The Lone Survivor book is one-third SEAL training, one-third grim Black Hawk Down-style firefight, and one-third not-at-all Hollywood inaction.
In that first third, Luttrell recalls Captain Joe Maguire speaking to his class of SEAL hopefuls:
First of all, I do not want you to give in to the pressure of the moment. Whenever you’re hurting bad, just hang in there. Finish the day. Then, if you’re still feeling bad, think about it long and hard before you decide to quit. Second, take it one day at a time. One evolution at a time.
Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to bail out because you’re worried about the future and how much you can take. Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and there’s a wonderful career ahead of you.
I have to wonder if such troops, selected for zero neuroticism, are prone to a certain kind of hubris.
Also, I have to wonder if selecting elite troops based on their ability to withstand endless push-ups, pull-ups, log-carrying, and flutter-kicks in cold water is really selecting the right candidates and not filtering out good candidates.
As in the movie, the SEAL team clearly has no plan for dealing with semi-hostile civilians. Luttrell is disgusted by “liberal journalists” and seems to think that killing hostile civilians should be fine, but the lawyers back home would have them in prison for doing what they clearly had to do. Since they can’t kill the goatherds who stumble on their positions, they simply let them go.
How is there no standard operating procedure for this? No one has zip ties or paracord? And no one speaks the language?
The SEALs don’t seem so elite when they have no plan for this contingency. Luttrell in particular doesn’t seem so elite when he struggles on the mountain, when he’s amazed by how quiet the locals are, when he doesn’t understand why his local allies panic when he flashes the light on his watch in the pitch dark, when he doesn’t understand the local traditions about hospitality, etc.
The one thing the SEALs do seem to have is fortitude.
You know, I’ve thought some of this myself. The cardinal virtues are ranked for a reason and Prudence (needs to be understood as something closer to horse sense than esoteric wisdom) outranks fortitude. Theoretically SEAL veterans should know best how to train new SEALs, but we also know that great players don’t always make great coaches.
This isn’t to bag on the SEALs — far, far from it — and I’m sure they have more fortitude than I possess. There is a general attitude throughout male culture in America that it’s better to be strong than wise. Luckily this gets overcome in fields like medicine and engineering, but it still rears its ugly head on a regular basis.
I’m reminded of William Lind’s point that America doesn’t do light infantry, even in our special forces. H.J. Poole makes a similar point that our troops learn too little tactical technique.
SEALs have a long history of being the most hoo-ah of the hoo-ah. What they don’t have is a history of tempering that with a tremendous amount of common sense.
Anybody with a lick of that, common sense, would have looked over the recent history of SF-type operations in the Middle East, and thought to themselves “Self, many of these missions my fellow SF operators have gone on around here have foundered on the rocks and shoals of local civilians discovering what were supposed to be covert missions… Perhaps we need to plan for that…?”.
Going back to Desert Storm, there was the infamous Bravo Two-Zero mission that the SAS had turn south on them because (ta-daaa!) of discovery by local civilians, who dialed up the local regime guys, who promptly ran down the SAS team.
So, this ain’t exactly a really unusual thing to have happen. Unfortunately, we mostly train in isolated areas here in the US that are virtual wilderness, and there just aren’t scads of subsistence farmers wandering the countryside and compromising hide sites or missions. I could name a bunch of other ops, many of which are likely still classified that have run into the same things. Anybody who’s been paying attention to things should have foreseen the possibility, and then taken steps to either neutralize the problem, or deal with it during the mission.
They didn’t. SEALs. Great guys, but possessed of some rather glaring blind spots.
Which goes right back to a point I find myself having to continually make about the US military in general: The whole bloody organization, regardless of branch, is essentially ahistorical. They don’t learn from anything except painful personal experience. The system is not amenable to thoughtful people who look around them and go “Y’know… I can see some problems coming down the road towards us… Perhaps it would be wise to take some steps…?”.
Trust me on this — I lived that BS personally, with regards to countermine and IED stuff back in the 1990s. Had we been listened to, we would have been prepared to deal with the IED threat in Iraq in 2003, and odds are decent that that particular threat would have been neutralized by our prepared countermeasures — Which likely would have meant the campaign against us would have never gotten off the ground in the first place.
Or, so I like to think…
Biggest problem the US military has is that it cannot seem to learn except by painful personal experience, and the lessons learned are not actually digested and institutionalized. Don’t think I’m right? Take a good, hard look at what’s going on out in the ground forces, now that the wars are winding down. In order to achieve mobility for commanders, we had to create what were known as “Personal Security Detachments”, which were essentially platoon-sized combat elements attached to a higher-level commander to provide him security while he did his job, circulating around his units. These elements had to be taken out of hide, robbing line units of critical personnel.
Now, a rational learning organization would look at that experience and say “Hey, I don’t see this condition changing — The idea of a safe rear area through which my leaders can circulate at will is now dead, and I will likely always have to have security detachments for these leaders, plus vehicles…”.
So, that sort of thing would then become enshrined in the organizational matrix as personified in what the military refers to as “Tables of Organization and Equipment”, which are the spreadsheets upon which organizations are laid out in terms of manpower and gear.
Care to guess what we’re doing, instead of making these necessary ad-hoc organizations permanent and a part of the hallowed MTOE? Yeah… We’re ignoring the experience, and making believe the next war we fight will be just like the Good Old Days ™, and have real, live rear areas we can drive around in jeeps with no more than a driver for security… So, instead of making these ad-hoc organizations a permanent part of unit structure, we’re dissolving them as soon as the unit returns stateside, and not making the modifications to the MTOE in terms of additional personnel or equipment.
Yeah… We’re a learning organization, we are. Fucking morons.
Worked with a Brit Sergeant Major for a bit, who was working as an exchange NCO here in the US. In reference to the Army’s highly-regarded “Center for Army Lessons Learned”, he made a comment that stuck with me for a long time: “Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it? You can’t bloody well call it a “lesson learnt” when nobody actually manages to avoid repeating the same damn mistakes, time after time, can you? They ought to rename the place the “Center for Army Lessons Identified, and then Bloody Well Forgotten…”".
As an outside observer, I think he came damn close to the truth.
I’m less concerned about extreme fortitude being required of SEALs than how much of a career boost being able run really fast into one’s middle age is when it comes to selecting for strategic leadership.
