Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  And yet, American military culture, policy, and habit since World War I—with a few noteworthy exceptions—has treated the connectedness of soldiers to one another as irrelevant. Instead, soldiers with the same MOS (military occupation specialty) and training credentials are as fungible as dollar bills—utterly equivalent, substitutable, and replaceable. When first introduced into the U.S. Army in World War I by followers of the industrial efficiency expert Fredrick Winslow Taylor and his disciple Elihu Root,6 this turning of soldiers into replaceable parts was regarded as rational and efficient. Many people still think that way.

  But from a military point of view, it is not rational. Soldiers who know each other only slightly or not at all fight badly, regardless of their individual skills, training, and bravery. The great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld blames the poor combat performance of American troops against their World War II German army adversaries on the individual replacement system:

  The U.S. Army … put technical and administrative efficiency at the head of its list of priorities, disregarding other considerations, and produced a [replacement] system that possessed a strong inherent tendency to turn men into nervous wrecks. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it was this system that was responsible for the weaknesses displayed by the U.S. Army during World War II.7 [Emphasis added.]

  Stephen E. Ambrose, the American historian of World War II, wrote:

  The replacements paid the price for a criminally wasteful Replacement System that chose to put quantity ahead of quality…. It was paying lives but getting no return. It was just pure waste and the commanders should have done something about it.

  Example: in January 1945, Capt. Belton Cooper of the 3rd Armored Division got thirty-five [individual] replacements to help crew the seventeen new tanks the division had received….

  The previous night, the thirty-five replacements had been in Antwerp. At 1500 they lumbered off in a convoy of seventeen tanks headed for the front. Two hours later, fifteen of the seventeen were knocked out by German panzers.8 [Emphasis added.]

  Ambrose does not tell us how many of the thirty-five individual replacements survived. Many that did survive undoubtedly took horrible physical wounds and burns; and those lucky enough to escape unmarked were probably shattered psychologically. The rates of physical wounds and psychological casualties track each other very closely: what spills blood spills spirit.9

  During the Korean War, the individual replacement system continued its lethal work, according to retired U.S. Army four-star General Donn A. Starry, who fought in both Korea and Vietnam and became one of the leaders of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s:

  Many commanders [in Korea] would remark that the new replacements would arrive with dinner, and after a night of contact with the Chinese, they would leave in body bags as breakfast arrived.10

  Social cohesion—from having trained together and traveled to the war zone together—is what keeps people physically alive and mentally sane when faced with a human enemy who really is trying to kill them. The malignity of the armed human enemy is not a psychological figment. Only the support of others makes it possible to face armed killers. Professional military literature on the combat strength multiplier effect of unit cohesion has been thoroughly reviewed by Nora Kinzer Stewart, a principal scientist with the U.S. Army Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences.11 The idea that the social connectedness and esteem of the soldier’s unit are psychologically protective is not new, and is found in the lessons learned in World War II (but then forgotten):

  Repeated observations indicated that the absence or inadequacy of such sustaining influences or their disruption during combat was mainly responsible for psychiatric breakdown in battle.12

  This has been confirmed by subsequent research that troubled to look at the qualities of community of the unit, rather than solely the traits of the individual soldier.13 Most U.S. military studies do not look—their individual-focused culture blinds them to community phenomena.

  Why Does Cohesion Matter?

  A cohesive unit creates courage by reducing fear.14 The human brain codes social recognition, support, and attachment as physical safety. Cohesion both increases the ability to overcome fear (we call that courage) and reduces fear. The fictional Spartan platoon commander named Dienikes, in the acclaimed novel Gates of Fire, puts it very compactly: “The opposite of fear … is love.”15

  One would think that the profession of arms would make the deepest study imaginable of the topics of courage and fear. Yet according to General Starry, “There is no course in any Army school today that teaches anything about fear in battle, how a leader copes with his own fear, how a leader talks about it to his subordinates and helps them cope with their fear.”16 Given current American military culture, General Starry’s observation is not surprising. In a discussion on cohesion and love in the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, I wrote:

  When you talk to active American military officers and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) about love—they squirm. They are embarrassed. On the one had, their organizational culture highly values rationality, which has been packaged to them as emotion-free17—and love is clearly emotional. On the other hand, they instantly start worrying about sex, which in modern forces is always prohibited within a unit, whether heterosexual or homosexual. In present-day America, the ideas of love and sex have gotten mashed together. The two notions of rationality-contra- emotion and love-is-sex give a one-two punch to clear thinking and discussion of mutual love among military professionals. Of all groups in America today, military people have the greatest right to, and will benefit most, if they reclaim the word “love” as a part of what they are and what they do.18

  The courage-creating aspect of good leadership loses out in this cultural blind spot on love and the institutional practices, such as too-rapid turnover of leaders, which inhibits the growth of mutual love between leader and led. A leader’s love for his troops reduces that leader’s level of fear in the face of danger. The leader’s lowered or absent fear—here usually called “confidence”—communicates itself to the troops, thus reducing their fear. But beyond an imitative or contagion effect of the leader’s confidence, fear is directly alleviated when troops can feel the leader’s love for them. But current American military culture runs the other way.

