Carnifex (14 page)

At some point—Carrera presumed it was when the intel collection team reported to the platoon leader that the bodies were clear—another star cluster was launched. Men began to scurry back to the ambush line, even as the demo team shouted "Fire in the hole" and pulled the igniters that led to the charges they'd placed on the arms.

Once the demo team had cleared away, there was another whistle blast and, once again, the rifles and machine guns poured lines of death into the jungle opposite the ambush line. Voice commands followed and, by ones and twos the ambushing platoon began to form up to fall back to the ORP.

"It's
too
smooth," Carrera whispered.

Cano was
pissed.
Being taken by surprise, ambushed himself by the
Duque
, was just too fucking much. Bad enough that . . . 

"Relax, Tribune," Carrera said, not ungently. He was actually impressed with the kid. "I just have some questions. It was a
good
ambush. Really. What bothers me was that maybe it was
too
good. Why do you think it was so good?"

Cano didn't relax. Sure, he wasn't a signifer anymore; he was entitled to tie his boots in the morning without tying the left one to the right one. Even so, this was the bloody
Duque
. He was a bastard; everyone knew it. Cano could just see his career flying off to parts unknown and unknowable. He could . . . 

"I asked a question, Tribune," Carrera reminded.

"Oh . . . sorry, sir. I was . . . I just wasn't expecting you to—"

"I
asked
a question, Tribune."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well . . . sir . . . we've done this ambush here maybe a dozen times just since
I've
been leading the platoon. The boys know what to do and, then again, we drill the shit out of it . . . "

Aha.

"Jamey! Call the Chief of Staff, the I and the Ia. I don't give a shit if they're asleep. Get 'em up."

Normally, in every day life, Carrera was a surprisingly gentle sort. He wasn't particularly aggressive, or vicious. He'd probably never done a deliberately cruel thing, outside of line of duty, in his life.

In line of duty, however, or especially in action, he changed. The change wasn't like that of a man turning to a wolf; that kind of transition, even in myth, took time. Instead, for Carrera, there simply came a moment when stress impended and he changed.

It was something like a
click.

"I'm
so
glad you could all make it," Carrera hissed to the assembled senior officers and centurions of the Legion.

As a single man, they thought,
Oh, shit, we're in trouble
.

"You people suck mastodon cock," Carrera began, with his usual fine sense of tact. "Where the
fuck
did you get the idea that your job is to train people to follow formulae, rather than training them, mentally and morally, as individuals and as units, to solve unique problems? You've been fighting for
five
fucking years now. When did you all forget that war is always
different
?

His face was livid as he continued, "Can anyone answer me; when did Cazador School begin training leaders to be robots? Hmmm? No takers? I see. Did it creep in in OCS or CCS? No?

"I watched an ambush the other night. Good unit, good leaders, conducting a good ambush. But you know
what
? They'd been doing the same thing in the same way in the same place for fucking
years
." With this he spared a glare for Kuralski and the staff. "Why have we had our soldiers doing the same fucking thing in the same fucking place in the same fucking way for
years
? Why
didn't
we give them different problems, in different places, with different circumstances?
Why
, you assholes? Why?"

It had taken Carrera thirty-six hours of brooding to become as angry as he was. He'd nurtured the anger, cultivated it, so that he could release it on his subordinates. Once released, though, it ebbed quickly enough.

"Now listen," he said, more calmly. "I'm going to explain something."

"Battle drills—preset solutions, well rehearsed, for common battlefield circumstances—are an interesting subject. Likewise for Standard Operating Procedures, individual tasks done to perfection, crew drills, and formations. There are some very good armies that depend on them. The Federated States and Volgan Republic do; and maybe the Foreign Military Training Group is where we were contaminated from. There are also some very good armies that loath them, the Sachsen and Zionis, for example.

