by Rory Miller
This is one of the big disconnects between soldiers and civilians in our population. In a liberal republic or democracy, war is not only a logical, cold decision. It is also a symbol that factions can use to manipulate popular opinion. The party in the minority can almost always use the fact of war and sometimes the fact of a refusal to engage in war, to try to remove another party from power.
In the civilian world this is rarely thought of and, when it is, seems fair, if political.
On the frontlines it is perceived not only as betrayal (remember that on a gut level, soldiers understand that winning is a matter of will and they can lose based on the lack of will of people who are not there) but as if the people back home are being deliberately manipulated for political reasons in ways that serve the enemy.
American soldiers (the type I have been and know best) pride themselves on their history. The have lost very few battles. Between technological superiority, training and tenacity, they tend to inflict extremely lop-sided casualties. They do not feel they have ever lost a war and rarely lost a battle. But they have been pulled out of wars by those with weaker will or for political expediency… and running away, even under orders, feels infinitely worse than being beaten.
There is yet another factor that affects how soldiers and civilians see war. Especially in modern times, information is closely guarded. Those who actually know what is going on not only stay silent out of prudence or to maintain a tactical advantage. Almost everyone is under direct orders or contract to say nothing.
By definition, almost anything civilians hear on the news came from a source without direct information. Even when the information is incorrect or seems a blatant lie the people on the job are prohibited from denying information or pointing out inaccuracies.
When soldiers have been caught in this trap, notably Vietnam veterans, they see the civilian world as easily manipulated, misinformed sheep.
This means that modern war must be fought on several levels. It is not merely a mass of men and weapons vying for supremacy. Gathering intelligence, conducting tactical and strategic operations against the enemy have always been a part of warfare. But managing public sentiment back home and abroad and trying to mitigate media damage—or play the media, which the military seems to be very bad at—is a critical aspect of war that only in the last fifty years has become a decisive factor.
An important aspect of this, which also marks a huge change in philosophy, is that there is no longer any such thing as “acceptable losses”. Deaths, whether of soldiers or collateral damage, play poorly in the media. They are wasteful as well, and every commander I know considers every friendly death a mistake. My first commander long ago, Lt. Whalen, said, “There are only two things. Accomplish the mission and survive on the modern battlefield. Everything we do must serve those goals.”
This is a philosophy, however and soldiers have to deal with the practicality. How do you deal with an enemy who hides in the civilian population or uses children as shields? You can’t avoid all casualties and zero friendly deaths is a dream. And there is a very real possibility that taking this philosophy as truth would leave us helpless against an enemy that had the means and desire to wage a war of attrition.
Terrorists. When Americans try to write terrorists they want to give them some big tragedy in their past-- family killed by an Israeli bomb or something like that. That's not the profile. There are voluntary and involuntary terrorists.
Voluntary terrorists are almost all from wealthy, western-educated secular families. (Hmmm, exact same profile for cult recruits, huh?) They have usually lived for some or all of their lives in the West. As such, they have always felt like outsiders, never fully part of their ancestral world or the world they are living in. Always outsiders, hungering to belong...and someone offers them a guaranteed entry not just to one of those worlds but to the elite of one of those worlds. It's not about the virgins in paradise. It is about a human's sometimes pathological need to belong at any cost. It might take some work, but it's important to understand this from their point of view. Some volunteer for the army or join gangs because it is far more important to belong than to not be shot at. People volunteer for suicide bombings because death is abstract and belonging is real.
Involuntary terrorists
L, one of our translators told us the first day in-country:
We will be good friends. We will work together and you will like me and trust me. Never like me so much that you can't shoot me in the head. Listen to what I am telling you, this is how they are doing it now. I may come home and find the {Name of specific militia redacted} with my family tied up. They will point guns at them. They will point guns at me. They will give me a vest bomb. If I say no, they will shoot my youngest daughter. If I still say no, they will shoot my other daughter. Then my wife, then my youngest son. They will keep going until I say yes or they shoot me. If I take the vest, they will let my family go and give them ten thousand US dollars and protect them. I love you all like brothers, but I will wear the vest even to save my youngest daughter.
Most of that was background and based on modern war and modern perceptions of war, the idea of the ‘big picture’ as seen from the ground. What follows is more personal.
War is mostly boring. There is a lot of waiting, often in places that have terrible climates. Battle is anything but boring.
What follows is a list of things that have often bothered me in fiction. They are details, things to think about. Use as you will:
You can’t tell what is going on. Whether close range riot control or a pitched battle, your adrenaline is spiked, which almost automatically guarantees that you will have tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. Even without the biology, it’s usually dark or too bright. The enemy doesn’t want to be seen, and neither do your own guys. In a matter of seconds, especially if the team isn’t tight or the leadership is weak or commo goes bad or it is at night, you lose track of where everybody is. It is a mess of noise and light and deafness.
