Something is going to be the leading cause of casualties.
In peacetime, it doesn't seem outrageous that that would be on-base accidents (especially if that includes automobile accidents and injuries during training exercises).
In peacetime, it doesn't seem outrageous that that would be on-base accidents (especially if that includes automobile accidents and injuries during training exercises).
The US was in two wars for nearly 2 decades, to say nothing of various other special operations, and accidents were a leading cause of deaths and permanent disability for a large number of those years.
Readiness is important, but IMO, the Army does a ton of unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous training for capabilities that are almost never needed (jumping, in particular, but also certain types of combat training). Most importantly, this destroys people's physical health for no reason. Secondarily, this also costs the taxpayer enormous sums of money (each permanent disability retirement for a 30 year old is many millions of dollars).
The other branches might be more reasonable. Not sure.
Training is the core of what we do, and extremely important no matter what. But, the nature of the training often doesn't match the real job. For instance, I remember at LDAC, a required ROTC summer course where you get evaluated and stack ranked prior to being given a job, there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear. Forcing cadets that you know for certain are going into healthcare fields to train as infantry is no doubt harmful and unnecessary. At the time, women weren't even legally able to try becoming infantry, but still forced to do the training.
Personally, I served in a combat job, but even then, a lot of what we did felt more like hazing and dick measuring contests than skills-related. For instance, in a Cav unit, we were all required to do spur rides until passing, which involved activities like carrying telephone poles up and down hilly trails for 12 miles at 3 in the morning after not sleeping for 48 hours. I have no doubt doing stuff like that contributed to the spinal degeneration I eventually lost two years of my life to after leaving the services. Nonetheless, being a large, physical capable person who played and excelled at sports my entire life, I enjoyed that type of thing at the time. In retrospect, though, it sure looks wasteful and stupid. The repeated forced sleep deprivation is especially egregious, as it seems like the top contributor to all the accidents, and as far as I understood, training in a sleep deprived state doesn't actually improve your ability to deal with sleep deprivation in theater. At best, it helps to weed out and select who can and can't naturally deal with it, but it isn't really trainable.
At this point, the US military has determined that having paratroop units available is a useful capability in war. Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid, and I would hope goes for anything: strategies, tactics, personnel, armaments, vehicles, equipment, etc.
However, once decided that a particular tool is necessary, it seems to me unquestionable that they should be kept in a ready, prepared, capable state. I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable," but if we've decided that our military needs people to jump out of planes, I would hope it goes without question that those people need to practice jumping out of planes.
shorter: training and necessity of a unit seem to be orthogonal concepts
Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?
> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.
Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?
This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.
For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.
On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.
Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.
Those two are related and form a vicious cycle. The more people you injure, the the more you have train. The more jumps you require for minimal readiness, the more folks eventually refuse to re-up to even leave the Army as they watch their friends drop like flies to spinal injuries.
Jumps, and dangerous jumps in particular, are a huge point of contention in the Army because the Army likes to screw soldiers by claiming that spinal injuries from jumps aren't service-related.
Then there's a really long tail of physical fitness training that has more to do with macho signalling than actual readiness. Plenty of discussion down-thread.
There is nuance and trade-off, but there's a LOT of training in the military that does little or nothing for readiness and contributes massively to injury rates. I think the Army is so far to the "stupid" end of that spectrum that the nuanced conversation doesn't make much sense to me.
Readiness is precisely about training for things that will almost never happen. Until they do.
IMO, the number of jumps the Army does each year is far in excess of what is necessary for readiness.
What I can say with some confidence is that there are perverse organizational incentives for some highly accident-prone training exercises. So, even if these exercises are required for readiness, that's not the (only) reason they're done in such high numbers.
Military Operations Research is a huge field. I like to use Google Scholar, which has many Masters Theses from military grad students, etc... Here's a few results to walk you "on target" if you want to continue to dig:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA545145.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA618622.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=airb...
You really think the military should forgo combat training?
It is like the Marine Corp who just disbanded their armored division and gave all the tanks to the Army. If an army can put a javelin in the hands of enough soldiers, are tanks really that effective anymore?
Now this isn't to say all combat training it useless, but some may be. Some of those things we are doing may be relics of the past and no longer necessary. We seem to train like the next world war is going be just like World War 2, but I imagine the next world war will look a whole lot different.
I don't expect that number to ever go to 0, but I'd hope it could be smaller.
> You really think the military should forgo combat training?
This is not what anyone said. I'm in strong favor of more realistic training.
Of course, even this may be unnecessary for many. E.g., read the uncle comment's anecdote about ROTC.
> there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear.
Whose idiocy was at fault here? I don't honestly think the military wanted people like this in the first place.
Meanwhile at the next door ROTC program it's all ridiculously soft and drill.
This all speaks to poor organizational controls.
Does that need outweigh outweigh the difficulty of individually tailored ROTC programs for one person? I don't know
If they raised concerns and were overruled, then it's that person's fault also.
FWIW, this isn't some crazy take. "Maybe the number and severity of injuries due to this activity is reducing readiness more than the resulting experience is increasing readiness" is a known trade-off.
Mundane things are deadly, simply because we use them everyday.