The Rule of Three

How do you organize your team for maximum effectiveness?

“During the whole affair, the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body.  Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so.  Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.  They have men among them who know very well what they are about.” -Lord Hugh Percy, after the battle of Lexington.

 Since time immemorial, men have understood that a team of men will defeat a mob, even if the mob is comprised of men who are superb individual fighters. This is largely why the Romans defeated Spartacus’s revolt, and the colonial powers defeated so many nineteenth- century tribesmen. The question I am interested in, in this post, is not whether a team is superior, but how should it be composed, and in what number.

 With a two- element team, you have fire and maneuver capability.  One element can fire while the other moves, bounding either forward (for the attack), backward (to break contact), or laterally (to flank).

The smallest possible number of people you can have, and still be called a team, is of course two. For that reason, the buddy team is foundational for soldiers and cops everywhere.  The weakness of the buddy team is that it has severely limited fire power, with only one person to lay down suppressive fire, while the second moves. One man can only easily cover a sector about 45 degrees wide.  A dispersed enemy will require more people to suppress.  Moreover, the buddy team is fragile, being only one casualty or weapon malfunction away from a single warrior.

  Far greater fire power and survivability is found in the four man fire team.  Not only does the fire team lay down twice as many rounds and suppress twice as wide an area, but it has the man power to continue function as a team, even if as many of two of its members are out of action.  Then, having cleared the area of enemy fighters, one team member can administer aid to the injured, while the other provides a security over- watch.  Even the old Boy Scout manual recommended a minimum of four boys for a backwoods hike. In case of injury, one could stay with the injured party, while two went for help.

 A great deal can be accomplished with a four man fire team, but still, you are limited. It just doesn’t have much mass, especially when divided into two maneuver elements.  The next step up in organization would be the eight man squad, which is commonly used by the U.S. Army.  In this configuration, with each fire team acting as an independent maneuver element, we start to see how truly functional a small unit can be.  It is not just a matter of eight men being twice as good as four. At these numbers, we start to reach a critical mass, where the whole begins to be much more than the sum of its parts.

 Even so, with only two elements, you are limited to simple bounding maneuvers.  Most battle drills, whether raid, ambush, or deliberate attack, call for three elements: Assault, Support and Security. In area defense, this breaks down into line, reserve and screening activities; still three elements.  Even the ancient Roman army was divided into three elements; Hastati, Principes, Triarii.

 If our basic unit is the fire team, this gives us a twelve man squad, as is commonly deployed by the USMC.

  To say twelve is better than eight, is not a simple matter of “more is better”. A twelve man squad fills every task at a minimum level, and achieves a synergy that is difficult with smaller numbers.

 All well and good, but what if you don’t have twelve men?  Obviously, you will have to make adjustments.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the team you have, not the team you want.  First, consider your mission.  Are you tasked with reconnaissance?  If your goal is not to make hard contact with the enemy (in other words see him without him seeing you), you may be better served by a smaller team. Smaller teams are easier to hide, and, as we pointed out earlier, two elements are all that is necessary to break contact if things go sour.  One of the classic examples of a tiny recon team would be a scout sniper team, consisting of a sniper and his spotter.  (While sniper teams are famous for taking out high value targets on the battle field, their value for scouting and reconnaissance, is often more important.)

 Another approach is to intentionally neglect one of the elements. For instance, if you are shorthanded, you may decide to task all of your meager resources to assault and support, and none to security.  While this is inherently dangerous, and there are many examples of commanders doing this to their peril, there are cases in history where commanders have used heavy violence of action and a rapid operational tempo in lieu of flank security.  In other words, they have attacked with enough vigor that the enemy is constantly on his heels, and too unbalanced to launch a counterattack.

 Finally, you can scale your mission down. Imagine this tiny, six man ambush: One buddy team is the attack, one is support, and the third is split into two lonely, one man flank security elements.  With teams this small, every man must be utterly dependable. There is no one to wake up a drowsy sentinel, and it is difficult to mix in new troops with less experience, when the numbers are this small, without seriously diluting your fighting ability.

 Lastly, you can alter your tactics. Outnumbered forces have historically employed far ambushes, baited ambushes, reverse slope defenses, booby traps, and sabotage.

 If you are a man who knows very much what you are about you can transform your irregular mob into an effective team.

Book Reviews for July 2019

A wise man once told me, “If you want to be a leader, you have to be a reader”.

I have found this good advice.  Here are some of the books I have been reading lately, not necessarily in any type of order.

No Second Place Winner,  by Bill Jordan, published in 1965.  This is a classic that everyone should read.  You will find lots of pictures of Jordan shooting one- handed, from the hip, pipe in his mouth, and cowboy hat firmly on his head.  Shooting styles surely have changed, but there is no getting around the fact that this man was an expert with a handgun, who had shot his way out of more than a couple of scrapes in his day.  Interestingly, for all the emphasis on shot- from- the- hip fast draw, Jordan recommends bringing the gun up into the line of sight at distances of seven yards and greater (as Applegate did with his point shooting method), and actually using the sights beyond 15 yards.  This book has lots of quotable passages, but my favorite is: “For ninety percent of your practice, draw from the holster, and fire one shot. It’s that first shot that’s important, and it is the one that is most difficult to place accurately.” True words.

