With all of the discourse around lethality, training and military competency, I teamed up with my Second Breakfast co-host to talk about what real, effective military training looks like and why bravado and ego only endangers our ability to fight. Justin is a retired Army Special Forces soldier working in defense tech. You should subscribe to his Substack Mind of Things.
In We Were Soldiers there is an iconic scene of US Army helicopters first landing in the Ia Drang Valley. This is the first combat mission of the 1st Cavalry under Army legend LTC Hal Moore. Immediately upon hitting the landing zone, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick sees a NVA scout and gives chase, calling his men up behind him. The scout runs them right into a waiting ambush line. Herrick, in his blind search for glory, dragged his men to their deaths. It’s cinematic. The story is real and left a lasting impression on Hal Moore in his memoirs. It’s also stupid. Blind courage and bravado, while seemingly righteous, is a dereliction of Herrick’s actual duties, to complete his mission, with his men. It is not bravado that wins wars. In training, it is not aping the warriors of antiquity that matters. Lethality and warrior branding mean nothing if you’re dead because you forgot how to mount a tripod, charged into an obvious ambush, or broke communications discipline to micromanage your subordinates. Counter to the prevailing narrative, it is the unsexy aspects of combat training that keep you alive and bring victory. It is the preparation, sequencing, and the boring repetitions of training that turn people from liabilities into soldiers.
Aggression without sequencing isn’t courage; it’s malpractice. It is a story that goes back to the Iliad and Odyssey. Achilles’ rage, in battle and out, broke armies, led to atrocities, dishonorable behavior, and at the end cost the Acheans more than it gained. The cure to the individual warrior mentality is progressive training that turns baseline skills into unit-level habits, then combines arms under a shared plan, timeline, and picture of the terrain.
Professional vs Performative
The way some envision training and military operations is through the lens of individual capabilities, or worse: showmanship and pomp. Emphasis is placed on outward displays and form. This is ego. When combined with novelty and adrenaline, it mixes into a lethal dose of stupid. The wherewithal necessary to execute; to plan and win firefights and wars dies in the battle for oxygen with ego. This is why the majority of Ranger School and Small Units Tactics focuses so much time on planning and the ability to implement troop leading procedures under extreme stress. War is exhausting. Training for ego, instead of exhaustion, will kill you faster. The ability to execute basic procedures to excellence even when you are tired, hungry, cold, and just want to stop carrying a rucksack is what makes a professional. The alternative to the professional is the eponymous Leeroy Jenkins.
There are three ways that bad leaders incentivize Leeroy Jenkins’ behavior.
Leaders praise speed over sequencing. “Move fast and break things” sounds good in the Valley, the things that break in military operations are people or the things carrying the people. Planning, risk analysis, and allocation of resources in time and space are key.
Leaders provide vague intent and/or conflicting guidance. Without clear direction, staff and lower echelons cannot plan, train, and resource appropriately. Everyone has to work to the same end state or the mission falls apart.
Leaders emphasize bravado and performative training over the harder, less sexy requirements. When under stress, people fall back on their training. If their training is to do dumb shit, they will do dumb shit.
Together, the Leeroy Jenkins Leadership style emphasizes the showmanship of training as the goal itself, instead of training as a means to an end for victory. You wear camouflage paint on your face because that’s what Warriors do (even though you haven’t left your tank in six days). You jump through flaming hoops because that looks cool, not because the PLA has invented new flaming hoop obstacles. You make everyone train on drill and ceremony because a crisp column left appeals to a leader’s ego, not because pike squares are suddenly an effective defense against FPV drones. In battle, showmanship translates only to death and defeat.
On Training to Failure
Training to failure is something that has to be approached very carefully. In some weightlifting methods, the idea of training to failure or as close to it as possible is vital to inciting maximum physical adaptation. This is also true in military training, training to or near failure is how units and individuals learn their limits and start to push them. However, just as in fitness, you do not start with going to failure. No one walks into the gym on their first day and power cleans 315 to exhaustion. You crawl, walk, then run. First you learn proper form, then you build up strength and confidence, then you test that strength and push yourself harder. For combat units, this means training on individual skills, then battle drills, and so on. Building up in complexity by perfecting the smaller things first. Where popular discourse, including from senior leaders, gets stuck is in the first phase of crawl-walk-run, creating an obsession over the sexy individual skills instead of the excellence of the team.
Waging war is about decision making under uncertainty. Training, good training, is about progressively building people’s ability to make those good decisions. There are four major stages for effectively training up a military force.
