PhDs who can fight
Yes, talking about SOCOM
I had the pleasure of spending the last several days with Australian mates. Over that time, Admiral Bradley embodied Bill Donovan’s saying, “We want PhDs that can win bar fights.” This was the hallmark of what the OSS looked for, at least sometimes. The OSS recruited hard, smart men. They also recruited Julia Child. What does this tell us about the education of Special Operations, past and present?
“The bar fight is the PhD, “says Dino Gardner. I submit that is an incorrect understanding of what the OSS did and what violence generally is. The bar fight is actually failing the PhD. It is better to recognize a fight is coming and build a coalition of allies strong enough to stop any fight. Second to that, being able to convince another person to fight for you is better than fighting yourself.
Let’s remember that bar fights are at least as much chance as they are skill. When you come to the point of throwing hands, you admit that you are accepting unknown danger. Does the other person have a knife? Or a gun? Are they in a bar that is their local and surrounded by friends? All of those are important questions if you are about to offer up combat.
The PhD is knowing when and where to apply force and by what means. Seldom did the OSS carry out their missions alone. They worked with partisans. Those partisans were willing to carry the bar fight to the enemy while being orchestrated by the OSS. To believe otherwise is to believe a lie. The OSS in France did not want to fight. They wanted to complete their mission. If they did that and never fired a shot in anger, it made no real difference.
The OSS were glorious amateurs. Georg Olden, Ralph Bunche, and a cast of Americans from many backgrounds led the OSS to success upon success. Clearly, it takes all kinds. What I worry about with the idea that “the bar fight is the PhD” is that we start to misconstrue willingness to do violence to others with capacity to lead resistance.
When I was out with my Australian mates, I found we were talking about when we were young. When I was very young, I was in a fight with my brother that resulted in bloody noses, black eyes, and a lesson that I have never forgotten. My father, after telling me off for hitting my brother, tied a cloth around my eyes and made me try to walk down a hall. Predictably, I knocked into a table. He told me I could have blinded my brother and that is what it would be like for him. Pretty jarring as a young kid. Jarring enough to stay with me until today. What I learned was not, “don’t hit your brother,” which was the likely lesson. I learned to pull my punches, identify and avoid confrontation when possible, and, most importantly, that every use of force comes with risk. My brother had bloodied my nose as much as I had bloodied his. My lesson was not do not fight, but do not be caught fighting.
The same is true of the OSS. At the core of many arguments around the bar fighter surrounds both honor and the knowledge of that ability to deal out pain. As to honor, Falstaff said, “‘tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.”
“Discretion is the better part of valor.” The core purpose of the OSS was not to engage in bar fights; it was to win the war. They did that by living and continuing the fight. Not by chasing honor like Lt. Dan looking for a glorious death, they scrap, survive, avoid the direct fight, and win in the shadows.
A final observation: the idea that a FAANG engineer who shoots on the weekend is the solution to this particular problem, or the one that Admiral Bradley was addressing, is wrong. We need people like that, sure. We also need the person who joins the Peace Corps, learns another language, and lives in another culture, or the SEAL pup who does well in school but needs adventure. As the SOE and OSS taught us, what all of them need is training. Having had the privilege of hearing Major General Singlaub speak on multiple occasions, I can tell you that OSS training was at least as much about teaching you what you were incapable of as it was about teaching Ivy League PhDs what they could do. Per MG Singlaub:
“Well, I think the way in which individual training was administered to people who were already militarily qualified. The training taught you skills that you didn’t already have. Most importantly, it enabled the instructors and others to evaluate your ability to absorb information and instructions, perform skills, and demonstrate your ability to handle problems.
In fact, if there weren’t problems, they’d create them. Occasionally one of the psychologists or psychiatrists would be dressed and introduced as one of the students. And that person would invariably screw things up. It was then up to the guy who was the acting leader at that time to exercise leadership and solve the particular exercise problem without this guy’s help or to reduce his participation to that of an automaton. This deliberate effort to use this training as a means of psychological assessment was unusual for me.”
Many of those who joined MG Singlaub quit. That’s normal. There is a belief that capability in one field, say FAANG engineering, means that you naturally will have capacity and capability in another. It’s true that a high-level education in any field could be a key indicator of aptitude, but equally important are pain tolerance and willingness to persist. That is where many struggle. Persistence in the face of failure is core to winning the imbalanced fights the OSS undertook. Setbacks were regular.
What this means, in the end, is that SOCOM has to find smart people and teach them to fight. They also need to find people who can fight and teach them to think. It’s only when you have a mixture that an organization charged with a mission as wide as irregular warfare can ensure it has access to the best of what America has to offer.