MURPHY'S LAWS OF COMBAT
By David Evans
In a few short weeks the nation's military academies will graduate about 4,000 new officers into the commisioned ranks of our armed forces. They will join an ancient and honored fraternity, one that has been around ever since homo combatus first picked up a club to smite other primates horning in on his territory.
The typical freshyl minted lieutenant or ensign wants to succeed badly and, perhaps more importantly, avoid embarrassment. Accordingly, the more ambitious among them will no doubt look for the secret formula to success by reading the Chinese warlord Sun Tzu's 500 B.C. treatise. The Art Of War. Others might search in Frederick the Great's 1747 Instructions for His Generals, and some will read the more recent collected memoranda General George Patton issued to his corps and division commanders in World War II.
But why bother with book-length tomes? An Army Colonel of my acquaintance has distilled everything any new officer needs to know about fighting into a single page. Call his cribsheet "Murphy's Laws of Combat"
1. You are not SuperMen. (Freshly graduated recruits from Marine boot camp and all fighter pilots, especially, take note.)
2. Supressive fires--won't.
3. If it's stupid, but works, it isn't stupid.
4. Don't look conspicuous--it draws fire. (For this reason aircraft carriers have been called "bomb magnets.")
5. When in doubt, empty the magazine.
6. Never forget, your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.
8. If your attack is going really well, it's an ambush.
9. No plan survives the first contact intact.
10. All five-second grenade fuses will burn down in three seconds.
11. Try to look unimportant, because the bad guys may be low on ammo. (Triva devotees will recall the sudden disapperance of rank and distinctive caps on the uniforms worn by Soviet officers in Afghanistan.)
12. If you are forward of your position, the artillery will fall short.
13. The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack.
14. The important things are always simple.
15. The simple things are always hard.
16. The easy way is always mined.
17. If you are short of everything except the enemy, you are in combat.
18. When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the enemy.
19. Incoming fire has the right-of-way.
20. No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection (Note: No Marine unit has ever failed a combat readiness inspecion, which suggests peactime inspections are to readiness as mess-hall food is to cuisine.)
21. If the enemy is in range, SO ARE YOU.
22. Beer math is 2 beers times 37 men equals 49 cases.
23. Body-count math is 3 guerrillas plus 1 probable plus 2 pigs equals 37 enemy killed in action.
24. Friendly fire--isn't.
25. Things that must be together to work usually can't be shipped together.
26. Radios will fail as soon as you need fire support desperately. (Corollary: Radar tends to fail at night and in bad weather, and especially during both.)
27. Anything you do can get you shot--including doing nothing.
28. Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you can't get out. (This seems to be the guiding design principle behind the Soviets' BMP and our own Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, both of which nicely package the troops in armored boxes for group destruction.)
29. Tracers work BOTH ways.
30. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.
31. If you take more than your fair share of objectives, you will have more than your fair share to take.
32. When both sides are convinced they are about to loose, they're both right.
33. Professional soldiers are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs.
34. Murphy was a grunt.
There you have it, a phenonmenal amount of wisdom and combat savvy on one page. But can we do even better? Can we distill everything, from Sun Tzu to Murphy, into a one-line predicator of victory of defeat?
I think so, and in fact, I stand in awe of Marine Reserve maj. Mark Cancian, who now directs studies on defense matters at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Shortly before he left active duty a few years ago, Cancian reduced man's entire knowledge of war into this dictum: "The side with the simplest uniforms wins."