"The Captaines of the men to be trained for the warres (whether they bee Muster-Masters, or private Commanders) have two things referred unto them, that is, sorting of armes, and the formes or true manners of trayning."--Gervase Markham 1635AD A crowd of several hundred people gather in front of a police station. They are angry, one of their friends is arrested and in detention. They are united in a desire to free him. A leader steps forward and asks they to attack. They are uncertain but with some prodding they begin to work themselves up to violence. Still they don't attack. Something holds them back. What is it? A small group of police come out from the station and attempt to capture the leader. At first it looks like they will take him quietly. The crowd stands by observing what happens, still frozen in inaction. The leader then breaks free. But rather than running from the police he picks up a club and attacks them. This single act wakes the crowd up from its slumber. They follow the leaders example. The police are surged over and killed. Down the street from the station, a line of 30 policemen with clubs, helmets, and riot shields receives the order to move in and break up the crowd. They are outnumbered nearly 10 to 1. They slowly move up the street towards the rioters. The mob is busy battering down the doors of the jail. Someone in the rear sees the riot police advancing from their rear. A leader emerges who calls on the crowd to split in two. Those who follow him will attack the advancing police. A few people follow him but most sit back and watch again. They do not know what to do. When the police close with the mob, the few who have turned to fight are quickly defeated. The rest of the crowd is then engaged. The faint at heart (usually found in the rear of most mobs) begin to run away. The police press the melee and literally push the mob over. Men fall down or start running to the rear to escape the losing battle. Soon the whole crowd is in rout. The police then break up into small groups and begin arresting people. Hundreds escape, but many are captured. The losing side suffers many casualties, mainly inflicted as they ran away. The police lose only the men that were overwhelmed at the beginning of the fray. The crowd is broken up and streaming away from the streets into back alleys and safety. Why does it play out this way? The police are out numbered 10 to 1. The crowd is angry. They are united in their goal. They have roughly comparably weapons. They have a ready supply of good leaders. But still they lose. What is the difference? In a word the difference is in training. Training Riot police are trained in a manual of arms that Markham was very familiar with 350 years ago. Soldiers form into lines of battle. They use their shields to protect themselves and their neighbors from blows. They learn to push men over and maintain their formation in the face of small groups of resisters. Once the mob is broken, they know the drill. Go out in small groups to subdue and arrest rioters. The Rodney King beating was not an aberration from police procedure as much as riot control tactics used without their being a riot. The mob on the other hand has no training in how to fight together. Individually they know how to hit. The first leader showed them they could do this, by his example of evading and then attacking his arresters. He crossed the attack barrier and freed the others to fight rather than to remain frozen. The second leader attempts to do the same thing, when the police line approaches. Since the mob is untrained in how to divide its efforts, this second action throws them into confusion. They are torn between wanting to free their friend and switching focus to the new threat. Despite the best efforts of the rear guard leader, the crowd breaks and routs. Maybe if the small rear guard is able to stop the police line with the ferociousness of its attack, then the greater crowd would have time to switch its efforts. The police will then be in a very bad spot. All in all though, training wins out. Formed men know how to march in step and to fight together. Mobs don't. MANUAL OF ARMS Throughout history, soldiers are trained in the use of arms. Each army is different. Mongols shoot bows from horse back. Swiss pikemen stand in large phalanxes. Knights learn how to charge home with the lance. When pitted against mobs, they always win in a straight up fight. When pitted against one another the situation become much more complex. What training does is to tell the individual soldiers what is expected of them. So when the enemy is in sight, the average knight knows that he is suppose to charge. He has trained all his life to do this one task. If he is facing Swiss pikemen, that matters not. His training gives him no other options. The pikeman faces the same dilemma when pitted against a line of musketeers protected by a ditch. So why not improvise? Leave the manual of arms at home and fight the way the situation demands! There is a simple reason why. Humans are easily confused animals. We hate change. We freeze when confronted with confusion. So why not change? Just ask the knights who dismounted and marched on foot into battle at Crecy and Agincourt. Battle is a place of fear. Soldiers are asked to cross psychological boundaries of flight and fight. Then once in melee they are asked to break the commandment against killing. This is no small thing to ask by itself. To add to the request that the soldier approach battle in an entirely new way, is frequently just too