He'll make some initial mistakes, as he always has, but he'll pay the price for them, learn from them, and adapt, as he always has. And he may have a few new tricks to introduce to the way the game is played....
Posted on 12/10/2002 11:59:10 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
FORT BENNING, Ga. -- U.S. military technology, accelerating American dominance over allies and rivals at a dizzying pace, is driving enemy forces to scatter and hide where they are vulnerable only to that most humble and low-tech weapon -- the infantry grunt.The lessons emerging from the global war on terrorism suggest the Pentagon will come to depend heavily on infantry to track down and root out terrorists and guerrillas, to assault Saddam Hussein's last defenders in their hide-holes, to provide security and stability in postwar nations like Afghanistan, and to offer a reassuring American presence in volatile regions from the Korean peninsula to southern Europe and Africa.
Yet the infantry, whose troops have streamed forth from this training base for generations, is undermanned, cash-poor and ill-equipped, senior officers acknowledge.
From the dusty, sunburned veterans of firefights with al-Qaida in Afghanistan to the parka-swathed GIs on guard along Korea's frozen DMZ, infantrymen already have borne a heroically heavy burden. In combat, they suffer disproportionately heavy casualties.
But there's barely a dribble for the infantry in the new $392 billion defense spending bill.
"We have chosen to do other things," says the Army's chief of infantry, Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, with a touch of ironic sourness.
For instance, just the overrun this year on the Air Force's new F-22 fighter program, $690 million, is enough to outfit about 87,000 infantrymen with brand-new stuff including boots, desert camouflage fatigues, helmets, flak vests, weapons, ammo, night vision goggles, chem-bio protective suits and a day's worth of MRE rations.
While the Air Force is paying $204 million (not including overrun) for each new F-22, GIs in Afghanistan are forced to buy their own gloves, cushioned socks, cargo belts, flashlights, padded rucksack straps and CamelBak hydration systems, Army investigators found.
Garmin satellite position-finders, preferred over the scarce, military-issue Pluggers, are popular gifts for soldiers in the field; they're $99 at Wal-Mart.
And this is to equip an infantry that has shrunk significantly, in the past decade losing two entire divisions and 43 percent of its troops -- 42,314 soldiers. Today's infantry has fewer than half the battalions it fielded at the peak of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1968.
To be sure, such high-tech weapons as the unmanned Predator spy plane, the satellite-guided JDAM bomb and the latest versions of the F-15 strike fighter won raves for their dazzling performance last year in Afghanistan, where they helped to shatter the exposed formations of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.
But detailed analyses of those and other battles in Afghanistan demonstrate that air power, even when linked to Special Forces troops on the ground, has severe limits.
Days after the U.S. precision bombing began in Afghanistan on Oct 7, 2001, al-Qaida began quietly disappearing -- not killed, as it turned out, but hiding. They split up and headed in different directions. Their satellite phones went dead, and they began using runners to communicate, U.S. intelligence sources reported.
Infantrymen later came upon al-Qaida sites the Air Force had carefully bombed. They held only dummy weapons and fake fighting positions.
In preparation for Operation Anaconda last March, U.S. Central Command focused all its intelligence assets on a tiny section of the Shahi-kot Valley where al-Qaida fighters were thought to be hiding. These included Predator spy planes, satellite surveillance, hypersensitive listening devices, thermal imaging sensors and airborne radars, according to a study by Stephen Biddle of the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.
All that sophisticated technology found fewer than half the al-Qaida positions, Biddle determined. The rest were discovered by infantrymen cautiously moving uphill, often under fire.
"I don't think anyone doubts now that to root out these murderers is going to require the man on the ground with a rifle," said Bing West, a former Marine officer and Pentagon official.
Indeed, Biddle found that despite days of heavy bombing with precision weapons, most al-Qaida fighters survived in their camouflaged fighting positions, only to rise against the infantrymen landing in helicopter assaults.
"Precision weapons are helpful and I'd far rather have them take out targets than have to close that last 100 yards" with the enemy, said Eaton, the infantry chief.
"But it has to be done. You can't put a precision round into every foxhole. You gotta charge up and bayonet him in his foxhole," he said.
