SWINGIN' ARMIES

Over at Blog of Xanadu, there's a discussion of how to tell good armies from bad armies by watching them march (Hint: bad armies swing their arms like demented windmills, good ones stick with sychronized footwork). I asked the opintion of an old high school buddy of mine who knows way too much about things military, and he commented as follows:

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Quoth the blog:

"Crapulent Armies have a fancy march. They high step, or goose step, or they
hang one arm stiff at their side. Maybe they swing the forearm across their
body, swing the arms ridiculously high, or do a fancy stall-step. Either
way, they try to dress up their military incompetence with fancy marching.

So if you want a snapshot view of the Armies, look at how they march on
Parade. US and British forces use a very basic step. Iran, Iraq (formerly),
and North Korea make it a fancy step and high swinging arms. The Soviet
Union was guilty of the same thing -- and their battle doctrine has been
proven to be pretty crappy."

IIRC the fancy arms-swing crap that the arabs all do came from the British
early in this century when they called most of the shots in the Middle East.
In defense of Her Majesty's armed forces, they never did the kind of
exaggerated half-circle thing that we see the arabic military and police
forces do on parade when we see them on TV.

I think what is more telling about the quality of a military is whether or
not they have a Praetorian Guard -- the Revolutionary Guards (Iran),
Republican Guards (Iraq) -- that is provided with better training and
equipment because they are politically reliable while the regular Joes get shit.

With respect to the goose-stepping, the Germans did that and they were
hardly "crapulent." In fact the really good goose-steppers - the Schutz
Staffel - were generally the worst of the hard-asses on the field. Also I
would refrain from judging Soviet military doctrine as harshly as the blog
does because we have not tangled with it directly. We and our allies and/or
proxies have only tangled with people who followed it to various degrees of
competence. Advised by the Russians does not equal Russians in the field.

As far as crappy arab armies go, I think the biggest problem they have is
the apparent inability to train anyone to use the sights on their weapons.
There were many battlefield reports swirling around before the whole
low-intensity thing got started recounting an outlandish reliance on the
spray-and-pray technique, followed by quick liquidation at the hands of an often
numerically smaller group of Marines/Army who could aim.

It is unfortunate that the current crop of nasties seem to have either
learned the lesson or been taught by someone smarter (like Al-Qaeda).
Bummer. But nice work on the Hussein brothers by the Screaming Eagles. Heard
one report that says they used a TOW to pop the front door on the villa.
Only made the Husseins a little extra-crispy.

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In short, it's the shootin', not the swingin'.