much. Armies quickly becomes a mob when so confused. And we already know what happens to mobs in battle. Most armies are comparably trained. Periodically, though, a breakthrough occurs and the Nazi's pull a blitzkrieg. Such advantages never last for long, so, often training takes a back seat to such minor points as who has the greatest spirit or the best leader. Battle begins to boil down into a high performance road race. Two titans vie against one another to see who will reach the finish first. The tiniest of advantages is enough to push the winner over the top. Training then is only the entry point of morale. Without that, men remain just a mob (ie worthless in battle). Once basic training is over then the real work begins. Training to be better than the enemy. CROSSING THE LINE INTO THE PLACE OF FEAR Battle is a place of fear. All human instincts tell men to run away from it. Yet throughout recorded history, men have voluntarily gone off to war. The chance of dead or maiming has not been a deterrence. Training is responsible for this, but how? If fact training methods are remarkably consistent throughout time. First of all men are taught from a very young age that they are suppose to be aggressive, like warriors. Men are taught to look down on women, who are weak and in need of protection. Men are taught that they are suppose to sacrifice themselves for the societies good. Whether a person is an Arab in Iraq, a Hindu in India, a Christian in England or an Native American in Canada, the same basic message is there. When the need arises, men with the above basic messages can be easily trained to be "good soldiers". In the USA, men around the age of 18, either volunteer or are drafted into the armed services. They are segregated from the rest of society, given distinctive hair cuts, dressed in strange clothing and yelled at constantly. They are given basic skills training in shooting weapons and hand to hand combat, but more importantly they are made to do everything in groups. The message that men are aggressive, manly, self sacrificing warriors is reenforced. Men ire suppose to be strong and unified. Weakness is not to be shown. Those who do not conform to just what the sergeant says are defined as weak/bad/wrong/evil and are ridiculed. Men learn that it is not a good idea to deviate from the norm, as defined by the sergeant. Self sacrifice is directed towards the group, so that the members begin to develop love between them (agape, not amour). They learn to trust their mates, and form an alliance against the "evil" sergeants as well as the "evil enemy" the sergeant keeps on telling them about during craining. Men are taught military law. They are told that it is okay to kill an enemy in the line of duty. They are told that failure to kill the enemy is considered cowardness, for which one can be shot on the spot by a supervising officer. They are told that it is morale to kill the enemy since a living enemy could kill a friend, which would then be the first soldiers fault. So at the end of training the soldier knows many things. How to use his weapons. How to love his mess mates. How to rationalize killing "the enemy". And most importantly that he dill himself be killed if he fails to follow orders. With this is mind he will cross the line into battle without difficulty. He will kill and be killed, without complaint. He will also engage in some of the greatest acts of personal courage and self sacrifice that most men ever experience. He will not necessarily win. That rests on factors beyond mere training. As I said above, battle boils down to a high performance road race, where the slightest advantages can be pivotal. PEAK PERFORMANCE AND SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY Every record of human performance has been broken in this century. Many have been broken many times over. Just how far this can keep on going is uncertain, but it has lead to an ever increasing body of work on what make humans reach "peak performance". The field is sports psychology and what they are finding out is just how closely fighting a battle and winning a road race really are. Consider the following examples... The Greek army sits at Marathon. Their men have just won an important victory. They need help to care for the wounded and prisoners. They need provisions and transport. So they send a runner to travel the 26 miles back to Athens. If he is not fast then the Persians may rally before the Greeks are ready. He runs the distance in record time. The feat is celebrated in later games as a 26 mile race. The Greek military system involves lightly armed troops to throw javelins at enemy formations. To train for this they practice spear chucking for distance. The activity becomes a game that is still done today. And finally, two runners compete in a series of track meets. The press play up the rivalry between the them. Their coaches tell them "All you have to do is beat Jones!" Their training is geared towards meeting the challenge of that next meet only. Failure is a disgrace. One could lose everything'. "Win'. Don't let the thought of losing even enter your head." Battle and sports put a lot on the line. It may seem crazy that this is so, but it is true. People die in battle, but people also die at sporting events! Just go to soccer games in Europe if you doubt this! In the US, college sports boosters care not about NCAA ethics rules. They want a winning team! If a few kids get hurt along the way, well that's just part of the game. Being crippled for life is the price athletes pay