Military MOS : In wars, how often do soldiers get shoved into infantry instead?

Factual Questions
1

So, in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, if you joined the army as a tank crewmember, enlisted artillery soldier, or MP, as I understand it, it was extremely common to end up having to fight on the streets of Iraq or Afghanistan as infantry or drive trucks. Ditto for medics.

You would train to drive an Abrams tank but probably wouldn’t get to actually have your tank in Afganistan or Iraq, which makes a huge difference in survivability, because the Abrams is basically immune to almost anything the insurgents could do from the front or sides. It would usually survive driving over buried bombs as well, although the flat bottom was a weak spot, and occasionally the insurgents did kill an Abrams with EFPs, it only happened a few times the whole conflict.

Ditto for Artillery - if you got to actually have an artillery piece and stay back 5-20 miles, the insurgents wouldn’t have been able to kill you.

So, when watching Fury, and seeing them fill an empty gunner spot in the Sherman with a typist…I wondered just how often this happens.

The military recruiting system has these hundreds of MOSes in all these specialized skills. Is this really more a scam to get people to sign up, and most people who actually join don’t get to use their specialized skill and end up having to do classic grunt-work?

It’s a shame it works this way. If you’re going to end up fighting in the streets anyway, you might as well train as infantry, because you’ll have the most training in what you’ll actually face in the field.

2

If you put on the uniform, you’re a soldier first, period.

3

And if you’re a Marine, you’re a rifleman first. Period.

4

I on my phone, so I will keep this as short as possible. To answer your first question, it was veery common to see a non-combat arms Soldier on patrol, but their main job was to provide a presence more than anything. If a group of non-combat Soldiers ended up being the fighting force in a combat situation, then something went wrong. Keep in mind, every Soldier is a rifleman first, especially in an area that has no defined front line.

If there was a planned operation, the combat-arms MOSs would be the planned fighting force, utilizing their special skills as necessary. If there was a shortage of personnel, or a particular piece of equipment was not practical (tanks or artillery in an urban setting), then the commander could decide to utilize the operators of those troops as he/she see fit.

Don’t forget that there are a lot of MOSs that directly support combat arms, and due to the lack of defined front line or situation, those Soldiers may have to provide that support in locations that were especially dangerous.

You assumed that there is a scam going around to get people to sign up for a technical job, then throw them in the streets doing grunt work. Your assumption is very inaccurate.

5

In WWII, a lot. Tankers were often replacement troops that arrived in theater and quickly trained in forward replacement depots.

In the modern Army they don’t just point to you and say “Now you are infantry.” However there is overlap with basic soldier skills and infantry tasks. Every soldier does not have the training to execute Infantry battle drills but they should have the training to pull security, perform combat convoy operations, presence patrols etc. There are many instances particularly in the beginning stages of Iraq that combat arms personnel such as tankers were made to dismount and perform combat ground operations. Grunts will tell you that is not the same as being infantry. That doesn’t mean they didn’t perform dangerous missions. It is pretty much the reason why the Combat Action Badge was created.

More along the lines of what you are talking about is what happens with the National Guard sometimes. A tank unit I was in was deployed to Gitmo for detainee operations.
They were all trained up for the mission before they deployed. An artillery battalion I had friends in were deployed as MPs. They spent a couple months in training and were given the MOS before they deployed. No one was yanked off the plane in Baghdad and told “You are now an MP.” When the deployment was over they went back to their MOS.

Everyone knows you are a soldier first. The first thing you are taught are basic combat and infantry skills. That’s what Basic Training is.

6

This is just the nature of war. It’s often unintentional; There are lots of occasions when a person might be on a truck, driving between bases, or performing some kind of duty outside the wire. When they get attacked, they don’t really have a choice about whether they are combat arms or not. I’ve seen intelligence collectors kicking in doors with infantrymen, because going outside the wire to meet the locals was part of their job and when shit got real they did what they had to do.

Some formations, such as LRS platoons and Striker squadrons, do include non-combat arms MOS’s as part of their MTOE. They train and deploy as part of the formation, and are expected to perform their specialty role in addition to their combat role.

I have a hard time conceiving of this as a “scam.” The purpose of the army is to fight, and even if you spend 364 days of your deployment behind a computer there might be that one day when the shit hits the fan and you need to ruck up. Everyone understands this.

7

I am an officer, and not a combat arms trade, but we are still trained as a soldier first.

8

“Soldier first” doesn’t mean infantry. Infantry is a specialized skill that requires specialized training.

As an example, I was a repairman for TOW missile systems, which in my unit were all on Bradley fighting vehicles. In Iraq, I fixed quite a few Bradleys, but it wasn’t an everyday job. Mostly, I pulled a lot of guard duty, for prisoners, the front gate, and several perimeter guard stations.

Sometimes we had to go on a convoy and I was the SAW gunner, so I went, sitting in the back of a humvee, guarding our convoy. On the way into Iraq, we had to convoy in from Kuwait to Habbaniyah, which is west of Fallujah, so I started and finished that tour with a 3 day convoy outside the wire, pointing a machine gun at the berms by the highway.

We also did a lot of work on our base, loading and moving concrete from crumbled buildings, yardwork, painting, building outhouses and solar showers and then later digging a trench to bury the cabling that powered the shower and toilet trailers they gave us. Any “free time” we had during the day was then taken up by maintaining and fixing our humvees, 5-ton trucks, generators and weapons.

