Why our generals were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan

Key points by Thomas Ricks:
The success of American generals in World War II was largely due to a policy of "relief," where successful commanders were kept in place and promoted. In contrast, unsuccessful commanders were relieved and moved into other jobs. This policy created a culture of accountability and encouraged risk-taking among officers.

The lack of such a policy in the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq/Afghanistan wars led to a culture of mediocrity and risk aversion among American generals. Ricks attributes this to the fact that there was no real incentive for generals to excel, as they were unlikely to be punished for failure or rewarded for success.

Ricks also points out that the American military has become more risk-averse in recent years due to factors such as the constant deployment of troops, the emphasis on political correctness, and the increasing complexity of military operations. He argues that this risk aversion is hindering the military's ability to adapt to new challenges and win wars.

Ricks argues that the military needs to return to the policy of relief to create a more effective and successful officer corps.

Young Lisa Moore Amy Brown Sharon

I wonder how General Marshall would react to DEI practiced in the modern military.
Officers are not promoted based on their abilities, skills, or qualifications.
Instead, they are promoted based skin color or sexual preference.
I am certain that General Marshall would be appalled.
However, since he was a straight white man, he would have no place in the military today.
This military genius would be passed over in favor of a black lesbian.
Our country is much worse off because of this idiocy.

This speaker is missing the elephant in the room: rules of engagement (ROE). In WWII, it was bomb the enemy, hunt them down, invade their lands, and don't stop until they completely capitulate. In Korea, it was: "Now don't you cross that line, General MacArthur; you're only allowed to fight the enemy over here in this area of the sandbox." Same BS in Vietnam. WWII would have been a stalemate just like Vietnam if the Allies declared Germany itself off limits and all they could do was fight them outside of Germany. While he may be right that Marshall had a system to weed out non-aggressive generals, the point still remains that if they had been bound by ridiculous ROE like in Vietnam and Korea, they wouldn't have been able to win.

In WW2 the Russians did the Main Job. Simple

Because WW2 was a war for mankind. All others were for empire

I'd have like have seen this lecture post-Afghan withdraw!

Americas military history is a mix of fantasy and hollywood which is why the empire is collapsing at a collasal scale

China joined in the Korea War, Vietnam was hobbled by DC, politically cost tens of thousand of American lives. The air and ground forces had four enemies, in order of the most dangerous, Washington DC, generals conceding to offensive restrictions that favored the enemy, China, and North Vietnam.

3 things I found very interesting in this video:

First: You have to seriously screw up to get fired by general/field marshal Harold Alexander. Like making fun of his talks about ancient Rome or not knowing who Belisarius was and what he did. I am dead serious, because there were (british) staff officers shuffled off because of that. Harold Alexander was an exceptional man and officer, very generous, courtly and brave but this was something he didn't let slide.

Second: Eisenhower basically trolling Montgomery with that firing letter was the only thing he could do. There was only one man that could fire Monty, barely, and that was Winston Churchill. Not even Chief of the Imperial General Staff, sir Alan Brooke, who HATED Monty, could do that (and would not do it for Eisenhower, whom he also didn't like). And Churchill invested too much into Monty's propaganda mythos to just get rid of him. That is why Harold Alexander was for so long paired with him, to mediate between Monty and Eisenhower. And also one of the reasons why he was originally chosen to be the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Plus he was already an experienced and respected field commander, unlike Ike.

And third: Another US commander, close to Eisenhower, never fired for his MULTIPLE cases of a bad judgement, failure, clash with superiors and clearly anti-British sentiments was Mark W. Clark. On the contrary, he was promoted! Seems like other people took the fall for him (Ernest J. Dawley and John P. Lucas).
By the way, from my reading on Clark, I think he had some sort of inferiority complex, because 2 commanders he singled out to bad-mouth especially were Harold Alexander and his chief of staff, sir Richard McCreery, both decorated and respected WWI veterans, unlike Clark, who didn't have the chance (he was wounded early on and sent home).