Repeating in a way, but in much of history you could not see, through musket smoke, cannon fire or dust of marching infantry and charging cavalry much of anything. You couldn’t tell if you were winning or losing unless you saw that the guys running back were from your side. On horseback was best--it gave you some elevation--but it still sucked.
Nobody really knows the big picture. There are political considerations, strategic considerations and tactical considerations. If you have good leaders they will share what they know. This is one of the reasons that obedience is important: the people making decisions have more information than you. Trust is huge in this, but obedience is critical. There is a reason why the bigger, stronger Germanic and Celtic people with home-court advantage were easily defeated by the Romans. Individuals on a battlefield are meat. Organized units with good leadership are power multipliers.
Communication is always bad. I’ve worked with some relatively high-end radio systems designed for tactical operations. They all had dead zones in certain buildings. Microphones work loose and quit transmitting. Batteries die that should be fresh. In older systems they tried trumpets and drums and flags, most of which were hampered by the din of battle or the dust and smoke. Those with good commo have a huge edge, but it always seems to suck when it counts.
Supplies are critical. Armies, even roving bands of bandits, need a lot of food and ammo. Hunting takes time. Pillaging takes a lot less time. The idea of supply lines really made a difference not just in how wars are fought but in who won AND how the populace felt about invading armies (when invaders treat you nicer than your own nobles…)
Battling is anaerobic, usually, and very much a matter of nerve. Soldiering is aerobic and very much a matter of endurance. Fighters win your battles. Soldiers win your wars. Fighters bring down hell on the enemy. Soldiers are the ones who get to the right place at the right time.
Warfighting is not the place for heroism. Individualism may be valued in fiction and in our society, but in mass battle you must b
e able to suppress your ego and accept your place as part of a larger machine. An individual on a battlefield is just meat. At best, he will get killed, at worst he will get everyone else killed as well. What civilians see as rugged individuality we see as suicidal ego. Or, as the saying goes, “Hero is a four-letter word for someone who gets all his friends killed and manages to look good in the AAR (After-Action Report.)”
Close range hand-to-hand combat, whether in a medieval battle (Not personally experienced) or a riot or mass brawl (have experienced) is a tangle of arms and legs. There is no room for big technique and people are almost as likely to hurt a friend as an enemy (one of the cool things about uniforms--if I’m twisting a blue polyester leg, I’m probably leg-locking a cop.)
The randomness of it is overwhelming. This is something that not just civilians but that even people in danger have trouble wrapping their minds around. Not many people actually die in modern war. Ancient combat often had incredible death rates… but even then battles or wars where an entire side was wiped out were rare. Going to war is not the inevitable doom many seem to believe. (According to Plutarch in the Battle of Granicus River, Alexander the Great lost only 34 men routing an army of forty thousand. The Persians lost considerably more.) Even in really horrific legendary battles, few, relatively speaking, die… but those that do die… it seems random. Bullets and arrows fly. Sometimes they hit the best soldiers. There is no skill for avoiding what you don’t see and what you don’t see is what kills you. It makes every time you step into battle a strange and desperate act of faith. It breeds a form of fatalism that is the opposite of fatalism, because those who are in train harder hoping it won’t be luck that kills them. This is hard to put into words, but it is part of a warrior’s psyche: nothing will keep me safe. Death takes who she wishes. Maybe not me, maybe not today.
Conversely, embracing that (It is a good day to die) allows you to do some truly amazing things. When you quit flinching and ducking you can aim, you can cut, you can become a cold predator and a force of nature. Those that embrace death care for their weapons. Everyone else does a kind of fidgety, ritualistic, preparation. They care for weapons but also pay obsessive attention to details of uniform and gear before a battle. Maybe it is a ritual, maybe it is just a way to not think.
I have been in riots and even when you are there to quell them the emotional force of a bunch of people losing control or even on the edge of losing control is intoxicating. For those in the riot, it is a feeling of enormous, anonymous raw animal power. We can break things. We can destroy. We can leave our mark. We will never be known or punished. It is the pure rage of a toddler’s tantrum and just as free.
Teams are the essence of skilled group combat. It takes time and skill to make a team. Just throwing really skilled people together doesn’t even approach what a skilled team can do. The ability to work together is a force multiplier like no other.
Teams must train together and they must fight together. Training will bring them to a level of skill, but actual operations will solidify the trust, and there are things that come up in real life that rarely come up in training: bad intel; bad commo; environmental hazards so extreme that your equipment fails; the sheer speed with which things can go bad. Until your first operation, you don’t know who can really fight. You don’t know who can control the fear. You don’t know who is steady and who is excitable.
In a good team with experienced members, the ability to remain steady will grow over time as new members model veterans. The veterans know what to pay attention to, what doesn’t matter. Details get you killed. Which details will get you killed is something you learn from experience or from experienced people.
