We're in war we shouldn't be in. Shouldn't have gone in. The sooner we're out, the better. This is just another reason why.

So are we in a Catch-22, where short deployments cause too much churn for COIN operations to be successful, while longer deployments cause too much damage to the troops for COIN operations to be successful?

What it means is that you don't put yourself in situations where you have to conduct significant COIN operations for longer than 7 months. Which is a pretty damn good rule just generally speaking.

I wonder what the learning curve for counter-resistance operations is.

I don't think anyone in the real military (who is realistic) actually plans to get into a situation where they would be doing COIN for longer than 7 months.

This problem stems from the civilians at the Pentagon - like our little buddy Rummy and his minions.

I'd love to see some photos of the soldiers who are "literally green with envy."

Iwas in ko Pha Ngan in Thailand a few years back and I met a Lao woman who owned a bar there. It's very unusual for a Lao woman in Thailand to have that kind of money, so I asked her how she got it. It turns out that she joined the Royal Lao Army in 1967. She fought eight years of straight combat duty until her side lost. Then she ended up on a refugee camp for two months. She talked her way out of the refugee camp by agreeing to join the Thai Army for ten years. She was immediately sent into combat in Cambodia, first fighting against the Khmer Rouge and then fighting against the Vietnamese occupation. At the end of her contract, she was eligible for Thai citizenship, but not a military pension. The Thai offered her a pension if she would stay in the Army until the Vietnamese were defeated. So she fought for another three years. This woman fought 21 years of straight combat duty, interrupted only by a two month stay in one of the world's most brutal refugee camps. And she was very glad she did.

I tell this story not to denigrate our troops but to give an idea of what some soldiers are expected to do. And there are Americans who have done similar tours. In Hue, Vietnam I met a guy whose father was in the US Navy and fought for 25 years in Vietnam before being killed by a sniper. That soldier never once saw America after setting foot in Vietnam in 1950. And he died only months before the fighting stopped.

I'll add that I don't think we should subject our troops to the kinds of experiences noted above. But some soldiers seem comfortable with it.

Technically, no. You could meet both objectives -- shorter tours with units in country long enough to build the relationships with locals essential to counterinsurgency -- by assigning tours to individual soldiers rather than entire units. Some officers and senior enlisted personnel might need to serve longer tours, because most of the relationships we'd be trying to maintain would be with them. But the GIs and Marines who provide most of the ground forces' combat power could rotate out more frequently.

The problem, of course, is that the Army and Marines stopped operating like that after Vietnam, for pretty good reasons, one of which was that protracted occupation of an Arab country was not seen to be part of our military future. Units go in, units go out, because if maintaining combat effectiveness is the top priority keeping units together is the best way to address it. Once the Iraq adventure has ended, this will still probably be the best way to handle deployments; it just has certain disadvantages for this particular war.

I haven't seen any explanations how the Army is going to cut tours from 15 months to 12, and at the same time will "pause" in withdrawing troops.

Wouldn't that mean that a sizable number of troops now at home will be headed out for another tour sooner than planned?

"I don't think anyone in the real military (who is realistic) actually plans to get into a situation where they would be doing COIN for longer than 7 months."

Surely the *absolute* reverse. Everyone knows that a successful counter-insurgency campaign is going to take years, not months. Not that there are many successes.

I'll add that I don't think we should subject our troops to the kinds of experiences noted above. But some soldiers seem comfortable with it.

My question is whether those particular soldiers who are comfortable in a war zone are effective in winning hearts and minds, or are they the ones that are effective killers?

(Disclaimer - I did my 20 in the Army and do not use "killer" to denigrate, but rather in accepting there are people who have skills and temperament for combat that I do not. But I don't think we can kill our way to victory in Iraq.)

But I thought that they implemented the "Surge" by extending deployments to 15 months, and that the return to 12-month deployments was always the plan.

I'd love to see some photos of the soldiers who are "literally green with envy.

The only way is if they're wearing jungle camo face paint, which I really hope they're not doing because, well, they're in the eff-ing desert.

"My question is whether those particular soldiers who are comfortable in a war zone are effective in winning hearts and minds, or are they the ones that are effective killers?"