Shame Sawyer is a frad! 🤣

1. MacArthur planned and executed the recovery of South Korea and the destruction of the DRKA as an effective fighting force. WW2 showed how he could swing from genius to stupid and back, but that may have been due to his tendency to pick yes-men for his staff, so that his G-2, Willoughby, completely screwed the pooch about the Chinese.
2. Ridgeway was one of the greatest of America's combat generals. He restored morale in the UN forces after the near-rout of a retreat and loss of Seoul. He then proceeded to adapt the late WW1 French tactics of limited offensives intended to capture limited parts of the enemy line and then stand on the defensive. He retrained his officers to fight 360 on defense and ground down the CVF to where one more offensive could have broken them and allowed another pursuit to the Yalu (if we were stupid enough to do it again). But Van Fleet who replaced him, was denied permission to execute that final offensive. Ridgeway also resigned from the Army during Eisenhower's second term to protest the atrophy of the Army brough about by the Eisenhower Administration's reliance on a strategy of "massive retaliation" to which the Soviets responded with an asymmetric strategy of supporting "national liberation" and anti-colonial movements around the world.
3. It wasn't just the generals or only the generals that failed to find a successful strategy in Vietnam. The political decision to tie escalation to the actions of the DRV leadership gave them the initiative and left the US responding to their strategy. What the US should have done is commit forces up front, in 1966-67, and break the Ho Chi Minh Trail and wipe out the sanctuaries in Cambodia. These two pivotal "schwerpunkts" would have forced the NVA and VC Main Units to attack US and allied forces to try and recover the supplies and equipment in the sanctuary areas and reopen the Trail, leading to their destruction, a year or more before their failed Tet '68 offensive. With the conventional war won, the US could turn the ARVN towards counter-insurgency warfare without the threat of defeat in detail by NVA and VC MF, while working on reforming the RVN government.

But, does this "firing after failure" not lead to sticking to textbook solutions and not to trying something new and possibly better?

The allies were successful only due to their sheer numbers against the lone Germans..

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Easy.

In WW1, French carried the heaviest brunt. They fought German Imperial head on. US only acted as support, and they entered the war very late, when German and their allies already exhausted.

In WW2, Soviet took the heaviest brunt of Nazi German and their axis allies best troop. US entered the war late, and bogged down so long against undersupplied Imperial Japan troop in Pacific. The moment they entered Europe, German already commited more than 70% of their best troop in East front against Soviet. The German that US fought in Africa, Italy, French and German were either teenager, WW1 veteran or Italian army with no strict loyalty towards German. Even then, US still got bogged down. D Day is a walk in the park compared to Bagration, Uranus, Stalingrad, Kursk, Moscow and Leningrad Battle. They didnt even faced German tank when entering that beaches.

So when US have to head any type of war, theyre clueless. They also enter any big war late, let someone else took the heavy job, and usually act as support act instead of the main player. Of course they cant win a war. Especially when its atrition war. US had imported too many former Nazi officer into their rank post WW2, they dont do atrition war well.

Easy to win when russia does the heavy lifting

You just think they were successful back then.....

Why they were more successful ? Brcause it was against Germany. Quite simple.

World War 2, the generals took care of business. Starting in Korea politicians got involved, that ment the generals had to get approval before doing anything, Vietnam was even worse. Get politics out of the military and let the combat personnel do there job.

A very excellent point that i knew all too well during my career in in the USN from 1978-2000. Promotions used to mean something when I first came in, but towards the end, promotions were based on a "Beauty Contest" or who has their nose up the CO's butt deeperst.

USA didn't fight in ww2. They just drop the bomb.

They are not even comparable. We dropped atomic bombs in WW2. We haven't used it again since. If we use them, this discussion will not even happen.

Earlier Generals could find an enemy, in masse wearing uniforms and defeat them in battle. Vietnam and Afghanistan were guerilla wars...in foriegn lands. Fought with expeditionary forces and handcuffed with rules of engagement which make "victory" impossible.

You have to conquer and rule a foreign power, or give up and go home. Those are the only 2 options.

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Mark Clark?