Every time a new member comes on a team, especially an experienced team, there is a rough period. Sometimes for two reasons. The person being replaced will usually be missed. If the lost member retired or moved on (fighting is a young man’s game) there may be little problem. If the person being replaced was killed or crippled, there will be some unprocessed grieving and a lot of resentment. If the person being replaced was removed because he was a danger, then there may actually be some guarded hope.
The second source of tension is that any new person is a risk. No matter the person’s skill or history, she may not fit and that potentially endangers everyone. There are, sometimes, membership rituals (usually low-key, nothing like a fraternity hazing, you don’t pull that shit on dangerous people) to try to ease the tension… but the real membership initiation is the first operation.
A well-run team:
-Agrees on the goals and the methods.
-Communicates
-Are ordered to have balanced lives (seriously, some times you have to tell these guys to spend time with family)…and we always watch for that, because someone who wraps his or her whole life around the team is a short step away from burn-out. We don’t just do this, whatever this is, for the team or an ideal. We are very aware that we deal with ugly things so that those we find precious never have to see or feel that kind of ugly.
-Trust each other. If I tell you to hold a door, I will not look to see if you do it…and if I hear gunshots coming from you sector I will not look or come to your aid unless you ask. I trust you to handle it. Wrap your head around that—I trust you so much that I leave my exposed back to your protection and I don’t even look. There is an old SWAT saying: “If you catch yourself looking over your shoulder to see if a specific teammate is doing his job, one of you shouldn’t be on the team.”
-Trains hard and fights hard. The harder you train, the easier you fight. They continually push each other to be better, faster, stronger and more creative.
-There is a dynamic that comes up in the best teams (and marriages for that matter) where insecurity makes things constantly improve. The rookie comes onto a legendary team and thinks, “I don’t know how I made it. I’m not good enough to hang with these guys” and spends the rest of his career continually getting better trying to be worthy of the badge/pennant/order/name/whatever. And this is one of the reasons why self-aggrandizing egotists are so despised in the Special Operations community. Some are gifted, but they simply don’t work as hard as the good operators. There are a few who have made names in the public sector who are despised by their old squadmates.
-Leadership is not bossy. Your guys follow you because they trust you. If you have to order them, have to ‘get their attention’ it is almost always a lack of trust. You follow, because you trust the leader: He knows the plan, He has the team’s interest at heart. He will not get you killed for his own career.
-There is often a separation between the team and the people giving the orders. This may be a modern phenomenon, and it has good and bad points. You don’t want people who are good at solving problems with violence deciding which problems need to be solved. That aspect of warrior/servant is pretty critical to modern ideas of civilization. That said, there is an often palpable fear and/or disdain from those who give the orders. They are aware that they could never do the job the team does, and to save ego, it is often easy to decide that the team is composed of savages or something not quite, and much less than a ‘normal’ or ‘real’ human.
Bad teams happen:
-When the goals or methods are not agreed on. Enemies make poor teammates. Pacifists don’t blend well with meat-eaters. If the plan is to finesse/con the mission and one insists on going in with force and intimidation, the whole structure becomes weak, unstable and untrustworthy.
-When the leadership is weak. Operators do not rank weak and strong leadership by timid and courageous or quiet or loud or asking versus ordering, a weak leader is one who is not respected for ANY reason. Unskilled, stupid, timid, aggressive, or even morally questionable leaders lose respect quickly and lose control. Many try to take back respect by increasing aggression or loudness. It never works.
-When the members don’t want to be there. Most elite teams in the US are voluntary and often the selection process is rough. The people who make these team
s want to be there. In other places and times a bureaucrat decides who has the skills. These teams are often trained hard, even brutally, but they tend to be far less successful in combat.
There are a few administration issues that can damage or destroy a team. A connected resume packer may get a place on a team for the sole purpose of being able to brag about it later. The entire team feels cheapened, like their sweat and blood will be discounted to the value of his talk. Another is when the administration chooses to make a political statement by assigning members for reason other than fitness for duty. For instance (something actually somewhat common and a potential source of dramatic tension) assigning someone to an elite team in order to make it look more ‘representational’ (ethnicity, gender or religion) who failed the required tests to join.
Recap
-Wars happen for a specific purpose
- Different cultures see war differently
- Mass combat is chaotic and hard for an individual to see or understand
-Terrorists may be voluntary or involuntary and voluntary terrorists have a profile
-Teams, good or bad, are the essence of skilled mass combat
Chapter 15: Violence in other Places and Times
This is a really hard subject to talk about without people's political sensibilities getting in the way. Universally, however you were raised is ‘normal’ and your ideas of right and wrong seem sensible and obvious. We live in what is possibly the most affluent time and place in all of history. There are many things that we accept as obvious truths that would be considered unnatural in almost any other century.
There are few things I find more annoying than a work of fiction set in a medieval or quasi-medieval setting where the characters have 21st century American values.
