Condition of the United States Military during the 70s

[jetsetter]

I was reading a work of fiction (science fiction) set in the current day. One of the characters in the book mentioned that during the 70s the condition of the U.S. Military was generally poor. Now, this book was written by a retired soldier but I was wondering how true he was. I do know of some of the problems but not in too much detail. The character in the book said that if war had broken out with the Soviet Union at the time the U.S. Marines would have had to take a substantial portion of the combat on their shoulders due to the poor condition of the U.S. Army. Would that have been true?

Thank you for any insight you can give me.

[Ordie]

I wasn't around back then, however I did manage to talk with a Gunny who served in Vietnam and the 70's.

The situation of the Marines was no less dire. Many of the Army's rejected vehicles and tanks were passed down to the Marines. But the Marines, masters of improvisation, managed to keep them running.

In the late 70's The Marines and Navy also took initiative in setting a network of pre-positioned ships around the globe. The idea was to load cargo vessels, anchor them near hot spots, and deploy them to a rondevous spot with Marines flying in from CONUS.

Therefore the Marines were in better position to react to any crisis such as they did in Desert Shield.

[clean]

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES

By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.
North American Newspaper Alliance
Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971


THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.

The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.

By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.

Only the Marines - who have made news this year by their hard line against indiscipline and general permissiveness - seem with their expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

[vryhpyammoadded]

One of my favorite quotes I heard from a group of sailors during the malaise forever era was “What, they’re gonna start piss testing for pot? G*d dammed, that ain’t right, what about my rights? Dam, now we’re gonna have to do acid. They can’t test for acid man”. Then I could go on about the theft and violence these nut jobs were responsible for and the brief attempt at forming a “union”.

My father was a naval officer during this period and I think he must have aged 2 for 1 every year. He seemed continually pissed off for ten years mostly because of these yahoo’s. Then I enlisted in 80 discovering that yes, it really was a mess. Next, Reagan came along and for about two years heads were rolling like French nobility.

[XASA]

When I enlisted in the Army in 1965, it was a very professional, well trained and motivated force. When I was discharged in late 1971, it was drug addled, rife with racial turmoil and suffering from low morale, which is why I got out. Militarily, the units assigned to Europe had been depleted to provide needed bodies for Vietnam and was, basically, a skeleton force far removed from its former strength. Standards for enlisting and draftees had been lowered to the point where there were soldiers in the field who could not read, had criminal records and were drug addicts. My last assignment was Ft. Bragg. While I was there, the 82nd Airborne was known as the "Jumping Junkies". The Navy, Air Force and Marines were also experiencing similar problems although on a lesser scale.


To sum it up: It was a mess and it took years to rebuild our armed forces.

[SOG]

would you say it was a combination of the times at hand ie heavy drug times plus the war that did it?

did some of the burden fall on officers for not taking charge or was it the vietnam war that created a need for lower standards?

ie was there a certain fault or was it generally many factors?

[orionhawk]

jetsetter, by any chance would this book be John Ringo's "A Hymn Before Battle"?

[jetsetter]

jetsetter, by any chance would this book be John Ringo's "A Hymn Before Battle"?

You got it.

[XASA]

would you say it was a combination of the times at hand ie heavy drug times plus the war that did it?

did some of the burden fall on officers for not taking charge or was it the vietnam war that created a need for lower standards?

ie was there a certain fault or was it generally many factors?

Everything you wrote is spot on. In 1965, the Army still had some NCOs who were veterans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and wore two stars on their CIBs, by 1971, "Shake & Bake" academies were graduating NCOs right after Basic and AIT. Officers were "punching their tickets" in Vietnam for career advancement and were in command slots for usually six months or less so that other officers could get their tickets punched. So, leadership wasn't as strong as it should have been.

Those who were entering the military reflected the civilian manpower pool and by 1971, that pool consisted of those who use drugs and had no respect for authority. It was also an unpopular war by 1971, with stories like My Lai in the media, which certainly didn't help motivate draftees. Even the Marine Corps had to resort to the draft because they couldn't meet their numbers-- can you imagine how a youngster felt being drafted to be a Marine rifleman after watching the Battle of Khe Sanh on the news? Unit cohesion wasn't strong since the replacement system was an individual and not a unit one. Although the fraggings are well documented, there were also many mutinies where soldiers simply refused to follow orders that they thought were wrong that weren't reported. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, black G.I.s began to question their role in a war overseas while racial unrest continued at home, which led to many racial confrontations. Although no one ever dared to spit on me and I know of no one who that did happen to, wearing your uniform off-duty did create tension with some civilians in parts of the country where there wasn't a military base, which certainly didn't aid morale.

Colin Powell's autobiography discusses the period in some detail and what steps were taken to correct the problems.

Yeah, it was certainly FUBAR but most of us made the best of it. Despite all the bullsh***, I still think of my time in the service as being a rewarding and peak experience.

[orionhawk]

You got it.

Thought so. That would be the speech by Gunny Pappas talking to his boot-camp trainees.
I love that series.
A Hymn Before Battle
Gust Front
When the Devil Dances
Yellow Eyes
Watch on the Rhein (Die Wacht am Rhein)
Hell's Faire
Cally's War
Hero
there is also a forthcoming sequel to Cally's War

That series, and the same author's "Prince Roger's Own" series, got me hooked on Kipling's military poetry.

