Elite Special Forces boot camp

Hi,

I've been doing some thinking on how one of my fictional countries is going to train their most elite sub-group of the special forces. It should be noted that this country is very left wing and it's people typically have morals that put high value on loving one's fellow man. My idea so far goes as follows.

This special sub-group has come to be known as Ignis.

Each batch of recruits will be trained in a group of 20 with one sergeant, Ignis is open to both males and females. Sergeants typically have a masters or doctorate degree in psychology.

During training hours and weeknights during sleeping hours sergeants will act as extremely harsh drill sergeants and are equipped with specialized rubber bats (or some other kind of weapon that will hurt and leave bruises but will be less prone to break bones) which they can use to beat trainees whenever they step out of line. Outside of these specified hours sergeants will be very friendly and will take the time talk and listen to the concerns of their trainees.

If trainees infight, bully, or hurt the feelings of any other trainee, regardless of the hour, the sergeant will treat said trainee with immediate corporal punishment. The sergeant will then take all parties involved, and will have with them a therapy session. Only two trainees and the sergeant will be involved in a session at once. When more than two parties are involved each pairing of trainees will be rotated in and out until all parties have had a therapy session one on one with the sergeant as a supervisor. When multiple parties were involved, there will also then be a quick group session. If for any reason a trainee seeks vengeance on another trainee for getting them into trouble, they will be severely beaten with each time they seek vengeance resulting in more sever the corporal punishment. Therapy sessions will also be repeated. Trainees who get along the worst will be grouped together at every possible opportunity.

Until basic training is over, no trainee can leave the base or quit the program without the permission of the sergeant; their rights to not override his authority. If the trainee wants to leave and the sergeant will not allow them to leave, they can make an appeal to the military court which will review their case but they typically won't make it out in under a week.

Affection, intimacy, and inter-reliance on one another is never stifled and is always encouraged between trainees. This is reinforced in part through survival exercises that stress teamwork and a groups ability to support it's members. Additionally Intimate and sexual contact is encouraged between trainees but it cannot violate the weekday bedtime hours or interfere during training hours. Contraceptives are provided. Couples that apply to join Ignis are almost always assigned to the same camp for training, for purposes of further comradery.

After the intense and long basic training, which lasts until it has been determined that all of the trainees have bonded with each other to some extent. All trainees will be put through an extreme psychological/survival test dubbed the Tentatio. Before this test, all trainees are reminded of what this test entails and are given the opportunity to leave the program honorably. Those who stay will have to endure the test. In the Tentatio all trainees will be monitored via special surveillance equipment. It is mandatory that all trainees stay together; separating from the group results in intervention and severe corporal punishment. The trainee who separates themselves from the group will then be dragged back to the group. The Tentatio does not end until either three trainees die, or one of the trainees intentionally takes his or her own life (if they separate themselves from the group first it will not count). Trainees are not allowed to encourage other trainees to commit suicide, this will be met with severe corporal punishment. If an encouraged suicide takes place, it will not count. Food and resources are removed gradually to increase stress. Any trainee who attempts to, or does, take the life of another trainee will be dishonorably removed from the program, but if a trainee attempts to, or does, take the life of another trainee as a preventive method to protect a third trainee, there is little to no punishment. At the end of this test, a funeral is held for those who died during the test, all trainees are required to attend.

After the Tentatio, trainees are given a short vacation on base and will then go through their advanced special forces training. The disciplinary rules of basic training will be reinstated here. During this time, each trainee will be carefully psychologically monitored. Three man psychological evaluations as well as group evaluations will be held regularly; the sergeant will discuss with the trainees what their mental states are, as well as their perceptions of their fellow trainees mental states. After three weeks of evaluation and continued training, trainees are finally permitted, and are encouraged, to leave the base during off hours. The advanced special forces training will then typically continue for several months.