A platoon to “secure” a Brigade commander, or is it a higher level we’re talking about? If so, how is a brigade commander to be effective with a platoon around him?
And inconspicuous.
I’d love to hear some of those lessons learned — pardon, lessons identified and forgotten — about IEDs.
Lucklucky, generally, you’re talking about a platoon, platoon-plus taken out of hide for battalion- and brigade-level leadership PSD. The PSD may wind up broken down into three elements: one for the commander, one for the Sergeant Major, and one for the deputy/XO. Each element has to be able to operate outside the wire, which means a minimum of three vehicles with at least three personnel on board: driver, gunner, and what the US calls the “TC”, which is a vestigial term from the old “Track Commander”, the guy who’s running the vehicle.
Minimum, for most such elements, is that they’re taking 27–40 men and nine vehicles out of the sub-units. In today’s austere, stripped-down MTOE world, that’s a hefty chunk of personnel, and it reduces real-world capabilities of the line units so stripped.
Nowhere that I’m aware of are they doing anything about making these ad-hoc units permanent or dedicating slots in the MTOE to them for personnel, or adding equipment to support them. Remember, those elements are either “borrowed” manpower and equipment, or they were borrowed manpower and theater-supplied equipment. Either way, the next time we do this, we’re pulling those elements out of our collective asses. Again.
Like I said, anything but a learning organization, because if they don’t learn from experience and institutionalize the ad-hoc changes and adaptations forced on them by practical experience, they’re not learning.
Handwriting has been on the wall about this stuff since at least WWII. We just don’t learn very well. Look at what happened in Korea, to General Dean, for an example. Battlefields are now fluid, and do not have front lines, rear areas, or any of the other features our “system” apparently envisages as part of the paradigm of war.
Look at the contributing factors leading to the incident with the 507th Maintenance Company. That was a typical rear-echelon unit, one that had no business being where it was put, which was in the trail elements of a combat division in Iraq. No money was ever spent on those poor bastards for training, nor were they ever sent to the NTC for participation in those exercises. And, then they were attached to 3ID, which had no clue how inept such units are under real combat conditions. Neither the 3ID elements or the commander of the 507th had one flippin’ clue what they didn’t know, until it was too late. Blame should lie on the Army as a whole, because the Army is the entity that did the decision-making about where they were going to spend the money on training. Budget triage led to units like the 507th getting jack and shit for training money, and most of their training exercises consisted of setting up shop in their motor pool and doing their usual Patriot maintenance missions from there. They had no damn business being assigned to a divisional combat unit, which also had no clue what they were dealing with, because they were never budgeted to take such attached units with them for training exercises to places like the NTC…
Vicious circle, I’m afraid, and it’s also not like people haven’t been pointing this crap out for years and years. When I was an Observer/Controller at the NTC back at the end of the ’90s, this was one of my issues about things we were doing down there, because my former unit, a combat engineer battalion assigned to a Corps Headquarters, was never allocated an opportunity to go down to the NTC as anything other than OPFOR support. Yet, we were supposed to be attached to divisional units as augmentation during wartime, essentially the same situation the 507th found itself in. Saving grace for us was that the battalion saw a lot of personnel turnover with other combat engineer units that were participants in realistic training, so there were people around who knew what “right” looked like. 507th? Not so much…
Isegoria, the key take-away was that the IED campaign never should have surprised us, not one little bit.
As I allude to above, in my reply to Lucklucky, the handwriting has been on the wall since at least WWII. Rear areas don’t exist anymore. Period. And, with the current innovations of our enemies, as evidenced by such incidents as the ones at Fort Hood, various recruiting stations here in the US, and the Lee Rigby killing in London, you’re not even safe in your base areas at home station. With the current situation in Europe, I give it a year, maybe two, and certainly less than five years, before we start seeing infiltration and insider attacks at facilities like Landstuhl. A foresightful leader in the US military in Europe would be taking steps to get all dependents moved into secure, defensible housing areas, and to start vetting any and all locally sourced employees very carefully. They won’t, however, and we’re going to see something fairly horrific happen before anyone wises up. I’d lay long odds that Landstuhl is probably a priority target and being infiltrated as we speak.
The IED issue is part of this continuum. In WWII, the Germans faced the issue of a porous front in the East, and that’s where the Soviets developed a lot of the doctrine and ideas that they later passed on to their international proteges. This doctrinal concept says that you attack whenever and wherever you can, using what means you have available, and emphasizes attacking rear-area logistics elements and lines of communications, in order to isolate front-line combat units. So, IEDs and mines.
Every war since WWII has seen this stuff emphasized, and it’s incredible that we still have a mentality that says such things as front lines and “forward edge of battle area” conceptualizations even exist. The enemy is not stupid. They see our prowess on the battlefield, as the Soviets saw the Germans during the opening phases of Barbarossa, and they realize that direct confrontation is a fruitless activity. So, what to attack? The lines of communications and support elements. We saw this time and time again in any Soviet-sponsored insurgency, whether in Asia or in Africa. But, what did we do? Again, Jack and shit.
The only people who took another path were the Rhodesians and South Africans, who recognized the threat posed by mines and IEDs in their rear areas. Both nations were facing the same threat that the US was in Vietnam, but they chose to do something about it and developed the line of vehicles and equipment that led to the current lineup of MRAP vehicles. The US Army, faced with a similar set of conditions, chose to double-down on stupid and did their route clearing in Vietnam with troops out in the open, carrying mine detectors ahead of standard cargo vehicles that had their floors sandbagged.
Rhodesia and South Africa, however, developed specialized mine-resistant vehicles and mechanical sweep and clearance vehicles. I really don’t want to know how many of our draftees we killed in Vietnam, doing the job that only killed a handful of Rhodesians — who, I might point out, were operating under international sanctions, and without access to the full range of technical and industrial assets that were available to the US Army.
It’s not pleasant, thinking about the prioritization on soldiers’ lives that that set of facts would indicate. It’s one reason I’m dead-set against draftee armies. Make manpower too cheaply available to the military, and they do shit like that, trading lives for money by not developing the specialized gear that would save them.