[SOG]

Everything you wrote is spot on. In 1965, the Army still had some NCOs who were veterans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and wore two stars on their CIBs, by 1971, "Shake & Bake" academies were graduating NCOs right after Basic and AIT. Officers were "punching their tickets" in Vietnam for career advancement and were in command slots for usually six months or less so that other officers could get their tickets punched. So, leadership wasn't as strong as it should have been.

Those who were entering the military reflected the civilian manpower pool and by 1971, that pool consisted of those who use drugs and had no respect for authority. It was also an unpopular war by 1971, with stories like My Lai in the media, which certainly didn't help motivate draftees. Even the Marine Corps had to resort to the draft because they couldn't meet their numbers-- can you imagine how a youngster felt being drafted to be a Marine rifleman after watching the Battle of Khe Sanh on the news? Unit cohesion wasn't strong since the replacement system was an individual and not a unit one. Although the fraggings are well documented, there were also many mutinies where soldiers simply refused to follow orders that they thought were wrong that weren't reported. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, black G.I.s began to question their role in a war overseas while racial unrest continued at home, which led to many racial confrontations. Although no one ever dared to spit on me and I know of no one who that did happen to, wearing your uniform off-duty did create tension with some civilians in parts of the country where there wasn't a military base, which certainly didn't aid morale.

Colin Powell's autobiography discusses the period in some detail and what steps were taken to correct the problems.

Yeah, it was certainly FUBAR but most of us made the best of it. Despite all the bullsh***, I still think of my time in the service as being a rewarding and peak experience.

thanks for the response, i appreciate. i was wondering, based on what you said and well, history, it seemed like the vietnam war created an excessive demand that we werent ready to meet.

in the current war in iraq do you think the use of PMC's to fill 100,000+ manpower roles has alleviated that problem from happening again, ie no lowered standards, no draft etc?

are PMC's a good solution despite their controversy as a stop gap measure or is our military too small ie "less is more" screwed us anyway? or is this the way its going to be from now on? i think the army and marines were given permission to expand a bit?

[XASA]

thanks for the response, i appreciate. i was wondering, based on what you said and well, history, it seemed like the vietnam war created an excessive demand that we werent ready to meet.

in the current war in iraq do you think the use of PMC's to fill 100,000+ manpower roles has alleviated that problem from happening again, ie no lowered standards, no draft etc?

are PMC's a good solution despite their controversy as a stop gap measure or is our military too small ie "less is more" screwed us anyway? or is this the way its going to be from now on? i think the army and marines were given permission to expand a bit?

Both conservatives and liberals like to compare our current situation in Iraq to Vietnam to fit their agenda. I think both sides would agree that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, went to war way too light and should have gone in heavy. Johnson, McNamera and Westmoreland also committed troops piecemeal and "escalated" until there was 500,000 troops in country. In Vietnam, we controlled territory but not the country, and we never did win the "hearts and minds" of the locals. Although we won all the military battles, we lost the political war. One can argue that in Iraq, we control most of the population centers through force and that, if we left, it would turn into a sh**storm real fast. Obviously, many Iraqis, including the present government do not want us there (although the latter realizes their survival depends on our presence). No matter how many troops or PMCs you put on the ground, you can't force a democracy on a society that resents being occupied.

I see the Army is upmanning by adding 74,000 slots-- too little, too late. If we had used our full force of arms in Vietnam in 1965, it would have been over with within a year is one argument. The counterargument is that the Chinese and the Russians wouldn't have allowed it without a fight. If we had gone into Iraq with all the means we had available, set some reachable goals before we went in, and had an exit strategy (the Powell doctrine), the troops would have probably been home by now. We didn't despite not being threatened by any other country. Our goals keep shifting with each political breeze. There is no exit strategy.

Seeing the best trained and equipped Army (and Marines) in the world being worn down because of political (not having the support of the American public) and diplomatic (not having the support of our "Allies") mistakes is, IMHO, very much like the Vietnam era. I hope the troops, who have nothing to do with the politics of war, don't have to go through the crap many Vietnam Vets went through or be part of a weakened military because asshat politicians didn't have their act together before committing them into harm's way.

[SOG]

thanks again, i really appreciate the response!

[Sith]

It's kind of interesting that this topic comes up right now as two chapters of my Masters thesis deal with this period. I am currently working on it so I do not have a lot of time to write at length right now. But one of my favored quotes from the period is from General Creighton Abrams after he became COS. Just prior to sending General Donn Starry to take command of Ft. Knox he told him to, "Go out there and get the Army off its ass."

Thanks,
Sith

[angry cow]

Lots of autobiographies by military commanders who served during the 70s talk at length about the problems that plagued the US military at the time. Into the Storm and American Soldier come to mind.

My dad was stationed in Germany during the late 70s. His position as a calibration technician meant he needed additional security clearance, his support unit along with a engineering and signal unit had a separate, completely self-contained military post within a larger army base to protect equipment and national secrets from the extensive gang and criminal activity occurring throughout the post.

As a result my dad's experience was not at all positive, and no matter what I do I still have trouble convincing him that things have changed for the better.

[BugHunt]

I recall reading Gen Eric Zinni talking about his first big command post, which was all about gaining control at night on the USMC base he was on.

There were riots every night - riots in which marines were killing marines....