EPILOGUE
I WILL END WITH A plea, extended to whoever has the power, or even casual interest, to heed it. We must learn from the lessons of recent history. For the United States, from World War II onward, technology has been a major asset, but not a magic-bullet solution to all security problems. Warfare remained what it has always been—an elemental, wasteful, tragic contest of wills. Contrary to the predictions of techno-vangelists, ground soldiers have done almost all of the fighting and dying in America’s modern wars. Upon their overworked shoulders, the outcome of those wars rested. There were rarely enough of them. Nor was there, in general, enough national emphasis on them as the leading weapon in the American arsenal. Instead, the United States invested the bulk of its power and resources in technological weaponry, too often at the expense of the ground pounders. This must change, or we risk more Pelelius, more Dak Tos, and more Iraqs.
In the early twenty-first century, with wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, stretching both the Marine Corps and the Army to the breaking point, politicians of both parties talked of placing a new emphasis on building up the ground combat services. They spoke of expanding the Army to over 700,000 active duty soldiers and the Marine Corps to a strength of over 200,000. This was a step in the right direction, although only barely adequate to meet the considerable global responsibilities of the soldiers and leathernecks. The budget appropriations for the Army and Marines did rise, if only out of the sheer necessity that resulted from the two vexing wars and the obvious fact that these two services were doing almost all of the fighting and dying. Plus, the Air Force and Navy were both working diligently to assist the ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, the good intentions for expanding ground combat forces did not survive the recession that began in 2008. With the Obama administration seeking to curtail defense spending, the Army took a 17 percent cut in its projected 2010 budget, while the Navy got a nice increase and the Air Force stayed more or less the same. By this time, after eight years of tough ground warfare, the Army and Marines still accounted for only about 31 percent of the defense budget, the Navy and Air Force over half of the rest. The historical pattern that had held true since World War II had not, then, really changed by the twenty-first century, even in the face of bloody ground wars. “Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists, insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork remains the soldier or Marine,” Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters wrote. “Yet, confronted with reality’s bloody evidence, we simply pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems we adore.”
In the wake of the cuts, the Army now had to reconsider its plan to create three new combat brigades. I do not pretend to be an expert or an insider on the intricacies of Washington budget policies. But I do think it is fair to say that any cut in the Army’s operating expenses is not likely to achieve the goal of adding to the number of ground combat soldiers in America’s defense arsenal. S. L. A. Marshall once wrote that “we in the United States . . . have made a habit of believing that national security lies at the end of a production line.” This indeed has been the American way of war—the material over the corporeal. Marshall understood that infantrymen cannot be cranked out of a production line or hatched from a lab. Not just anyone can become a combat soldier. They are a unique group, always the minority within their society, even within the armed forces, too. They represent the ultimate weapon of war for the mundane reason that no technology has yet eclipsed the human brain, the human will, and the human spirit in potency.1
The explosion of information-age technology since Marshall’s time has only exacerbated American material predilections and techno-vangelism all the more. If that does not change, then the Americans risk more unhappy reality checks amid a troubling world that continues to rapidly urbanize, an internationalist media whose Net-centric, anti-U.S. hostility seemingly hardens by the day, and the power of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and FARC grows. These are the lessons of recent history, from Guam to Baghdad. In the absence of any meaningful change, the grunts, as always, will pay the steepest price, for it is they who most fully experience war’s unforgiving cruelty.
To them, war is personal, animal, disturbing, and affecting beyond description. For them, war cannot possibly be seen as clinical, calculating, or material. They view it only through the prism of “the blood-soaked bandages, the smell of gunpowders, the horrendous din of the weaponry, the pain and numbness of a wound and the medic’s syrette, all never to be forgotten, but to play forever within the memory of a ‘Grunt,’” in the estimation of one Dak To veteran. As one Marine grunt put it, “Until you have physically experienced looking an enemy soldier in the face and pulling the trigger, the sensation in your hand as the k-bar [knife] cuts [through] the windpipe, the actual smell of burning flesh, or the human rage, and competition for life that allows a soldier to kill another soldier, you will never fully be able to feel or describe, or convey the emotions” of modern war.
They know, firsthand, the unhappy reality of war’s viciousness—the anger, the desperation of small, frightened groups of men trying to kill one another, the survivor’s guilt, the lust for revenge and destruction, the intensity of living with fear, boredom, physical discomfort, and danger for days, weeks, years on end. “Men get blown to bits, or shot, men that you know, men who are your friends,” a World War II rifle platoon leader wrote. At the same time, the grunts experience “near shell hits, so close that you hear the fragments screaming, while you wonder . . . why you weren’t hit; closing so near to the enemy that you can see his body jar under small, precise blows as somebody empties a BAR magazine into him; disappointment, maybe, at the difference between what Hollywood has taught you a battle should look like and the seemingly disjointed series of action that the thing really is; and somewhere in the middle of it, the desire to lie down in sheer disgust . . . and forget the whole business.” Through it all, they come to know firsthand the strange nobility that sometimes grows, like a beautiful flower in the wild, out of the desperate, horrible world of combat. They see that, amid the worst of circumstances, human beings are capable of decency, honor, and amazing selflessness. They understand to their very core that all grunts fight primarily for one another, nothing more, nothing less. This brotherhood marks them forever. For many, it is the most powerful phenomenon they will experience in their lives.2
Some say that humanity is divided into three groups—sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The majority are sheep. They are peaceful, compliant, with small capacity for violence and not much ability to defend themselves. The minority are wolves or sheepdogs. Wolves will always prowl, plunder, and defile the sheep. They thrive on destruction, domination, and bloodshed. Only the sheepdogs can protect the flock from these preying wolves, men like Hitler, Zarqawi, and their ilk. The sheepdogs’ job is to protect the sheep. To do so, they will use violence if necessary. They must maintain constant vigilance. Robots and machines cannot stand in for the sheepdogs. Technology can only assist them. They are a special breed. Theirs is a self-sacrificial struggle to the death to keep the wolves at bay. If necessary, they will lay down their lives so that the sheep might live. Without the sheepdogs, the wolves would rule. The grunts are America’s sheepdogs. May they never go away. May there be peace on earth . . . but don’t count on it.3