"Generally speaking, I
don't
like them. There are a number of reasons for that. Listen,
carefully.
"

The assembled leaders did listen carefully. They also relaxed to a degree; when Carrera went into teaching mode, they knew, he was unlikely to shoot someone on the spot. They knew he was going into teaching mode when he pulled some index cards out of his right breast pocket.
When did Carrera need prompt cards to chew someone's ass?

"Number one, remember that drills, if they're going to be reliable, must be conditioned into troops, almost as if the troops were Pavlov's dogs. So if you can't really condition something well enough to rely on it,
don't
make a drill of it.

"Two, conditioning takes a lot of time, time you probably won't have. So even if something can, in theory, be conditioned, if you don't have the time to condition it, don't waste what time you have on the impossible.

"Three, drills—like everything else—take place under certain conditions. If those conditions are subject to radical differences such that no amount of practical drilling can condition them all, do not train as a drill something that will only be true infrequently.

"Four, military units suffer losses. They are almost never at full strength. If a drill requires a particular level of manpower or equipment, and you can reasonably predict that that particular level of strength will rarely be met, I would suggest you don't bother.

"Three and four are related in a way. We use
crew
drill for the tank and Ocelot crews, don't we? One thing about the inside of a turret; it doesn't change. The crewmen have seats they stay in. The gun doesn't move relative to the crew. The internal communications gear typically works. And the crew of an armored vehicle generally lives or dies together, no attrition that matters in the short term. So a drill for a crew like that makes sense. The same holds true for much that the mortars and artillery do. Their positions may change from place to place, but the important thing, the gun, is always the same. The positions they build to protect the gun and themselves are always the same, too. The casualties they take, mostly to other mortars and artillery, or air, tend to be either catastrophic or insignificant—the crew lives or dies together."

Carrera became reflective. "Actually towed artillery is a funny case. They don't usually come under small arms fire. Mines are only rarely a problem for them. For the most part they lose men to aerial attack and counter battery fire from enemy artillery. That fire either is close enough to emulsify the crew, or it's far enough away, when it explodes, to do only limited damage to the crew, or it is so far away it is irrelevant to the crew. In cases one and three, that the artillery crew was drilled numb doesn't hurt matters. It can still either do the job or it is dead. In the middle case, because gun crews are much larger than the bare minimum needed to load and fire the gun, and because artillery crew drill is so simple that everyone can be, and in a good crew is, trained to do all the jobs, even with some losses the gun can still fill the important jobs with adequately trained troops and function at a reduced rate of fire."

"However, compare the problem at the crew level to a platoon of mortars, tanks or tracks, or a battery of guns. They always have to adjust: to terrain, to the enemy situation, to their own strength. The variables for infantry are infinite, a few drills won't do and the number that might do is impossible. So, before you decide to train something as a drill, ask yourself also whether the conditions—to include your own strength—are likely to be the same in war. I'll give you a hint; a line remains a line, even when you erase some portion of it. If you plan on doing a drill or formation with any unit above the crew level, you had best consider making it some variable on a line . . . wedges and echelons count as lines. Only that kind of formation or drill is sustainable after losses.

"In a similar vein; formations. If you've ever seen a platoon, normally of four vehicles, trying to bound forward by sections of two vehicles, when the platoon is down to only three vehicles, you'll know what I mean. It just doesn't work the same way. You end up with either an inadequate covering force—one vehicle—or the covering force is two vehicles and the single track sent ahead to bound feels alone and abandoned and advances most reluctantly. So under normal combat conditions the bounding drill has less benefit than you expect and need and all the time spent on drilling such movement tends to be wasted. On the other hand, a company bounding forward by alternating its platoons can work because even if a bounding platoon has taken some losses, it is still capable of covering its own front and has enough sub units left to give each other moral support to go forward. That, by the way, is the single most important reason Legion tank platoons have six tanks instead of the usual four other armies have; so they can take losses and still have two sections capable of forming some variant on a line to cover themselves while they move forward by bounds.

