Comments
As a 21 yrs in service Master Sergeant I agree with Mr. Woods. One of the first comemts was about "Not all Soldiers are combat hardened", well if you are a Soldier I agree since you are probably comparing us with us which is fine. I have the pleasesure to serve at the FOB as well as in combat and I can say this, regardles if you are a Finance guy or an Infantry guy they are both hardened as warriors. First regardless what your job is in the Army, doing it while deploy is not the same as in garrison. If you are infantry you are not shooting at pop up targets anymore and if you are Personnel the deaths you are reporting are not notional anymore. Saying that the majority of the force is not hardened is just wrong.
<b>Bill C.:</b>
All IMO:
No. It had little to do in the determination with reference to the experience of combat factor. OTOH, both were affected by the failures in the realm of diplomacy and relations with others though not to a debilitating degree -- or even a very significant degree. Not nearly as significantly as many think. Both Armies also adopted some good and some bad lessons.
No, not a <i>major</i> impact. There would certainly have been some minor impacts locally from point to point and time to time. The effects would have been tactical, not operational or strategic.
Small Wars dos not necessarily enhance the capability of a nation; there are too many variables to say that. Nor does it necessarily enhance the overall ability of Armed Forces that were involved. It can even have an adverse impact depending on the lessons selected to be 'learned' or embedded for the future. (I would submit that's the case for both nations and wars you cited). It can enhance the capability of the Forces if properly analyzed and embedded. It does enhance the capability of most individuals and some units involved. Most. People and units, like large organizations don't always imprint the proper lessons...
Let me ask the question this way:
Did the experience of our Armed Forces -- and that of the Soviet Military -- gained in the conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively, play any important role in determining the fate of these nations (the USA and the Soviet Union)?
Or did this experience/expertise have little to do with how things could, would or did turn out.
If the United States and the Soviet Union had gone to war, would the experience/expertise of our/their military forces -- gained in fights in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively -- have played a major role in the outcome of these wars?
Stated yet another way: Is such experience -- in what some might call less than important wars -- (1) enhance each nation's ability to defend itself and achieve its objectives or (2) might such experience actually detract from/compromise the skills that are needed for more important/more-critical conflicts (in this latter respect, thus the need to "re-build" America's Army after Vietnam)?
No.
Individuals gained experience; the institutions to which they belonged both rejected that experience and suffered from the wars rather than learning from them.
People and organizations who are embarrassed by a poor performance tend to blot that performance from their memory. That's not smart at all...
Armies often forget they are comprised of individuals and that what those people know and can do is important. Experience rejected is experience wasted. If that were not so we would not have blundered so badly in Iraq for four plus years -- or the Russians so badly in Chechnya...
Should we consider that, like our forces today, our military during Vietnam -- and the Soviet military during their conflict in Afghanistan -- likewise became somewhat "battle-hardened."
If so, did this level and type of expertise and experience translate to much more capable/better prepared armed forces who, by way of this "battle-hardening," became much more capable of defending their respective nation and achieving their nation's objectives?
I think there is a difference between "saltiness" (A Navy-Marine term in origin) which is what most actually have and "experience." We have a lot of guys and gals who are pretty "salty" in that they have: deployed a lot, maybe know quite a bit about a small area of Iraq or Afghanistan, maybe been under fire for some amount of time, and maybe even killed folks. But gaining "saltiness" is fundamentally a passive act. Experience is more than just showing up (with apologies to Woddy Allen)---it is learned from those events. "Experience" is actively gained since true learning requires positive effort, analysis, and synthesis. As an aside, I am a big fan of the British term "Lessons Identified" versus "Lessons Learned" especially when we never seem to learn things but rather regurgitate timeless tips, tricks, and tidbits.
MARINE CORPS GAZETTE had an article about being "in combat" verus in combat about 12-15 years ago---unfortunately, I can't find it online.
There is an apocryphal saying about the value of combat "experience" (various derivations of this are around):
<i>"Frederick the Great's horse was on seven campaigns, but at the end of it all he was still a horse."</i>
I see the points and am also humbled by the Marines and Soldiers I've met who know much more of danger than I do. However, combat experience can come in many forms and has different repercussions or impacts.
I seem to remember that one of the factors that played into Desert Storm calculations was the significant combat experience of the Iraqi Army we faced, based on long years of their war with Iran.
I once heard LtGen Paul Van Riper USMC describe to an audience why he still studied and read after he had combat experience. He stated (and this is from my memory) that in his 40+ years of service he had seen maybe 3 years of combat duty, all told. How, he asked, could that stand against the millenium of experience captured in history? How could he beleive that those 3 years provided him all he needed to learn?
I'm not sure what direction our combat-experienced, or campaign experienced, or battle-hardened, etc. force goes. My concern is when the experience becomes blinders rather than a flashlight to the future.
