of loved ones and the hugs of grateful citizens. It is an interesting study. A natural line forms. Single file, these desert sand–clad youngsters shake hands as if they were walking off the court after an NCAA basketball game. The greeting crowd is always drawn to the American beauties. The first to be deluged is always a tall, blond airman (actually an “airwoman”) with tightly braided hair, smelling fresh even after twenty hours stuffed into a crowded aluminum tube. I look at her rank and badges and know from them that this is her first tour and that she has spent the past four months in an air-conditioned “hooch” with shiny toilets, running water, and an Anthony’s Pizza or a Starbucks just around the corner.
Walking some distance behind, bending under a heavy rucksack, is a kid who looks much older. He is not smiling. Most likely, he is trying to get around the pack and into a taxi that can take him to the nearest bar. His boots give him away. They are worn and discolored. He has pushed his trousers cuffs down over his boot tops to make his short stride more comfortable. If he is white, he is darkly tanned. Most of them sport unhealed blisters and deep scratches. Some show signs of having been recently wounded. And they all wear the same black badge. It is a long, thin rectangle about four inches long surrounded by a wreath. If you look closely you will see the faint outline of a Revolutionary War–era musket embedded in the rectangle. It is the Combat Infantry Badge (CIB), the most coveted and respected piece of apparel in the military services—because (to those few who know) it is worn by a tiny percentage of the 1 percent who do virtually all of the killing and dying in America’s wars today.
Only infantrymen can wear the CIB. Only recently has it come to symbolize those most likely to die in war. During World War II, the greatest chance of dying at the hands of the enemy was faced by submariners; the odds of a submariner dying at the hands of a Japanese destroyer or aircraft was about one in five. Next in this frightful roll came bomber pilots flying over the skies of Germany. Like the submariners of that war, airmen who flew in the Eighth Air Force have no battlefield memorials. They left no trace of the horror of their demise other than the odd monument or the headstones lined carefully, row on row, in our overseas military cemeteries. Third in proportion were infantrymen. Because of their huge numbers in World War II, “grunts” constituted more than 70 percent of all servicemen who died at the hands of the enemy, dying in the hundreds of thousands. If you are related to a member of the “Greatest Generation” who died in that war, chances are he was an infantryman.
Since the end of World War II, the dynamics of the dead have changed. Submarines are still dangerous vessels. But the enemy has sunk no U.S. submarine since 1945. The enemy killed a few bomber crewmen over the skies of Korea and Vietnam, but none have died since the Christmas bombing offensive against Hanoi in 1972. The infantry has not been so lucky. In a strange, ironic twist, the proportion of infantry killed at the hands of the enemy now is actually higher, 81 percent. In Afghanistan the proportion of infantry deaths at the hands of the enemy is even greater, 89 percent. Of those, more than 90 percent occurred within four hundred meters of a road. Today, some elite small units, like Delta Force and the SEALs, have suffered losses in Iraq and Afghanistan that proportionally approach those of submariners in World War II.
The number of Soldiers in this fraternity—it is predominately male, a “band of brothers”—is small. The total number of infantry serving today, Army, Marine, and Special Forces, would not fill FedEx Field, home of the Washington Redskins. Put in its starkest terms: 4 out of 5 of all Americans killed at the hands of the enemy have come from a force that makes up less than 4 percent of men and women in uniform. Not many of our citizens know that.
These men are our warriors. Others serving in uniform are not. In fact, the vast majority of men and women in uniform are employed in professions similar to those of their civilian counterparts: they fix or drive trucks, cook food, staff hospitals, and operate radios and telephones. Over the past fourteen years most of them have served honorably in Afghanistan and Iraq. On rare occasions these “incidental warriors” come under fire, in ambushes or by exposure to IEDs. Some in uniform are “almost warriors,” in that they are well trained to fight using small arms and might meet the enemy. These men and women get close to the infantry fight when they fire artillery, fly aircraft, remove explosive ordnance, guard roads, or defend firebases against enemy attacks. I am one of these. I spent my career as an artilleryman.
Only guys like Sergeant Giunta and Captain Swenson had the job that required them to go out every day with the intention of killing, and avoiding being killed by, the enemy. One would expect that those Americans most likely to die would gain the support of those pledged to protect them. Sadly, for too long this has not been the case. This book is mostly about them, the ones most likely to die. It will be the last of seven books I have written over the years about warfare. It is an unusual work, for two reasons in particular: first, it appears after the United States’ interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are substantively over. History has shown that armies reform successfully after wars end, especially after wars that do not end well. During wartime, armies, in particular, are too busy fighting to worry much about the next war. Wait too long after a war, however, and an army ossifies. It fights for money in peacetime rather than thinking of things anew. Second, as the stories of the two heroes testify, the United States has exhibited an unhealthy habit of trying to fight its wars with machines instead of Soldiers. Sadly, as you will read in the pages to come, our enemies continue to succeed against us because they are willing to sacrifice their fighters copiously to offset our matériel superiority.
My hope is that the logic of the argument to follow will convince policy makers in our defense establishment not to make these mistakes again. But I am afraid they will. My fear is that my grandchildren will have to pay in blood for our mindless return to high tech, matériel warfare. So this is my last shot to tell the sad story of neglect, ahistoricism, intellectual hubris, corruption, and ignorance about the nature and character of war that has left too many of our (mostly) Soldier sons needlessly dead on our battlefields.
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In fact, Washington “makes” very little. Yet there is one industry that Washington can claim as its own: the ideas industry.
—Peter W. Singer, Brookings Institution
America loves its Army, and Washington hates it. Some Americans in the heartland (west of the Blue Ridge and east of the Rockies) think of Washington as a scourge for blue-collar America, a place that receives from and never seems to give back to America’s working stiffs. That is the main reason why many in Washington hate the Army and so much of the heartland loves it: because the Army is America’s service, a blue-collar haven for the likes of Willie and Joe, the venerable Bill Mauldin cartoon characters who always seem to sit in water-filled foxholes waiting to be screwed by clueless bureaucrats, self-serving officers, and, on rare occasion, the enemy. In our modern wars, media images depict sailors, airmen, and Marines as eager volunteers who seek to join war-fighting elites. Soldiers, in contrast, have traditionally been depicted as the drafted poor who found themselves in foxholes due to bad draft numbers, a judge’s order, bad luck, or bad grades in high school. So it comes as no surprise that the hardworking heartland loves Willie and Joe. Virtually every poll taken since the end of the draft highlights the common man’s regard for our Soldiers.
Of course, anything popular to the heartland gets attention from politicians. I am continually amazed at the fecklessness of our congressional leaders in this regard. Too often in the green room at Fox News, I listen to the rants of senior solons who complain that generals are stupid, that they do not understand the inner workings of the “system,” that they too often give false or misleading testimony. Politicians say they are fed up with listening to visiting generals obsessed with PowerPoint slides. They are too often offended when bemedaled colonels and generals fail to worship the wisdom of slick congressional staffers, usually twenty-something “trust fund babies,” who lecture these combat veterans
