Angry Planet - When the Battlefield Is the Home Front

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Right now, Russia is learning a lesson as old as combat, morale is at the center of any fighting force. How does it change things when you can pick up your cell phone and call your mom to share your experiences, or even complain about your commander?How do you build a band of brothers when home is just a phone call away? Colonel John Spencer asked himself these questions and wrote a book about it called Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War. Spencer is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the modern war institute at West Point.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. Matthew Galt had some car trouble, and he'll be back. soon. Right now, Russia is learning a lesson as old as combat. Morale is at the center of any fighting force. How does it change things, though, when you can pick up your cell phone and call your mom to share your experiences or even complain about your commanders? How do you build a band of brothers when home is just a phone call away? Colonel John Spencer asked himself these questions and wrote a book about it called Connected Soldiers, Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern

War. Spencer is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm going to ask just the most basic question. You know, neither Matthew and I have ever served, and I know, hopefully we've never pretended otherwise. So at its most basic, How do you create an effective fighting unit out of a bunch of guys who just came out of many different backgrounds? So, you know, while that's a simple question, it's actually really complex. But there are things we've learned across the history of warfare that work in because war is both an individual act, right? So the individual soldiers, psychology, his physiology, his belief of control.

but it's more importantly a group act so everything from the day we enter the military much what we're told to do or what we do as kind of an organization is has this combat translation right everything from eating together sleeping together achieving a sense of group identity is all about really preparing them for war as we know in research shows the number one answer to any soldier, really in any military, why do you fight? Why are you moving forward in the face of insane, horrible things waiting to try to kill you? And the number one answer, although it's complex, the number one answer is always for the person to my left and right. That's called cohesion. Some people call it primary group cohesion. And there are different forms. There's

task cohesion. As it's like we all agree that what we're doing. And then there's social cohesion. And that's this passion of mine. I call it the band of brothers effect that you actually mentioned it. Now, how you get to that point where you have an individual who views his, the welfare of the people to his left and right and the welfare of the group over his own welfare. So it's part of his identity that he is a part of this group and that he has formed this bond with people in this small group that is so strong that they're willing to literally die for that person. And that's, that's a special situation.

It's a special moment. I strongly believe it translates to not just a military. It's, it's about community. And, you know, Sebastian Younger calls it the tribe. It's a, it's called a brotherhood. I could go on for a while about it. But now the question that I tried to answer in my book is, there is no magic formula to get to that point. or to get to create cohesion.

There's all kinds of things that we know that we do and we know that it builds cohesive teams, having good leaders, enduring shared hardships, which makes sense, right? Do you experience hard things together? You kind of bond as a group as, hey, that guy just did what I, oh, gal, just did what I did, and they understand and we as a group did this. actually the research also shows that which then translates to the book is that the other way that bonds are formed between groups of men and women is just mindless hours spent together because war is is as there's a quote in the book about war being you know just insane amounts

of boredom punctuated by extreme fear and violence so you spend a lot of time together as groups. And that's where actually the bonding is in, I know that person. I know about his family. I know about what he cares about. We laugh together. We sing together. So there's these two aspects, shared hardships, which is almost a double-edged sword right up as two hardship. It can actually, you know, cause trauma and things like that. But if you get through the hardship together, But then there's this mindless hours together. That's very human, actually. What if you don't like the person sitting next to you?

I mean, because in any group, there's at least the possibility that there's someone you're not going to like. Oh, yeah. So how do you bring people who can't stand each other together if they have to function as a unit? Right. So one, you know, sometimes that stuff, well, some people are just buttholes. And like any organization, the army has them, the military has them. And like there is a part of groupness, right? So that person, despite his personality quirks or even sometimes their beliefs,

again, this is about cohesion. So this is about a group. It works better if they love each other. But sometimes you will have members of the group that you just don't, I don't like that guy. or I don't like those two guys, but they usually what I've experienced, so that that may be happen, and that's also human. But what actually happens is that it doesn't override the group function, right? Because even the person that doesn't, you might not like each other,

you know you depend on each other. And that's part of this cohesion. Usually it's a love for each other. But like you said, there's always that odd ball. But interesting, we also know from group, cohesion, it establishes group norms. Or what is this, in that group, they as a group, you know, there's also an ethical framework, the military's law, war, and all that stuff.

Within the group, they'll establish within themselves, what is accepted and what is not. So that guy might be a, you know, whatever. You can say anything you like on the podcast. He may be a butthole, but he also will adhere to the norms of the group on how we treat each other, how we treat others, how we treat prisoners of war, things like that. And if not, again, research shows that if they don't, then they get outcast. And there's some really good research, like even like the British Wellington's campaign, where it was you ate together at night.