Well, the American soldier married a Vietnamese woman, learned to speak fluent Vietnamese, and raised a family in Hue. So he probably did win more than a few hearts and minds. By the accounts of his son, that soldier basically "went native" and felt that he was fighting for the Vietnamese and not the Americans. His primary motive for staying in Vietnam was to be with the family he had started there. Vietnam had become his home, and he was willing to fight for it.

The Lao soldier is certainly a different story. She became a true mercenary once she joined the Thai Army. And she readily admitted to disliking the Cambodians. To her, her service was a job that would allow her to escape the refugee camp and crushing poverty. So I'd put her in the "effective killer" category. Although one of her jobs in the Thai Army was translation. She was fluent in Lao, Thai, Khmer, Mandarin, French, and English. She worked a lot with American "advisers" who were giving combat advice to Thai soldiers (she had worked with similar advisers in Laos). They needed translators, as you might expect, and she was a good one because she could talk to the Cambodian volunteers as well. She also helped in the translation of intercepted Chinese intelligence (and later with translating conversations between Chinese and American soldiers, who had become allies). But winning hearts and minds was never her job, it I don't think she would have been good at it.

Holy mother of Jeebus.

OK, but here's a question for Phil: are 7-month tours consistent with the learning-curve requirements of counterinsurgency? I've heard frequently that one of our problems in Iraq, even with 12-month tours, has been the constant churn of new troops and new commanders into an area, which requires several months after each rotation to build back the trust and relationships put in place by the previous unit.

Try not to let your Repug show to much Kevin, along with you're excited glee.

Why do Repugs say, family, God and Country?

Why not remove the family part? Which Kevin, equates into non-family time for those all volunteer, stupid people in Iraq. I guess we haven’t seen enough suicide by members of military already. What is the Repugs need for family? And as if we haven’t seen enough suicide by members of military already, what do Repugs need with family. Nothin, so why have combat tours at all. You sign up, you fight till you die.

I'm suprised Bush didn't think of it first.

The whole rationale for the 15months was that the home interval was 12 months -rest plus retraining, and they didn't have enough soldiers for 12/12, so they did 15/12. so unless they cut the home phase back -or get more troops, or use fewer troops, the numbers won't add up.

This is all the usual runaround, searching for better strategy, when what we need to do is ask "Do we want to be an imperialist power?". If the country decides it really does, then it will have to find a way to recruit and pay for a big enough army to do that.

The problem has been we want to be imperialist, but not admit it to our own people. The rest of the world understands that we have become imperialist -but Joe Sixpack still believes our own propaganda. It is time to end the deception.

Why don't they just send half a platoon home every 6 months, so the new people have more experienced personnel around them when they come it to replace the half of the platoon that left, and can therefore get better training- can get a better idea more quickly of how to interact with the Iraqi allies- before the other half of the platoon gets its turn to leave.

Then the Iraqis will be less likely to encounter personnel who are very new to the area, too, because any group of troops going through their neighborhoods will tend to include 50% older people as opposed to a bunch of fresh faces.

Anyway, the problem of the "learning curve" for counter-insurgency operations may be exagerrated, at least in a theater like Iraq, where operations aren't quite as hot as say, Vietnam was. It may really be worth it (because of the "combat ineefective"ness problem) just to send troops home more often anyway, even if their education about working in Iraq suffers a little.

Also, the idea that the new rotation rule wasn't going to apply until August sounded to me like pretty cold comfort to those who are already there who it won't help.

August is over three months away!!

It's a sop, plus an FU. It won't take effect until the next President is in place. It's pushing poop under the carpet until after November, pure and simple ...

I think the other commenters are missing something: why is the relationship between Iraqis and Americans being built by soldiers? We're not in a war in Iraq, we're in an occupation.

The trust-based relationships should be built by a civilian occupying authority that wouldn't need to be pulled out every six months due to combat stress.

This isn't happening because the CPA are pussies and won't venture out of the Green Zone, leaving army officers to function as both governors and enforcers of colonial decree.

Historian Gwynne Dyer wrote in 'War': "The U.S. Army concluded during World War II that almost every soldier, if he escaped death or wounds, would break down after 200 to 240 'combat days'; the British, who rotated their troops out of the front line more often, reckoned 400 days, but they agreed that breakdown was inevitable."

