Army Colonel Says U.S. Needs Better Focus in the War on Terror

To better understand the Quranic basis of jihad as practiced by extremists without sifting through a library of interpretations, you should read one book above all others, says Lt. Col. Joseph Myers.

“The Quranic Concept of War,” by Pakistani Brig. Gen. S.K. Malik in the late 1970s, isn’t much studied in the West.

But it should be, Myers said, if America, and more specifically, the U.S. military, wants to gain a better understanding of the enemy in the war on terrorism...

..."I think the significant strategic shortcoming or failing in the war on terror is that we have not gone through the strategic, doctrinal analysis of the enemy, we haven’t distilled and elaborated his threat doctrine."

Q: If you could speak to the members of Congress or members of the federal government, is there anything they could do about that situation?

Not only do you have the dnc talking points down to a Tee, like the dems, you also offer no solutions.

First, I would bet at the end of a day that I am a whole lot more conservative than you are. Second, as a retired senior Naval Officer who spent a lot of time on military planning staffs and at war colleges I think I know a lot more about the military planning and strategy process than you do. In the third place how can we start talking about solutions when I am arguing with a head-in-the-sand bushbot who denies there is even a problem.

The problem for us conservatives is that a tidal wave of voter resentment is about to kill us at the poles. The path to recovery is an analysis of what has gone wrong. That begins, not with blaming the media, but with looking in a mirror, looking into our own souls and looking at our own ugly mugs and figuring out how to change ourselves.

Unfortunately one of the solutions to strategic blunders is not to make them. Having made them, there is often no good way out. That is why they are called strategic blunders. Hitler invading Russia was one of the biggest strategic blunders in the history of warfare. It was doubly a blunder because Napolean had already proved that it was one of the biggest strategic blunders in the history of warfare.

The DNC did not write the talking points. Republicans are the author of these talking points, and all the Dems did is find them lying in the street when they were out playing in traffic.

Military strategy is an all inclusive integrative systems analysis of the environment, and what you hope to be able to achieve in it. It's fundamental roots are not in "Know thine enemy" but in the famous quote at the temple at Delphi "Know thyself." It starts not with a telescope but a mirror. You don't get to decide to do some of it and not other parts of it. You have to understand it all. When you decide on course of action A, you are precluded from actions B,C and D because your resources included finance, and especially command attention are very strictly circumscribed.

Petraeus is, thankfully, part of the solution in Iraq, because it begins to address the requirement of having a truly deep strategic thinker in command. Even so, we don't know what success would look like there in Iraq, Iraq as it actually exists, taking into account the character of the people and its civil, religious and economic institution. Part of the solution is to drop the idological us vs them, conservatives vs liberal appeasers, etc. etc. Name calling is not a solution to our strategic problems in the middle east.

A real energy policy that is other than "cheap oil" at its roots is the ultimate solution to our strategic problems. The strategic environment with resurgent Indian and Chinese economies, even ignoring if there is any genuine military dimension, requires that we start to figure out how to fall back on our own resources. Part of this is lots of nuclear energy, of course using solar and wind and efficiency whenever they make sense. Easing the problems of domestic oil production is part of a short term solution, but is not a solution for our grandchildren.

Bush started down the nuclear path, in fact, but he spent so much of his political capital on running the Iraq war that he had to sacrifice his nuclear energy goals. That is part of strategic planning, as well, deciding what fundamentally you really want to achieve with the finite temporal, economic and political resources at hand.

That’s a far cry from your original assertion that we had no plan.

We had no effective plan for what to do in Iraq after we booted Sadam, which was the really easy part of the whole thing. We knew that the next step was rebuilding the economy and society, which required rapid infusion of funds and contract efforts building civil works as well as creating the security that allowed us to do that. Disbanding the Iraq army and deba'athification (deliberate policy decisions with foreseen attendent consequences) destroyed the security apparatus, and we had insufficient force in Iraq to provide the security ourselve (again deliberate policy decisions with foreseen attendent consequences). We had a procurement bureaucracy through the provisional administrator Bremer that was staffed for ideological purity rather than competence at understanding and building the necessary infrastructure (again a deliberate policy decision with foreseen attendent consequences).

So, no there was no Plan, no plan that anyone with an ounce of sense and a touch of experience thought stood a chance of working.

That’s a far cry from your original assertion that we had no plan

Furthermore, deliberately planning to use insufficient force, to accomplish ill-defined goals after booting Sadam is no plan, not a plan that would have passed muster on an military planning staff I ever served on.

A security plan would have included an assessment of the threat, key points and regions to be held, a force structure and command structure to administer them, billiting and supply details, armaments, a law-enforcement/justice administration/ provost plan just for a start, in detail, city by city, village by village, province by province, administrative district by administrative district, identifying important local leadership in each place and how you will interface with them to ensure support of an Iraqi run civil administration.