The Complete Book of Combat Handgunning, By Chuck Taylor, published in 1982.  This really is a comprehensive book, covering gear and ammunition selection, weapon maintenance tactics, and strategy.  Taylor is one of the influential shooters from the early days of the Modern Technique of the pistol, and despite what a lot of current trainers like to say about the gun fighting in the post 9-11 world, not much has changed from the techniques Taylor demonstrates in this book (with excellent photographs).  The same cannot be said for handguns, ammunition, and holsters, all of which have improved considerably from the selection that was available in 1982.  The best part of this book, to me, is the section of recommended dryfire and live fire drills.  He recommends 30-45 minutes of dry practice, daily. He considers this a basic level, for more advanced practice, he adds an additional 20 minutes daily.  The live fire drills are challenging, and I would urge anyone who is serious about the pistol to find this book, and try the drills. Chuck Taylor went on to develop the Hand Gun combat master certification which is near legendary in its difficulty.

If Jordan and Taylor were interested in mastering the pistol, Karl Rehn and Jon Daub are at the opposite spectrum, with their newly published book, Strategies and Standards for Defensive Handgun Training. Rehn and Daub recognize that far from spending 45 minutes a day dry practicing with their hand guns, or practicing fast draw by shooting up thousands of specially hand loaded, paraffin wax projectiles, (as Jordan recommends) most civilian pistol carriers will, at best, show up for one, four- hour class per year.  Rehn and Daub try to establish what a minimum standard of skill should be, and how to get a student to that level, in the time that they are willing to spend.  This book is a trove of good information, filled with useful statistics. They even make an attempt to categorize the difficulty level of various common drills.  As much as I like this book, it could have used a better editor.  The information is a bit disorganized, and they have an annoying habit of referencing a drill, but not describing it, advising readers to “look it up on the internet”.  If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have had to buy the book, not to mention that many drills are not standardized, and it is difficult to know if the version of, say, the “Casino drill”, which you can find online, is the same one that the authors are referencing.  If you do any handgun instruction at all, you should read this book; if you don’t teach, you probably won’t find it interesting.

I like to read a lot of first person accounts by regular G.I.s, and Jumping From Helicopters, by John Stillman, is just one of the most recent I have found.  It contains a good, firsthand account of a paratrooper in Vietnam.

The Farnam Method of Defensive Handgunning, By John S. Farnam, published in 2000, is yet another gun-fighting manual, but it contains very little information that is redundant to the similar books I have already mentioned here.  Aside from excellent coverage of gun handling and self- defense, this book covers: dealing with law enforcement, confronting criminals, use- of- force considerations, and even touches on first aid.  The best part, for me, was Farnam’s extensive coverage of the traditional, double action pistol; a system that doesn’t get much coverage from serious gun writers, in spite of its popularity with police and militaries around the world. Farnam loves charts, comparing the various attributes of different pistols and ammunitions, and I found the chart comparing the workings of various traditional, double action pistols to be quite enlightening.  Many of these systems are very different from each other, in spite of being classified as the same.

If you are interested in a deeper dive into military history, Martin Van Creveld’s The Culture of War, and his History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind, are a pair of books that I have recently read.  Van Creveld writes succinctly, with an easy- to- read style, which, layman though I am, I found easy to understand.  His books are filled with a dry humor (at one point, he refers to T. E. Lawrence as “a typical British Eccentric”).  I have only recently discovered this author, and plan to read more of his works in the future.

Another recent discovery, for me, is Tony Hillerman, who wrote detective fiction set on the Navajo reservation, and starring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.  The mysteries are clever, the characters interesting, and Hillerman weaves in a lot of detail about Navajo culture, history, and religion that I find fascinating.  I’ve read four of these, and immensely enjoyed every one, although Sacred Clowns is my favorite so far.

I know a lot of people who have snobbish disdain for fiction, usually characterizing their thoughts by saying, with words or demeanor, “I only have time to read serious books.”  This attitude is as sophomoric as it is stupid.  Oftentimes, more truth can be conveyed in a good work of fiction, than in an entire library of technical manuals, so don’t be ashamed to mix a little quality fiction into your reading.

We have more written material available to us than at any previous time in history, anything you want to know, someone has written a book about it.  While there is no substitute for hands on experience, we can gain a huge leg up by reading about the work of those who have gone before us.