I'd expect someone in the Army knows how a combat day in Iraq compares to a combat day in WWII. Many of our troops must be well beyond 240 days. The idea that soldiers can't keep this up seems reasonable. Something needs to change.

are 7-month tours consistent with the learning-curve requirements of counterinsurgency?

Kevin, every time I come here you say something even more fucking stupid then before. That one has to be one of the toppers.
Listen, pal, the solution is easy! Before we send them over, have the soldiers spend a couple of months in a government-supported criminal gang in a third-world country. That's all the training they need, the rest comes natural.
Are you even gonna be embarrassed when our "requirements of counterinsurgency" turn out to be war crimes? like the "enhanced interrogations".

Get a clue Kev! What something actually turns out to be is not necessarily the same as the name given it.

big Tom wrote: "This is all the usual runaround, searching for better strategy, when what we need to do is ask 'Do we want to be an imperialist power?'"

Most of the discussion of "counter-insurgency" strategies and tactics by "sensible liberal" armchair generals such as Kevin and many commenters on this blog assumes as a starting point that the US is an imperialist power and is going to be one for the foreseeable future, and will thus have an ongoing need to wage "counter-insurgency" wars of occupation all over the world for decades to come.

The discussion then moves on to the most effective way to do this, and the harshest criticism of Rumsfeld and his ilk from the "sensible liberals" is of the failure of his tactics and strategies to accomplish a successful counter-insurgent, imperialist occupation. And the central focus becomes how to build and maintain a military machine that can successfully occupy and put down "insurgencies" in countries all over the world, whenever "needed" to protect "US interests".

US corporate-militarist imperialism in the 21st century is not only a project of the Bushes and Cheneys of the world -- it is dependent on the acquiescence of, and enabling from, the so-called "liberal" sectors of the political establishment.

And have no doubt, those folks know what they are doing -- just as they knew what they were doing when they supported Bush's invasion of Iraq in the first place in spite of knowing that Bush's given reasons for it were lies.

"I've heard frequently that one of our problems in Iraq, even with 12-month tours, has been the constant churn of new troops and new commanders into an area, which requires several months after each rotation to build back the trust and relationships put in place by the previous unit" -KD

Exactly, thats why even the "well intended" occupation also fails in the end (not that Bush/co ever had any good intentions, nevertheless, I am certain some commanders on the ground over there do).

Until fairly recently, say the last 50 years or so, armies deployed for the duration. You would have to say that the Roman legions, for instance, were spectacularly successful in destroying local resistance in France and Germany and then garrisoning them for very long periods of time. One suspects that many legionnaires simply cashiered out and settled permanently in these outposts of empire. The other side of the coin is that the locals gained continuous years of experience in dealing with the conquerors. Short terms of deployment keep alive the mythology of the citizen soldiery but its unlikely that they add to military effectiveness. After all, military occupation, much like local policing, relies on snitches. And its really difficult to cultivate snitches when you don't speak the language and have no vested interest in ever learning how to nor the time to do it well. This may ultimately become an argument in favor of neutron weapons I guess. Best just stop committing war crimes by invading sovereign states without cause or authority. The locals will tend to want to kill you.

Bush hasn't cut anyones' combat tour from 15 to 12 months. It's just more propaganda.

Bush's order doesn't affect anyone currently in combat, and won't take effect until August 2008. Bush will be long gone 12 months later, in August 2009, when this order first takes effect.

So, Bush is just kicking this can down the road for the next president to deal with, same as his war in Iraq.

OK, but here's a question for Phil: are 7-month tours consistent with the learning-curve requirements of counterinsurgency? I've heard frequently that one of our problems in Iraq, even with 12-month tours, has been the constant churn of new troops and new commanders into an area, which requires several months after each rotation to build back the trust and relationships put in place by the previous unit. So are we in a Catch-22, where short deployments cause too much churn for COIN operations to be successful, while longer deployments cause too much troop stress for COIN operations to be successful?

There's a school of thought that says we are overreacting to the need to organize the military as a counterinsurgency force. Iraq is clearly not the war we should ever try to fight again--Iraq is nation building on steroids and the people we are trying to build the nation for are used to corruption and dictatorship. There is no successful way to drop a 140,000 man Army into that situation and expect the outcome to be anything other than a painful lesson in humility.

