BOOK REVIEW: Infantry Combat, The Rifle Platoon

There are a lot of weird experimental products in the world of Military Publishing…there’s no other subject for adults where professional volumes are published in the same format as children’s picture books where every other page is a full page image so that when you hold it in your hands you always have 50% picture/50% text, and yet that’s exactly how military atlas’s are formatted. They’re amazing!

Example of a WW1 military atlas from Amber books.

Likewise military identification/vehicle guides, book length manuals or ship tours, or regimental campaign histories and memorabilia… These push the limits of the publishing medium, because they have to. The subject matter is complex, technical, tactile, risky, and multifaceted enough that aside from experimental horror novels or the vanishingly rare graphic novel… Nothing pushes the limits of paper so completely… indeed there are almost certainly some military history books that rival the experimental horror novel House of Leaves in terms of sheer medium breaking complexity.

And while Colonel John F. Antal hasn’t produced the most complex example of this… He may have produced one of the most experimental.

Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) In the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.

And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos is really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…

And It just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.

It actually does push the format of the “Choose your own adventure novel” incredibly far in terms of complexity. I’ve never seen one before that included several pages of charts just to track your decisions down the matrix.

The setup is primally simple.

You are US Army 2nd Lieutenant Davis. While it isn’t your first-First day, it is nearly your first after getting to the unit, and a very unlucky one at that.

You graduated West Point, attended ranger school, and this is day 2-3 of your first command.

America’s army is in an unnamed country and temporarily outnumbered as it is invaded, however they’re just dumb Arabs… it’s fine. Will probably get settled at the negotiating, and beside you have air dominance and the technological marvel of the US Military behind you.

Note this map is oriented 90 degrees off. North is on the left, east at the top. The triangle are a tank ditch meant to stop armoured vehicles (like a massive dry moat)

The main force isn’t going to be attacking you.

Your lone platoon of just 38 will be defending Wadi Al Sirree, a narrow mountain pass seperate and a little ahead of your main force.

You might think this is a little exposed but they’re almost certainly going to exploit the open country with their armor and proceed up the dirt road to hit the 1st armoured battalion and the rest of your company. This is the fastest way they can proceed and exploit their momentary numbers in the theater before the rest of the US military arrives. Your pass isn’t valuable much at all for a ground invasion, and besides there's a massive tank ditch and other obstacles that will deter the enemy. Your troops are really just there as an auxiliary to the land and the ditch. Maybe spot some artillery fire.

But hey! This is a great opportunity to see what war in the late 20th early 21st century is about up close and personal. Just keep your head down, let your NCOs who have the experience do their jobs, and you’ll get a nice combat medal on your second day on the job. Just try not to get in people’s way.

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As you can guess, the job of a Infantry commander is probably a bit more complex than that…

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But this is the real genius of the work.

You might rightly think: “Really a choose your own adventure novel?” Video games are mocked for their role-play unreality and detachment from actual combat… And they have dozens if not hundreds of technological mechanisms to get you to engage. A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.

But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.

I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.

Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…

But i died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.

One of the things I’ll really credit the work for is how fair it is. If you’re like a random mother who’s done nothing military or even really outdoorsy, but you just think things through, have good instincts, and pay attention… You could get the best ending first try.

Indeed every decision is actually signposted fairly intensively… Not necessarily in the individual section where the decision is made, but something in the early sections, some throwaway lines that just read like flavour text, or a train of thought Davis has that comes to a conclusion and all the steps just feel like character building… Buried in long strings of of concepts and info reports, and the conditions of the troops, all the relevant information is there.

Weirdly enough the writer Antal reminds me most of is J.K. Rowling, she does the same thing but with the solutions to her mysteries and hints at character outcomes being buried in the mood details and magical nonsense that’s hard to visualize…

So if you’re a novelist, they’re an interesting compare and contrast.

Except with Antal’s work your direct success or failure depends on your ability to think through and visualize and build a mental model of the information presented. Whether you are able to visualize the space and where your men and the enemy are has a big impact on how you make some decisions.

Likewise you’re heavily punished for trying to game it. If you’re a fan Video Game RPGs you’ve almost certainly had tropes trained into you that you must do these things when prompted this way or a party member will die and you’ll be forced to feel bad, etc…

NOPE. Antal gives you none of these tropes and obvious wins, if anything he baits you several times tempting you to do the narratively appropriate thing that a sympathetic video game or TV writer would put in, and then ruthlessly punishing you for it because what actually matters are the principles of leadership and infantry warfare, not narrative satisfaction.

