Maintaining Troop Morale

[Barnes] Last Sunday the New York Times had a very interesting report on a psychological study that the U.S. army has made on our ground forces in Bosnia indicating that basically six months is about the maximum that you can reasonably expect troops to remain with high morale. At six months, some 20 percent of people will have some form of psychosomatic problem; beyond six months, it will be 30 to 35 percent. So the problem is that you have people who are still there in a military stance. They must still be careful, obviously. How are you going to cope with that?

I didn't read that article but let me tell you what comes to mind right away. Our six-month cruises on an aircraft carrier, used to be nine month, ten month, eleven month cruises, are about keeping people's attention focused on the mission. And I don't mean to tell you that the army is recognizing this for the first time. Clearly that's not the case. But I will tell you right now, we put marines in Okinawa for a year at a time, we put sailors at sea (and I personally had the USS America in the North Arabian Sea for 102 days without going into port), there were ships that spent much, much longer than that, I think one of them was 156 days without going into port, and you have a morale problem. You have a situation where you've got to keep the attention of the people focused. Now, it's impossible to try to describe the difference between a ground soldier in Tuzla and a sailor on an aircraft carrier, but let me tell you something else. I describe operations on an aircraft carrier as orchestrated mayhem. It's the only occupation in the world where you start the day on the brink of disaster and it can only get worse. And you survive because the people there are trained, they are vigilant, they know what their job is, and you keep their attention focused. So we work on that a lot.

Let's put that aside and go back to the army. I don't think that the fact that they're in a peace-support operation has any effect whatsoever on the fact that you see, after a certain period of time, that 20 percent of the people are going to go a little bit off to the right here and the next six months or so you've got another 25 percent. I think that's human nature and you've just got to work with the problem. I don't see that as unique to Tuzla. Let me take you back a step to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. We had 541 soldiers in Macedonia, and commanded those soldiers through the command chain. I gave them orders and they followed those orders. The soldiers were shipping over -- they were re-enlisting, they were so happy. I'm as serious as I can be. It's because they were doing a mission that they enjoyed. They saw a need for what they were doing. They felt they were being used in a very productive way. And they felt good about themselves and they felt good about the army, and they re-enlisted in the army because of that.

We should mention that this force is a trip-wire, a warning to Serbia not to gobble up Macedonia.

The force basically is there as a commitment, a visible presence by the United States of America to say enough is enough, don't cross this line, this is our line in the sand. And we have to draw that line, and I think that line has already been drawn there. It's probably drawn in Kosovo. And we need to worry about Albania because Albania could create the refugee problem that we were afraid might be created as a result of the Serbs in Kosovo.

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