Humility in that--the war is FIVE YEARS OLD. Twenty-five thousand irregular insurgents have fought us to a standstill. They control territory. They have negotiated with us and some of the insurgents have come over to our side, hence the number opposed to us keeps changing. Some have actually been swept up into the government, like the Badr Corps. Some still oppose us in different parts of the country.

The question is not the length of the tour--the question is, should there even BE a tour?

The one year thing is left over from shitty duties the Army has put on its troops. Germany--two years if you're alone, three with your family, just like Hawaii, Alaska, England, etc--the "OCONUS tours you WANT." The OCONUS tour you DON'T want is Korea. Strides have been made--I left Camp Humphreys as the big building boom was kicking in. They were building actual apartments you could live in with your family. The problem was, they looked out over rice paddies that were fertilized with human waste at that magical time of year. Ah, the pleasant memories...

Three days of intense combat will grind a person down. Several hundred days of it are maddening--this is why mental health issues and PTSD are through the roof.

If the next fight is another Iraq, goodbye to a volunteer Army. Goodbye to a professionalized, educated military. We won't have one--period. We'll have a foreign legion if things continue, populated by the illiterate and the non-native speakers. I kid you not--they are trying to launch something called Future Combat Systems and one thing they don't realize--marginal soldiers who don't have high school diplomas aren't exactly going to be able to operate a multi-million dollar wireless networked system without a serious amount of remedial education and instruction.

But "tour length" is a question we shouldn't even be asking, because the fight itself is wiping out our best troops and leaving us hollow and vulnerable.

Most of the discussion of "counter-insurgency" strategies and tactics by "sensible liberal" armchair generals such as Kevin and many commenters on this blog

To respond to this and whoever it was responding to:

We're in Iraq now, and there are plenty of people in Iraq who are violent bad guys by any definition, and those are by and large the people we're fighting there. So long as we're there, we can either combat these guys or do nothing. As long as we're squatting our fat ass down on their country, it's reasonable for us to make ourselves useful by taking some of these guys out. And of course we don't want our own soldiers to be killed.

Also, I guess the term "armchair generals" was sort of beside the point, but I'd just like to remind everybody that this isn't rocket science. Just like we opine on these blogs on a host of issues we're inexpert on, we can learn about and try to think up new ideas on military matters, and since we're very smart people, we're likely to have some very good ideas. I have no doubt, for example, that if you replaced the highest military commanders of the US military with a bunch of elite ACLU lawyers and brilliant liberals scientists (after giving them education on the military) the lawyers and scientists would end up organizing and running a much more effective military, just because they'd be so much smarter than your average guy-who-is-only-most-fascinated-by-military-exploits. It's not really hard to figure out military questions-- like anything else, they're just different kind of questions that take some learning about and thinking about to become accustomed to, to get the knack of, if you haven't really thought of them before. I don't mean to downplay all that's been said about war being hell and about taking the cost of war seriously, all of which are valid points- but which shouldn't, of themselves, discourage capabale minds from thinking that they can productively think about war. Regular people think up goods ideas that are used by all kinds of industries all the time, and at a certain level, understanding war really is like understanding a game, like chess. Granted, it's a little more complicated than that, but most individuals who have to think about war only have to think about a smaller part of the problem of war-making at a time, anyway-- that is, we have for example many (and many ranks of) tank commanders and operators; it's not as if every officer in the military is charged with thinking about every problem in the military, and then the all vote by Internet, or something.

If we involve ourselves in thinking about the military more instead of leaving it to the politicized, career military fanatics, we'll democratize the way our nation looks at the military, take away its use as a conservative propaganda tool, and lessen the possibility that the military will ever be abused in any other way for conservative military purposes.

What I am wondering is whether Defense Secretary Robert Gates, when he was selling cluster bombs to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s, as noted in this affidavit, knew that two decades later that he would be complicit in hanging him and sending 4,000 soldiers to die in Iraq for some idiotic lie about WMDs?? Ya think?

Granted, it's a little more complicated than that, but most individuals who have to think about war only have to think about a smaller part of the problem of war-making at a time, anyway-- that is, we have for example many (and many ranks of) tank commanders and operators; it's not as if every officer in the military is charged with thinking about every problem in the military, and then the all vote by Internet, or something.

