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Know the other and know yourself. Fight one hundred battles without danger.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Pete Carroll, coach of the perennially successful Seattle Seahawks football team, is a friend. We met in 2009 during the first international small-unit symposium that I put together for Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), then commanded by the legendary Gen. Jim Mattis, the most venerated war fighter in the Marine Corps at the time.
To our surprise, Carroll did not come to be venerated. He came to learn and to help. Over three days he would walk into a work group and explain how he developed small teams, in his case of eleven men each for offense, defense, and special teams. We asked him to sum up his experiences at the end of the symposium, and his observations were simple and direct. He recounts his time with us in his book Win Forever: “I am grateful to [General Scales] for allowing me to participate in the conference and for helping me understand just how universal the basic principles of leadership, competition, and self-knowledge really are.”1
My most memorable encounter with the coach came after a day’s work when he sat with my business partner, Jack Pryor, General Mattis, and Professor Marty Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. As Carroll talked, we were struck by the remarkable similarities between a football team and an infantry small unit: two “elevens,” one trying to win and finish uninjured, the other trying to win and stay alive. Marty Seligman remarked that teams of nine to eleven were the same for the squad and most outdoor contact athletic teams. Eleven was the number of most primitive, aboriginal hunting groups in the Kalahari Desert and Australia. Perhaps eleven is in our DNA. Eleven was ideal because a smaller group would not have the heft to run down and kill large mammals, whereas any larger and the group would be too ungainly for extended expeditions.
Carroll talked about the effort he put into selecting and conditioning his coaches and players. A few months later, when we were his guests at the University of Southern California, he showed us his remarkable Trojan fitness centers, with row after row of machines. He introduced us to his incredibly professional fitness staff. We talked about the extensive and imaginative drills and player exercises he employed in daily practices in an effort, as he says, to “win forever.”
On both occasions, he asked if the Army and Marine Corps were as thorough and lavish when putting together their “elevens.” Sadly, of course, the answer was no. However, his questions during the conference had intrigued General Mattis and his team. Afterward, we talked extensively about the need to do for our teams what Coach Carroll did for his. How would it be done? What would be the cost? Where would such conditioning and training best be conducted?
At the time the ground services fielded about 6,000 small units, Army and Marine squads of infantry, sappers, tank crews, Special Forces, Rangers, Deltas, SEALs, and the occasional CIA direct action teams—6,000 teams from a nation of 330 million. Surely, the nation could afford to lavish the same care and attention on those who go out every day to face death as the NCAA spends on student athletes. So, we put together a wish list for how the 6,000 might be turned into armed Division I varsity athletes.
To tell the story, let us begin, as always, with some history. During World War II and Korea, the “exchange ratio” for American air forces was extremely favorable. The ratio between enemy and friendly killed in air-to-air combat over Europe versus the German Luftwaffe was nine to one, against the Japanese about thirteen to one. The advantage in Korea against North Korean and Russian flyers was, again, about thirteen to one. For a time in Vietnam, however, the ratio dropped embarrassingly. In 1967, it approached parity.
The response within the Air Force and Navy was immediate and dramatic. Both services began to restore the traditional dominant ratios by creating advanced tactical fighter schools, made famous by Tom Cruise: Top Gun for the Navy and Red Flag for the Air Force. The air services quickly developed new tactics for air-to-air combat. The shock and embarrassment of this tough era also led the aerial services to develop a new series of tactical fighter aircraft, such as the F-16 and F-15 for the Air Force and the F-18 for the Navy. Since Vietnam, these aircraft in the hands of U.S. and Israeli pilots have achieved incredible exchange ratios, well over two hundred to one. Today, thanks to the airpower pioneers of the seventies, the United States cannot be challenged in the air.
