So I was reading a book (Tripwire by Lee Childs, if anyone is interested) and there is a passage in it when the characters are talking about the war in Vietnam and the fact that the quality of soldiers decreased as time went on.
The section reads;
Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and harassed. Facilities you'd built would be all falling down, trenches you'd dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you'd cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You'd feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally it was true. The whole 'Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the personnel just got worse and worse. (p.279)
I was just wondering if this was true? Does the 'quality' of soldier get worse as a war drags out? I'm assuming that some of this belief comes from the fact the volunteers or career soldiers were the first ones to go fight, and are then replaced by inexperienced or reluctant conscripts. I've noticed similar arguments put forward in other films and books for other conflicts and wars (like Black Hawk Down, Band of Brothers, Battle of Britain etc) so I was just wondering if there is any truth in it? Is there any factual evidence that supports such claims for any modern wars?
(And yes I know 'quality' is a difficult term to use but I don't really know how else to phrase the question!)
Thank you in advance!
It would rather depend on the nature of the state and its army at the time.
In Britain, there is no indication of a deterioration in the quality of the army as the Napoleonic wars went on, and I have read at least one suggestion that the turnover in officers was beneficial to the purchase system (The Reason Why by C. Woodham Smith) and also that at Waterloo, after a break of several years, there was dearth of experienced, battle-hardended redcoats.
The Luftwaffe in WWII is a good example of a force that is initially superior but steadily deteriorates with mounting pressure over several years. On the other hand, RAF bomber command steadily increases in efficacy with better equipment and better training as the war progresses.
The British army in WWI is a mix of both. It starts off being the best army in the world size for size (arguably), then deteriorates rapidly in 1915 as the old regulars and territorials are killed off. It reaches its nadir in 1916 with large drafts of gallant but semi-trained recruits and then slowly builds up to being the supreme fighting power by summer of 1918.
We can look at WWII as an example of the opposite happening for the Allied powers, especially with naval aviators in the Pacific.
At the onset, the US had few carriers, and few pilots with any real experience. The Imperial Japanese Navy had a number of carriers and rather experienced pilots as of Pearl Harbor. However, this changed dramatically over the course of the war.
The key difference is that the US rotated experienced pilots back to training positions routinely, which kept new pilots up to speed with new tactics and techniques developed in combat, and it ensured that actual combat veterans were teaching combat lessons to the next set of recruits. The Japanese had no such system, and their experienced corps of pilots dwindled, and was in tatters after the attrition of the Solomon Isles campaign. As a result, their pilots became less and less experienced, and more prone to errors that the increasingly experienced American pilots would exploit.
Similarly, the state of readiness of the US military was well behind par for the other powers at the time. Again, as the war progressed, new tactics and training methods were developed and brought to bear. For example, after the Sicily campaign, a substantial number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne were transferred to the then-in-training 101st Airborne to provide combat experience to the incoming soldiers.
I'm going to cross-reference another recent post and suggest that conscription in and of itself was probably not a factor in declining quality.
What /u/ThinMountainAir suggests in this post about the necessity for reform in the U.S. Army is that there were a large number of fairly unique societal factors in the United States at the time that collectively contributed to a marked decline in the quality of soldier serving in Vietnam.
The only cases that come to mind where quality declines directly as a result of conscription are those of doomed nations that expand the scope and relax the standards of conscription out of desperation, having already spent their way through their population of able-bodied men.
Nice to see a fellow Reacher Creature though. Love those books.