Stardate 20020825.1249

(Captain's log): Well, we may as well make it a clean sweep. Randy writes from Germany:

I read your article regarding European attitudes with great interest and I have also enjoyed your discussions on weapons and military capabilities. I am a senior US military officer serving in Germany and your analysis of the differences is decidedly correct. However, some important differences were also absent: the chasm in our respective time horizons and American’s innate feeling of “freedom.”

Americans are, for the most part, optimists and we love to solve problems regardless of their intricacies. Therefore, we think (perhaps naively sometimes) we can solve most any problem that comes along. Moreover, our frame of reference is one of "freedom of choice" and that greatly influences our decision process because we think in terms of multiple options or parallel solutions. From my experience, Europeans are pessimists, in general, that do indeed react to situations with canned responses. They expect the worst and quite often are not disappointed.

My point to all of this is that I think it stems from the differences in our time horizons. We have difficulty in carrying on a conversation (much less a relationship) because Europeans remember the past too easily and Americans don't seem to remember it past last Tuesday! This disjunction in our ability to communicate causes the Europeans to remember every little taunt or slight that occurred in the past 500 years and Americans don't seem to recall (much less be grateful for) the last time anyone offered the US help in a time of need. (Answer: The Germans provided AWACS coverage to defend Washington & New York for 8 months while our planes were over in the Middle East after 9/11. Of course, they didn't do it completely out of the goodness of their hearts but it was a significant gesture. But that is another discussion….)

Another analogy might be trying to connect a copper wire to a fiber optic cable. The result is confusion, frustration, and faulty circuit checks between the parties. The Europeans move at a slower more deliberate pace while Americans are zooming around on anything and everything that will move at the speed of electrons. Result: the two “couplings” do not work together well and a lot of important signals are missed.

I've been talking about the militaries of other nations, but I suspect that to a lot of people that the US military is the norm, and what we discuss is how others diverge from that. In reality, our military has several unique aspects, too.

Of course, American equipment is excellent. Not universally, and for political reasons the military has been saddled with some unbelievable pieces of crap because some powerful Congressman wanted them built in his district, such as the gawdawful Sergeant York gun, which was so crummy that Weinberger cancelled it during the Reagan military spending buildup. But for the most part it works well, and much of it (like the M1's firing system, or the JDAM) is superb. But that's not what is really so distinctive.

As with all other militaries, the essential difference with the Americans is the men, and the organization built out of them. (Repeat after me: "You fight a war with men, not with weapons.") And what the best officers in the US military realized a long time ago was that in the US military, it's good for morale to tolerate a certain amount of controlled insubordination.

It has to be controlled; it has to be channeled; you have to make sure it doesn't get out of hand or affect things that might matter. But you have to permit it, or your men will become sullen. That's because Americans, even in the service, are used to being free and used to thinking for themselves; they did it before they entered the service, they expect to again when they leave, and while they're inside they don't like the idea of ceasing to do so entirely.

Rather than try to suppress that, our military uses it. Our soldiers are not automata; they're thinking contributors to accomplishing the mission. Our military pushes extreme amounts of responsibility and authority downward, especially to non-coms. The US Navy is built out of its petty officers; without them it would collapse. The Army and Marines depend on their sergeants. Our military doesn't give orders to the men; it assigns them missions and grants them considerable leeway in determining how to carry them out. And it can do that, because as Randy says we Americans are culturally used to doing that kind of thing anyway.

The relationship between officers and men in the US Army is in many ways diametrically opposite to how it exists in the British Army. Traditionally in the British Army, officers were drawn from the nobility and the ranks from the commoners, and so the same separation which existed in civilian society appeared in the military. In the 20th century, the British Army ceased to rely on nobles for its officers, but they're still largely drawn from the educated upper class while the ranks are usually middle or lower class, and because the class structure in the UK remains strong, there's still a cultural divide between officers and men.

America is a nation built of mongrels; and to some extent we glory in that (the way that the Australians glory in being descended from transported prisoners). Our officers do generally have better educations than the men they command, but as often as not they come from about the same kind of civilian situation. And they tend to have a more common touch, and to expect less in the way of deference.