As a combat engineer NCO that came up the ranks in the 1980s, research in this area did not lead me to the conclusion that my senior leaders knew what the hell they were doing. Most of what we learned in Vietnam was promptly forgotten, the mentality apparently being “We won’t do that again, ever,” and you could watch the deemphasis of route clearance in the Mine/Countermine Warfare manuals. The 1960s versions had three bloody chapters about how to conduct route clearance, and the ones that came out after the war had successively less and less, until the one that came out in the ’90s had basically a couple of paragraphs and not even a line drawing showing how to do it.
What’s even more horrifying? I went to the Engineer School library, circa 1994. Asked for the “old mine warfare manuals”. Reply? “Oh, we don’t keep those. They get trashed as soon as we get the new ones in.”
Circa 2005, I ran into a friend of mine, who’d been tasked with standing up the new mine-detection dog companies, which we’d had back during Vietnam. He’d had to do it from scratch, because (a) nobody had a copy of the old manual that described how to organize such a unit, and (b) they couldn’t even find anyone who remembered that we’d had such a thing. They were forced to go out to veterans organizations and say “Hey, anyone here ever work with mine dogs in Vietnam?” So, he basically had to reinvent the wheel, with the entire concept. They eventually found a partial copy of the old manual in a museum display, and were quite happy to find that they’d mostly managed to do the same things all over again, from first principles. Hell of a painful process, though.
He wasn’t happy to find out that I had a complete original copy of that manual in my files, either. Had I known, I’d have gotten it to someone, but the word never got out to where I was that they were even bringing those units back, or that they had zero resources to do it with, so until I talked to him well after the fact, I had no idea. The profanity was epic.
It’s interesting to note that none of this crap was exactly unexpected by people in the Army, either. I sat in a session with a Lieutenant Colonel who was serving as our Engineer Group Deputy Commander/XO, while we were in Kuwait waiting to go north into Iraq in 2003. In that session, he laid out everything that we could expect to see in the next few years, and a timeline to when things would happen, particularly with reference to the IED campaign and the insurgency. In retrospect, the only thing I can say he got wrong was the date by which we’d see common use of improvised self-forging fragment munitions, which didn’t show up until about nine to twelve months after he projected we’d be seeing them. None of his projections were anything particularly insightful or requiring of much genius. All you needed to do was look at the trajectory of other such operations and do a little linear extrapolation. That we were as “surprised” by it all happening as an institution? Criminal. And, a lot of it has to do with the mentality in the various schoolhouses that run the branches. They’re parochial, insular, and not at all amenable to outsiders trying to change things. We tried to get the Army to look at procuring the South African armored route clearance equipment, but they wouldn’t do it all through the 1990s. They couldn’t conceive of a situation where we’d ever need it. Eventually, the folks who were doing humanitarian demining (another unwanted mission they sloughed off for years) procured a set, tested it, and then left it to rot in an ass-end of nowhere motor pool at Fort Leonard Wood. Came 2004, it took a Major committing career suicide by contacting his congressman to get that gear refurbished and on its way to Iraq for testing.
None of which should have ever happened. Anyone with a lick of sense saw the IED campaign happening, and not one person in the hierarchy that should have been paying attention did anything about it until it was almost too late. I’m still convinced that had we gone into Iraq even partially prepared for such a thing, we’d have shortstalled a great deal of what happened. Early attempts at the IED game would have been seen as failures, and since nobody likes failures, odds are pretty good the campaign would have died in its infancy. You don’t do what doesn’t succeed, and by offering the enemy an unguarded flank in our rear areas, we essentially enabled that whole thing happening to us.
I could go on for hours, with this, but I’ll leave it here for the time being.
Thanks Kirk, i was thinking about WW2 War in North Africa. There HQ security could almost to be said non existent even at Corps level.
Lucklucky, hmmm… WWII, North Africa… Really, not so much, to be quite honest.
If you were German, you had to worry about visits from the nice gentlemen of the LRDG, the nascent SAS, and all the cute little gangs of bravos that the Brits came up with, like Popski’s Private Army.
And, then there were the various North African locals who’d slit your throat if they found you wandering the desert alone, should you have the misfortune to suffer a vehicle breakdown or other issue.
All-in-all, North Africa was not a “traditional” linear battlefield. It may have been written up as such, and experienced as such by a few select lucky bastards, but it really wasn’t. Especially if you were German…
Part of the problem we have is that the historical narrative we’ve fabricated really does not reflect reality. The last truly linear battlefield, where there was a reliable front-line trace behind which you had unquestionably friendly territory was the Western Front in WWI. That, for some damn reason, sticks with everyone’s mentality, when the reality of things even as far back as the Civil War here in the US was that there wasn’t really a well-defined front line of battle–Mosby and his fellows made damn sure of that, especially in the West.
I honestly don’t know where the hell these geniuses are getting the idee fixe that they seem to have, where such things as a clearly defined battle area exist. You go back and look, and there really wasn’t such a thing in most of the wars that we have good historical records for–Yet, the expectation is that Commander X, and supply convoy Y will be able to move unmolested through the “rear areas”, and only face danger when near the “front”. This is manifestly a false set of expectations, and why they’ve developed, I’ll never understand.
During the Cold War, when we drove out the gate for an alert, I fully expected that we’d probably be facing attack from either Spetsnatz elements or some of the local fifth column types like the Rot Armee Faction. My guess, as a cynical NCO with a dark set of expectations about life, was that these were facts of life I needed to deal with. What blew my mind then, and still does, is that the folks writing up the operations orders and so forth did not share my pessimism or paranoia. I’m not the only person that saw this, either–But, damned if I was ever able to sway the thought processes of my highers. I’d bring up the issues of friction likely to be caused by such things as Spetsnatz attacks on the local nuke and ADA sites, and they’d all be hand-waved away, with an insouciant “We’ll deal with that when it happens…”.
Me? I’d be building in plenty of extra time and allocating more forces to tasks, in expectation that the clockwork “perfect world” plan in the OPORD was probably going right out the ‘effing window the moment we got a real alert order. You predicate your operations on predictability and safety anywhere outside your own unit-secured areas, and you’re playing dice with the devil. It’s not going to work, and the plan will turn into a list of things that aren’t going to happen.
So… Yeah. This is a problem with a long history, and a source I can’t even begin to comprehend. I know that the rear areas aren’t secure and safe, and that Convoy Y stands a good chance of not getting through intact, but you’ll hardly ever find some genius planner or trainer that bothers to work through the implications of that. You go down to the NTC at Fort Irwin, and there is no “rear area friction” involved in the scenarios–The convoy with your fuel, food, and spare parts is always assumed to get through, and they don’t play rough in the rear areas where the attacks are going to come, as the enemy seeks to play judo by attacking your weaknesses.
