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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (90070)	4/4/2003 8:55:32 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Peace is Hell theatlantic.com [ I share your admiration of the military, Rascal. But: this article gives a pretty detailed look at what it's like for them to assume a much different role. Notably, the people followed here are part of the 3rd ID, currently at the gates of Baghdad. I've posted this link before, but I think it's worth another look. First bit of this article: ] O ne day last fall in Bosnia, I met a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, a peacekeeper there, who said he worried about America's role in the world. He was a big, blond Californian, nearly thirty years old, who had risen through the enlisted ranks before qualifying for his commission. Now he was leading a U.S. infantry patrol through a sullen town named Bratunac, on a slow walk at dusk toward the central square. He could have driven there, but had parked his armored Humvees in an outlying neighborhood and proceeded on foot, because contact with the townspeople was said to be an important part of the job. In practice, though, the contact was limited by orders that required GIs to remain armed, helmeted, and clothed in their camouflaged combat gear. During the walk to the central square the only Bosnians who got close were a few audacious children asking for gum and candy, which the soldiers were forbidden to hand out. This was how it normally went, the lieutenant said. Most of the adults ignored the Americans, and some gave them hostile stares; many believed, erroneously, that the United States had become a force of occupation. Later in the evening the lieutenant was due to appear on a radio talk show during which he was supposed to encourage people to turn in their hoarded weapons—promoting a civic ideal that hardly anyone could believe in. He had been given a script that required him to report on a few recently surrendered guns, as if this truly indicated progress toward a better future. The lieutenant was a willing soldier, but somewhat disillusioned. He had been trained as an infantryman to close with the enemy and fight, and instead now found himself doing the work of a street-corner diplomat. It was not just that he felt individually unsuited to the role; he said that the entire brigade, 3,500 strong, had lost its war-fighting ability and would require six months of retraining upon returning home. I was a bit skeptical about that claim, which is often made, but I also knew that it was not entirely without merit. These soldiers had already spent six months in specialized training before coming to Bosnia, during which they had been encouraged to unlearn the standard kill-or-die mentality, and had been allowed to neglect their traditional military skills. The most perishable of those skills did not consist of shooting guns but, rather, involved the complex organizational interactions necessary to coordinate large groups of embattled fighters. In Bosnia the soldiers had indeed been forced to set much of that aside. Still, the claim that great damage was being done was not quite convincing. I asked, "How can a unit forget those skills so quickly?" The lieutenant shrugged. There was the problem of turnover, which in the U.S. military is high. There was also the inherent intricacy of battlefield scenarios, specifically those played out in the war games by which the Army evaluates its abilities. The lieutenant asked, "Why does an orchestra have to practice?" What he was practicing here in Bratunac was mostly just how to police other troubled towns—a safe enough job for him, but one that he saw as dangerously open-ended for the United States.