And if you did something on the battlefield that was not a part of the group norms, as in you showed cowardice, you didn't fight back, you, you know, threw your buddy under a bus, as we say, you wouldn't be allowed to eat with that group. And the group collects their own food. So there is also checks and balances for those guys that are, yeah, they don't really fit in the group, but you'd be surprised even when you, within this group function, when there's aspects of there's an outlier and the group norms kind of bring it, still bring it together as then we're going to fight together and I have to rely on you.

And there's this brotherhood, even if I don't like you sometimes. Well, you bring up just one of the most important points that is going on right now in the news, and may just simply be one of the most important points, period. When you have shared norms in, let's say, a situation like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those norms, I guess, they can be a negative thing as well, right, if it comes to mistreating prisoners of war or civilians. How does something like that get established? How do you come to a group norm that's, you know, going to lead to atrocities? Absolutely. No, it's a great question. And it is a double-edged sword. Group norms can be bad, as in they've established within themselves,

things that aren't even accepted in the organization or in the Army, and they're doing it themselves. And the U.S. military had had a few black marks where that happens. And really, you know, the fighting formation under this extreme situation that is war, where there is a lot of autonomy and people would actually be surprised on how much autonomy. And that's part of being a profession, right? We're experts in our whatever we do. And this just has to be in managing violence and imposing violence when required. But as a profession, we're given the autonomy to do that within what we call these ethical frameworks and what we will and won't do. And we started on day one on ensuring that's ingrained and the values and whether there's a card you carry in your pocket or

actually the morals inside of you. And I even have in the book a couple of times where we had individuals in the group who, one, he took a knee and shot a non-combatant. And, you know, some people may think, well, the group would rally behind that person because, again, they love him. No, the group actually were the first to say, what you just did was wrong. And we're going to ensure you seek justice because justice is another part of how you control this aspect. What you're talking about is complex, but it involves leaders that, you're right, lower level leaders. Again, what the Russians don't have, right, these career enlisted soldiers. You can say non-commissioned officers or sergeants.

Russians don't have them. They have a different system where it's officer-based and they have some warrant officers and they have contracted soldiers and conscripted soldiers. But they lack these first-line supervisors at the point of where this is going to happen, right? These what we call moral ethical dilemmas. I've had, you know, people offer me money in combat. I've seen soldiers do the wrong thing. And then that's when the group backed by a strong ethical framework that's taken years to impose,

enforced by junior leaders who are among the group, right, who are using what we call reverent power rather than legitimate power, telling people, people are following them because they're respected for their expertise. That all adds up to preventing under the extremes of combat bad things from happening. So, of course, you've been an important history where it's happened. But what we've seen in Russia is, to me, it's not a rogue unit where maybe a group norm was established between a rogue unit to go do some bad things. The scale that we've seen in places like Bucha and Rupin and other places, it's a massive scale.

And from my experience, that would have to be, if not ordered, but at least condoned by the lower leaders who are there, battalion commanders, company. commanders who know it's happening, aren't stopping it immediately. So one of the biggest kind of atrocities that's happened in the U.S. military that we use in schoolhouse today and it stood is the Milai massacre in Vietnam, where a unit went down and did terrible things. But even in that moment, you had individual soldiers and leaders saying, stop, this is not right. And there's a famous one where a helicopter pilot brings his helicopter down in between machine

gun fire where the soldiers were trying to shoot civilians in the back, he brings his helicopter down right in front of the machine gun fire. That's what our profession is about, about doing the right thing in the absence of orders and stopping bad things when they happen. That's not what happened in Russia. You had a, you had an implemented mass atrocities, if not ordered, which I strongly believe probably was ordered, condoned and allowed to flourish at mass. Do you have any thoughts about why command might issue orders like that? I mean, is it a matter of scaring the public into, or, you know, the occupied people into obedience? Or is it something even more, you know, sinister than that?

I think, yeah, I think it's all of the above, right? So, yes, you could use it as a form of psychological warfare to make the entire country's population. fear the Russian soldiers. And it could be viewed as retribution for fighting back, right? So that if they fear they won't fight back and they won't receive this wrath of these vicious Russian soldiers. I think, you know, based on Putin's own writings and words, it could be even more sinister as in pre-programmed cleansing of Ukrainian citizens, which he views aren't allowed to

their own country, they don't, they shouldn't exist, the dehumanizing in statements that really are analogous to Hitler and his thoughts towards Jewish people. I think it's a little bit of all of it. And then lastly, probably retro, real retribution for their own failures, right? They're taking out their failures to achieve their mission in all locations. But I don't, again, I hate the narrative. This is, this is just what happens in war. No, no, no, it's not. This is just what happens with the Russians. Well, I don't care.

