Posted on 06/27/2004 9:28:36 PM PDT by quidnunc
“Who dares to call the child by its true name?” – Goethe, "Faust"
In our military, the danger of accepting the traditional wisdom has become part of the traditional wisdom. Despite our lip service to creativity and innovation, we rarely pause to question fundamentals. Partly, of course, this is because officers in today’s Army or Marine Corps operate at a wartime tempo, with little leisure for reflection. Yet, even more fundamentally, deep prejudices have crept into our military — as well as into the civilian world — that obscure elementary truths.
There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error than our rejection of the term “war of attrition.” The belief that attrition, as an objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the moment, is secondary. And to kill the enemy is to attrit the enemy. All wars in which bullets — or arrows — fly are wars of attrition.
Of course, the term “war of attrition” conjures the unimaginative slaughter of the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last year, when journalists wanted to denigrate our military’s occupation efforts in Iraq, the term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the enemy is a bad thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industry’s claims, seconded by glib military careerists, that precision weapons and technology in general had irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the nature of warfare never changes — only its superficial manifestations.
The US Army also did great harm to its own intellectual and practical grasp of war by trolling for theories, especially in the 1980s. Theories don’t win wars. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing effectively. Yet we heard a great deal of nonsense about “maneuver warfare” as the solution to all our woes, from our numerical disadvantage vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the “active defense” on the old inner-German border was political tomfoolery and a military sham — and, frankly, the best an Army gutted by Vietnam and its long hangover could hope to do.
Maneuver is not a solution unto itself, any more than technology is. It exists in an ever-readjusting balance with fires. Neither fires nor maneuver can be dispensed with. This sounds obvious, but that which is obvious is not always that which is valued or pursued. Those who would be theorists always prefer the arcane to the actual.
Precious few military campaigns have been won by maneuver alone — at least not since the Renaissance and the days of chessboard battles between corporate condottieri. Napoleon’s Ulm campaign, the Japanese march on Singapore, and a few others make up the short list of “bloodless” victories.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at carlisle.army.mil ...
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Theories in Action in Vietnam =
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_set1.htm
(Photos)
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_collection.htm
(Photos)
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General Patton put it in very succinct terms, telling his troops:
"It's not your job to die for your country. Your job is to make the other guy die for his country."
"Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,....."
IMHO, Replace Dep. Sec. Def. Wolfowitz (sp?) with Ralph Peters.
Already posted.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1146574/posts
Plus, Leisler's version was complete and not excerpted.
FMCDH(BITS)
We can't have that, now can we?
The purpose of an army is to kill people and break things: Rush Limbaugh
Bump
And take over real estate.
"And take over real estate."
LOL, you are correct, that is a very important part of it.
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