Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  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 Fo
rce 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.41 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.”42

  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.43 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.

  Cohesion, from the Point of View of Ethics …

  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!

  Unit Associations—A Neglected Resource

  Many of the derailed lives of veterans and their families would have been preserved, I believe, if every service member going into harm’s way and his or her family had enjoyed the social support and resources of a good military unit association. At every step—adjustment to military life, the family’s experience of the service member’s deployment, the service member’s own and the family’s experience of return from deployment (especially if it’s been a dangerous one), recognizing and coping with psychological and physical injury, making the transition to civilian life, networking in civilian life and educating employers, again, recognizing and coping with psychological and physical injuries, practical assistance in obtaining health and governmental services—every one of these would benefit from a vibrant military unit association.

  Unit associations could enter into seamless partnership with the family support programs on our military bases, thus taking advantage of the added wisdom from the families of former members of the unit who still live nearby. Members of the unit association could receive training as peer counselors. This would both help destigmatize psychological injury and provide a confidential and knowledgeable source for treatment referrals, if needed. It would also reduce the sense of isolation that psychologically injured service members and recently separated veterans often suffer.

  While the mass membership veterans’ service organizations have many advantages that come from their size alone, I believe that they have not been as effective as unit associations can be in providing continuity of support during the transition from active duty to veteran status. For combat veterans, generalized fellowship does not easily substitute for the shared experience and shared narrative of the unit association—common identity. But there is no need for unit associations and mass membership veterans service organizations to be adversarial. They can and should be synergistic and mutually supporting.

  Thus, sound unit associations can be an effective and efficient means of delivering both prevention and restoration.

  In the wake of any war, these unit associations will be noisy, demanding, and make themselves a thorn in the side of bureaucrats and politicians. Many civilian bureaucrats nervously view these groups as nearly criminal gangs because of their lack of docile gratitude. But the peer acknowledgment, social recognition, and practical support that unit associations provide should be treasured, not feared.

  Historically minded readers may remember with a shudder the proto-Nazi Freikorps death squads, which destabilized the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I, and may wonder how I could be advocating the encouragement of military unit associations. Historical research indicates that it was precisely those German World War I veterans who were demobilized as individuals, not as units, who gravitated to the Freikorps.44 Their alienation, bitterness, and boredom crystallized into street violence, extortion, murder, and political terrorism.

  Unit associations are no single magic bullet. The reception of returning veterans by the local community, abundant and combat-trauma-aware vocational and educational programs, employer education and support, and community-based, veteran-based treatment programs with early, assertive, and persistent outreach to psychologically injured veterans, all form part of the complete picture. What I am saying is hardly more than a restatement of what World War I veteran Waller said near the close of World War II.45 Will we never put into practice what we learn from our own experience?

  TRAINING

  There is relatively little public awareness of the extent to which the U.S. armed services reformed themselves in the wake of the Vietnam War. Journalist James Kitfield devoted his 1995 book to this story: Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War.46 The Army’s COHORT program was a direct product of this self-reform process—now undone. But something that so far has largely not been undone is the revolution in training made by the generation of officers who stayed in after the Vietnam War.47 The most visible legacy of these reforms is the combat training centers with resident opposing force (OPFOR) units. If I concentrate on the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, it is because of my greater familiarity with it. But I believe that what I have to say is true of all the combat training centers, as well as the air combat equivalents at Nellis Air Force Base and Fallon Naval Air Station.

  The visiting units are typically thoroughly whipped by the highly skilled—but low-tech-equipped— opposing forces (OPFORs).

  Colonel John Rosenberger, recent commander of the 11th Armore
d Cavalry Regiment, the OPFOR at the National Training Center, rhetorically asks:

  How does OPFOR develop and sustain its ability to fight and defeat its opponents in almost every battle at the National Training Center? How does the regiment, fighting with 1960s-1970s technology, routinely defeat brigade task forces equipped with the most modern weapon systems and technology our Army can provide?48

  His answer is mainly in terms of the training that the 11th ACR troopers receive at all levels, from private to colonel.

  As with cohesion, I do not make cheap hyperbole when I call training a combat strength multiplier. Excellent training engages the whole person: mind, body, emotions, character, and spirit. It prepares for the demands and stresses of war and other situations with mortal stakes. Therefore, at all levels it must be “tough” and realistic.49

  The particular content of training experience to which “toughness” applies varies with the technical content and military role the trainees are being prepared for and with rank. All roles need training to perform effectively in the face of physical danger and to perform ethically in the face of moral danger. The relative proportions of physical and moral danger may tend to change according to rank, but in the interconnected modern world no enlisted man or woman is too low to be released from moral strain or the need for moral understanding. Former Marine Corps Commandant Charles C. Krulak spoke of the “strategic corporal,” whose “maturity, restraint, and judgment” can influence foreign policy outcomes at the strategic level.50 And no officer is too high to be sheltered from the dangers of attack.