to be the best. The damnedest thing about all the pressure in sports is that it is paying off. The limits of human performance are being pushed back. In 1968, Mark Spitz won a flurry of gold metals for swimming. He set worlds records. Now his performance would not even rate notice. It has been so far surpassed. The same is true in other sports as well. WORLD RECORDS World records have been kept for about a hundred years now. They are a history of psychological and physical barriers that men and women have crossed by training and hard work. They are the measuring sticks that athletes use to see how they are doing. As such they create in interesting psychological space that tends to lead to ever increasing performance. Soldiers are trained to run together in groups. Individual effort is required but no one is expected to be a star. One normally thinks of athletes, on the other hand, as being very star oriented. On the surface this is correct, but it misses how stars are made. Athletes train together in groups. It is the rare world class performer who does all his training along out in the back forty. Runners, do a lot of lone running, but this is like basic training - it sets the ground work. Great improvement is only attained by training with others Consider racing horses. Horse trainers have horses run to improve their speed. But they never run alone. They always run with a pace horse. Why? Because the physical presence of the other horse spurs it on to run faster. Training becomes a race. Competition then increases short term performance. Human runners also train in groups. They become "team mates" with ties very similar to those of soldiers. They encourage and challenge one another to do better. When one pulls out ahead of the group, he pulls the others after him. Soon they will be equalling his performance and possibly even bettering it. The same principle holds true sales. A company may have never had a salesman make one million dollars in sales in one month. Then one of them does it. Soon several sales men have equaled the record. It is almost as though the presence of the record tells athletes (and sales men) that it can be done. They think maybe they can do that too. Soon they do. Records also stand as challenges to those who come later. They send an implied message, "If you do one fraction of a second better than me, you win!" This is a powerful incentive to strive forward. In fact sports become a cooperative effort been all the competing athletes. They create a synergy of force that jointly pushes the limits of human performance back. This returns the point to the notion of training. The next question to look at is when does training hurt more than it helps. OVER TRAINING AND DIMINISHING RETURNS Many people live under the illusion that people get better and better at everything the more one works at it. This is clearly not true. People age as they gain experience. Eventually age diminishes ability. And of course humans die of old age as well. Yet long before aging factors come into play people experience ever poorer returns from training. Sports psychologists are well aware of this process. They have noted that individual human performance increases with basic training. Eventually though the performance curve peaks and begins to decline. Added training can bring the peak back up, but if the same training regimen is used, the curve peaks out at a lower level. If the issue is pressed to many times, people actually create a mental block on doing well in a given area in the future. Over training then is the worst thing one can do if a peak performance is desired. Sports physiologists have found that human energy ebbs and flows on a weakly chaotic curve. (Which is to say it goes up and down within a certain range, but what will happen next is not really predictable.) By pacing an athlete's training in accordance with this curve, the athlete should be at his peak on the day of the meet. Athletes how push too hard too fast burn out and lose. There are analogies of this in education. The US has many colleges and technical schools. Technical schools teach "job skills" that can get one a job (or so the TV ads claim). Colleges offer a more liberal arts approach to education (which is not at all oriented towards job skills). Which education is better? Vocational training does lead people to jobs quicker than liberal arts degrees do. So they are obviously better. Right? Maybe. If the job market stays the same then a steady job works out. But today people retrain a couple of times in their life. Technical training tends to experience diminishing returns with time. Liberal arts degrees on the other hand are not as marketable but apply to a wider array of jobs. Retraining tends to add rather than conflict with previous learning. So which is better? Goal focused training or diversity training. Goal focused training rapidly increases performance, but tends to peak early. Diversity training slowly increases performance but it lengthens out the peaks and decreases the dips. High performance athletes know this. So gone are the days of short term grueling training for an event. Now coaches have their charges training all year round. Sharp goal focused training for a given event yes, but also other exercises that have nothing to do with the muscles used in the give sport. They call this cross training. CROSS TRAINING Goal focused training does not work in the long run. The human body can not stand up to it. Diminishing returns makes an athlete a loser before the competition even