“No shit, there I was..”
Old soldiers are storytellers and this refrain is so common as to be both enduring and a pejorative. When I was a young soldier I meet those stories with a mixture of awe and “what do you know old man.” Old soldiers often impart their experiences though stories. In the U.S. Military experience counts for a lot. Old soldiers have a gravitas reinforced by their stacks of combat and service stripes. These and other physical markers denote access to a wisdom drawn from experience. The military system likes older people. It artificially restricts upward mobility with time in grade (current rank) and service requirements and mandatory education milestone to qualify for promotion.
The military, with its very visible expressions of age and experience, preferences the steady hand older soldiers. Time and school requirements create career maps that dictate how fast a soldier can advance through the ranks regardless of capability. There are inherent risks in this approach. What is the military looking for when preferences experience? Does a system that promotes off of past performance err towards a state of stagnation? Does the speed of technological advancement mean this system is stagnate?
What do I mean by experience? It seems like a dumb question. But when someone talks about experience in the military what do they mean? Are all experiences weighted the same? What they do not mean, or at least should not mean, is simply experience in the military’s bureaucratic system. There are arcane rules and knowledge that resides in some “old timers.” What form needs to be submitted to what office or what hand needs to be shaken to make administrative functions happen is valuable and navigating these systems does require knowledge. But it is not the type of experience that defines leaders in the military.
People are also not talking about experience in practice and training events. Though the most people see many more training events than combat missions over a career. Those events are little more than artificial experiences. Do they help prepare you for “game time.” Yes, but they are not the big show, combat. Combat is what comes to mind when someone thinks of military experience.
When I was a young soldier some of my seniors had parachuted into Panama and Grenada. Some served in Desert Storm. A few were even on the vaunted Special Forces teams that invaded Afghanistan. Their experiences in the military-decades of deployments, exercises, and training-could be summed up succinctly by their roles in these conflicts. They used their experiences from combat as the foundation for lessons they gave me and other young members of the unit. This is also where I encountered the first issue with reliance on experience. Sometimes the experiences gets translated into “the way it has always been done,” a rote mindset of actions to take and apply to situations.
Tolstoy, in writing War and Peace, perfectly summed up the issue with using war stories as lessons.
His [Rostov’s] version of the battle at Schöngrabern was the usual version of a man who has been in a battle, he tells it as he would have liked it to have been, or as described by someone else, or in a version that just sounds good, anything but the way it really happened.
I do not think this tendency of telling a better story is malicious. There is some self-aggrandizing, but it is by and large harmless (I am not talking about people that claim “I’ve received awards for valor from every combat deployment” that is called lying.) The tendencies for stories of combat to change is something that I have seen. After a particularly harrowing few days of combat where my team retrograded from two positions and had to destroy some of our equipment along the way, we all set down to write sworn statements about the events. These were required for awards and to account for the equipment we destroyed. I collected and complied twenty odd statements. Each was remarkably different. Everyone that experienced those four days of combat recorded it differently. Part of this is because everyone was at different positions, but part of this was also the emotions of each man as they wrote. Those emotions ranged from angry to elated. The experiences and lessons learned from those days were different for everyone. What would my younger soldiers take and remember a decade later when they pass on their lessons? I am not sure, but they would not wholly be the lessons I learned.
How does the experience of a young private serving as a rifleman in a platoon jumping into the Panamanian jungle translate to a senior non-commissioned officer preparing to deploy a company to combat in Afghanistan? I do not know. I am sure there are anecdotal lessons that can and should be applied. But outside of some universal principles (i.e. two is one and one is none, fortune favors the prepared, leaders check soldiers and leaders check leaders) few of his past experiences apply directly to his current position. In part this is because he did not experience Panama as a leader but as a follower. He was not privy to the decisions and dilemma his leaders faced. So, what is combat experience?
At its core, combat experience is the record of a way to act. Note, that I said it is “A” way and not “THE” way. That is where issues arise. I survived twenty years of deployments, saw combat in several countries, and trained fighters around the world. You could infer from those experiences that I have some deep insight and mastery of the principles of combat that has kept me upright. The truth is, often I was lucky. Luck is what the retelling of experiences does not often account for. Did what I do in a situation work because it was the best way to act, or was it luck that carried the day? It takes a degree a humility to acknowledge the role of luck. However, by not acknowledging it, we allow hubris to take over. We run the risk of stagnating over a perceived “right way” to do things because “that’s the way I did it.”
Heuristics, mental shortcuts, are developed from experiences. People use them to make snap judgements on a litany of choices and decisions. They also are innate prejudices and preferences. Leaders need to question all of their heuristics. Starting first with, how does a system built to inculcate experience change when the majority of soldiers and junior leaders have little to no combat experience?
The military’s promotion system is both too fast and too slow.
Where should the military do this? Ideally, everyday. How do you raise a child to be an adult? You give them responsibility and consequences. Challenging young service members to solve problem in the unit is the first way to access new solutions. The next best place is at the joint training readiness centers and maneuver warfare training centers. However, stupidly, these are seen as performances for the units. This reinforces the commander’s desire to lean on his experiences. For some, this event will be the high water mark of their years in command. Only a very unconventional leader would risk that on “untried ideas.” But those are the leaders we should be selecting and promoting. The audacious that take risks. Simulated battle is the best place to test new ideas and the lessons of experience and see what trying works better.