There’s a general lack of reality about a lot of this stuff, and I think we badly need to rethink a bunch of this crap and then rework how we plan on and train for war.
One of the other general issues that needs serious rethinking is the vast separation we’ve allowed to grow up between the combat and the support elements.
In Iraq, I found it maddening that I’d be sitting there in the Division Main, with full visibility of the area we were responsible for, and watch the whole shambolic approach we were taking. Most of the flipping contacts with insurgents were happening at night as the supply and support convoys would conduct operations, moving up and down the Main Supply Routes. They’d set off an IED, take a little fire, and blow through the area going to their next stop. Half the damn time, they wouldn’t even bother to report contacts they had on their convoys with the responsible local combat unit that owned that battlespace–You’d only get the word about one of these contacts when the unit finally deigned to report it, 48 hours later or so.
Meanwhile, the combat units are out doing patrols and looking for the enemy, coming up with dry holes about 90% of the time.
Now, I’m taking a macro-level view of this, and the question I kept asking was “Why in the fuck aren’t we taking these contacts the supply guys are having, and using those to find and fix the enemy? Hell, they’re attacking us, why can’t we follow those “annoyance attacks” up, run them to ground, and destroy them? I mean, if they’re nice enough to raise their heads, why don’t we follow up on it by chopping them off…?”
Thing was, the support guys didn’t want to stop and deal with the attacks, and the combat guys didn’t want to go out and “nursemaid every convoy…” either. So, what happened was, we were really running a finishing school for insurgents. I (and a few others that were thinking “off the reservation”) thought that we ought to be taking every single contact as a God-sent opportunity to identify and destroy the enemy. My thinking was “OK, they’re shooting at us; we ought to take that as a sign that these are the bad guys we’re really here to deal with, and then run these people to ground, and utterly destroy them without mercy…”.
Instead, you shoot at a convoy, and you get some return fire and they blow and go, leaving you with the idea that “Hey, I’m a badass Ay-rab Jihadi, and those Crusader bastards are scared of me…”. Following morning, you’re laying low and laughing your ass off as the local combat troops come through on yet another dry hole mission, looking for you…
Not. Fucking. Smart.
Me, I think we should have been taking every one of those “minor contacts” and stopping the convoys to fix and engage the enemy, not stopping until you’d either run them to ground or killed them.
The enemy shoots at your support troops, as they drive by? Hell, he’s doing your work for you, ‘cos he’s just identified himself and separated himself from the local sheep and goats. Get to it, follow up on his ass, and kill him. Period. That’s how you win these things, not by blowing through an attempted ambush, not reporting it for 48 hours, and expecting that the combat troops are somehow going to divine the bad guys from the good via some form of clairvoyance when they come out looking through the local community.
What was interesting was that when I went to look into the history of this shit, I discover that the US Army in Iraq basically was engaged in a recapitulation of the German Wehrmacht experience with rear area battle on the Eastern Front. Funny, that–The same crap went on, conducted by the proteges of the people who’d used those tactics, techniques and procedures on the Germans. Wonder how that happened? Fucking magic, maybe?
In any event, the German response to this very similar situation was initially very much like our own, and succeeded about as well. Subsequently, they developed this policy of “You get attacked? By God, you run those bastards to ground, and we don’t give a rip if you’re a rear area maintenance unit… Oh, and here are a bunch of extra weapons, and you might want to start doing better training for combat with your troops…”.
So, the German solution became what I think we should have been doing in Iraq: You get attacked? Then you attack the enemy right back, and you don’t quit until you’ve run them to ground and destroyed them. In the Wehrmacht, if a rear-echelon unit got hit by partisans and didn’t react by fighting them and keeping the pressure on until combat troops could be brought up? Well, that commander had better hope he died during the action, because odds were, he was getting court-martialed and executed for dereliction of duty.
In order to make this work, you’ve got to have every single person in your forces who is deployed in a combat zone trained and equipped to the same minimum standard as your line infantry. And, you’ve got to inculcate the attitudes of the line infantry into all of your officers and enlisted soldiers, so that when some damn fool decides to open fire on a logistics convoy, every one of the men and women in that convoy react like wolves being loosed upon the sheep. You have to develop each and every contact into full-scale combat, and utterly destroy any idiot that thinks he’s going to be a hero and shoot at you. This is how you win these wars like the ones we’re in, and nobody seems to realize it.
Hell, try explaining the concept of a Rhodesian “Q”-Ship operation in the context of the counter-IED fight to some of the officers I worked around…
Sweet Jesus, how in the hell do we have graduates of a military training program that have never heard of or studied the anti-submarine warfare techniques used as far back as WWI? I mean, seriously–A flipping LTC who taught Military History at West Point needed me to explain to him what a “Q”-Ship was, and the provenance of it all. And, he’d never heard of such a thing…, either. After describing to one bright light on the 101st Airborne Division staff how the Rhodesians had run decoy convoys and used camouflaged armored vehicles that looked like civilian trucks to decoy and attack guerrillas using mines and ambushes on civilian traffic, I got both a “deer in headlights” look, and a later response that “We can’t do that… JAG says it is against the Law of War…”.
Yeah. Sure it is. Idiots.
I’m not the smartest person out there, but by God, I’ll never understand how so many highly educated and very intelligent people couldn’t come up with this crap themselves, and why we’re losing these wars with the most highly educated and well-trained Army we’ve ever had.
If I had to guess, I think maybe we’d do better with a bunch of less smart people running things, who are a bit more imaginative and willing to actually read some freakin’ history books, in order to put some actual use to that knowledge. As I have to keep pointing out, the US military is essentially ahistorical… Something that might be worth changing, ya know?
Excerpt from The Rhodesian Army: Counter-Insurgency, part 1 and part 2.
From an account of The Battle for Salisbury.
Some of these unique vehicles can be seen here, or in detail; the Pookie, the world’s first successful landmine detector carrier, or the Leopard, a land mine resisting vehicle.
Guess what modern MRAP vehicle designs are based on (deployed to Iraq only in 2007!). This British Morris CDSW WW2 quad tractor looks suspiciously like a primitive Humvee as well.