What about on the ground? Let us do some more arithmetic. During the battle for Fallujah in 2004, at least ninety Marines and Soldiers perished in brutal street-to-street and house-to-house fighting. The arithmetic loss rate in this urban fight was virtually the same as those in Korea and Vietnam, about six to one in open street fights, approaching parity once the fight moved into buildings. So at JFCOM, Jim Mattis and I asked why the ground forces should suffer such discouraging ratios. We concluded that it was not about Soldier and Marine quality. The performance of close-combat Soldiers and Marines was high. When compared to the enemy, there was no contest. Look at any news report or photograph of tactical engagements in Afghanistan and you will notice enemy combatants running about, shooting wildly. U.S. Soldiers and Marines move in tightly formed groups and, even in the tensest moments, carry their rifles with fingers outside the trigger wells. These images prove the value of rigorous training, and no one respects and appreciates first-rate training more than close-combat Soldiers, who consistently rate the importance of good training higher than pay and benefits. They know that first-rate preparation for war is the best life insurance. In Vietnam, two-thirds of all small-unit combat deaths occurred during the first two months in the field, in part because the training system had mass-produced Soldiers too quickly to prepare them properly for the complex, difficult task of close-in killing. So we asked what a difference it would make if we could adapt some of Pete Carroll’s methods to create a ground version of “Top Gun.”
We needed a “win forever” strategy—an attributable, measurable, service-wide system for selecting, training, and verifying the fighting ability of small units and their leaders. Such a system would begin with selection and testing of all infantry volunteers. Much as in the National Football League, this testing would include measures of physical prowess and neuro-cognitive levels, along with assessment of adaptability, character, and commitment. This baseline of information would guide training of Soldiers and Marines before combat begins. We concluded that, as in the air services, no small unit should be sent into a shooting situation until both leaders and followers had experienced bloodless battle on a virtual practice field.
So the challenge for the future was clear in 2009: we needed to create superb small teams during a protracted period of peace that we knew was coming. This was a tough sell in 2009. At the time, infantry leaders had as many as five or six tours in the combat zone. Some special operating forces had as many as twelve. But we knew budget cuts and radical reductions in training and operations budgets were coming and would threaten to dull the sharp edge honed after nearly a decade of war. We foresaw the emergence of a “garrison” Army and Marine Corps that would be locked into bases with little chance of overseas deployment. Given normal career attrition, we feared that units would increasingly be made up of new Soldiers who did not have close-combat experience . . . and had no chance to inoculate themselves for combat before again going to war inadequately prepared.
Unfortunately, the enemy rarely takes downtime. The enemy’s tempo along the “Arc of Instability” continues to increase while fighting skills atrophy at home. If the past is prologue, our ground forces will inevitably be required to deploy directly into a combat zone with little or no notice. First priority must be to keep combat proficiency high, so units will not have to go to war without extensive training-up or last-minute personnel reshuffling. Individual small-unit proficiency must be constant, not subject to the same pendulum swings that diminished fighting proficiency in past wars. Tomorrow’s training regimes will increasingly become more episodic. Just before deployments, units are at their peak. Soldier assignments, both internally and externally, are more stable, and turbulence is at a minimum. Distractions are few, and leaders concentrate on those tasks to be accomplished in battle. Most deployments are preceded by a rotation through a combat training center, where leaders get the opportunity to practice skills in rigorous simulated combat. All too often, however, even in combat, these skills deteriorate quickly.
For a solution to this vexing problem, we discovered a mirror image of Carroll’s win-forever philosophy in our elite special operation units. In 2009 these men were engaged in direct action “night raids” and established a remarkable record for killing many Al Qaeda and Taliban with very small losses. To be sure, as in all aspects of human behavior, bad things happen: a lucky shot by a rocket-propelled-grenade gunner downs a Chinook helicopter, and dozens of SEALs or Rangers die. Yet the “exchange ratios” achieved among these Tier I forces were remarkable. Based on my discussions with special operators in the field and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I estimated that direct-action teams, Special Operations Forces, Delta, the Rangers, and the SEALs, routinely achieve an exchange ratio of about forty to one. Of course, we could not expect such extraordinary ratios among Army and Marine general-purpose forces. Perhaps a more achievable ratio might be twenty to one. Adding those enemy killed at a distance by drones, close air support, artillery, and mortars, we concluded with reasonable confidence that a ratio of at least sixty to seventy to one is possible—depending, of course, on the mission, the nature of the enemy, and conditions of terrain and weather. With ratios like these the president’s decision making would not be driven just by the arithmetic. He would have more time and strategic maneuver room to win before the American people grew tired of the exercise.
