Pentomic: A Technical But Actually Sociological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1955, I

 

Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey
but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." 
https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html

So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason.  That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.

The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if  my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt. 

No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart. 

The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.

My humble apologies to De Lackner Helicopters. This was absolutely a real thing that the U.S. Army was absolutely interested in. I've clipped the projected production model weight of 125lbs, but the real problem with the "De Lackner Aerocycle" was that it didn't turn out to as easy to ride as a bicycle. It's somehow unbelievable that this contraption made it from the drawing board to NACA feasibility studies to the proving grounds before this was noticed, since bicycles are, like, on the ground. 

The PLUMBOMB live Genie firing, 1957

Or maybe it's not. I'm currently reading Brian McAlister Linn's Elvis' Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield, and the contemporary press, so I have seen the AEC, or the USAF, or Aviation Week straight-out lying about the W25, a 2kt warhead weighing 235lb as a complete package, which is heavier than an entire Falcon missile. The W35 was explicitly developed for unguided rockets, the Genie, intended to be fired into a self-defending Soviet bomber formation, than which I can imagine nothing less likely. In spite of which, it armed the RCAF's interceptor force from 1965-84, and not without controversy, as, once fired, the Genie had no safe fuse. So the "paranoid" left wing claim that the Genie was going to be mainly effective at atomic bombing the Canadian North was absolutely correct. Egg on my Young Conservative face circa 1982! 

And if the Air Force was a bit wacky, the Army was in full meltdown. Maxwell Taylor was then building up political capital in Washington by supporting the President against the Radford and Carney on the Joint Chiefs, and spending it on his pet project, the "Pentomic Army." On the one  hand, this was an organisational change, reorganising the divisions of the U.S. Army into five five-company battalion battlegroups that would be able to move in a wide enough dispersal to avoid atomic counterattack, and then concentrate to attack the advancing Red Army armoured columns. The concept does not require the use of tactical atomic weapons, but Taylor embraced them enthusiastically. TEAPOT wasn't completely humbug. The XW25 couldn't fit in any existing guided air-to-air missile, but it was the first at least, the first subcalibre atomic weapon tested. There may have been some creative obfuscation over the fallout implications, since smaller explosions don't mean less plutonium or neutrons, but, unlike the 20kT warhead fired by the Army's impractical 280mm atomic cannon and inaccurate Matador missiles, this kind of warhead could be detonated in the vicinity of friendly combatants and posed less risk of "tactical" atomic war turning into strategic as "targeting airfields, depots, and bridges" turned into "hitting the adjacent city with an H-bomb." And it is hard to talk about the pentomic division without talking about the "Davy Crockett," probably the most famous of all "tactical atomic weapons," and which surely doesn't need discussing here.

The cultural history of the Davy Crockett craze, on the other hand, now there's a subject!

If Taylor's pentomic division didn't need atom bombs to justify its existence, what did? Here is where I feel as though we're beginning to slip away from reality in a non-atomic way. The Cold War fear of a climactic land battle in Central Europe was ultimately inspired by the enormous conscript forces of the Red Army. As we were repeatedly told through the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Communists outnumbered us so much that something had to be done.

In 1955, the population of the United States was 166 millions, compared with 175 millions in the former Soviet Union. That is technically being outnumbered, if we leave out the allied balance, but what the heck are we even talking about? After all, the United States had conscription, too. Selective Service is admittedly a kludge, but the strength of the American forces hit 3.5 million in 1953. The actual and absolute margin of the Red Army's margin of superiority in a conventional war in Europe was going to depend on the speed and success of mobilisation plans --and was completely impractical in that sense because of atomic weapons, no nuclear recoilless rifles needed.

The idea of a massed charge of AH-64s might have made
sense in some short window before the SA-7 was fully
deployed, but, once again, helicopters are up in the air.

We now know that Bogislav v. Bonin's national defence project of a fortified border anti-tank zone was the actual future of airland warfare. Only the mythical "cold start," in which the Warsaw Pact attacks a completely unprepared NATO could possibly have breached such a barrier backed up by proportional American, British, and French artillery and air power. Given that the BAOR never wavered from this vision, even if the French and Germans did briefly experiment with the "pentomic" model. It's particularly odd that Taylor and his leading deputies were artillery men who ought to have understood this. It's even odder that a cavalryman was chosen to head the Army Aviation Corps on its formation, which might have had something to do with the long-lasting mirage of "Air Cavalry." 

Linn, perhaps inadvertently, explores the elephant in the room, pointing out how the the mid-Fifties American army was more diverse than any before or since, equally recruited across the country, unlike the New Army, which is mainly recruited from the territory of the former Confederacy and which has to work very hard to avoid a racialised hierarchy.

On the other hand, the Fifties army definitely had a racialised hierarchy. Nineteenth Century conscript armies could be, and sometimes were, seen as "schools of the nation," but they could also be feared as dangerously democratic simply because the ruling oligarchy had to reach out to the "broad masses" with universal suffrage and the like if they expected compliance with conscription laws and an effective army. (Would the Bonin Plan lead to fewer strikes, or more?) Linn also emphasises at great length the problem of recruiting technicians and training Selective Service conscripts to handle the high technology that was supposed to balance Soviet numbers. Officer memoirs repeatedly emphasise the number of Infantry recruits in the lowest test score bands. It is less often noted that the Regular Army did a good job of hitting its recruiting targets with promises of technical training and retirement benefits, so that by the mid-Fifties the Army could require a high school education. It could not retain electronics technicians at reenlistment, but that's nothing new. 

What we're left with is the problem of dispersal and concentration. In 1953, that meant parachute assault, perhaps with the way opened by Matador missiles. It was clear by 1955 that the fleets of C-123s and C-125s required were not going to materialise,  and that, if they did, they could not be maintained. Helicopters offered an alternative, but a whole lot of obstacles quickly became obvious, just one of which was pilot training; that was for smart people. And, indeed, some were even pointing out the dysgenic  effect of modern war, which was sending the best and brightest to war while those too genetically (not racial, never racial, but, on the other hand, our interlocuter continues, can we be "realistic"?) inferior to be taken up by Selective Service reproduced themselves. 

Which takes us back to the Aerocycle. I'm not saying that it was meant to be easy enough to fly that even brown people could master it, but that's the subtext. And a sketch of an argument Linn seems to cautious to make: The real purpose of the Pentomic Army was to find a way around desegregation.