MAINSTREAM MEDIA BAFFLED BY 'WESTERN WAY OF WAR'

"Perspectives" (University of Dayton) forthcoming, and on-line at "Campus News" ^ | 4/8/03 | LS

[ExpandNATO]

One more point, the Red Army grew to have many of the features of a Western army during World War Two.

[CyberCowboy777]

VDH - Bump

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

[machman]

Nice work LS.


Sometimes its nice to be reminded there are still guys like you that work at US universities.

[lepton]

Bookmark Bump

[AHerald]

Great post! Thanks for writing and posting this, LS.

[wildbill]

What's the author's point?"

Yea, though I rumble through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the baddest MF in the Euphrates valley.

[zeugma]

I'd have to second the earlier post about information being a major force in our arsenal. People don't generally understand how deadly information can be if used intellegently.

[JavaTheHutt]

Thanks for a very insightful article. I was lucky enough to have a professor of your caliber for my 20th century history class while in college. Keep up the good work!

[Publius6961]

Victor Davis Hanson BUMP!

[edwin hubble]

LS --

Congratulations. Excellent piece.
Very well thought out.

If the media don't understand history...
Why should they understand the history of warfare...
or realize that it is being re-written before their eyes.

[bvw]

Football.

[Phsstpok]

I would disagree with one very common assertion also carried in this article:

We never even fought the worst Iraqi troops -- they quickly and quietly left

We did fight them, just primarily out of camera range and largely from the air. There are stories of thousands of tanks burning south and particularly southeast of Baghad (where the I MEF did their work) this last week. I believe this is also where the two BLU 82 daisy cutters were dropped.

We fought them and killed them, by the thousands. That's why the remainder of the Republican Guard have elected to go home. I remember one military analyst pointing out that we weren't "softening up" the Republican Guard, we were killing them. Obviously an effective tactic.

This fiction of Iraq's army being a "paper tiger" and no real threat seeks to spin and minimize the achievement of the US armed forces and the much derided Pentagon plan. The Iraqis reportedly started this conflict with around 4,000 tanks (we're real good at counting tanks with satellites). As of Wednesday the Pentagon reported the Iraqis had between 200 and 400 left. The rest didn't get hidden, they got killed.

[El Gato]

Correct me if I am wrong, but is England the only other army that does this?

No, the Russians at least at one time, had a pretty good war college system. The problem there was that the top slots rarely went to those who really understood the lessons, and the lessons themselves were too colored by the Communist version of political correctness, (or is "communist version" redundent?) I think even the French once had such a system. Japanese too, IIRC. The Germans, along with the British I think, pretty much invented the whole idea. Actually it was the Prussians rather than "the Germans" in general. The quintessional Western war theorist was after all a Prussian, Karl Von Clausewitz.

[Publius6961]

One of the ground assumptions behind the covert, "asymmetric" model is that the niceties of international law would provide safe havens for organizations if they took the trouble to deny state funding or involvement; that a respect for national sovereignity would make direct confrontation unlikely or impossible.

A critical and crucial recent development not discussed nearly enough.

This reality has escaped most of the American citizenry and all of the "human shield/peacenik" contingent.
Sometimes it seems our State Department is unaware of it!

"International Law" is such a handy device behind which to hide cowardice, ignorance, indifference and incompetence.

[El Gato]

How was the Red Army able to beat the Wehrmacht?

The slow grinding way that ate up lots of troops on both sides. The Russians had superior numbers, if only because the Germans were fighting on multiple fronts. Pluse they were fighting, up until near the end, on Russian territory. The US and Britain were attempting to bomb them back into the stone age, and defending against that took up lots of resources, most especially lots of '88s which could otherwise have been killing Russians. They also had to backstop a totally incompentent ally in the Italians, which basically gave then a 3rd "front" in Africa and later Italy.

[Publius6961]

It's a pleasure to meet you.
I just wish you hadn't been so reticent about emphasizing the "pursuit of unconditional surrender by the enemy".
Hanson's The Soul of Battle expands on this and demonstrates how psychologically it maintains the momentum and almost makes success inevitable.

Unfortunately the principle was not applied in Iraq and, except for some yet unexplained luck, could have horribly skewed the result.

Epimanondas would have never spared the enemy's "temples"!

[LS]

Except that the enemy's "temples" are not Muslim mosques, but Saddam's bunkers, which are hardly being spared.

And in Afghanistan, an equally devastating example of the "western way of war," there was no surrender to accept---but that didn't make it any less real.

"Unconditional surrender" does presuppose an enemy who has enough western traits to actually surrender. Carthage did. But I doubt if a large mongol army was defeated, for example, anyone would "surrender." I think they would just slip away into the geography and evaporate.

[LS]

hahah. Maybe I was him!

[LS]

Actually, between two Poly Sci guys; one fellow in Philosophy who is a genuine Libertarian (but a former, reformed Marxist and reasonably conservative) and perhaps one other fellow in history, we reach a LARGE number of kids.

UD routinely sends a large contingent to C-PAC.

[LS]

You must understand, I was on a tight word leash, and they already chopped a couple of good points!