Indeed one could say the narrative itself is fairly unsatisfying (the best ending is actually the least narratively and thematically compelling), but that’s really secondary to the fact this is meant to be a exercise-book to be pared with a textbook or other subject matter research. Don’t get me wrong, it stands incredibly well on its own, indeed of all the books on “Leadership” that are put out there, this might be the only one I’ve read or encountered that actually teaches valuable lessons in its theming and experience that would transfer to a business or personal capacity. But it is by no means exhaustive, its few concepts it teaches VERY VERY WELL, and some of them are ethos or attitude concepts it’d be hard to imagine teaching from any other book… but the book is not teaching you rifle squad formations, or breaching, or identifying force elements, or 95% of the technical knowledge an Infantry officer would need to be familiar with.

It is concerned with some the nature of decision making and some basic tactical concepts. Under stress. Where quality of leadership matters.

And for how bloody shallow the book’s main mechanism is, just a series of A-B binary choices… My God does it teach you a lot about decision making.

Mainly that the decisions which determine success or failure are often made days, hours, weeks, or even years before the event. Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal descision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…

And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.

I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.

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So before I go into the spoilers below (WHICH YOU SHOULD NOT READ) I’m STRONGLY recommending “Infantry Combat: the Rifle Platoon” and would like to really encourage my readers to get the kindle edition at amazon, or grab it from a library, or just grab a PDF from an archive site (you can buy the paperback later if you like it) and just read through til you get ONE ending, take note of the numbered sections you go through so you can retrace your thought process later…

But this is one really unique experience you’re never going to get to do blind again, and who knows you might find out you’re a natural God of War and get the best ending first try no problem…. or like me you’ll get a bad ending do to a choice you made…. And what mistake it is will tell you a lot about yourself. Seriously the average run is like 20 pages total, it’s short, but because there are so many branching paths and so many different temptations, and ways to be mistaken, it almost turns into a personality test.

Horoscopes for mil nerds.

And if you really like the work Col. Antal also has the Sister works “Armor Attacks: The Tank Platoon” and “Combat Team: The Captain’s War”… However I think Infantry Combat is probably both the most primally eternal, and the one most relevant to us thinking in a prepper manner.

And given how blown away I was by Infantry Combat, I’ll probably checkout Antal’s other books Next War: Reimaging how we Fight and 7 Seconds to Die: A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the Future of Warfighting.

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Also any Video Game writers should study Antal’s books because the decisions are that cleverly designed and well written, if an RPG included decisions this cleverly designed it’d be one of the best written games of all time.

TL;DR: Great Read, Highly Recommend. Go get your first ending and comment about what it taught you about yourself. DON’T READ THE SPOILERS

SPOILER SECTION

It was really happening during the Emu War the whole time.

I’m going to TRY to avoid spoiling the actual tactical decisions so that any of you who did not heed my advice can still get something out of the work (seriously to get to an ending is like a total of 10-20 ages… It is very worth it) But diving in…

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So the twist Antal reveals at the end is that everything about this happening during a fictional future war in the middle east? That was fake.

This was a real battle, it all happened, the overwhelming force, etc…. In World War 2.

He changed a bunch, there were no overflying f-18s and helicopters in WW2, but the core tactical scenario, the overwhelming odds and the decisions that had to be made just right by the junior officers for it to actually work… All of that was basically real to a battle that happened in 1940s North Africa.

The very first decision of a forward slope defense vs. ambush in paths, vs. reverse slope Defense? That was a decision faced there in 1940s North Africa and did make all the difference.

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And for 1995… That alone is quite the statement.

In 1995 America had just rolled over the Iraqi army in Desert Storm, and the Disaster that was the Battle of Mogadishu, as immortalized by Black Hawk Down still resulted in a 10 to 1 favourable casualty ratio for the American special forces involved.

The idea American soldiers were hyper-skilled supermen able to roll over lesser forces, even when massively outnumbered, was a major “lesson” of the early 90s, and is seemingly still believed by politicians, neo-cons, and boomer commentators to this day…

The fact that that is largely illusory and that it is VERY possible for a merely competent or numerically superior or just lucky enemy to just crush an American unit or even force with a single brilliancy or one lucky break if they find themselves overexposed and/or complacent…. That’s a lesson a whole lot of Army and Marine officers currently deployed to Iraq, Syria, and Eastern Europe as “Tripwire” forces should be thinking very deeply about.

While things are much different now from 1943 or 1995… with the complexity of the information space, the advancement in weapons systems, and the rise of FPV drones changing a lot of the battlefield… Fundamentally Infantry tactics, and more importantly infantry principles and risks, remain the same as they ever were.

And while Antal’s warning of armor attacks and conventional yet adaptive enemy combined arms campaigns have not occurred, at least against American troops; You could have told a similar story with an example from Vietnam or other counter-insurgency war (such as the war in North Ireland at that exact moment), or the Urban warfare that occurred in Italy in 1943, and it WOULD have been a prescient warning about the mess Americans did face when they were forced to face, not a near peer enemy employing conventional forces against infantry, but the danger of Infantry and unconventional forces against conventional American units.

If Antal had Chosen the battle of Ortona instead of El Guettar I might now be talking about how he had predicted Fallujah.

