William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[AmericanPride]

To this civilian defending excel spreadsheets as a military decision making tool is...silly. The great leaders of the past didn't need them and there were a lot of great leaders in the past. If they had them they still would be who they were and if McClellan had excel that wouldn't have made him Grant. The problem is for the military to find those Grants and I fear that if proficiency with excel is valued the next incarnation of Bill Slim (sorry British, we're taking your man) who happened to be a computer klutz will be lost to us. That is not a good thing.

Those are two different issues. And the first part is not "defending excel"; excel is a tool. It's about the lack of rigorous intellect applied to military problems. This is not strongly cultivated in the officer corps until senior leadership - and only narrowly. Another poster referenced this problem implicitly with the failure of the senior leadership to understand sociology, et.al and how it fits with military science. Embarking on military campaigns in the complexity of the modern security environment without appreciating the nuances of practical understanding is both ignorant and deadly. Modern general officers are no longer galloping on horseback to break the enemy's center - they're managers of a complex multi-layered bureaucracy embedded in an tightly-woven political-economic-social fabric and engaged in a highly disruptive enterprise with long-term multi-ordered effects. There is no excuse for ignorance, especially for officers.

I think people tried everything way back when. It wasn't tried too much after that because the ones who thought that was a good idea lost their fights and they all got killed. The reason I figure that is because humans are very pragmatic and if mixed sex groups had worked in battle, people would have kept on doing it because winning is a good thing.

That's a highly superficial reading of history. Care to provide any examples? Humans are pragmatic - to an extent. They're also rationalizing, which means they're better at excusing their condition than rationally improving or understanding their condition. Fuchs is right about the historical condition of women, which indicates that exclusion of women from combat is a socio-political construction rather than one based strictly on military proficiency. The destruction of mythologized forms of femininity is the greatest problem facing the integration of women in the hyper-masculine culture of the military. And this social construct is enforced through very deeply-held norms that are practiced through structurally discriminatory practices - and not just in the military, but from the moment of birth. Success in combat, like sports, is not exclusively a question of maximizing physical strength. It also requires technical skill, intellect, and moral and physical courage. Is the 'worst' male soldier more effective in combat than the 'best' female soldier?

Also, the military is a reflection of the society. There is currently a significant "me first" attitude of the Ayn Rand "virtue of selfishness" variety. Combined with the "everyone deserves a prize" crowd you get the drive for "disruptive thinkers", people with little or no actual experience who believe they know what is best for everyone else but don't really want to work their way up the ladder and earn that position, they want it given to them. The military is a argot society that is dependent on the idea of "duties", not "rights." You get people suing the Army over policy because they have the "right" to be part of a unit. That is hard for many people who have grown up in the "me first" generation to assimilate to.

If the "military is a reflection of society" and society is changing, shouldn't the military also change? Similarly, if the conduct or character of war is changing, doesn't that also necessitate a change in military culture? Is a 19th century military culture optimal for 21st century conflict?