When the trainees finally reach graduation, they will be assigned to 3-5 man cells based both on the skill set of each trainee, as well as who they spent the most time interacting positively with. The exception to this is when two trainees are in a relationship together, they will almost always be in a cell together. Trainees who fail to be compatible with 2 or more other trainees are honorably released from the program and are typically transferred to another branch of the special forces.

According to the founder of Ignis, in addition to trying to train the Ignis to become elite special forces, the program is intended to form between soldiers the intense camaraderie typically found only between soldiers who see harsh duty together. The program is also intended to erase societal taboos relating to human relationships from the minds of the trainees, that way they can come to understand one another better. This is meant to allow them to work even better as a team even under extreme and irregular circumstances that might cause normal squadmates to turn on one another. Lastly the program is intended to make Ignis soldiers used to death, especially the death of people that they come to know. This is so they will be prepared to cope with death in the field.

Critique and suggestions for the concept is much appreciated, I just started rolling the concept around in my head today. Thanks!

It's an interesting concept, but there a few things I'd like to say.

First of all, are these trainees soldiers who were chosen and recommended by their superiors to go to this school, or are they recruits making the transition from civilian to soldier? The term "boot camp" implies the latter, but you wouldn't stuff a fresh recruit into a special forces school before you had any practical idea of their abilities, will and motivation.

I highly recommend that you look up how boot camp actually works in Real Life, more specifically, the United States Marine Corps boot camp. Not only would you gain an understanding of the kind of training that goes on in those places, but also the smaller things, like drill instructors, their methods, and how the Crucible, the irl version of your Tentatio, works and is like.

Last thing: I kind of object with two things in your draft: The recruit death, and the procedure to drop out.

Death is well, a pretty big thing, and while YMMV, it seems pretty wasteful of recruits and money to just let them die. Not to mention, could you imagine the psychological trauma and PTSD that could cause, if they knew the only way out was for either three of them to die or one to commit suicide? And these guys haven't even made it to the battlefield yet!

As for dropping out, that seems pretty convoluted and red-tapey if you ask me. While you can't drop out of USMC boot camp (You signed the 4-year contract sucker!), you're free to drop out of stuff like sniper or recon school, in real life. Why? Because what's the point of keeping a student who's obviously not fit to become a scout sniper or recon marine or Special Forces in your case. If the person gives up or is found not to be fit, they should be allowed to wash out swiftly and with grace.

Recommended research: Selection for UK Special Forces, BUD/S for the US Navy SEALs...in fact, go look up the different real-life Special Forces groups and see what they do for training. The whole point of Special Forces is that you've invested a lot of resources in finding the best soldiers you can and giving them all kinds of expensive, time-consuming training. The Spartan Way? Right out. Some of these places have a 10% graduation rate; many trainees go through the course two or three times before they pass. There is no stigma attached for those who wash out.

Hence, dial down the overdramatic aspects. Anything you've seen from Starship Troopers, throw away. Go on a research binge or two about real-life SF organizations and how they select for and train their soldiers. (The Russian Spetsnaz groups may be an exception here because they drew from conscripts instead of professional soldiers, but even they had limits on what was okay and what was not to do to their trainees—it looks very bad if you lose someone that you as an officer are responsible for, after all.) Then tweak as needed.

I never watched starship troopers Sabre's Edge >.< . And Ignis is intended to achieve the spetsnaz level of hardness in their training program, perhaps surpass it; It is most certainly "The Spartan Way". Instead of teaching the trainees that they are emotionless machines however, the process is intended to form tight knit family-like connections between members of cells, but at the same time it's meant to teach them to be able to let go of this family without letting it break them, that's what the Tentatio is for.