It's still a violent war crime that if we allowed to stand and don't investigate, prosecute, highlight would radically change the future of the global international order. If we allowed, you know, a bigger military to enter a smaller country and then create rape, systematic rape, murder, mutilation, torture. I mean, this is the reason that we have the laws of war, the law of armed conflict, all these things. It's just crazy. If we can talk about sort of the flip side of some of this, which is the morale of the Russian troops, right? I mean, we've had all sorts of stories of troops not wanting to fight, troops running away, especially conscripts who were not supposed to be there in the first place. and then it turned out they, you know, they were there. You talked a little bit about why someone would actually go into combat for the guy on your left and you're right.

But what happens if morale gets low enough? I mean, why are these Russian soldiers not fighting? Yeah, absolutely. So the byproducts of a broken combat unit, right? So a combat unit is a group of individual soldiers fighting. as a group. Sometimes we use the word morale to encompass really the will to fight. Moral is kind of an individual feeling of, you know, a good feeling about the situation, confidence, zeal, you name it. You know, cohesion is the bond. Motivation is the drive to move

forward. If you really take motivation, morale, cohesion, and put them all together, you get to what's called the will to fight. what we've seen in Russia for a long list of reasons, everything from they weren't told, the soldiers weren't told where they were going before this invasion. They were told that this was a training event. So then you start to break a what's called like the psychological bond of why am I here? Like why am I fighting? Just as soldiers aren't robots.

You know, they don't just fight for a dictator because the dictator said so. Soldiers are, you know, they fight for a cause. They fight for each other. they fight for a nation and their families. There's reasons, and that's the motivation. Moral is how they feel about it and how it's going, right? So if you have a unit that's been sent into war, wasn't given much training,

their equipment's falling apart, their leaders are just making crazy decisions. The morale of the individual soldiers in the group starts to go way down. And then, you know, last year, and that starts to affect the cohesion as the group, And that leads to these byproducts, right? When you start to have a breaking apart or the fabric of a fighting formation,

their morale, cohesion, motivation. Then you start to see things, and this happens in history. We're just seeing it today in Ukraine. You see things like soldiers shooting their own officers, what we call fragging or running them over with tanks is what we've seen in Ukraine. You see sabotaging their own equipment because they don't believe in what they're doing. So early on, once many of the formations understood where they were going, what they were doing, and then the likelihood of their success, they started doing things like puncturing their own gas tanks, so the vehicles were not a gas, slitting their own tires. And really the culminating byproduct of a lack of, again, leadership, cohesion, morale, is a refusal to fight.

Literally soldiers sitting down and going, no, I'm not, I'm not moving forward. I'm not fighting. And that's what we've seen. That's the ultimate byproduct of loss of all these things is a unit that says, I don't care what you say. I'm not going into that fight. Does it make a difference that let's say you're an 18-year-old Russian soldier that you can call mom? I mean, they actually have cell networks that are still up and running, which is a fascinating thing by itself. But does that make a difference that, I mean, you are so connected to home?

I mean, I know that's sort of, you know, books got a lot to do with that. So explain what you're at. Absolutely, I think it makes a difference. One, the, the idea of sending soldiers off to war, even if it's one country next to you, and then you'll hear from them when the war is over, is gone. It's not the world we live in. Even if you were to take all the soldiers' cell phones, they'll find a way. And that's what we've seen in Russia, right?

We've seen soldiers calling on open cell networks, which is actually very dangerous. It'll get you killed as a soldier because you can target that now and it's an artillery strike. But we as humans yearn for our social support networks, right? We have the groups that we're fighting with. We also have a complex network to loved ones at home. Moms, wives, kids that we want to talk. That's human. And wars, that can influence your motivation, the cohesion between you and your other troops.

and your morale. So you not only get the influence of the social support network, like mom is not happy, where are you? What are you doing? I heard that this person did that, even though Russia tries to control information. You can't control all information in the world today. It's just not possible. And the soldier could actually be telling mom what's happening, what they've been asked to do,

what they've seen. All wars, politics by other means. And we usually forget that the war is made up of three groups. It's made up by the military is fighting the, right? That's all the way down to the individual soldier. It's also made up by politics, the political apparatuses. So the Ukrainian military or, you know, their president's ability to garner support and to get weapons. Putin's ability to hold together his complex evil networks of oligarchs and things like that.

