Task Force Smith

The lesson military leadership refuses to learn.

The Battle of Osan was the first engagement between the United States and North Korea during the Korean War. On July 5, 1950, Task Force Smith, an American task force from 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment consisting of 540 infantry supported by an artillery battery commanded by Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith, were the first American soldiers to see ground combat in the Korean War. They were moved to Osan and ordered to fight as a rearguard to delay the advancing North Korean forces while more U.S. troops arrived to form a stronger defensive line to the south.

North Koreans overran the task force in the first encounter and continued its advance south. North Korean troops eventually flanked and overwhelmed the U.S. positions with the rest of the task force retreating in disorder. The fight showed that American forces were weak and unprepared for the war, having poorly trained and inexperienced units that were no match for better-trained North Korean troops. Undisciplined U.S. troops abandoned their positions prematurely and left equipment and wounded for North Korean troops to capture. This happened just five years after victory in World War 2.

According to training records, Task Force Smith was “ready” having received the highest score of any unit in Japan on its battalion tactical test in March 1950, just a few months prior. They met or exceeded the Army’s standards for “readiness” before the war. While the actual training reports do not survive, according to Bill Wyrick, who served as a platoon leader in Task Force Smith, the unit had completed all “individual and collective training program tasks” which seems consistent with a battalion that had achieved the highest score on its recent tactical evaluation.

Nonetheless, few of them had expected their readiness to be tested and the result was complete disaster. Lt. Col. Smith himself would later admit his training regime “was almost non-existent” and that claims that he conducted useful live fire training were “hogwash.”

Smith’s contradiction to Wyrick’s account and the results of the battalion tactical test in March 1950 reflects the heart of the problem. The post-war Army in the late 1940s was beginning to adopt mandatory training regimes to ensure readiness that persists in various forms to this day. Soldiers of Task Force Smith were among the first representatives of the Army’s enduring tradition of achieving impossibly ambitious training objectives by recording training that never occurred, thus achieving “readiness” - at least on paper, or in the Digital Training Management System (DTMS) or other myriad systems that are little more than an expensive accounting fiction. The veterans surviving Task Force Smith seemed certain the higher echelons of their chain of command were blissfully unaware of how low their readiness really was.

How it’s going today:

Army Doctrine Publications (ADP) are the current capstone resources within Field Manuals and Training Circulars. ADP 7-0 Training has recently been changed: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN40738-ADP_7-0-000-WEB-2.pdf

Or, so says an official document. Trainers in the know discussing the lack of unit compliance with weapons qualification requirements have noted it boils down to no forcing function or even an inspection program to ensure units are doing Individual Weapons Qualification properly. AR 350-1 tells units to conduct IWQ IAW the relevant TCs, but because there's neither visibility nor consequence for deviating from "mandatory" requirements then all bets are off despite being officially published.

After almost 30 years of concerted effort to make this and other training documents matter, I threw up my hands and said it just doesn't matter because these documents have no bearing on reality whatsoever. There is no enforcement mechanism, it is only “guidance.” There is a persistent culture embedded in the training centers that is perpetually locked into the past. Mostly because the civilians that become the “legacy” were in fact senior leaders in uniform before they became GS employee “gatekeepers.” There’s what the standard says, and then there’s what gets done in practice. So, print all the ADPs and ADRPs that you want. It won't change a damned thing.

You want to know what will? The next Task Force Smith. IYKYK.

Task Force Smith: The Lesson Never Learned:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA381834.pdf
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/task-force-smith-and-the-problem-with-readiness/