by Tom Kratman
And what have we done, by this? We’ve conditioned the troops, utterly convinced them, that they and their leaders just aren't competent to fight.
There is a place for this: ONCE. The very first time. Ever. Or if a unit has had nearly one hundred percent turnover since the last one, which really ought never be allowed to happen. But after that, having shown how to do it, to keep on with the travesty has nothing but bad effects.
For that matter on site rehearsals generally suck most of the value from training. We justify this because the enemy, being gentlemen, always let us rehearse on his ground. Or something. Or how about giving the leader or commander the plan, rather than letting him develop his own from higher's plan…because he's just not competent...and never will be, since you won't let him even try.
My advice then is do it like war, or don't do it at all.
Doing it like war also means not establishing a second chain of command, called “safeties.” Why not? Because they are responsible. Being responsible they will take charge. They will give orders. There is little more dangerous than a troop on a live fire exercise getting orders from both his immediate leader and this other person who has taken charge of him. It confuses him. Confused troops do dumb things.
Get that? Having safeties, establishing a separate safety chain of command, is inherently unsafe.
So how do we do it?
First, do not establish that second chain of command. Do, however, task your evaluators to watch out for danger. Tell them that the only command they are permitted to give to the troops going through the exercise is a complete halt for everyone. “Stop! Cease Fire! Lock and clear!” Period.
VIII
If everything were to be discountenanced in
peace by which an accident might possibly occur,
soldiers would be greatly sinned against, since they
would be enfeebled and rendered inept for war, the
chances of losses being doubled at the same time.
—Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz,
The Nation in Arms
Axiom Thirteen: Safety is a combat multiplier; all the best safety publications, regulations, and bureaucrats say so. The problem is that it’s often – in practice it’s usually – a multiplier with a value of less than one.
A little less than half of our day is spent at night, or in other forms of limited visibility. Night has been the aide of the outmatched for millennia. Failure to be prepared to fight at night destroyed the Athenian expedition against Syracuse. And even if the more powerful party, as long as your enemy may resort to operating at night, you must be able to meet him.
Despite this, in a repetitive show of absolutely cutting edge, world class moral cowardice and unfitness for office, some years ago a succession of commanders taking their units through the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, decided against doing a night attack, because of the risk assessment. This lasted for about two years to my knowledge; it may have gone on longer.
Just think about the short-sightedness, careerist selfishness, poor judgment, and moral cowardice implicit in that. Then ask yourself just what the hell we select for in promoting senior officers.
Vignette Fourteen: Don't forget about luck, good and bad
The CG who made the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in Panama, unusually nuts – it had, though, always been a little strange – was named Leuer. Leuer’s contribution to safety was to require all the officers to put red dots on their watch faces: “Time Out For Safety.” If he was serious about it, none of us believed it. It was the kind of place where, if someone was shot on a live fire range, you didn’t stop training but just called in a “Dustoff” and kept going. Yes, really.
Most lieutenants simply stopped wearing a watch, in rebellion at what they saw as hypocrisy. They had no problem with the risks, mind you, only with the pretense that anyone cared about the risk.
After Leuer left he was replaced by Woerner. Woerner didn't really seem to fully understand what the 193rd was when he took over, so we got progressively nuttier and nuttier, which is to say progressively more disdainful of anything that so much as smacked of safety, without his understanding or realization of what was going on more or less behind his back.
So, one week, one of the platoon leaders in the company Hamilton was XO for ordered a metric buttload of demolitions, the study of which said platoon leader had taken as an elective, so it was said, at West Point. He trained the company on the classroom part, with heavy emphasis on Factor P, for Plenty. Then the company went to a place not all that far from Range 12, which was an abandoned major ammunition supply point. The commander sent Hamilton along to keep the platoon leader from doing anything too outrageous.
The only helmet on the range was Hamilton’s, under the theory that the most probable cause for a fatality (this was perhaps optimistic) would be a hangfire of sorts that went off while someone was checking out why the explosive failed to go boom, after the regulatory wait. Since Hamilton was the senior officer present, that was going to be him. Worst come to worst, he didn't want anyone to have to fill out any paperwork having to explain why his disembodied head wasn't in a helmet. The one vehicle was his M151 jeep, or given local pronunciation, “heap.”
After blowing up some small shit, the next event was to try to send a rather large tree into orbit. They started by using a shaped charge to blow a hole into the Earth underneath the tree. Then they start packing. In went one hundred and sixty-eight sticks of military dynamite. That was followed up with a couple of forty pounder cratering charges. Okay, maybe it was four or five. In went some TNT. Okay, it was a lot of TNT. Then they added a leetle touch of C4, for ambience. And they were ready to go.
Hamilton looked at his jeep. He looked at the base of the tree. This is a big tree, an easy twelve feet across, maybe even fifteen. It’s a big-assed tree, in any case. Hamilton looks up and up. Tall tree. Really tall. He told the platoon leader, "Hold up a minute," then – anticipating a nasty survey should the jeep be damaged – he told his driver to drive about four hundred meters away and listen for screams.
