Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 186

Other sad facts I learned from 'Six Weeks': Artillery as the top killer, the hordes of shellshock cases decades later

--By 1917,
so many young
British officers had been killed that "most company commanders were not
more than twenty" years old.

--Despite the images of waves of soldiers being scythed down
by machine gun fire, artillery and mortar shells inflicted the majority (60
percent) of wounds in the British infantry in World War I. Bullets caused 35
percent. (I didn't see numbers on gas
casualties.)

--In 1938, some twenty years after the end of World War I,
there were still 120,000 former British soldiers receiving pensions or awards
for "shellshock" or other psychiatric disabilities -- that is, what he now call
severe PTSD.

--Finally, I read aloud to my wife this passage by a Royal Fusiliers
officer about dealing with a panicky soldier as they sheltered in a shell hole
during a German artillery barrage during the battle of Passchendaele:

I tried to reason with
the boy, but the more I talked top him the more distraught he became, until he
was almost screaming. 'I can't stay here! Let me go! I want my Mum!' So I
switched my tactics, called him a coward, threatened him with court martial and
slapped his face as hard as I could, several times. It had an extraordinary
effect. There was absolute silence in the shell-hole and then the corporal, who
was a much older man, said, ‘I think I can manage him now, sir.' Well, he took
that boy in his arms, just as if he was a small child, and when I crawled back
a little later to see if all was well, they were both lying there asleep and
the corporal still had his arms round the boy . . . .

Sure, introduce more rigor into the professional military education system -- but not by imitating civilian schools

[image error]

By Robert Goldich

Best Defense
department of military
education

I'd suggest that
letter grading is inappropriate for institutions like the war colleges, but that more
systematic evaluation is not.  

Letter grades were
not given at the interwar Command and General Staff School, but class rankings
based on percentages were, and I think something like that might be more
appropriate. I do know that there was a distinct but very visible
minority of students, military and civilian, at the National War College when I
was a student who just skated by, including contributing nothing to group
projects and letting others take up the slack. Some sort of more rigorous evaluation seems
to me to be indicated.

One thing I think
that any war college evaluation system needs to be very careful about is the
application of civilian academic standards and concepts to military students.
There is a fundamental and decisive difference between mid-career
military officers in a military institution and civilian graduate students.
While I am a big proponent of more civilian graduate education for
military officers, there are also a fair number of officers who might not excel
in a formal educational milieu who are nonetheless consummate military
professionals.

As Bob
Killebrew has pointed out numerous times, military knowledge is a distinct
and separate component of human disciplines of study, and should be able to
stand on its own.  We should not shoehorn military officers into civilian
shoes which do not fit.

Robert L.
Goldich retired from
the Congressional Research Service in 2005 as its senior
military manpower analyst. Currently he is consulting and drafting a book
on the history of conscription.

JP Morgan exec warns against being like Tommy R. Franks or Donald Rumsfeld when it comes to employing veterans

That is, getting there, or getting them employed, is only
half the fight. The next step is to keep them. Nathan Herman writes
that, "We
need to win the long war to successfully combat veteran unemployment. We
are currently experiencing veterans 'shock and awe' -- are we sufficiently
focused on what comes after a veteran is hired?"

In other words, he explains, "True success isn't just a measurement of
how many veterans we've hired but also by how many we've retained and
promoted."

Reasons to dislike rotations (Part II): Turning it over to fatties from the 1st ID

Speaking
of rotations, as we were yesterday,
Maj. Christopher Rowe, who was a company commander with the 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan in 2009-10, in
a recent Leavenworth interview recalled
the handoff to a 1st ID unit:

"I
think it was with 3rd Brigade, 1st ID, 1-26. When they came in, their heavy
weapons company commander replaced me there. That was kind of interesting too
because that was getting to be the time of Wanat.
They did not seem very well prepared at all. There were reports of guys from my
other platoon that was attached, Chosen Company, guys getting up into the watch
towers for night security, without night vision goggles (NVGs), without ammo in
their weapons, falling asleep in the guard towers; it was scary. Okay. We had
been in country and you go through the natural weight loss, hardening
progression but they were showing up fat and just -- how are you an Infantry
guy? It was very visible. The majority of us did not want to handoff to them.
We would have rather stayed there until another unit was ready, honestly."  

Another powerful line from 'Six Weeks'

From my
current reading:
British Capt. Alan
Hanbury-Sparrow, who served in World War I, called chemical weapons "the
Devil's breath." (That would be a great title for a history of chlorine and
mustard gas.) Soldiers wearing gas masks, he wrote, looked like "imbecile
frogs" -- I guess especially in the green haze of chlorine.

