Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
Oh well, it seems that military leadership in the Infantry all boils down to bringing order out of chaos. It's almost as though because in combat they're all improvised solutions that are all unique, there are no larger lessons or solutions to be derived. Damn, all those Vu-Graph slides in '77-'78 in Infantry Hall were for nothing.
In reverse order, probably true on the Vu-graphs as is true for most of the foolishness that comes out of Bunker 4.

Not just the Infantry. Armor and Cavalry have exactly the same sorts and sets of problems -- as do Attack and Scout aircraft crews and the Engineers on occasion. The other combat and combat support arms can have the same sort of problems every now and then but those are rather rare and they seldom train for such efforts. Thus they tend to be more orderly and less chaotic. They tend to seek and use checklists, metrics and can actually apply larger lessons effectively and can also generally apply derived or patterned solutions

Maneuver combat OTOH is indeed a series of really unique situations and essentially undiffrentiated chaos requiring rapid assessments and intuitive responses and thinking. The problems of leadership and command in combat are many for all branches -- but those problems are far less structured and much more diverse for the maneuver arms and they are ferociously exacerbated for those guys BECAUSE we foolishly try to encapsulate 'doctrine' in larger lessons and solutions derived from other situations that were just enough different to be problematic...

At about the time you were cruising the Snack Bar in Muskogee County, Georgia that is the meeting place of the Army, had you instead gone to Leavenworth the Tactics Department there would have informed you first thing something along this line: "What we are going to teach you will work in gently rolling open terrain on a mild June day against a peer competitor with approximately equal strength and equipment provided you have all your authorized personnel and equipment and they are trained and it is all operational. If any of those factors differ, you will have to adapt."

That means that if it is raining pitchforks, you've got a problem. If the opponent is a mess of Go-rillas instead of a generally like unit, you've got problems. If you are short 20% of your folks and have only a 70% OR, it's snowing and you have to fit those guerrillas AND a like sized and equipped opponent, you got bi-i-g-g-g problems. Like I said, it's simple...