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But going into my experience reading the work and not getting the best ending first time (Major Spoilers Now):

I recognized the Forward Slope Defense that “my” Sergeant Piper had selected (I can’t tell American Sergeant ranks apart, Canada has 1 Sergeant rank, Americans seem to have 10) was terrible even before the choice was presented, usually when you’re a weaker force exposed to enemy fire you want to “keyhole” behind narrow obstacles such that you control where the enemy can see and fire at you from… This I mostly know from very low level individual tactics from video-games and books about snipers, but the exposed forward position was obviously vulnerable to just being pounded at max range by enemy armour and artillery. Then when the option was presented to defend via ambushing in the multiple passes I correctly thought to myself that this would make command and control a nightmare and make the weaker divided troops vulnerable to defeat in detail (you certainly don’t want to divide your forces when you’re already outnumbered).

So even before the words “reverse slope defense” appeared on the page and I remembered this was how Wellington nullified much of Napoleon’s advantage in cannon, that stretch of the map just seemed like the obvious point to mount a defense.

So already about 2/3rds of the book and the further mistakes you could make are eliminated.

Then I made 3 mistakes in a row that had way less to do with the tactics than my lack of leadership instincts.

First, Sergeant Piper suggested that the troops needed to rest before finishing their fighting positions later in the day… not thinking I assumed he had a good estimate of how long that’d take and how necessary those fighting positions were, that we had ample time that it was better to avoid casualties from heat stroke… Usually how long it takes to dig holes and the necessity of digging those holes, is the kind of thing you could trust a Sergeant to understand (I’m reading a book I can’t look at the holes myself). However he was talking out his ass!

There was NOT enough time, if you choose to give them a break they don’t finish the fighting positions and have to go to war without overhead cover, and will inevitably be ripped apart by artillery once the enemy figures out where you are.

Now, on the face of it, anything could have interrupted us and made that “time to rest” disappear and throw us behind schedule on that fatally necessary work… so it is a leadership failure on my part. However when I realized this, after he had tried to bully 2nd Lt. Davis into ignoring his tactical judgement, I grew to hate Sergeant Piper, an emotion that doubled and tripled when I went back and reread some of the bad routes I didn’t take, and saw him doing shit like this ALL THE TIME. Tempting you to every kind of negligence or mistake, on basic soldiering matters that a reasonable person would expect him to understand as senior NCO, and that a very junior officer would understandably feel they should defer to his expertise on. Between this and his insubordination at the start of the book I was FUCKING FURIOUS when he got promoted to officer rank in the final good ending.

You add up all the shit he pulls, across 5 or 6 different paths, so basically what he’d do during a campaign and he’d easily wipe out a platoon or more on his own.

This ending actively makes me more cruel and judgemental, if there’s ever a war so catastrophic and long lasting that I of all people wind up in a leadership position I am vastly more likely to demand court martials for minor fuckups now that I have dealt with Sergeant Piper.

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All of this was a great lesson, these are good principles to teach, and these are the temptations that present themselves, but ya if I’m ever leading anything like that I’ll be vastly harsher because of it.

The second mistake, and the one that got me killed first run, was when my forces were divided in the night and it seemed they might get ambushed I decided to personally run to grab Piper and his team (this division was not Piper’s fault) and then one of Piper’s men panicking lit me up and I died right there.

Part of this was a videogame-ism where in almost any other RPG type game doing “More effort” or taking more personal risk when given the option almost ALWAYS results in a better outcome (to the point where you do this without thinking), but this was actually a really cool lesson, This was a really good demonstration of the principle of security, a great lesson overall… and I actually wish video games would incorporate more stuff like this where taking heroic action is the mistake and actually considered inaction, or trust, that’s the right decision. I know it got me to think twice about everything going forward, as stated any Video Game writers should study Antal’s books because the decisions are that cleverly designed and well written.

Then the final mistake I made after dying to friendly fire the first time was Calling back my forward observer when he requested to be pulled out… I really didn’t understand how completely dependent on forward observers fighting forces are, and that by doing so I was:

A. Blinding my entire unit in the midst of a fight.

B. Throwing away our artillery advantage and effectively 90+% of our firepower.

Again a lot of this was “Gamer-instinct” where if you’ve played videogames you’re used to always responding with concern to the NPC begging you to relieve them of their dangerous duty…, but ya complete mistake on my part, very valuable lesson, think I got the “pyrrhic victory” ending on that one.

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And those were my 3 mistakes. After that I got through the Initial defensive action and the counter-attack without issue.

No Idea if that speaks to good instincts or bad, but I’ve learned I much prefer the attack than the defense.

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Anyway, great book, If you read this without going through the book yourself, then shame on you… Take 3 shots and try to forget the specifics of what I said.

And check it out! I will also be reviewing Antal’s other books eventually.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak