Military Dilemma
I see that the Yankee army has revamped its basic training to include more intensive combat medical treatment coverage.[Link] This immediately brings us to mind of two sets of counter-actions.
The first of these is that over time, but especially since the start of the Industrial Revolution, weapons have steadily gotten more effective, more “lethal”. This is explained fairly well by Trevor Dupuy in both Numbers, Predictions, and War, and The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare.
Despite this increase, casualties in warfare have generally decreased over time. There are a couple of reasons for this. The technological one has been better field hygiene and medical care, but the primary reason has been the decrease in density of forces. In Archer Jones terms (The Art of War in the Western World,) the force-to-space ratio has consistently decreased and faster that the lethal range of weapons has increased.
Unfortunately, this somewhat falls apart when we go into the current campaigns (occupations?) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a very mountainous environment where actual and statistical dispersion are radically different. One may have fifty soldiers in a one square kilometer area, but only 0.1 of that area may be militarily (humanly) usable, so on paper the density looks like 5E-5 soldiers per square meter but the actual functional density is 5E-4.
In Iraq, much of the action is occurring in cities and villages where the combination of buildings and streets has much the same effect as the tight terrain of Afghanistan. As a result, given modern weapons and high force-to-space ratio, casualties are higher than previous experience of the last century or so.
The aspect of at least one of these “countries” being engaged in a “civil war” is also contributory. I blogged yesterday about how Gettysburg might not be the nation’s bloodiest battle. Now let me drop another bomb. One of the things one notes in looking at American Civil War battles as part of a larger context of battles is that relatively speaking, those civil war battles were less bloody than the universal norm. What made the American Civil War the bloodiest in American history, aside from both sides being Americans, was the sheer number of battles. What we see of civil wars, and to a certain extent guerrilla wars, is many small battles, none of which are very bloody individually. “Normal” wars are characterized by fewer battles that are considerably bloodier.
In this case what we have is occupation forces being exposed to these frequent, small battles as interested onlookers.
The other counter-action has to do with battlefield injury and medical care. A somewhat rough military taxonomy of battlefield wounds is: wounds that can be treated in situ and the soldier returned to combat; wounds that incapacitate the soldier; and wounds that kill instantly or near instantly. From a mission minded perspective, the first and third types are more desirable than the second. The reason for this is that caring for soldiers who are incapacitated detracts resources from the fight, it compromises mission.
When one has an army of impressed or purchased soldiers, who obey mindlessly and fear their officers more than death, then one may leave the wounded where they lie and worry about medical care after the mission is performed. In a democratic governance and a volunteer army, keeping the wounded alive and on the path to recovery becomes critical to the strategic mission. Hence the improved training.
