Posted on 05/18/2006 10:10:11 AM PDT by river rat
On Recent Wars
Things Not Figured Out
May 17, 2006
People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can’t get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, etc. Why don’t they learn?
The answer I think is that militaries are influenced by a kind of man—call him the Warrior—who by nature is unsuited for modern wars. He doesn’t understand them, can’t adapt to them.
The Warrior is emotionally suited to pitched, Pattonesque battles of moral clarity and simple intent. I don’t mean that he is stupid. Among fighter pilots and in the Special Forces for example it is not uncommon to find men with IQs of 145. Yet emotionally the Warrior has the uncomplicated instincts of a pit bull. Intensely loyal to friends and intensely hostile to the enemy, he doesn’t want any confusion as to which is which. His tolerance for ambiguity is very low. He wants to close with the enemy and destroy him.
This works in wars like WWII. (Note that the American military is an advanced version of the military that beat Germany and Japan.) It does not work when winning requires the support of the population. The Warrior, unable to see things through the eyes of the enemy, or of the local population, whom he quickly comes to hate, wants to blow hell out of things. He detests all that therapeutic crap, that touchy-feely leftist stuff about respect the population, especially the women. Having the empathy of an engine block, he regards mention of mutilated children as intensely annoying at best, and communist propaganda at worst.
On the net these men sometimes speak approvingly to each other of the massacre at My Lai. Hey, they were all Cong. If they weren’t, they knew who the Cong were and didn’t tell us. Calley did the right thing, taught them a lesson. There is an admiration of Calley for having avoided bureaucratic rules of engagement probably dreamed up by civilians. War is war. You kill people. Deal with it.
If you point out that collateral damage (dead children, for example) makes the survivors into murderously angry Viet Cong, the Warrior thinks that you are a lefty tree-hugger.
Today, the battlefield as understood by the enemy, but seldom by the Warrior, extends far beyond the physical battlefield, and the chief targets are political. In this kind of war, if America can get the local population to support it, the insurgents are out of business; if the insurgents can get the American public to stop supporting the war, the American military is out of business. This is what counts. It is what works. The Warrior, all oooh-rah and jump wings, doesn’t get it. Vo Nguyen Giap got it. Ho Chi Minh got it.
Thus the furious, embittered insistence of Warriors that “We won Tet of ’68. We slaughtered them! We won, dammit! Militarily, we absolutely won!” Swell, but politically they lost. It was a catastrophe on the order of Kursk or Dien Bien Phu. But they can’t figure it out.
The warrior doesn’t understand what “victory” means because he thinks in terms of firefights, courage, weaponry, and valor. His approach is emotional, not rational. Though not stupid, he is regularly out-thought. Why?
It’s not mysterious. An intelligent enemy knows that America cannot be beaten at industrial war. So he thinks, “What then are America’s weaknesses?” The first and crucial one is that the American government enters into distant wars in which the public has no stake. Do you want your son to die for—get this—democracy in Iraq? You diapered him, got him through school-yard fist fights, his first prom, graduation from boot camp, and he comes home in a box—for democracy in Iraq?
The thing to do, then (continues thinking the intelligent enemy) is to make the Americans grow sick of the war. How? Not by winning battles, which is difficult against the Americans. You win otherwise. First, don’t give them point targets, since these are easily destroyed by big guns and advanced technology. Second, keep the level of combat high enough to maintain the war in the forefront of American consciousness, and to keep the monetary expense high. (Inflation and gasoline prices are weapons as much as rifles, another idea that the Warrior just doesn’t get. Bin Laden does.) Third, keep the body bags flowing. Sooner or later the Americans will weary of losing their sons for something that doesn’t really interest them.
However, the Warrior does not grant the public the right to grow weary. For him, America exists to support the military, not the other way around. Are two hundred dead a week coming back from Asia? The Warrior believes that small-town America (which is where the coffins usually go) should grit its teeth, bear down, and make the sacrifice for the country. Sacrifice for what? It doesn’t matter. We’re at war, dammit. Rally ‘round. What are you, a commy?
To the Warrior, to doubt the war is treason, aiding and supporting, liberalism, cowardice, back-stabbing, and so on. He uses these phrases unrelentingly. We must fight, and fight, and fight, and never yield, and sacrifice and spend. We must never ask why, or whether, or what for, or do we want to.
The public of course doesn’t see it that way. In 1964 I graduated from a rural high school in Virginia with a senior class of, I think, sixty. Doug took a 12.7 through the head, Sonny spent time at Walter Reed with neck wounds, Studley I hear is a paraplegic, another kid got mostly blinded for life, and several, whom I won’t name, tough country kids as I knew them, came back as apparently irredeemable drunks. (These were kids I knew, not all in my class.) It was a lot of dead and crippled for a small place. For what?
Cowardice? I was on campus in 1966 on a small, very Republican, very patriotic, very conservative, very Southern campus. The students, and their girlfriends, were all violently against the war. So, I gather, were their parents. Why? Were they the traitors of the Warrior’s imagination? No. They didn’t want to die for something that they didn’t care about.