And then the wars are made up by our populations, right? the populations that either support or in hopeful cases like in Russia resist the fact that they're at war with another country. So that connection between the soldier and mom can absolutely have an impact on everything, on that individual soldier through the entire organization that's fighting. Oh, by the way, they can also cause a lot of problems back home. And interestingly, the Russian mothers have had anordinate amount experiences causing problems in Russia for wars. During the Chechen wars in the 1990s, they not only held protesting the Red Square, which is really not good if you're Russian, they marched the entire formation of mams into Chechnya and camped outside one of the major battle areas. And for a month, it would not leave until the generals came to talk to them about how their troops were being treated, which sounds really familiar to this situation.

So that link between now, that immediate link between the soldier and mom can literally end wars. Overall, do you see it as a force for good? I mean, in this case, I mean, especially, you know, if you're Chechen, that sounds like a force for good. Or I guess if you're a Ukrainian, right? What do you think? I think it's a, it literally is a double-edged sword. Of course, you're not going to control it. I don't care how much you try to take people's.

cell phones away from limited information. It is a source for good, right? I, in my book, talk about my wife going off the war in 2018, and I'm home with our three small kids who need mom. It's a social requirement. They need parents. And they were able to FaceTime with her every day. That's a good thing.

It helps with this aspect of war in this soldier who is a complex social being. It creates this connection. So you don't have to, you know, we were deploying in Iraq for 15 months. Imagine how much your family and your, all your networks change over a year or 15 months. So now you can talk to them every day. You can send messages of love and support. But of course, there are drawbacks. And it's able to garner, it has a tactical translation, right?

So when the president sends out a message like Allah, of Winston Churchill or Eisenhower. And it can literally within seconds hit thousands and thousands of troops. Like, I am with you. Keep fighting. Or the Snake Island response to the Russian warships. Go after yourself. That's more powerful than bullets.

And the ability to get that to the soldiers immediately is a new, powerful tool. Now the kind of the negatives, of course, are now the soldier who's at war has to deal with the problems at home. There's always problems at home, right? You know, you know, so-and-so did this. You know, this is what happened at school. I actually tried to control that from my wife who had wanted none of that. She wanted to know every problem no matter how bad, no matter what it was, immediately,

which translates to combat fighting capability. If the soldier has a foot both in home and at war, that means that things have changed, and that could have a negative impact. And I experience is in war where somebody gets a message that their pregnant girlfriend is overdosing on drugs. That took that soldier out of the fight. It's a reality of the new world. To break off to your other area of expertise, in Ukraine, there's actually been an enormous amount of urban fighting. I mean, because they're trying to take over, the Russians are trying to take over substantial cities.

And they've been bombing the crap out of them to say mildly. I'm going to give you a question that, you know, it's sort of like a flip side. If you were in charge of taking the as-of-style steel plant, which held out for months with soldiers and has tunnels underneath it. And I mean, that's a tough assault, right? How would you go about it? Well, it's near impossible assault. So the Assault Steel Factory was interestingly, you know, I wasn't an expert before this region before they started. I'm not an expert now.

Interesting to find out that, right, so the city of Marriott, Poole, city of 500,000 will call down as one of the biggest urban battles of modern history. I mean, 5,000, you know, 3,000 Ukrainian fighters held off upwards of 20,000 Russian soldiers in an urban terrain. But that's amazing in the itself. And then to have over 80 days, about 1,000 of those pull back into an underground fortress. So it's not just the fact that this massive steel factory works had some underground. It has a military built underground fortress that goes six or seven levels down, has portions of it that are nuclear bunkers that can literally withstand a nuclear strike. So it's not, once you start to understand that, and you understand the complexity of urban warfare, and then understand the complexity of underground warfare, because I study both because you really on the modern area, you can't separate the two. What would it take to get a thousand fighters out of an underground military built with air,

ventilation, possibly underground water sources? And it'd be near impossible. You would need a highly trained formation with specialized equipment and specialized training for underground. And we, the U.S. military, have that. Russians don't. You need things to breathe underground. You need things to see underground, talk underground, navigate underground.

And oh, by the white, everything you use on the surface doesn't work underground. So you need all new stuff for that. You need ballistic shields. You need different types of ear protection. Even the ear protection we use, even fire your weapon underground, the concussions, because of the underground space, could literally incapacity. you because you didn't have the right equipment. Then you, I mean, literally, the list goes on of what you need to have a battle in the tunnels of an underground complex. Russians don't have it.

