Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  The custom of the day was that localities and counties which surround military bases see those bases as a source of revenue. In our case, the Marines who inhabited those bases were kind of a nuisance. "Spend your money, and go away," was pretty much the theme. Numerous local merchants would display flags and other patriotic regalia, and then proceed to rip off young Marines left and right. Young Marines knew a lot about killing, but not much at all about contracts and leases and easy financing. And the county government was the enforcer of those rules, which almost universally benefitted the rip-off artists.

  The prosecutor in New Bern was accustomed to uppity Marines, and knew exactly how they should be put in their place. His wishes were not opposed by the senior officers in my command. These officers sought peace in public relations more than they cared about the Constitutional principles they had sworn to defend. They also probably agreed that I needed to be put in my place as my academy mischief-making, now more refined and subtle, had followed me to the fleet. With their abeyance, the county assigned me two days' community service for this non-event.

  And so, when Saddam Hussein's tanks rolled into Kuwait that fall, the wheels of justice had ground slowly by then. I found out about this invasion as I was hanging lights in the New Bern old folks home, community service being the modern moral equivalent of slavery. Other Marines would be assigned the task of controlling air in that war, that part of the world being in their slice of it. Marines more senior to me in my unit were assigned a deception mission at sea and left within days. I was left behind partly because I just missed the cut, but also because of my unresolved prosecutorial status.

  Of the Marines in my specialty who were left, I wasn't the most senior, but I was one of the most qualified and experienced. This isn't saying much as I had only been in the fleet barely a year. Regardless, I was placed in the position of Senior Air Director, and tasked to train the more junior Marines to execute the primary air support control mission as a contingency. Meanwhile, a few more senior Marines remaining in my unit undertook the planning phases.

  I took this assignment more seriously than any I had been given. For the next six months my team prepared for a desert war among the pine trees of North Carolina. We cross-trained on other specialties. We practiced air control while simulating evasion. We read Rommel and practiced his small unit tactics and indirect rifle fire techniques against the day our batteries failed and we became a fighting force out of contact with the rest of the Corps.

  A quirk of physics made all of this effort worthwhile once the air war started. The other Marines from the west coast and the Pacific, better equipped and more senior, could not find a position from which critical radio links would function. The air support mission would have to initially be performed from the air.

  Anticipating an eventual move into an area with good communication, the current ground package would remain intact. Those Marines on the ground would monitor the progress of the air package until they could regain control. So, they couldn't strip that unit to perform this supposed temporary function. And our Marines onboard ships couldn't be stripped off. That reorganization might give away the deception of an amphibious assault, a deception which pulled Saddam's forces away from the Saudi border. It fell to us, the most junior assortment of Marines in our specialty on the planet, to take on this pivotal role. But, with the most recent and intensive training of any of them, we were ready.

  And so, a few days after the air war began, I found myself the junior Senior Air Director of the three air support control teams assigned to execute the temporary air support control mission. As I was the junior of the three, I was assigned the night shift, which turned out to be the most busy of them all. I had deliberately chosen a Marine ground billet from the academy to avoid my airsickness. I even had myself medically disqualified from flight to avoid an accidental assignment thus at limited capacity. Despite this, I was solely responsible for the airborne air support control function for the Marine Air Wing each night during Operation Desert Storm. This temporary mission, because of the operational tempo, turned out to span the entire war.

  While First Wife watched it all on TV, I rode in the back of a KC-130. Each night I listened to voices in the ether in a communications van where fuel tanks normally ride. My team and I fought a war visualized in three dimensions inside our heads each night, and I forgot about my airsickness until the downhill leg of the flight back to Jubail each morning.

  This was Al Gray's war. For a career spanning over forty years he watched, waited, learned. At last, when he became Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1987, he formally revolutionized the heart of the Marines, a process which had been incubating informally since Vietnam. No more would there be the "hey diddle diddle up the middle" suicide attacks, but instead the Marine Corps would become the force of the mind. This approach was known as Maneuver Warfare.

  Internet Research

  Research Maneuver Warfare. Unlike the Marines of old who were famed for amphibious assaults, the Marine Corps of that era planned to fly into battle aboard commandeered airliners. Arriving at a remote battlefield these Marines would face Soviets who drove there. The reality of this match-up was reflected in the renaming of our deployed forces: Marine Amphibious Units, Battalions and Forces became Marine Expeditionary Units, Battalions, and Forces, respectively. Most of the equipment we would ever have was already sitting in forward caches, waiting to be unpacked. Accordingly, throughout any of our expeditions we would be outnumbered and facing an enemy who was better equipped and could drive as much equipment and materiel to the front as they chose.

  So, we would have to redefine the front.

  Children and generals imagine lines on a map, forces as having substance, battalions and regiments and divisions being solid things. In reality, like the atom, these things are mostly empty space between knots of substance. Smash a blacksmith's hammer against an ingot held against an anvil, and work is done. Replace the ingot and the anvil with a vision in smoke, and the hammer will dislocate the shoulder which swings it, or strike its own knee with a crippling blow.