In fact, U.S. intelligence reported during the initial days of battle in Anaconda that despite continued bombing with precision strike weapons, hardened enemy combat troops intent on killing Americans were moving into the battle zone -- not fleeing in terror.
"We can expect future opponents to fight much the same way," Biddle wrote in his study, published in October.
How will American infantrymen fare against hardened, desperate fighters who run toward battle, not away from it?
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, infantrymen accounted for 80 percent of American battle dead, even though they comprised only about 4 percent of military personnel in the war theater, Army data show.
The key to prevailing in such bloody work is psychological hardening, said Eaton, an intense, ruddy-faced West Pointer whose conference room displays bayonets used in past American wars.
"The biggest imponderable is psychologically causing this young man or woman to feel supremely confident they can handle any situation, that when the green light goes on and it's time to jump out of a C-130 into the dark and sleet, they are confident and tough enough," Eaton said.
The goal of rigorous field training, Eaton said, is to take "all these wonderful young men who come in with 18 years of Western Christian civilization" and cause them "to plunge a piece of steel into somebody's chest."
Acknowledging the difficulty of honing young American civilians to such a hard edge, he added, "There, we have an opportunity to improve."
But not only killing is required, as troops engaged in peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and development missions will attest.
"You gotta be fighting and setting up day centers too," said Col. Paul Melody, senior thinker at the U.S. Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning. "Here you have a battalion fighting the enemy, two blocks away citizens need food and water. You can't say any longer, `I'm just a combat soldier."'
These are skills lost after Vietnam, said Melody, who enlisted in the infantry in 1971. How do you work with local mayors? And the United Nations? How do you work a checkpoint? How do you negotiate with a warlord? How do you romance the local population while keeping your soldiers from becoming targets?
"We didn't think of any of this stuff during the Cold War," Melody said. "We only thought about killing Soviets."
None of this has a dampening effect on the new second lieutenants undergoing 16 weeks of basic training here. Most will be trained as paratroopers, then graduate into two months of Ranger school, a grueling course designed to produce skilled and hardened combat leaders.
The lieutenants, many of whom came into the Army purely for adventure, are pumped. They will go into action in the war on terrorism and they know it.
"I'd like to look back and say I'd done something unselfish," 2d Lt. Stephen Holmberg, a 22-year-old from Boston, said to explain his volunteering for infantry service.
"And if you're going to join the Army you'd best be out here at the point of the spear," he added with a grin.
Is this true anymore?
"The key to prevailing in such bloody work is psychological hardening, said Eaton, an intense, ruddy-faced West Pointer whose conference room displays bayonets used in past American wars."
"The goal of rigorous field training, Eaton said, is to take "all these wonderful young men who come in with 18 years of Western Christian civilization" and cause them "to plunge a piece of steel into somebody's chest."
Dude's got a serious bayonet fixation. He was probably born a couple of centuries too late.
He's probably had and taken advantage of the opportunity to "plunge a piece of steel into somebody's chest."
A friend of mine heard a speech from a retired Colonel while in basic. The gentleman had a bronzed entrenching tool that he'd used to crush North Korean skulls before they could get in his foxhole.
Declare Phenix City off limits and then, uh, patrol it frequently to ensure your troop's compliance.
Oh wait, he's not talking about life at Benning. Never mind.
He'll make some initial mistakes, as he always has, but he'll pay the price for them, learn from them, and adapt, as he always has. And he may have a few new tricks to introduce to the way the game is played....
There's a damn good reason our troops still take bayonet training. It's because you frequently encounter the enemy when he's less than 3 feet away.
L
He had the right idea. It's a pity that the present-issue entrenching tool is both less suitable for such use [though it can be used as a handy field latrine seat] and for the bronzing treatment afterward- it doesn't stick well to the aluminium handle.
But there are those who never lost sight of the simple E-tool as both tool and weapon to be mastered and used.
-archy-/-
Not *frequently,* but it happens *sometimes.* And it can also be at the worst possible of times, at night, when it's pouring rain, you're changing magazines and at least one of your boots is mired in the muck.
Please, God: not *frequently.*
-archy-/-
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