Point being, if you only have to think about the smidgen of tank-warfare you're involved in, and, even more specifically, the specific duty you're tasked with invlving tank warfare that's in front of your face, it doesn't require you to be some kind of ultra-special, ultra-trained person who can automatically spot all sorts of repercussions for the total war effort. Fact is, there may not be any. It's realistic for armchair generals to be able to think about simple sorts of problems that don't require a lot of specific knowledge besides the relevant considerations that are reported by the military to newspaper reporters.

Another thing I wanted to say is that people may not notice the problem about "combat ineffectiveness" because it's a little hard to appreciate from the sidelines. The fact is that for people on the sidelines, unless we take an effort to understand the reality of war, a lot of our conceptions of war our governed by fondly-held myths.

Here's how this may apply to people trying to understand how troops degrade after months of combat duty: A lot of guys always want to think that they're going to be like Bruce Willis in Die Hard if they ever get into a really violent situation. But what they may not appreciate is that there is a wide variation to people's personal psychologies, and consequently to their toleration of combat. That translates into, just hypothetically, only maybe 20% of guys can really reminas effective even after a couple months of combat, but 20% get really bugged out, inwardly depressed, or otherwise demoralized after very little combat. And then there is a whole range in between of guys who you don't know when they're going to snap.

So, you may have your fantasy that 80% of guys are "real men" who can take as much constanst-combat as anybody can dish out, but the fact is that maybe there are only a few nutty guys out there who can really adapt to that kind of situation and accept it as their new reality, and that everybody else kind of gets worn out after a while by constantly being jumpy- by constantly realizing they may get shot or blown up at any minute, and they may have to spend the rest of their life as a cripple! If you think you're stressed or on pins and needles about people who gossip about you at work, about a pending divorce, or about money troubles-- imagine having to walk down the street every day under the realistic fear that someone is going to hurt you, almost no matter where you go! It's totally understandable they most people can't adapt- they don't want to get hurt, they want to go home and have a nice life. So they stay jumpy, and it takes its psychological toll on them, sooner or later.

Basically, being a cop takes years to be really good at, but new recruits keep getting fit into the current process. The army is not a police force and is not designed to be a police force. The problems are policing in nature, even with heavy weapons fire.

Swan: Why don't they just send half a platoon home every 6 months...

The reason is called, among other things, unit integrity or unit cohesion. You tend to work better with people you've trained, worked and fought with. In short, you work better with people you know and trust. As much as some might like to think otherwise, soldiers are not interchangeable cogs.

Swan: I have no doubt, for example, that if you replaced the highest military commanders of the US military with a bunch of elite ACLU lawyers and brilliant liberals scientists...

There is little to commend many in command of our military. However, your stupidity and ignorance make them look like giants. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and STFU.

has407 wrote:

The reason is called, among other things, unit integrity or unit cohesion. You tend to work better with people you've trained, worked and fought with. In short, you work better with people you know and trust. As much as some might like to think otherwise, soldiers are not interchangeable cogs.

I'm sure that's the general policy, but policies of militaries do not always stay the same. There could be specific circumstances in which some of the benefits of unit cohesion yield to other considerations, such as training / keeping minimally experienced personnel within operating combat platoons where they're most needed.

Commenter at 12:15 wrote:

However, your stupidity and ignorance make them look like giants.

What makes you say that? You didn't provide any reason why I'm wrong, you just called names.

Probably you did that because all the reasons are on my side: history and experience have shown that a smarter soldier is a better soldier (that's probably why, until the recent trouble attracting recruits, our military adopted minimum educational standards, preferring high school graduation as a default requirement to enlist).

Napoleon was not a better commander because he was plumb lucky. He was a more successful commander because he was a smart little guy who did his homework.

Greater intelligence = a greater ability to retain knowledge = a more immediate understanding and command of a military situation. Great military leadership does not take some ephemeral, mythical quality all macho idiots wish they had alone- it takes brains. Read the history of any war or any military operation and you'll be surprised at the cleverness and brainpower that was employed in the quest to win.

Your comment is insulting to me, to great military achievers, to our military's policy-makers, to our country, and to our troops.

Yes, but this just tells us what we already knew: counterinsurgency wars are unwinnable.

Assholery today, assholery tomorrow, assholery forever.

