The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics And Cohesi...
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How do small groups of combat soldiers maintain their cohesion under fire This question has long intrigued social scientists, military historians, and philosophers. Based on extensive research and drawing on graphic analysis of close quarter combat from the Somme to Sangin, the book puts forward a novel and challenging answer to this question. Against the common presumption of the virtues of the citizen soldier, this book claims that, in fact, the infantry platoon of the mass twentieth century army typically performed poorly and demonstrated low levels of cohesion in combat. With inadequate time and resources to train their troops for the industrial battlefield, citizen armies typically relied on appeals to masculinity, nationalism and ethnicity to unite their troops and to encourage them to fight. By contrast, cohesion among today's professional soldiers is generated and sustained quite differently. While concepts of masculinity and patriotism are not wholly irrelevant, the combat performance of professional soldiers is based primarily on drills which are inculcated through intense training regimes. Consequently, the infantry platoon has become a highly skilled team capable of collective virtuosity in combat. The increasing importance of training, competence and drills to the professional infantry soldier has not only changed the character of cohesion in the twenty-first century platoon but it has also allowed for a wider social membership of this group. Soldiers are no longer included or excluded into the platoon on the basis of their skin colour, ethnicity, social background, sexuality or even sex (women are increasingly being included in the infantry) but their professional competence alone: can they do the job In this way, the book traces a profound transformation in the western way of warfare to shed light on wider processes of transformation in civilian society.This book is a project of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War.
\"Professor King provides a well-written (perhaps too lengthy, sometimes rambling) and well-documented work of immense value, describing infantry tactics from WorldWar I up to the present time, with a clear depiction of the brutality of industrial age and urban warfare. Particularly, useful is his style of presenting a tactical problem and indicating what was done to address the problem.\" - Guy L. Siebold, Armed Forces & Society
By Anthony King On 24 January 2013, Leon Panetta, the US Secretary of State for Defence, made an historic announcement: from 2016, combat roles would be open to female service personnel. For the first time, women would be allowed to serve in the infantry. Applauded in liberal quarters, the decision was widely seen as unproblematic since it merely ratified a de facto reality.
In arguing against female accession to ground combat roles and especially to the infantry, Anna Simons makes three valid observations. Firstly, fraternization between male and female soldiers undermines unit cohesion and that while male soldiers are equally and normally more responsible for this breach of discipline, it is an un-ignorable issue. Secondly, it is dangerous to lower physical standards to facilitate female integration. Infantry work requires a general physical robustness which is accurately, cheaply and easily assessed by apparently brutal tests such as marches, runs and pull-ups.
Simons is correct to highlight the special difficulties of integrating women into the infantry. It is a unique role. In order to ensure combat effectiveness, standards have to be enforced and fraternization avoided. That perforce means only a few exceptional women will be able to fight in the infantry. However, a blanket ban on the possibility of any women ever serving in the infantry, no matter how capable or willing, is as archaic as the obsolete form of social cohesion which Simons invokes to justify it.
Professor Anthony King specialises in the study of the war and the armed forces and is particularly interested in the question of small unit cohesion. His most recent publications include The Combat Soldier: infantry tactics and cohesion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Oxford, 2013) and (ed.) Frontline: combat and cohesion in the twenty-first century (Oxford, 2015). He is currently working on a new book on divisional command, supported by a research grant from the ESRC. This project also involves an international and interdisciplinary scholarly-practitioner conference, 'Command in the 21st Century' to be held at Warwick in September 2017. He has worked closely with the armed forces as an adviser and mentor. Having worked at the University of Exeter for almost two decades, he is excited about taking up the Chair in War Studies at Warwick and building on PAIS's traditional strengths in the security studies area.
The project on cohesion plots the development of infantry tactics from the First World War to current operations in Afghanistan to explore the different ways in which western armies have generated combat performance in their infantry platoons. The central thesis of the project is that, with inadequate time and resources, the citizen armies of the twentieth century generally failed to prepare its combat soldiers for battle adequately and relied instead on appeals to masculinity, nationality and ethnicity (and recourse to mass tactics) to encourage performance from the infantry. By contrast, today's professional force has been able to generate higher levels of performance by the inculcation of collective drills which the soldiers are intensely trained to perform. The research explores not only how professionalisation has changed the nature of combat performance, ie cohesion, but the profound social implications both within the military and in civilian society of development. Not least, the move to a professional ethos has facilitated the accession of groups once excluded from the infantry, including most recently, women.
Group dynamics are critical to upholding resistance to the stress of combat. As the historian S. L. A. Marshall once noted, I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war, that the thing which enables an infantry soldier to
The PLA's disastrous performance in the Sino-Vietnam War owed a great deal to such factors. The Cultural Revolution directed by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in the late 1960s decimated the officer class and destroyed much of the professional knowledge that had been accumulated over decades, especially after the fall of Lin Biao, one of the PLA's most talented generals, and his followers. The deleterious consequences (PDF) are evident in the PLA's reversion to discredited, but low-skill, tactics like the human-wave assault, as well as in the inability of infantrymen to navigate or read maps, and the inaccuracy of artillerymen due to unfamiliarity with procedures for measuring distances and calculating firing distances.
In China's case, the PLA has made impressive gains in raising (PDF) education levels, the quality of recruits, the realism of training, and an overall readiness for a broader range of missions. After a disastrous performance in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, for example, the PLA carried out an overhaul of its approach to such operations. As a result of these changes, military forces have operated more effectively in subsequent major relief operations. The PLA has also eagerly sought opportunities to deepen its experience through non-combat operations. Since 2008, for example, the PLA Navy has deployed a counter-piracy (PDF) task force near the Horn of Africa. The PLA has expanded its participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world as well, and deployed its first full infantry battalion in 2015 to South Sudan. The PLA has also stepped up its involvement in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief; in 2011, the Navy competently carried out a major noncombatant evacuation operation in Libya. 59ce067264
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