Picture of the Day: Task Force Smith Remembered in South Korea

Brave men. Bad senior leadership.

https://mwi.usma.edu/task-force-smith-and-the-problem-with-readiness/

Key quote:

None of this should undermine the legacy of Task Force Smith. It was an understrength battalion that faced the nearly impossible mission of stopping an enemy division. Many of its members performed exceptionally valorously in combat. Moreover, no matter how “ready” Task Force Smith was, abstract readiness does not win battles. It is based on an idea, enshrined in law since 1999, that a force can be quantifiably “ready” for a broad set of possible contingencies. War is often not that abstract, however: today, a war in Korea would require radically different equipment than a war in Poland, because of the radically different terrain and enemy equipment involved. The real lesson of Task Force Smith is that striving to achieve abstract readiness creates perverse bureaucratic incentives that make readiness harder to measure, and no amount of arrogance—or spending—can make up for that.