Compass Points - Ground Combat Today

Paul Van Riper reviews Connable's, Ground Combat

Compass Points - Ground Combat Today

Paul Van Riper reviews Connable's, Ground Combat

March 4, 2025

.

The fighting in Ukraine has stretched into years now. For all the advanced technology being used in Ukraine including rockets, missiles, and a nearly uncountable number of drones, much of the fighting continues to be conventional, force-on-force, combined arms, ground combat.

Over the centuries, one new warfighting technology has arrived after another and each new technology promises to sweep away the messy, bloody, struggle of ground combat, and yet ground combat remains ground combat.

In his new book, Ground Combat - Puncturing the Myths of Modern War, author and Marine Ben Connable, "uses a new dataset of 423 battle cases (2003-2022) to describe 21st Century land war and to challenge standing assumptions about modern warfare." Ben Connable, PhD, is an independent research leader, retired Marine Corps intel and foreign area officer, adjunct principal research analyst at CNA, and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. He is the principal owner of the Battle Research Group.

In the interview that follows, Compass Points discusses Connable's new book with Marine LtGen Paul K. Van Riper. Van Riper has served more than four decades on active duty, including four combat tours, and command at every level from platoon to division. Van Riper also served as the first President of the Marine Corps University. In addition, his creative exploits as the red team commander for the massive exercise, Millennium Challenge, have been studied at length, including in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink.

General Van Riper has previously provided Compass Points readers with a review of SLA Marshall's famous and controversial book, Men Against Fire. Compass Points thanks General Van Riper for sharing his thoughts on Ben Connable’s new book, Ground Combat - Puncturing the Myths of Modern War.

.

-----------------

-----------------

.

Paul Van Riper’s

Review of

Ben Connable’s

Ground Combat - Puncturing the Myths of Modern War

.

CP: General Van Riper thank you for sitting down to discuss the book you have been reading about ground combat.

VR: Yes, the book is Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myth of Modern War by Ben Connable. A good friend and fellow Marine, Arnold Punaro, recommended it to me. The book is important because the author destroys two myths about future war, myths that have survived for far too long and done considerable damage to the US military. The first is the recurring and false assertion that some new weapon or weapons will fundamentally alter warfare as we know it. The second is the deceptive claim that long-standing elements of ground operations—infantry, artillery, and tanks—will have less utility in the future.

.

CP: Are there no other books that address these topics?

VR: I was going to say: “Unfortunately, no” but I prefer: “Tragically, no.” Tragically because for decades the theories of self-declared experts have dominated the literature on future war. Without exception the authors of these works, despite often impressive credentials, were poor students of the profession of arms and historically ill-informed or uninformed. Their books have taken up way too much space in military libraries. Ground Combat will fill a void in any collection of essential books on warfare, a void that has hindered discussions about the true face of battle and enabled charlatans to foist off their shallow ideas on combat. Ben Connable exposes many of these supposed authorities by name!

.

CP: How does Connable counter the recurring and false assertions about future war?

VR: First, he examined the numerous forecasts of future war made from the late 1960s until 2022 and showed that none came to pass. Among the false prophets he exposes are William Westmorland, David Deptula, and the champions of a so-called “revolution in military affairs”— Andrew Marshall, Andrew Krepinevich, William Owens, and Robert Work. He also looks back to the unfulfilled visions of I.S. Bloch, Giulio Douhet, and B.H. Liddell Hart. Surprisingly, he does not mention William “Billy” Mitchell who said in 1927 that “we must relegate armies and navies to a place in the glass case of a dusty museum . . . we must not entrust our national defense to these honored but obsolete services.”

Connable also points out that weapons have continued to increase their range, precision, and lethality for more than a century; these capabilities are not new and startling as many assumed authorities claim. No, technology is rarely as new and revolutionary as some claim. Warfare most often experiences evolutionary changes.

.

CP: Why have so many supposed authorities failed to see how war would evolve?

VR: Connable recognized that the many bold and confident declarations about what future war were made in the absence of any historical context or empirical analysis. Those putting forth these self-assured claims based them on an examination of a limited number of cases, often just the last war. In contrast Connable analyzed 20 cases of battles from World War II as a baseline, 25 more cases from the period 1946 through 2002, and 423 cases from 2003 through 2022.

.

CP: How is Connable’s study different?

VR: He provides a larger context. As I said, the purveyors of much of the nonsense we have seen for at least a hundred years usually point to the most recent conflict and extrapolate their ideas from it. They fail to look over the longer course of history. Connable exposed them by conducting an extensive analysis of modern tactical battles. As he writes: “My objective was to produce a database of all known and recorded modern ground combat battles available in the public domain.” (p. 286)

.

CP: And what about those individuals who tell us today that the character of war is changing?

VR: Connable easily knocks down the crutch many prognosticators lean on, that is, as you note, that the character of war is changing. In a lengthy discourse he shows that that term has no definition, and it may not be possible to create one. Thus, it is an inadequate basis for advocating radical changes to force structure.

He focuses instead on a range of characteristics of battles, factors such as tactics, weapons, equipment, munitions, and technologies, and the recurrence of these characteristics over extended periods and across geographic regions.

If characteristics appear consistently over time, the likelihood that they will continue to do so is high. A person thinking about future war cannot simply dismiss any of these characteristics at a whim. We saw this with the 38^th Commandant of the Marine Corps.