Pete Carroll and the special operations community share similarities we could build on. First, there was the imperative to have a realistic, repeatable system for hammering the realities of war (or football) into the primal reflexes of the brain. Think of two-a-days on steroids. We thought of building a small-unit Top Gun–or Red Flag–style exercise into team training. Maybe we could exploit the gaming industry to find an immersive simulation that put Soldiers virtually into harm’s way without ever firing a shot. Carroll had told us that the key to winning was repetition—constant, unending, and boring repetition. Ideally, repetition in practice would not be rote football drills; instead, each repetition would be unique, making every player think about what was about to happen, not just going through the motions.
So we envisioned a “virtual gym” where the senses, brain, and body would be highly developed and fully integrated, sort of an NFL training facility in every combat brigade. Experienced military and civilian coaches and facilitators would run these gyms. The centerpiece of the gym would be an instrumented open space, like Top Gun’s but indoors. Soldiers and Marines would don gaming headsets and walk through a virtual battlescape. No two repetitions would be the same. As the trainees crept through this virtual space, images and targets would appear. Some would be innocents caught in the crossfire. Others would be bad guys, perhaps some wearing disguises. Others would charge the squad wrapped in suicide belts. Some engagements would be in virtual villages and cities. Others would occur in open spaces, where enemy snipers would engage from long distances. Soldier and Marine small units would have to react reflexively and make decisions intuitively. All of these engagements would be caught on tape to be repeated, like game films, after each exercise.
These virtual “combat immersions” could be immediately paused and restarted, time after time, under a variety of circumstances. Repetition has two important effects on the quality of the training experience. First, the small unit develops what behavioral scientists term “collective muscle memory,” a condition that fuses together the collective action of nine Soldiers into a cohesive and effective whole. Second, unexpected and seemingly random sets of circumstances demand that the small-unit leader make immediate “in extremis” decisions that reveal whether he possesses the intuitive “right stuff” to lead young Soldiers in combat.
Perhaps virtual immersions could be connected to Soldiers in the combat zone over the net. Such virtual “right-seat rides” would allow a Soldier at Fort Lewis or a Marine at sea to watch an action in real time, transmitted through a fighting Soldier’s helmet cam. After the battle was over, both Soldiers could discuss and replay the episode. Monitors and “coaches” would transcribe the tape into another scenario for the virtual trainer.
Think of how proficient our small units would be if they could go through a thousand rotations per year, all of them at Top Gun standard. Variable scenarios would allow small-unit repetitions to be done many times per day; each with different missions, enemy situations, terrains, and at different levels of tactical tempo and complexity. The simulation facility would embrace all the goodness of the larger training centers. World-class and diabolically skilled “opposing forces,” or OPFORs, would play the enemy. The OPFOR would always play to win; each repetition would be a free-play exercise in which either side could prevail. All repetitions would be recorded, and after each exercise the evaluated team would undergo an after-action review, during which every player would share his successes and failures with his team. As in football, every Soldier in the gym would hear “footsteps” from competitors eager to take his job. Acceptance into tomorrow’s small units would have to be earned, and the teams would be required to compete every day. As they age, Soldiers lose their edge. Like professional football players, they slow and become less aggressive and eventually unfit for operating in life-and-death situations. The virtual gym would be an instrument for accountability. Repeated failure would disqualify leaders and teammates for deployment. No one should have to die because training and performance assessments did not hold a Soldier or his leaders accountable.
Coach Carroll puts as much or more emphasis on selecting and training his coaches as he does on his players. He told us that he does not coach players, he coaches his coaches. From a ground-service perspective the takeaway is universal: a team is only as good as its junior leaders. Small-unit leaders must be taught at a much earlier age to lead indirectly, to think quickly, and to “see” a battlefield that is dispersed, complex, hidden, and ambiguous. The isolation inherent in urban fighting puts even greater demands on small units and requires a degree of cohesion never before seen in the U.S. military. Today, learning and brain science can help identify those who can make tough decisions intuitively. Intuitive decision making is a learned skill; it is learned through a system that is experience based, rigorous, accountable, and repetitive. Decision-making simulations today can replicate conditions of uncertainty, fear, and ambiguity. If used properly, these immersions can help identify the natural leaders, perhaps even before taking the oath of enlistment or commissioning.