Kevin, Are you assuming that COIN is going to work? That the US is going to occupy a country and they are going to accept it? The Irish fought the Brits for centuries.

We need to withdraw our troops and let them have their bloody civil war.

Bush is just afraid that the winner will nationalize all the foreign oil companies.

Geez Kev, think about what you wrote, I mean, pull the beanie hat out of the closet, take off a couple of quiet minutes to sit in a corner and really, really, think about what you wrote.

Counter insurgency.

WFT.

WFT, are you concerned about our military getting to be specialists in counter insurgency.

The only people who NEED counter insurgency are those that are occupying anothers country.

Sit back and think about that again. I know you were all for the Great IraQ Adventure, but you confess to have wisened up.

Think about it, seriously.

Why would any rational person leading OUR country get involved in a situation where counter insurgency was necessary?

Exactly, they wouldn't. The time honored tradition in America is to buy whatever foreign cooperation is needed. It worked with Iran in 1980, it worked with Saddam in the 1980's, it worked with the Sunni's last fall. It works.

Pull it out, quit acting like a winger, and don't let it happen again.

PS: The Great IraQ Adventure needs to be ended ASAP. We need to find a way to minimize the damage as we exit stage left. We are a resourceful country, obviously with lots of cash to burn, and we could figure a way to get it done.

IF WE WANTED TO.

The reason is called, among other things, unit integrity or unit cohesion. You tend to work better with people you've trained, worked and fought with.

That one always cracks me up. Ever since the submarine was invented, its crew has been rotated piecemeal, a few men at a time. There was never a single time that we returned from sea that a handful of men did not transfer off the ship and some new men come aboard, and always some of them were straight from submarine school.

And don't tell me that men in combat need to be more highly trained, or more closely knit, or need to have more trust in each other than a submarine crew. Ever been at 400ft depth and have the fire alarm sound?

The mad soldier/sailor of Hue is a bullshit story. Nobody is deployed for 25 years! No doubt an 'ex' serviceman who went native.

Rotation tours for individuals, not units, were introduced during the Korean War—nine months for combat, twelve months for rear echelon. Vietnam had, I believe, a 12-15 policy.

Sorry about Phil. I ignore anything that comes from Pravda on the Potomac (formerly known as the Washington Post). There is no journalism there any more; just stenographers.

Probably you did that because all the reasons are on my side: history and experience have shown that a smarter soldier is a better soldier (that's probably why, until the recent trouble attracting recruits, our military adopted minimum educational standards, preferring high school graduation as a default requirement to enlist).

Actually, that's a completely ignorant and ridiculous position to take--intelligence has nothing to do with soldiering. Soldiering is about training, leadership, and motivation. You can hire 50 of the smartest dudes and 50 of the dumbest dudes and if you don't train them, lead them and motivate them, they'll run from any fight. Throughout our history, men who couldn't read and write have been our finest soldiers.

Napoleon was not a better commander because he was plumb lucky. He was a more successful commander because he was a smart little guy who did his homework.

Actually, Napoleon was schooled in the manual of arms and knew the emplacement of artillery and the lay of the land. He had an engineer's eye for battlefields. He knew exactly when to start columns on the march so that they would arrive on a battlefield at maximum impact. Generals in that era had to set thousands of pieces in motion, rely on couriers and know exactly how to time the engagement of their forces. He was not "lucky" in any sense of the word. He was an example of genius at war, and if you had even a shred of actual education or knowledge, you wouldn't make such flip remarks.

Greater intelligence = a greater ability to retain knowledge = a more immediate understanding and command of a military situation.

Which is all for naught if you can't hold up under fire, if you feel like your leaders will abandon you and if you aren't trained in the profession of soldiering. I don't care how smart you are--it doesn't matter when the shit hits the fan.

Great military leadership does not take some ephemeral, mythical quality all macho idiots wish they had alone- it takes brains. Read the history of any war or any military operation and you'll be surprised at the cleverness and brainpower that was employed in the quest to win.

Entirely a misreading of history. The cleverest, the smartest, and the most wily can be overcome with sheer power. If anything that you just said was even remotely accurate or true, Western Russia would be a German colony. In all of human history, the largest conflict happened between the Germans and Russians. In every single category, the Germans were smarter, more cunning and had the best technology. They had radios, signals intelligence, aircraft, unit coordination on all levels, and the most lethal weaponry. And they were swept from the battlefield and chewed to pieces because the Russian Army never stopped rolling forward and destroying them.