Because the true agenda of the military/industrial complex has not been to win wars but to drag them out as long as possible to steal trillions of dollars of borrowed taxpayer money. Bullets and bandages coming to you from Halliburton, Raytheon Boeing and your friends at DARPA et al.

ww2 we had commitment and loyalty,,after that we did not have commitment nor loyalty from some ,,,today is even worse,,,,,we have taken liberty for granted and we are losing it,,,,

Failure to cooperate also led to large losses on both sides in the Second World War. For example the happy times where the Germans sunk hundreds of US cargo vessels was avoidable had Admiral King not believed that Convoy tactics recommended by the British was bad because he disliked the British. In the same vein, Britain would not have lost its operations on Rhodes had it listened to American advice not to risk it.

Because the USSR pushed back the Nazi German Wehrmacht into a desperate retreat back towards Germany a year before D-Day

Question, how does a general gain trust/know his troops in the relieving system? Don't both result in people being shuffled out?

hahah, cuop giut ma li, tra tien diiii

McGregor is right today, 40 generals," to many cheifs and not enough indians"!

Simple because politics made it inpossible for the military to do there job in nam and elsewhere poor guys were fighting a war with one hand tied to there dicks

WW2 we were fighting foreign occupants. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan we were fighting the locals.

Does it really take an hour to explain this?

During this time, our military created a system where you had to meet specific criteria and fill specific positions to advance. This led our officers to falsify reports and hop from position to position to advance.

Then, the rotations of men made it so almost every company was inexperienced at the officer level. In WW2 you were there until you were injured, dead, or the war ended. In WW2 officers had the chance to actually learn their roles and master them, or be replaced.

And finally, in the Korean and Vietnam war, the strategy was treated the same as WW2. They were fighting for certain areas, but they werent staying to control them as they did in WW2. They treated a war against an ideology the same as an all out conventional war, so instead of behaving as we did in ar Ramadi or Baghdad in Iraq, we acted as if we were liberating France.

1) Officers were too busy trying to get their ticket punched and get to the next promotion, instead of actually learning and leading.
2) Instead of winning the alliance of Korean and Vietnamese civiliand, we tried to fight for land, which led to a hatred for the U.S...
3) The U.S. was fighting an ideology... and they weren't fighting to free one country from another. They were sticking their noses into civil wars.

That will work while you are occupying the area... but as soon as you leave, it fires right back up. And that's what happened with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The goal is not winning wars. The goal is making profits from arms sales.

Those countries the US just bullied for awhile and then moved on.

Because they were told to.

Watching on 28th August 2023. I didn't see the world war 2, only studied in books. In my opinion No General wins the war. Decisive factor was Atomic Bomb. It was observation but Ukraine war is verifying this thought. I don't know how much time will it take to be Decisive. Similar to July 1945. If Atomic Bomb wasn't used, nobody knows , how much time it takes to finish and How?. Similar positions occurred after 75 years. No solution?

Because it was the USSR that actually did the job

Who says out Generals were not successful in Korea? Success depends on what you are working with and against. There was an unlimited supply of bodies on the Chinese side and that makes “ Winning “ problematic . Holding the line was about the best they could do. Vietnam was never a war that could be won. Invading North Vietnam was out and the long winding boarder made security a joke. You would have to be willing to invade the North to win the war. China would have became directly involved at that point. Yeah, sometimes the Generals are ask to do miracles with their hands ties.

It seems he just jumps from one of thing to another, just telling some stories about a ton of different people.. What's the main strand? That they are somehow connected to someone who is also in turn connected to Marshal???? What is the actual TLDR of this?

Drafting men that didn't want to be there probably didn't help.

Very Good !!!

Coalition warfare … just like what is going to happen right now

Why were the American generals way better in WW II, then Korea and Nam, simple answer, the Russian generals fought and won WW II, both Korea and Nam were exercises in criminal Blackmail operations that gave us the gift that keeps on giving, that abomination called DHS.

Well this infantrymans favorite weapon is the 240Bravo and I think alot of other grunts would agree.