That is not a plan. That is an outline of some of steps you have to start down in an analysis of how to put together a plan.

From start to finish you have demonstrated no comprehension of what is involved in responsible military planning. Your first post here, just to remind you was

"You mean there was no casulty-free plan. No such plan exists in an operation of this magnitude. Regarding ‘clear estimate of the enemy’, the enemy consists of al-qaeda and Iranian backed terrorists from all over the world. Demanding a clear estimate of non-conventional foes is unrealistic.

First, you start by trying to put unuttered words in my mouth. Second, you follow with irresponsible nonsense, that amounts to nothing more than lashing out at an enemy you appear to claim we can neither see nor count nor understand. Third, in showing us how counterinsurgency is done right, Petraes is showing us just how wrong you and those you are trying to defend are.

Fourth, you simply fail to address the central point, which is that you are trying to defend an administration that is in trouble because it cannot articulate what it is that it is trying to accomplish in a manner that can convince the average person that it is worth the sacrifice. You cannot blame that on the press. This administration is not even trying.

Fifth, neither you nor my would be detractors have been able to articulate a clear set of goals that we can and should achieve in Iraq. Don't send us off scurrying for a largely irrelevant authorizing bill, which the authorizers only half understood and grudgingly passed, which isn't a strategy anyway, but merely an authorization to go ahead. Stating that victory would look like Japan or Germany is utter nonsense.

where they would be more than happy to pretend to believe your status.

How about a little test: Q1. Who was the most important strategic writer regarding the importance of sea-power? Q2. What was THE essential point made by von Clausewitz? Q3. What great military lessons were taught by the success of the Mongol armies that have formed the basis for modern military operations? Q4. What major strategic innovation was introduced in the conduct of the first gulf war? Who was the principal author of that strategy? What technological advancements enabled the development of that strategy? Q5. What were the sources of the strategy that Petraeus is trying to apply to Iraq? In view of the thinking behind this strategy what were the principal errors in conduct of military operations in Iraq prior to the adoption of this strategy?

There is an essential positive point I am making here. The way out of the Republican morass is analysis, the application of sound principles and long learned lessons to the factual environment as it exists - as it actually exists in the world we are in. If I have been sarcastic it is in the face of the apparent position that analysis is impossible, irrelevant, or fruitless, which is a nihilistic, view that in my view is immoral when you have the lives of our servicemen and the lives of innocent civilians around the world at stake. Even worse is the Panglossian position that nothing could be better.

I have gone into enough detail to show the kinds of analyses that genuine professionals apply. I have also given you enough detail of the approach that next time you should be able, with a little bit of independent thought, to discover whether a politician or political military officer's statements are those of a shallow minded charlatan. You discover that, not by whether his opinions accord with your opinions, but whether his facts seem sound on the basis of what you know of the world, and whether his analysis of those facts and the conclusions to be reached are deep and far reaching, based on a carefully schooled analysis.

One lesson of strategy is that strategy counts. The probability of randomly guessing your way through a long sequence of actions is nil. Professionals don't guess. They know, or they know how much they don't know and make conservative allowances for it.

We are 6 years into this.

We were warned, going in, that it would be a long war. But, perhaps, our society is so inured to immediate gratification that we're not prepared to fight such a long war anymore.

Strategically, Iraq, Afghanistan and al-Qaeda present a very difficult situation. There's just no successful history of such operations. For example, I'm aware of only two "wars of insurgency" that have been fought successfully --

a. The British in Malaya

b. The so-called Moro War in The Phillipines.

In addition, there was much to be learned from the French experience in The Algerian War, 1954-82

I believe Iraq and Afghanistan are on their way to providing a third example. Viet Nam would've, as well, had it not been for the politicians (who probably shouldn't have put us in the position to start with).

Your point about the peacetime military is well-taken. There is no evidence that the U.S. military (or any other, for that matter) has ever been prepared to fight "the next war". Invariably, the initial command fails...there is floundering...and then, finally, somebody figures out what to do.

I'm aware of only two "wars of insurgency" that have been fought successfully -- a. The British in Malaya b. The so-called Moro War in The Phillipines.

Which are among the examples in answer to my Q5 above that inform the current counterinsurgency campaign (in addition to the French experiences ). We also actually learned these lessons in Vietnam, and had some considerable successes except that we kept snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The problem is that counterinsurgency warfare is low tech wrestling pigs in the mud. It is frustrating and unsexy as hell. So much easier to back off 10miles, shell away, call in an airstrike and demolish the village that is the problem. At the end of it of course, all you have done is make the insurgency worse.

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