.

CP: Now that you mention the 38^th CMC, does Connable discuss Force Design 2030 directly?

VR: Yes, and he is not kind in his evaluation. Early in his book, Connable writes:

.

“He [General Berger] and his staff offered thin public evidence of objective analysis to justify big decisions like divesting tanks and artillery. Fairly or not, the official structured analyses on force design conducted after Berger issued his planning guidance in 2019 looked as if they had been contrived to justify what was by then a top-down fait accompli.” (p. 39)

.

CP: Have you seen evidence of this sort of twisting of the analyses conducted by the Marine Corps.

VR: Yes. I have in my possession statements from three people who participated in Force Design 2030 wargames saying that they were rigged to produce the results the Commandant wanted. One of these witnesses also said that after submission of reports by those responsible for the conduct of the wargames, others in the chain of command modified the reports.

.

CP: This is all very serious. What sort of conclusion did Connable come to about the changes Force Design made to the Marine Corps’ operating forces.

VR: He was quite clear in his overall evaluation stating:

.

“At least three of the foundational assumptions behind Force Design 2030 are unproven and may be unprovable: (1) the character of war has undergone revolutionary change rendering ‘traditional’ ground combat power less relevant and useful, (2) China has harnessed these revolutionary changes to render existing Marine Corps amphibious capabilities irrelevant, and (3) advanced sensors and munitions can effectively replace existing ground combat people and kit.” (p. 271)

.

Connable continues:

.

“If there is no definable character of war, no proven revolution, no proven Chinese capability, no proof that drones or missiles have or can offset existing ground combat systems, and a high likelihood of future combined arms ground combat that will, given my broader findings, demand long-proven capabilities like tanks and cannon artillery, then Force Design 2030 appears to have been built on shaky ground.” (p. 274)

.

CP: What sort of experience and expertise does Connable bring to his work?

VR: Connable enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1988 and served at Marine Barracks 8^th & I and then as a machine gunner with 3^rd Battalion, 9^th Marines during Operation Desert Storm. He was commissioned in 1995 after graduation from the University of Colorado. From then until his retirement in 2009 he served as a law enforcement platoon commander and executive officer at Camp Lejeune, and company commander with 4^th Marines. Subsequently he served as an intelligence officer at HQMC and multiple tours in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom and at Quantico. His last assignment was as the Marine and Naval Attache to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon.

After the Marine Corps, from 2009 to 2021 Connable was a senior political scientist at RAND corporation. In the following two years—2022 to 2024—he was a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Currently he is an on-call principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses.

Connable has an extensive educational background including master’s degrees from both American Military University in Strategic Intelligence, and Naval Postgraduate School in National Security Affairs, as well as a doctorate from the War Studies Program at King’s College London.

.

CP: Connable appears well qualified, and his book seems to be a damning indictment of the Marine Corps’ continued implementation of Force Design. Do you have any additional thoughts?

VR: Yes. I would like to offer evidence to counter one accusation Connable makes. Connable claims that senior retired Marine Corps officers critical of Force Design have also been ahistorical, that is, have offered no history based analytical criticism. As I am one of the retired senior officers opposed to Force Design, I can assure the author we have built our opposition to Force Design on history.

Members of Chowder Society II have on average 35-40 years of military experience, are graduates of command and staff colleges and war colleges and are generally well read, especially of military theory, strategy, and history. I spelled out my own study of history in “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession: An American Marine’s View” in the book, The Past as Prologue. Our analysis has not been done in a formal manner but developed using the Delphi method collectively informed by several thousand years of professional study and practice.

I must also note that we purposely have not created a detailed alternative to Force Design 2030; to do so would be to make the same error as General Berger, that is, to circumvent the Marine Corps’ combat development process and substitute the thoughts of a closed circle of Marines. We have, however, offered a general vision of where the Corps ought to move in Vision 2035.

.

CP: How would you sum up your experience of reading the book?

VR: It has been a great pleasure for me to read Ben Connable’s book, Ground Combat. His study and understanding of ground combat aligns with the study and understanding of so many retired senior Marines. It is good to see there are a growing number of Marines of every rank and MOS helping to get the Marine Corps to return its focus to global, combined arms, ground combat.

.

-----------------

-----------------

.

Compass Points salutes author and Marine, Ben Connable, for his new book, Ground Combat - Puncturing the Myths of Modern War, and thanks LtGen Van Riper for taking the time to review the book exclusively on Compass Points.

.

- - - - -

.

Ground Combat

Puncturing the Myths of Modern War

By Ben Connable

Ben Connable's Ground Combat uses a new dataset of 423 battle cases (2003-2022) to describe 21st Century land war and to challenge standing assumptions about modern warfare.

https://groundcombat.org/book

.

- - - - -

.

Ben Connable

https://benconnable.com/

.

- - - - -

.

Compass Points – Don’t Read this Book!

A controversial book on war

August 1, 2024

https://marinecorpscompasspoints.substack.com/p/compass-points-dont-read-this-book

.

- - - - -

.

Cambridge University Press

The Past as Prologue

The importance of history to the military profession

Edited by Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich

https://assets.cambridge.org/052185/377X/frontmatter/052185377X_frontmatter.htm