Stage 1: Individual Training
In the Army, these are akin to the Infantry Skill Level 1 tasks. Shoot, move, communicate. Every Infantry soldier is expected to be able to communicate. They need to be able to report their location, situation, and enemy with brevity. They can move. This is not just about running fast in PT shorts. Move means using individual movement techniques, using cover and concealment (and knowing the difference between the two), how to read a map, and how to move at night. They shoot and sustain. This means they know how to use their assigned weapons and maintain them, they can do basic tasks like throw a grenade, and they know how to perform basic combat casualty care.
These are not “Warrior Tasks” and we should stop calling them that. There’s nothing mystical about clearing a rifle stoppage, reading a contour line, or pushing a nine-line. These are seatbelt skills. You master them so you don’t die from dumb. These are the Basic Soldier Tasks, the minimums that transform a human from a liability to a contributor. Once someone can perform basic tasks they can be trusted to shoot, move, and communicate as part of a team. The name matters because culture follows language. “Warrior” invites cosplay. “Basic” invites accountability (and Starbucks.)
What that accountability does not look like is aping MMA fighters. Consider why soldiers are taught hand-to-hand fighting (hint: it’s not because they’re Spartans). The whole point of combatives is not to make someone a fighter but a survivor. The last thing you want is to be in that kind of fight. You want to create space and get your gun up, if that fails, you want to hold out long enough for a buddy with a gun to show up. That is who wins fist fights in combat, the ones whose buddies show up first and stay up til the fighting’s done. You cannot punch your way out of a gunfight, even Steve Rogers had his shield. No amount of glamorizing the fighting styles of old will change that. Map reading wins more battles than MMA skills.
Special Forces selection basically breaks on two events. Event two is team week: it’s about pain and the ability to tolerate it while contributing to a team. But the first event that breaks most people is land navigation. Why? Because, individual land navigation is a decision-making gym. It forces you to form a plan, commit to it, detect when you have made an error, and recover. You do all of this alone, with 55-65 lbs on your back. In January. After crossing the same river twice. It makes you doubt yourself, doubt gives way to fear, and fear is the mind killer. This, more than any individual capability, is why land navigation is important. As a skill it scales across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. At the tactical level, people that can read a map can see lines of drift and likely enemy approaches. They can pick advantageous fighting positions and know where to make assaults from. At the operational level, it enables units to choose routes that preserve tempo and surprise. It also lets good planners account for terrain when they plan supply to align with maneuver. Lastly, at the strategic level, commanders and staff that know how to read the map can anticipate how terrain compresses and expands decision windows. More than any other individual skill, map reading bridges the knowledge and competency gap between the individual and the small unit.
Stage 2: Small Unit Training and Tactics
This is where soldiers learn and practice the troop leading procedures (TLPs). They learn and rehearse battle drills to make some reactions automatic. This is key. The point of battle drills is to emphasize effective automatic reactions over heroics. Every member of the team or squad knows their job and knows what the other person is going to do. That frees them to concentrate on the enemy and not on each other. Battle drills are as much confidence building exercises as they are exercises in individual competencies. Examples of small unit training modules include: react to contact, squad attack, and hasty ambushes.
Small unit tactics drill actions until they are boring, then they drill it some more. The average machine gun team in an infantry weapons squad will place an M240 machine gun on a tripod hundreds of times without shooting. They will do that in the rain, at night, when fresh and when tired. The best teams will do it so often that it is second nature. Small unit training is also where discipline is truly developed. This is not the discipline to get your haircut or show up on time, that is assumed. It is the discipline to care for your equipment, keep rattling down, check yourself for noise, resist the urge to eat when you need to be silent, carry your loads, and conserve everything you can.
Stage 3: Large Unit Training
Large unit training introduces greater complexity and coordination, while building on the skills and capabilities of the small unit. This is where training passes from individual strain to collective pressure cooker. Young leaders are now integrating with more senior leaders. These operations cannot rely on individual repetition and scripts alone: forward planning, smart thinking, and communication across formations becomes requisite. Consider the seemingly simple “passage of lines” action. Friendly forces at or near the forward line of troops have to either allow another unit to pass through them or they must pass through someone else. This is a dangerous proposition. To dumb it down: you’re trying to walk through a line of armed soldiers, likely at night, without getting shot by your own people. Throw in armored vehicles, sleep deprivation, and enemy fire and this becomes harrowing. This is a complex maneuver, only growing more complex with the increase in jamming and EW on the battlefield making coordination and deconfliction difficult and slow. Planning underpins this but so too does decision making. As formation size grows, the communications delay (not unlike the speed of light delay between probe and ground station in space) grows as distance and people put space between the frontline and leader. During these training events leaders should look to push down as many decisions to lower levels as possible. This stress tests the more junior leaders and offers them a safe place to learn and very importantly, fail. For more senior leaders, it builds confidence in their ability to rely on their subordinates to execute without micromanagement.
