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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Military
cohesion, social discord By
Julian Delasantellis
In the spirit of
American hair restoration, impresario/pop culture
icon Sy Sperling, who used to hold up pictures of
his previously bald pate while claiming "I'm not
just the president of the Hair Club for Men, I'm a
client as well," I can truthfully say, "I'm not
just a writer for ATol, I'm a reader as well."
As such, I've lately been spending a lot
of time reading and rereading, and even more time
thinking about Brian M Downing's
January 9 ATol article, All together now, US troops stand
firm. All of you should now go back and
read this article for yourselves, but, for the
sake of convention, I'll briefly summarize its
main points.
Very much in contrast to the
American experience in the Vietnam War, and quite
in contravention to the predictions of many of the
Iraq War's critics, units of the American ground
forces prosecuting the war, the 20 or so US Army
and Marine Corps brigades, about 160,000 troops,
now shuttling in and out of the country have
managed to maintain a large degree of "unit
cohesion".
Unit cohesion was defined by
former US Army chief of staff (1979-1983) Edward
Meyer as "the bonding together of soldiers in such
a way as to sustain their will and commitment to
each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment,
despite combat or mission stress".
Many
times it has been said that soldiers do not give
their lives for their country, but they do for
their unit, the fellow soldiers in their company,
platoon, or other relatively small discreet
military formation. Specific political motivations
for a war may come and go, may morph and be stated
anew, but it really doesn't matter. For the
(usually) men under combat, a bond of friendship
and loyalty so intense and formidable, frequently
far more intense than filial or sibling bonds,
develops that the soldiers are willing, indeed,
they frequently volunteer to, sacrifice their very
lives to maintain the greater unit's continued
survival.
Basically speaking, when you are
reading war stories or watching war movies, from
Homer's Iliad to Steven Spielberg's 1998
movie Saving Private Ryan, the bravery and
heroism displayed are examples of successful unit
cohesion.
Human-like creatures have been
battling other humans since at least the Battle of
the Monolith in Arthur C Clarke's 1968 novel
2001: A Space Odyssey, and, even before the
creation of military sociology as a sub-discipline
of military science in the middle of the 20th
century, the wise commander always, even if on an
instinctual basis, realized the importance of unit
cohesion for his military mission.
But,
somehow, the corporate sector bureaucrats and
slide-rule toting mini-max acolytes who assumed
control of the US Pentagon with Robert McNamara's
ascendency as secretary of defense in 1961 had new
ideas as to how armies in wartime operated with
maximum efficiency.
According to Downing,
after about 1967 or so, the personnel policies of
the Pentagon related to the troops fighting in
Vietnam were diametrically antithetical to what
you would have expected had maximum unit cohesion
been your goal. "As casualties rose and tours
ended, units seemed to have revolving doors and
continuity suffered. Every month, 8.5% of soldiers
finished their tours and headed home.
(Short-timers were usually cut some slack and
allowed to finish their last month or so on a base
or at least a relatively secure firebase.)
"Furthermore, every month another 10%, if
not more, left because of transfer to another
company, rest and recreation, compassionate leave,
being deemed unfit for combat, illness, and of
course wounds and death. It all added up to high
and problematic turnovers - 50% in three months or
so. Eager to increase the numbers of young
infantry officers, the army rotated platoon and
company commanders every six months or so,
exacerbating continuity problems at the company
level."
There was no way that unit
cohesion could develop under these circumstances;
soldiers were continually individually entering
and exiting their units with such rapidity that no
one really ever got to know, at a level sufficient
to be willing to die for them, any one of their
fellow comrades. By the end of the war, the
Pentagon started to realize that you couldn't
treat soldiers like metal stamping machines on one
of McNamara's Ford Motor Company factory floors -
easily movable and interchangeable with all the
rest. Machines will not, and are not expected to,
voluntarily give their lives for other machines.