 

Liberal academic joins Navy reserve, stuns & puzzles several faculty colleagues

By Eric Shuck

Best Defense department of AVF issues

Two years ago, I was happily leading the life of a dilettante economics
professor, spending a month roaming across southern England and western France
with 14 economics majors. Hey -- it's a tough gig, but someone has to do
it. And then came a phone call. Not just any call -- THE call.
The call where I stopped being Dr. Schuck and instantly transformed to LT
Schuck, SC, USNR. It was 23 January 2010, and I can still tell you exactly
where I was (a lovely little bistro named L'Auberge
de la Reine Blanche on the Ile de St Louis) and what I was doing (enjoying
the last of my tarte tatin).
Everything after that point is a blur -- heading home, telling my family,
rearranging my classes for the spring and fall, training to deploy and
ultimately spending the better part of a foot fungus filled year coastwatching
in Kuwait.



The past is prologue, and that is my past. Here is my present. I've
been home for almost a year, and yet I still do not quite fit in. I
wander around a campus both achingly familiar and hauntingly distant. I
am back where I started, but it is not always clear if I am back where I belong.
It's hard. But stating that is not enough. I am, after all,
an academic. I cannot help but try to sort this all out. Rather
obviously, I am different from when I left. Being recalled to active duty
and mobilizing was a crucible event. It will, for the rest of my days,
mark a coda in my life, mark the defining point of 'before' and 'after'.
No one else around me has that. More critically, no one else around
me has EVER had that. Where I have been and what I have done is simply
completely beyond their scope of comprehension. Most of the time this
manifests in an unfortunate but typically well-meaning ignorance. When
other professors talk about my deployment, they either describe it as if I had
the worst sabbatical ever or as if I taught in some horribly misguided semester
at sea. They simply cannot bring themselves to say -- or to acknowledge --
that one of their own went to war. Such things are simply not dreamt of
in their philosophies.



Nine years ago I joined the Navy Reserve for one simple, clarion reason: because
people like me don't. I found -- and find -- that fact to be utterly
abhorrent. So, much to my wife's rather pronounced but mercifully
understanding displeasure, I instituted my own personal one-man draft. I
have never regretted it. Not for an instant. Make no mistake -- I am
not some Fox News watching Red State zealot. I'm a Subaru-driving,
green-tea drinking, registered Democrat, college professor from Oregon. To
say I stand out in the military is a bit of an understatement. But I
serve with the same honor, courage and commitment that all sailors show and I
do it because I love my country and I love the Navy. Simply put, this is
a duty I must fulfill.



Unfortunately, few people feel this way, and the AVF makes it all the easier
for them to do so. Under the AVF, the military is a job for 'other'
people (and at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, in the context of a
college campus 'other people' means non-upper/middle class people).
That's not good. It's corrosive to our society. Yet it is the
corrosive effects on the military itself that are most worrisome. It
allows the military to adopt a culture and identity that is distinctly
different from the society it defends. For the record, I do not call
myself a 'warfighter' or speak of a 'warrior ethos'. I'm a logistics
officer, and a part-time one to boot. Faux-Spartan affectations grow in
the military, however, because they enable the military to justify its distance
from the rest of society not as a failure of society but as a sign of elitism.
Civilian society encourages the creation of a 'warrior caste' because it
frees them of the guilt of not serving. That needs to stop. So
while as an economist I fully recognize that there would be a loss in
productivity by moving from an AVF to an at least partially conscripted force,
any losses in efficiency would be more than offset by gains in equity within
society. And if we hold true to the idea that 'all... are created equal',
does that not have some weight?

In short, I
agree with you: Even as a volunteer in the AVF, I believe the AVF era
should end.

Eric Shuck is a
professor of economics at Linfield College in Oregon, where he specializes in
natural resources and water usage.

Comment of the day: Thinking seriously about a whole new approach to rotations

The other day Butch Bracknell posted this comment, below. I think something like he proposes makes a lot of sense. Sure, doing it this way might be less "fair" to the entire officer corps. But what do you want -- to be equitable or to win? Wars should be fought for the nation’s interests, not for those of officers and their careers:

The rotations problem has been intractable but could be solved with a sea change in the way we've attacked the problem. We should have built a command there and sent officers and key leaders on 3 year PCS tours, with incentives to stay for year 4. We would have had to PCS families to an intermediate location like Turkey, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain. We'd let officers and key leaders go in for 3 months and out for 2 weeks on UNCHARGED leave, with no cell phones or email. Rinse and repeat. O-5 and O-6 command tours would be for 3 years. There would be no de facto requirement to rotate everyone thru the war as a career check in the box.

Commanders would rotate in, serve, and rotate out, then rotate in again to the SAME battlespace. Would this cut down on command opportunities? Yes. All the more incentive to rise above your peers if you really want command. We've talked a lot about the value of relationships with HN forces and political leaders, but we don't show we value it through our personnel policies. Our personnel policies look a lot like they did before the wars started and haven't kept pace, because our senior leaders haven't required them to morph in response to the operational demand signal.