But gate guard, perimeter guard, prisoner guard, convoy protection, and manual labor are not the infantry. Maybe guys with other combat arms MOSes (artillery, tanker, engineer, etc) had different experiences, but in my experience, if you weren’t trained as infantry, you didn’t serve as infantry, period. Sure, if you get shot at, you shoot back, but that’s not infantry either.

(Maybe I’m ignorant, here, but an essential component of the definition of infantry, in my opinion, is that you take the offensive. If you’re just defending yourself and others, that’s not infantry. If you go on patrols, and seek out the enemy in order to shoot them, you’re on the offense. If you don’t shoot unless the enemy finds you first, that’s not infantry, that’s just self defense.)

9

I don’t think Habeed’s question is really being answered. Of course a soldier always gets basic training as a soldier, and might sometimes be asked to shoot at people.

The question he’s asking is how often a soldier in a combat support or service support role is actually moved into a combat arms role. In the movie “Fury,” set during World War II, a guy in a service support role (admin) is moved into a combat arms role (armor.) It’s not that he happens to be typing one day and suddenly GErmans attack the typing pool and he picks up his rifle and shoots back; he’s moved from a non combat job to a combat job. How often does THAT happen is the question.

The answer is

  1. Today, almost never.
  2. In World War II, it was not at all uncommon.

Today there is very little reason for the US Armed Services to move a person from a support job to a full bore combat arms job simply because the casualty rate is not high enough to merit doing that. It’s more efficient and effective to train new combat arms specialists.

In World War II, casualty rates were incredibly high - some U.S. infantry formations has casualty rates well above 100% just between D-day and war’s end - and so getting fresh men out of support jobs and into combat jobs was just something that had to happen.

10

I don’t disagree with you, and truth be told, there is a very good reason that I am not an Infantry Officer - but I did take the Phase 1 and 2 training with them (patrolling, offensive/defensive, etc). Still, it’s not my “bread and butter” and not what I am a specialist in…so my skills in these areas would be basic and used only when really necessary.

11

Just to second what RickJay has said, in the time and place the movie Fury is set - nearing the end of WWII in Europe - it was not at all uncommon. Casualty rates for combat arms in general and infantry in particular were much higher than anticipated and prepared for. Between Normandy and the end of the war a large number of excess AAA and Tank Destroyer battalions were cannibalized to provide infantry replacements, and combing the rear echelon to provide warm bodies happened frequently. From here:

12

The troops in Fury were from2nd Armored Division.

It suffered very heavy losses especially in NW Europe.

13

This “military myth” has been debunked. Plus, read post #8 above again.

14

What’s been debunked? We may not be riflemen first, but we all qualify with a rifle or pistol. Well, maybe not the President’s band,

15

Almost never? It depends on the situation. Here is a Marine artilleryman who transferred to a different job because of a special skill he had: Hussein Farrah Aidid - Wikipedia

Similar to the typist in Fury, this Marine had a needed language skill.

16

Rifleman is a particular MOS, 0311, in the United States Marine Corps. Merely qualifying with a rifle does not award a Marine that MOS. The myth that “Every Marine is a rifleman first” or “Every Marine’s primary MOS is Rifleman” is just that: myth. Now that you know it is, you can stop repeating it as though it’s fact.

17

Let me re-describe where I got this idea. When I first signed up for the military, a decade ago, I was there in the recruiting office, and they showed me the hundreds and hundreds of jobs available. Lotta specialized stuff - everything from IT network to mechanics to radios, etc. Relative to the listings, the number of obvious combat positions - crewmember for the various artillery and tank and air to air systems, infantry, seemed pretty small.

So it got me thinking, much more recently. It’s pretty easy to get a kid to sign up to be an “IT network guy” in the Army. His parents will give him a thumbs up, after all, who gets killed running CAT-5 around. He himself will justify the casualties he hears about during the news “well, I’m not gonna be one of *those *guys, I’m gonna be too busy messing with subnet settings in a FOB somewhere.”

In reality, though, the military needs suckers to man trucks on dangerous roads, do dirty chores, watch the base, and go and shoot the guys it has has decreed need to be shot. It can just hire civilian experts and laborers to do many of the maintenance and support tasks.

So it made me wonder if that huge list of safe seeming jobs in skills useful in the civilian world was kind of just a scam, and most of those soldiers are going to spend 90% or more of their time doing tasks they didn’t receive specialized training for.

18

This:

Is not the same as this:

“Qualifying with a rifle” is not something unique to the Marine Corps. Every soldier in the US Army has to qualify with a rifle. Despite this fact, Marines continue to believe there is something special about having everyone qualify with a rifle. The Marines have POGs, flute players, cooks, and computer network guys just like everyone else.

19

Nope. Those jobs are just as useful in the Army as they are in civilian world. Those skills and specialized training would not be wasted by throwing those soldiers on patrols. They are going to be used where their skills are best utilized. The Army is not interested in wasting time and money, and close to 6 figure bonuses trying to to entice would-be computer technicians into joining, just so they can be tricked into doing infantry stuff. Amazingly, there is absolutely no shortage in infantry enlistments.

20

Bear_Nenno: As I showed in post #16, every Marine isn’t even a rifleman in the first place, let alone being a rifleman first.