Combat Experience
I read an article this morning about a bit of a culture problem in the Army. What it stems from is the lack of combat experience in the lower ranks, including junior leaders. In the other services, it is difficult to detect unless someone is in dress uniform, and they have all their awards and decorations on display. The Army is a bit different.
You can tell when a Soldier has been deployed to a warzone if they have a unit or organizational patch on their right shoulder sleeve. This is commonly referred to as a “Combat Patch”. In Army vocabulary, it is known as Shoulder Sleeve Insignia - Former Wartime Service or SSI-FWTS. Yeah, now you know why we called it a combat patch.
A Combat Patch can be a bit misleading. There is no “minimum” time required to earn one. You can be in a warzone for a day and qualify to wear one. Also, the definition of being in a war zone is pretty loose. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you could pass through one of those countries, never leave the base, and qualify for one. You could even be in a country that is included in the war zone and qualify for one. Having the patch doesn’t mean you’ve got combat experience, it only means you’ve been there.
In the Army, there are other ways to tell, especially since we LOVE to put our badges on our uniforms. There are a couple of badges out there like the Combat Action Badge and the Combat Infantryman Badge that show someone has at least been shot at or had some sort of direct encounter with the enemy. But even those two badges don’t necessarily equate to combat experience.
Side Note: You know who didn’t have combat experience at the beginning of WWII? Eisenhower. You know who didn’t have combat experience at the beginning of the war in Iraq 2003? Petraeus. Having experience doesn’t make you an expert, but it does give you some perspective.
Regardless, what the Army is experiencing is the same thing that happens after every period of combat…a case of the “Haves and have nots”. You have senior leadership that has some sort of combat experience, and the vast majority of the force does not. It happened between WWII and Korea. It happened between Korea and Viet Nam. There were a few incursions like Panama and Desert Storm and Somalia where combat was extremely brief, but people still earned their badges and medals. Then those people got out or retired and most of the force was without a combat patch.
The War on Terror is a little different. It lasted for two decades. Many, many leaders had multiple combat tours. Months and years deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, or both. In some cases, leaders had three or four of those “combat patches” to choose from when they put their uniform on. In the midst of all that, only the newest Soldiers didn’t have combat experience. We rarely had to worry about it in a small unit, let alone across the entire Army.
And now, the Army is back where it was when I first joined. A combat patch is a rare thing and only worn by the “old guys”. Those combat patches are also causing a very, very false impression of our Army and the challenges staring us in the face. You see, real combat experience from the War on Terror means you can probably gunfight pretty well. It means you can probably bring in an attack helicopter, or close air support, or a MEDEVAC helicopter. It means you know how to fight from a Forward Operating Base (FOB), and you can conduct Kill or Capture missions.
Those are all awesome things, if you’re down in a platoon of thirty-five or even a company of a hundred and forty. And when your enemy is a small terrorist cell of ten guys or less. And they are in sandals with AK-47s and RPGs. But that experience is pretty irrelevant if you are a multi-star general. Yeah, it gives you some street credit with the boys and girls down in the trenches, but those are NOT the skills you need as a senior leader.
The skills our senior leaders will require when we go toe-to-toe with a Peer or Near-Peer enemy like China or Russia were rarely used after the first month of the Iraq invasion. Our senior leaders need to know how to plan artillery at echelon, mass attack aviation at a critical point to destroy armor columns, fight our own tanks through dense vegetation, and provide logistical support for all those things.
Leaders will need to know how to maximize drone and satellite technology, not just to play whack-a-mole with bad guys emplacing IEDs in the middle of the night. We are going to have to relearn Naval Warfare. We will have to learn how to operate without complete Air Supremacy. They will have to know how to lead when entire units are combat ineffective or when they don’t have enough ammunition or when there isn’t a FOB to go back to. And what are they going to do when they don’t have internet connectivity and communications to every subordinate unit?
The answer is: They are going to have to LEARN. Every single leader at Every single level is going to have to learn to fight a different kind of war. They are going to have to bust out Sun Tsu and Clausewitz and even the old “Nine Principles of War” and learn all of it. Not just read it, learn it. They are going to have to learn it, know it, and apply it.
Even those guys with the combat patches and the badges and the medals and all the rank have never fought that kind of war. The culture of the “Haves and Have Nots” needs to go away and right-fucking-now. If we are worried about fighting China or Russia, everyone with a combat patch needs to shelve their ego because they don’t know this kind of war. They don’t know any better than that young private or brand new Lieutenant.
Right now, our Army, our entire military, needs to be a LEARNING organization. They need to learn TOGETHER because, honestly, NO ONE has that kind of Combat Experience.