Marshall, 1947 [2000]. Men against Fire
Marshall, S. L. A. 1947 [2000]. Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. Norman, Okla: University of Oklahoma Press.
I’ve always been interested in the problem of leadership in the military. Not so much through any desire to be in the military, or through any remaining boyhood romance with the military, so much as from a belief that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the military when it comes to how you organise and lead people. If ever there was a leadership problem, it is how you get people to do things that might get them killed. And if ever there was a reason to study and try to abstract what works and what doesn’t when it comes to leadership, it is when the leaders you train have a tendency to get killed faster than the people they lead. Next to an army in the field, a university department — even an English department — seems pretty easy in comparison.
Of course there are a couple of big differences between the military and, say, a university. One is that soldiers go through a basic training that is in part supposed to inculcate a group ethos and willingness to obey that graduate students and undergraduates (let alone faculty members) do not. And another is that field commanders get killed — which leads to an approach to leadership development that is quite different from what we do in academia: even in peacetime, as I understand it, military leaders are cycled through positions and ranks relatively quickly in a way they are not in dean’s offices
But there are also commonalities: like the military, universities take eighteen-year-olds and “finish” them (in the sense of finishing school); where the military trains them (in part) to think as a unit, we train them (pace the criticism of the populist right) to think for themselves (I’ve often wondered, in fact, if that may not explain why the “faculty” in these two industries are said to lean away from each other politically: it takes a certain kind of person to run boot camp; another to run English 100).
All of which is a long introduction to why I have Men against fire on my bookshelf. Men against fire is a famous book on military leadership, written by S.L.A. Marshall, a journalist and US army historian, based (allegedly, as we will see) on after-action group interviews he conducted with soldiers in the U.S. during WWII.
Just shoot me. Not.
The book is famous primarily as the origin of the claim that in battle as few as 15% of the soldiers involved fire their weapons. This is one of those factoids — like the number of Inuit words for snow — that is often cited but rarely sourced. Sometimes you hear 25% (that’s the version I knew); other times 30%; sometimes 10%. But regardless of the number, the point is that a huge percentage of soldiers, even in combat, don’t fire their weapons. (For the record, Marshall says all these percentages, but does qualify them).
The reason why they don’t is pretty much as famous a factoid: because they have been conditioned by their families and society not to take lives. That is, the reason they don’t shoot is not so much as that they are scared as that they don’t want to kill somebody.
This factoid has had a large impact on military and police training. It is the reason why, for example, militaries now use pop-up human-shaped targets for their marksmanship training instead of bullseyes (Williams 1990), and it led to militaries around the world devoting considerable attention to encouraging soldiers to shoot more (I read somewhere, but can’t find it now, that it also led to the U.S. military in particular developing a reputation for having less fire discipline than other armies it allies with; I don’t know if this is true or not).
Just talk to me. Not.
The other reason why the book is famous is for its focus on small unit cohesion. One of the things that Marshall argues is that modern combat is different from training in the degree to which you seem alone. In training, he argues, you go out to the field with all your comrades, and huge amounts of equipment. And, if it is a wargame, the “other side” does the same thing. In combat, however, he argues, things spread out the closer they get to the front, to the point that, once the shooting starts and everybody drops, there is nobody to be seen anywhere: no comrades, and no enemies.
Marshall’s point is that this loneliness and sense of isolation is fatal to military success: if you think you are alone, you are more likely to worry about being outflanked, surrounded, out-gunned; if you think there are others with you, you are more likely to continue to play your part of the whole (guarding your quadrant, for example, or helping others advance). Here his argument is that soldiers should talk a lot more — letting others know where they are and coordinating. Apparently (according to Marshall), the Germans talked a mile a minute when they fought, which allowed them to work better together.
Leaders lead, bosses boss.
Fire ratios and yelling in battle are problems that don’t come up all the time in academia, of course. And in fact if you start yelling in the library, we’ll shut you down. But the two points come together for Marshall in Men against fire in a way that I think is relevant for all leadership: namely, he argues, the main issue is trust among members of an organisation. In the broader scheme of things, Marshall argues, the goal of military leadership should be to create situations where the ranks are willing to work together creatively to solve problems; and he argues that that can only happen when they share an understanding of the problem and a belief that the people they are working with are telling them the truth and engaging with them and their imaginations truthfully. This is a version of that other famous military factoid, that soldiers fight for their colleagues, not their armies (for example, Marshall cites some interesting stories about how stragglers who arrive in groups can be sent back into the fight, where stragglers who arrive on their own are simply incapable of further effort).
This does strike me as a useful lesson, for Academia and elsewhere: in universities, it is as much a truism that academics’ loyalties are to discipline, department, faculty, and university (in that order); and certainly recent events at the U of L have shown that when people don’t trust their leaders (or are infantalised by them), they perform less well.
But is any of it true?
The last thing to say about this book is that its claims — like the claim that Inuit languages have inordinately large numbers of words for snow — are controversial. While Marshall presents his findings as if they are based on his interview data, there is considerable confusion as to precisely what data (and whether) he collected about this: according to his detractors, there is no evidence that he collected ratio of fire data in any systematic way — his assistant claims that he never heard the question asked. In the introduction to my copy of the book [published in 2000], the editor essentially concedes that they are without factual basis, although argues that they are not out of line with what others have seen.
Interestingly, when I went to research this, it turns out that there has been a bit of a revival in team Marshall vs. critics. One of his most vehement critics (a former colleague) has himself been accused of shaping facts to fit his personal narrative and work by some researchers appears to have demonstrated that when records of Marshall’s interviews exist, his claims mirror that evidence more-or-less precisely. As far as I can tell, nobody has uncovered how he produced his precise ratio-of-fire statistics, but, again the claims do not appear to be out of line with what others have found.