  In Al Gray's vision of the Marine Corps, we would defend Norway and portions of Korea and selected points of the Middle East and the western Pacific against the numerically superior Soviets. We would do this, not by presenting a solid wall, but through smoke, haze, vapor and confusion.

  To achieve this effect, control of the battlefield would be decentralized far beyond what would be possible to a collective. Instead, we would rely on the innate American individualism which had not yet been bred out of the populace. It was this aggressive decentralization, far beyond what had been considered acceptable in the past, which shocked Al Gray's detractors. And won him the admiration, respect and determination of the rest. Including me.

  Our Commandant assigned a list of books which was mandatory to read. Each sergeant and lieutenant and captain and general, regardless of his day to day job, must understand a soldier's load. Or, the mobility of a nation, or how a young Erwin Rommel attacked and overwhelmed numerically superior enemy units in World War I. He must also understand the outdated principles which we would never use again. And why to not use them, lest these suicidal tactics be revived in ignorance and paid for in the blood of young Marines.

  Colonels would no longer fight today's war. The war against a larger enemy would be won by hundreds or thousands of sergeants and corporals, whose battlefield it always was. But now these sergeants and corporals would explicitly control it, always mindful of the common intent.

  The colonel, now removed from today's action, would plan tomorrow's. The lieutenants and captains served to communicate that intent and remove obstacles in logistics and capacity. These junior officers would take action when fate intervened. They were in a position to redirect the sergeants and corporals onto valuable targets of opportunity. Often, these targets would be revealed in the confusion far faster than the colonel could receive the information, comprehend it, and issue new orders. And those sergeants and corpora
ls and lieutenants and captains had better be up to the task, and not merely automatons or administrative functionaries.

  They were up to it. And all of them were capable of shooting a man at five hundred yards while peering through iron sights should the need or opportunity arise, no scope required. From the chow hall cook to the supply sergeant to the aviation mechanic to the pilot to the admin officer or clerk, they were all lethal killing machines serving their larger role. But each was capable of evaporating into handfuls of destruction when needed.

  Shoot down the Marine's plane, and he becomes a reconnaissance asset, special operations unit, and light sniper. And not a victim in need of rescue. Sink his amphibious ship and the enemy will have just created hundreds of two-man gunboats from the survivors. Destroy the Marine's logistics, and he will eat the food and drink the water he takes off of the enemy's dead body after spending the night hunting.

  Hills and ridges mean nothing beyond their utility as geographic references, channels and points of feigned defense, not worthwhile beyond that for the cost of a single life. The focus of action turns from geography to the enemy itself. No more would this hill or that town become points to be saved at all costs. Instead these features would extract cost, abandoned when they had served their purpose.

  I now knew why those Marine officers had smiled at my disabled rifle. They knew better than to believe my feigned compliance with the regulations. Deceive and confuse the enemy, presenting him with an image, weak or strong, which doesn't exist. Give the enemy multiple tempting targets from which to choose, and lay traps for all of them no matter what course of action they decide. Should he divide his forces and try for them all, pick one and reduce it in detail. Gain local superiority in time and place, leaving the now smaller rest for tomorrow, your forces still intact.

  Should the enemy attack your battalion with his division, the battalion evaporates into vapor. Leave him advancing toward your phantom of a few fire teams trading worthless ground for valuable time, yet having the thunder of the gods from air and artillery. The remainder of your forces he passed by, effectively transported miles to his rear by his own effort, destroys his logistics. And shoots him in the back as he attacks your ghosts.

  His generals and colonels are left defenseless. To save themselves they turn their massive waves back or commit the reserve. In so doing, they attack themselves in the confusion, as not all of their forces will have received the new plan. The price would be Marine friendly-fire incidents as well, but the overall fratricidal losses from these would be surely less than those sustained by directly repelling the greater force. This results in a net increase in the survivability of the nineteen-year-old lance corporal with the rifle, who was the ultimate customer of all of our services.

  The enemy's every strength, and the mass of the collective, is turned to the individual Marine's purpose. These Marines act in groups as small as two, three, or four in unspoken concert with all the others. Even the most capable tank must eventually refuel, its protective infantry drained away chasing downed and deadly pilots. In so doing its valuable, irreplaceable crew may fall prey to a few well-aimed rounds from the fire team waiting above that curiously wide stretch of hillside road. The Marine corporal leading that fire team recognized the pattern from his reading and practice, so his fire team's retreat and hides would already be prepared. And then they vanish into the wild while the enemy gives chase to repeat the cycle.

  Each such attack and withdrawal draws retribution from rear area forces who rush to the hunt, exhausted from other chases. The chasers leave cover, abandon cohesion, and expose themselves in their haste to other nearby fire teams. Other Marine fire teams are alerted to the hunt by the rifle shots and the wasteful and unproductive answering panic fire. This endless, fluid, mostly one-sided attrition buys the time for the colonels to plot the counterattack against weaknesses discovered and created by the corporals.