Once again, Swan sucks wind and gets it wrong.

Your comment is insulting to me, to great military achievers, to our military's policy-makers, to our country, and to our troops.

What are you? A drama queen? You're a punk ass thread troll with no knowledge, no information and no skill. And you equate yourself with great military achievers and the troops, the country, etc?

Delusions of grandeur much?

"Actually, that's a completely ignorant and ridiculous position to take--intelligence has nothing to do with soldiering. Soldiering is about training, leadership, and motivation. You can hire 50 of the smartest dudes and 50 of the dumbest dudes and if you don't train them, lead them and motivate them, they'll run from any fight. Throughout our history, men who couldn't read and write have been our finest soldiers."

Intelligence has nothing to do with soldiering. Right. This is a really fucking stupid post. Pale Rider, you win the prize. No one reading comments here should ever again take you seriously. What a putz.

Intelligence has nothing to do with soldiering. Right. This is a really fucking stupid post. Pale Rider, you win the prize. No one reading comments here should ever again take you seriously. What a putz.

Uh huh. So prove that it does, fucko.

The proof is where? The information that backs up your assertion is where?

The most educated army always wins, is that what you're saying?

Uh huh. Can't wait to see that "proof."

I was in on much of the research and deliberation that lead to the decision to strongly favor High School Diploma Graduatess (HSDGs) over non-grads and even those applicants with GEDs. The decision was not based on supposed intelligence.

If it was, then a non-grad or GED holder with a higher Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery would be preferred over an HSDG. Yet, that is not the case. The desired minimum score for HSDGs to enlist in the Army is 31, but for GEDs it is 50. For non-grads it used to be 65, but I think that was lowered to 50.

So, given that HSDGs were not preferred due to a presumption of higher intelligence, why were they preferred? Because successfully completing a High School Diploma is a proxy for an applicant's willingness to stick to a lengthy task. More clearly put, an HSDG recruits of any test score level was more likely to successfully complete their training and their enlistment contract than non-grad and GED recruits with the same, or even higher, scores.

I don't recall all the specifics of the research all these years later, but I do recall that we found that for one of the services more than two thirds of the recruits who failed to complete their contracts were no-grads and GEDs. Yet they made up less than 20% of that service's recruits for the period studied.

Also, non-grads and GEDs were significantly larger percentages of recruits who completed their enlistments but failed to be recommended for reenlistment or received the lowest category of reenlistment recommendation. Low reenlistment recommendations are normally the result of multiple or serious violations regulations, failure to attain better than minimal competence in one's field or failure to demonstrate leadership and management skills needed for advancement.

There are limits written into Federal law on the minimum AFQT score that can be accepted for enlistment. I seem to recall there are also limits to the number of non-HSDGs. I know there are "guidelines" for maximum percentage of non-HSDGs. Guidelines can be exceeded up to the legal limit, at the discretion of the Service Secretary for that Service, but the reasons must be provided to Congress.

Finally, AFQT scores are percentiles. They represent the number of ASVAB takers who achieve a lower score. Thus, an HSDG who only scores better than 31 percent of all ASVAB takers is preferred over a GED holder who scores better than 49 percent of test takers.

Bottom line Swan, the services don't prefer High School Grads for any supposed additional intelligence.

Bill H -- What constitutes "a few men at a time", or what is required to maintain a "closely knit" unit or "trust" when applied to a few hundred people in a relatively closed environment does not have a linear or simple translation to an infantry battalion operating in a relatively open battle space.

That's not to say any one approach is right or wrong--the objective and need for integrity and cohesion in both cases is certainly the same--simply that the appropriate approach must taken account of the factors unique to each, of which there are many.

Swan: What makes you say that? You didn't provide any reason why I'm wrong, you just called names.

I'm not calling names, simply calling it as I see it. You hypothesize and pontificate on intelligence, leadership and soldiering, without it appears the ability to discriminate between them, how
they relate, or their relative weight.

While an intelligent and trained force is desirable, 100,000 Napoleons does not generally make for an effective army.

p.s. and that was has407 above (not sure what happened to lose my ident info).

