What this article does argue is that the strategic manpower decisions and policies made by the United States before and during the war did not give U.N. Command and Eighth Army the capability or the capacity to militarily coerce China and North Korea to agree to a negotiated settlement. Even given the multinational aspects of U.N. Command, the United States provided the momentum for the war’s execution and provided the cultural and intellectual foundation for the pursuance of negotiations at Panmunjom. To this point, the United States, at multiple levels of policy, viewed military coercion as the preferred method of gaining the advantage at the negotiating table and getting the concessions they sought. The inability of U.N. Command, and specifically Eighth Army, to gain an operational advantage after 1951 jeopardized the ability of the United States and its partners to contain the conflict. Out of options, America proposed vertical and horizontal escalation at multiple levels, putting at risk the cohesion that defined U.N. Command’s efforts and the ability to limit the war to the Korean peninsula.
Understanding the failure of the Defense Department’s force management system to account for the possibility of a protracted conflict in Korea is more relevant today than perhaps ever before. Confronted with the possibility of a great-power conflict, facing an aggressive and revanchist Russia, and ordered to maintain military superiority over the multi-generational challenge presented by China, U.S. military leaders should reexamine how they man, train, and equip U.S. forces. They should do so in a manner that emphasizes readiness and modernization but also accounts for the potential of a protracted conflict.
Tactical Shortfalls
The U.S. Army entered the Korean War in the midst of great change. With recent multi-year increases to the defense budget, in mid-1950 the Truman administration began the concrete resourcing of its ideological commitment to containing communism’s spread throughout the world. This entailed massive growth in the size of the U.S. Joint Force, along with a corresponding increase in the defense budget. In his 1949 budget submission, President Harry Truman asked for $279 million more than the year prior, arguing that this amount still did not fully meet the demands of the Defense Department, but that it “emphasizes progress towards a modern and balanced armed force.” The next year, the president sought an increase of approximately $3.5 billion dollars for an armed force that would be the “most powerful this Nation has ever maintained in peacetime,” one that “will permit this nation to maintain a proper military preparedness in uncertain times.”