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John D SaltI am still looking forward to reading it: as you say, the area is still not written about very much. I am very familiar with QSOH, and recognize those dynamics that you are alluding too.
For coverage of what you’re likely to find in print, Kellett’s “Combat Motivation” does as complete a job as I think is possible of surveying the available literature — although one has to add in more recent writings, such as “Brains and Bullets” and “Bayonets and Blobsticks”.
More generally, do you think that long periods of peace/low-intensity/one-sided warfare positively encourages tactical over-complication (one things variously of the RAF ‘vic’ formation and associated tactics, “optimistic” IFV doctrine), so there might be an argument that, for the many advantages regular armies may have in individual training, tactically they could just as well be worse rather than better?
Skills fade astonishingly fast once real experience stops being available, and odd ideas thrive when there is no strong evolutionary pressure separating the good ideas from the bad ones. I don’t think this is a divide between “regular” and “conscript” so much as between busy and idle militaries. The British and US militaries have managed to keep themselves surprisingly busy since 1945.
Things like Air Ministry attacks and IFVs — I’d be interested to know what you mean by “optimistic” IFV doctrine — I think tend to grow up in peacetime when everyone is preparing for a future hi-tech war that nobody has any experience of. Douhet’s ideas about airpower, Boney Fuller’s all-tank forces maneouvring like fleets, “Surcouf”-type submarine monitors, the “revolution in military affairs” that would let us dance around inside the enemy’s OODA loop thanks to better C2 technology, all arose when it appeared that a new technology might change the way wars were fought, and all failed when exposed to the harsh reality of war-fighting. Not all peace-conceived ideas faill in like manner. Tukhachevsky’s “deep battle” was fundamentally sound, as was the amphibious assault doctrine developed by the USMC between the wars, and Liddell Hart’s field service handbooks were pretty darn good. The difference, I think, is that the successful peacetime ideas were based on hard thinking and operational experience, whereas the failures were based on over-optimism about “transformative” technology. And of course there’s the old saying that “in peacetime, the cry is always for quicker time into action, in war, for weight of shell.”
And what do you think of the Army’s attempts so far to square the circle regarding combat loads?
They have at least recognised the problem, and are conducting a programme of experiments to find out what might be done. And some of the experimenters have a very sound attitude to insisting on hard evidence, and some have been infected with the spirit of “Brains and Bullets”, and quite a lot are from my old regiment, and therefore sound chaps by definition. So from what I can see there seems a fair chance that the top people might decide something sensible.
All the best,
John.