4 - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
ditring the Vietnam War. Such charges must be taken seriously. Some may be
accurate; others can likely be cssessed as exaggeration or pure fabrication.
G;.,briel and Savage, in their study Crisis in Command, claim that
"... the Army began to border on an undisciplined, ineffective, almost
anomic mass of individuals wno collectively had no goals and who,
individually, only sought to survive the length of their tours." 79/
While
this claim is partially true it's vaiidity can be applied only to the
period from about )970 on.
was probably onerating at its peak performance,
At that time, although the formal school system
having incorporated the
lessons of Vietnam and having the advantage of veteran instructors, the
all-important unit schools in-country vwre suffering from unit turbulence
of an inordinate degree as withdrawal planning was implemented.
In short,
training was good to excellent, but indoctrination was not succeeding in
marny of the rear ar'as where disciplinary problems increased markedly.
course, indoctrination alone could not resolve the sericus problems of that
era.
BG Douglas Kinnard's The War Managers does not dwell oi training.
but rather on leadership and piofession~lism.
these issues to training is obvious.
Of
Yet the relationship of
Good training depends on leadership
and professionalism, and the shortcomings in those areas describee by the
generals who responded to Kinnard'F survey arL also an indictment of some
aspects of the training and indoctrination effort undertak-n during the
Vietnam war. 80/
But the point to be made is this. the Army faced a massive task
during the Vietnam War in training, equipping, and deploying a force which,
at its peak, numbered more than 500,000 men. It also advisea, trained, and
equipped the RVNAF.
And both armies were simultarncisly fighting a clever,
shadowy insurgent enemy withi a tough, resourceful main force organization.
Training and indoctrination were not always at their best, but they accomplished
thp job that was necessary, particularly during the first fnur and
a half years of the fighting.
combat presence in Vietnam,
During the last three years of the American
serious problemF arose which affected training
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