Ken raises an excellent point. When I rolled north in an Egyptian APC as an advisor to the main effort brigade to the Arab Coalition for Desert Storm, I had never had a shot fired at me in anger prior to that, and neither had any of my peers.
As I was medevaced out of Afghanistan a few months ago I was honored and humbled to meet and travel with young men who had seen several years of combat, to include one brave soldier who had been subjected to 10 IED attacks, and while he struggled to remember who had talked to him 5 minutes earlier, he wanted nothing more than to return to his unit as a 13F forward observer outside Kandahar. Or the young commo E4 who 5 minutes after coming on duty at Jalalabad to pull his security shift, held off multiple IED attacks, having his M-240 shot out of his hands, only to chase down his two Afghan partners hiding downstairs, ripping the AK-47 from ones hands to rush outside the bunker to continue the fight.
America may lack for a cogent strategy, but we do not lack for amazing young warriors. We owe them better. That is my challenge and my quest. We owe them better, because they give us everything they have and only want to give more.
Only true sociopaths will really become battle hardened -- and that hardness is brittle; it can shatter at any time for strange reasons. It is a condition to be avoided...
Combat experienced is a more accurate and far better term.
That combat experience may be argued about here and elsewhere but it exists and is a consideration for anyone thinking of seriously trifling with the US. That experience may mean one thing to the writer of the Article and many of his readers but it means quite another in the Defense establishments of the rest of the world...
Well, other than the 254,894 Guardsmen deployed for OEF and OIF through Nov 2007 and probably a similar number of reservists, the Author makes a great point...
Historically America fights its war with militia and draftees; and maintains the peace, writes doctrine, deals with peacetime skirmishes (like todays "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan) with the regular force. This is how America likes it. This small cadre of regulars then expands to receive the draftee and militia citizen soldiers to ramp up rapidly when the real wars come along.
The real problem is that we forget how irregular the Cold War was (actually the Eisenhower Doctrine was rooted in a mix of Asymmetric [our nukes vs. their conventional arms] and Irregular warfare [a robust UW campaign to manipulate governments around the world] to contain the Soviets, but somehow we seem to forget or ignore that fact).
We built a historically exceedingly large conventional force due to the mission in Europe and the understanding that a relatively large force there (large enough to help deter, but perhaps not large enough to fight and win) was an important part of the mix. Then, once that long contest ended, we were reluctant to right size the force once again. Even today the services chase missions to justify the unjustifiable so that they don't lose the competition with the other services. We cling to old missions that make little sense in today's security climate on one hand, and create new security missions that make little sense in the context of best lending stability to the more irregular threats emerging today.
Bad systems lead to bad behavior. This is true in how the Afghanistan Constitution ensures electoral fraud and rampant corruption; and it is true in our system for shaping missions to fit the capabilities that the services want to build and the competition between services that leads to everyone seeking to 'win' the programming and budget wars. Having the civilian leadership all coming from one party and promoting one agenda that changes every 4-8 years does not help. Like I said, bad systems promote bad behavior.
Makes you scratch your head when you look at it from a distance. It makes you want to pound your head on the table when you see it up close.
Phil is right about the sensitivity of this topic. His last paragraph gets at the point I was trying to make--and have made in different venues at different times. Of course in history, especially in modern wars, the number of soldiers actually doing the fighting was by ratio quite small relative to the size of the aggregate force involved.
But in today's Army, and in how experts and media use today's wars, my argument is that the notion of being "battle hardened" takes, I think, our eye of the ball of problems of atrophying combined arms competencies in the Army. The thinking goes that since we have so much combat experience in our army from these two current wars that that very experience will compensate and allow for very quick return to combined arms competencies. I think this is a dangerous proposition.
You know in the mid to late 70s General DePuy would often go around the army and lecture at places like Carlisle and Leavenworth and he would tell the officers in front of him that they really were not as good as they thought they were, that they had a long way to go to rebuild the army in the spirit of combined arms after Vietnam. He was getting after the brewing Harry Summersesque argument that the Army "won" every tactical battle on the ground only to have the war lost by a bunch of protesting hippies and weak politicians back home. Further, DePuy was saying that just because there was a lot of combat experience from Vietam didnt necessarily mean it would make automatic success in a future war with the Soviets or anybody else. His point I think was for the army to take a couple of teaspoonfuls of humility.
Perhaps that is what we need today after the last three years of freebasing off of the high of the Surge triumph narrative, that a reinvented army under better generals saved Iraq from a desperate situation, and we can do this all over again ad infinitum as long as we get more troops and the American people and the political class dont lose their will.
