Cracks and fissures: Pentagon says 6 percent of force is highly stressed

But for COIN, a man who knows the territory is vastly more useful than somebody new.

Rotate out a platoon and replace them with a platoon that hasn't been in the area for 6 months and their effectiveness is way down for a month or more. Rotate in a green platoon and how long does it take before they're much use at all?

For COIN purposes it might be better to keep the same troops in the same areas for years at a time. And if it's too stressful for them, that might be a sign that there's something wrong with their COIN approach. But we can't really do that....

I have to agree with IRR Soldier, that dilution thru averaging is one of the most common statistical dodges. Half truth is all lie, if the intent is to misdirect.

Any measure of combat manpower levels and stress attenuation that mentions PTSD, but fails to mention TBI, is also misdirection. The medical estimate on traumatic blast injury attrition, which is known to have delayed sequalae and accumulative component, has not been opened to public view.

The medical generals proudly directed the primary military mission, which was to return men to the firing line ASAP, in a time of manpower shortage. Hooah. Now they need to answer to the second part; what is the TBI force level/effectiveness picture?

Measuring force level/combat effectives and attrition is one of the most basic requirements of military calculus. No less for TBI in 2009 than for marching fitness in 1918.

Whatever the experience level, manning an automatice weapon with neurologically impaired executive function, or a trainer with impaired memory, puts the COIN mission at risk.

I think your three points are good start but the military needs to make mental health a priority. The way in which this country treats its veterans is abhorrent. Young men and Women who have given up their best years to the service of this country are virtually left without a support structer when they come home. They are left with the horrific memories of what they have seen in the combat theatre only to be left to their own devices afterwards. Combat is a hard, terrible thing and being a soldier is a very tough job, as it should be. Our soldiers need the care, incentive, and pay to match what they have givin up for this country. It is apparant that the army needs to spread the burden out more, but they are not going to be able to do this if they can't get enlistment nubers up. to do that they need a comprehensive overhaul of the post combat care system, education benefits, and monetary incentives. If I can sit in an office and type all day making 50% more than the average soldiers salary then there is something very wrong with the system.

Patrick from www.yournewswire.com

The goal was not to gloss over anything in the aggregation, the individual services' data is broken out in the later slides.

Unicorn, the point is that for some of the natural questions we'd like to ask, the data has no answers because of the biases in its collection.

It makes sense that those biases were not introduced intentionally to skew the data. But they are still there, and so the result is biased.

It may be the best data possible for your concerns about combat pay. But it doesn't fit very well to Ricks's headline.

As a separate matter, I'm concerned about the problems of COIN. For that, in many contexts a new man simply cannot do the job. When you're interacting with individual locals and the requirement is to get to know them well enough that they trust you and you have a sense how much you can trust them, it simply does not work to rotate out the guy with the experience and rotate in somebody fresh.

Can you get a new COIN doctrine that makes the guys who meet the locals more interchangeable? Otherwise how can you spread the load?

The solution is longer individual tours to the problem area. My Father, and I suspect yours or your grandfather went far away to fight in World War II and did not come back until it was over.

As it happened, my relative in WWII got a spot on a training base and didn't leave texas until after the war was over. When the training base was shutting down, he got more and more jobs piled on him. When somebody who wasn't in his chain of command wanted him to pick up the mail in town on sundays, he refused. Everybody in his unit got orders to go to guam but after VJ day the orders were all cancelled except for his. He was seasick the whole way. When he got to guam they didn't know what to do with hm and put him in an empty barracks, and during the night the barracks filled up with POWs flying home, and they almost flew him back the next day by mistake. He spent a long time on guama and got jungle rot but didn't interact with any of the japanese snipers.

Moral: Entirely apart from chain-of-command, never refuse an order until you know what the other guy can do to you.

Anyway, I agree. Longer tours are necessary, but they pile up the stress on the guys doing it.

There is no longer the national will to do that.

Then we should avoid missions that require what we aren't willing to do.

My headline is how so many in the institution do things other than what the very few are doing in the lonely and dangerous places. We simply need to get less of the former more of the later.

That's important. So for that purpose you particularly need to count the ones who aren't put in danger, more than the ones who are. Your statistics appear to overestimate the *ratio*. But again, if the point is to look at a particular cohort -- the ones who were there at one starting time -- and you're interested in the ones who stay the whole time, the ones who remain a fraction of the institution, then this is completely appropriate.

It just doesn't tell us about what happens to the guys who're fighting. We'd have to be careful about what conclusions to draw about them from your data. That isn't what you're looking at.

We simply need to get less of the former more of the later.

How many of the former should be replaced by civilian contractors? How many of their functions can be eliminated? Or should it be the Marine approach, where everybody's combat but some have extra duties too?

I see potential problems each way, but something needs to be done.

If you get the chance (in your copious free time? ;) ) you might try an actual cohort study.

When I looked closer at your report you looked at people who were active duty at the end of 2008. That left out people who for whatever reason were not active duty at that time. And it of course resulted in slides that need some interpretation. Like, if a man is E1 in 2005 and he serves 27 months in a combat zone and he's still an E1 ... well there won't be very many of those, and the graphs show it. Your data necessarily covers people who have served for different times. Somebody who joined the military within the last year cannot have more than 12 month's combat. Etc.

It would be extremely interesting if you could look at the people who were in the military at the end of 2001, and track what happened to them. How many of them got excessive time in combat zones? How many of them left for one reason or another?

If it were to turn out that, say, 70% of the ones who were there in 2001 had less than 12 months combat pay, and that many of the ones who did get a lot of combat pay left before 2009, it might say something about the institution in the long term. If the ones who don't go to the hotspots way outnumber the ones who do in the institutional memory....

But I suspect that sort of study might make the results look milder. From your data, higher ranks get more combat pay. I can't tell whether it's that the people who get more combat pay get promoted faster, or if they have a lower attrition rate than lower ranks or both, but either way it would tend to help even the odds.

If you could look at a fixed group of people and see what happens to them, that would be very interesting. A lot of people might want to draw a lot of conclusions. It might be so interesting that it would be necessary for it to be classified. ;>