Odysseus in America (39 page)

The replacement system forces combat units to devote a major portion of available training time to training … the most basic unit skills…. Because the unit loses large numbers of people upon completing training at a Combat Training Center, it must begin its training cycle over again, or, at least, retrain the new members in the skills that the departed members had already acquired. With high levels of turbulence [personnel turnover], the unit must continually train new members and never has the
opportunity to develop higher-level skills whose attainment requires soldiers and marines to stay together for long periods of time.
³²

When the Army instituted COHORT, soldiers finished freshman year and then—what a concept!—graduated to sophomore year, and then to junior year. They kept on getting better—nobody then in the U.S. Army had ever seen such a thing. COHORT units developed spontaneous practices of cooperative learning, where the soldiers taught each other, and made sure that the slowest and least skilled were brought along, rather than left behind. Men in these units believed that they would be going to war together—some of them did in Panama and the Gulf—and felt in their guts that their survival would depend on each other.

The Vietnam veteran and military social scientist whose memory inspires this chapter, the late Faris Kirkland (lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army), was a senior member of the team that evaluated COHORT for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He observed the 7th Infantry Division (Light), the first all-COHORT division, over an extended period for the Department of the Army in the early 1980s. He estimated that the
least
capable COHORT unit was three times more skilled and effective than the
most
capable standard, individual replacement, shuffle-the-deck unit in the research comparison group. The best COHORT units took people's breath away. The troops assigned to these COHORT units were the ordinary, average cross section of American military recruits, not in anyway specially screened or selected. This lack of special selection was intentional. When I speak of cohesion as a combat strength
multiplier,
this is not hyperbole. Many currently serving officers and NCOs who led COHORT units in the 1980s and early 1990s often say that this was the high point of their military career.

The unit stabilization policies of COHORT (and the related programs) are now
gone
from the U.S. Army. I repeat, COHORT is gone. It was killed by the personnel bureaucracy, both civilian and military, and by the line officers. The personnel men found it contrary to their concept of rationality and too inconvenient to administer. Their systems and their computer programs were all organized around numbers of individuals (“faces”) and the “percent fill” of the units' table of organization (“places”). “Do we have the numbers?” was, and still is, the focus of the individual manning/replacement/rotation system.
³³
Numerical “fill” is something that the existing computer programs were (and are) good at. Assignment of personnel in COHORT units had to be done by hand, because the computer programs had not been revised to focus on managing units rather than managing individuals.

The line officers found that COHORT'S three-year (rather than one-year) training cycle made their “readiness “statistics look bad. And looking bad in those statistics meant no promotion; under “up-or-out,” no promotion meant the end of an officer's career. During the first year of any COHORT unit, it was classified as “not ready,” reflecting badly on the parent unit's commander. He knew he would be rated for promotion on the readiness of his subordinate units in competition with commanders of non-COHORT outfits. For example, a COHORT brigade with three infantry battalions would always have one battalion “not ready,” compared to standard individual replacement brigades where all three battalions would always be rated as ready, no matter how mediocre.
³⁴

COHORT units progressed very rapidly and sometimes outstripped the habitual practices and expectations of their leaders. These leaders found themselves stretched by their trainees to provide more and more challenging, demanding, and interesting training exercises and situations. What should have been an occasion for pride and a call for the leaders' self-improvement was experienced as a humiliation—another reason COHORT was killed.

If we take Faris Kirkland's multiplier at face value, the fighting power of two officially ready COHORT battalions in a three-battalion brigade was worth the fighting power of six ordinary individual replacement battalions. So by this arithmetic, the administrative rigidity and career fears that killed COHORT chose a total fighting power of three over a fighting power of six. Where's the rationality in that?
³⁵

The metaphor of interchangeable parts has had a powerful and pervasive grip on American organizational culture. The military occupational specialty and training credentials of a soldier are treated like the physical dimensions, mechanical and electrical design specs of a carburetor. However, an automobile's carburetor and brake cylinders do not have to practice together in order to operate. They don't have to get to know each other, and it makes no sense to speak of the brake cylinder needing to trust the carburetor. A machine like an automobile has no “unit skills.” Put in a working replacement carburetor of the right model, and the car will run like new; replace it again, and again, and again, and it will still run like new.
Not so
with a military unit, especially in conditions of danger and privation.

Military training
always
contains a significant component of retraining. This is inevitable because combat (actual or simulated) is a practice, like a sport, surgery, or music, not a science.
³⁶
Its skills are perishable and have to be constantly retrained. Studies of the decay and restoration of the tank crew skills associated with tank gunnery have shown that retraining happened
much faster when done in the same crew that the skills were originally trained in, compared to a crew of strangers who on paper were just as proficient as the original one. For example, tank crews lose 25 percent of their speed and accuracy in only three months, according to Tillson and Canby, who explain:

First, unit members forget the details of complex tasks and lose their edge over time. Second, unit members may be replaced with new people who do not know their jobs. The latter factor is clearly the most important. While unit members do forget the specifics of tasks they may have learned some time ago, in general they can restore their skills relatively quickly with retraining, especially when they are with people they know. When untrained individuals are placed in a unit, they must be taught both individual and collective skills and the unit must stop or slow its own training to conduct this new training.
³⁷

Excellence in many domains of professional practice is not something that, once acquired, becomes a permanent possession, like riding a bicycle, never lost by turning to other things. Collective skills are no less important in an Army tank crew or a Marine Corps fire team than in a string quartet or cardiac transplant team.