  The enemy's divisions drown within a sea of disciplined and productive and aggressive minds. But these minds must be prepared years before the battle by Marines sweating and bleeding, learning skills, accumulating data and watching the patterns emerge. By Marines running, stumbling, crawling through practices for which there seems no immediate purpose, no foreseeable payback, and may, in fact, never be applied. But when the time comes, the Marine's mind is ready.

  It was this mindset, inculcated by Al Gray, that would have been used against the Soviets in key locations here and there across the globe. But in late 1990 and early 1991, these ideas met a different enemy. For the six months of Desert Shield, the Army's Green Berets would be reinforced and replaced later by the Marines as they arrived in force. Both of these groups blocked a numerically superior force using many of these same approaches in numerous border skirmishes. Then, and throughout Desert Storm, the Marines applied Al Gray's intent.

  At national planning levels the Marines were intended to conduct a holding action to tie up Saddam's forces in Kuwait. Instead, this war became a model of violence and confusion and speed not seen since the Blitzkrieg. Meanwhile, the Army implemented maneuver warfare in its own style writ large in Iraq to the west, to equal effect on a vastly larger scale. The principle had been vindicated. During that month of war I experienced the exhilaration of the years of planning and training culminating in victory. And of having the privilege of serving with some of the best men I have ever known.

  For that month, our time had come.

  And during that month, I narrowly escaped as many as three courts martial. One of these incidents involved my diversion of a preplanned package from a minefield clearing mission. That mission had been armed with napalm, but I diverted it onto active artillery which was busy shooting at fellow Marines on the ground. This attack created imagery on the television coverage injurious to the parallel public relations war. My behavior was described later:

  "The aircraft in question may have been (emphasis added) executing a strike on a higher priority target than the artillery battery that 1stLt Baugh identified. Other assets may have been (emphasis added) available to attack the artillery battery. ... In his enthusiasm to attack a known target, 1stLt Baugh exceeded his authority in trying (sic) to divert the aircraft."

  Source: "Marine Corps Gazette", July, 1993, page 11. Uhh, I didn't try to divert it, I diverted it. Oscar Two Bravo, Roger Out. And may have been wasn't good enough for me at the time. Regardless, actively firing artillery was up at the top of the target priority list, for what are obvious reasons. If these reasons are not obvious, ask someone who has been on the receiving end. But nonetheless, these words indicated the after-action second-guessing of wartime decisions which grow increasingly common today.

  Now this kind of analysis percolates down to each trigger squeeze of each nineteen-year-old lance corporal with a rifle. And for that matter, now includes the second-guessing of each decision made by business leaders across the country. This spirit of continuous and arbitrary oversight has now been shifted by the lobbyists of those titans to weigh on your shoulders. And has possibly cost you fines, your businesses, and for many of you, your jobs. And for a few of you, even the lives of those you held dear. Your time will come.

  From this perspective, after a few detours in which I accumulated knowledge and experience which would only later prove important, I started my business determined to apply what I knew worked. And it worked better than I had hoped, but the lessons learned were unexpected and the battlefield has changed. The American economy is now that battlefield, and in particular, the role played by each productive individual in it. The change in the landscape of that battlefield is the total revolution of thought in our nation regarding the definition of success. This revolution will soon precipitate a battle which we did not start, but which we must win.

  This change, and my understanding of its true nature, causes me to now reorient toward the new opportunities which have presented themselves, buried within impending crises. Our handling of these opportunities will dictate whether we will succeed or fail
in our new endeavors. For if we fail, we will not survive. I mean by this not that our system will not survive, but that we will die at the hands of our oppressors. Or, perhaps worse, our spirits will die inside as we accept their chains.

  Our time is coming. And we had better be ready for it.

  Chapter 2, Who Should Read This Book

  Foremost, this book is written for those individuals who fear that they are losing their essential right to survival as individuals, along with their individual goals, faith, and aspirations. You are correct in this fear, because you are losing this right.

  This book is written for those individuals who have tried to follow the rules, and who find after they had invested themselves in that path that the rules had been changed beneath them. And who had everything they have ever worked for destroyed as a result.

  This book is written for the individuals who feel disenfranchised from success. And who feel that their own efforts to provide for themselves seem to only put them farther away from that goal.

  This book is written for the individual who may have a successful business, at least from an outsider's perspective. But who are nonetheless lacking the fulfillment and sense of well-being which should accompany success. Or who had a successful business, only to see it now being destroyed by forces beyond their control.

  This book is written for individuals who think agreements should be based on a handshake. But who are disappointed by partners, above, across, and below, who deliberately fail to satisfy the intent of agreements. These individuals feel that paper agreements only exist to refresh the memory of what each signer intends to actually perform, rather than a foundation from which to weasel out of their obligations. Viewed this way, these individuals believe that contracts are really just a reminder for yourself.