Odysseus in America (54 page)

²⁴
Retired marine H. John Poole has just brought out an enormously illuminating and valuable book that addresses this very question,
Phantom Soldier: The Enemy's Answer to U.S. Firepower
(Emerald Isle, N.C.: Posterity Press, 2001).

²⁵
The classic discussion of this paradoxical dynamic is Edward Luttwak's
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

²⁶
Van Creveld,
Fitting Power,
p. 95.

²⁷
I am using the acronym COHORT to stand for the whole range of Army policies and practices aimed at stabilizing soldiers in their units. Sometimes these were called the “New Manning System,” sometimes the “Unit Manning System,” sometimes “OSUT” (One Station Unit Training), and sometimes COHORT. Each different name applied to a slightly different set of policies and practices, but all with the same overall objective.

²⁸
Explaining
why
the services do things this way is far beyond the scope of this book, but is thoroughly covered in Major Donald Vandergriff's magisterial history of the American military personnel system,
Path to Victory.

²⁹
Paris R. Kirkland et al.,
Unit Manning System Field Evaluation: Technical Report No. 5
(Washington: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, September 1987), p. 24.

³⁰
The 11th ACR is now the dreaded OPFOR (Opposing Force) at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin.

³¹
A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

³²
John C. F. Tillson and Steven L. Canby,
Alternative Approaches to Organizing, Training, and Assessing Army and Manne Corps Units, Part I: The Active Component.
Report C-MDA 909 89 C 0003/T-L6-1057 for the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Force Management and Personnel) (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analysis, November 1992), p. III-8.

³³
Former Army Chief of Staff General Edward “Shy” Meyer, at First Friday Defense Lunch, May 7, 1999. Other guests at First Friday Defense Lunch from the Army's reform era have been Lieutenant General Bob Elton, Lieutenant General Dick Trefry, and General Donn Starry. The leading spirit of the reforms, General Max Thurman, is no longer living. Faris Kirkland was working on a biography of Thurman at the time of his death, and faithfully attended First Friday until he was no longer physically able.

³⁴
The Army's ferocious unwillingness to report any unit as unready is curiously not shared by the Navy, which unblinkingly “reports ships as unready when they return from an overseas deployment and large numbers of sailors are reassigned.” HQ U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command,
Assessment of the Unit Manning System,
Fort Monroe, Va., March 1981, p. 1. Quoted in Tillson and Canby,
Alternative Approaches,
p. A-3. Confirmed as still true by Captain Michael Dunaway, USN, at First Friday Defense Lunch, May 7, 1999. The current Status of Resources and Training System (SORTS) and the unit's condition rating (C-rating), the basic documents used by management to assess the readiness of units and thus the performance of their leaders, continue to be mainly matters of counting equipment, counting bodies (“fill”) and credentials, but blind to the stability, cohesion, and collective proficiency of the unit. Richard K. Betts,
Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, Consequences
(Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995), pp. 136-39.

³⁵
As of 1992, when Tillson and Canby did their study, “company-sized units in the Army face turbulence of 8 to 10% per month for enlisted men, 6 to 10% for NCOs and 10% for officers. This means that the average unit changes over 100% of its personnel each year and must commence its training cycle on an annual basis.” Tillson and Canby describe the impact of the individual replacement system: Tillson and Canby,
Alternative Approaches
, pp. III-17, III-9f. The [individual replacement] system has a devastating impact on Army units in wartime. The wartime system treated soldiers as anonymous spare parts from the day they arrived in their replacement training centers, through their training and deployment to a combat theater, to their assignment to a unit on the line (often in contact with the enemy), during their treatment by the medical system once they became a casualty, and in reassigning them to a different unit when they returned to the combat theater. These concepts have been at the heart of Army planning since World War I … the time when large-scale casualties caused by attrition warfare and the novelty of the assembly line exercised a heavy influence on planners. In this system, men became spare parts to be produced on an assembly line. Once trained, they were to be inserted in combat units as needed. But assignment
to a unit did not mean that the soldier would have the time to learn about that unit or that the unit would have the time to build its collective skills…. This system and the unanticipated demands of the war conspired to produce units of semi-trained individuals barely adequate to conduct the relatively simple tactics called for in that war…. The replacement system designed for WWII was built on the principles developed for WWI. Once again soldiers were considered interchangeable spare parts and replacements became a class of supply to be managed in the same way as any other class of supply. General Marshall believed that the success of the American Army in World War II lay in its ability to keep divisions “up to strength daily by trained men from the replacement pool.” It was this concept that led to the fundamental organizational and operational decisions that still dominate today.

³⁶
A book with great, but to my knowledge unrecognized, relevance to the profession of arms is
The Logic of Practice,
by French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, trans. R. Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).

³⁷
Tillson and Canby,
Alternative Approaches,
p. III-8.

³⁸
Gal,
A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier,
p. 217.

³⁹
Ibid.

⁴⁰
The Reichsheer (German army), which had a total strength of about 400,000 in the spring of 1919, was reduced to 100,000 by March 1920. We must weep that the German army got
better
during the Weimar Republic, through its concentration on the human dimension of military organizations—cohesion, leadership, training—even though the Versailles Treaty forbade virtually every aspect of technological modernization. Dupuy,
A Genius for War,
pp. 192-93.

⁴¹
Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft,
America's First Battles: 1776-1965
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). According to historian John Shy, the defeats were Long Island (Revolutionary War), Queenston Heights (War of 1812), Bull Run (American Civil War), Kasserine Pass (World War II—European theater), and Osan/Naktong (Korean War). The unnecessarily costly victories were San Juan (Spanish-American War), Cantigny (World War I), Buna (World War II—Pacific theater, but Bataan maybe should count here), and Ia Drang (Vietnam War—against the NVA).