And a great Rhodie Vehicle Evolution diagram, just because.
Q car is of course derived from Q ship:
Rhodesia, like the Necronomicon, is a fascinating source of forbidden lore.
Frankly, I’ve been wondering for some time why we don’t use more Q-cars, -ships, -planes, etc.
The really telling question would be to ask the men and women running our armed forces if they have ever even heard of the concept, and then ask the follow-on questions “Why the hell aren’t you familiar with this…?” and “How much did the American taxpayer contribute towards your education, and can we please have it back?”
From the evidence, I have to say I don’t think we’re getting good value for our money.
It’s upsetting, but not shocking, that American soldiers haven’t heard of Q-ships — although I must say that I knew about them as a kid with a typical boy’s very casual interest in war (and a less casual interest in geeky games). Now, if Americans sailors haven’t heard about them…
If it was just an item of esoteric naval history, yeah…
However, huge ‘effing comma, the specific TTP (Tactic, Technique, and Procedure) was one that was prevalent in the most recent analogous campaign to the one we found ourselves in. That nobody in authority or command recognized that a.) such information and experience existed, and that b.) it might have some slight relevance to our situation? Yeah, that’s more than slightly incomprehensible.
Peter Stiff wrote a huge and invaluable book called Taming the Landmine. On the staff of the 101st Airborne Division circa 2005–2006, I was apparently the only person who’d ever heard of it, let alone read it. Since I was simply a senior NCO liaison from an attached Engineer brigade, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of input into what was going on, but I could talk to the people I was working around. Few demonstrated the slightest amount of comprehension or intellectual curiosity about what I was talking about. Went so far as to run down a copy of Stiff’s book and passed it around. Everybody thought it was cool to see where the MRAP concept came from, but the operational details of the Rhodesian or South African campaigns? Zero interest. Zero comprehension that there were parallels to be examined, or ideas to be looked at.
In another context, we had an attached staff element that was overseeing the support, logistical and training of the Iraqi police. At the time, the vehicles they were using for mobility were commercial light trucks without armor, and they were getting slaughtered. Armored patrol vehicles were coming, but full deployment on those was years off. So, I thought “Hey, if the Rhodesians were building prototype and production MRAPs in railway workshops under international sanctions, why can’t the Iraqis do the same thing…?”.
I thought it would be a no-brainer; get armor to the police faster, get Iraqis jobs, save money, develop indigenous industry and encourage self-sufficiency…
No interest, whatsoever, and nobody cared to seroously consider it as a course of action. It was easier to put it out for contract through the corrupt Iraqi government and wait through 18 months of death for the Iraqi cops we were supporting.
There are more than a few reasons I was happy to retire after that deployment.
I have to think that the WWII Army would have acted, but the situation wasn’t quite dire enough in Iraq. Sigh.
So, besides V-shaped hulls, what were the other tactics for taming the landmine (and machine-gun ambush)?
The WWII US Army wasn’t notably proficient at this aspect of war, either. Note the limited uptake of Hobart’s “Funnies”, the specialized armored vehicles that made the British parts of the Normandy invasion go ever so much easier than Omaha did…
Key thing that went into the whole Rhodesian and South African success with the land mine/IED campaign wasn’t so much just the one thing like the V-shaped hull, and/or any particular TTP, it was the mentality they approached it with. They realized that the loss of communications in their “rear areas” of the countryside represented a clear threat, and then came up with innovative and effective means of dealing with it. In Vietnam, the US Army never regarded the whole “We can’t get there from here, via the roads (because, mines)…” thing as a sideline, a minor issue. Had we been restricted to roads alone, and without significant aviation assets, we’d have been screwed, because we couldn’t have kept all those isolated base camps alive via the MSRs. Which is, in essence, what happened to the French in their earlier campaigns against the Viet Minh.
You look at the numbers, and it’s really astounding. We nearly lost Vietnam, and would have, without aviation. The other thing that is just absolutely ‘effing mind-boggling? We had a huge in-country effort going, in terms of counter-mine and IED stuff. And, when we left? We left all of it behind. All of it. It’s probably still in a warehouse somewhere in Saigon, every single report, counter-measure result, and all the information about the campaign we spent vast amounts of blood and treasure on. It was like the Army treated Vietnam as a bad dream it wanted to wake up from, and consciously determined to ignore the lessons of the war. You go looking for the detailed information about that aspect of the Vietnam war today, and you’re going to be limited to a tiny part of the information we gathered. There’s a Rand report in, I think, two or three volumes. It’s kind of a survey of the entire countermine effort in Vietnam, and that set of books had been checked out of the Fort Leonard Wood Engineer Center library exactly three times before I got to it in the early 1990s. I pointed a staff officer who was researching the IED campaign in Iraq at that set of books, and when I heard back from him around 2005, he told me that the last person to have accessed that set of books was… Me, in 1994.
The problem hasn’t been so much the technology, or the TTPs. They’re relatively simple–The problem is the macro-level mentality and attitudes.
Circa that same 1994 time period, one of my bosses was a staff guy in Somalia. He came back from that, and took command of the HHC I was assigned to. One of his “things” was the poor preparation we had for actual war, in terms of running around the supplies we’d need. At that time, it was a Corps-level Engineer Battalion, and we were envisaged to be operating at least over a division-wide area of operations. With our unique Engineer equipment, there was no damn way we were going to be able to have our spread-out units draw supplies and parts from the combat units they were attached to, so the vision was we were going to be running periodic supply runs to each widely-separated company. This is a relatively uncommon requirement across the Army, but Engineers and a few other “support slice” units need to do this.
Thing was, we had exactly Jack, and shit to do it with. My battalion support platoon had something like 15 assigned HEMMTT trucks, and 15 drivers. First off, you’re not supposed to operate those things without two licensed operators per vehicle, for relief and so forth. We had no radios, no crew-served weapons, no weapons mounts, and I was supposed to be running this whole cluster-fuck across an area equal to (in the event…) half your average western state in the US. From the standpoint of “How is this supposed to work…?”, it was insane. Peacetime exercise, we could do it, but the conditions for that exercise were simply not realistic, at all. Wartime? It is to laugh…
Anyway, this commander had some sense in his head, and set about getting the equipment we’d need, like crew-served weapons, ring-mounts for the HEMTTs, radios, the works. One of the things we were looking at back in those days was the development program for the then-not-yet-procured FMTV program. When we got a look at the initial prototypes, he and I just about had aneurysms because the lead candidate was a cab-over design. Now, this is a design choice that seems insignificant, but when you’re looking at rear-area battle and the mine/IED threat, a cab-over is just soooo… Stupid. The first thing that’s going to hit the mine/IED is the wheel/axle. So, when you put the crew cab right over the top of the lead wheel/axle, you’re vastly increasing the risk of killing the poor bastards in the crew cab when the mine/IED strike happens. You look at the South African SAMIL line of trucks, and they’re all conventionally designed, with the front axle well forward of the crew capsule.