The higher education hall of shame

Here are the for-profit schools kicked
out by Student Veterans of America. (And hats
off to VA for blogging
about them.):

SCHOOL LIST OF REVOKED CHAPTERS

ALLIED AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

ANTHEM COLLEGE-ONLINE

ARGOSY UNIVERSITY-ONLINE

ARGOSY UNIVERSITY-SAN BERNARDINO

ART INSTITUTE OF CALIFORNIA-ORANGE COUNTY

ART INSTITUTE OF CALIFORNIA-SACRAMENTO

ART INSTITUTE OF MICHIGAN

ART INSTITUTE OF NEW YORK CITY

ART INSTITUTE OF PITTSBURGH

ART INSTITUTE OF PITTSBURGH-ONLINE

ART INSTITUTE OF WASHINGTON

ART INSTITUTES INTERNATIONAL-KANSAS CITY

ASHWORTH COLLEGE

BROWN MACKIE COLLEGE-AKRON

DEVRY UNIVERSITY-ORLANDO SOUTH

ECPI COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY-INNSBROOK

ECPI COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY-RALEIGH

ECPI COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY-RICHMOND

EX'PRESSION COLLEGE FOR DIGITAL ARTS

FASHION INSTITUTE OF DESIGN & MERCHANDISING

ITT TECHNICAL INSTITUTE-SOUTH BEND

ITT TECHNICAL INSTITUTE-SPRINGFIELD

ITT TECHNICAL INSTITUTE-STRONGSVILLE

MEDICAL CAREERS INSTITUTE

SOUTH UNIVERSITY-ALABAMA

SOUTH UNIVERSITY-GEORGIA

 

It's an odd world after all

One of Sudan's "lost boys" is now a sergeant
with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. Peter Kuch remembered about
his early life in Sudan that after his village was attacked, he hid by day and
walked by night and over the course of many months, made it to Kenya. I bet
Fort Benning seemed easy after that.

It reminds me of a Marine I met who was had been an illegal
immigrant from Belize. When he joined the Marines he was amazed that not only
did he get good food and a clean bed, he also got paid. On the downside, he had
thought they worked at Sea World. 

Don't just talk about troubled vets, do something responsible about them

By Kayla Williams

Best Defense guest columnist

Rising suicide rates among military personnel and veterans
have received a great deal of attention from the media, advocacy organizations,
and pundits. While I appreciate the efforts to raise awareness and address the
problem, I am gravely concerned about the tone and method of much of this
coverage, some of which reminds me of Mrs. Lovejoy on The Simpsons, flinging her hand to her forehead and gasping
"Won't somebody think of the children?!" without providing solutions.

Rather than simply urging DoD and VA to do "something" or
"more," we should push for specific changes like those identified by CNAS in Losing the Battle  and increased use of evidence-based programs
such as those identified in the RAND study The War Within.

The media should acknowledge their responsibility to cover
military and veteran suicides carefully. There is a proven "contagion effect"
for suicide, and there are widely available recommendations
for journalists to follow in order to reduce imitations and encourage
help-seeking. Unfortunately, most
coverage does not follow those recommendations. An article
in Stars and Stripes last week is, in
my opinion, an egregious example of this -- it is irresponsible and hypocritical
to note that VA failed to provide the hotline number to someone in crisis while not providing it!* Every article
on military and veteran suicide should feature the crisis line, 800-273-TALK (veterans press 1).
Advocates who go on TV to talk about military and veteran suicides should
insist that it be included on-screen and mention it at least once. If you are
active in this community and don't have the number memorized, you are wrong.

I certainly don't hold advocates or the media uniquely
responsible. DoD and VA have a long way to go in improving their response to
high suicide rates, even though they are making
progress. However, this problem is too big for DoD or VA to address alone.
I know how powerful the feelings
of desperation can be, and it's time for all of us to come together to act,
rather than simply calling for someone else to do something. If you hear from
or know of a veteran who is suicidal, point them toward the right resources --
or call the hotline yourself and get them help. Change should start with each
of us -- and advocates, journalists, pundits, and bloggers must be aware that by ignoring available recommendations, they can
actually make the problem worse
rather than better. Learn the recommendations on how to cover suicide
responsibly. Follow them. Lives depend on it.

Kayla Williams is
author of Love
My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army .

*When I called @LeoShane out on this via Twitter recently,
he responded, "It's going in print that way, and we're having a little trouble
with the web layout. But all the resources will be up there." At the time of
this writing, neither a list or resources nor the crisis line had been
added to the online version.