A Response to Bob
Our friend in Washington is the de facto interim editor. I am publishing his quick take on the Scales article preceding as I received it–a great read:
Well, there he goes again. Here’s another propaganda piece (attached) from Bob Scales concerning the need for the nation to concentrate on how to perform close combat better—and get this—with less loss of life. His answer? FIRST, we need better troop-carrying vehicles, to get more of our young people INTO the close fight faster. Second, we need more robots—that’s right, robots—things the infantry can control so that we get into close combat faster. Third, we need more airplanes to perform the logistics mission to support those troops and the vehicles taking them to the close fight. Ah, but first a little “history” of warfare, in which no airplane is mentioned. It is as if they never existed. In fact, the fulcrum of all military history apparently is the infantry! Amazing. The closest to modernity he gets is blitzkrieg, which for some reason has become “tank-on-tank” warfare in Scale’s sanctified imagination of warfare history…so, warfare has lurched between infantry dominance and ground mobility (horse or tank) dominance. And, as luck would have it, in his mind we are back to an infantry-dominated world! (For those of you keeping score at home, I will say it again, “Historians reflexively neglect and denigrate airpower.” Scales is no different, he’s just more of a pure proselytizer for his faith than your average civilian historian.)
But, before we get too far into that theological discussion, let’s take a look at the Army’s favorite game—the blame game. Apparently, the Army and Marine Corps bear no responsibility for what Scales identifies as a terrible national neglect of emphasis on close combat. After all, they are the keepers of the infantry flame, right? If that is the choir you are preaching to, it would be bad form to put any blame on them, so it must be someone else. Right. And they are, of course, the usual suspects. First, you have the American people, who by some sort of historical or hereditary oddity, do not like their young people dying in combat, like, say, the Germans or Islamic radicals or Vietnamese did. Oh, that pain of not having been born in a more courageous, manly society that really, really FAVORs their young dying in combat! Lacking that, we must, in an odd turn of logic, blame them for death itself. So, after a long, extended discussion about death, which is important because it weakens the audience to your point, even if your point now concentrates on dying rather than war, he gets to the other evils—aircraft and ship programs, and the evil contractors and lawmakers whose coffers bulge with big dollars from those programs, robbing the infantry of its due. So, the American people stab the infantry in the back, abetted by evil corporations, the airmen and naval officers who feed them lies, and the lawmakers who only know dollars, not war.
What a terrible, terrible situation we have created for our infantry and the glorious services who speak for them! How do we fix it? What is the goal? To achieve the same kill ratios we have achieved in air-to-air combat—you know, because we’ve given the air guys so much money and attention, and that’s all it takes. Although the cost per infantry soldier has increased exponentially, some orders of magnitude over the past several years, he doesn’t bring that fact to bear, because all the facts do not matter. Only the casualty facts matter when you’re beating someone with your bloody scarf.
The real problem is that if Bob got his wish, and we really did allow our navies and air forces to atrophy so we could concentrate on REAL men—the infantry—he’d lose the game he loves so well. Then, he’d have nobody else to blame for the fact that close combat still kills too many Americans—or that it doesn’t kill enough, and that would take all the fun out of it. When you can be as irresponsible as the Army in neglecting counterinsurgency or even the infantry themselves in THEIR OWN SERVICE, and still successfully blame everyone else—EVEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE—you are sitting in a place too pretty to be interrupted by accountability. No, Bob, you love things just as they are—you’re making too much money and having too much fun being a Jesuit for your religion to have it all ruined by empiricism or actually seeing dramatic decreases in death from close combat. That would suck the air right out of your system of demagoguery.
I would ask you to consider, based on this tract, why Airmen were placed in such a land as America? Was it to create a world safe for infantry close combat as Scales suggests? He LOVES airpower—you know, drones and airlift and A-10s buzzing over the close combat killing fields, and Airmen to blame after every battle. Given this sort of advocacy environment, what is an Airman to do? To join him? To go with the flow? If war is all about the close fight, then you would be right to take the easy road. But, if it isn’t, and in fact, if close combat actually is something to avoid due to our national humanitarian culture, then what is our role? Bob’s fans are sucking this stuff up—in fact, I got it sent to me by people gushing about how great it is. This article should be a way of examining just what war is, and how America should wage it. The infantry is here to stay, and airpower has a tremendous role in precluding close combat to the extent it can be—when it cannot, airpower has a tremendous role in dominating that environment and extricating the infantry as rapidly as possible from no-win situations. Someone must speak FOR the American people on this issue, not against them. That might be YOUR role.
Best,
Tom