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Pentagon Plan for Infantry: Better Training, Smaller Units, Fewer Deaths
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/07/21/pentagon-plan-for-infantry-better-training-smaller-forces-few/
Increasing the size of the Army, announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is just the beginning of an ambitious new military effort to build a force of more highly trained, more psychologically hardened infantrymen to fight "hybrid wars" like Afghanistan in the years ahead. The effort, spearheaded by Marine Gen. James N. Mattis and retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, is designed to reverse a decades-long pattern in which infantrymen do most of the nation's war fighting and suffer the most battlefield casualties, and yet receive the least training and the smallest share of budget support.
Mattis himself is a tough infantryman who led the 1st Marine Division into Iraq in 2003 and commanded Marines during the battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004.
His focus is on developing small infantry units – principally nine-man squads and 40-man platoons – to operate far more isolated than they have in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will require years of specific training to enable them to fight alongside local indigenous forces in what the Pentagon sees as a "long war'' against Islamist extremism. Their assignment: to train local forces, to help build local government, to oversee development and to kill extremists in "close'' or face-to-face combat.
In a report on the small-unit initiative this spring, Mattis said the United States has a "moral obligation'' to build the capability and resilience of its small infantry units that will be sent out into a dangerously tricky world of shadowy insurgents, roadside bombs and nuclear terrorism, fanatic fighters and high-tech missiles, and squalid urban sprawls bulging with unemployed youth.
The stress of this brutal kind of warfare, pursuing political stability against a shadowy and ruthless enemy, is already evident in the physical and psychological scars borne by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it is deadly: In the wars America has fought since 1950, four out of five servicemen killed in action have been infantry, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, 89 percent of American dead served in small units.
To reverse that trend, and to gain tactical predominance over the enemy, will require a sharp change in how American infantrymen are recruited, educated, trained, and deployed.
"To put the 'best and brightest' into the infantry is not the American way, but it has to be done,'' Scales, former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, told me recently.
"Traditionally, the image of the soldier is Willie and Joe. Now, we're going to have to have Willie and Joe with PhDs in knowledge and culture,'' Scales said.
What Gates announced Monday was nothing of the sort. He said only that he would ask Congress, which must authorize any increase in military force, for a "temporary'' increase of 22,000 active-duty soldiers. The increase would expand the Army's ranks to 569,000 from today's 547,000.
Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters that the increase was needed to give today's troops some breathing space between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. But since it takes a year or longer to recruit and train a new soldier, it's unlikely that an addition of 20,000 new soldiers would have an impact on currently planned deployments.
But Mullen made it clear he is thinking in the longer term -- and that he is thinking about "hybrid'' or "irregular'' conflicts. These are the nasty, long-term wars against insurgents who are clever at adapting to different forms of American power (perfecting, for example, the IED).
"I've grown increasingly concerned about the stress on the force and our ability to meet the demands out there,'' Mullen said Monday. The expansion of the Army "will give us room to run an even faster-paced war against an adaptive enemy.''
Running a faster pace, not just in the two current wars but elsewhere (the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Horn of Africa's Somalia spring to mind) is precisely the focus of the sweeping new initiative by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, headed by Gen. Mattis. JFCOM ("Jiff-Com''), a small, multi-service headquarters in Suffolk, Va., has broad responsibility for figuring out how to win wars faster and better.
Quietly over the past year, Mattis has invited combat soldiers, neurobiologists, human factors engineers, behavioral scientists, athletic coaches and others to a remarkable series of conferences to outline a plan of action to develop the kind of hardened small units Scales envisions.
The conferences were co-sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, on the understanding that firefighters, police and other "first responders'' operate in much the same conditions of chaos and violence as soldiers.
The Army's effort to understand how to harden soldiers for small-unit action is taking it into some strange places. Among the issues that JFCOM is studying:
How to teach small-unit leaders to better lead men in extreme conditions, and how to train them to make snap decisions under severe stress;
How the science of "learned optimism, resilience, positive psychology'' can strengthen a soldier's mental, spiritual and emotional condition for peak performance;
How to inoculate soldiers against the fear of close (face-to-face) combat;
How to create what Scales calls the "multi-dimensional soldier'' who excels at language, cultural knowledge, medicine, communications, engineering, as well as combat.
That means more intense and longer training.
A platoon of 40 soldiers sent downrange in, say, Indonesia, won't have room to take along someone skilled in family medicine, an engineer who can design and build bridges or supervise road construction, and a lawyer who can help train local cops and prosecutors. Each soldier will have to be proficient at each skill as well as being a master of close combat.
"Thirteen weeks of basic training (the current standard) is over,'' Scales said.
The 22,000 new soldiers Gates announced he will hire are likely to get a taste of this new approach, which will soon accelerate – if Mattis, Scales and other proponents can win support from the Pentagon and Congress.
They acknowledge that this kind of thing doesn't go down well in the tradition-bound halls of the Pentagon – or in the walnut-paneled conference rooms of the giant defense contractors who produce hardware.
"It's not something that captures the imagination of those inside the Beltway because it's not something that has a lot of money attached to it,'' Scales said.
But the old bulls of the traditional Army are being replaced by generals who excelled in Iraq and Afghanistan – men like Petraeus, Odierno, Dubik, Chiarelli.
"We are seeing a tectonic shift'' in how the brass view the importance of small-unit operations, Scales said.
But Congress, the defense industry – and the public – may be more resistant.
"Americans seek to solve problems with technology – physical solutions to human problems. Well, irregular warfare is a human problem, and it is cultural behavior, psychology and anthropology and sociology that determine success at the tactical level of war – not the ability to deliver precision munitions,'' Scale said. "And that's hard for our society, especially military society, to fathom."
But push down into the ranks, where the real fighting is done, and you'll find an appreciation that "it is what you put into soldiers that counts, not what you put on them.''
