Never-Never Army

Last week the Army got a new Chief of Infantry: Major General Courtney H. Hodges, 54. Among other infantrymen, it was a popular promotion. Now commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., General Hodges will take over his new job on May 23, when blocky, phlegmatic Major General George Arthur Lynch's four-year tour as Chief expires.

By Army standards, Generals Hodges and Lynch are both able officers. Courtney Hodges had to leave West Point (he flunked geometry) after one year, in 1905. He had the guts and gumption to enlist as a private, the rare ability and good fortune to scrabble his way up from the ranks. Under General Lynch (who was graduated from West Point) the infantry has shown more zip, taken on more new ideas than it had in the 20 preceding years. If there is anything wrong with Generals Hodges, Lynch and their like, then there is something deeply wrong with the Army.

Last week, from within the Army itself, just such an accusation was made. By pointed inference, equally harsh criticism was directed at 1) most of the Army's ranking officers, and 2) the usual standards for judging those officers. Author of this indictment was Lieut. Colonel Thomas Raphael Phillips, a Coast Artilleryman who has long had a name for his acrid, authoritative writings in military journals. In the sprightly, unofficial but respected Infantry Journal, Colonel Phillips aimed a steel-jacketed burst at his brother officers and superiors. His essay (Traditionalism and Military Defeat) was also a chilling message to the whole U. S. Excerpts:

> ". . . We have never had a good Army in peacetime. This is as true now as at any other time in our history."

> "The only certain thing about war . . . is change. The innovator and the radical may be mistaken part of the time--but the traditionalist is certain to be wrong all of the time. The traditionalist is right in insisting on the permanence of certain elements. . . . But he is merely a fool when he resists experimentation with new weapons and adoption of new tactics."

> "Certain individuals in every Army foresee the changes in war brought about by new weapons and new social conditions, but only rarely do these detested radicals reach high place. When they do, stupendous conquests and victories result."

> "It is much easier to continue doing in old age what you have learned to do in youth. Thus it is essential in armies that some method be devised by which the acceptance of change is considered normal. . . . The officer who knows nothing about the evolution of war automatically will be suspicious of change. . . . Our Army never has had a body of ardent professional students who were cognizant of the realities of war. . . . There are few enough capable American military students, but even rarer is it to find one of them in an influential position where policies are made. . . ."

> "The failure of military organization to progress has been most glaring in the United States. . . . The only advances in the art of war ever made by the U. S. occurred when the untutored and professionally illiterate civilian soldiers of the Civil War worked out their problems freed from the dead hand of a past of which they knew nothing. . . . Today war has become too complex to turn it over to the citizen soldier. . . . Until the professional student attains full stature in our he-man Army and ousts the conservative and administrator from control, we shall continue to lag among armies and shall pay for it again, as we have in the past, in needless dead and wounded, in lost battles, and even lost wars."

Critic Phillips documented his piercing generalities with many a specific instance: the Army's slowness to recognize the tank as "the greatest offensive weapon in all history of warfare''; the 20 barren years after World War I when the Army did nothing to modernize its division organization, then adopted "a nonprogressive imitation of the French division of 1918"; its long failure even to utilize the truck ("Imagine the Army making a ten-mile march, marching all night, when the same troops in motor vehicles could have motored completely around the division being attacked three times in a single night"). Said he, of such absurdities: "It is like a fantasy, the nostalgia of men who want to return to a never-never land."

Some of Colonel Phillips' strictures were perhaps extreme, outdated or unfair (General Lynch has vigorously revamped infantry practices; the Army has at last gone in for motorized transport, armored forces). And the fact that such a blast could be written by a Regular Army officer, published in a service journal, was in itself encouraging evidence that the Army was not altogether hidebound. General Lynch has long urged his officers to encourage and contribute candid criticism of the Army, has never exercised his power to keep such criticism out of the Infantry Journal. But the Army's blindest apologists could neither deny nor explain away the state of military mind which gave Colonel Phillips such a pointblank, unmissable target.

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