"It's too smooth," Carrera whispered.
* * *
Cano was pissed. Being taken by surprise, ambushed himself by the Duque, was just too fucking much. Bad enough that . . .
"Relax, Tribune," Carrera said, not ungently. He was actually impressed with the kid. "I just have some questions. It was a good ambush. Really. What bothers me was that maybe it was too good. Why do you think it was so good?"
Cano didn't relax. Sure, he wasn't a signifer anymore; he was entitled to tie his boots in the morning without tying the left one to the right one. Even so, this was the bloody Duque. He was a bastard; everyone knew it. Cano could just see his career flying off to parts unknown and unknowable. He could . . .
"I asked a question, Tribune," Carrera reminded.
"Oh . . . sorry, sir. I was . . . I just wasn't expecting you to—"
"I asked a question, Tribune."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well . . . sir . . . we've done this ambush here maybe a dozen times just since I've been leading the platoon. The boys know what to do and, then again, we drill the shit out of it . . . "
Aha.
"Jamey! Call the Chief of Staff, the I and the Ia. I don't give a shit if they're asleep. Get 'em up."
17/10/466 AC, Main Officers Club, Isla Real
Normally, in every day life, Carrera was a surprisingly gentle sort. He wasn't particularly aggressive, or vicious. He'd probably never done a deliberately cruel thing, outside of line of duty, in his life.
In line of duty, however, or especially in action, he changed. The change wasn't like that of a man turning to a wolf; that kind of transition, even in myth, took time. Instead, for Carrera, there simply came a moment when stress impended and he changed.
It was something like a click.
"I'm so glad you could all make it," Carrera hissed to the assembled senior officers and centurions of the Legion.
As a single man, they thought, Oh, shit, we're in trouble.
"You people suck mastodon cock," Carrera began, with his usual fine sense of tact. "Where the fuck did you get the idea that your job is to train people to follow formulae, rather than training them, mentally and morally, as individuals and as units, to solve unique problems? You've been fighting for five fucking years now. When did you all forget that war is always different?
His face was livid as he continued, "Can anyone answer me; when did Cazador School begin training leaders to be robots? Hmmm? No takers? I see. Did it creep in in OCS or CCS? No?
"I watched an ambush the other night. Good unit, good leaders, conducting a good ambush. But you know what? They'd been doing the same thing in the same way in the same place for fucking years." With this he spared a glare for Kuralski and the staff. "Why have we had our soldiers doing the same fucking thing in the same fucking place in the same fucking way for years? Why didn't we give them different problems, in different places, with different circumstances? Why, you assholes? Why?"
It had taken Carrera thirty-six hours of brooding to become as angry as he was. He'd nurtured the anger, cultivated it, so that he could release it on his subordinates. Once released, though, it ebbed quickly enough.
"Now listen," he said, more calmly. "I'm going to explain something."
"Battle drills—preset solutions, well rehearsed, for common battlefield circumstances—are an interesting subject. Likewise for Standard Operating Procedures, individual tasks done to perfection, crew drills, and formations. There are some very good armies that depend on them. The Federated States and Volgan Republic do; and maybe the Foreign Military Training Group is where we were contaminated from. There are also some very good armies that loath them, the Sachsen and Zionis, for example.
"Generally speaking, I don't like them. There are a number of reasons for that. Listen, carefully."
The assembled leaders did listen carefully. They also relaxed to a degree; when Carrera went into teaching mode, they knew, he was unlikely to shoot someone on the spot. They knew he was going into teaching mode when he pulled some index cards out of his right breast pocket. When did Carrera need prompt cards to chew someone's ass?
"Number one, remember that drills, if they're going to be reliable, must be conditioned into troops, almost as if the troops were Pavlov's dogs. So if you can't really condition something well enough to rely on it, don't make a drill of it.
"Two, conditioning takes a lot of time, time you probably won't have. So even if something can, in theory, be conditioned, if you don't have the time to condition it, don't waste what time you have on the impossible.
"Three, drills—like everything else—take place under certain conditions. If those conditions are subject to radical differences such that no amount of practical drilling can condition them all, do not train as a drill something that will only be true infrequently.
"Four, military units suffer losses. They are almost never at full strength. If a drill requires a particular level of manpower or equipment, and you can reasonably predict that that particular level of strength will rarely be met, I would suggest you don't bother.
"Three and four are related in a way. We use crew drill for the tank and Ocelot crews, don't we? One thing about the inside of a turret; it doesn't change. The crewmen have seats they stay in. The gun doesn't move relative to the crew. The internal communications gear typically works. And the crew of an armored vehicle generally lives or dies together, no attrition that matters in the short term. So a drill for a crew like that makes sense. The same holds true for much that the mortars and artillery do. Their positions may change from place to place, but the important thing, the gun, is always the same. The positions they build to protect the gun and themselves are always the same, too. The casualties they take, mostly to other mortars and artillery, or air, tend to be either catastrophic or insignificant—the crew lives or dies together."
Carrera became reflective. "Actually towed artillery is a funny case. They don't usually come under small arms fire. Mines are only rarely a problem for them. For the most part they lose men to aerial attack and counter battery fire from enemy artillery. That fire either is close enough to emulsify the crew, or it's far enough away, when it explodes, to do only limited damage to the crew, or it is so far away it is irrelevant to the crew. In cases one and three, that the artillery crew was drilled numb doesn't hurt matters. It can still either do the job or it is dead. In the middle case, because gun crews are much larger than the bare minimum needed to load and fire the gun, and because artillery crew drill is so simple that everyone can be, and in a good crew is, trained to do all the jobs, even with some losses the gun can still fill the important jobs with adequately trained troops and function at a reduced rate of fire."
"However, compare the problem at the crew level to a platoon of mortars, tanks or tracks, or a battery of guns. They always have to adjust: to terrain, to the enemy situation, to their own strength. The variables for infantry are infinite, a few drills won't do and the number that might do is impossible. So, before you decide to train something as a drill, ask yourself also whether the conditions—to include your own strength—are likely to be the same in war. I'll give you a hint; a line remains a line, even when you erase some portion of it. If you plan on doing a drill or formation with any unit above the crew level, you had best consider making it some variable on a line . . . wedges and echelons count as lines. Only that kind of formation or drill is sustainable after losses.