You know, another tactic is really the siege warfare of starry amount. You know, you can bomb, well, the underground, much like the more you bomb an urban area, actually, the harder it is to take it. because the more you bomb it, the more rubble you create. And rubble actually is a man-made bunker that's stronger than a bunker if you tried to build it yourself. It's just really strong. So history shows that if you like in Stalingrad and a lot of these major battles, the more you bomb it, you actually can make it a lot worse for yourself.

You can't bring in your vehicles because you've rubbleized everything. And now you have fighters deep inside the rubble that you have to go and pry out. In the underground, again, they weren't going to enter it. Literally all you have to do is stand at every tunnel and set up redundancies, but just shoot out anything that comes in there. There's not much you can do about it. So, you know, they're going to, you know, like they did, isolate it, you know, continue to bomb it, have some impact on some segments,

but you'll never get to the fighters down there. But it looks like, as we're talking, that they've achieved. achieved, one, for over 80 plus days, the strategic impact the small fighting forces had, we'll go down in history as, I mean, just historic as in how much they tied up Russian forces and didn't allow Russians to achieve a victory which they badly won it. But, you know, starvation, the wounded succumbing to their wounds, there really becomes a decision of the defenders of, you know, do I want to die in place? most of them have said, or if this person doesn't get medical aid, that person will die.

So it sets up these complex systems, but you don't clear that is the answer. But isn't it amazing that they never lost communication? So thanks this, I mean, they were doing teleconferences. As a researcher, like two weeks ago, there was a commander from within the Avistal on the panel of a conversation about the war in the Ukraine. Do you have any idea how that worked? Yes. I mean, we strongly believe it was, funny enough, Elon Musk is Starlink, these little devices that can link to satellites and provide internet access and communication, no matter where you are on the planet of the earth. Many of those were sent.

They were present in Marriott, and pretty sure that's how it was possible. Wow. To sort of wrap things up, where do you see the future of, communications and warfare going. Are we developing towards something or is this just we're dealing with a new reality and that's what it's going to be? Yeah, I think both. So the U.S. military and our allies spend a lot of money on building a network. We bring our network with us, right? We don't want to rely on any unsecure networks because of how deadly that could be to you and our troops. So we spend a lot of money and we continue to setting up, bringing our network in and keeping our network,

being able to transmit on secure networks. That'll be critical and there's nothing in Ukraine that's changing that. You're living in this society that we live in. We fight with the armies from within our societies of this ability, no matter where I'm in the world, I can pick up a phone and call home. It's just something that we'll have to live in. The Russians have, again, that there's some lessons you just don't want to take from the Russian war in Ukraine. And that's they were, they had to immediately go to to actually using unsecured networks for tactical reasons, not just keeping the soldier connected to home,

which they didn't want, but they couldn't control. We will have to fight in this world of constant, um, connection. And that translates to the political as well, right? So it's more analogous.

There's nothing that's going to be. done on the battle foot. I can watch a live feed of Kib right now. I could during this whole war. So it does change the way you fight if you're always being watched. Of course, we want our soldiers. We'll do 99.9% of time. We'll do the right thing when nobody's watching.

But now you're basically telling people you're going to fight a war, but basically like in a football stadium. There's millions of cell phones and millions of satellite video, you name it. I mean, I'm watching the war in real time as we speak. It's the future, for sure. It's really interesting because if you're Russia, you can dispute facts as well. They take a piece of video and they say, oh, no, that's actually Ukrainian forces doing these terrible things. Yeah, they used to be the masters of this psychological information warfare stuff.

They've been getting a master class from the Ukrainian, just for sure. All right. Well, I want to say thank you very much for joining us today. And where can people get your book? It's called Connected Soldiers, Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War. Where is it available? Yeah, it's available on Amazon. Just search up for Connected Soldiers. It'll pop right up. Pre-order comes out officially in July 1st and both hardback, Kindle and Audio versions. You could also go to my website, John Spenceronline.com. And you can also go to my website, John Spenceronline.com. And, you can get a personalized autograph one if you want. Well, thank you again for joining us. Thanks for having me. Test, test, test. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always,

Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you really like us, please contribute to our substack, where $9 a month gets you access to bonus content and commercial free episodes

of the mainline cast. Got some exciting stuff coming up for you in the coming weeks. another conversation with Aaron and think is somebody that everyone loves about some more Russia stuff. I think we may get Danny Gold back to Good Lord, he's been publishing some incredible pieces.

Some really harrowing reporting coming out of Ukraine from him going to get him back. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.