A Soldier's Load, and His Lack of Mobility

[DRZinn]

Most of the 240s in Iraq are vehicle mounted. Anyone dismounted is usually carrying the SAW.

Not in my experience....

 

[Vern Humphrey]

BUT most of all, is the fact that in WW1 and WW2, only 15-20 percent of US riflemen would fire at the enemy (because of psychological reasons), wheras near 100 percent of machinegunners would fire at the enemy because of the peer pressure of the machinegun squad.

SLA Marshall never conducted the study he said he conducted -- He claimed he got his data from conducting in-depth interviews of 600 companies after action. As Trevor N. Depue pointed out, that means about 150 men per company (after allowing for casualties and under strength), or 90,000 interviews.

He presents his results statistically -- which means he had to have real numbers from those interviews. You can go through "Men Agains Fire" and check off all the questions he would have had to ask -- "How old are you?" "What weapon did you have?" "Did you fire?" The resulting data-gathering instrument would be several pages long.

No where can we find that mass of paper -- did he ship if from the Pacific to Europe? Did he send it home? Where is it? And more important, who went through a quarter of a million pages (before the days of computers) and tabulated the data?

Marshal himself "duplicated" his study in Korea -- and found out he was right!

But in Viet Nam, there was never a problem with men firing in battle -- the problem was getting aimed, measured fire. There was no problem in Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Afghanistan or today in Iraq.

The problem only surfaces when Marshal's around -- and he's dead.

 

[ghost squire]

So do you personally believe more than 20 percent of US soldiers would fire on a German soldier in WW2?

What reasons would SLA Marshall have to lie? Maybe he didn't interview everyone in the company.

 

[carebear]

I don't recall it being a big problem mentioned in any of the memoirs I've read of actual combatants. As some were not particularly happy to be there, and others were in command positions, you'd think they would have mentioned it or come out corroberating Marshall at least.

 

[Thin Black Line]

Not in my experience....

Then you must be in the marines, not the army

 

[carebear]

Then you must be in the marines, not the army

Given a Marine, a machine gun and a truck, the average Marine logistician would have the Marine carry the MG.

Given two Marines, he'd also try to figure out how to have the Marines carry the truck to save on POL.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

So do you personally believe more than 20 percent of US soldiers would fire on a German soldier in WW2?

Yes -- for several reasons:

1. There is little or no mention of soldiers not firing outside Marshall's writings. If it was that common, surely platoon leaders and company commanders would have noticed and commented on it.

2. Veterans do not say they or their comrades failed to fire.

3. The not-firing phenomenon does not appear in any war or encounter when Marshall is not there. I know from personal experience (as an adviser to Viet Namese infantry my first tour and as an Infantry company commander, my second tour) troops tended to shoot too much, rather than not enough.

What reasons would SLA Marshall have to lie?

What reason would Gerald Belisles (the author of "The Arming of America") have to lie -- but he definitely did lie!

We have plenty of examples of authors and researchers who lied -- they lie because it gets them noticed, sells their books and so on.

Maybe he didn't interview everyone in the company.

He said he did!

 

[DRZinn]

Then you must be in the marines, not the army

Good guess. I'm 28 and have the knees of a 60-year-old.

 

[carebear]

Good guess. I'm 28 and have the knees of a 60-year-old.

Good luck getting disability on that too.

Ooh Rah!

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Good guess. I'm 28 and have the knees of a 60-year-old.

Marines have knees? In the Infantry in the old days, we were lucky to have ankles.

 

[carebear]

Ankles?

We were offered that trade, but we chose to keep the portion of the brain that controls marching ability and marksmanship instead.

 

[DRZinn]

Hey carebear -

What did the very first Marine say to the second Marine at Tun Tavern?

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Ankles?

We were offered that trade, but we chose to keep the portion of the brain that controls marching ability and marksmanship instead.

I was in the 3rd MarDiv (which had two Marine regiments and one Army brigade) in Viet Nam. The NVA were very afraid of the Marines -- they used to say, "You shoot them in the head and they keep coming."

