http://slate.msn.com/id/2108357/
war stories Military analysis.
The Reserve Mutiny
How the Iraq war is crippling the Army Reserve.
By Phillip Carter
Posted Monday, Oct. 18, 2004, at 2:33 PM PT
First reports are always wrong, or so the military maxim goes. The
initial dispatches from Iraq said that a platoon from the Army
Reserve's 343rd Quartermaster Company had committed something close to
mutiny in the desert by refusing to deliver supplies in combat.
Subsequent reports indicate the unit may have objected to the mission
for more tangible reasons than simply fear: Its vehicles were in sorry
shape, and it lacked the firepower to survive the mission. Still, the
incident has raised alarm from Baghdad to Washington, because such
mass disobedience is nearly unheard of in today's all-volunteer U.S.
military.
But the U.S. military hasn't always been so free from insubordination.
During World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War,
conscript-based units did precisely what the soldiers of the 343rd
allegedly did. The military held 2 million courts-martial in a force
of 16 million during World War II, with similar disobedient behavior
occupying a significant part of the docket. The similarities between
insubordination in past wars and the behavior of the 343rd raise the
question: Is there any difference between today's reserve units and
the draftee forces of years gone by?
Although American active-duty forces have been driven hard for the
past three years in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have also benefited
from that combat service. Soldier for soldier, today's combat-hardened
force is the best military in the world, largely because of its recent
duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. The professional active-duty force of
today still represents the best argument for why we do not want to
resume the draft:A conscript-based force simply can't achieve the
skill, unit cohesion, or professionalism of today's active military.
But America's weekend warriors are a different story. The reserves are
increasingly taking over the Iraq and Afghanistan missions because of
the strain on the active forces. Nearly 400,000 reservists have been
mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001, with 158,000 Army and Marine Corps
reservists serving on active duty now. The Army has been stretched so
thin that it has had to mobilize 5,600 members of its Individual Ready
Reserve to fill out its ranks.
The reservists closely resemble the draftees of days gone by.
Reservists train for one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer:
Thirty-nine days a year is hardly enough to build true tactical
competence on the complex tasks of warfighting. Soldiers in logistics
units like the 343rd learn how to drive their big rigs and maintain
them, but they hardly have time to practice convoy defense or route
reconnaissance. The lack of training time is compounded by other
resource problems in the reserves. Many reserve leaders don't have
significant active-duty experience, so they lack the expertise
necessary to train their units on these important missions. Reserve
equipment—particularly in the National Guard—suffers from decades of
neglect. It is not uncommon for reservists and National Guardsmen to
drive vehicles that are older than they are.
When the Army created its "total force concept"—the mix of active and
reserve forces it has today—after the Vietnam War, it allocated combat
units mostly to the active force, while support and logistics units
were put in the reserves. The Army assumed it didn't need highly
trained truck drivers on active duty as badly as it needed
infantrymen, tankers, and aviators on active duty. The problem with
this model in Iraq is that truck drivers are front-line soldiers: A
supply convoy driving up the Main Supply Route from Baghdad to
Fallujah is as likely to see action as an infantry patrol, if not more
so because the insurgents know the convoy is an easier target. Thus,
the soldiers in harm's way the most are in many ways the least
prepared.
Mass conscription was invented by Napoleon—who dubbed it the leveé en
masse—as a way of mobilizing an entire nation for war, in order to
field the largest army possible. The advent of the draft in the late
18th century brought with it a new, attrition-based model of warfare,
with carnage on a scale never before seen. The essential strategy of
"second generation warfare," as some theorists today call this
Napoleonic model, was to throw as many men and machines as possible
into the war effort and to exact the highest price possible from your
opponent. Good training and equipment might help some troops survive,
but in the larger picture it was irrelevant to national success. What
mattered was sheer volume. In many ways, the U.S. victory in World War
II represented the apotheosis of this warfighting model, for the
Allies defeated the Axis not because of strategic acumen, but because
of our ability to churn out divisions of men and materiel while
simultaneously destroying the war industries of the Axis with
airpower.
One of the Pentagon's best arguments for rejecting the draft was that
it wanted to move away from this style of warfare, where whole
divisions of conscripts were thrown into the meat grinder of combat.
Today's all-volunteer U.S. military fights differently. Instead of
employing pure mass, it uses skill and maneuver and technology to
fight, such that it won't have to suffer needless casualties, or even
inflict them. Because of this, today's professional force has helped
minimize one of the great moral dilemmas of war.
But the unfortunate truth is that today's Guard and reserve units are
being thrown into the fight in ways similar to conscript-based units
of past generations. Reservists today get mobilized, trained on the
most basic tasks of war, and then shipped to Iraq in a matter of
weeks. Today, just as in World War II and Korea, we are throwing
unprepared units into battle with the hope that they survive and gel
as a team in the ultimate Darwinian environment. The reservists in
Iraq lack the training, equipment, leadership, and resources to do
their job. And their morale proves it; surveys conducted under the
Army's auspices last year showed a marked difference between the
attitudes of active-duty soldiers and Marines, and of reservists like
those in the 343rd.
There remain a number of salient differences between today's soldiers
and the draftees of the World War II and Vietnam generations. Unlike
conscripts, today's reservists are volunteers, and they have gone
through the rigors of boot camp. But from an operational perspective,
some of those differences have been slowly ground away by the
exigencies of the mission in Iraq. Consequently, reservists today are
acting in ways that look startlingly like conscripts of yesterday. The
reservists in the 343rd made a conscious choice between the risk of
court-martial and the risk of a combat mission, based on their gut
feelings about their equipment, training, leadership, and likelihood
of survival. Professional soldiers face such risks every day, and yet
they persevere because they have faith in their units, leaders,
training, and equipment. The reservists of the 343rd Quartermaster
Company appear to have run out of faith, perhaps because the
Army—which treated them as disposable—never gave them enough reason to
have it.
Phillip Carter is a former U.S. Army officer who now writes on legal
and military affairs in Los Angeles.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Vote for Bush. Why vote for the lesser of two evils?
No matter the candidates the superstition industry wins.
'Jesus' is a sock-puppet Christians utilize to add 'authority' to
whatever action they intend on taking. -Stoney
And Duty Imp and Rapscallion
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