April 8, 2003
It also involves a paradox in which Western societies, with their value on the individual and human life, fight with unparalleled ferocity and willingly take high short-term casualties to effect a long-term result. They also risk the lives of many to rescue the one -- a characteristic not seen in non-Western combat (one only has to watch Black Hawk Down to appreciate the differences in styles).
Finally, in the West, peace is viewed as the norm, not an aberration. Consequently, breaches of peace are met with initial reluctance to use force, even to the point that Western societies frequently engage in denial and self-deception about the ultimate need for force. However, once the decision to act is made, overwhelming force is wielded to end conflicts quickly.
"Iraqi Freedom" perfectly conforms to the "Western way of war," which has totally baffled the network anchors and newsroom reporters who do not grasp it. But it is not lost on the so-called "embeds," who witnessed this war-fighting style up close.
The result is that Reuters, CNN, most of the old-line broadcast networks and the New York Times, largely because of their liberal bias, have drifted into a quagmire of their own. Because of their aversion to making "value judgments" about anything, including military success, the mainstream media equated a terrorist pickup truck, armed with a half-a-dozen poorly trained irregulars with a .30-caliber machine gun, to a squad of Marines. This is, of course, absurd. We never even fought the worst Iraqi troops -- they quickly and quietly left. When coalition forces encountered the best Iraqi units, they have killed Saddam's forces by the truckload, according to one report.
The media's quagmire deepened when it failed to understand the straightforward explanations patiently delivered by Generals Vincent Brooks and Tommy Franks. The follow-up questions at the CENTCOM briefings indicated that either the journalists deliberately ignored the information they were handed, or worse, utterly failed to understand it.
From the onset of hostilities, allied commanders, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have consistently told the press exactly how the campaign would unfold. In a nutshell, the Rumsfeld/Franks plan resembled Gen. Douglas MacArthur's "Island Hopping" strategy in World War II in the Pacific, where, it is worth noting, MacArthur had the lowest casualty ratio-to-troops employed of any general in any theater of the entire war.
The Rumsfeld/Franks plan was obvious to anyone wanting to understand it: bypass strong points, isolating them and allowing them to run out of food, ammo, and above all, severing their command and control from Baghdad; blast northward along twin lines of attack so as to draw out the Iraqi Republican Guard into an open fight; and seal off all avenues of escape (or reinforcement) for Saddam and his regime; and topple Saddam's oppressive government.
Journalists' incessant questions, both at the briefings and in the studios, about the coalition's "threatened" or "overextended" supply lines were nonsense. The supply-line issue was baseless: coalition forces, in a pinch, could always have been temporarily re supplied by air; but there was never any danger of outstripping supply lines because American aircraft controlled the skies, and coalition spies and special operations people dominated the intelligence functions. Nevertheless, for nearly a week, news headlines kept harping on "insufficient force." (Someone might want to tell that to the Iraqi "elite" Republican Guard!)
The media's staggering inability to grasp the Western way of war has left it re-fighting Vietnam, or, worse, World War I, and the pundits should have known better, if for no other reason than our stunning success in Afghanistan. Does anyone recall the "quagmire" alerts then? After only a week, journalists were complaining that some of the northern cities had not fallen, and that American fighters could not handle the intense cold of the mountains. Only a few weeks later, Taliban and al-Qaeda thugs were scurrying into the hills as fast as they could, thoroughly routed by an "insufficient" American force.
As Hanson points out, rarely do Western armies outnumber their enemy, but they always place superior force and firepower in theater. Typically, the Western way of war relies on superior training and discipline -- mixed with the individual initiative inherent in free societies and simply not present in un-free armies -- that results in an unparalleled success rate.
How often did commanders in the field boast about their units' superb training and about the cohesion of "the plan?" And is it not telling that individual commanders in the field, acting on their own initiative, and not Tommy Franks or Donald Rumsfeld, ordered the rescued of Pfc. Jessica Lynch? Yet again, the mainstream media missed it, to the point that it virtually ignored training as a key element of the combat situation, even when the GIs themselves repeatedly cited their superior preparation as key to the low casualty ratios and to battlefield victory.
Long after U.S. troops have departed Baghdad in victory, and turned Iraq over to a new, democratic government, the media will still be stuck in its own "Vietnam quagmire" of false perceptions and flawed assumptions. The mainstream media's only salvation may be to replace network anchors and newsroom reporters with reporters who were with the troops, and who saw the Western way of war in operation. To those "embeds," there is no question that the war has proceeded on schedule, on plan, and to a victorious and just conclusion.
-- Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, teaches a course in "Technology and the Culture of War" and has written program histories of the United States Navy's Trident Submarine System ("Trident," Southern Illinois University Press, 1984) and the USAF's National Aerospace Plane System ("The Quest for the Orbital Jet," USAF, 1998)
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That is one big difference right there. U.S. field commanders are empowered to make decisions on their own in order to adjust to rapidly changing battle conditions. Iraqi field commanders are used to taking orders from the top and when they are on their own and out of communication with Saddam, they are crippled. Of course, there are many factors but this is an important one.