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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Joseph Juran meets Carl von Clausewitz

The Globe, of all places, talks about military effectiveness, in this article by columnist H D S Greenway.  The title is "When a sixth sense saves lives."  The news is that the Army is trying to figure out what gives soldiers in the field a special sense of the battlefield, what the French call the coup d'oeil.  This is not a new idea.  See this paragraph from the 1832 version of On War:
If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable:  first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead. The first of these qualities is described by the French term, coup d'oeil; the second is determination.
The idea put forward by Mr Greenway should not be new to us.  Isn't it said that Ted Williams could see the stitches on the baseball being pitched to him?

In the fighter pilot dodge the theory has been that 5% of the fight pilots achieve 95% of the kills and the rest of us are just ablation material.  The numbers are probably a bit off, but are close to those in Pareto's Principle.  The principle, really attributed to business management expert Joseph M. Juran, is that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  It did start with Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, whose analysis showed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy. 

Almost a decade ago Air Force's Air & Space Power Journal published an article by Majors Dominic J. Caraccilo and John L. Pothin on this issue:  "Coup d’oeil:  The Commander’s Intuition in Clausewitzian Terms."  Interesting diagrams.

One of the things I liked is that he mentions one of my favorite authors, John Masters.  I commend John Masters to any young readers of this blog.

Regards  —  Cliff

  Mr Greenway is one of those elite Globe writers who does not provide an EMail address with which we could respond directly to his ideas, with which he blesses us.
  Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book One, Chapter Three, page 102 of the Michael Howard and Peter Paret translation.
  As the Wikipedia article on the Pareto Principle points out, in 1989, the richest 20% of the people in the world controlled 82.7% of the GDP.  Pretty close to Mr Pareto's 1906 analysis.  Here is another take on Pareto's Principle

2 comments:

Craig H said...

I've often seen military references to studies that estimate that fewer than 5% of soldiers contribute over half the battlefield kills. (If I recall correctly, a general named Marshall studied WWII infantry engagements and concluded that only 15-20% of the soldiers even fired their weapons at all in combat). The WWII air statistics I've read attribute almost half the air-to-air kills to just 1% of the pilots.

Though I can't find the source to cite for this, I've also read that US army training has now been tuned to the study of how to influence more soldiers to emulate this killing behavior, via depersonalization of enemies and other psychological strategies. These stories cite kill ratios that are higher for American soldiers than for any other army in the world today, but also a marked increase in PTSD and similar after effects.

The logical conclusion is that the vast majority of human beings, even with a gun in their hand and a reason to pull the trigger, are committed pacifists.

C R Krieger said...

I am not so sure they are pacifists as much as they are bargainers.  I think there is a psychological quirk in which some soldiers say to themselves, if I don't shoot, maybe he won't shoot.  Thinking like that can get you killed, but it is comfortable.

As to your point about PTSD, that may well be a problem, but it could also be the nature of the environment—a Counter Insurgency (COIN) environment involves women and little kids and that is a lot of stress.  I would think even non-combatant personnel (e.g., medics) could develop PTSD on the battlefield.  Getting blown up makes it tougher.  As I recall, Reporter Kimberly Dozier, in her book Breathing the Fire, talks about having to deal with PTSD after being the victim of a VBIED.

Regards  —  Cliff