...any echelon can lose a battle, campaign, war.... but in this era, they are won by companies.
Which means junior officers and non-commissioned officers. The proverbial Strategic Corporal in the three-block war.
2nd Lt. John Herman, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, and one of his Soldiers pass out candy to children while on patrol with Iraqi police in Kirkuk, Iraq. This photo appeared on www.army.mil.
From the New Yorker article linked to late in this post:
[article opens with an anecdote too long to stick in here without making this an even longer post] ...but, shortly before the Americans invaded Iraq, the Army had concluded that its officers lacked the ability to do precisely what he did: innovate and think creatively. In 2000, the new Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, was determined to shake up the Army and suspected that about half of a soldier’s training was meaningless and “non-essential.” The job of figuring out which half went to Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Wong (retired), a research professor of military strategy at the Army War College. At forty-five, Wong is handsome and voluble, with the air of a man who makes his living prodding the comfortable. Wong found that the problem was not “bogus” training exercises but worthwhile training being handled in such a way as to stifle fresh thinking. The Army had so loaded training schedules with doctrinaire requirements and standardized procedures that unit commanders had no time—or need—to think for themselves. The service was encouraging “reactive instead of proactive thought, compliance instead of creativity, and adherence instead of audacity,” Wong wrote in his report. As one captain put it to him, “They’re giving me the egg and telling me how to suck it.”
Word.
Wong flew to Baghdad last April, a year after the supposed cessation of “major combat operations,” to find out how the “reactive” and “compliant” junior officers the Army had trained were performing amid the insurgency. He and an active-duty officer flew to bases all over Iraq, interviewing lieutenants, who lead platoons of about thirty soldiers, and captains, who command companies of one to two hundred. These officers, scrambling to bring order to Mosul, Fallujah, and Baghdad, had been trained and equipped to fight against numbered, mechanized regiments in open-maneuver warfare. They had been taught to avoid fighting in cities at all costs.
Yep. But what did he find? What just about everybody who ever deals with the US Military - in combat - finds.
Yet he found the opposite. Platoon and company commanders were exercising their initiative to the point of occasional genius. Whatever else the Iraq war is doing to American power and prestige, it is producing the creative and flexible junior officers that the Army’s training could not.
And ours are very, very, good. And won't sit around waiting for a bunch of old farts like me to get off the dime and give them the info they need - and more importantly, the forum to share it.
So they did it themselves. Extremely well. Whether it will be enough is yet to be seen. But if we 'lose' Iraq - it won't be these guy's fault.
I'm still amazed on an almost daily basis how unconnected and uninformed about the Internet and information sharing many of my peers and seniors were, are, and, it seems, will continue to be. But that's okay, like me, they're retiring in their turn, and getting out of the way. Hopefully sooner rather than later, if they don't want to learn.
But some are, if slowly, and in some cases, seemingly reluctantly.
Officer after officer told me that they use call when they have the leisure, but it’s Companycommand or Platoonleader they check regularly and find most useful. call’s director, Colonel Saul, wondered if “maybe captains shouldn’t be spending so much time in front of their computer, but should be with their soldiers.” He pointed out, however, that call itself has found Companycommand useful; earlier this year, call posted a request on Companycommand for advice on using interpreters in Iraq, eliciting replies that became a call lesson on the subject. Saul’s ambivalence about the Web sites is emblematic of the Army’s attitude. “Institutional education has three components,” said Lieutenant Colonel Kelly Jordan, an active-duty officer who also runs the R.O.T.C. program at Notre Dame. “It’s got to have a common curriculum, a dedicated cadre of trained instructors, and common experience.” Companycommand and Platoonleader are free-for-alls of shared experience, with no designated interpreter. “What you get out of it may not be what I get out of it,” Jordan said. “You may get the occasional Napoleon or Alexander the Great out of it, but it does nothing to raise the educational level of the officer corps.”
As long as they either Lead, Follow - or, like me, Get Out Of The Way, though not really because I wanted to...
6 Comments