Every Army officer begins his career convinced he is Patton.
Eventually, most discover they are actually middle management with a security clearance.
I know because I watched the transformation happen.
Worse.
It happened to me.
There was a time when I was operational. I rode around in armored vehicles. I slept outside. I ate whatever appeared in the vicinity of my face. I understood that rain was something you wore rather than something you watched through a window.
And I knew exactly who the enemy was.
FOBbits.
FOBbits were mysterious rear-area creatures who lived safely inside the wire and appeared to survive primarily on PowerPoint, Green Beans coffee and soft-serve ice cream.
Their uniforms were clean.
Suspiciously clean.
You could always identify a serious FOBbit because he knew the DFAC schedule better than the operations schedule.
“Sir, convoy got hit on Route Irish.”
“Roger. Is that going to affect Mongolian barbecue night?”
These were the people we mocked.
We were warriors.
They were staff weenies.
We went outside the wire.
They went outside the TOC to smoke.
Then something terrible happened.
The Army promoted us.
Nobody warns you about this.
You think promotion means increased responsibility, greater leadership opportunities and perhaps the chance to command larger formations.
Bull$hit.
It means Microsoft Outlook.
The metamorphosis usually begins around senior Captain or Major.
The Army takes a perfectly functional human being, removes him from anything he understands, gives him three computer monitors and places him inside a windowless building where he will spend the next eighteen months moving colored rectangles around PowerPoint.
This is called “broadening assignment.”
The major initially resists.
He still remembers the field.
He occasionally says dangerous things like:
“Does the battalion actually need to report this?”
This attitude is corrected immediately.
Soon he learns the sacred rhythms of staff life.
There is the morning update.
The commander’s update.
The working group.
The synchronization meeting.
The planning meeting.
The pre-brief.
The brief.
The post-brief.
And, naturally, the meeting to discuss why yesterday’s meeting failed to produce sufficient meetings.
Eventually the Army achieves the theoretical maximum of military bureaucracy:
Every officer is attending a meeting about work nobody can accomplish because everyone is attending meetings.
This is when the major begins evolving into his final form.
FOBbitus Staffweinius.
His natural habitat is the Joint Operations Center.
His primary weapon is PowerPoint.
His secondary weapon is Excel.
His preferred indirect-fire system is email.
His most devastating munition is:
**ALL — Suspense 1600 TODAY.**
Nobody knows why the information is needed.
The major doesn’t know.
The lieutenant colonel doesn’t know.
The colonel definitely doesn’t know.
Somewhere three headquarters above them, however, a general has apparently asked a question.
Therefore 4,700 soldiers must immediately stop fighting the war and count something.
Vehicles.
Radios.
Porta-johns.
Goats.
It doesn’t matter.
The information must be collected, consolidated, color-coded and placed onto a slide so dense that no human being could possibly mis-read it from the conference table. But some GO’s still do.
Then comes the most dangerous sentence in modern warfare:
“Sir, we’re going to need another slide.”
Entire civilizations have collapsed with less bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the FOBbit flourishes.
Life inside the wire becomes surprisingly civilized.
There is a gym.
There are showers.
There is Wi-Fi.
There is coffee.
There is Baskin-Robbins, unlimited and free, and all 31 flavors.
You are standing in Baghdad holding a waffle cone while an Apache flies overhead and suddenly realize Alexander the Great never had anything remotely this good.
Then somebody complains that they’re out of Rocky Road.
This is how empires die.
Eventually you develop FOB geography.
A building 200 meters away is no longer nearby.
It is:
“Way the hell over by Corps HQ.”
You consider taking a vehicle.
You begin judging deployments by chow halls.
“That was a rough deployment.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Only one omelet station.”
Then comes the final stage of FOBbit evolution.
You forget that the outside world exists.
A young captain walks into the headquarters covered in dust after spending twelve hours outside the wire.
You look up from your laptop.
You are drinking coffee.
The air conditioning is set to 68 degrees.
There may be ice cream nearby.
And you say:
“Hey, before you leave, battalion still needs your updated vehicle status tracker.”
The captain stares at you.
Something ancient passes between you.
Because fifteen years earlier, you were that captain.
You hated this man.
You swore you would never become this man.
And now you are asking him to update an Excel spreadsheet because one cell is yellow instead of green.
Congratulations.
The transformation is complete.
You are the FOBbit.
Of course, here is the dirty little secret.
The Army actually needs FOBbits.
Wars don’t run themselves.
Somebody has to move fuel, ammunition, replacements, intelligence, maintenance, money and thousands of other things across a battlefield.
Some exhausted staff officer has to figure out why 17 trucks exist on one spreadsheet, 16 exist on another and apparently 14 exist in physical reality.
The problem was never the guy sitting behind the desk.
The problem was the guy sitting behind the desk who forgot there was a war happening outside it.
That is why FOBbit humor was so brutally effective.
It wasn’t really about cowardice.
It was institutional quality control administered through ridicule.
The infantryman mocked the staff officer.
The staff officer mocked higher headquarters.
Higher headquarters mocked the Pentagon.
And the Pentagon responded by creating another mandatory annual training requirement.
The system worked perfectly.
And perhaps that’s the ultimate lifecycle of the American military officer.
At 22, you’re convinced you’re Patton.
At 30, you’re outside the wire making fun of FOBbits.
At 40, you’re inside the wire making PowerPoint slides.
At 45, you’re arguing passionately that the font on Slide 37 should be Arial.
Then one afternoon you find yourself sitting in an air-conditioned headquarters in a combat zone, eating Baskin-Robbins while sending an RFI to some poor bastard outside the wire.
You stop.
You look at the ice cream.
You look at the laptop.
You look at your clean uniform.
And the horrible truth finally arrives.
Oh, $hit!
I’m the FOBbit…
Somewhere Tolkien is laughing.
And somewhere outside the wire, a captain is calling you a staff weenie.
As God intended.
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