Talk:Unit cohesion

Improvements

The weakness of this new article is that it doesn't have enough on what unit cohesion is, and how it is formed, or its relationship to battlefield success. The "strength" if I may say so is that it's well referenced. --Uncle Ed (talk) 18:03, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, George, Alexander L. (1967), The Chinese Communist Army in Action: The War and its Aftermath, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, OCLC 284111 systematically examines about how Chinese unit cohesion is formed and how it differs from American unit cohesion. I believe the same research exists for Soviet Army and Imperial Japanese Army since the topic of Chinese unit cohesion just keep referencing back to those earlier models. Jim101 (talk) 03:27, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Interesting you should mention that, because I've just started reading comparisons between Mao's views on unit cohesion and those of the American military leadership during the Vietnam War era. One writer suggests that Mao had it right, and that America lost the war (er, ahem, decided to pull out) in part because of policies that were detrimental to unit cohesion. Rotating officers out after a 6-month tour was one such policy.

Disclaimer: I never served in combat, and my reading on this topic is dilatory (dilettantish?) at best. --Uncle Ed (talk) 04:34, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Why is this an article?

It seems to be simply the combination of:

1. a WP:DICTDEF
2. a WP:QUOTEFARM &
3. material already covered, in context at Don't ask, don't tell

Any reason it should not be redirected to the latter article, or deleted? Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 05:32, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

NPOV

This article is US-centric. DADT is also not a unit-cohesion problem, since gays are known to be more cohesive when in coupled pairs as a military unit than any other kind of military unit. Sacred Band anyone? 65.94.45.160 (talk) 06:16, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Undue weight to Palmer

Why is this article relying on a mere journalist for its definition of the topic, let alone quoting him extensively? Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 07:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

That was my error: the Slate article was simply the first one I found when I googled the topic. I should have realized that the concept of unit cohesion has been around for centuries, if not millenia, but its importance has been deemphasized in the last few decades. --Uncle Ed (talk) 19:24, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, perhaps you could put a bit more thought into a topic before you dump an article on it into mainspace (it might also help rectify the fact that your new creations, almost ubiquitously either fail to articulate notability, or turn out to be quotefarms). I can see no evidence that "its importance has been deemphasized in the last few decades" -- certainly not since Vietnam. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 20:47, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

What happens when unit cohesion breaks down

Freud and Major Van Epps, writing several decades apart, wrote about what happens when unit cohesion breaks down. I don't know why the Freud quote was deleted: he was speaking about a group (not the entire institution of a nation's military). Van Epps gives a non-military example of men fighting a forest fire whose unit lost its cohesion when the entered a situation that was much more dangerous than they were led to expect; they disobeyed their leader and ran away in panic (all but 3 died); only the leader survived. Van Epps says a similar thing happened in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir when a large combat team disintegrated under mounting pressure from the Chinese, while a group of Marines in the same battle escaped. --Uncle Ed (talk) 20:31, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Freud was deleted because he wasn't talking about unit cohesion, but "libidinal ties" in the army (and the Catholic church) as a whole. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 20:44, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Hrafn, try googling "unit cohesion" and "freud". Oh, hell, lemme do it for ya (but this is absolutely the last time I'll do your homework): Web ... Scholar ... Books. If Freud wasn't talking about unit cohesion, why do so many writers on unit cohesion believe he was? Prior to Freud's fall from grace in mainstream psychiatric thinking, his theories were obviously taken seriously in studies of unit cohesion (this was news to me, but undeniable all the same), and in fact at least one of the sources cited for this article (van Epps) cites Freud directly. Whether Freud's theories of military cohesion were predicated on "libidinal ties" is irrelevant -- Freud predicated his very influential thinking on a lot of assumptions that turned out to be crap. (E.g., penis envy.) It's appropriate for this article to contain discussions of how psychiatric thinking on unit cohesion has evolved. Nnot least because it has evolved beyond Freud, including among military psychiatrists. Indeed, had it not, we wouldn't even have had DADT. Yakushima (talk) 07:24, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Yakushima: try looking up WP:Synthesis. Now take your google search and stick it where the sun don't shine -- if you aren't citing a source then it's irrelevant to this discussion. If Freud is talking about "unit cohesion" then find a WP:SECONDARY source that says so -- as Freud himself sure as hell does not! Freud ONLY speaks about "libidinal ties" -- he makes no mention of unit cohesion. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 07:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

van Epps (cited in the article) says so. I was about to add him as a cite, in fact, when you reverted my edit. As for responding to my edit, and to my pointing out extensive military science literature that cites Freud, with "stick it where the sun don't shine", shall we initiate editor dispute-resolution procedures? Yakushima (talk) 07:45, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

You restored the material cited only to Freud, so only Freud is relevant to the question of whether the material is verifiable or WP:Synthesis. Your "try googling 'unit cohesion' and 'freud'" was thus irrelevant, and your "Oh, hell, lemme do it for ya" was adding supercilious insult to pig-headed-full-speed-ahead-and-damn-the-policy injury. So darn shootin' tootin' falutin' right I told ya to "stick it where the sun don't shine". Freud's opinions may have been relevant to the historical development of unit cohesion, but there's little in the cited writings to indicate that he was thinking in these terms (and the language he does use does not exactly add clarity to this) -- so you need to source claims about him to secondary sources who do in fact discuss his writings in these terms, not Freud himself. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 08:13, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Never-ending WP:DEADHORSE in ubiquituous violation of WP:TALK's instruction to "Comment on content, not on the contributor"
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Look, if Ed Poor has the problem that he thinks a string of quotes constitutes an article, you seem to have the problem of thinking -- contra WP:PRESERVE -- that every problem with a passage should be approached by first making it go away, not by seeing if there's actually something to the passage. In WP:BLP, that might be defensible. But this is not a biography, much less one for a living person. I have provided an alternative passage that should address your concerns. I do not, however, consider that you're editing cooperatively here. For one thing, editing cooperatively requires far more actual work than you seem willing to put into this article, which (you claim on your Talk page) you're not even very interested in. Yakushima (talk) 08:23, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Removing (a quite small amount of) material that is blatant synthesis is hardly a violation of WP:PRESERVE. There is nothing in that policy, which states "Preserve appropriate content" that suggests that material that violates clearly WP:NOR need be kept -- in fact it explicitly states "WP:No original research discusses the need to remove original research". I would further point out that, apart from this one issue, my changess on this article have tended to be fairly 'preservative' -- moving things around & rewriting, rather than removal. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 08:41, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Yes, but you made your feelings about the article quite clear, in the AfD discussion: you thought it shouldn't exist, and (since you have not yet said otherwise) you think it's only worth keeping because you think it's about some different subject now. Your arguments for deletion amounted to nothing more than WP:UGLY and WP:UNENCYC, and your opinion that it's now about a different subject can have no other basis than a simple failure to read sources, both those cited in the article and those freely available through the obvious web searches. I saw the Freud passage as worth keeping because van Epps cited it, and quoted it. You didn't read van Epps, apparently because you somehow knew it couldn't contain anything relevant, for this article which you have said doesn't actually interest you! Really: go somewhere else. Some of us are working hard trying to (re-)write an article, and I know I don't feel any particular onus to measure up to your standards of perfection. I just want to see the article get the point of "good enough to not be an embarassment to Wikipedia". Between wrangling on the AfD discussion and WP:PRESERVE-violating edits to this article, you've done little but slow the process down. Want to start reversing that impression? Add content. Based on research. You know, like: Real Work? Yakushima (talk) 10:12, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Your claims about my AfD arguments are (i) WP:Complete bollocks (the policies/guidelines I referred to were WP:DICTDEF, WP:QUOTEFARM/WP:INDISCRIMINATE & WP:CFORK, NOT "WP:UGLY and WP:UNENCYC") & (ii) WP:DEADHORSE (as I've long since mooted that view as being about the original-now-non-existent article. None of those policies (with the possible exception of WP:DICTDEF -- clearly not a problem to anyone who'd trouble themselves with websearches, which you obviously didn't do), are reasons for deletion, which is what an AfD is about, is it not? The "original-now-non-existent" article is little more than a reorganized paraphrasing of what used to be directly quoted, plus some added substantiation for the claim that the term predates DADT controversies. WP:CFORK was clearly wrong -- the article contained quotes and references to material not available in DADT and related articles. How the article "no longer exists" when it's actually rewrite of an existing article that was never deleted -- uh, this must be some definition of "exists" in your imagination. Yakushima (talk) 13:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Your "WP:PRESERVE-violating" claim is directly contradicted by that section explicitly referring to "WP:No original research discusses the need to remove original research". Which is immediately preceded by this: Instead of deleting text, consider: rephrasing correcting inaccuracy while keeping the rest of the content intact moving text within an article or to another article (existing or new) adding more of what you think is important to make an article more balanced requesting a citation by adding the tag doing a quick search for sources and adding a citation yourself adding appropriate cleanup tags to problematic sections repair a dead link if a new URL .... None of which you even tried, from what I can see. Yakushima (talk) 13:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Your whole comment is in gross violation of WP:TALK: "Comment on content, not on the contributor"] Takes one to know one, apparently. To repeat the offer: care to go to dispute resolution procedures? Yakushima (talk) 13:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC) As far as I can see your last comment serves no useful purpose whatsoever. The synthesis that was there has now been removed, the AfD appears to be heading towards WP:SNOW, so "drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass", please. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 11:02, 26 April 2011 (UTC) Not while you keep chopping pieces off of the article in question, in violation of the spirit and letter of WP:PRESERVE. The Freud reference was relevant. You didn't know that, not just because you're ignorant of the subject, but far worse: you hardly lift a finger to inform yourself about it. This much will be clear not only to anyone seriously involved in the discussion here, and with your edits to the article and contributions to the AfD, but to any mediator who looks into the details. The obvious question arises, again: if you're not actually interested in the subject, as you've admitted on your talk page, what are you persisting executing summary judgments against the edits of those who are better informed about it? Why not just move on, even if it's only to WP:HARASS somebody less inclined to fight back against you? Yakushima (talk) 13:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Structure: suggestions?

There is now enough material to make overall structure an issue. A better structure would facilitate constructive edits. But unit cohesion is a complex topic -- finding a more-or-less straightline reading of it doesn't seem easy.

Up to now, I've felt deferring organizational issues is best. Where others have edited in sub-topic headings, I've mostly removed and rearranged, wherever I felt the very existence of a heading could place WP:UNDUE emphasis on one category or another of person or issue. I'd seriously like to avoid edit warring at a time when the expiration of DADT is stoking the issue and lending the term "unit cohesion" an undesirable political charge.

An obvious approach: A mere chronological ordering. But this could invite invite confusing sprawl. So what to do?

In an intriguing comment in the AfD discussion, the glimmerings of a topic outline might be seen:

Comment- References have the term used in discussions of gender & racial integration, religious differences, high turnover rate in short tours, differing tour lengths between services, impact of casualties, death and suicides on deployed units, relieving commanders, reported sexual assault and harassment incidents (confirmed and those deemed false)... Dru of Id (talk) 10:28, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Some of these seem like second-order effects (e.g., "differing tour lengths between services" - eh? How's that work?). But others seem pretty big, even where they hadn't occurred to me -- e.g., religious differences. I think a rough chronological ordering of the issues of minority assimilation is appropriate somewhere -- it should go a long way toward putting DADT debates (which are big now, of course, but that's mostly recency bias) into proper perspective. Beyond that, I don't think it makes much sense to take a chronological approach, since categories like impact of casualties, etc., are almost certainly timeless and universal.

Taking a more taxonomy-first/chronology-second approach, I see the coarse-grain structure of the article as something like this - off the top of my head:

• Intro
• Brief history of the concept
• Theoretical issues for unit cohesion (roughly chronological)
  • Theory of maneuvers
  • Responses to casualties
  • Responses to command changes
  • Turnover
• Historical social issues for unit cohesion (roughly chronological)
  • Class
  • Religion
  • Race
  • Gender
  • Sexual orientation

I like this ordering partly because anybody arriving at the article with their brains on fire over DADT issues are likely to leave it with glazed eyes, if they aren't actually interested in unit cohesion as such. But it might have some fatal flaw -- some of you out there who know much more than I do can undoubtedly see it, if so. Yakushima (talk) 14:46, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm also no expert but I used the same approach on the article human wave attack, so this is a good start. Just make sure that you take the extra effort to keep popular media sources out and professional military science sources in, and there is no way this article will get devolved into childish bickering about DADT (or segregation or what not). Jim101 (talk) 23:42, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

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