"The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in C20-C21" Topic

I thought that this book link looked interesting and the author is pretty well known but the price is pretty steep. Has anyone read it?

I haven't read it. I can only comment on the summary on Amazon.

While concepts of masculinity and patriotism are not wholly irrelevant, the combat performance of professional soldiers is based primarily on drills which are inculcated through intense training regimes.

^This x1000. Immediate Action Drills are your money-maker. And you have to do them over…and over…and over. It gets mind-numbingly boring sometimes. But when you see your collective reaction times drop from seconds to split seconds, it fills you with a sense of confidence. "Man, whoever runs into us on the battlefield is gonna DIE."

Re: intensity. It wasn't until I got to the Marine Corps that I understood what was meant by "High-Fiving on the Objective". In much of my Army training, we carried unrealistically light loads (sometimes no body armor at all) and did an "EndEx" as soon as we completed Actions on the Objective. Training at The Basic School, we much more frequently went through the whole life-cycle of an attack: marching to an Assembly Area with full packs, dropping down to assault packs/combat load/full body armor, assaulting the objective, consolidating….and then rolling right into another mission, or heading back to the AA to pick up our packs and hump somewhere else. Adding all those movements in and conducting combat operations for 12-48hrs or more (without losing track of personnel/gear/mission timelines) is the grueling part of infantry work IMO, and makes the actual assaults feel easy. Any units that DON'T train at that intensity level will be in for a rude awakening in combat.

Soldiers are no longer included or excluded into the platoon on the basis of their skin colour, ethnicity, social background, sexuality or even sex (women are increasingly being included in the infantry) but their professional competence alone

This I disagree with. Granted, I've never been in a combat zone to put any theories to the test, but I've been in all-male combat arms units (National Guard infantry and USMC IOC) and in mixed-gender POG units (Active Army Air Defense Artillery and Marine Aircraft Wing)…..the fastest way to break the cohesion of a group of men is to drop a female into the mix.

I have generally have to pretty much agree with Noble. However, I never have read the book either… But my experience was a little different. As I was in active duty Infantry units. Like the 101, the 2ID on the ROK DMZ and later with the only Mech Bde with the 18th ABN Corps. We trained much more has he said he did in the USMC. And exercises were long and grueling at times. At least that was my experience…

I was mechanized Mortar (4-deuce) in 90-92 and while most of our training centered around the gun and mech mortar operations, we did do normal infantry stuff.

Much of what we did was patrols when we did it- with the occasional reminder training of what we are expected to be doing as Grunts if we didn't have the tube. (MOUT ops mostly)

Hot, tiring and strenuous stuff. Would not trade it. :)

I always believed and say it occassionly. That all Infantrymen do their best work dismounted. And dismounted patrolling is the basis for all Infantry ops on one level or another … Of course you still have to be introduced into the battlefield, by some sort of vehicle, bird, chute, etc. … Then the walking[or running] starts …

No matter how high-tech war seems to go, in the end, someone still gotta walk to their destination :)

You got it ! Until we can get teleportation like on Star Trek ! Reminds me, back in the day, the troops called their boots "black cadillacs" ! Way back when US Troops wore black boots …

"Poor man's horses" is the term I heard growing up.

I've also heard them called LPCs, as in Leather Personnel Carriers.

I like that :)

I managed to get a (library!) copy, this is my review:

This is a very in-depth look at the combat soldier from the beginning of the C20 until the present day, focusing very largely on the experiences of North American, European and ANZAC infantry. It is not a history as such, but a sociological analysis concentrating on changes in combat effectiveness over the course of this period.

For those interested in the subject, it is fascinating in its detail and very thought-provoking in its thesis: to sum up very roughly, the author sees an increase in combat effectiveness in modern militaries – particularly in its infantry soldiers – in comparison to their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the mass citizen/conscript armies which fought in WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam. The author is strongly inclined to see this improvement in terms of an increasing professionalisation of the military in comparison to these mass forces, partly due to increased training levels but also, perhaps mainly, that this emphasis on training and professional competence has changed the nature of the bonds between soldiers which make them fight successfully, in comparison to the previous appeals of nationalism ("for king and country"), masculinity ("join the marines and be a man") and friendship ("you fight for your mates beside you").