Then he told the platoon leader, “Okay, go ahead.”
Remember, his was the only helmet for miles.
With a beatific smile, the platoon leader squeezes the blasting machine and touches off the tree, which starts to rise. And rise. And rise. Actually, it looks like a leafy Saturn V heading for space. It’s really beautiful and, fortunately, when it stops rising and starts to fall it falls in the other direction.
Unfortunately, tons and tons of dirt and, oh, yes, rock come down. Miraculously, nobody gets hit or, at least, not seriously hit. There are, go figure, a few bruises here and there. Of injuries, though, that’s it. But about a quarter ton boulder lands not all that far from Hamilton, exactly where his jeep had been parked. No, not a few feet either way. Had he not had it moved, his driver would have been squashed like a bug.
Now, one can take several lessons from that. One is that it was incredibly stupid, from start to finish. It was. The second is that luck plays a tremendous role in human affairs. It does. And the third lesson was that Hamilton was never again, not even once, to be cavalier with any demo above the one pound level. Never.
Vignette Fifteen: Don't forget about luck, bad and good
It was SOP in Hamilton’s unit, the one he served as an Exec for, that Claymore mines, safety regs be damned, could be set off perfect well a meter or so in front of the firer, provided that sandbags – two or three or sometimes four of them, for the timid – were placed behind them to absorb the blast and the plastic fragments.
So the company is giving a demonstration of daisy chaining Claymores, linking them with det cord to set them all off, simultaneously with a single detonator, or “clacker.” There are targets set up along a berm a hundred meters or so from the bleachers whence the troops watch. There are also sandbags behind the claymores, which are perhaps fifty meters from the berm.
Along comes another officer, formerly of the same bat
talion but now, sadly, contaminated by Fort Sherman’s unrighteous ways.
“No, no, no. There’ll be none of that daisy chaining here,” insists he. “Move those Claymores to the other side of the berm.
Well, after some fruitless argument – fruitless because this defector of an officer owned the range – Hamilton gave in…with indefinable misgivings. So the whole bloody assembly was disassembled and the Claymores and sandbags were moved to the other side of the berm, with the targets being moved further downrange still. Then they were set off.
Now you have to picture this; for the first time in memory this company is actually doing something like following the rules. And, because they did, when the backblast, which is only limited, not eliminated, by the sandbags, picks up a stout rock, which it drives back against the earthen berm, turning said berm into a launch rail.
Up, up and away, goes the rock. Down, down, down, comes the rock. Right onto the knee of a medic, sitting the bleachers, watching the demonstration. Smash! Ouch! “Medic!”
So much for following the rules.
Vignette Sixteen: You want me to do what?
“I want a rolling barrage preceding the troops up the final objective.”
“Whew,” said Lieutenant Hamilton, “that’s a pretty tall order, boss.”
“Yeah, well, figure it out.”
“Yes, sir.” Crap! How do I do this?
In the event, what Hamilton did was think about the attributes of the systems available – 105mm M102 howitzers, 107mm heavy rifled mortars, and 81mm smoothbore mortars – to do what his battalion commander wanted, to walk a rolling barrage in front of the assault line.
Right off he tossed out the 81mm mortars. They were just not accurate enough. Being finned they were subject to derangement by winds. And quality control at the factory was probably not everything one might have wanted.
The 107mm rifled mortars were better. Within their range, on a windless day, they were about as accurate as a 105, though their trajectory was usually high enough that winds, if present, could move them around a little.
And then there were the 105s.
For the latter there were four attributes of importance, though it took some thought to identify them. The guns had lesser deviation error than range error. They could fire shells on delay fuse. They could be pre-fired, which is to say, pre-registered. They could use meteorological data to correct for any changes after they were registered. Most of this was also true of the 107mm mortars.
Right off, Hamilton made several decisions. One was that the mortars and the 105mm howitzers would set up to fire at right angles to the anticipated assault line, so that any deviation would move the guns right or left, as the troops faced, but not long or short, into their ranks. Moreover, the mortars would only fire on the final objective. The third requirement was that every round to be fired would be pre-registered. Fourth was that all guns would fire with delay fuse, which was tactically sound, even more visually impressive to the troops, and much, much safer.
In the event, it worked well. At a certain point in the exercise, the infantry company commanders going through the live fire would receive authority to fire the rolling barrage. They’d call for it and the guns would go through their dance, dropping rounds seventy-five to about one hundred and fifty meters ahead of the line. The delayed explosions lofted great quantities of dirt and rock skyward. The troops were impressed and the artillerymen had to be sent to the hospital to have their erections surgically reduced. Okay, I’m lying about the last part. But not by much.
Vignette Seventeen: Opportunity knocks but once
“Hey, sir, what do you want me to do with this?”
