Transcripts For CSPAN3 Manpower Morale After The 1968 Tet O

CSPAN3 Manpower Morale After The 1968 Tet Offensive July 14, 2024

Test. Test. Now, the next slide, a little complicated but its priority one assignments, percentage of the total of College Graduates brought into the army. These are both draftees and enlisted. Priority one was the category the army called wanted to be filled with a College Graduate. So some of the an acronyms on the bottom, men who volunteered for officer candidate school or enlisted for it. C. A. S. Stands for civilian acquired skills. Those are men who came in with skills that immediately translated to an mos, so they were awarded that mos based on their skills, such as delta clerks. A lot of lawyers got drafted and wound up as legal clerks. 91 seiierra, preventive medicin. Department of the army preferred mos utilization, these were moss requiring a high score in the Armed Forces Qualification test, such as 96 bravo intelligence analysts. Men could be assigned that, or they could actually enlist for it as well. Now, enlisted for an mos is men who went down to see their recruiting sergeant and signed up for three years for a very specific mos. Almost always, and there are reams of figures for this and i looked through all the reports, very, very fewm men enlist for combat arms in these years. At the far end, you can see the army was very successful in getting men to volunteer for ocs. Fiscal year 69 is the first year in the war in which a majority of ocs commissions go to College Graduates. Even when the numbers start falling of people who volunteer from among College Graduates, because they make other changes in the ocs program, College Graduates remain the majority of people who get ocs commissions for the rest of the war. Now, the next slide, priority two were moss made through the normal computer driven assignment system in washington and were considered ones, quote, which challenged the leadership or Technical Capability of the average College Graduate. Now, across the bottom there, combat arms, those are the infantry armor, field artillery, and combat engineer moss. Broken out separately, you can see the College Graduates who are assigned the 11 bravo mos. Now, the 71 series, those are all the radar oriellys, the clerks. The 76 series are all the supply moss. The 91 series are medical care and treatment moss. That does include combat aid men. And the 95 series is Law Enforcement moss. I find that last spike in the last fiscal year in the 95 very interesting. I havent found anything, a smoking gun, but i got to wonder if there was any more College Graduates sent to Law Enforcement noss because of the deteriorating discipline within the force. And they thought they might be more reliable as mps and cid agents and things like that. You can see from the combat arms and the 11 bravo columns that for the first three years, the army was fairly successful in getting a good number of College Graduates into the combat arms, thereby implementing harold k. Johnsons leaf that, quote, the smartest people available should be squad leaders. He wrote that as marginalia on a report. The chief of staff was very much against the concept of using these men. I didnt put this on a slide because it was already busy enough, but College Graduate input to the shake and bake course was 18. 1 in 69, 8 in 70, and 12. 4 in 71 and then the program was canceled. Now, what were some of the effects on the army of increased College Graduate exsessions . First, it was used when filling moss that required good academic skills. Theres a noticeable lowering in the attrition rate. A lot of the mos advanced individual training courses that require those sort of skills. And these men generally performed better in units, at least anecdotally. Theres no statistical study i found. Second, and this is also z anecdotal, it increases the number of junior leaders possessing attributes the army defined as high quality. The men going to oca and the shake and bake ncos. This is how the army defined quality. The consensus among Senior Officers and then captain barry mccaffery, who went to vietnam and did a study of particularly in the combat arms what was going on within units in 1971 is that most Junior Officers and ncos were technically competent. They were very well trained in their schools but lacked sufficient experience in leadership for complex situations they encountered after tet, particularly outside combat. When youre in the rear or youre a combat unit and youre not in the field a lot, those create lots of different situations which werent covered until the courses these men went through. Third, talking to the earlier fear about would this undermine discipline, the consensus within the army was while most College Graduates did bring antiwar, antimilitary sentiments into the service, only a handful ever acted on them to promote dissidence or resistance. The army ran a very vigorous counterintelligence operation against the dissidence and resistance in the army. There are summaries. I havent seen their actual field reports, but their summaries to the chief of staff never mentioned College Graduates as a source of problem for this. So the generals rediction in 1969 that, quote, if we dont engage these bright young men in responsible job, they will be off in the barracks planning a riot, unquote, did not come to pass. I think thats a good topic for the question and answer to tease out some of the reasons why that didnt come to pass with these men. Finally, the army staffs objective of extending the wars cost beyond the working class was partly fulfilled. But not to the extent i think it desired. Its at least certain of the general officers, particularly people like bruce palmer jr. Earlier we heard about the world war ii and korean war generations and the gap between them and the vietnam people. I think this is