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![handle is hein.milandgov/aryhsy0051 and id is 1 raw text is:
ARMY HISTORY
THE PROFESSIONAL BULLETIN OF ARMY HISTORY
PB-20-01-1 (No. 51) Washington, D.C. Winter 2001
The Pentomic Puzzle
The Influence of Personality and Nuclear Weapons on U.S. Army Organization
1952-1958
By Kalev I. Sepp
Secretary [of Defense Charles E.] Wilson once sent back an Army budget to get us to
substitute requests for newfangled items with public appeal instead of the prosaic accoutrements
of the foot soldier. . It . led me to conjure up the Madison Avenue adjective,
pentomic, to describe the new Army division which was designed on a pentagonal rather than
triangular pattern with atomic-capable weapons in its standard equipment.'
General Maxwell h). Taylor
The following article is a modified version of
the paper the author presented at the 1996 Con-
ference of Army Historians in Arlington, Virginia.
The Nature of the Puzzle
In the midst of the storm of military debate in the
1950s about how tactical nuclear weapons might
change the way ground forces would fight wars, the
United States Army radically reorganized most of its
combat divisions into units based on sets of fives to
enhance its nuclear warfighting capability. The U.S.
Army was alone among the great armies of the world
to configure itself in this unorthodox fashion, and no
other nation or service chose to emulate its unique ad-
aptation to the imagined nuclear battlefield of the fu-
ture. Only five years later, this pentomic division con-
cept, so labeled for its quintuplicate structure designed
for atomic warfare, was abandoned without having
endured the test of an actual nuclear or nonnuclear
war. This detour in organizational development should
not have occurred, but it did, despite significant evi-
dence that railed against the pursuit ofpentomics.
As the U.S. Army returned in the 1960s to a more
traditional divisional model formed primarily on ele-
ments in sets of threes, various postmortems by senior
U.S. military leaders highlighted intrinsic flaws in the
divergent pentomic scheme that had been revealed
during its relatively brief period of employment. Not
the least of these was the absence of battalions and
the consequent lack of command positions for lieuten-
ant colonels.' Left unanswered was why such a theo-
retical concept was implemented at a time when the
U.S. Army's key allies, the British Army and the new
West German Army; its chief opponent, the Soviet
Army; and its leading competitor, the U.S. Marine
Corps, adhered to battle-proven formations modern-
ized with new equipment and technology. In light of
prevailing military thought and doctrine clearly articu-
lated by the U.S. Army's leaders, its choice of the
pentomic organization appears puzzling.
American doctrinal histories generally portray the
pentomic plan as a predictable stage in a gradually
evolving series of organizational modifications that were
necessary to adapt to changes in missions, weaponry,
tactics, manpower, leadership, and other societal, eco-
nomic, and technological forces. There was almost
universal agreement among different schools of mili-
tary thought about the likely effects of nuclear weap-
ons on existing tactical and operational doctrine. This
consensus was remarkable in its uniformity of expres-
sion across ideological divides. U.S. Army Chief of
Staff General Matthew B. Ridgway observed in 1956
that in contemporary warfare men and equipment
must move from dispersed positions with great speed](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.milandgov/aryhsy0051&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)