Carrera flipped one of his prompt cards over. "Back to the main subject: Fifth, time to execute the drill in battle is another consideration. Some things don't have to be conditioned to be done. Even in battle there is often time to give more than one word drill commands. So ask yourselves, before deciding to do something as a drill, if there would normally be time to give orders to have your troops act more appropriately than a drill would allow.

"Sixth, is the drill a matter of life and death for an individual, victory or defeat for a higher unit? I don't mean simply that under some rare circumstances a well-executed drill might be life or death for us or the enemy. I mean is a precise response virtually always that important. Reaction to a near ambush is that kind of circumstance. So is using a bangalore torpedo to breach an obstacle, especially when attacking a position held by an enemy with a very responsive artillery support network . . . if surprise fails you and you must clear a path quickly. In those circumstances a simple, on line rush, drilled in advance, may be your best bet.

"At a lower level, the individual level, there are also a few tasks like that. The whole field of combat demolitions is dangerous enough to justify drilling troops to do it perfectly every time. The time to put on a gas mask is about that critical, too. Although, if you want to see an interesting show, sometime have your troops come under a chemical attack when they are advancing at a crawl under fire, with inadequate cover and concealment. Our boys are already well drilled on immediate action for a chemical attack. I'd give odds that most of them stand up in direct fire to put on their masks. Hmmm. Maybe that's not such a good drill after all. See my point?"

Whether they really saw it or not, the officers and centurions nodded vigorously.

"Seven, 'only the very simple can work in war.' Clausewitz, as I'm sure you recognize. Complex drills simply won't work. Something will fail if a drill is too complex.

"Eighth, your enemy will adapt to your drills very quickly.

"Ninth and last, and why I'm not a drill enthusiast, is this: There is a mindset, common in many armies, which has no understanding of war as the chaos it is. To these people, everything is controllable, everything is predictable. They will forget that war is about prevailing against an armed enemy, who does not think about himself as a target set up to give you the best possible chance of success, but instead will do everything he can to thwart and destroy you. In peacetime maneuvers, these people and their units often do well, even better than those who see war more clearly. They then stretch the idea of drill beyond the legitimate limits it has, and try to make everything a drill, everything precise. Skills and purely measurable factors assume an unmerited importance. Leaders and troops are not trained to
think
. Their
moral
faculties are not developed.

"Let me give you an example from Old Earth history. After the First World War there, the victorious French Army developed some very standardized drills for higher formations. The German Army examined these division level drills in wargames on maps and came to the conclusion that they were, most of the time, more effective than the more chaotic approach the Germans had favored. Nonetheless, the Germans didn't adopt the French methods. The French continued to drill; the Germans continued to treat war as uncontrollable chaos and trained their army accordingly. France fell in
six weeks
in 1940. So much for the efficacy of drill."

Carrera's voice grew hard again, where it had softened as he lectured. "Here are my orders. To the staff and especially the operations and training staff: I want you to re-divide up the training areas, and especially the live fire training areas, such that no unit ever has to train the same problem on the same spot of ground within a year. Dan, I also want you to monitor that no unit
does
train the same problem in the same way on the same spot within a year. I want you to relook the non-crew drills we may already have instituted and get rid of any that do not meet the nine points of guidance I just gave you."

Carrera glanced around for his Inspector General. "You," he pointed, "are to change your orientation partly away from administrative inspections and more toward inspection of training, in accordance with my guidance.

"Remember this, IG: There are five functions to training; only five things we can expect out of training. One:
Skill training
, the individual, leader, and collective tasks that soldiers and units should be able to perform. Two:
Conditioning
of individual non-conscious characteristics, attitudes and the physical body. Three:
Development
of conscious characteristics, judgment, determination, dedication, and so forth. Four:
Testing
of doctrine and equipment. Five:
Selection
of leaders, of people for special or advanced training, of people to keep and of people to eliminate from the Legion.