We wrote a letter off to the people who were responsible for the FMTV program, pointing this out. About six months later, we got back a reply, saying that we should stay in our own lane, and that the FMTV was not envisaged to be operating in what they were calling a “combat environment”. As such, our point about the axle placement was not worth worrying about, and our further suggestion that a set of armor for the vehicle be designed in concurrence with the development program was an unnecessary waste of money, because such a thing would never be needed.
Pretty much everything we did went the same way. None of the recommended MTOE changes ever happened, and none of the requested training opportunities for showing the way this crap wasn’t going to work out in the real world were ever funded. I don’t think we ever actually did an exercise where the logistics play was ever actually even semi-realistic, so we were never able to demonstrate the deficiencies in how things were organized.
That captain finally said “Fuck it… If they’re not going to be serious about this shit, neither am I…”, and he got out of the Army sometime in the late 1990s. Me, I had too much time vested, and though I could see disaster coming if we ever went to war, well… What the hell could I do about it?
Final denouement of the whole thing? Come 2003, we’re jumping through our ass trying to get ready to go to Iraq, and magically, everyone suddenly realized that that battalion needed to be fixed. We were stripping radios, weapons, and tons of other gear from units not going to war, in order to fix that support platoon so it could do its job. By that time, I’d been gone from it for two other tours, but had returned to Fort Lewis to retire, and was working up at the brigade headquarters directly above them. I watched every single damn initiative that my old commander and I had advocated get put into place quite literally overnight, and as we were on our way out the door to Iraq.
And, oh-by-the-way, every fucking thing we’d said and written about rear-area battle and the mine/IED campaign came to pass within a year or two.
Had someone listened, ten years earlier, the initial course of the conflict in both Iraq and Afghanistan would have gone much differently, but because we weren’t prepared for predictable events, the enemy got the jump on us. It would take until 2005-6 before armor kits for the FMTV were prevalent, and the South African armored route clearance gear didn’t finish getting procured until around the same timeframe. Every casualty we suffered for that reason should be ascribed to the general incompetence, malfeasance, and utter lack of imagination displayed by our vaunted “system”.
Personally, I think we should have been holding court-martials, and summarily executing every one of those stupid motherfuckers, and sterilizing their descendants for the good of the race. One of the comments I got back from the Engineer schoolhouse during the early ’90s, in reference to humanitarian demining was that “…this is a mission we don’t want, and if we don’t have the capability, nobody can tell us to do it…”. That mentality pervaded the Army then, and I suspect it still infests the institution to this day.
Oh, and about that humanitarian demining mission we “didn’t want”? Yeah, about three months after I got shot down for trying to get some of my guys up to the Canadian Army demining course up at CFB Kelowna, I had the guys from First SF Group wander over to my office to pick my brain for what I knew about the subject… Seems they’d been ordered to go do some humanitarian demining in Cambodia, and needed to get spun up on it…
Huh. Go figure.
I don’t know how you get Big Army to prepare, really prepare, for war during peacetime. It really is a bureaucracy.
Peter Stiff’s works seem pretty hard to find, but they are available directly from Galago Publishing in South Africa. Someone should show them how to make their books available on Kindle.
The problem is rooted in the entrenched bureaucracy of the system. I’ve got a family friend whose father was involved in the pre-WWII defense planning for Singapore. None of what the Japanese did was unforeseen, especially the attack from the landward side of the city. Junior officers were saying that was a possibility for a very long time–What was the problem was that bureaucrats and senior leadership did not listen to what they were being told. Similarly, the US was warned by numerous people that a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor was a likely opening move of the Japanese Empire, given their preference for such coup-de-main opening attacks in their strategic history–The attack at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War is a good example.
Where we’re screwing up is in who we’re selecting for promotion and command; every time we’ve been taken by “surprise”, you can go back and find numerous places where there were people inside the system who were attentive enough to give warning–And, every damn time, they got quashed. The system does not seek out or reward prescience, or even people paying attention to outside indicators of reality. Instead, they have a set-point that they’re comfortable with, and seek to constantly return to that.
The current Fantasy Island approach to dealing with the implications of the recent wars is what I find really maddening. Common sense says we’re going to have to provide security and route clearance throughout the entire rear area, as well as provide manpower and equipment to enable commanders to circulate, especially in the low- to medium-intensity wars we’re most likely to be fighting. Instead, we’re returning to the default ante-bellum dream world, where there’s a clearly delineated front line, and a safe, secure rear area.
We should be building in security elements to all headquarters, on the MTOE and permanently staffed. We should be creating capable rear-area security specialist units, somewhat akin to the Wehrmacht partisan-hunter organizations, and we should be upgrading training and equipment for all combatants we intend to send in-theater. What are we doing, instead? Returning to the “good old days”, that really only existed in our imaginations. Hell, the handwriting has been on the wall about all of this, since at least WWII. We just haven’t been paying attention, and none of our brilliant leaders have bothered themselves to look into these issues.
I think at least one reason is that the branch structure encourages people to create blinders for themselves, and to ignore the realities that combat units can’t function without logistics, and that logistics units can’t do their jobs without fighting forward, either. The mentality we are encouraging in our leaders is not amenable to them grasping the nettle, here, at all. Loggies say “Not my problem… Here are your beans and bullets…”, and the combatant leadership just goes “OK, just get them to me, somehow…”. The reality is that modern combat leadership has to look at the entire spectrum of combat, whether it is seeking out and destroying the enemy combatants, or overcoming the enemy-induced frictions of the rear-area battle. I don’t see much sign of anyone recognizing these facts of modern war, anywhere.
