https://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2019/05/poorly-trained-troops-will-run-rather.html

Links are down near the bottom; I’d recommend reading them to all and sundry, particularly the one where they interview another historian who’d been an escort officer for Marshall. Note especially where the light comes on over his head, and he realizes just how badly he’d been had by Marshall, and how thoroughly Marshall exploited the trust of everyone around him, as well as his sloth and essential incompetence around the battlefield. This is a guy who needed keepers to provide him with the basics like a helmet…

Marshall was a fraud, from start to finish. Some of his work does possess some value, but the majority of it…? I would stay the hell away from citing anything that crooked bastard had to say. Where he was right could be easily explained via the stopped clock paradigm.

There’s also a lot more out there–These cites by Dunn are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got a file folder somewhere full of a bunch of other stuff I’ve run across, over the years. One of these days, I’ll have to digitize it–The resources outlining the actual genesis of the Trainfire program are quite telling, when juxtaposed with Marshall’s self-adulatory prose taking credit for that program.

Swear to God, he had some of the crap the guards made out of tattooed human skin on display.

I still don’t know what to make of that whole thing. Jewish friend of mine at the time was a retired Chicago PD cop, owned a gun store, and I delicately asked him about it, and the response I got from him was seriously weird. I was left wondering whether or not the whole deal was a false-flag operation by the ADL, some sort of law enforcement scam, or genuinely a sick bastard who had a concentration camp fetish.

That whole region of the country is just shot through with the strange and unusual, in a lot of ways.

…Say what now?

What I can’t figure out is how the hell I’m only now hearing of this, when it was published in 2006. Yeah, esoterica erotica for the military mind, but… Nobody I’ve read has cited it, and I’ve never run into a review. Just goes to show you.

Couple of works I wonder if you’ve run across, now: John English’s On Infantry, the original version that grew out of his doctoral thesis, not the tarted-up and butchered version that later got published by Praeger and “co-authored” (butchered, really…) by Gudmundsson. Then, there’s The Combat Soldier, by Anthony King, where I note that this work by Rowland isn’t even cited in the bibliography, which you think it would be, given the muchly-touted status of King’s work as being definitive.

Ah, well… Scholarship in this area sucks. Really, really sucks. In the US, it’s a flock of dilettantes like Grossman who’re stone-ignorant and pretty much about as dumb as posts, when it comes to historical antecedents, and all the really switched-on types do one or two papers while they’re at Leavenworth, and then abandon the field to the lightweights. I presume that’s because the scholarly tradition here in the US is inimical to real military history and inquiry on the matters pertaining to it, but who knows? All I can say is that when I find stuff that’s really well-done, pertinent and well-thought out, with good research and no faddish false “conclusions” that they started out with, it’s usually from a Canadian, an Australian, or an Englishman.

Thing I find really annoying, down the years: Nobody, but nobody, has gone back and done the research to find, translate, and then publish in English the work I know the Germans did during the interwar years. I ran into a gentleman, years ago, at the Lake County Gun Show (Illinois Nazis all over the place, there, and strangely ignored–Bastards once had a booth selling concentration camp memorabilia ferchrissakes’…), and he’d picked up a fascination with German MG tactics, techniques, and history. While he’d been in Germany from the late ’50s to the early ’80s, he’d spent a lot of his spare time in the archives, out collecting stuff at used-book stores, and doing solid research on the subject. When he’d finally retired from being a Department of the Army civilian, he’d gone home to Lake County, Illinois to put it all together and publish it. When I ran into him, he’d been selling off some of his excess “stuff”, like rangefinders and tripods, at the gun show. Holy crap, but did he have a treasure-trove of stuff, including 8mm movies and a ton of still un-translated material that had come out of the archives and various other places he’d ferreted this stuff out of. His intent was to write the definitive work about German machinegunnery from the tactical/operational standpoint, not the typical Wehraboo gun nut one that focused strictly on the guns themselves. I cribbed a bunch of notes from him, and made a note to buy the book when he published, because it was gonna be amazing.

