Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Without breaking any confidences I can say that I was informally consulted as to my opinions of DO by one of the men responsible for the concept. As outline to me at the time, it seemed to make sense.

About a year later I got to talk to one of the men involved in actually making it happen and it then made very little sense compared to what I had discussed and the written papers did not impress me.

I think DO became "new and clever". - and the more I work on and study this area, the more I believe we need to keep things "iron-bar-simple."
What is almost amazing, considering how much time and effort was put into DO, starting with Project METROPOLIS, and through the various "Hunter"-series of experiments, and finally to DO itself, is that DO was even "killed-off" at all. It might have turned into another V-22; too good a concept to give up on, but too hard to get just right, yet still dragging on year after year, decade after decade.

DO as originally envisaged is indeed too good to let go of; but DO as it mutated into a sort of shiny-kit monster in reality was a beast that had to be slain. Otherwise, at the very least it would have placed intolerable pressures upon budgets, resources, and training, and have produced something that might not have been terribly applicable outside of an LIC environment - at least for some of the roles in which it was being proposed or implied - except of course for reconnaissance and certain other special units. It may well be organizationally and technologically possible to equip regular infantry as DO. It might even be argued that DO was more or less duplicating what some specialist units already do, just with the latest technology; but we do not normally expect said specialist units to perform regular infantry tasks. So, for other than reconnaissance and certain other missions and tasks, how practical is DO outside of an LIC environment?

It seems that the original DO gave way to something like conceptual and technological hubris; whatever its reputed effectiveness on the COIN battlefield, it seemed to try to go too far too fast, and for practical purposes may not be applicable to the ground force as a whole. But like I said, DO in principle is too good conceptually to completely let go of. If it is not preserved in some limited form somewhere, it will almost certainly return in the future in another guise.

Ranger94 wrote:

William Owen (and anyone else),

Do you have recommendations for further reading on why it failed? Specifically, what effect did the use of 6man squads have on the overall outcome?

Use of 6man teams and 12man "heavy" teams have been used extensively by some Army units during OIF rotations. Some say that this set up is "advanced math" but with good SOPs, detailed mission planning and understanding of C&C it can be made very simple. The system worked well to cover a larger area with fewer resources than traditional platoon sized assets.
Without going into details, it is my (and very possibly poorly informed) understanding that non-DO units resorted to the 6-man "team/squad" out of practical necessity as the 4-man Fire Teams just weren't cutting it (for different reasons), and that in certain instances such teams were also employed in a sort of ad hoc DO manner for certain purposes. It seems it may have worked well enough that DO itself seemed unnecessary, even excessive, by comparison. Probably the right decision to give DO the axe, then, at least for the foreseeable future.