We should be proud of what we have done and what we have learned in the last eight years of war. But that pride should be tempered with an honest assessment of where we are at now and what our weaknesses are; pumping up with articles like Woods or on books like Jungers or Mullaneys takes our eye off the ball of the serious challenges that our army (and other services) faces today.
gian
I think this can devolve into a very ugly and useless argument. Does "combat-hardenend" mean a majority of individuals in the organization have seen combat, or that the organization as a whole has the experience of keeping its combat arms in sustained contact with the enemy? In terms of percentages, is the "combat hardening" of the WWII Army or (or armed forces) any greater than today? What is the measure of "combat hardened"? How many trips outside the wire (and by definition, everyone in Iraq of Afghanistan has probably taken a few, even if just for transiting from FOB to FOB)? Is it being in/out of a vehicle? Is it type of contacts? How do you measure and compare combat experience: 76 hours on Tarawa vs. 15 months in Baghdad?
By design, the combat arms will always bear more combat (hence the term). Combat support, and combat service support, less so (on average). Im not a great fan of the "fob-ification" of the force, but neither do I see any purpose in the "combat tourist" who seeks a trip just to get a taste. Everyone has their assigned job and, if the machine is operating properly, their assigned billet has them contributing to their overall goal (the problem isnt that we have troops always behind the wire, its that we have so many in billets that dont really need to be there in the first place).
I think the best way to say it is that we have a campaign-experienced Army and Marine Corps. That can be a very positive characteristic. But as Col. Gentile has described, if the campaign experience becomes a limiting factor, or it is an excuse to not be self-critical of assumptions about future conflict, then it will be a weight around our necks. We have always fielded brave and resourceful troops and leaders. However the organizational and cultural assumptions that they take into any conflict greatly shape their overall performance. This issue isnt the ability of our junior officers and NCOs to perform. Its when they become Colonels and Generals in 10-15 years--will they still be fighting as they have experienced today, or will they have learned and adapted to how they will need to fight?
The problem with this article by Mr Wood is that it mistakenly makes the entire American Army seem "battle hardened" from combat as if every Army soldier who has deployed has kicked in doors in Baghdad or moved through open fields under fire in Helmand. But of course the blunt and true reality is that most American Army soldiers, even if they have deployed numerous times, have not experienced combat, or even the daily grind of mortal fear caused by leaving the security of fobs and bases. We certainly have a "deployment" hardened Army, but a combat hardened one, I dont think so.
We are kidding ourselves, as Mr Wood's article facilitates, if we think we do.
Ah HA! I'm not as loopy as I often appear -- this software will time out on you if you're an old, slow typist and though you may have logged in, if you're too slow it'll shut you out...
Thus my "Anonymous" post at 7:14 PM above when I foolishly thought I was logged in. I refuse your anonymity, so there... ;)
A few points on his fairly good article.
This is not the first time in our history we have excused the vast majority of our citizens from service and engaged in a major, decade-long conflict instead with an Army manned entirely by professional soldiers. Soldiers, not warriors -- and that semantic note is the difference between civilian fighters and professional soldiers.
Other than parts of the Civil War, all of WWI, WW II and the Cold War periods, our wars were fought by professional forces -- in the shorter wars, augmented by the Militia -- in the longer ones, it was the small regular force that served. The Indian wars, The Marines in the Caribbean and Central America. All pros. So he's a bit incorrect on that item.
We really only had an active conscription effort for about 35 of our 234 plus years; thus about 85% -- 200 years -- of that total time we have had a professional or volunteer force -- and for almost half of those 200 years those forces were involved in combat either at home or abroad. As for lengths of wars, the Indian Wars were nominally from 1790 until 1891 but by any measure, the years prior to and just after the Civil War comprised two twenty or so year periods where the bulk of the Army was involved in combat operations almost constantly. Add the Seminole Wars, also over twenty years. So, no, it is not the first time in our history nor even in the last one hundred years if you count the Marines, merely the first time during his life...
He quotes two important statements: "They don't know what we do." and "I don't have anything else to talk about." The former is the more important as it unfortunately applies to not only the public at large but to our policy makers. It is worrisome but is not an insurmountable problem. All that's required is that the Armed Forces leadership accurately apprise the civilian leaders of capabilities and limitations. We only get in trouble when that does not happen...
The second quote is reality and is IMO, not a concern. As they say, I've been there and done that. Learned that it was not an issue provided I was willing to listen to the civilians and their concerns -- most of which I could understand even if I didn't agree on their significance -- and interjected what I wanted and was able to talk about <i>only</i> when it seemed important -- which, really, was surprisingly rarely. They did not and mostly could not understand and that was okay.
His concern with filling the gap between soldiers and civilians is understandable but probably not nearly as important as too many seem to believe. Growing up in pre WW II -- and the immediate postwar period -- with a Father in the then totally volunteer force leads me to believe that gap is significantly overstated as a concern by many. His final paragraph and the quote it contained:<blockquote>""A lot of us are here because society has no further use for us," he said. "The Army has become home for a lot of restless souls who can never really go back."</blockquote>has been true for thousands of years in many societies -- we are but the latest and we've been there before. A fighting force and the civilian milieu are indeed, different worlds and that's always been true. That is a good thing...
Nothing new in all this, we just are more aware and communicate more rapidly and freely.