Tehpillowstar, you have a point about the boot camp thing. I may restructure this concept so that it is more modular to the different corps in the military. The Tentatio is only intended for Ignis though. The recruit death is intended to put a mental strain on the recruits, they are supposed to feel as though they've been on the battlefield before they even get there. Recruits are allowed to drop out before the Tentatio because the recruit death is such a heavy thing. The Tentatio is never supposed to be forced, it's already scraping the barrier of what is humane. What actually inspired me to come up with the concept of Ignis was reading an autobiographic novel about World War I. The main character described himself and his friends as laughing and playing cards while all 5 of them were sitting naked on mess holes, all while under fire. This same character described what comradery was like. He described it as a stronger bond than any other, stronger than your bond with your family or even your spouse. Only going through hell with another man, as he described it, could forge that bond. The point of Ignis is really to put out cells of soldiers, fresh onto the battlefield, with that kind-of camaraderie already forged. That is why Ignis is a controversial and completely optional branch of the countries military.

Any more advice would be greatly appreciated, but the risk of causing emotional trauma is part of what Ignis is intended to put soldiers through.

The novel in question sounds like Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, but there is a lot of literature attesting to the "camaraderie of the trench", call it what you will. The thing is, the training program you're imagining would still be enormously impractical.

True, there's no real way to recreate the conditions of losing a battle buddy except to actually experience it—but that comes with the obvious downside that you're wasting a lot of perfectly good recruits. In a war, manpower is a limited and highly prized resource. If you take in a regiment of new bodies and use it to turn out half a regiment of soldiers conditioned to that level and half a regiment of corpses, it'd still be inferior to churning out a whole regiment of less-conditioned but still well-trained soldiers—especially in a war where every warm body you could throw into the meatgrinder counts! No point killing off your own soldiers when your enemy is happy to do it for you, after all, and the soldiers will do what soldiers have done for eternity: learn on the battlefield.

Plus, the approach you've described falls short in a lot of ways. One thing uniting soldiers is the feeling that they're in a common struggle, together against the common enemy. A training action like that one, and they'll be united all right—everyone against their officers. With US boot camps, the drill instructors make their recruits' lives a living hell to push them together, and there is much common resentment against them—but with a proper drill instructor, there is also the recognition that the gunny is doing it for the sake of you and your buddies, and that when push comes to shove, he will take care of you. With the system you've thought up, there isn't that crucial second half. So there might be unity and camaraderie, but it's the kind of unity found in paramilitaries and street gangs, where those in authority are seen as the enemies. Those would be the kind of soldiers who frag their officers and slack off on the offensive—after all, their enemy wouldn't be the state's enemy, but rather their own officers who killed half their buddies.

In short, better to do what real life military groups do: let experience the battlefield do the weeding instead of artificially imposing it with counterproductive methods of cruelty, and pick out the likely ones from there. For the rest, remember that for every highly-skilled elite regiment that an army has, there are ten less-skilled but just-as-crucial regular regiments—the frontoviki who do the bulk of the fighting.

Plus, there's something you seem to have forgot: the same static-warfare WWI conditions that bred the camaraderie of the trench also bred rock-bottom morale. For every Ernst Junger there was a Wilfred Owen. That's not the kind of mindset you want to inculcate into your troops before they hit the line.

edited 4th May '14 1:13:06 AM by SabresEdge

Ignis is intended to be a very small corps, similar to Vymple or Alfa subgroups of the Spetznaz, it's not supposed to be a main force. I suppose you have a point with the soldiers turning on their officers but every soldier is given the opportunity to drop out preceding the Tentatio, so as to not make it seem as if the officers are forcing them to go and die. Additionally that is why the drill Sergeants spend some of their time bonding with their trainees rather than riding their asses 24 hours a day. I realize that losing 3 out of 20 trainees can be wasteful, but it is a lot less wasteful than actually losing half. That's also why only a minimal percentage of soldiers are actually accepted into Ignis. Perhaps I should think of a program for weeding out recruits who apply for Ignis but really are not fit. Additionally I could increase the class size to further minimize the recruit death's effect of overall manpower.

Also Ironically im waist deep in Wilred Owen right now prepping for english exams lol.