During World War II, this kind of thing used to mystify the British. One way it showed up was as bomber nose art. American bombers nearly all carried unique names and had big pictures painted on them, some of which were quite elaborate. (And many approached obscenity; nearly-naked women were a common theme.) Fighter units quite commonly adopted a common (non-standard!) paint scheme for their units. The 332nd Fighter Group (the famous "Tuskegee Airmen") painted the tails of their planes bright red, for example, and it was common in many theaters to paint a toothy shark's grin on the engine cowling of the P-40 Warhawk, most famously by the Flying Tigers when they fought in China against the Japanese.

The British never did that. There were a few cases where British units started doing that kind of thing, but they were ordered to stop. They viewed it as indiscipline. Given the culture of the British military, it probably was.

But for the Americans, what it did was boost morale. With the fighter groups, in particular, it was a way of announcing to the enemy that this particular group thought it was damned good, and wanted the enemy to know it was coming because the enemy would know they were good and would be afraid. It showed pride, dedication, commitment to the effort – and it was a way of cheating just a bit, because it actually was technically against the rules (not that anyone ever enforced it to speak of).

Just prior to D-Day, all the men in one unit of the 101st Airborne cut their hair into the traditional Mohawk cut. When the commander of the unit found out about it, he showed his true quality as an American officer. He ordered the most junior private in his command to cut his hair the same way, and had it done with his men standing around, watching and cheering. The idea of British soldiers doing anything like that, or of a British officer doing anything even remotely like that, is beyond my ability to imagine.

And there is, of course, the case of Sergeant Bill Mauldin, who spent most of the war drawing cartoons for the military paper Stars and Stripes, most of which lampooned the officers, the war, the allies, the food, MPs, the weather and everything else. He even sometimes made fun of the enemy. This was printed and distributed to our soldiers by our own Army; he was a staff subversive.

Once he was hitchhiking in Italy and got picked up by a pretty high officer who gave him a ride, and they spent a bunch of time talking. (Which, itself, says something about American officers; this guy was something like a Colonel.) Mauldin was feeling a bit insecure about this all; he wasn't sure if he was going too far, because he'd been receiving nasty letters from officers. And the Colonel reassured him that if he wasn't offending anyone that he wasn't doing his job. That Colonel understood; Mauldin was a morale asset.

The majority of the Americans serving in World War II were draftees, and they didn't really think of themselves as soldiers, really. They thought of themselves as civilians who were temporarily working for the Army in order to do a job that had to be done, and once it was done they would go back to being civilians. (Which was, in fact, correct.) And while they were in the military they understood that discipline and hierarchy and orders were a necessary part of the process, but that when it was taken to excess it was just chickenshit.

The modern US military is made up entirely of volunteers; we ended the draft in 1972 (two months before my year of eligibility, whew!), but on some level nearly all soldiers still nurse some small amount of "short timer" feelings.

A successful military culture has to be based on the character of the people it's built out of. If that isn't done, it can't win. And the reason that the American military depends on giving its enlisted men considerable amounts of flexibility in carrying out their mission, and also tolerates what many other nations consider unreasonably large amounts of indiscipline and what seems like outright insubordination, is that it fits the temperament of American civilians who choose to become soldiers and sailors.

I don't think any other nation in the world could run their military the way we do, even if they wanted to. But for us, there are significant benefits in it. Major changes in approach sometimes came from very low levels. When the Americans were stuck in the hedgerows in Normandy, some unknown American maintenance guy came up with the idea of welding two big teeth to the bottom of a tank, to permit it to cut its way through the built-up mound of earth and tree roots which were at the bottom of the "row" of "hedges" (actually trees). It worked, and the idea spread.

One of the most extreme cases of "Well, let's see what we can do with it" was in the Pacific, when an Air Corps unit in Australia found that its B-25 Mitchells (a 2-engine medium bomber) were pretty much useless, because the mission they had been designed for (medium-altitude bombing) was a waste of time against the targets which needed to be attacked. The General in charge told some of his people to see if they could figure out how to change the plane into something they could use.

What they ended up doing was to completely redesign the plane. The bombardier was removed; and the bomb-bay redesigned. Controls for it were rewired up to the pilot. Then they mounted eight .50 caliber machine guns on the front of the plane, on motorized mounts all slaved to a single control in the transparent nose where the bombardier had been.

Instead of attacking at high altitude, the new approach was to come in a treetop level (and I mean so low that they sometimes brushed the branches) so as to reduce vulnerability to AAA. The plane carried a load of what were known as "para-