Actually, it was even more dumbed down than that, our exhortations to wear body armor, especially ballistic glasses (fancy safety glasses capable of repelling shrapnel).
You gotta remember, in Vietnam, we had flak jackets, quite capable of providing protection, troops rejected it most part. Why? It was hot. Iraq is hot too. Not sticky hot, more like a hot oven, keeping your hands in way too long hot.
Our glasses was very silly, our command sargent major decided several months in advanced we would be wearing them 24/7, if we were seen without them we would get into trouble. His own wacky idea. Well- a lot of guys lost their glasses prior to ever deploying, and ended up buying non-ballistic fakes so they wouldn’t get yelled at, deployed with them, everyone was stealing from one another. I ended up writing my name on the nose of them so I can see if it was mine if someone snatched them. We had a limited market in Alaska that close to deployment.
In the end, didn’t really work. Guys protesting would make their families wear it too, including kids. Sent a ugly signal. Then it was knee pads- turned into a mockery when your in full battle rattle, and have knee pads that aren’t designed for human knees, wouldn’t stay up. They sat strapped to the boots. Even in guard towers, had to have them, in case knee cancer struck. Many guys made fake sappi plates for towers, cardboard or foam inside to maintain the shape.
Reason for that level of entrenched disbelief and cynicism is a direct result of military pedogogy. You have guys in team, squad, and platoon leader positions who haven’t the slightest clue in regards to exhaustively explain why something needs to be done- I’ve seen examples of this being done, but those guys are usually isolated, sent off to “special schools” or given jobs in scouts (basically a infantry battalions special forces team), where the rest don’t have go deal with them. There is a strong distinction drawn between “book smarts” and “practical intelligence”. If your not as stupid and pugheaded as the rest who get promoted alongside of you, your in this first group, and that group flees the infantry- given I can try can’t find work as other than infantry, they leave the army. This is for enlisted men, obviously not officers.
So the enlisted command gets dumber and dumber the higher the rank, and their responses dumber. It comes down to “If I say the sky is pink, and you look up and see it is blue, then God dammit, you better believe it is pink” sort of insistence it works. It works, just fucking works, smart people at TRADOC made it work, have worked out every issue, shut up, quit questioning it, it fucking works.
It usually doesn’t work, especially when they have to resort to this level of reasoning. They are not well trained debaters or philosophers. One exception would be in the Airborne Infantry, the jump masters at Fort Benning. You may not be aware, but the fast majority of soldiers signing up to jump are deathly afraid of heights. I’m scared of heights too. Wasn’t uncommon with the old round parachutes for people in a class to die or be injured badly, they’ve recently modified them, square, fall I think 30/40% slower now, still faster than civilian shoots. They were trained to answer literally anything, and build off it in a question and reply format “What do you do if this then happens”. My favorite was what do you do if your jumping, land in power lines, in combat, guys are shooting at you, you fall to the ground into a pond and active piwerlines are jiggling around you, next to the pond, troops are approaching, your in your parachute wrapped up in water, get out following the Seams, and when you emerge from the water aquatic reeds are stuck in your release, and you step on the shore, wet parachute attached, stuck on you, and you see a sign marking the shore as a mine field- what do you do? "
Everyone of those aspects have a solution a soldier going through airborne school. He already knows how to “slowly” probe for mines with a stick- but what happens if he is under fire? Run, hope for the best. In Airborne School, electric wire landings and water landings are exhaustively explained, but even they can become overwhelmed when you start compounding “what if” situations, snapping their logic. Your just fucked. Unfortunately, our bizarre KIAs often happen from bizarre instances- our units first KIA was electrocuted from a mortar blowing up a electric pole, line dropped down, in contact with his rifle. Others drowned, while driving. Yeah…
So I’m Hardy surprised to see the local Al Nursa commander take the position he did in regards to body armor. He could be in literally any military. If your army didn’t have body armor, they would denigrate it, emphasizing light mobile flexibility, how much easier it to move and wear down a heavy infantry opponent. That only pussies wear it, real men don’t have to, because they blend in so well and fight so well the enemy can’t shoot back accurately- then when you get some body armor, it is like “this is the greatest fucking shit in the world, use it and be proud, don’t worry where it came from, we are looking out for you”. Wasn’t too different from both times the military equipped me with new stuff I never saw before, similar talk, saying army supports you. I think that guy went to the same school the guts at Fort Benning goes to who hand out the boots. I got in 2004 black cortex boots, neither warm enough in the winter to qualify as winter boots, or cool enough in the summer- they were hell. One guy had feet too big to fit inside of their stock, got the old Vietnam jungle boots, way better except one problem, hard as hell to break in, can take months if you don’t boil them for a hour in water. You can’t boil shit in basic training, so the guy was tortured with blisters and bleeding, while the rest had feet that roasted under the Georgian Sun.
