Ambushes and Suicides

What is happening? According to the Pentagon, the current United States Army is the best trained, best equipped., best educated and most intelligent, the country has ever seen. They are also the best paid. A couple of nagging questions keep popping up. Every other day we read, “U.S. Army unit ambushed.” How can this be? Our troops are equipped with night vision equipment, sound and motion sensors, and any number of hi-tech security devices, yet our troops are continually caught off guard by our rag-tag enemy?

Now we read that the suicide rate has spiked to the highest level in more than a quarter of a century. How can this be true? These troops are all “volunteers”, “Professional soldiers” who receive $20,000 and $150,000 to reenlist. . Even though comparisons are always odious, the soldiers of WWII, ninety-eight percent of whom were draftees, disliked the Army, and was promised nothing more than the “thanks from your friends and neighbors", and a “ruptured duck” pin to show that he had served, yet there was no epidemic of suicides.

Could it be that the troubles the Army now faces are a result of its “All Volunteer” status? Since its inception, the Regular Army has adopted an “us vs. them” attitude, “us” being the organized, efficient truly patriotic force and “them” being the sloppy, undisciplined louts who do drugs and have no feeling of patriotic duty – i.e. civilians. This attitude of exclusiveness tends to breed a kind of incestuous feeling that sets the soldier apart from the civilian he is fighting for. The “Band of Brothers” can become an exclusive club from which civilians are excluded because “they don’t understand.” And for the most part, they don’t.

But both ambushes and suicides come back to the problem of leadership or lack of it. If we study the history of elite military units, almost invariably their uniqueness, their elitism, leads to over-confidence and assumptions that “we can do anything” without daily attention to details. But leadership is a never-ending duty that requires constant vigilance. If the officers were executing their leadership responsibilities this best trained and best equipped Army would not be decimated by ambushes and suicides.