part of it, they came out of a world war ii experience particularly where, you know, it was the whole nation engaged in the war. They felt that it should be the same way in vietnam. At least some of them, they felt that way. But theres not enough of the College Graduates to overturn any kind of consensus that this is still a working class war on the ground in the combat arms. So that is still true. I think the work there is not challenged at all by this. But i think it does require a slight modification in that in the post tet years, you should note there are more tim obriens out there in the bush than we generally think were in those years. Id like to close with a somewhat larger question. Was there an unintended effect on American Society by ending the draft deferments . So did bringing 109,777 College Graduates into the army as well as the even greater number of College Graduates who successfully avoided getting into the army or being brought into the army help accelerate war weariness and antiwar sentiments in the years after tet . Well, one general thought, at least after the war, general bruce palmer jr. , who was the armys vice chief from 1968 to 1972 and by the way, had a son who got a high number in the draft lottery. So he was never drafted. Palmer came to believe that, quote, the real demonstrations against the war didnt start coming until they started drafting middle class, upper middle class whites and blacks, unquote. As a matter of fact, he said that in an interview to bob griffith when he was researching all volunteer force book. So i would like to close with saying asking, perhaps thats one of the other questions we can consider today. Did bringing all these men into the army and by the way, pretty much all of them went into the army. Only a few went into the marine corps actually help accelerate other changes in the greater American Society . Thank you. [ applause ] im eric flint, director of the lewis army museum. I get to follow bill with a little bit of an explanation about he mentioned something called project 100,000. Just a quick show of hands. Who knows what project 100,000 is . Okay. So ill endeavor to kind of not barney it down too much. I was going to have a slide presentation, but it was going to exist solely of the smiling picture of robert mack that mar ra. After some of my conversations last night, i decided that was just going to be a bad idea. So one thing from the conversations last night, i did realize that we have some of my colleagues here who are going to be touching on other elements of this program. What im going to do is give you a wave top with some statistical background to set the stage for further discussion and for the remainder of the day. So background, in august of 1966 at the same time as americas manpower requirements vietnam were rapidly expanding, defense secretary Robert Mcnamara was speaking to the veterans of foreign wars. In that speech, he introduced a new program that in his own words would juuplift, quote, americas subterranean poor, by providing those young men who had previously been disqualified training, benefits, and opportunities of military service. The project was titled project 100,000, and it was meant to be a win win for both the United States military and American Society as a whole. The Program Officially began in october 1966 and ran through december 1971. The program was a disaster. The destruction that it ultimately wrought on the Armed Services and more importantly on the individuals who were unfairly inducted and on the lies of those who were either endangered or lost their lives because of the use of substandard men in military service, particularly in combat service. So how did this program come about . Why was such a disastrous idea made policy . Well, mcnamara, as an integral part of linden johnsons team, the project 100,000 program was designed as an integral part of lbjs greater war on poverty, his Great Society programs. In the early mid1960s, approximately 1. 8 million men came of draft age every year. Of that number, about 600,000 were deemed unfit for military service due to mental or physical reasons. And the split there was about 50 50. So you had 300,000 mental, 300,000 physical disqualifications each year. Mcnamaras thinking was, is it of those 300,000 who are disqualified for mental reasons, a good portion of them were simply victims of circumstance. They were men who possessed innate intelligence, yet whose poverty prevented them from gaining the education necessary to qualify for military service. In his 1966 speech to the vfw, mcnamara decried that these young men had, quote, not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nations abundance. And through military service, these disadvantaged men could return to their communities with skills and experience, and by extension better those depressed and marginalized communities. The road to hell paved with good intentions, i think, keeps coming to mind. The goal of project 100,000 was to induct annually through voluntary or compulsory means 100,000, hence the title, previously disqualified men into the military. Each branch was assigned a percentage of men from this program. What officially became known as new standards men, thats another marvelous euphemism. The army received a bulk of new standards men followed closely by the United States marine corps. Believe it or not, even the air force and the navy were required to take a certain percentage of new standards men as well. So what were these new standards . For the purposes of induction classification, the military has five mental categories ranging from category one, very high iq, down to category five, very low iq, with category three being average iq. Now, throughout the late 50s and early 1960s, utilizing results from the Armed Forces Qualification test, which the military had adopted during