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Hey carebear -

What did the very first Marine say to the second Marine at Tun Tavern?

"You'd never have made it in the Old Corps, Boot."

 

[DRZinn]

 

[carebear]

 

[Jeff White]

ghost squire,
I was in the Army from 6 Dec 1974 until 1 Nov 2003. So I'd say I covered both areas. I spent the first 21 years as an Infantryman and the last almost 8 years as an Artilleryman.

None at all. But I trust his studies, and unless you show me evidence that shows he was wrong, I will continue to trust them.

Vern and I had a long debate on this issue in another thread. I've since re-read Men Against Fire, gone back and reviewed a lot of history from WWII and Korea, relooked my own experience and decided that Vern was right. Marshall did bring up some good points, but the fact that most Infantrymen were reluctant to fire their weapons wasn't one of them.

Quote:
Perhaps you want to sit in your defensive position while the enemy is attacking without your platoon's two machine guns interlocking their final protective fires to your front as the last defense before the dismounted enemy gets in among your fighting postions....I don't.

Thats one of those situations I was talking about. But to be fair, how often does that happen nowadays. Maybe if we fought Iran that would become far more useful.

I would bet that anytime a unit spends the night outside the FOB they still prepare a proper defense.

Quote:
Perhaps you want to to maneuver across the last 100 meters of open ground from the assault position to the obj with only M16s and M4s in the SBF position.

The super low recoil of the wonderful .223 system should allow fully automatic suppressing fire. In all seriousness though, are you Vietnam era or Iraq 2 era? I'm just curious.

The 5.56x45 is not a suitable replacement for 7.62x51 at the platoon level. It lacks the range and penetration. The Army did suggest this very thing some years ago and there was a huge outcry from the Infantry community. You get 300 meters more maximum effective range and much greater penetration with the trade off in weight. If you use them properly, you employ your machine guns from the tripod and T&E so they don't need to be as maneuverable as the the other weapons in the platoon.

I don't really understand what you're trying to convince me of. I know the machinegun is a useful tool in our arsenal. Nevertheless it is less powerful on the battlefield now compared to WW 1 and WW 2.

Actually since we've drastically reduced the number of artillery tubes in the new organizations, the machine gun is more important then it was in WWI or WWII. The maneuver commander can no longer count on having immediate fire support at the other end of his radio. Tac air will never be timely or versatile enough to support maneuver warfare across the entire battlefield no matter how much Don Rumsfeld wishes for it to be.

My point being from a bean counters convoluted view, they are less useful and therefore deserve less soldiers to carry them.

I don't think the bean counters think that machine guns are less useful, they just are concerned with reducing the number of soldiers in the organization.

These are the same people who give us the Stryker.

Nope the J series MTOE called Army of Excellence IIRC was created in 1986. No one had ever heard of a Styker then.

Jeff

 

[ghost squire]

1. There is little or no mention of soldiers not firing outside Marshall's writings. If it was that common, surely platoon leaders and company commanders would have noticed and commented on it.

2. Veterans do not say they or their comrades failed to fire.

3. The not-firing phenomenon does not appear in any war or encounter when Marshall is not there. I know from personal experience (as an adviser to Viet Namese infantry my first tour and as an Infantry company commander, my second tour) troops tended to shoot too much, rather than not enough.

1.) Dave Grossman at least mentions that in fact firing rates went up to near 100 percent when officers came around the men.

2.) Not suprising to me.

3.) Well he didn't do any studies previous to WW1, and in Vietnam Grossman says that firing rates went up to over 90 percent due to conditioning and training.

Actually since we've drastically reduced the number of artillery tubes in the new organizations, the machine gun is more important then it was in WWI or WWII. The maneuver commander can no longer count on having immediate fire support at the other end of his radio. Tac air will never be timely or versatile enough to support maneuver warfare across the entire battlefield no matter how much Don Rumsfeld wishes for it to be.