  Those who have experienced good military training might object to my comments on cohesion: “but tough, realistic training reduces fear and bonds the unit together!” We must expect many circularities: cohesion reduces fear in the face of real danger, and going through danger together increases cohesion. Here are several more of these circularities:

  • Cohesion increases success in acquiring difficult military skills; and success in executing difficult military skills increases cohesion of the unit.

  • Cohesion can become portable from unit to unit as esprit de corps and increases esprit de corps,19 and esprit de corps encourages cohesion among thrown-together service members who are strangers to each other.

  • Trust makes consistent truthfulness possible, and consistent truthfulness makes well-founded trust possible.

  These circularities are rising (or falling!) social and psychological spirals in time, not signs of logical failure or empty identities. The art of military trainers and leaders is to create and harness rising spirals for constructive ends.

  Note that Ardant du Picq’s rational expectation arising from mutual familiarity, quoted at the beginning of this section, and the nonrational effect of mutual love work together. They require the same conditions for their creation.

  It is a common tenet of religious thought that awareness of God’s love reduces fear. This is one of their major themes of the biblical Psalms—hardly an accident, because a fighting man, King David, composed them. Christian scripture continues the same theme: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.”20 It is also widely observed that awareness of the love of one’s parents, children, and spouse can co
ntrol both physical fear, when confronting physical danger, and social fear when confronting moral danger. Religiosity and family support as sources of courage are forms of what could be called the “right stuff” theory of good military performance. According to this theory, some people have the “right stuff” in their character, and all you have to do is sift them out of the population. Proponents of this theory will say that high-performing units can instantly be built on the fly from people with good individual training, esprit de corps, and the “the right (individual) stuff.”21 I would not attempt to disprove this assertion as stated, but only point out that it cannot reliably be put into practice in the real world for whole American military services, whereas the alternative, creation of cohesive units of unselected ordinary Americans, can be put into practice.

  The militarily strengthening and psychologically protective effect of stable, socially cohesive units is neither scientifically speculative, ambiguous, nor uncertain. But as Professor van Creveld noted above, the U.S. Army placed administrative “rationality” above the human powers of social cohesion. American military historian Gerald Linderman notes about World War II that

  Almost all other armies established systems of rotating units out of the line. Even the Wehrmacht, with enemy armies pressing on the homeland from east and west, managed practically to the war’s end to withdraw combat formations for days and weeks of refitting [integrating cohesive subunit packets of replacements].22

  Whatever the Germans did, they did by units. Surely, the Germans loved efficiency every bit as much as we Americans do, and yet they never adopted an individual replacement or rotation policy for their troops. The inconveniences of managing units, rather than individuals, were something that the Germans took in stride, according to Israeli military historian van Creveld.

  Twenty years later, the North Vietnamese Army placed enormous emphasis on the maintenance of unit integrity, according to Colonel William D. Henderson, the author Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat, who commanded an infantry company in Vietnam.23

  In World War II, we “lost” so many of our battles against the Germans at the tactical level, but at the theater and strategic levels of war, we and our allies won it. In Vietnam, we “won” almost all of our battles with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong at the tactical level—at least in the sense of being in momentary possession of the ground when the firing stopped—but at the operational and strategic level of war, we lost. The enemy had figured out how to use his advantage in the human factors of war to nullify our stupendous advantage in high-tech weaponry.24

  Because we still seem enchanted by our own size, wealth, and technological inventiveness, it may help to point out that there is no necessary connection between the fighting strength conferred by an abundance of powerful weapons and the fighting strength conferred by the human factors of cohesion, leadership, and training. These factors vary independently of each other. Attempts to substitute the former for the latter sometimes fail in the short run, and always fail in the long term, because of the dynamic nature of war as a human struggle in which skill trumps technology—in time.25 The Israel Defense Force (IDF) is as high-tech as Israels economic resources and American aid permit, which is to say, very high. In some important areas, the IDF is technologically ahead of the United States. But just as the IDF is high-tech, it is also high-skill and extremely cohesive at the small-unit level. I mention this example, because I have heard American officers state as obvious truth that the complexity and educational requirements of a high-tech military are incompatible with the social creation of cohesion in its units. The IDF shows that they are not incompatible.