“This” was a dud 4.2 inch mortar round, held in the sergeant’s hands, that he’d carried from the half completed fighting position where it been uncovered, fortunately without going off. Hamilton nearly wets himself. You don’t, you just don’t, mess with duds.
Thinking, Oh, fuck, Hamilton turns the sergeant around and begins to guide him closer to the impact area to the north. It’s not far.
Says he, “Let's just put it on the other side of the lip of the OP line, shall we?" He then walks the sergeant, arm around the sergeant’s shoulder, to where he wants the round put down…gently.
Gay? Not at all. Hamilton just needed to make sure that a) the sergeant didn’t fall and b) that if the round went off – 4.2 inch was a little deadlier than a 105mm shell – he would not survive the experience. In any event, they did get it placed back on the ground ten or twelve feet down from the lip.
Then, thinks Hamilton, Aha, training opportunity. He tells the sergeant, “Go take apart one of those claymores and prime this thing for demolition.” Then he has the unit – actually two companies, training together – line up south of the lip, such that there was probably thirty or forty meters of dirt between them and the round. Nothing with any velocity can go to them directly, and anything that goes up, with come down with only terminal velocity, if that.
"Okay boys; heads down! This is what incoming feels like!" KAABOOOOMMM!
Appendix 1
Things we are not, never have been, and hopefully never will be serious about:
1. We have to be ready to go to war tomorrow!
Oh, really? Let me tell you what life would be like for an army totally dedicated to going to war tomorrow. Every CO would call the troops in, every day, at somewhere between midnight and 0230. They would then load all the vehicles, check shot records, run the boys (oh, and girls, too, of course) through JAG, etc. Ammunition would be taken from the bunkers, broken down and distributed (and then the clever and thoughtful commander would start the paperwork for the survey for the ammunition damaged).
Then, while waiting for flights to be arranged and ships and flat cars to show up, they’d send everyone home for one last chance at a little woopie with Mama (or Papa, I suppose). There would be no training to get better for going to war, someday, because, by God, the number one thing to do is to be ready to GO – that is the operative word, “Go,” not win, but “Go” – to war tomorrow.
Of course, we don’t do that. Nobody does. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever should. Everyone knows it’s silly and so pays it little more than lip service. Instead the “going” part is just one more mission, and often shunted to a low priority to allow time to train to win the fight once we get there.
Besides, jumping through our butts and improvising are among our greatest strengths.
2. It is completely impermissible and doubleplusungood ever to get a soldier injured or killed in training.
Again, oh really? Let me tell you what an Army would look like that never got a soldier killed or hurt in training. It would stay in the barracks. All training would be done on simulators…heavily cushioned simulators. The troops would never be allowed to take their weapons from the arms room. Foot marches and other physical training would be strictly forbidden, lest somebody have a heart attack. Parachute jumps for parachute units? “No, nay, never!”
Instead, we know everything we do carries risk and we accept that, even as senior cowards and frauds dishonestly pander to “enlightened” sentiment and say, “It is completely impermissible…”
We can’t say how many senior non-coms are going to have heart attacks on foot marches under heavy loads, but we know someone will. We can’t predict when a tank will catch fire, the fire suppression system fail, and a driver, trapped inside, will burn alive. But it has happened before and probably will again. We can’t say when the jump masters will screw up, put two people out opposite doors at the same time, and have those two jumpers smash into each other, before falling to their deaths. But that, too, has happened and, given an infinity of time and sufficient jumps, it will happen again. Or something just as bad will. Or an unpredictable wind will spring up and drag several troops to their deaths. Or dump them in trees, where one will hang and another be impaled. We can’t say when a track will drive off a bridge into the water, drowning the crew. But, boys and girls, it’s going to
happen.
I would further suggest that anyone who mouths the platitude opening this section, or any variant thereto, has thereby demonstrated dishonesty and morale cowardice sufficient to select them out of the armed forces. At the very least it should be a bar to promotion or selection for command.
3. Every Marine a rifleman.
A rifleman as someone who can shoot with a reasonable expectation of hitting a target, within the rifle’s effective range, where no one’s shooting back? Sure, this much of a rifleman the Marines can produce. So could the Army – so could the Andorran Army, if they had an army – if it chose to. But a rifleman actually morally and emotionally integrated into a unit capable of closing with and destroying the enemy, or repelling his assault by fire, close combat, and counterattack? One doubts. In fact, one rolls on the floor laughing. Oh, sure, there’s always the individual exception. Counting on individual exceptions is right up there with confusing hope and a plan.
This doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile to try to keep a combat mentality among one’s service support types. It is definitely worthwhile. What it means is, as the Sphinx told the Aussie, “Don’t expect too much.”
Appendix 2: Build your own targets
Training doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, stop in the theater of war. Rest is needed, of course, or the troops begin to morally and mentally disintegrate, but the biggest and most important rest troops pulled out of the line get is relief from danger and the stress danger brings. It is in those rests that new troops are best integrated, and best integrated by hard training with the old troops.