None of te gear he handed out fit them, helmets too big, he either didn’t have the padding, or straps for making a oversized helmet fit, he didn’t try to show them how to adjust the chin straps. Did some effort to fit shoe size, no explanation of how sapi plates worked (easy to break them), so they clearly just liberated the stockpiles from Assad, not knowing to get the accessories, which were nearby guaranteed, but they were too ignorant to know better.
I can see him outfitting everyone, then once you run out, it is back to "oh, you don’t need body armor, real soldiers… "
We’ve historically have had light and heavy infantry. Airborne Infantry is mistakenly labeled as “light” (my full infantry title was Arctic Light Airborne Infantry) because non-airborbe infantry is all mechanized. They have armored vehicles. You cant jump many vehicles because they have nitrogen based components that explode upon the shock of contact, you can rig them up like the Dumbo Drop movie, but not for a whole unit. The actual difference historically between light and heavy infantry is personal body armor. Some were lighter skirmishers, others heavy, doing too very different jobs. Alexander the Great was the large scale innovator who used both systems in tangem. It isn’t shameful or primitive to be light infantry, not a sign of advancement to be heavy.
Under US classification, those uarmored guys hopping out of that armor car would be “heavy infantry” while a soldier in standard armor would be “light” if merely from a airborne unit. It is bizarre and not historically based.
I really don’t blame Al Nursa for doing that, as it is largely reasonable. It isn’t very different from how we do things. It is easy to denigrate them when you haven’t gone through a similar process yourself. Troops being trained and instructed can follow blindly like ducks, following accidental non-orders, Greeks used to laugh at this phenomena, I believe it was Onasander who first described this phenomena. Greeks also used to denigrate swords and arrows, how real men wore shields and spears, thrashing, taking it like a man. They had heavy infantry. It is a very silly mindset, but men like to find clever excuses to promote specializations, and some not so clever responses to when their great system fails, like Spartans being lured into uphill ambushes, slaughtered with darts, or killed through attrition by arrow barrages isolated on a barren island surrounded by Athenian boats. I’m sure some older Spartan fell back on the old explanation that you just need to shut up and believe me, then taking the poor soldier for questioning the system- cause Spartan pedogogy involved pedophilia to boot. I’m not joking, it is where pedo- cones from, the teaching method. It is today taken as purely intellectual teaching methods, but in ancient times, Anthony Weiner would be a scholar of great renown. Notice neither Al Nursa nor the US Army does this, at least for the most part. You can take that as evidence of advance thinking. Hard to say what ISIS does, maybe they manrape recruits, possible given some of the shit they do.
I’m 90% opposed to Al Nursa, but 200% to ISIS. Al Nursa doesn’t harvest human organs from prisoners for the black market and the rest, it is still body bombing and mutilation based on sharua, but not some of the even worst extremes ISIS does. Even Lawrence of Arabia got raped in that area, just never know what a completely irresponsible ad hoc organization will do when it lacks the ability to set standards and oluce their own men, in fear they will defect to other factions or rebel.