In the 1980s, as the US Army and Marines
Corps started to look at what went so disastrously
wrong in Vietnam, it was realized that one of the
first things that had to be changed was the
above-described personnel replacement policy. From
then forward, the military has opted for what is
called unit replacement, whereby entire units,
frequently up to the brigade (3,000-5,000) level,
are brought into Iraq together, then, after their
tour of combat, taken out together. The soldiers
contained within these units get to know, trust,
rely, eventually, to be willing to die for, the
comrades with whom they are fighting
shoulder-to-shoulder.
If the unit cohesion
success story in Iraq was limited only to the
recognition of the importance of unit replacement,
then all we would be dealing with was a fairly
beneficent application of the social sciences to
military personnel management. However, there is
another aspect to the unit cohesion story, one
that suggests that the gains in military unit
cohesion in Iraq may be being accomplished at the
costs of less societal cohesion at home in
America.
The military America sent to Iraq
is far different from the one it sent to Vietnam.
The Vietnam-era military was primarily populated
through conscription, the draft, whether directly
or by the threat of conscription driving enlistees
to the navy or air force, thinking that by
voluntarily entering those services one could cut
down on the chances of being involuntarily
assigned to jungle combat on the ground.
The Vietnam-era draft worked fairly simply
- a young American man turned 18, reported to his
draft board (in my small town it was in the local
YMCA, the Young Men's Christian Association social
organization), and got himself signed up; unless
you could find a way to successfully game the
system and get a deferment, a few weeks later you
were in basic training. For all the stories about
potential draftees winking at draft board
officials to be granted a homosexuality deferment,
the vast majority of deferments were achieved by
having the young man enrolled in college, getting
an educational deferment.
It may be hard
to believe these days, with colleges competing for
students by providing everything from libraries
with cappuccino services to Olympic-quality
gymnasiums in the dormitories, but in the Vietnam
era it was hard to get into college. Because it
was such a ready method to avoid Vietnam, the
competition for admission to reasonably priced
public colleges was fierce, and many young men
just couldn't afford the expensive tuition at
private colleges.
If you couldn't get a
deferment, you most likely were destined for the
military and Vietnam. In this way, the Vietnam-era
draft worked much like a giant vacuum cleaner
poised over America, sucking up any young man not
bolted down by a deferment privilege. You could be
a ghetto kid from Chicago's South Side, or the son
of struggling farmers from Kansas, but if you
couldn't buy your way into a deferment, there
you'd be with your brothers of the middle and
lower middle classes in Vietnam, slogging your way
through the lethal rice paddies and jungles of a
failed counter-insurgency.
American
popular legend is that this manner of military
personnel policy worked fine during World War II,
with combat platoons, at least in the movies, all
composed of Italian Americans, Polish Americans,
Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, the entire
American melting pot, all successfully and
harmoniously led by America's mid-century
governing aristocracy, its white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants (WASPs).
Of course, during
World War II, this peaceful vision of American
inter-ethnic harmony was never put to the ultimate
test by racially integrating individual combat
units. The US military still allowed racial
segregation by law up until president Harry
Truman's Executive Order 9981, in July 1948, with
bureaucratic ennui keeping most of the military
segregated during the Korean conflict of the early
1950s.
That left Vietnam for America's
first attempt at fighting a war with a military
attempting to be reflective of the society for
which it was fighting. According to Downing,
"Conscription in the 1960s brought together urban
and rural, black and white, poor and middle class.
There were even a few from the upper crust where
noblesse oblige had not yet perished. The youth of
a greatly and rather suddenly changed nation came
into swift and close collision for the first
time."
