(This excerpt takes approximately four minutes to read.)
By the mid-1980s the discussion of the Wehrmacht within Military Review reached such an extent that it, as a trend in itself, became the topic of debate under the title “Wehrmacht mystique.” The term was first used by Roger Beaumont in an article published in 1986 wherein he criticised the U.S. Army’s infatuation with the Wehrmacht on both practical and ethical grounds.¹³
Beaumont argued that the Wehrmacht was not the epitome of efficiency that it was being made out to be, and even if it were, the dangers of emulating an organisation so closely intertwined with one of the most evil and destructive régimes in history outweighed its possible benefits.¹⁴
Beaumont’s article incited a string of responses in Military Review, with the majority of which attempting to refute his criticisms regarding the value of emulating the Wehrmacht.¹⁵ That Beaumont’s attack on the Wehrmacht mystique invoked such a response from academics and U.S. Army officers alike is, by its very existence, telling evidence of the mystique’s strength.
Perhaps of even greater significance is the fact that none of the responders made even a limited attempt to dispute the fundamental assumptions underlying Beaumont’s argument: that the U.S. Army was fascinated by the Wehrmacht and was actively seeking to emulate its doctrine and organisation.
Chapter four analyses the degree to which the U.S. Army’s fascination with the Wehrmacht had a tangible impact on American doctrinal development and the conduct of U.S. forces in Operation Desert Storm. The written doctrinal manuals of the Wehrmacht and U.S. Army are compared in order to uncover their similarities and shared theoretical underpinnings.
Such an analysis reveals that the fundamental tenets listed in FM 100-5 — Initiative, Agility, Depth, and Synchronization — were primarily based on doctrinal concepts first utilized by the Wehrmacht. In practice too, the late Cold War U.S. Army and Wehrmacht demonstrated an almost identical operational approach.
As previously mentioned, Operation Desert Storm and the Wehrmacht’s Fall Gelb campaign both incorporated the use of deception, surprise, an unexpected avenue of attack, close air-ground cooperation, and large flanking envelopments. A more detailed look at the conduct of these campaigns demonstrates that the U.S. Army did much more than transplant a selection of German doctrinal concepts into its own field manual: it effectively recreated the core aspects of Blitzkrieg on the battlefield.
[…]
The post-Vietnam period was a particularly unique phase in the traditional relationship between the German and American armies. The U.S. Army of the 1970s and 1980s faced a number of major challenges: defeat in Vietnam and its ramifications, the abolition of conscription, preparing to fight outnumbered, and responding to rapid technological change. Similar circumstances had also confronted the [Reichswehr] during the 1920s and 1930s.
Chapter six examines these environmental similarities in order to explain what motivated the U.S. Army to so drastically reform itself during the late Cold War period, and why it chose the Wehrmacht as a model for those reforms. It could be argued that the similarities between Airland Battle and Blitzkrieg were the result of their having been developed under similar conditions, rather than being the result of any direct effort on the part of the U.S. Army to emulate the Wehrmacht.
However, there is significant evidence that American officers recognised the parallels between the circumstances they faced and those surrounding the development of Blitzkrieg and that they used this fact as a means of justifying their efforts to emulate the Wehrmacht. A synthesis can therefore be found, whereby the similarities between Blitzkrieg and Airland Battle are viewed partly as the result of shared circumstances, and partly because the U.S. Army identified those shared circumstances and actively sought to emulate the Wehrmacht.
Chapter seven analyses the factors which encouraged the popularity of the Wehrmacht mystique in the years leading up to the development of Airland Battle in 1982. One of the most prominent of these was a general push within the U.S. Army to place a greater emphasis on the study of military history following their defeat in Vietnam.
As part of this effort, the army formed a military history committee, conducted surveys of officer interest in history, increased the number of compulsory and elective history courses in most major training schools, and created the Combat Studies Institute whose mission statement was to encourage greater attention in “the doctrinal and policy lessons of history.”¹⁸
Greater awareness of military history helped fuel the spread of the Wehrmacht mystique, as many U.S. officers were now able to satiate a latent curiosity regarding the German military. Beyond the study of military history, the U.S. Army’s continuous presence in West Germany since 1945 as part of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commitment to the defence of Europe exposed generations of American officers to German culture and (after the creation of the Bundeswehr in 1955) German military methods and doctrine as well.
The U.S. Army’s first doctrinal manual to be published after Vietnam, “Active Defense,” was written with the explicit purpose of bringing U.S. doctrine more in line with that of its West German ally. However, Active Defense failed to adequately capture the basis of the Bundeswehr’s doctrine. The new American doctrine’s emphasis on the defensive and firepower generated a great deal of criticism from within the U.S. Army.
The widespread disapproval of the new doctrine became a springboard for the rise of a civilian reform movement devoted to transforming the American military and its approach to warfare. Many of the prominent civilian reformers — such as William Lind, and John Boyd — also happened to be vocal advocates, directly or indirectly, of emulating the Wehrmacht’s military practices and doctrine.
Lind in particular called for the U.S. Army to adopt what he referred to as “manoeuvre warfare” as the basis of their doctrinal approach, but in doing so he utilized terms and concepts taken directly from Wehrmacht doctrine. Lind’s arguments proved quite controversial within the army, and before long Military Review became littered with articles concerning manoeuvre warfare and the German doctrinal terminology it was built upon.
(Emphasis added.)
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen others refer to Imperial America as ‘the Fourth Reich’ or ‘the new Nazi Germany’ or simply ‘a fascist state’. I find those descriptions inaccurate, personally, but since these are the condemnations from lower-class people (such as myself) who are rightfully upset with the empire, I feel that interrupting so as to contradict them would only prove counterproductive. On the contrary, I would rather support them—even if I find their conclusions questionable—by showing them these links between Imperial America and European Fascism. When innocent people are upset, prompting them to question their own sanity is not what they need most.
Not particularly new information, I’ve been banging on for years that the u.s army is a wehrmacht copy-paste but slathered in oil, apple pie, and enough smart people behind the scenes to stop the dipshits in charge from repeating the nazis mistake of attacking a) peer enemy states, b) on multiple fronts.
Fair… though doing a quick search, I did not see you cite your information. In fact, I appear to be the first one on this instance to cite James Curry’s research.
Generally I try to cite my important claims, as that makes it harder to dismiss them as either guesswork or ‘raving’.
I don’t think the military people thought attacking the rest of the entire world would go well - I think the impending economic crisis led the Nazis to try to kill all their foreign creditors, and the concept that the war could possibly work meant that it had to be tried, since they were certain to lose control domestically once the sheen wore off and the treats disappeared again