I should have done more, looking back on it, because this guy died not much after that, and I had moved on to another assignment when that happened. One of those casual meetings you have, ignore as interesting-but-unimportant, and then later recognize as a massive wasted opportunity.

I presume his collection got broken up by his heirs, or went to a dump somewhere when they cleaned up his house. The man had literal tons of material he’d collected, and then had shipped back to Illinois from Germany.

There’s a huge void in the scholarship available in English. I doubt that its available in German, either, except in the original sources, because nobody is looking at this stuff. It should have been, but wasn’t.

Ah, well… If I ever win the lottery, I’ll go looking for it. If not, maybe someone reading this will be inspired.

So, yes… I’d absolutely love to exchange contact info with you, if Isegoria would be so kind as to expedite the matter. This book by Rowland sounds amazing.

Actually, the public domain stuff got published, or I wouldn’t be discussing it on here. The author is the senior engineer I mentioned. Great guy; retired now but I have immense respect for the work he did driving historical analysis almost single handed. He never got the recognition for it; the management squawked about rewarding technical excellence whilst actually rewarding smooth-arsed charlatans with meaningless influence diagrams.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13456860-the-stress-of-battle

Don’t buy it: I have several spare copies lying around if you would like one (leave an email and I’ll contact you; or get Isegoria to give you mine – this post constitutes permission.). It is about as readable as telephone directory in parts, but stuffed full of interesting charts. I think you’d find it interesting.

Every time you post, you just keep teasing that infovore that lives between my ears. I would so love to go digging through the results of that work you describe, but I’ll bet money it’s buried deep in the system and unavailable to mortal man.

I don’t profess to knowing what the hell really goes on in combat, any more than the next idjit. I just know BS when I see it, and I also recognize how little real work has been done in this regard–Reading your description of what your work was does give me hope, though.

The fundamental problem here is the same one that bedevils so much of modern life–The theorists have taken over everything, and they have so thoroughly polluted the mental commons that people are unable to see past their failed ideation of reality. You come to an issue with preconceived notions, you’re going to template it along those lines, and if you’re starting from flawed theory, it isn’t very likely that you’re going to be doing much more than add to the confusion.

When it comes to combat effectiveness, I think there are a number of things going on: Just like with most fields of human endeavor, there are always going to be the “10 percent” that just about everything in human endeavor relies on. There are always certain individuals that provide the yeast, the movement, the shaking, the bit that gets things done. And, who carry the other 80% along to success.

This isn’t a hypocritical rehash that agrees with Marshall or Grossman, either–What I’m saying is that the statistical phenomenon that they observed exists, it’s just that they got the causes completely wrong. It’s not that the 80% is reluctant to kill; it’s that they’re that component of society that just goes along to get along; give them a chance, and they’ll happily kill if that’s what everybody else is doing–But, they’re not going to motivate themselves or anyone else to go do it, because that’s what they do. It’s like that across society–You have key influencers that somehow manage to shift entire social movements, just ‘cos they make it look like the thing to do. If you look at human behavior from a marketing standpoint, and then do a cross-correlation to behavior in combat, there you go: The 10% is that bit of the equation that you have to take into account, because they’re the guys who’re going out in front, taking the initiative, and doing the actual “thing” that needs doing. They’re like those first few rocks in an avalanche; inertia keeps the hillside solid, and then one or two rocks fall, then a few more, and finally the whole damn thing falls on your ass.

What is crucial to military leadership is identifying these guys, and ensuring that you co-opt them for the good of the mission and unit. Not all of them can serve as formal leaders, either, but they’re the crucial guys who every junior soldier looks to for cues as to how to behave. “Oh, if Smith is doing it, then I’d better…”. Smith charges the MG nest, you’re golden. Smith turns tail and runs from the tanks…? You’re screwed.

The really amazing thing is how one day’s coward can be the hero on another occasion, or how just a slight change in circumstance can completely undo someone who was a pillar of strength. An acquaintance of mine was an Emergency Services tech, someone who’d dealt with it all for years with no apparent psychic damage. He’d pulled people out of car wrecks, searched for dead bodies (finding them…), and all of that. Thing that broke him, though? One day, he’s working a car wreck, literally picking up the pieces, and he looks down at his feet to see a stuffed animal just like the one that belonged to his daughter. Bang. That was the last shift he could handle doing EMS work, and the way he completely lost his shit that afternoon freaked out everyone he worked around, mostly because he’d always been this vast bastion of strength and calm.

People are the wild variable in every one of these equations, and I think it is an error of massive proportions to try to do what DuPuy did (along with a bunch of Soviets…), and try to reduce everything to a nice, neat equation. There are “best practices” that can be identified, as you allude to, like having leadership nodes with the major weapons, but… In the final analysis, you need to know your people and use them effectively. A really good leader knows who to put into place on his gun team, and who to have playing scout out in front, as well as where to place his flawed subordinates in order to get the most out of them.

One of the major issues I see with regards to a lot of this is that this all comes down to “tribal knowledge” and it isn’t formally studied or taught; you have to pick it up by serving a long tuition as a junior leader, and graduate to a knowing seniority that quite often isn’t attained because the majority of the people who aspire to these things are not the introspective sort who bother to think deeply about what they are doing, or the systems around them. In my experience, there’s a severe lack of deep introspective thought that goes on down where it would need to, in order to gain a true understanding of these things. You need a John English, and there just aren’t that many of him running around. The latest aspirant is Anthony King, and I’m afraid he suffers from the same set of flaws that most academics take to these things–He’s never lived the life, and he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. You want at the truth of the matter, you have to be that guy who is deathly tired after 72 hours on his feet, with thirty-five miles of cumulative marching under a ruck that’s two-thirds of his body weight, and then trying to organize a live-fire defense that actually does anything past expending some ammunition. You can’t extrapolate from dry academic “studies”, you have to have been that guy, before you really begin to even get an inkling.

Make me “King for a Day”, and I’d go out and find some bright young men in the forces, identify them after a successful tour in the ranks, sponsor their way through a truly objective course of study to qualify them as field sociologists, and then send them back into the forces to try to winkle the secrets of these realities out. I’d also start wiring units for sound, send them off to war, and then gather the data from actual engagements they were in, in order to try to get at the actual ground truth of what the hell was happening. Precisely which fires impacted the enemy the most–Not just supposition and inference, but fact. What works, what doesn’t, and which systems do the most damage to the enemy, as well as which are a complete waste of time.

I’m morally certain that while a good deal of what we think we know would be proven out, there’s also a potentially massive set of “esoteric knowledge” that we just don’t know, and will be shocked by.

I recall a study where they tried to replicate Napoleonic era weapons’ effects. They knew from studies done at the time (the Prussians did several, and so did the British), that there was a reasonably scientific hit ratio using a typical smoothbore musket.

They took these studies, and using period muskets and reproductions, re-produced them, and compared the results. They validated the theoretical hit probability (i.e. “X’% hits at “Y” distance against a 5×10 foot target by a platoon and so on). Then they tried to wargame an engagement using laser guns programed with the same level of accuracy (dispersion), using volunteers. The result was that the re-creators achieved a far higher “kill rate” than that reported historically.

Basically, when you are actually in mortal danger on the proverbial “two way range”, your actual performance is way worse. Understandably so.

I recall an incident in the biography of a British soldier turned mercenary, of his experience in Rhodesia. An older rifle shooter, with trophies under his belt from Bisley etc. was criticizing the performance of modern soldiers compared to the long range marksmanship of the rifle association shooters. In response, he set up a scenario on the range, getting the shooter to fire on a figure target (rather than a bulls-eye), running progressively from firing point to firing point, and finally, when the older man started shooting, he yelled, screamed and shot up the ground around him with his own rifle. Needless to say, the results were not pretty, and his point was taken in by the older shooter.

Myself, I think that the Pareto distribution is at work here. To follow up what Alistair said, there is a small minority actually capable of thriving in the unnatural environment of combat. I commented before about the psychology of survival situations, and the distribution of reaction to same.

A minority panic, go catatonic and are completely useless. Another minority, are capable of staying calm, thinking and reasoning, and functioning more-or less normally. The middle of the curve responds to training and follows instructions/orders, to varying degrees of efficiency, but do not perform optimally. Hence the need for training and drills. This is the majority of people and the majority of soldiers.

There are some who can stay calm, control the adrenaline, and shoot calmly and accurately, BUT THEY ARE A MINORITY.

Interestingly, there is some literature out there to suggest that most people under stress get tunnel vision and time dilation, the frontal cortex being swamped by adrenaline/epinephrine. Those that perform best do not, they keep being able to use the frontal cortex. Interestingly, they also suffer less PTSD. A lot of Special Ops types fall into this group, and the discussion is currently a debate as to whether Special Forces selection selects people with this ability, of if the training inculcates this ability, especially since some of the brain chemicals concerned, increase with physical fitness and training.

There are lots of very competent and professional soldiers, who excel in peacetime, who will likely fail in wartime, simply because there are very few with the natural talent to do so. There are plenty of fit, driven, dedicated cyclists, but very few Lance Armstrongs.

I have a suspicion that proximity and danger have a lot to do with the relative degradation of performance over time. In the Boer war, if you were firing controlled volleys at long range, in a group, under orders and control of your superiors, you were in little actual danger. Or rather, the few enemy rounds cracking overhead did not SEEM to be really dangerous. On the other hand, in the jungles of Vietnam, or Malaysia, or the dense bush of Rhodesia, the enemy blasting rounds into your position form 20 yards away, and you by yourself, the nearest comrade 10 yards or more away, is a very different thing.

The other point to make, is do infantry smallarms really matter in the grand scheme of things? It seems to me that the infantry is either pinning the enemy in place so that support fire can take them out, or allowing a maneuver element to move to such a place as to make their position untenable. Alternatively, driving the enemy out, or occupying their former position, AFTER support fire has already killed, demoralized, driven them out, or at least, “suppressed” them.

Infantry tactics are far simpler than they used to be. We used to teach various tactical bounding and flanking movements, but back then, the infantry was fighting essentially other infantry. Today, we expect support fire of all kinds, including direct fire support from the 25mm on the vehicle that we deploy from, and direct frontal assault is more common.

I think Kirk has it right when he describes the German way of war, MG and crew served weapons centric, rather than the traditional rifleman centric doctrine that we still to a certain extent hold onto. If you watch video of engagements in Afghanistan, what you often see is infantry taking cover, and engaging the enemy, but not really attacking/assaulting, but rather locating and keeping them busy while the CAS arrives. In that context, does it really matter how “effective” and “accurate” our smallarms fire is, when most of the killing is done by aerial bombs?

Don’t get me started on Dupuy. He meant well, but oh gosh, what a mess from a data handling and hypothesis formation POV.

S’ok; no offense taken, mate; I value your perspectives and experience.

I came in cold to the programme as a wet-nosed graduate. The whole thing was run by an old-school engineer who had come across Marshall whilst trying to make sense of historical data which was definitely NOT behaving; it was supposed to supplement the trials data but looked nothing like it. Faced with a legion of Desk Officers defending their very expensive trials and models, he took the principled decision that it was all crap and went off to run his own stats based on the original war diaries, maps, casualty reports and survivor accounts.

Any individual action was messy; but once you had a few dozen statistical patterns emerged. Once you had a few hundred they became irrefutable. The MG were doing a disproportionate share of the defence killing. Not all. But at lot. There was also a big difference between the SAW class weapons and the crew-served MGs; more than raw firepower would suggest.

By now we had found Marshall. We looked at team and supervision effects. We had a team of historians crawling through the archives. We found guns that had Sgts or Officers in proximity fired more and seemed to kill more. Some people where doing a lot more than the others.

We looked at heroism awards; we found people who won heroism awards and their sections/crew went on to be much more effective killers. We then checked before the award; and found they were already good killers before the brass noticed. These people just seemed to be less phased by danger. A disproportionate number of them ended up dead, of course. But that indicated a strong link between participation / exposure and effectiveness.