  Nor is a loathing for American deaths and wounds a sign of weakness or deterioration in the American military. Currently some commentators worry about what they say is a growing national aversion to military casualties. Yet while no nation in the world is more averse to military casualties than Israel, where single deaths have been treated as national tragedies, no one takes this as a sign of weakness or timidity in the IDF. Do Americans cherish their children in the service less than Israelis? Should we, as a matter of national strength, be instructing American wives to stop caring if their husbands are killed or maimed in the nation’s defense? Yes, I am mocking those who equate aversion to casualties with military weakness. Nothing protects the safety of troops—reduces casualties—like military excellence in cohesion, leadership, and training, and wisdom in the political leaders who commit the troops. Aversion to casualties—we should all be for it!

  In World War II the United States made a Herculean effort to “screen” recruits for psychological fitness, based on the “right stuff notion—this idea dies hard—that the individual character of the soldier primarily determines how he holds up under fire. Confidence in screening seemed to absolve the American leadership of any responsibility for protection of the troops through policy or organization, according to van Creveld.26

  During the 1980s the U.S. Army instituted a program called COHORT,27 an acronym for “Cohesion, Operational Readiness, Training,” that kept soldiers together in their squads, platoons, companies, from the beginning of recruit training, right through to the end of their first term of enlistment. This hardly sounds like a revolution. Many civilian readers are probably making a mental shrug—because they are unaware of how radically different this was from the prevailing practices of individual-by-individual manning, individual casualty replacement, and individual rotation. Before COHORT, recruits would go through Basic Training with one group of recruits, then—shuffle the deck—with another group through Advanced Infantry Training—then shuffle again—assigned as an individual to an operational unit. In a three-year first term of enlistment, the average peacetime U.S. Army soldier made and broke the small-unit face-to-face social bonds five times! In peacetime this leads to low-skill units, enormous waste, rampant dissatisfaction, and the creation of the bored, resistant, negativistic enlisted-man stereotype. In war, it means that a soldier arrives in the battle zone with strangers. In Vietnam, this was the overwhelmingly predominant experience, with some few exceptions. In World War II, a shockingly large number of troops stripped out of reserve units were used to “fill” divisions embarking for overseas, and virtually all replacements of battle casualties and other attrition were made on an individual basis, not a unit basis.

  In the modern Army (or Navy, Marine Corps, or Air Force), the entry-level training only begins the acquisition of military skills. The training that actually qualifies a soldier to fight effectively takes place in the operational unit. In general, soldiers love their first year of training, because they are constantly learning new and interesting skills, lore, and knowledge. However, when the deck is shuffled, typically the whole freshly shuffled unit is held back, like being held back in school. Before COHORT the average three-year enlisted Army soldier enjoyed freshman year, and then repeated freshman year, and then repeated it again!28 This was considered normal; things that are habitual over time come to be accepted as the way they must be according to human nature or the laws of nature. If enlisted men had a negative, bored, resistant attitude, that is the nature of enlisted men. What do you expect?

  The individual-based American military personnel system inadvertently creates this recalcitrant enlisted man—it is not built into human nature. The Unit Manning System Field Evaluation by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) observes:

  The spontaneous motivation of the first-term [COHORT] soldiers played an important role in their achievements…. Senior commanders and NCOs were unanimous in their opinion that their privates were exceptionally intelligent, eager to learn, interested in the Army, and dedicated…. One NCO said, “These young soldiers will do anything we ask of them. So you have to be careful….” Very few leaders understood as well as this sergeant that they were dealing with a new and unfamiliar phenomenon—soldiers who were self-motivated, who needed and wanted to be taught and guided, not driven.29

  The soldiers in the units studied by
WRAIR were not specially selected for high intelligence—what their leaders witnessed was the intelligence that is always there and which standard manning, training, and leadership practices had stifled. In fact, these COHORT soldiers had not been specially selected for any traits.

  John C. F. Tillson, who commanded a troop of the famous 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment30 (Blackhorse) in Vietnam, and military analyst Steven Canby31 have written trenchantly about this in the unclassified report of study for the Pentagon by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit think tank established by the Department of Defense:

  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.