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Original post can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/recommended-innovation-articles-and-commentary-8-first-earth-battalion-1979-army-field-manual-ba78904ef318

If you remember the George Clooney movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats”- it was a strange but “based on some real events” (and wildly exaggerated in Hollywood fashion) story about a special ops unit (coincidently called“Task Force Delta”- but not the same as the more well-known one from Fort Bragg (and Chuck Norris fame, cough, cough… Hollywood strikes again). This group adapted the “Delta” symbol in 1979 and just as it is used today by USSPACECOM in fact for different space applications and culture. The “Delta” is associated with change, innovation, difference, based in ancient Greek history and beliefs. This too was why LTC Jim Channon selected that symbol to represent this highly experimental unit.

There are even more similarities between the First Earth Battalion and USSPACECOM. Back in the late 1970s, the CIA, NSA, DIA and the US Army began investing billions of dollars into research on telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and other somewhat metaphysical concepts associated with the “New Age Movement” of the 1960s-1970s. They did this because China publicly reported in 1979 that several thousand of its children were capable of these abilities, and intelligence analysts feared that China was experimenting in creating “super soldiers” of the future. Even then, fears of Chinese new technological military capabilities would influence an American DoD reaction.

The Army created this experimental unit and assigned them at Fort Meade, Maryland as part of the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Linked below is their declassified Field Manual first printed in 1979, and only recently unclassified and made available online to the public. If you go through it, you may pick up on many themes that remain popular today but were quite radical and out-of-the-box at the time. There are also a slew of concepts that are metaphysical and isolated to the 1960s-1970s period that no longer are taken seriously. Readers may use their own judgment on which apply to what here.

Considering the whole person, relationships, emotions, total well-being; harmonizing groups, encouraging deep reflection and individual/team improvement; considering diet, exercise, spiritual and emotional heath, and more can be found in an Army manual crafted in 1979, even before the significant Army doctrinal shift in the early 1980s (operational art, operational level of war, the eventual establishment of SAMS, etc) as a clear result of post-Vietnam institutional soul searching.

Physically, the unit was way ahead of the DoD with cross-training, martial arts, meditation, and more. They argued for gender equality in military service decades ahead of the mainstream, and environmentalism for military forces as well. “Whole of the person” is popular only recently in organizations such as USSOCOM where the “total operator” is considered in a wide range of inter-related dimensions and aspects. Most all of that is here, in the earliest form created decades ahead of time. For those fans of maverick innovators such as General Billy Mitchell (U.S. Army Air Corps, the father of Naval Aviation), or going a generation earlier, Italian Army General Giulio Douhet, both visionary aviators…the institution rarely is kind to deep, forward thinkers. Both were court-martialed, with Douhet actually put in an Army prison for a year until they released him to put his ideas back into operation. Militaries tend to frown upon innovation if it is anything that disrupts the institutional identity and core belief systems and practices. This First Earth Battalion manual illuminates this tension in a powerful and historic time capsule of sorts.

Some of the controversial stuff included the radical notion that this unit answered to a higher power than the nation- that these “warrior monks” were in fact ‘guardians of Planet Earth’, and they represented a new way to approach war that might enable a different sort of conflict resolution to create lasting world peace and save the planet. Sound a bit familiar? They also studied and attempted to prove mind control, telepathy, telekinesis, and lots of “mind over matter” metaphysical stuff that at the time was being explored by militaries and scientists as well as the CIA, KGB, etc.

You can get a clean text version of the document here online: Journal of Non-lethal Combat: The First Earth Battalion (ejmas.com)

https://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_channon_0200.htm

Again- this is perhaps one of the most radical units ever created for experimentation and future thinking by the military. Yet looking back some four decades to when this was cutting-edge, they did get many things right. This represents perhaps the most divergent, counter-culture sort of organization a military force might envision. It also is likely why mandatory drug testing became widespread in the 1980s. : ) As an aside, when I interviewed a former SAMS Director for my upcoming book on the Military Design Movement, he told me how the school invited LTC (retired) Jim Channon to speak to faculty and students in the early 2000s. Most recollections are very positive, with students fascinated by his vision, ideas, and desire to transform the military that appeared as revolutionary in the 2000s as it was in the late 1970s. Perhaps Channon’s vision requires a little more time, and potentially for organizations such as both the U.S. Space Command and the U.S. Space Force (a ‘new’ service in a ‘new’ domain requiring new war theory and new cultural identity unique to it’s form-function-purpose), this is a useful resource and historical case study to ponder.

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