begins. Cross training then is the edge that the athlete needs to cross the finish line just ahead of the opponent. Once goal focused basic training is done an athlete will finish races in the pack. He will not win. Winning requires the athlete to have an edge over the opponent. The smallest advantage can give victory. Breathing deeper, relaxation techniques, focuses imagery, prayer, and meditation can all be decisive advantages. Why? Well because they take the players mind away from the stress of the training which postpones diminishing returns. Consider the following... A student has a big test in the morning. He studies for a couple of hours the goes off to watch some TV and then to bed. In the morning he glances at his notes, eats breakfast and goes to the test. He gets there a little early, find a good seat and relaxes till class starts. He passes the test with flying colors. A game maker is working on a new historical game. The project is coming alone nicely. The next day he puts the project aside and paints lead monsters. He then reads a book about physics and attends church. While sitting in church he has a break through idea in a problem that his project faces. A business executive leaves the office at 3PM and goes to a gym to lift weights and run for a few hours. The next morning he feels more rested and ready to go back to work. A soldier is in a trench waiting for the order to go over the top. He focuses his mind and asks himself "How fast am I? As fast as the wind. What are my legs? Steel Springs. What am I going to do? Win." The whistle sounds and he goes over, despite the danger. Each of these people is practicing a form of cross training. In each case the activities done are only vaguely related to the original task. But each allows the individual to return to the task and have a peak performance. The cross training is their edge. In the last case (taken from the movie Gallipoli) the soldier in question runs twice as far as any of the others before being shot down. MOUNTAIN CLIMBING AND MORALE Prior to WWII mountain climbers in Germany set their sights on climbing the most dangerous. peaks in the country. The most dangerous of theses was the Eiger. Many climbers died in this endeavor. Yet still more came. They were totally goal focused and would accept any loses to reach the peak. They ran, climbed, shoot, skied, and drank as part of their training. And they climbed the Eiger. When the war began, these men were members of mountain regiments. Many analysts appear to discount these units fighting qualities because they lacked much of the heavy equipment of other units. This is a mistake. What they had was that same goal oriented focus that allowed them to ignore any sacrifice to reach the goal. In 1941 they were put to the test in the invasion of Crete. The 100th Gebirgsjager crashed landed in gliders on the airport run way in gliders. The defending New Zealanders had them in their sights from the moment they started to land until the defenders were driven off. The Germans suffered only 18% casualties, despite being out numbered, out gunned, and attacking a dug in defender in broad daylight. The assault of Crete stands as a testimony to the power of cross training and peak military performance. PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS The last point on peak performance is the wide spread use of steroids and other drugs. Sports ethics state that they are illegal. But they work, so goal focused young athletes are bound to use them. Armies also use drugs to enhance performance. The Prussian army gave men cocaine in the late 19th century. The US army used amphetamines widely in WWII. All nations used alcohol at one time or other to get men "fighting drunk". Again, as in sports, they work. But they don't work well! Mood altering chemicals tend to help the soldier ignore the fear of battle. They lower inhibitions (like the prohibition against killing). They generally aid the soldier in either mobilizing a lot of energy, or providing a lot of energy themselves. One wonders how the old East German Women's Shotput team would have done in the assault of Crete? Drugs are, at the same time, ineffective. Their use tends to increase the level of psychiatric casualties an army experiences. Illicit drug use in US troops in Vietnam, and Soviet troops in Afghanistan, are blamed for the decline of morale of troops in these wars. Alcoholism is still high in the US armed services but nothing like the rate in the late 19th century! Maybe the best argument against the use of drink as a morale booster in modern armies is that drunk people make bad rocket launchers! AFTERWARD There are many psychological barriers that keep untrained civilians out of battles. Basic training in a manual of arms is generally enough to get a soldier to cross this threshold of fear. Then the decision of who wins falls on having very small advantages. Further training can improve these advantages, but over training tends to diminish performance. Cross training in other related areas allows one to push beyond other barriers. And finally, once one person has crossed the barrier, others will follow. T raining then helps soldiers resolve the conflict of crossing boundaries of fear. The fear to kill, the fear of being killed. Soldiers know this. What is no widely known is what the other consequences are of crossing the line. The next article in this series looks at what happens after the shooting has stopped. Back to Experimental Games Group # 27 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com