Individual skills and small unit tactics are how units learn to crawl. These units should be running short, frequent, coached iterations of lanes (tactical tasks) for their mission types. This means if you are in the infantry, doing recon and ambush lanes. Mortarmen should be setting in and simulating fire missions with large shifts. These are done to focus on the unit’s actions. Once they can crawl then they are ready to walk.
Large unit training is where units learn to walk. It is not enough for a squad or platoon to work on ambushes and react to contact drills, now they have to think about movement and control, they need to plan resupply, and they need to scale up the complexity to better test decision making. Leaders, already versed in small unit tactics individually, now must be tested on their ability to manage span of control and communications between formations and on their ability to work together with their peers and superiors, not just subordinates under their direct command. These exercises should be built to test a unit’s ability to develop and affect commander’s critical intelligence requirements, develop and act on decision points, and present problems that challenge commanders’ decision space. This type of training must be force on force against a capable peer (not three bored dudes hanging out on the objective). And the rate of failure per iteration should go up, not down. We should not be in the business of affirming the beliefs or egos of leadership. Bullets and artillery shells don’t care about those things. When a unit validates their ability to perform under these conditions, they move onto stage 4: combined arms maneuver.
Stage 4: Combined Arms Maneuver
Combined Arms (and joint) maneuver is the orchestra of operations. Various instruments and sections combined into one performance to make music. For the leader, the built-in assumption is that the individual, squad, platoon, company, etc. can all do their jobs in a vacuum. Now they have to all get along, with various equipment and systems ranging from tanks and aircraft to communications relays in order to take the fight to the enemy. If executed well, training can become overwhelming for the incompetent command and staff. Even for a competent commander and staff, combined arms training should be challenging and even painful. The point of combined arms training is for units to show they can plan, prioritize effects (bombs, electromagnetic waves, bullets, cyberattacks, things that disrupt the enemy) and resources, and deliver those effects in time and space to shape and form the battlespace in their favor against a thinking enemy. Modern commanders have to be able to synchronize these effects over time and space, often blind and/or deaf to what their peers are up to as the enemy does its damnedest to the same.
By building and training for each of the four stages, we build a force capable of fighting under the harshest conditions. It all kinda sounds like it sucks, right? That’s because it does, but it sucks for a purpose. Plenty of leaders will tell you that soldiers learn two ways: pain and repetition. But both pain and repetition must come with a purpose in order to be effective. Pain and repetition just for the sake of it solve nothing and that’s where we begin to trade performance for the performative.
The core theme in each of these levels of training, individual to combined arms, is decision making. The ability to decide when to pull the trigger or which path to navigate, the ability to decide whether to flank left or right against a machine gun nest, the ability to decide how best to maneuver and position your forces over many kilometers against a peer, and the ability to deconflict and coordinate a heterogeneous mix of assets, egos, and threats on the modern battlefield. Decision quality is directly tied to the number of quality reps leaders get.
If you could boil it all down to an equation it would look something like:
(quality reps x support) - (ego x fog and friction) = Quality of Decision
This surely seems deceivingly easy. Just eliminate the ego right? Pulling ego out of the equation is damn near impossible. And, we are never going to reduce the fog and friction. The best option we are left with is to make people do enough quality reps, and give them the proper support, so there is a positive number left at the end.
Troop leading procedures, priorities of work, battle drills, and the military decision making process all exist to preserve decision time under fire. The battle drills and priorities of work exist to make certain reactions nearly automatic. This allows for pattern building and predictability that enables better coordination and confidence with your fellow soldiers. It also guards against the type of unpredictable behavior that gets people killed, like running after a lone NVA scout into an ambush. Running fast is not the hallmark of courage, being able to decide and act quickly can be, as long as the decision making muscles are developed. You should be unpredictable to the enemy, you absolutely do not want to be unpredictable and therefore unreliable to your friends.
Soldiers are not trained to be fearless. Lethality is not about breaking bricks against your head. Don’t trust anyone that says they had their life on their line and were not scared. Soldiers are trained to be useful even when they are scared. That training is often boring. It’s maps and maintenance, rehearsals and recocks, threat assessments and vehicle identification. The boring stuff, a deep foxhole, a clean rifle, knowing where you are, these are things that matter. They are also the things that keep people from sprinting off after the illusion of glory. You can’t be lethal if you’re dead from stupid.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!
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