This factor alone accounts for much of the learning gain realized by stable units, where faster retraining frees up the time saved for new, more advanced training. Similarly, because newly assigned soldiers have to be “brought up to speed,” reducing the drain caused by “newbies” also increases available training time. This arithmetic is painfully simple. Our failures to reap the benefits of this arithmetic are self-inflicted. When there is too much shuffling of the personnel in units and of their leaders, everyone may be going through the motions of training, but the cognitive and emotional resources that should go into learning, go instead into figuring out the new people. A major outcome of excellent training is confidence in one's own military skills. Researchers in the Israel Defense Force after the Yom Kippur War found that paratroopers who broke down during or after the battles were eight times more likely to lack confidence in their skills than a random sample of those who did not break down.
³⁸

People are familiar with team skills (as contrasted to individual skills) from other complex, cooperative performance in real time. The performance of a basketball team or a string quartet is such a cooperative performance. Different positions on the team have different “jobs” but the team begins to cook when the players have practiced together and played
together enough to develop what current Marine Corps doctrine calls “implicit understanding and communication.” Of course individual skills are important, but our administrative practices make them the
only
skills. If you then add the element of mortal danger, which is not found even in the most competitive basketball league, the element of trust must be added to the picture. The only sure way to create trust among a group of unrelated strangers is time doing demanding, difficult, worthwhile, and sometimes dangerous things—together.

The American public understands the importance of keeping people together before, during, and after danger. Since the publication of
Achilles in Vietnam
I have spoken ten or so times a year to public audiences at colleges and universities. Even though my host is often the Classics department—not ROTC—and they want me to talk about Homer's
Iliad,
I always give my prevention message that the single most important preventive psychiatry move for the military is to keep people together: train them together, send them into danger together, and bring them home together. The audience response is—you mean we're
still
moving people around like we did in Vietnam! The public is not much interested in internal military administration. But the single administrative fact they are likely to know about the U.S. forces in Vietnam is the fixed tour, individual rotation policy that had men go over with strangers, work their way into a fighting unit of strangers, and then come home with strangers.

This practice of individual manning, replacement, and rotation would strike us as bizarre if it were not so familiar from practice over a century. Not only do cohesive units fight more successfully, thus reducing
all
casualties, but also they directly protect their members from psychological injury. This is not speculative. The evidence is in hand.

The heaviest weight of battle borne by Israelis in the Yom Kippur War fell on the armored units meeting the massive Syrian tank attack in the north and units rushing to block the Egyptian penetration in the south. After the war, researchers examined two levels of social connectedness that are present in all fighting units but especially clear in tank units: the level of the tank crew and the level of the unit to which the tank belonged. The Israel Defense Force prizes cohesion and normally keeps crews and units together for all purposes, even mess hall duty, “KP.” However, the Yom Kippur attack came as a complete surprise. Men rushed directly from their prayers to the bases and were thrown into tanks and toward the front willy-nilly. Tankers who fought the Syrians or Egyptians with a crew of strangers (even though equally well trained) were four times more likely
to break down during or after combat, and three times more likely if thrown into a strange unit.
³⁹

The inevitable reduction in the size of the U.S. armed services after the end of the Cold War does not have to be accompanied by deterioration in quality.
⁴⁰
One goal of this chapter is to provide a clear and positive picture of the qualities we want a smaller twenty-first-century military to have.

My agenda is to prevent casualties, not to arouse apocalyptic fears that the United States faces destruction. In the new world after the Cold War, our forces can be both smaller
and
better, intelligently prepared for whatever we have to face. As a nation we have a painful history of having suffered monstrous bloodletting in the “first battle” of every war.
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I am deeply worried by the triumphalism that took hold after the military victory against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, success “makes the victor stupid.”
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These criticisms of our forces as they stand today may strike readers as too harsh, especially when we seem to win our fights so handily, such as in the Gulf War and at the time I am writing these words, apparently in Afghanistan. My answer is that our performance in these two conflicts proves the point, rather than refutes it. In the Gulf an incompetent foe allowed us to train up with stable units for months before we attacked in the time, place, and manner of our choosing. By the time of the attack our forces had created the basis of cohesion, leadership, and training that would have been lacking had we had to fight our way into the Arabian Peninsula. In Afghanistan as of December 2001, we are using that relatively tiny fraction of our forces, which already gets the good resources of cohesion, leadership, and training. Army Special Forces certainly do.
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The Marine Expeditionary Units (Special Operations Capable) have a very firm and successful policy of unit stabilization during the long and rigorous train-up prior to deployments. The 10th Mountain Division is similarly “regimental” in its ethos and practices.

You don't have to be Saint Thomas Aquinas or Immanuel Kant to see that there is an ethical side to what I have presented above as matters of policy. If
you
are in the position to set policy on how other people are ordered into danger, and you know that sending them into harm's way with strangers greatly increases their chances of dying, you have an ethical duty
not
to make personnel policies that have that result. Better alternatives are available. It's simple “do unto others.”

Policy and ethics should converge on the subject of keeping people together through training, into danger, out the other side, and home again—together. In the event, God forbid, of war, units should be rotated in and out of combat
as units, not as individuals,
and not kept permanently in contact with the enemy. When enemy action has caused operationally significant casualties, the unit should be pulled out of combat to the rear to reconstitute—i.e., to recadre, retrain, reequip, and establish social bonds with the replacement subunits. We must
never, never again
practice the individual replacement of casualties and individual rotation of troops that we practiced in Vietnam!