In the years following Vietnam, the
all-volunteer force that succeeded the draft in
1973 seemed to go a long way in actually
fulfilling the American dream of successful racial
(if not class or economic) integration. Up to 25%
of the post-Vietnam army and marines were African
American, and during the first Gulf War of
1990-91, the successful integration of the armed
forces seemed well symbolized in the personage of
General Colin Powell, the first ( and so far only)
African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
But it is in today's Iraq War that
can be seen the outline of the devil's bargain the
war's supporters have acceded to in order to
achieve the unit cohesion not seen in Vietnam. The
military fighting in Iraq now is far different to
the troops sent to either Vietnam or the first
Gulf War.
For one thing, it's a lot less
racially diverse than the military of the 1980s
and 1990s. Since 2001, the percentage of
African-Americans in the pool of US Army recruits
has declined from 23% to 13% in 2006; similar
declines for the marines saw the percentages of
their African-American recruits fall from 12% to
8%. One of the many failures of the Iraq anti-war
movement to connect with the American people was
New York Congressman Charles Rangel's argument
that a new draft should be initiated, to take the
fighting and dying burden off soldiers and marines
who were primarily the poor and the black.
It was plain for America to see, in the
news footage of the soldiers fighting the war, and
in the pictures accompanying the newspaper
obituaries of those who had fallen in the war,
that, at least for the Vietnam-era shibboleth that
blacks were massively over-represented among those
suffering casualties, a new reality had emerged as
to who was fighting America's current war.
So who actually is in the US military in
Iraq? A 2007 article in the Financial Times of
London described the new dynamic of military
demographics in the Iraq War:
The Pentagon does not disclose the
socio-economic background of the 25,000 US
soldiers who have been killed or wounded in
Iraq. But a breakdown of their ethnicity and
states of origins shows they are overwhelmingly
white and from small towns in the interior
states of mid-America and the South. For
example, the ratio of killed to the state's
population is 221% for South Dakota, 178% for
Nebraska and 163% for Louisiana.
In
contrast, the District of Columbia, which is
home to Washington, the US capital, has a ratio
of just 52%, while Connecticut is 66% and New
Jersey is 60%. Charles Moskos, a military
sociologist at Northwestern University, says the
divorce between the social origins of most US
army personnel and the character of the
population as a whole is greater than ever.
Without the statistics, Downing makes
a similar point.
The rank and file of the US military
come disproportionately if not mainly from small
towns and rural areas, culturally distinctive
parts of the country that instill beliefs and
outlooks conducive to vigorous community life
and also to ties among soldiers. While people in
many urban and suburban areas over the last few
decades have become highly individualistic,
those in small towns and rural areas have
maintained traditions of interdependence.
Respect for authority in almost all forms took a
beating during Vietnam, but regained strength
away from the cities, especially during the
Reagan years. Further, people in these
communities view themselves as composing a
redoubt of morality and tradition in a country
that has become far too secular and hedonistic.
Pride in military service is an integral part of
community life in small towns and rural areas,
though it has faded if not disappeared
elsewhere.
The real question here
becomes just what is the price, in national social
cohesion, of America populating its armed forces
from such a relatively small sub-section of its
population, the rural, in many cases rapidly
depopulating small red-state towns and communities
of its between the coasts "heartland".
Downing's article is mostly upbeat, he
hails the social cohesion of the American armed
forces in Iraq as a marked contrast to the chaos
of Vietnam. I wonder. Many political observers and
commentators have noted the ugly political and
social polarization of current American public
life. This phenomenon is blamed on many factors,
such as the increasing economic divide between
rich and poor, the decline in influence and power
of the two major political parties, the rise of
talk radio and bloggers, the treatment given to
prospective Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and
Clarence Thomas in 1987 and 1991 respectively,
etc.
The yawning divide between
America's rural core and its cosmopolitan coastal
periphery is one of the most obvious points of political
and social division and polarization. After the
2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Democrats
noted with despair the county by county maps of
the election results, with huge swaths of the
American heartland painted red, denoting a George W
Bush victory, and a smaller number of much
larger population areas in and surrounding most
major cities painted blue, denoting areas won by Al
Gore or John Kerry. (As an example of this
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