⁴²
Human, All Too Human,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 163.

⁴³
An Army lieutenant general recently pointed out to me that Army Special Forces is in many respects a traditional regiment, referring to its unit stability, its esprit, and its training rigor.

⁴⁴
Bruce I. Gudmundsson, “The German Army in World War I: The Contingents,”
Tactical Notebook,
November 1991. He writes: The final service rendered to the German nation by the system of regional recruiting was, ironically, to help ensure a quiet demobilization. When, in November of 1918, the regiments of the German Army marched home, they marched, in good order, to their local barracks. There the regiments were demobilized and the soldiers freed to walk the few miles that separated them from their homes. Units that lacked a regional character, however, resisted demobilization. Men of the Assault Battalions, the Guard Divisions, or the Marine units formed by sailors who had volunteered for duty at the front, faced the hard
choice between returning home to the loved ones of half-forgotten pre-war lives or remaining with the “families” that had sustained them in hard months and years of combat. Many opted for the latter, forming the hard nucleus of the Freikorps. These latter units had an ethos that was essentially different from that of regionally based units. The latter, however misinformed they might have been about the relationship to Germany's aims in the First World War to the defense of their loved ones, were clearly fighting for hearth and home. The Freikorps, however, developed a nihilistic ethos that celebrated violence for its own sake. One of the symptoms of this was the resurrection of the cult of the Landesknechte, the 16th and 17th century German freebooters who ravaged Europe in search of booty and adventure. (By permission of the author.)

⁴⁵
Waller's chapter “Objectives and Principles of a Veterans' Program,”
The Veteran Comes Back,
pp. 259-83, pulls no punches and has never been surpassed as a picture of what's needed.

⁴⁶
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

⁴⁷
There are ominous signs of “dumbing down” and hemorrhaging from our combat training centers. See Mark Lewis, “Lewis Report: Why Stopping the Exodus of Junior Officers Is Important, September 7, 2001,”
www.d-n-i.net/FCS_Folder/comments/c426.htm
. Mark Lewis is currently an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research and development center for the office of the Secretary of Defense.

⁴⁸
Colonel John D. Rosenberger, “Reaching Our Army's Full Combat Potential in the 21st Century,”
Landpower Essay Series
No. 99-2, February 1999, p. 1

⁴⁹
Evidence for these assertions can be found in my paper for the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study,
online at
www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/shay/shay_prevent_psy_injury.htm
. Many important points, such as what “toughness” in training is, and why it is ethically required, are covered there, and are beyond the scope of this book.

⁵⁰
General Charles C. Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,”
Manne Corps Gazette
83:18-22 (January 1999).

⁵¹
Tillson and Canby,
Alternative Approaches,
p. III-4, quoting Thomas C. Thayer, ed.,
A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War, 1965-1972,
vol. 8,
Casualties and Losses,
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, Defense Technical Information Center, 1975, DTIC #ADA051613, p. 225.

⁵²
Gal and Jones, “A Psychological Model of Combat Stress.”

⁵³
This cluster of leadership practices has been called various things at various times and places:
Auftragstaktik,
“Positive Leadership,” “Power Down,” empowerment, decentralization, and others. Both the benefits from these practices and the catastrophic consequences of the familiar rule-by-fear and manage-in-detail-from-the-top alternatives are lucidly documented in Faris Kirkland's publications in professional military journals and textbooks, a partial selection of which can be found in the Bibliography.

⁵⁴
Quoted uncut above on page 157. This time I use Carver's translation.

⁵⁵
U. F. Zwygart, “How Much Obedience Does an Officer Need?,” U.S. Army Command and General Staff College pamphlet, 1993.

⁵⁶
I have explored the role of trust in lubricating both the external (Clausewitzian) and internal (self-generated) sources of friction in military operations in “Trust.”

⁵⁷
See for example Major Donald Vandergriff, “[email protected],”
Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute,
June 1999.

⁵⁸
Broadside
by Jeff Davis,
Navy Times Almanac,
1998.

⁵⁹
To return to the matter of leadership responsibility in atrocities, Colonel Bernard's judgment on the Kerrey affair is that employment of the SEAL team in the Mekong Delta's densely populated area was wrongheaded from the start, and that the blame lies with the ignorance, negligence, and arrogance of the higher-ups who ordered these young Americans into morally impossible situations. The difference between an accident in the dark and a tragic us-or-them decision is thus a difference without a moral or legal distinction.

⁶⁰
Current U.S. Marine Corps doctrine, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication No. 6—
Command and Control,
places great and explicit emphasis on trust. For excerpts from this doctrinal publication see my piece “Preventing Psychological and Moral Injury in Military Service” from the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study,
available online at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
. Also found in the same piece is a discussion that relates the work of comparative economic historian Francis Fukuyama (
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
[New York: Free Press, 1995]) on trust in the civilian economy to the analysis of internal or self-generated “friction” in military operations.

⁶¹
“Military Leadership into the 21st Century: Another ‘Bridge Too Far'?”
Parameters
28:4-26 (Spring 1998).

⁶²
Readers who are hungry for information on our military institutions that is of high quality, trustworthy, nonpartisan, nonideological, and economically untainted by military contracting money should start by immersing themselves in the Web site
Defense and the National Interest,
www.d-n-i.net
, edited by Chet and Ginger Richards. It carries Franklin C. Spinney's famous “blasters” (e-mail circular letters), both current and archived.