this period, the military services were able to be very selective. During this period, almost 50 of draft age men were disqualified. So during this period, the military was able to only induct personnel from the top three mental categories. Under project 100,000, however, large numbers of mental category four were now eligible and available for military service. This meant that men who scored between the 10th and 30th percent tile on the Armed Forces Qualifying test could now be inducted into service. Well, how did the induction of these low iq men impact manpower . The simple answer is it had a positive effect on manpower. It provided the bodies needed for a growing requirements in vietnam. In total, between 1966 and 1971, 354,000 new standards men were inducted and served. Of that, 47 were drafted. The balance, the other 53 , volunteered or were induced to volunteer by the threat of the draft. So from a strictly manpower standpoint, it worked. It brought in the bodies. But did the program truly work as advertised . No, it didnt. In my opinion, the program was a failure. So id like to take a minute and throw some statistics at you to illustrate what the impact was on the armed forces, particularly on the army and marine corps. 50 of the men had an iq 50 came from the south when compared to 28 of the general population. 40 were africanamerican compared to only 8 of the American Population at the time. 80 were college dropouts. And 40 of new standards men could only read below a sixth grade level with a further 20 reading below a fourth grade level. Within a relatively short period, the negative impact of inducting large numbers of low iq men started to become clear. For example, by 1968, the u. S. Armys Continental Army commander, which was the predecessor to todays training and doctrine command, the organization responsible for the training of all soldiers, including new standards men, they had excluded new standards men from 64 of the armys 237 entry level military occupational specialties. After they continued to identify more problems with training the new standards men, they started excluding new standards men from more and more of these moss to the point where they were now excluded from a full 74 of all entry level moss. In short, the new standards men were a drain on resources. They were difficult to train. They took longer. They had a much lower completion rate. You already had overtaxed instructor staff. Im talking from basic combat training all the way up through advanced individual mos training. The army, particularly, was not given additional resources. They were not told, okay, heres youre getting all these new standards men. Theyre going to require more training. Therefore, were going to give you more resources in terms of manpower and other resources to train these men. So theyre now taking those instructor staffs and having to work a lot harder with less result. When youre spending all your time for those of you who have been that junior leader an find yourself spending all of your time with that 10 of your troops who are your biggest problems, these instructors were spending all their time trying to train a very small number of new soldiers, and theyre neglecting all the others. So project 100,000 was a failure. The negative consequences of utilizing these substandard manpower, especially during wartime, was understood by military leaders. And again, i want to set the stage for this further discussion, but i want to end with a sobering statistic. Of the 354,000 new standards men who were inducted between 1966 and 1971, 5,478 died on active duty. The majority of them in combat in vietnam. New standards men were twice as likely to die in combat as their hi higher iq comrades. Its also estimated that over 20,000 of them theyve had to extrapolate this but over 20,000 new standards men were wounded in combat as well. So on the whole, the program was a failure, and i hope this overview sets up for further discussion. Ill be followed by marjory. [ applause ] i know you were all hoping for the doctor, but youre stuck with me. Ill try to do her talk justice. The first thing she put, the tradition gnat disclaimer that this presentation represents her views and is not the official position of the dod, u. S. Army, or u. S. Army war college. So hello, everyone. Im so sorry i could not join this fantastic lineup today. I was struck with a terrible curse from the travel gods with no reasonable way to make it to kansas today. So i hope youll accept my sincerest regrets, and i hope ill be able to catch up with many of you at the society for military history meeting in may or sometime in the future. Ill happily field questions via email or social media. In the short time i have, i want to use a narrow lens of religion to examine the question of morale after tet. Even this narrow framing allows us to ask interesting questions about morale and the relationship between morale and Public Opinion. To explore this relationship, i focus on firstperson accounts from chaplains, as well as official records. Today, i want to ask two primary questions. One, how did declining support from religious organizations at home and their firsthand experiences affect chaplain morale in posttet vietnam . And second, how did military chaplains who served both before and after observe and interpret changes in troops morale . The basic trends in Public Opinion on the vietnam war are well known. As the war escalated, american casualties mounted, and the draft increased pressure on Young American men, public support for the war declined. The National Media played a Critical Role in shaping Public Opinion about the war. When the National Media portrayed religious people in relation to the war in vietnam, especially after 1967, its coverage was overwhelmingly about religiou

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