CHAPTER 6: MAXWELL TAYLOR'S UNCERTAIN TRUMPET
1 of 56: If you have not been following along with this story, please go back and read the first five chapters of “The Atomic Age.”

2 of 56: We here in the Imperial Airborne Corps have been telling this story all week and will continue through Friday, July 18.

3 of 56: You see, dear reader, this is more than a series of tweets. This is storytelling at its highest level.

4 of 56: All these threads are part of a single plot arc.

5 of 56: And just as you wouldn’t start reading a novel from Chapter 6, you’ll get more out of this if you started with Chapter 1.

6 of 56: We’re about to introduce another major character to our novel. A man well-known to the @101AASLTDiv and the @82ndABNDiv: Maxwell Taylor.
https://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Maxwell-Davenport-Taylor/

7 of 56: By 1955, Taylor was commanding @EighthArmyKorea in Korea. He had replaced Ridgway in 1953.

8 of 56: In that job, Taylor ingratiated himself to Eisenhower by focusing on reducing troop presence on the Korean peninsula.

9 of 56: That summer, in 1955, Matthew Ridgway was pushed out as Chief of Staff.

10 of 56: Exhausted with the constant pushback from “Old Iron @$$,” Ike effectively fired Ridgway as Army Chief 2 years into his term.

11 of 56: Technically Ridgway retired, but Ike did not want him to complete a full 4-year-team.

12 of 56: If Ridgway hadn’t retired, Ike would have forced his hand. [if anyone wants to debate this point, we’ve got original source docs on this one].

13 of 56: So, Taylor was a natural choice to once again replace Ridgway.

14 of 56: In fact, Taylor actively politicked for the job, publicly praising Ike’s New Look strategy.

15 of 56: By this time, President Eisenhower had become a largely reviled figure among the Army senior leaders he’d led in WWII.

16 of 56: Army leaders saw the way the president treated Ridgway, mocking him in meetings and dismissing him without fanfare halfway through his 4-year term.

17 of 56: Many senior Army leaders looked at Taylor’s constant acclaim of the president with suspicion.

18 of 56: Nonetheless, Maxwell Taylor was now in charge of the Army.

19 of 56: In September 1955, President Eisenhower suffered a massive heart attack. Some senior Army leaders hoped he would not recover in time to seek reelection.

20 of 56: But he did. And once Ike committed to the November 1956 election, there was little doubt he would easily win. Ike remained widely popular, almost as popular as he was right after victory in Europe.

21 of 56: The election was a re-match of 1952, as his opponent in 1956 was Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier.

22 of 56: Ike won big in 1956.

23 of 56: Americans not only thought he’d provided the country with firm leadership, but thought he was a reasonable, sincere guy. People really DID like Ike.

24 of 56: But the Army certainly did not.

25 of 56: With a second term, Eisenhower committed fully to his New Look strategy. Many national security analysts referred to this as the Offset Strategy.

26 of 56: The Soviets had an enormous advantage in ground forces. Eisenhower looked to offset a Soviet advantage with nuclear weapons.

27 of 56: In so doing, Eisenhower could keep the Army small, thereby committing to a key principle of his grand strategy: maintain a strong economy by minimizing the cost of the Department of Defense.

28 of 56: Meanwhile, the focus on nuclear capability pushed money to a new market that would bolster the domestic economy: the civilian defense industry.

29 of 56: Private technology firms began developing newer, safer warheads, creating large government contracts, and employing many Americans.

30 of 56: In 1961, on his way out of the White House, Eisenhower would warn the Nation against the “military-industrial complex” he helped create. For now, however, it was a critical component to his grand strategy.

31 of 56: Meanwhile, by the time of Eisenhower’s second inauguration on January 20, 1957, Taylor, like Ridgway, bristled under Ike’s reductive national security strategy.

32 of 56: Unlike Ridgway, Taylor was extremely duplicitous; in the White House, the general was overly deferential to the president, so much so that the other service chiefs did not trust him.

