Executive orders - Tom Clancy [89]
The Russian smiled. Marion, I had no choice. There was no place to run away, and I knew what they did to captured Russian officers. So, they give me medal and promotion, and then my country-how you say? Evaporate? There was more to it, of course. Bondarenko had been in Moscow during the coup, and for the first time in his life faced with making a moral decision, he'd made the right one, attracting the notice of several people who were now highly placed in the government of a new and smaller country.
How about a country reborn? Colonel Hamm suggested. How about, we can be friends now?
Da. You speak well, Colonel. And you command well.
Thank you, sir. Mainly I just sit back and let the regiment run itself. That was a lie that any really good officer understood as a special sort of truth.
Using Sov-Russian tactical doctrine! It just seemed so outrageous to the Russian general.
It works, doesn't it? Hamm finished his beer.
It would work, Bondarenko promised himself. It would work for his army as it had worked for the American, once he got back and got the political support he needed to rebuild the Russian Army into something it had never been. Even at its fighting peak, driving the Germans back to Berlin, the Red Army had been a heavy, blunt instrument, depending on the shock value of mass more than anything else. He also knew what a role luck had played. His former country had fielded the world's finest tank, the T-34, blessed with a diesel engine designed in France to power dirigibles, a suspension system designed by an American named J. Walter Christie, and a handful of brilliant design innovations from young Russian engineers. That was one of the few instances in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in which his countrymen had managed to turn out a world-class product-and in this case it had been the right one at the right time-without which his country would surely have died. But the time was past for his country to depend on luck and mass. In the early 1980s the Americans had come up with the right formula: a small, professional army, carefully selected, exquisitely trained, and lavishly equipped. Colonel Hamm's OpFor, this 11th Cavalry Regiment, was like nothing he'd ever seen. His pre-travel brief had told him what to expect, but that was different from believing it. You had to see it to believe. In the right terrain, that one regiment could take on a division and destroy it in hours. The Blue Force was hardly incompetent, though its commander had declined the chance to come and eat here in order to work with his sub-unit leaders this day, so badly had they been mauled.
So much to learn here, but the most important lesson of all was how the Americans faced their lessons. Senior officers were humiliated regularly, both in the mock battles and afterward in what they called the AAR, after-action review, during which the observer-controller officers analyzed everything that had taken place, reading their notes off multicolored file cards like hospital pathologists.
I tell you, Bondarenko said after a few seconds of reflection, in my army, people would start fistfights during-
Oh, we came close to that in the beginning, Diggs assured him. When they started this place up, commanders got relieved for losing battles, until everybody took a deep breath and realized that it was supposed to be tough here. Pete Taylor is the guy who really got the NTC running right. The OCs had to learn diplomacy, and the Blue Force people had to learn that they were here to learn, but I'll tell you, Gennady, there isn't another army in the world that inflicts humiliation on its commanders the way we do.
That's a fact, sir. I was talking with Scan Connolly the other day-he's CO of the 10th ACR in the Negev Desert, Hamm explained to the Russian. The Israelis still haven't got it all the way figured out. They still bitch about what the OCs tell 'em.
We keep