Daily Times

Soldiering my dear madam is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak

(George Bernard Shaw)

The above quote from Shaw’s classic drama “Arms and the Men” expresses the levity of human spirit and the instinct to survive when confronted with heavy odds. With his acerbic wit and limpid prose Shaw parses open the paradoxes of human nature that Norman Dixon had also portrayed so vividly in his scholarly tour d’ horizon of the military foibles in “Psychology of Military Incompetence.” Dixon related piquantly the predilection of “bull headed” and unimaginative generals like Elphinston and Lord Raglan who sent their men to the meat grinders of Afghanistan and Crimea without any compunction, to their disturbed childhood under over strict mothers. The instinct of self- preservation therefore trumps any other instinct in a soldier’s repertoire of martial skills.

Armies in the past and current times have always responded to dangers and threats with a response consistent with their dominant ethos or what the French call the elan vital. The courage, panache, and self -immolation displayed by a soldier forms the warp and woof of a nation’s martial hagiology and in many ways is reflective of a nation’s collective sense of discipline, social grooming, and cohesion. The legendary cohesion and self abnegating zeal of the German Army during all wars was for instance derived from their Spartan military upbringing in a highly regimented society, the apogee of which was Prussian Army. Duty, honour, and discipline were the three clarion calls for the German Army that cohered better than all armies, even under the worst conditions of military defeat. Contrarily there have been armies such as the US Army in Vietnam that disintegrated even while winning.

What leads to a proper symbiosis between the arms and the men that creates an effective and cohesive military has been the subject of debate amongst the military historians and analysts since long. There are questions like, “what constitutes the military effectiveness?’ and “what leads to better cohesion in a military outfit?” The factors for analysis are both sociological and technical. In sociology the mental make up, ideology, and military traditions form the units of analysis while in the technical the size, training, and armaments form the units of analysis. With all other factors being equal with small margins of error, the quality of leadership and the motivation of the officers leading the men top the list. Napoleon had said that “it is with baubles that the men are led”, while General Aubrey Newman, US Army believed that “it is not the sharpness of the bayonet blades but the cold glint in the eyes of men that scares the enemy”.

Officers are the glue that binds an army or for that matter any body of men charged with any disciplined undertaking. S.L.A. Marshall writes in his classic, “The Officer As A Leader,” that the character of an army is the final safeguard of the character of a nation. That character is forged in the smithy of a common crucible of the battlefield where the instinct for self-preservation and killing of adversary sit cheek by jowl testing the true grit of soldiers and officers alike. Field Marshal William Slim’s words crackle like epigrams in his classic i.e “Defeat Into Victory” where he writes that success is the easy foundation on which is built the morale, provided one has it.” The possession of that special spark of inspiration to cohere as an army distinguished Spartans from the rest of the Greeks just as it distinguished the Romans from the rest of their contemporaries.

A seminal study on the causes of indifferent performance in the Vietnam War by the US Army by Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage concluded that the US Army needed reforms for improving its operational performance and that the most serious factor was the state of its officers. Officers as a class were identified as responsible for the battlefield performance of the soldiers. An important factor of unit cohesion was identified as an indicator of operational effectiveness. The cohesion included the battlefield discipline, absence of incidents of desertions and insubordinations. Many amongst the officers’ corps thought that the critical analysis of army was akin to self-flagellation which should be avoided in the interest of army’s morale. But the USA being a functioning democracy with a very strong tradition of civilian control of the military prevailed upon the internal naysayers and commissioned the study.

The study revealed startling results. One of the conclusions was that the managerial ethos that in the name of modernization was introduced in the armed forces by General Marshal had damaged the time honoured military traditions of duty, honour, and altruism through a deluge of corporate practices. The function of command was perceived as identical to that of a corporate executive with totally opposing requirements. Traditional aspects of military way of doing things collapsed in the face of computer models of decision making, systems analysis and career management. The military as per Savage and Gabriel imbibed not only the technology of business world but its language, style, and ethics.In the business world the self interest and the organizational interest are encouraged to be combined while in the military the self interest is encouraged to be sacrificed in the overall collective interest of the platoon, company, or battalion.

In World War II the officers to men ratio of US Army was 7%, while the same ratio had climbed up to 15% in the Vietnam War without any improvement in the performance. Officer inflation therefore is not a panacea for military effectiveness. The US Army’s effectiveness declined with the increase in the officers-enlisted men ratio. Contrarily the army with the lowest officers to men ratio during WW II i.e German Army displayed the highest standards of cohesion despite suffering greater casualties and suffering defeats. In WW II German Army lost 1,709,739 men vis a vis 59,965 officers having one of the highest ratios of the officers killed i.e 3.5% of total casualties despite being only 2.86% of the total army strength. Amongst the total officers corps strength 30% died in battle yet the German units cohered with the lowest desertion rate amongst all the armies on the battle front including the victorious allies. Amongst the 675 German generals 233 were killed in action and of the 8284 German officers from nobility(Germans kept a record of their nobility meticulously) 4690 i.e 56% died in battle.

The continually increasing incidents of fratricide and suicides amongst Indian army troops deployed in Kashmir have been ascribed amongst other factors to incompetent officers in a study by Sakshi Sharma i.e “Occupational Stress in the armed forces: An Indian Army perspective”

Compared to above the US desertion rate in Vietnam was 462%. The reasons ascribed to poor officer leadership performance were the infusion of managerial ethos in army, over concern with careerism, tendency to evade frontline jobs, rapid rotation of commanders leaving no chance for bonding of officers and men and tendency of the educated elite of the society to evade the military service. Another important reason was the rank inflation in the officers’ corps. Military history proves that whenever the number of officers is allowed to swell beyond the capacity of the society to produce good officers the third of the Military’s “Graham’s Laws” begins to operate with the bad officers driving out the good. If we take critical a look at Indian and Pakistan armies the contrast would appear striking. Pakistan Army has around 3% of officers in entire army whereas the same ratio in India is over 5%. The combat casualties’ ratio in Pakistan Army is much higher due to the greater willingness of the officers to expose themselves to the dangers as evidenced by casualties’ figures. In WW I German Army suffered 1 officer to 28 enlisted men fatal casualties while the Indian Army’s average in Kashmir, from 1989 to 2019, is 1 officer to 150 men. Pakistan Army has suffered 1 officer to 20 men casualty ratio in war on terror, even larger than the German Army in WW II.

The above speaks of the courage and quality of leadership amongst the Pakistan Army officers. The continually increasing incidents of fratricide and suicides amongst Indian army troops deployed in Kashmir have been ascribed amongst other factors to incompetent officers in a study by Sakshi Sharma i.e “Occupational Stress in the armed forces: An Indian Army perspective.” The lessons from Indian Army’s experiences in Kashmir are that inflated officers’ corps strength, incompetent leadership, and poor organizational environment lead towards diminished military effectiveness. These are the lessons Pakistan army too needs to heed in its long quest for internal stability.

(The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST: email rwjanj@hotmail.com)