WWII Infantry Combat Load

One of my cousins recently found some letters written by my great- uncle, Warren. They were posted from Czechoslovakia, where he was fighting in the 97th Infantry Brigade during the Second World War.  One of these was sent to two of his younger brothers, who were also in the army, preparing to go to the Pacific theater.  In one of the letters, he passes on to his brothers some of the lessons he has learned in combat. Of particular interest is his advice concerning combat loads. Here is an excerpt:

Say when the Sgt. tells you that to wear the packs and so on you can figure to yourself that he is wrong but don’t tell him yourself it may get you in trouble. Over here when you are in action all you wear is your belt with canteen, bayonet, shovel, first aid packet and rifle launcher sight if you have it.  With that you have two bandoleers of ammunition plus three or four hand grenades.  I have three rifle grenades because I have the launcher.  All of this gets heavy as almost any pack you may wear except a full field with a horseshoe roll over it. Right at present I have twenty eight clips of ammo with me and it is darn nice to have that much.  I don’t know what they wear in the south pacific but I would imagine about the same.

This description of his combat load piqued my interest. It is easy to find what the field manuals of the day told infantrymen to carry, but I don’t often see actual, original- source accounts.  This is, of course, of special interest to me, because of the family connection.  Therefore, I set out to recreate Uncle Warren’s combat load, as he describes it, as closely as possible, from things I had knocking about in the shed.  Here is a picture of what it looked like.

Before I get the historians and reenactors upset, let me say there are more things wrong with this than are correct.  The Bayonet is for an M14, the E-tool is Danish (I think), the belt and suspenders are wrong, etc.  My purpose in this was not to create a museum display, but to get a rough estimate for what all of this would look like, and, more importantly, weigh.

In this photo, we have an M1 Garand rifle with cotton web sling, belt and suspenders, bayonet, E-tool, grenade launcher sight, canteen, and two bandoleers of ball ammunition.  I would have expected him to carry two canteens, but he lists his canteen in the singular. As he is talking about cutting weight, I’ll assume this is not a mistake.  He was also campaigning in April, so a single canteen may have been sufficient in the cool European spring.

The load, as shown, weighs 26 pounds.

Items not shown are the grenade launcher at 1.1 #, three rifle grenades at 1.5 # ea, hand grenades at 1.3 # ea, and first aid packet at .5 #. He mentions at the time of his writing, he has 28 clips instead of the 16 pictured. The extra 12, to make up the balance, would add 4.5 pounds.

This would bring the total to 41.3 pounds; as he notes, this is heavy enough; especially when you consider that I did not take into account the weight of clothing, boots and helmet.

Some thoughts on this: First, the problem of soldiers being weighted down with excess gear is not new.  Estimates of WWII combat loads are much lighter than that of infantrymen today, but even then, they found it necessary to strip down to bare essentials in order to reduce weight.

Second, note what is not carried: No food (he writes a lot about being hungry), no second canteen, no blankets or sleeping bag, no tent, no rain gear. Yet, with everything he has stripped from his load, he is happy to have the extra ammunition, with all its weight.

Third: He was serving as line infantry in a settled area. Trucks were supposed to bring up food and supplies to the front regularly (in practice they often did not), and there were sometimes buildings the men could take shelter in.

Finally, his outfit were moving very fast, covering nineteen- plus miles a day on foot. You have to travel light if you are going to do that.

Uncle Warren was killed in action on May 2, 1945 the day after the letter sited here was posted.

If any historians or reenactors reading this have special knowledge on this subject, I would love to hear from you.

WWI Memorial and Museum

My wife and I went to K.C., and, among other things, visited the WWI museum and memorial. Here are some of my thoughts.

I can’t say it was fun; it is, after all, about one of the greatest catastrophes to have occurred in human history.   It is, however, a place that everyone should probably visit.

The Memorial, dedicated in 1921, and the museum, built in the late 1990s, each have very different messages and meanings.

The memorial is very much about remembering the fallen. It was built by people who had lost loved ones in the war, and wanted to be certain that their sacrifice was remembered, and that it mattered.  Noteworthy is the inscription on the base, with the words: “The World War”. No one expected that there would ever be more than one, at that time.

The Museum is very much from a current perspective, the same that I learned in school: The war was pointless, no one really knows why it happened, the reasons for the U.S. getting involved were largely trumped up.

I have to wonder whether we are looking at the actions of the world leaders of one hundred years ago with too much smug self-righteousness.   It is easy to look at a slogan like “war to end all wars” and scoff, but then again we have the benefit of hindsight that they did not.

“Make the world safe for democracy” in another phrase that is widely derided, without considering that, had Germany won, people the world over might have felt that their democratic governments were weak and ineffectual; strong man dictators would have certainly been more appealing.

Then there is the nationalist propaganda, depicting Germany as a barbaric nation bent on evil.  I have never quite understood why this is so widely mocked. If anything, the actions of Germany in that war and the next war were far worse than even the worst allied propaganda depicted.

The cost of WWI was truly staggering, and the museum does an excellent job of depicting that cost. A war that claims  19 million combat deaths, 7 million civilian, and another 11 non-combat military deaths, indeed deserves close scrutiny, and  somber remembrance.

https://www.theworldwar.org/