Hmm could this be because the army doesn't even have its own fixed wing combat planes anymore for CAS? Why could we have timely CAS in Vietnam but not now? I'm convinced that you're right about the machinegun thing now though.

The 5.56x45 is not a suitable replacement for 7.62x51 at the platoon level. It lacks the range and penetration. The Army did suggest this very thing some years ago and there was a huge outcry from the Infantry community. You get 300 meters more maximum effective range and much greater penetration with the trade off in weight. If you use them properly, you employ your machine guns from the tripod and T&E so they don't need to be as maneuverable as the the other weapons in the platoon.

LOL I was just joking about the 5.56 thing!

Nope the J series MTOE called Army of Excellence IIRC was created in 1986. No one had ever heard of a Styker then.

I have a feeling beancounters and commitees don't change much throughout the years...

 

[Vern Humphrey]

1.) Dave Grossman at least mentions that in fact firing rates went up to near 100 percent when officers came around the men.

David Grossman was a Permanent Professor at West Point -- which is to say, a college professor who wears a uniform. He's never been in combat.

2.) Not suprising to me.

You don't think veterans would notice what was happening around them? You don't think people like John B George (author of "Shots Fired in Anger") who fought on Guadalcanal and was a member of Merrill's Marauders later didn't KNOW what his men did?

3.) Well he didn't do any studies previous to WW1, and in Vietnam Grossman says that firing rates went up to over 90 percent due to conditioning and training.

Grossman wasn't there.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Here's a site you might want to visit: http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallproblem.htm

In one of the most disturbing, and nutty, passages in Marshall's Men Against Fire, he explains why he kept his wartime findings to himself. Surely, something as serious as riflemen not firing should have been reported or at least discussed with colleagues. This is how Marshall explains it:

The data which came of [my] prolonged personal research was my own and I made no attempt to cross-check or co-related it with the findings of my friends and colleagues in the Historical Division, ETO. There was a reason for this quite apart from the lack of time and high pressure of duty. Each man judges performance according to some standard deriving from his own experience. But the impressions of others, and how they evaluate man against fire, are also either validated by a breadth of experience or colored by a lack of perspective. Where the armchair historian may pick and choose whatever fits in to the making of a good story, the combat historian may be sure only of his own datum plane.

"Prolonged personal research" while heading an historical mission for the United States Army? How can Marshall call his colleagues in the field, who were as close to the frontlines as he, "armchair historians"? (And why would he dedicate the book to them, if they were such dullards?) Wasn't it Marshall's "duty" to record and share findings? And, while we're at it, what on earth is a "datum plane" that can only be understood be its creator?

From top to bottom, Marshall is fibbing.

The "Marshall problem" is that he was both a perceptive commentator and a fibbing windbag. A supreme over-reacher, he was a habitually dishonest man in a field where honesty is everything.

Some writers still claim that Marshall's work has an overall validity. Some have said that he helped focus the Army's attention on fighting men rather than bombs. But fraud can never have an altogether beneficial result. Fraud saves the perpetrator from an honest effort which might have been useful, and wastes the victim's time and energy on nonsense. It is alarming, for instance, to find Marshall's "ratio of fire" quoted as fact in the War Psychiatry Textbook of Military Medicine (Office of the Surgeon General, 1995). One would wish for a bit more intellectual rigor on the part of our boys in white coats.

 

[ghost squire]

Thanks for the link, but its certainly not an overwhelming body of evidence. Seems like any site that tries to prove that Marshall and Grossman were incorrect are rife with ad hoc attacks.

Wasn't he a General, and wasn't it his mission to find out what the battlefield is really like? I'm just going to go with my instincts here.

But this has really been an enlightening debate!

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Thanks for the link, but its certainly not an overwhelming body of evidence. Seems like any site that tries to prove that Marshall and Grossman were incorrect are rife with ad hoc attacks.

What's ad hoc? That means "one time."

Wasn't he a General, and wasn't it his mission to find out what the battlefield is really like? I'm just going to go with my instincts here.

