Victory Disease? I don't think so, son.
I am a graduate of the Naval War College. I think I have some idea what our forces can do if unleashed. Our boys are being killed in Iraq by timid leadership out of the State Dept, and our honorable desire to protect civilian life. If we wanted to destroy Iraq or any enemy, our forces could do so without much of a problem.
I am a graduate of the Naval War College. I'm impressed. (no sarcasm, I'm serious). The question is, "When we have control of an AO, say Iraq, but continue to lose troops to pinprick attacks, is that the victory a professional warrior calls it, or the defeat the press does?"
We can't "nuke em all and let God sort 'em out," as emotionally saftisfying as it is to fantasize about that. That is unacceptable to a moral nation, which we still are, the best efforts of Hollywood and Clinton having availed little in that direction.
When I expound on strategy, I am playing in leagues above my formal military education, most of which was oriented to identifying, finding, and killing terrorists, or operating in strictly denied areas in all conditions and climates. I've never planned an operation beyond a few hundred guys, and was never the man whose signature was on the final plan. But I read the same stuff y'all do at the War College, and probably more of it, in all modesty.
What I keep coming up with for Iraq is:
- Build Iraqi institutions so they can take on more of the burden themselves.
- Protect our troops, especially our logistics "tail," to the degree we can.
- Conduct an aggressive, active intel, active CI, and special operations campaign against the insurgent cells, and especially THEIR leadership and logistics.
- Conduct ongoing and sophisticated information operations on multiple targets:
- The insurgents: make them despair and give up.
- The public: encourage them to turn in the insurgents
- The Iraqi security forces: stiffen their spine
- Other Arab nations' populations: to undermine their support for the insurgency.
- The US population and media: to make them understand that Rome wasn't built in a day.
Of all these, I think we are doing most of them. The IO war could be conducted with more verve, panache and imagination; there needs to be one leader in charge (and if there already is, a head should roll [probably a bad metaphor to use here]) and there needs to be one unified plan, and if that is happening I don't see the indicators.
Things we could add to the mix:
- The shooters need to understand that there is no percentage in taking these guys alive.
- The SJAs need their collective asses kicked, and they need to go back to the books. The ununiformed, non-observant-of-the-laws-of-war guerillas are not protected as combatants by the laws of land warfare, and by extending them a protection they don't deserve, we are undermining ourselves. We need to put out the word that if you are caught with military arms in your hand, or your house, or your yard, the sentence is death by hanging and every corporal in the occupation army has the authority to carry it out. If the lawyers don't like it, we should hang a few of them pour encourager les autres. It would work well to shake down the hanging process before we inflict it on the hapless terrorists, too.
- We should remove bodies of insurgents and burn them unshriven in the landfills with the other garbage. We can probably find some tame clerics to bless this -- Islam is whatever any geezer with a biker beard wants it to be, anyway.
- if we haven't got the national balls to execute this plan, we ought to encourage the Iraqis to do it. From their standpoint, these insurgents are traitors and I doubt they'll have any trouble with hanging 'em.
Some people may think I am not a nice guy. Oh, well. I don't recommend we play hardball at random, or inflict mass punishment, but the bad guys that run up against us need to know they lost. Nothing like a hanging to get that point across.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F