Good commanders know how to lead in combat. Great commanders possess an intuitive sense of how to transition quickly from kinetic warfare to a subtler kind of cultural warfare, distinguished by the need to win the narrative and well as the kinetic battle. Rare are the leaders who can shift between these two disparate universes and lead and fight competently in both. The key to achieving excellence in both combat domains is what combat leaders call “combat inurement”—that is, the intuitive ability of leaders, Soldiers, and small units to fight together with an unprecedented level of proficiency.
Pete Carroll’s fitness centers have dozens of workout machines that his players use to increase muscle strength, endurance, and flexibility. An Army virtual gym could easily do the same thing. Soldiers could also increase visual and perceptual acuity and the ability to see, sense, and react to unseen enemies using “surround” screens that present infinitely varied situations. Virtual firing ranges would allow Soldiers to improve their shooting and sniping skills. Virtual Soldier gyms could be made portable; a unit flying (or floating) to a distant, unfamiliar objective could download the latest intelligence and geography of the area and practice the operation many times before doing the real thing.
One lesson I have learned from combat and from observing close small units in action for more than a decade is that there is no magic formula for finding the Vikings within the officer and NCO corps. No personnel selection system will reveal who can sense the battlefield and make decisions “in extremis” using innate intuitive skills. There is no examination for courage or coolness under fire. A lieutenant graduating from West Point or the Reserve Officers Training Corps may want passionately to wear the crossed rifles. His father and grandfather may have served with distinction in combat. Maybe he is tall, blond, played football, and married the general’s daughter. But none of the traditional indicators tells anything about his potential for leading a platoon in combat. In fact, a review of past performance using today’s subjective selection criteria would have left Sergeant Giunta and Captain Swenson off the list. Sadly, at present the Army and Marine Corps must put young officers in front of forty men and risk their lives in a live-fire crapshoot to find out if he has the right stuff.
The right answer, of course, is to put every young man who wants to lead in the close fight through a virtual gym. To be fair, the infantry aspirant should undergo a lengthy string of immersions that objectively test his leadership and command skills. Only then can a West Point tactical officer or a Marine instructor tell a young man that he has made the cut. Squad-leader selection for NCOs must be even more stringent. As part of his qualification for every stripe earned, a young enlisted infantryman should prove his ability to make intuitive decisions in the heat of battle. He should be given more time to correct his mistakes in the virtual gym, but he should never be certified to lead a squad in combat until he has proven himself in a simulation.
Today, the National Football League is making great progress in developing decision-making simulations for quarterbacks. Quarterbacks are trained to observe and orient, visualize, focus, and execute to a standard of seven seconds or less.2 This standard is exactly the same for a small-unit leader exposed to first contact with the enemy. Unfortunately, nothing has happened to create a similar virtual immersion for combat leaders. This must change. As a first priority, the Department of Defense must create a national-level small-combat-unit “simulations and gaming” effort managed by the ground services but funded by a separate (and fenced) line within the Defense budget. To ensure that such an effort would survive internecine budgetary battles, legislation should be enacted that would set aside a percentage of all Defense simulations funding (say 20 percent) for small units and small-unit leader simulations.
The nation spends at least two million dollars to select and train a Navy carrier pilot. Pilots, civilian and military, must spend time in multimillion-dollar simulators several times per year in order to maintain flying proficiency. Just one Navy F-18 pilot has died at the hands of the enemy since 1972. Today, small-unit leaders are still dying. Yet the cost of preparing them for small-unit leadership is very small. The video-gaming industry has been creating realistic close-combat simulations for decades. Professional sports teams use them routinely. Thus the critical question: Do pilots deserve better training than infantryman? Even if every close-combat Soldier and Marine were given the exact same treatment as a Tier I Special Forces team, the total cost would be significantly less than what the nation spends to train fighter pilots.
So let us pick a number . . . say a million dollars, dedicated to training every regular Army and Marine squad using cutting-edge technologies. And then let us put it into law. Forget the humanity for a moment and just think of the long-term cost saving. Such a commitment to world-class simulations would save money over time by reducing the number of Soldiers and Marines who wind up in VA hospitals.
Yet here we are in 2016, fourteen years into war, and a Soldier or Marine can play his Xbox and fight a virtual enemy for entertainment in the barracks, but his service cannot spend the money to give him a simulation that will save his life in combat.