With the Army downsizing as the war winds down, many officers are going to be given six months to get out of the Army and transition to civilian life. How all of this plays out will be interesting, to say the least.
“Leadership from 3,000 feet.” “The C&C bird” was the villain- a helicopter crammed with radios from which the commanders at every level from battalion up were able to fly over their subordinate units and “command” them from a vantage point high above. From that lofty position, it was very easy for a battalion commander to direct not only the companies under his command, but also the platoons, and even squads. “Get that left-flank squad up and moving” was an effortless thing to demand over the radio. That was easy to say from a position high above, where the air was cool, the fatigue of having humped a rucksack all day nonexistent, and the deadly stream of steel from a hidden enemy machine gun was well out of range. But it was all the vogue of the recent Vietnam War, and it carried over into the Army afterward. It created role models that must have made George Patton want to return from his grave. (243)
I am sad to say that the level of micro-management that Lt. Col. Burress experienced after Vietnam has gotten worse. Much, much worse. Computers, radios, satellite phones, and other instantaneous communications systems have allowed those at the highest levels of command to reach all the way down through the command structure to dictate actions to the lowliest soldier on the ground. Not only that, but these electronic systems are now trusted more than actual soldiers on the ground.
In Ranger Battalion, we went and blew this guy’s door in three nights in a row. We would drive up to his house at night, explosively breach, enter and clear, and find no bad guys there. Civil Affairs would come out the next day, buy him a new door, and then we would come blow it down again that night. All because electronic intelligence gathering was trusted over the ground truth experienced by the soldiers who were there.
I saw it again in Special Forces. About once a month, my ODA would have to drive out into the city, knock on someone’s door, and drink some chai with them. It wasn’t a social visit; we did it because if we didn’t, then the Task Force would send in Rangers to hit the house, potentially hurting our rapport with the locals. Hitting bad guys is great, but hitting civilians when we know for a fact there are no bad guys there is beyond asinine.
The ODA we relieved warned us about this, as the Task Force had wanted to hit the house every week. All because one source provided very sketchy intelligence about the “target,” and that source’s word was trusted over 12 Green Berets who knew the people who lived in that house by name.
…they [officers] had somehow gotten the idea that they shouldn’t get too close to their soldiers-that emotional involvement with their men might cause them to hesitate to risk their men’s lives when it became necessary That’s a weakling’s excuse for distancing oneself from his troops…making them mere pawns instead of fellow human beings, and enabling him to sacrifice them with emotionless, electronically delivered commands from high above or far to the rear, instead of with the traditional order of the Infantry officer-an order shouted above the din of battle from the combat leader’s rightful place-at the front and center of his soldiers… (243)
Do you want to know why the numbers of soldier and veteran suicides is “shockingly” high? This is it. We’re afraid to get our hands dirty and actually engage with our troops on a man-to-man level. Once upon a time, a First Sergeant would buy a soldier a beer and ask him what seemed to be troubling him. Today the Army replaces human beings with sterile suicide dashboard gimmicks on their computers and “don’t kill yourself” briefs. There is no substitute for real leadership, and no excuse for not getting to know the soldiers under your command. Pack up those nonsense command climate surveys and start asking soldiers what is really going on. I’ve seen officers and NCOs who still do this. It means a lot to the troops and allows leadership to assess where the points of failure exist within the organization.
When Bucky has his soldiers piss tested to begin weeding out drug addicts, he finds himself getting dressed down by his superiors.
It would look bad in the quarterly statistics. And that would make the battalion commander look bad. And that might hurt his Officer Efficiency Report, which could hurt his chances for promotion. (245)
Today’s obsession with statistics is another de facto violation of a SOF truth, that humans are more important than hardware. The military still believes that SOF soldiers are interchangeable parts, like cogs in a machine. See my statements above about soldier suicide rates, for instance. These are soldiers, not statistics. They need to be given some pride in their job. That comes from hard training and shared purpose. It does not come from the current metrics used to measure command success, such as what percentage of the force has completed their information awareness training on some website, and obsessing over shot records on MEDPROS. These metrics for success need to be replaced with ones that measure the technical and tactical proficiency of the soldiers in the unit. Incentivize leaders to lead, place emphasis on combat training and war rather than bullshit and all the rest will fall into place.
But why was all this happening to begin with? Bucky’s take:
It was a time of strange priorities and weird values, brought about, I believe, by the Army’s being forced to adapt to the cultural revolution in American society which had occurred while we were focused on the task at hand in Vietnam. (247)
This is where the political correctness comes in. I don’t doubt for a moment that it exists, but the enforcement mechanism (the nonsense described above) happens because of careerism which is detached from any specific ideology. In other words, civilian political leaders and high-ranking Generals and Admirals (who are also political survivors) set policies based upon political correctness. That is to say, they make military decisions based upon real or perceived shifts in social norms. Lower ranking officers and NCOs then enforce these policies because they want to get promoted, and rocking the boat by not supporting said policies would be career suicide. Remember, in OERs and NCOERs there is a block that gets checked for “loyalty.” If you don’t support policies, then you may be perceived as being disloyal by your superiors.
What I’ve come to realize from reading the works of Jim Morris and Lt. Col. Burruss is that none of the negative things I saw in SOF are “new,” but rather they were simply new to me. These issues have existed since at least the Vietnam War. They have simply escalated and gotten worse because of shifts of American social values, and because of the advance of technology which allows greater levels of micro-management.
So how do you attempt to rectify these problems? Bucky asked his Sergeant Major this same question.
The same thing good American officers have done for the last two hundred years, sir…The same damned thing you did in the Mike Force when you were given a mission; attack it, sir. Attack!
I’m getting tired of bitching about the same old shit. The same shit that has been infecting the US military for the last fifty years. Rather than complaining, it is time to attack the problem. The next step is to plan for the future of Special Operations. My next project is to write a white paper on just that. The threats America faces into the rest of this new century are something that we are currently unprepared for.
The solutions are not going to be programs, or weapons, and certainly will not be ill advised attempts at political correctness. As it stands we will be as bad at counter-insurgency and unconventional warfare in fifty years as we are now. It isn’t because we can’t identify the problems but rather that we can’t change our manner of doing things. It is a question of culture and paradigms.
We need to start looking for new paradigms, and we need to do it sooner rather than later.
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