Bah, POW courses are mostly wayang, even in the so called
"tough" armed forces.
The truth of the matter is, when you are a real POW, you suck thumb
have to endure the torture, or else, too bad you're dead. In the
end, when you are POW, there's little you can really do about your
situtation. POW courses are nice, but affect the outcome little.
Broken and whimpering on TV? There's no shame in being scared when
you're a POW.
In the end, tougher soldiers are nice, but the basic requirement of
a soldier is to get to the position to project firepower in a
controlled manner so as to achieve the victory conditions. There
are many ways to achieve this. In the end, you can create a very
tough, high attrition rate course to create tough soldiers but in
the end the gain in combat effectiveness is marginal and certainly
not worth the cost and energy put into training such
soldiers.
As long as a soldier can be basically fit to survive in the field,
and do his job, that's about as good as you can get. Far more
energy can be put into making him do his job smarter, rather then
harder, to use the stuff between his ears to survive rather then
sheer brawn.
Adolf believed that the soft children of american democracy would
be little match for the tough, disciplined professional soldiers of
nazi germany. He guessed wrongly. In the end, plenty of factors
determine how to win a war, and the toughness of the troops, while
nice, is something that history has shown time and time again, can
be made up for if you have other factors. In the end it's about
what's most effective. It's nice to have a tough army, but is it
pratical? Given our current situtation?
