When Boatner came in to replace Colson at Koje-do, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), he noticed that everyone there was wearing different uniforms:
“Fitzgeral, speaking of uniforms, why are there so many different kinds around?”
“General, you wouldn’t want your own headquarters wearing the same uniform as the troops!”
Boatner, who had been on Heartbreak Ridge, was speechless. But only for a moment. “Dammit, that’s exactly what I want! Furthermore, some of the troops are wearing side arms, some aren’t. Put everybody under arms.”
“Oh, please, General, don’t do that. You’ll be sorry.”
“Why?”
“There’ll be so many accidental discharges around here, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
“Goddamit!” the Bull roared. “Goddamit, if a soldier can’t handle his weapons, what the hell kind of outfit have we got? Put ‘em under arms!”
“General, I wish you’d reconsider —”
The summation of Boatner’s further remarks was No.
The level of discomfort that many American officers have with the troops actually being armed is… Interesting. And, it goes back a lot longer than many of us suppose.
And, again, it’s more evidence for my theory that most “soldiers” in the American forces are better described as “bureaucrats in uniform” rather than actual, y’know… Soldiers.
I’ve actually seen some of these types mentally freak out and go nearly catatonic upon the realization they were dealing with troops that had live ammo and weapons.
Give you another example–1985, I was in Germany. Our kaserne was identified as a target of the Rot Armee Faction because German Polizei raiding one of their safe houses found a set of maps and notes outlining our guard setup and all the details of our fences, gates, and other security precautions. It was pretty obvious they’d been casing us for months, and the description I got from our Battalion S2 NCOIC who’d actually seen the material, they had a better handle on what we were doing for security than we had–They had, for example, the names, addresses, and phone numbers for all of our civilian security officers that guarded the gates; things that we weren’t allowed to have due to contract provisions with the guard company.
You would think that this information would engender a certain amount of panic on the part of our leadership all the way up to V Corps commander. It kinda did, but at our level, all they did was take away our pick-mattock handles and issue rifles. Without ammo. Ammo for the guard force was held in the safe up in the Staff Duty Officer office, who was not required to remain on post, and who had the only key. Should there have ever been an instance where we needed to actually shoot someone, it would have meant calling the staff duty office on a landline, begging for ammo, having them figure out how to open the safe, and then somehow get it out to us in the midst of a terrorist attack. This during a period where we were an identified terrorist target…
Insane.
Probably were a lot of accidental discharges.
Lu An Li,
“Accidental discharges”? Sounds like natural selection to me.
It has been said that the gate guards at the Beirut barracks at the time of the deadly 1983 truck bombings were not able to stop the suicide bombers because they had rifles but no ammunition.
Of course, when Major Hasan went postal at Fort Bliss in 2009, it looked like he was one of very few armed soldiers on the base.
How many of the 25,000 National Guardsmen activated to the Swamp to ensure Biden’s swearing-in were actually issued ammunition? Seems like there is a long tradition of Kabuki Theater.
Kabuki theater is right, although I think it may be more along the lines of No.
It’s all about the forms, not the reality; smoke, not the fire.
The theory goes along the lines of what I’ve always termed “voodoo engineering”; you do what you do not because you understand how it works, but because someone told you that’s how you do it. Form; not substance.
The problem we have in the military isn’t so much that the military is fuxxored beyond recognition, but that the society which it draws upon is. You can’t recruit people with sense from a population which has abandoned reality.
You see it all over the place–Pragmatism and objective evaluation loses every time to wishful thinking and the diktat of ideology. The Marines ran careful tests to see what the effects were of adding women to combat arms; the results of those tests were simultaneously ignored, misinterpreted, and set aside. You look at them, and you think “WTF? How could they not see the issues…?”, but they don’t.
You could run the military with a little common sense and make allowances for having women integrated. Yet, they won’t do that, because ideology trumps all. Objective reality and the results of same? Something we studiously look aside from and ignore.
If the people we have running things were actually sane and observant of the reality around them, none of the things they’re doing would be done. Unfortunately, they’re living in their own worlds of delusion and wishful thinking, so here we are.
It’s gonna be an ugly awakening, when it comes.
Kirk: “You can’t recruit people with sense from a population which has abandoned reality.”
This brought back a memory which might seem apparently unrelated — but is probably a demonstration of that very point.
Some years ago on a long plane flight, I happened to find myself sitting next to a Canadian lady who turned out to be a scientist returning from a NATO (yes, NATO) conference on atmospheric physics.
She talked about the difficulty of finding competent graduate students to assist with research. The best experimentalists in her view were farm boys.
She ascribed the superior performance of farm boys to an upbringing in which they were used to looking at something complicated (like a combine harvester) which was not working, figuring out how it was intended to work, and then making it work again with the resources they had on hand — rather than waiting for several days for the manufacturer’s representative to get to the farm.
Oh well! Reality always wins in the end.
Jeff Bezos made the same point about spending summers on his grandfather’s ranch.
Kirk: “You can’t recruit people with sense from a population which has abandoned reality.”
This is all gas-lighting. It’s not that people don’t have sense it’s that they have attacked people so viciously that they keep their mouths shut or they bleat platitudes acceptable to their owners. But they don’t believe a word of this bullshit. The MAJORITY do not believe the bullshit.
Kirk: “I’ve actually seen some of these types mentally freak out and go nearly catatonic upon the realization they were dealing with troops that had live ammo and weapons.”
Continuing our one-fuckups-manship, I CAN beat that.
The W.VA NG unit we relieved on ECP duty in 06 had turned their weapons in, they just had the crew served that came with the ECP [Checkpoint folks]. Yes this ECP was ‘customer facing’. In Iraq, 2006, hostile village outside the gate. Yes attacks were a sporadic constant, daily really. In a lazy way.
Of course when your leadership are (1) women and (2) not present, it’s not their problem.
That’s real women in combat folks. They aren’t facing the enemy, they’re at a position of safety sitting with the other girrls writing up their awards.
I don’t even care about the rare ones who can cut it, or even the ones missing limbs; because they were silent when we were all being accused of being “a culture of rapists,” so I don’t mind if I broad brush them all as cowards and frauds.
Actually knitting up their awards works better.
Sam J.,
If this majority that “don’t believe a word of the bullshit” don’t ever actually do anyting about that, then what good is it? It’s like getting in a car with a drunk driver, watching him drive, and saying to yourself “Wow, he’s really, really drunk… He shouldn’t be driving…”, and then not doing a damn thing to stop him until he drives your stupid ass off a cliff. At that point, you’re effectively at one with the drunk, so what’s the point of saying anything, right?
“’Wow, he’s really, really drunk… He shouldn’t be driving…,’ and then not doing a damn thing to stop him until he drives your stupid ass off a cliff. At that point, you’re effectively at one with the drunk”
Good point and something to ask yourself because it’s not my people driving.
Ain’t mine, neither…
So, whose people are they?