Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 67

SOLDIER MYTHS

of thousands of IEDs, not to mention pay the salary of thousands of recruits. That’s a helluva lot more important than killing someone planting an IED every night.” Despite his impassioned plea, the staff officers ultimately left the brief unconvinced, promising to provide only limited support. These staff officers clearly had a blind spot. Even if convinced that stopping this criminal enterprise would impact the insurgency far more than, say, removing 10 Taliban foot soldiers, they would not have cared. The root cause of their shortsightedness lay, not in ignorance or a lack of common sense, but in the lies we soldiers tell ourselves. We idealize ourselves as warriors, as noble killers, and we produce metrics of success to reinforce this objectification. For combat troops, preventing an IED network from receiving the support it needs to operate may seem unimportant—even if this support is indirectly, unknowingly, and shamefully provided by American taxpayers.49 Although “body count” fell from favor long ago as an acceptable measure of effectiveness, our military is not all that far removed from this metric culturally. Most daily command briefs in combat zones begin with a roll-up of “SIGACTS” (significant acts) tallying friendly versus enemy casualties, and much reporting is likewise dominated by such SIGACTS—text that implicitly evaluates only friendly and enemy casualties as “significant.” Combat support troops suffer from similarly flawed metrics. Logisticians, for example, love to report that supported combat troops are “green” on ammo, fuel, and food, but they rarely report or reliably track how many supplies were stolen enroute to the troops (even when these stolen supplies support the enemy). Losses of 10, 20, or a much higher percentage are acceptable, as long as combat troops are “green” on all supplies.

Becoming Who We Say We Are

We reap the fruits of our actions in ways too many military leaders simply fail to see, let alone acknowledge. This strategic sowing and harvesting is a pattern the Army has to break. For example, when we fail to hold adequately accountable those soldiers who have abused locals, we are repeating a pattern within the history of expeditionary warfare. The Roman Empire’s troubled experience in the Middle East illustrated
MILITARY REVIEW ? September-October 2013

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