The Fourth of July is usually a time of celebration for Americans, and rightly so. But amid the fireworks and hoopla, a discordant note sounds in the background for some members of the armed forces. Today marks the 75th anniversary of one of the great debacles in this country’s military history, and it is only through constant vigilance that America can avoid another Task Force Smith.
On June 25, 1950, with the blessing and support of its Chinese and Soviet allies, North Korea sneak attacked South Korea. As the Communists drove southward relentlessly, the underequipped and poorly trained American garrison in Japan rushed across the sea to slow them down. Task Force Smith, the first American unit to encounter the North Koreans, watched in horror as most of its shells bounced harmlessly off the sides of enemy tanks. The unit was routed on July 5 at the Battle of Osan.
Failures of that magnitude stem from many causes. The American public had little appetite for big defense budgets, so the Truman administration had to prioritize. Much of the nation’s best equipment flowed across the Atlantic, not the Pacific.
There was not much to go around. Paul Nitze and the State Department’s policy planning team reviewed the strategic situation after the Communists conquered China and the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb. They found in April 1950 that “the military weaknesses of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, however, include its numerical inferiority in forces in being … and munitions power in being and readily available” before warning ominously, “there exists a sharp disparity between our actual military strength and our commitments.” President Truman referred their review, NSC-68, to his budget experts and otherwise ignored it.
Clever diplomacy failed to paper over the problem. In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson sketched out an American “defensive perimeter” in Asia that notably excluded South Korea. He pined for a Sino-Soviet split, stating “we must not undertake to deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger, and the wrath, and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop.”
Public opinion favored the prioritizers until Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin backed Pyongyang’s war of aggression. Then, the American people demanded a firm response. American forces surged into Korea and defense spending shot up from 5 percent of the U.S. economy in 1950 to nearly 14 percent in 1953. The war cost 36,574 American lives, and U.S. troops are still defending South Korea today.
“No more Task Force Smiths” is one of the U.S. Army’s unofficial mantras, but it is not clear that Washington is adequately preparing its forces for future conflicts. To be sure, our military is a highly professional force, and the Israelis and Ukrainians are demonstrating just how effective much of the U.S. arsenal is. But the Pentagon may not be moving fast enough. For example, the Army intends to equip each division with about 1,000 drones over the next two years, but Ukraine acquired more than 1.5 million just in 2024.
One option, which today’s prioritizers favor, is to sharply reduce or even cut off support for partners and allies in theaters they think are not vital. Many of them also lamented American support for Israel’s air campaign over Iran. They lost that argument, but halting deliveries to Ukraine of air defense missiles, artillery shells, and other munitions even as Russia ramps up its air attacks on Ukrainian cities was an important victory for this camp. Evidently, they think the risks of tolerating Iran’s nuclear program or inviting further Russian aggression are acceptable.
Another is to try to engineer a new Sino-Soviet split. Acheson was not wrong in January 1950: Beijing and Moscow eventually fell out. But it took another decade and a half before the wrath, hatred, and anger—righteous or otherwise—of the Chinese people developed toward Moscow. There is no indication today that the Russians are close to breaking with the Middle Kingdom.
Communist China studies the Korean War obsessively, largely because its forces have not otherwise squared off with Americans. Hopefully, Beijing learned that while the American people can grow uninterested in global affairs for a time, they will respond in fury when attacked. Permitting aggression in one theater can also set back Beijing’s other goals: Taiwan looked vulnerable before the North Koreans attacked, but once the United States surged forces to the western Pacific, attacking the island became impossible.
But just as many Americans learn the wrong lessons from history, our adversaries can too. Better to keep the military ready, just in case.
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