33 of 56: Inside the Pentagon, however, Taylor leaked all his concerns to his favorite reporters, who attributed the complaints to “an unnamed senior military official”

34 of 56: Taylor worked hard to stay in good stead with the President. Outside of the White House, however, he told Army leaders he was pushing back against Ike’s strategy.

35 of 56: Meanwhile, around this time, a group of Army colonels at the @ArmyWarCollege [not sure if they were taught by @notabattlechick] published a study called the “Pentomic Structure.”

36 of 56: In this report, these analysts described a possible Army reorganization in which each Army division had five smaller fighting units vs three larger regiments. The study was presented to the Army Chief of Staff.

37 of 56: Suddenly, Taylor had a means of bringing relevance (and $$$) back into the Army.

38 of 56: Taylor championed the Pentomic concept. This idea would radically reorganize most @USArmy combat divisions into smaller, faster, leaner, more mobile units.

39 of 56: So, for each Army division, this construct would create five smaller maneuver formations rather than three larger regiments.

40 of 56: The Pentomic Division would, according to Taylor, allow the Army to regain an important role in war.

41 of 56: The idea was this: smaller maneuver formations could move faster across nuclear-devastated battlefields to seize and secure whatever key terrain and resources had not been destroyed.

42 of 56: Additionally, smaller formations would make less lucrative targets for Soviet nukes. After all, what kind of idiot would waste $11 million [cost to produce and develop a 1956 nuclear warhead in 2020 $$$] on a squad of dismounts?

43 of 56: We’ll cover the Pentomic concept and why it was a terrible idea in great detail in Chapter 9: The Expendables. For now, suffice it to say that this was Taylor’s flagship idea.

44 of 56: Throughout 1957, Taylor went all over the country -- to military bases, to Congress, to the White House, and to national security reporters -- talking up the strategic value of the Pentomic design.

45 of 56: The entire Pentomic idea was really just a marketing ploy by Taylor. By developing this new concept, the Army chief could justify reversing Army budget reductions.

46 of 56: Operationally, it could not work, for reasons we’ll get into in Chapter 9. The problem was Taylor was overselling the idea while overlooking some real problems with the span of control.

47 of 56: Taylor didn’t account for the concern that this was too many units for a single division commander to control.

48 of 56: Further, Taylor made all sorts of assumptions about new equipment for these new formations that the Army was not close to developing. This was the kind of stuff that units needed in order to move quickly over open landscapes in a nuclear fight.

49 of 56: We’re talking weird stuff like individual helicopter transportation devices. Hovercraft. Stuff we don’t even have today!

50 of 56: So, Pentomic was all very “pie in the sky” and would surely fail in practice. Hey, there is a reason not a single major military force aside from America converted in this manner during the Atomic Age.

51 of 56: Nonetheless, Taylor felt he had a way to ensure Army relevance. For him, the Pentomic transformation was an enormous victory. He was able to stabilize Army budgets in the latter half of the 1950s.

52 of 56: But here again, Taylor was being duplicitous. He knew that history would judge the Pentomic concept harshly and he didn’t want that legacy.

53 of 56: So, he waited until his full 4-year term as Chief of Staff was over and then wrote a book critical of Ike and his grand strategy.

54 of 56: The book, “The Uncertain Trumpet,” published in 1960, is a scathing rebuke of Ike and his strategy. According to Taylor, the future of war was, well, “uncertain,” and the US military, under a misguided president and SecDef, was ill-prepared.

55 of 56: Taylor’s book is widely read in war colleges and military schools and among national security theorists. And Taylor is now considered a visionary, a man who made the Nation safer.

56 of 56: It should be considered, however, that throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, many of his peers held him in low-regard for his unwillingness to publicly or even privately argue the ideas in the “Uncertain Trumpet” while he was a serving Chief of Staff.