Amusing banter

[Adm.Lee]

I'm slowly raiding the Leavenworth Papers on PDF. Right now, it's Kevlar Legions, about the US Army's re-organization in the wake of the Cold War. Not terribly on topic to Twilight:2000, but it's not too dry a read. The following excerpt I found amusing in its comparison of the Army's heavy forces vs. light. I included the footnote, as it seemed appropriate.

"Training and culture were at issue as well. The Army had to overcome its heavy-light divide, entrenched philosophies with respect to combat service support, and a bias toward the upper echelons with respect to combined and joint operations if it was to make the new paradigm work.

The prolonged Cold War advanced and hardened a polarization between the Army’s Eurocentric heavy forces and light forces that seemed optimal for a fight anywhere except Europe. Tankers epitomized the heavy forces, with vehicle-borne fellow travelers from other branches riding alongside them and armored cavalrymen as a somewhat more ecumenical version of themselves. Paratroopers epitomized the light forces, with fellow travelers from other branches jumping out of planes alongside them and Rangers as a somewhat extreme tribal version of themselves. The two camps had their prejudices. Paratrooper banter stereotyped tankers as corpulent dwarves, strong enough in the shoulders to sling ammunition and break track, short
enough to get around in the confines of their turrets, and fattened by their aversion to running—or even walking—and by a diet dominated by Bier and Bratwurst. Tanker banter envisioned paratroopers as equivalent to the Eloi of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, prancing around in the great outdoors but never doing the real work of logistics, maintenance, and motor pools. Short-notice strategic mobility was something paratroopers did to get to the difficult out-of-the-way places where they were likely to fight. Tankers would roll out of their German motor pools to fight on the great plains of Central Europe or would join the European battle from the United States in accordance with well-choreographed war plans.

Nowhere was the heavy-light divide more pronounced than with respect to attitudes toward vehicles. Paratroopers, according to tankers, did not love their vehicles—what few that they had. To them one truck was as good as another to ride around in, and they happily accepted horrific attrition as they parachuted vehicles out of planes in flight or shoved them off the ramps of planes rolling down a runway. Tankers lavished two hours of maintenance on their tank for every hour that they operated it,knowing that if they took care of it, it would take care of them. This wedding of man and machine was particularly pronounced with respect to gunnery.

By virtue of both faith and science, tankers understood that each weapon on each tank had a unique signature with respect to the strike of its rounds on target. These signatures were unlocked by elaborate and arcane processes of bore sighting and zeroing, after which tank commanders and gunners bore the dial settings for each weapon and type of ammunition in a small notebook in their breast pockets—close to their hearts. Once a year tankers measured their worth in qualification gunnery, Tank Table VIII. A good tank (a term that included the crew) could put a round through a windowpane at two thousand meters or have two targets down before observers realized the first had been engaged. Tank Table VIII surpassed all other indicators as a measure of merit. By tradition, tank company commanders were the first crews down range on qualification day, leading from the front and by example. Battalion operations officers, battalion commanders, and brigade commanders of armor provenance invested heavily from their personal time to be members of a qualifying crew—not so much because of combat requirements but to maintain the respect of the men they commanded. Extraordinary expectations of men and
machines fostered emotional attachments.

Tankers would fight or shoot from a tank other than their own about as readily as they would wear another tanker’s underwear. If a tank were evacuated to higher levels of maintenance, at least one crew member went with it. Sometimes crewmen actually assisted in the maintenance; often they merely waited around like family members outside an operating room. Tankers were an extreme case of the man-machine interface, but all who rode with them—armored artillerymen, mechanized infantrymen, combat engineers, mechanics, truckers, and other combat support and combat service support troops of many types and specialties—were measured by the performances of the machines they manned. Each specialty had its version of crew qualification that enhanced competence and confidence with respect to the equipment they were on, and correspondingly diminished confidence with respect to equipment they had not themselves maintained.

It is true that REFORGER and other training deployments set crews onto unfamiliar vehicles, but these had generally been demonstrations for show or tactical maneuvers, seldom involved serious gunnery, and never featured qualification gunnery. If a rapid deployment paradigm was to include putting heavy forces onto unfamiliar vehicles, better means needed to be devised to render crews competent and confident with respect to vehicles they hastily manned.22

22 Bergesen and McDonald; Field Manual 100–5, Operations; Army Training and Evaluation Program 71–2 (Washington DC: Department of the Army, 1987); Army Field Manual 17–12–1, Tank Combat Tables (Washington DC: Department of the Army, 1987). The author’s description of tanker beliefs and prejudices comes from twenty-five years of serving as a tanker. The source of paratrooper beliefs and prejudices is Brigadier General (USA, Ret.) William Leszczynski, a lifelong friend, airborne Ranger, and former commander of the ranger regiment (MFR documenting this exchange appears in the Historians Files, CMH). Banter between the branches begins early, in the case of West Point graduates, during branch selection senior year—when branch representatives make the strongest possible cases to gain branch commitments. It lasts a lifetime."