Very, very interesting. In my view big bureaucracy has inertia of size X time in existence. like an oil tanker has inertia length X tons. What it needs is a Skunkworks. Rhodesia and South Africa had new, small bureaucracies faced by an existential threat. For them the threat was strategic and not military tactical. Their bureaucratic inertia was political in the entrenched cultural West V Communist African tribal society identifying with USA Deep South unresolved racism of slavery. A proposed solution to Racism in USA should have been Negro assimilation rather rejection. This was a mile too far for the politics of 1861. I have just read the memoir of U S Grant and the biography by Catton et al; it is clear politics moves at one battle at a time in a sequence of possible objectives, the outcomes not clearly understood at the time. This is the trial,and error of evolution.
Ideology. By ideology I don’t mean political. I mean a way to see war by dispising “little” problems.
We all know the problems of Universities and the bubbles they put themselves in. I think a big part of that is the military schools. They only think big because they they as an aristocratic caste are supposed to be that way. So US Navy for example today has no merchants escorts. It is carriers and Burkes.
Lucklucky,
I think that’s a piece of the problem, but I believe ideology is only an expression of a deeper problem, that of hierarchy and rigid structure.
Every failure that I’m talking about here has its roots in the fundamental structure of the organization; the Engineer branch is narrowly focused on their narrow specialty, for example, and loathes the idea of being pulled out of that focus. Part of this is due to budgeting, and the way we assign responsibilities within the greater organization. Anything that is cross-specialty gets short shrift, because it falls in that boundary space between clearly delineated fields and branches. In tactics, we’re taught to seek unit boundaries, in order to take advantage of the “seam of no man’s responsibilities”. You never want to attack a unit directly; far better to dislocate them by infiltrating along a boundary, getting in between them and their flanking unit, and then cause them to withdraw.
Likewise, if you’re determining a strategy, you want to find a seam between responsibilities. An example would be the IED campaign–No one organization or branch was responsible for keeping roads clear, so there was no specific attention focused on that mission. The lines of communications in rear areas are not specifically identified as an area of responsibility for any one branch or unit, and as such, nobody was responsible for keeping the roads clear and safe for operations.
It strikes me that the most successful operations and organizations I’ve personally experienced were all ad-hoc, short-term affairs where they were empowered to solve a particular problem under a specific talented officer or NCO, whose sole focus was dealing with that problem for the duration of that project. Likewise, the worst and least effective operations and organizations all had the common feature of being run by time-servers and a general apathy towards doing their jobs, because they were routine and locked in stone.
I think we need a totally different paradigm for how we organize our military. To some extent, I believe that a better model would be an entrepreneurial one, where specific missions are doled out to officers, who are then expected to build their own organizations from available assets. In the US Army, we’re a very adaptable and extremely flexible organization, to the point where we’re almost always re-inventing the wheel for every mission. That is a feature we should be taking advantage of, instead of making it a contributor to our dysfunction.
I’m a big believer in mission-type orders, and allowing the leadership to solve problems at the lowest level possible. The higher element structures would need to be adapted in order to make something like this work, however. You’d also need a clear set of eyes setting the goals and identifying the issues that need attention given to them.
The organizational straight-jacket that we have wrapped around ourselves is one that we’re going to have to overcome, and I would suggest we do it by doing away with it entirely.
A couple of things struck me, over the years I was on active duty: Very often, the specialty Military Occupational Specialty personnel we were assigned were not worth the powder to blow them up with, but the guys we seconded to those jobs from within the primary specialty of the unit were generally top-notch at getting things done. In other words, the best personnel clerk was often not the guy or girl who was trained by the admin people for the job, but in our case, a combat engineer who was seconded to that job due to shortages. For whatever reason, those personnel were often more diligent and more responsive to dealing with the issues of the other line troops than the dead weight assigned to us from the Adjutant General’s good offices. Likewise, the supply clerk who was supposed to be the unit armorer as well as clerk was almost always found to be doing a much worse job at maintaining the weapons than the kid off the line who was put in the arms room to supplement him.
I’m not fond of the way the US Army has approached a lot of these things–I’m dead set against all these approaches to manpower that treat each and every job like it’s an interchangeable slot that requires a specific cogwheel to fill it. If I were king for a day, and could do it, I’d shut down all those “specialty” MOS-producing schools, and have only a few generalist MOS, with appropriate specialty training for people needed in specific slots. In other words, instead of having a headquarter element with a dozen different specialties in one unit, like communications, supply, maintenance and so forth, you’d have a unit with just one specific MOS, like Infantry or Combat Engineer, and the specialty jobs would be filled with personnel given secondary specialty training in those support jobs that were necessary.
I’d also take a much more entrepreneurial approach to manning, particularly at the senior levels. Unit commanders would need to build their command teams of subordinate leaders before taking command; can’t attract sufficient junior officers or NCOs? That’s what I’d call a “sign” that your leadership has issues; the way we run things these days, the whole thing is very feudal–The commander is assigned by the higher headquarters, and then the people he’s put in charge of have no say in whether or not they want to work for him. This allows a bunch of problems to fester, in that toxic leadership is allowed to flourish, because they can basically treat their subordinates like so many serfs, whose lives are bound to the unit as though they were medieval peasants who were given to the lord with his land… Were a commander forced to actually attract subordinates to his service, he’d have a very hard time hiding his inability to lead from his bosses, which is all too easy under the current system.
People aren’t inanimate spare parts, and the biggest failing of our system is that it treats them as such. This failing is expressed in oh-so-many ways, including the “Not my lane” issues I’ve been railing against in this thread. With a more entrepreneurial approach, a higher commander might have been motivated to actually run some realistic exercises against an imaginative subordinate like my old captain, who would have been able to demonstrate the problems he was trying to solve. Then, the commander would have had an objective demonstration that such a problem existed, and could have “put out for bid” for someone to solve those issues.
The current system relies on someone who got where they are because they are successful time-serving hacks who lacked the imagination to do anything else with their lives, and when they have someone like my old boss approach them with a potential problem, it’s all to easy for them to take the path of least resistance and say “No, that’s not our problem… In fact, that’s not a problem, at all…”.
Which was why we were still putting fucking sandbags into the bottom of our truck cabs in 2003, as improvised armor against mines and IEDs. Something that still enrages me, to this day… I don’t even want to start counting up the lives lost and ruined through injuries that were completely unnecessary, had we but properly prepared ourselves for the entirely predictable hazards of modern warfare.