King is nuanced enough to see that this is a matter of degree and emphasis rather than a matter of either/or but he is persuasive that there is something to his thesis, mirroring similar phenomena throughout society. He sees this as basically positive, partly because he believes that it generally increases combat effectiveness and partly because he believes it to be more inclusive: if pure professional competence is the criterion for generating fighting efficiency at platoon and section level, there is obviously no reason to exclude efficient soldiers whatever their sex, colour, creed or sexual orientation. King's chapters on the more sociological phenomena involved in generating efficiency are always very interesting, whether dealing with the increasing role in modern Western professional militaries or the impact of disciplinary systems of wildly varying degrees of harshness.

The book is what it is: it is a long sociology book and it is not an easy read: there are plenty of academic terms in there to confuse the wider reading public. However, given this, King is a clear writer and it isn't difficult to understand what he is saying at any given point.

Whilst I would recommend this book to readers interested in this subject, I have several reservations – all related. Firstly, a definitional problem: the author uses 'cohesion' as a synonym for 'combat effectiveness'. I think this causes immense difficulties because cohesion can be understood in many ways, some of which would be a distinct 'input' into combat effectiveness rather than the sum of other factors. It basically biases the work in favour of sociological and psychological understandings of combat efficiency, where other factors, such as equipment and tactics may be equally or more important. Secondly, the writer relies on SLA Marshall and Dupuy for some of his insights into the relative effectiveness of Allied and German militaries and when your work relies on controversial analyses as one of the starting points, then it is always going to be difficult to make a really solid case. To be fair, the author does acknowledge the possible importance of the (perceived) superiority of the German WW2 section machinegun and the much harsher discipline regime that its soldiers operated under, but the difficulty is that he comes to no conclusion. It would be theoretically possible, for example, that the Allied soldiers facing the Wehrmacht were actually generally better trained/more professional than their German counterparts but the combination of the MG34/42 and the threat of execution trumped that advantage. Thirdly, and following on from this, the author just doesn't take into account sufficiently the different circumstances of combat may well play a much more determining factor in the appearance of 'competence' and 'incompetence' (the author's chosen words) in infantry fighting. For instance, King notes that two different units of US Paratroopers fought very differently at the same time in Normandy, one succeeding in the end by a desperate bayonet charge led by the CO himself, the other using much more 'competent' fire and movement tactics. However, because he basically follows Marshall in seeing 'incompetence' as a moral and/or training deficiency, he doesn't take into account that it it is more likely to have been the precise detail of the tactical circumstances which account for the differences. King feels that the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is very hard (which it is), but is also pretty much the equal of any fighting during the C20. This seems flat-earth wrong: the experience of US paratroopers (which King draws on in the various conflicts) in WW2, Vietnam and Afghanistan is different because objectively the levels of threat (where is the Taliban's Tiger tank?), the time in combat and the casualty levels suffered are simply on totally different scales. And by failing to take account of this, then it is difficult to be particularly confident that equivalent units are much more combat effective relative to a peer-enemy than there forebearers. Incidentally, modern soldier-load has made many of the advanced tactics practiced somewhere between very difficult and impossible to execute on the ground: Western troops rely heavily on various forms of fire-support to simply outgun their Taliban opponents. Brains and Bullets is a required read for a better description of the realities of section-level combat and Bayonets and Blobsticks: The Canadian Experience of Close Combat 1915-1918 is a good account of what conscript militaries were trying to do in WW1, showing a somewhat more professional and competent side than is sometimes granted in The Combat Soldier.

However, I don't want to over-emphasize my reservations about his conclusions: I feel that it the author is probably broadly correct, the problem is in knowing how right he is. Either way, the book is a good stimulant to thought about many issues of great importance to the military. The big problem is the price: many of those interested in reading it are simply going to be priced out. There is a real need for a paperback and a reasonably-priced Kindle version.

Interesting … Thanks for the review. Well as I have said many times before … an all volunteer professional force is the best option.

Worth noting that the only all-volunteer, fully professional armies that entered WW1 as such were those of the British Empire and the United States. The armies of virtually all of the other combatant nations had had peacetime conscription for at least two generations, and this was reflected in their organisation, training, and overall culture. In contrast, the Imperial and American forces brought civilians into what was still largely a professional culture.