One of the debacles that happened early in the Iraq war was the decision made to grant leave to troops who were "stuck" in Iraq. This was, IIRC, a Fall of 2003 decision that sort of recognized, hey, we're going to be in Iraq for a while.

So they started granting leave to soldiers--and wouldn't you know it?

We had about a battalion's worth of AWOLs before they could figure out how to stop it--and I think it swelled to several thousand AWOLs.

Was that based on intelligence? Unit cohesion?

No, it was based on the fact that people don't fucking want to go to a war zone with vinyl door HUMVEEs and no body armor.

When I was in MI, there was a thing you'd do where you'd compare GT scores on the ASVAB. Real soldiers compare gunnery skills, MI soldiers compare ASVAB GT scores. It was always cool to have mine, which was 128, because it was just high enough to help me stay above the average. I only encountered 2 or 3 people, ever, who were higher and one of those was an officer. What does it mean?

Nothing. I encountered people who were smarter and more capable than myself every single day. And I know people who were definitely better soldiers than I was. Some of the smartest people were people in jobs that didn't use any of their skills. It's just a big mismatch game that somehow doesn't matter at the end of the day. 25,000 track-suit wearing poor and illiterate Iraqis sure have stymied the most advanced and educated military in the history of the world, haven't they?

I mean, with the NCO schools, the guys who get their degrees online, the guys who get Masters degrees and all that, we have an extremely educated military that is the envy of the world.

But guess what? Intelligence has nothing to do with the fine art of soldiering.

Many soldiers I know are literally green with envy over the Marines' shorter seven-month tours, which are modeled on the Marines' practice of floating combat units abroad for six-month-long cruises.

The Marines shouldn't even be there. Aren't they supposed to storm the beaches?

Kevin, you're only asking enough to get at half the problem. The question ought not be focused on the mean combat tour length of ALL troops, because even in CoIn not ALL troops play a role.

Support troops, for example (in Iraq, "FOBbits") could be rotated every six months since what they do in-country is almost identical to what they do CONUS or in Europe or Korea). That would annoy to no end the combat arms guys, but being annoyed at support troops is genetically encoded in infantrymen (one reason why General Marshall created the Combat Infantry Badge). And since the lion's share of "the troops" in Iraq are support troops, there's no need to stress the entire US Army to the breaking point simply because there's a blanket 12-month (or 15-month) tour length.

Even in the case of infantry, not every rifleman is "doing" CoIn -- the junior-most Private in a rifle squad is not the one engaging the Sunni elder. Shorter tours for those troops, too, would be feasible, assuming that there is an institutional capacity for incorporating newly rotated personnel and bringing them up to speed on local conditions, the SOPs for patrolling, etc.

On the other hand, for NCOs, junior and senior officers, the story would have to be different. Since they are the ones most frequently in contact with the hearts-and-minds mission, they require the kind of local knowledge that can only come from long tours.

So two things would have to happen -- first, the Army's tactical leadership would have to perform tours not unlike those of the British Army's leadership in the Empire in the 19th- and 20th-centuries -- essentially committing to live in Iraq for the indefinite future -- and second, the Army would need to engineer a career path for them that would not be interrupted by a long 24- or even 36-month combat tour.

The difference, in part, between Iraqi combat operations and your example of the Hurtgenwald engagement is that, as Charles Macdonald recounts in his classic memoir _Company Commander_, the troops were in near-constant contact in the worst possible conditions (I've been in the Hurtgenwald and, if separated from a group, you can effectively disappear). When they weren't in small-arms range the G.I.'s were being shelled by 88s; when they weren't being shelled by 88s they were being raked with grazing machinegun fire.

And in WWII the infantry did not have the equivalent of today's FOB with internet, video games, and hot chow.

But, on the other hand, today's infantryman is probably in contact more frequently and, when not in contact, is patrolling and risking contact. So I would expect the 60-day period of 1944 is longer today, but the general question remains, just how much can one take?

So the Army could have a far more nuanced tour-length policy and still perform CoIn operations. However, the Army is a big institution, a big bureaucracy, and there are myriad pay and tax issues attendant to service in a combat zone of operations, so it might well be the case that it's just not administratively feasible to have layers of personnel policies in the way I've described.

think for kids rich flavor. to it they had neighborhood even Forest. competing plants