Not in my lane isn’t the only problem. There’s the “get back in your lane” issue where anyone who tries to solve issues in the gaps between responsibilities is discouraged or punished.
Exactly. That is the flip side of the coin, and to extend the metaphor, the metal that coin is stamped from is the inherent nature of the organization that even allows for the concept of such a thing as “lanes” to exist.
It isn’t just the military, either. Go down to your local school district, and you’ll find the same sort of dysfunction — In fact, try any organization bigger than a one-man operation thats been around for more than a few weeks. It is endemic to the human condition, I fear, and represents a flaw in our nature, and one that is going to continue to plague us.
“represents a flaw in our nature”
Maybe. But it seems to me that even when we try to make artificial software systems flexible w.r.t. changing design needs, that doing so tends to be difficult, and attempting to switch responsibilities from one subsystem to another is a common source of thorny problems. We could try to blame that inflexibility on a characteristically human tunnel vision flaw among the human programmers… but I also don’t get the impression from evolutionary history that impersonal natural selection is all that good at flexibly reassigning roles in the subsystems of the complex system that it is updating. So possibly this is related to some underlying fundamental difficulty in (re)optimizing complex systems to address new tradeoffs, not just a flaw in our nature but some deeper gotcha in the underlying problem being solved, vaguely comparable to the second law of thermodynamics.
None of that is to dispute that our bureaucracies seem to be seriously bad at it or that it is expensive. And we can expect that they are indeed worse at it than they would be if we designed them wisely, rather as a badly designed steam engine can be much more wasteful than thermodynamics requires. But it might not be possible to design them to completely avoid it, or to suppress trends like more complicated organizations suffering more severely from the problem.
One of the points that occurred to me, going back over all this, is just how often I’ve been in situations where problems were encountered and solved not because of the organization and its structure, but despite it.
There’s a dichotomy; on the one hand, you have the formal structure of a unit, an organization. And, then you have the informal “old boys network” that actually plays a key role in getting things done by circumventing the structural flaws and problems.
In the old Soviet Union, there was a recognized fixture to most organizations–Not the “organization man”, who sat up front and made pretty noises for the bureaucracy, but the “fixer”, who operated in the background in getting things done. I’ve talked to a bunch of people who were around, back then, and it was astounding to hear how they’d known of situations that were short-circuited by these “fixers”, who would find necessary materials, and informally barter services or products to get them. From one informant, I’ve quite gotten the impression that without these people, the whole system would have ground to a halt in very short order.
This leads me to the further speculation that the problem isn’t entirely ideological. Soviet industry, US Army, American corporate business, whatever… The problem is organization, and how we do it. Bureaucracy and hierarchy are pernicious evils, ones that seem to attract the worst people, and then bring out those people’s worst features. And, yet, whenever we encounter a problem, the first impulse we have is “Let’s create a committee, a working group, a new unit…”. Ten years later, we’re looking at an ossified, sclerotic entity that’s doing more active harm, and wondering “How the hell did we get here…?”.
Give you a case in example… Local health district is on a rampage, forcing businesses serving food to comply with food service regulations. One effect is forcing a business that served a continental breakfast to put a commercial kitchen into operation on their grounds. As a part of that, we’ve been doing the construction work, and one of the issues that arose was flooring: Our preferred solution? Paint the bare concrete, and use anti-fatigue kitchen mats as the flooring surface. Only thing is, when the owner tells the inspector about this, he’s informed that no, you can’t use paint.
Cue hours of research with the health department, the state ag people, and God alone knows who else. Now, what I found maddening? The inspector did not have to hand the NSF or ANSI standards that had to be met in order to provide a proper flooring surface. She just “knew” that paint wasn’t it, and kept quoting me generalities about the surface.
After sufficient research, I’m finding a paint product that meets and exceeds USDA standards, and that’s what we’re now using. Now, here’s a government inspector that doesn’t know their own source regulations and standards, and they’re out doing health and safety inspections–But, that’s alright, because construction stuff doesn’t fit into their lane very well, and they just go by the seat of their pants when it comes to evaluating this stuff. No standard, no citable regulation, just the “feeling” that things like a painted floor are unsanitary, for some munging reason…
There’s a reason most contractors drink, and heavily–It’s the government.
William Newman, I agree that the problem I’m trying to quantify here is possibly endemic to any organizational structure we might come up with, but… I’m not willing to just ascribe the whole thing to a natural law like gravity and throw up my hands.
We do manage to come up with organizations that solve problems and function effectively, on occasion. What we seem to have a problem with is in copying those entities, and in keeping them on track. Almost any organizational entity seems to have a definite life-cycle, whether you’re talking a religious institution like a church, or a military unit — and that life-cycle is somehow a separate thing, made up of the individuals in the organization, yet also entirely separate from them. I’ve been in military units that were dysfunctional on numerous occasions, and what struck me hard when I served in the same outfit twice, separated by years in some cases, was just how much they were still dysfunctional in the same way, despite turnover in personnel that sometimes might have been 100% repeated ten times.
I don’t think anyone pays attention to this stuff, or has really bothered to analyze it, either. Most of what I find out there in regards to published studies of organizational theory strikes me as being so far off base from my personal observations that I can’t take any of it seriously. In a lot of cases, the erudite academic observations I find read as though they were written by an asexual virgin trying to describe and discuss sex as experienced by Hugh Hefner. It’s amazing how little attention is paid to this stuff, and yet how intimately important it is to our daily lives. It’s not just the military where the problem is experienced; every workplace I’ve been in, around, or heard discussed goes through analogous problems, and everyone is made miserable by it. Not to mention, the amount of situational friction that gets added to everyday life by it all…
There has got to be a better way.
The British writer Northcote Parkinson actually had some valuable insights into organizational behavior, but because he was a witty writer, he’s often just written off as a humorist.
He’s most famous for “Parkinson’s Law” concerning the growth of Staff in the Admiralty, but he had lots of other insights.
Parkinson’s Law — “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” — has come up here before. When I looked, the earliest reference here came up in part 2 of my discussion of Goldratt’s Critical Chain.
It then came up in my (rather popular) post on Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics, in Why Democracy Inevitably Leads to More Bureaucracy, in Five Laws of Human Nature, in Bureaucracies Temporarily Reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and, naturally, in my post called Parkinson’s Law.