Volunteers!!

[carl]

May I suggest a small change of terminology here. I would suggest that such units be raised for a particular campaign or war (rather than a job).

Absolutely.

I suggest that you get the volunteers to sign up to serve in the unit for three years - this applies also to the leadership cadre. We are not talking about 100s of thousands of people here - you will find them out there. People like me People you sign up to go to war. Once I got into a mostly peacetime environment it was so stifling suffocating to the extent I had to leave. There will be thousands like that in the US you will get a good day's work out of.

I think so too, even now and back in the early 2000s, very much more so. There are over 300 million people in this country and the right types would be found in sufficient numbers.

Looking into the low incidence of PTSD in the RLI I believe we stumbled upon the secret by chance. Therefore in my experience where I spent a full three years doing a 6week:10days rotation of ops:R&R without any long term ill-effect (any aggressive behaviour I may exhibit from time to time was there from before my service started )

Now to page 251 of Stuart Cloete's book "A Victorian Son" talking about his time in hospital during the Great War, "The feeling that for the next few weeks I need no longer feel afraid or act with courage." That was it. Every two months you had a week when you returned to normality. You could drop your guard, you could wind down. I discussed this some time back somewhere here and suggested how such a rotation would work. That said little wonder - given what I saw in the movie Restrepo - that there is an increasing level of mental and PTSD incidence among those deployed to Afghanistan.

How beautifully and cogently stated by Cloete. Sometimes I think, Ken alludes to this, that the Americans are stuck with an early 20th century industrial view of human beings. We view them as just parts in a machine. Other countries seem to understand better that people are people and have be treated as such.

Could you view the Taliban as doing the same thing you guys did but in an informal manner? They get tired or stressed, and they just don't do missions or they go to Pakistan for a while to chill out. Then when they feel better, back they go.

You need the leadership cadre who are in it for the duration. Command continuity and theatre experience are essential. That is your backbone and it extends down to corporal level (squad leader). Ttoopie replacements (as I remember discussing elsewhere here a few years ago) can be trickle fed into the units at a slow rate to never diminish the level of combat experience of units. This I submit needs to be managed and must be maintained down to section/squad level. Once the units have deployed promotions must in the main be from within.

Yes x 3. I remember your talking about how handling replacements. I cut that one out (so to speak) because it is an excellent example of recognizing that you are dealing with people, not parts.

Leadership cadre in for the duration and promotion from within would result, I think (in my civilian bookish way), in a unit like this getting better and better during the course of its 3 year deployment.

I think a volunteer unit like this could work but it would require at least 3 mainly cultural adjustments that the American military might not be able to make. The first is recognizing that small wars are really honest to goodness different and have to be handled differently. I know we've been at this for 11 years but I still don't think that has really been accepted. The second is that people are people, not parts and have to be handled as such. The third comes from the first sort of in that just because you make changes to handle something unique, doesn't mean you are locked into those changes forever. You can switch back again...and people being people, not parts, they will be able to handle the adjustment.

That is all part of being adaptable. We used to be able to adapt. Chesty Puller and his contemporaries could adapt. He started out leading local constabulary. Then Pacific island battles against the Japanese then winter rough country fighting with a great large combined arms unit. He was adaptable. i don't see guys now being any less so, if given the chance.

Quite frankly I can't say, but I sometimes wonder if it (and other methods and tactical options) has received any serious consideration.

I would ask the guys who have been there and those who are going there to actively give the use of mounted infantry some thought. You may be greatly surprised at what the troopies come up with.

The American troops would be, I would bet, be quite enthusiastic about something like this. American leaders no, because there would be no high tech involved and they would be afraid they would have to have mounted units forever.