This eludes the Warrior. Always, he blames The Press for the waning of martial enthusiasm, for his misunderstanding of the kind of war we are fighting. Did the press make Studley a paraplegic? Or kill the guy with all the tubes who died in the stretcher above me on the Medevac 141 back from Danang? Did Walter Cronkite make my buddy Cagle blind when the rifle grenade exploded on the end of his fourteen? Do the Warriors think that people don’t notice when their kids come back forever in wheelchairs?
They don’t get it.
Collateral Damage. Between Phnom Penh and Kompong Speu, 1974.
Semper Fi
This guy strikes some very painful nerves..
"Fred" was there.....he has a right to express his opinions..
Semper Fi
In 10 separate "guerilla" wars of the 20th century (not including Algeria, which is a special case), the "government" or "established power" (that would be us) won eight. The thing is, it usually takes about five years. Currently, we are exactly on pace and pretty much where we were in the Filipino Insurrection---a war that was very similar in how Aguinaldo (like Zarqari) tried to fight us through the U.S. media and the U.S. electoral process, NOT on the battlefield. We understood it then, and get it now.
Fred is a great writer and always worth reading.
About 50% correct.
More BS than fact and his assumptions suck.........wars are "lost" not by Warriors but by gutless politicians who can't hack the bad PR involved in winning.
I'm sure most of us will disagree with a point or two of Fred's.....as I do.
But I'm coming to view many of his positions on our weaknesses with more and more agreement.
Semper Fi
That's because the "warriors" have precluded the enemy from choosing the battlefield option. There is no current enemy that can stand in the battlefield against out warriors. We have taken the high ground and will keep it for the forseeable future.
Our warriors don't send themselves into battle, the civilian leadership does.
His remarks that our warriors don't understand the new battlefield strikes me as silly. He understands, but the warriors don't...? In actual fact, our enemies work very hard to avoid contact with our warriors, because the results are fatal. They have learned to use our political system to their advantage, because our weakness, as he almost seems to understand, is not our military but our civilian leadership, who is unable to take the pounding.
All of our enemies learn the same lesson, or die. The key to victory over the US is American domestic politics. Hire a PR firm, hire a law firm, buy a few congressmen, buy a few journalists, and pound away every day in the American press. Modern warfare has gone beyond insurgencies, because in actual fact American soldiers don't only do Pattonesque warfare very well, they also do insurgencies very well. But they are commanded by civilians who have the resilience and durability under fire of a mayflower.
So thats where you attack, if you want to defeat the Americans. The toughest marine is helpless when his Oprah-fied leaders call him home, having changed their minds and lost heart midway through the battle.
Well, we've denied them the opportunity to have an open fight on the battlefield...
My point is, if you go back through our wars, we adapt pretty damn well, and usually quickly. Yes, it sometimes takes a whack or two---Kasserine, or bad torpedoes in WW II---but for every one of those examples, you can come up with a Col. John Wilder, who outfitted his entire cavalry/mounted infantry regiment with repeaers in the Civil War, and whipped a Confederate infantry division, or a "Thunder Run," where USARMY colonels, on the fly, came up with a plan that ran 100% contrary to established military doctrine that armor "can't go into urban areas without infantry support."
Americans repeatedly do the impossible, and then some.
Cochise, Nana, Victorio, Juh, and Geronimo were some of the greatest guerrillas who ever fought, and they were WARRIORS.
Asymetrical warfare goes back to at least the Romans, and probably earlier. Armies learn how to deal with it. For the Apaches, we produced Crook. For the Phillipines Insurrection, we had Arthur MacArthur. I don't agree with Fred at all. For one thing, he lets the military's civilian masters, who are not warriors, off the hook.
To a large degree, that has been true of Americans...of the past.
It will be interesting to see how the current stock of Americans hold up.
It will also be interesting to see how we pursue a war against an ideology without delivering a devastating blow against the primary purveyors and supporters of that ideology..
Do we have the stomach necessary to deliver the level of destruction against our enemy as we did in past wars?
Or, will we continue to prosecute the war with minimal enemy bloodshed or collateral damage?
Semper Fi
I am from a long military tradition, my Dad fought in WW2 and Korea. Your article is drivel, really irks me.
"Fred" is gutless, obviously a liberal, votes Democrat no doubt. Him and Skerry's views are about equal. And you support him and his theories? I'm connecting the dots. Two peas in a pod you two. I guess you voted for Kerry, am I right?
We fight wars because there is good and evil. Communism is evil (Vietnam), Al Queda is evil (Afganistan). Sadaam is evil.
Sure, there is a price to pay, people die and are injured. Sure, politicians didn't manage Vietnam right, but what are we supposed to do? Just let the atheist commies and mooselimbs run roughshod over us?
Only the Grunts on the ground, or the end of hostilities can tell you the status of winning the support of the local population to a degree that supports victory.
Here in America, we already have one Political Party calling for withdrawal.
The risks and exposure are THERE -- and they are huge...
Whistling past the cemetery will not make that go away...
Semper Fi
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