenters and tolerates unpopular ideas far more than civilian academia. By way of example, the faculty of Harvard University recently ran its President out of office for presenting a politically incorrect hypothesis, even though he presented it just to repudiate it (that the hypothesis was recently proved correct just shows how crippling political correctness can be). In contrast, when a young Army major named McMaster wrote a damning (and excellent) book about the failures of the senior military leadership during the Vietnam War, he was promptly fast tracked for high command.

Despite this tradition of open inquiry by the brightest minds in the country (and aided by something many academics lack: real life situations in which their theories are put to the test), Dr. Linn shows how often the army's assessments of the future have proven wrong. This should be an object lesson for ALL intellectuals, not just military theorists. Dr. Linn is describing the human condition, showing that every intellectual brings to his analyses his own bundle of prejudices and self-interest. This should make us all humbler in prognosticating with certitude.

Dr. Linn ends the book on an upbeat note, believing that the new cadre of military intellectuals have gotten things right. As someone who has gotten so many things right, Dr. Linn is in a position to know.

Retired Reader's review is excellent, and I agree with it in its entirety. However, author Linn goes beyond the three general grouping of military personnel into Guardians, Heroes and Managers. Clearly demonstrated throughout this work is that the U.S. was woefully unprepared for every conflict it entered until the minor operations of the Gulf Wars. In no case until then was our army well-trained, its officers hardened by experience and training, did it have the best weapons, did it have suitable and adequate equipment, or was its strategy and tactics equal to the new war.

There were reasons for all these deficiencies -- politicians and a democracy. For example Jefferson's reliance on militia and a coastal gunboat navy proved disasterous in 1812. In a democracy there is little incentive for politicians to spend money for future wars -- their planning and spending horizons are usually pegged for their next election. The result in the U.S. has been that in every case American soldiers (& sailors) gave up their lives to provide time for the public and its congressional leadership time to pony up to the problem. Unfortunately, in every case, Congress proved capable only when it came to shooting the wounded.

The Army assidiously avoided learning from its experience in fighting an insurgency in the Philippines and was forced to again pay in lives for its indolence and stupidity. Even today, where is the study of the highly successful guerrilla operations of Colonel Wendell Fertig on Mindanao during World War II?

Author Linn points out that War Plan Orange (the contingency plan for war against Japan before World War II) was fatally flawed and impractical, Korea was an improvisation with zero prior planning (the State Department was responsible for planning for Korea), inadequate forces and inadequate weapons, and Iraq was a blunder due to micro-management by the civilian leadership in the Defense Department. Given all that, we now must go to war only when we have a well-thought-out "exit" strategy (the Powell Doctrine.) In effect, we no longer plan to win a war -- merely to take it to a point that we can "exit." Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan are good examples of this. No doubt every successful general in history would approve. Does anyone remember MacArthur's, "There is no substitute for victory."

The American military is expected today to fight without suffering casualties to keep the people in front of their television sets happy. No mother should lose her son (like Cindy Sheehan) even if the son volunteers for service. It is better to use allies and aliens in the army to take the casualties. What Phillip Wylie call the tyranny of "Momism" during World War II has finally fully come to pass.

What the future will bring is anyone's guess, but the outlook is not good. The most effective army (pound for pound) in U.S. history was arguably the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee. That army will never again appear on the battlefield since the U.S. now follows a policy of maximum diversity in the ranks. The Confederates enlisted companies from individual towns and counties, built regiments from them from the same regions or states, brigaded them into brigades where all the soldiers were from the same state and commanded by officers from that state, and even in divisions attempted to keep them as homogenous as possible. Unit cohesion proved its worth in the extreme since troops were well familiar with the men beside them. The Federal forces generally did likewise until World War I when diversity as a viable concept raised its ugly head. So now are policy allows higher casualties as being acceptable as long as they are not from the same family, town or congressional district. Not only are women mixed in (for whatever value), but no two soldiers in a squad will be from the same state, and no single ethnic group, race or religion will dominate. Unfortunately, history tells us this is the worst of all possible military structures.

In addition it is obvious that the Army is still re-learning how to fight insurgencies. How this will play out in still open.

All in all, this is a very valuable work, Highly recommended to all.

This is an outstanding book about the evolution of U.S.Army doctrine. One mistake is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the outset of Vietnam was not General Earle M. Weaver but General Earle G. Wheeler. I wouldn't expect the editors at Harvard University Press to have a clue but a distingushed military historian like the author ought to have caught it.