He was not a genera at the time. He was promoted later. His duty as an officer was to help win the war -- and if he found a flaw in performance, it was his duty to report it at once.


Here's another discussion of Marshall's work: http://hnn.us/articles/1356.html

One who didn't buy Marshall's argument was Harold R. Leinbaugh, who served as a rifle company commander during World War II, and co-authored The Men of Company K. Leinbaugh characterized Marshall's assertions as "absurd, ridiculous and totally nonsensical." Leinbaugh wasn't alone in his skepticism. Roger Spiller, an historian at the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, challenged Marshall's claim that he questioned 400 companies of approximately 125 soldiers each immediately after they had fought in combat: "The systematic collection of data that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention." Spiller studied Marshall's records and other documents. He discovered there was no evidence to support support Marshall's grand claims. Spiller said that Marshall's aide, John Westover, who accompanied Marshall in Europe, didn't remember hearing Marshall ask soldiers if they had fired their weapons. Additionally, Westover didn't "recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations," said Spiller.

 

[ghost squire]

He was not a genera at the time.

Actually I believe he was in Korea, and he was still doing the same work to my knowledge.

What's ad hoc? That means "one time."

Whoops, total brainfart
I meant ad hominem referring to their not so subtle attacks on Marshall.

Any figure that prolific will have controversy surrounding them. Doesn't the US Army support his findings/claims?

Anyway on a side note (being the original subject): http://www.themule.com/military.php check out the video they have on the website.

Could this be useful? What about remote controlled aerial resupply vehicles? Small ones that would just deliver 50-100 pounds of supplies or so.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Actually I believe he was in Korea, and he was still doing the same work to my knowledge.

Which explains why only Korea and WWII show similar results -- the same man did both.

Whoops, total brainfart
I meant ad hominem referring to their not so subtle attacks on Marshall.

But they aren't ad hominem. They are comments on the work, not the man. The criticisms focus on the fact that Marshall's notes do not support his claims, that he spoke to no one about his findings until after the war, and so on.

Any figure that prolific will have controversy surrounding them. Doesn't the US Army support his findings/claims?

How do they "support" them? The Army is in the business of fighting wars -- the Marshall business is long behind us.

Anyway on a side note (being the original subject): http://www.themule.com/military.php check out the video they have on the website.

Could this be useful? What about remote controlled aerial resupply vehicles? Small ones that would just deliver 50-100 pounds of supplies or so.

Depends on the environment. During the Spanish American War we made a boo boo -- we had an observation balloon, whose ropes were held by troops in the front of the advance force. The Spanish shelled the ground under the balloon. We haven't forgotten that -- things that fly can give away your position.

 

[NMshooter]

Marshall was a journalist by trade, who also happened to be a reserve officer.

I like the various books of war stories he has written, though I do not know how well they fit with the facts.

I also enjoy his commentaries, at least the ones where he does not play amateur psychologist, he does make a number of important points.

Psychology in general is more voodoo than science, unless you are approaching it like Dr. Etscorn, my former Psych prof at NMT before he invented the nicotine patch. He was concerned with neurochemistry, things that were measureable and repeatible.

Thus my unwillingness to accept Grossman's writings.

As far as mechanical mules go, we have tried several in the past, and currently have the John Deere M-Gator in the inventory, though I suspect not very many. I bet there have been several discussions over the years concerning actual flesh and blood mules, and I bet some of the participants were horrified the subject ever came up.

Just think, America, the most technologically advanced nation in the world, reestablishing the Veternary Corps! I suspect the idea of horse cavalry would not be taken well either, despite the use of horses in Afganistan.

An electrically powered wheeled robot mule with a solar recharger is not quite feasible with current technology, but I have seen a few programs attempting to develop something like it.

There are a couple of unmanned combat vehicles the Army is playing with, something like that could carry machineguns and anti-tank weapons.

I suspect folks having read Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" cannot wait for powered armor to be fielded, thinking about how much stuff the infantryman could carry then. "Just think, a combat load of 1000 lbs.!"