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From: Member of the Staff of the House of Representatives
Date: 25 Jul 2000
Time: 11:11:30
The issue of basic training, physical fitness, and personal discipline is one of the most complex, if not the most complex, in the military. It goes to the heart of the anthropological question, "what motivates people to fight their own species - even in the face of extreme personal risk?" And, since it is not quantifiable, empirical evidence is hard to come by - except on a battlefield.
Physical fitness often becomes a surrogate metric for effective basic training. After all, you can count pushups and time runs. The Marines, for example, have developed this metric into a sort of cult. One may concede that, all things being equal, more physical fitness is better. But somehow, they are not equal. It's a curious and little-noted phenomenon that many incredibly heroic warriors were actually the undersized, apparently puny physical specimens of their outfits; Audie Murphy comes to mind. Were the guys who spent the Great Depression living out of boxcars and sleeping on park benches and subsisting on handouts from the kitchen door fine physical specimens? I doubt it; but they blazed a trail of valor from Iwo Jima to the Huertgen Forest.
Discipline is essential. But does it come from close-order drill? The origins of drill in Western armies derive from the fact that 1) 18th century professional armies were recruited from the illiterate brothel-sweepings of Europe (as late as 1913, a British Army study found the mental age of the average Tommy ranker to be 10-12 years); 2) the limited range of the musket, and dense smoke of black powder; and 3) lack of electronic communications devices made close order battle tactics essential. By Cold Harbor, at the latest, the day of close order formation was done. But every army still regarded training for fighting in such formations as the only way to raise a good crop of soldiers.
Drill instructors since the days of Hannibal have no doubt been lamenting the sad decline in standards among entering recruits, and SSGT Kutznikolai is no exception. I suspect he is absolutely right about the particular decline in standards he sees. The decline has in fact been mandated by the need to maintain quotas, political correctness, and the military leadership's relative neglect of human factors in favor of their obsession with weapons. But it raises a much larger question: If a glorified diversity training seminar is not turning out good troops, is Parris Island circa 1950 the optimum conceivable answer to train warriors for 4th generation warfare? If not, what?