Defeating the Gods of War

Tech Cnetral Station ^ | 02 May 03 | Michael Vlahos

[dts32041]

What can the recent war with Iraq teach us? Commentators everywhere are telling us we're the greatest, almost like Gods of War. Of course some aspects of the war are undeniably remarkable. Planning and execution were faultless - cost, time, and outcome couldn't get much better. The soldiering was outstanding - we saw their superlative performance on TV. And U.S. casualties were amazingly low - while tens of thousands of Iraqi fighters killed.

However, we must remember the true state of our enemy. The Iraqi forces were operationally degraded, fighting with 3rd rate equipment. There was no air opposition, and only feeble air defense. Furthermore, their command and control was ripped.

And we had other advantages. We enjoyed extended preparation time in-theater. Ours was the choice of when to attack and thus, the initiative. And we had a comprehensive intelligence picture, accumulated over many years.

In other words, we were facing an intimately familiar, badly weakened, and fatally exposed enemy, passively awaiting our attack.

So it is one thing to assert that we did a nice job. Indeed, given the expectations of the American people, we could do nothing less: we absolutely had to do a nice job.

But let's not go overboard. For example, Ralph Peters writes:

The basic lesson that governments and militaries around the world just learned was this: Don't fight the United States. Period. This stunning war did more to foster peace than a hundred treaties could begin to do.

The strengths demonstrated by American military force were surely exceptional. Like true Gods of War, America now "strides the world like a Colossus." No military in its right mind should wish to challenge us. That does not mean, however, that thus there will be no more war.

Americans inhabit a classical military reality, and why not? - We like what we do best. In another time and place, say in the Victorian era, we could have truly believed that we had ended war forever. In those sunny days there was only one kind of war, and if no one dared fight us then war itself would surely be finished. Peters indeed gives us the reasoning of a sincere Victorian gentleman when he says:

Consider the fear and impotent anger would-be opponents of the United States must feel today ? The Iraqi defeat was a defeat for every other military in the world - in a sense, even for our allies, whose forces cannot begin to keep pace with our own.

In contrast, however, this is the real lesson of the war:

The U.S. has indeed made war impossible - classical war, that is. No waiting enemy can take us on where we are strong - in the place we still think of as "real" war.

But today, unlike Victorian times, there is more than one way to make war. War is about using violence to achieve political objectives. Period. And it's not about how you make it, but what you achieve in the end. War isn't "real" because it's got tanks and planes and ships. It's real because somebody is fighting us, and fighting to win - no matter how they do it. In other words, war isn't about stuff (e.g., technology) it's about a coherent concept of violent struggle. We are so attached to war that puts ordnance on target better than anyone else that we cannot see a completely different paradigm of war emerging in front of us. We have seen its glimpses in places like Grozny and Jenin and Columbo. Call this new war "War by other means."

War by other means is about fighting us not where we are strong, but where we are weak. And just as we have so magnificently demonstrated where we are strong, we have with equal clarity shown others where we are weak. Where are we weak?

• U.S. military casualties - we now expect almost none; many means disaster.
  
• U.S. civilian casualties - the economy dives easily if our way of life is at risk.
  
• U.S. acting tyrannically - we cannot betray our values and sacred mission.
  
• Collective enemy hatred of us - if unbending, a signal of our failure.
  
• Enemy persistence in the face of material US military dominance - the same.

The enemy that knows not simply where we are weak, but figures out how to successfully attack our weakness, has a shot at defeating the Gods of War.

This doesn't mean that the new "war by other means" will be easy for future enemies, or that Saddam Hussein was trying to fight such a war and failed. Indeed, Peters is quite correct to say, "in the final grudge match between Clausewitz and GI Joe, it was a shutout" - as though the Iraqis were mere military antiquarians:

What remains remarkable is how little the Iraqis - and the Russian advisers who helped plan their defense - grasped the profound changes in our military and the American way of war. They clearly had no sense of the battlefield awareness, speed, precision and tactical ferocity of America's 21st century forces.

But as an antique army then the Iraqis were simply roadkill on the highway of war. The past was knocked off by the enlightened present. But this is hardly the future. Even if we are so hip as to be fully "network-centric" - all knowing, pinpoint, and overwhelming - the "American way of war" is nonetheless still classical war, fought between nations and waged in full uniform with traditional weapons.

Again, what the U.S. has ended is simply classical war, and it has ended that paradigm by making it un-useful and thus uninteresting to others. History - in the form of desperate "others" - will create the new paradigm of war. No one can hope to win fighting our kind of war, so they will make war they can win. Ironically, we have destroyed the war we do best - and we will come to ponder this recognition as we struggle to adapt to and defeat the new.

We will struggle for three reasons. We will struggle with the new war because it is alien and unfamiliar to us as war. Even now we still deny it by calling its early signs "terrorism" or "asymmetrical." But we will also struggle with the new war because we will not want to give up the war we like, the war in whose practice we were supreme. Finally, we will struggle with the new war because it may require us to act in ways we find distasteful. Just the other day US troops fired into a crowd at Fallujah, near Baghdad. This is just a taste of things to come. The French remember how they were defeated in Algeria, even as they won every battle. Talk to Sinhalese about the Tamil Tigers, and find out how a hopeless, beleaguered insurgency turned the tide against a dominant government and its military.

In Saddam Hussein and his Iraq, we chose our enemy well. But we should be wary of the future enemy that chooses us.

[dts32041]

A Different view drom Victor David Hanson and Ralph Peters.

[Snerfling]

As if this is an original argument. You gotta love the left - they throw out straw man arguments no matter how many times they are called on it. To wit, everyone knows, down to the dumbest lib, that the true threat to the US is asymetrical warfare. That's why we went into Iraq - to sever terrorist connections to WMD from at least those quarters. As Dubya said, the fight ain't over - not until everyone is brought into line.

[Conspiracy Guy]

blah blah blah blah blah scared.

[IronJack]

The Iraqi forces were operationally degraded, fighting with 3rd rate equipment.

All the more reason Saddam should have exited gracefully. You don't bluff a hand as strong as ours.

[IronJack]

we will struggle with the new war because it may require us to act in ways we find distasteful. ... This is just a taste of things to come.

One thing this thesis overlooks is that while the United States has excelled at conventional warfare, we can also excel on the New Battlefield. In other words, ANYTHING the enemy can do, we can do better. We can defeat them any time, any place, using any methods. Let them define the ground rules, ever mindful that they reap what they sow.

And frankly, I don't find that a BIT "distasteful."

[onedoug]

But we should be wary of the future enemy that chooses us.

Duh.... This limp wrist styles himself as some sort of deep military thinker?

[melsec]

This guy would be right if we were to sit back and wait for these terrorists to come and get us. Bush, Rummy and the rest know different and will seek these b*stards out and put them away. Post 9/11 that is what we have learned!

Mel

[Maceman]

I'm having trouble buying this. Since 9/11 Americans have recognized that terrorists are all about "war by other means." So this is no brilliant insight, IMHO.

The fact that there have been no significant terrorist attacks on US interests since Afghanistan is pretty good proof that the Bush military understands "war by other means" and is damn good at waging it.

it is impossible to believe that al Qaeda and other terrorists groups did not desire to mount a major attack in response to our responses in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their credibility, morale, recruiting prospects and momentum clearly required it. I don't believe that al Qaeda's inaction to this point is due to any other reason than their inability to operate under the relentless pressure of George Bush's vision and executive brilliance.

And "War by other means" doesn't seem that easy to mount against us. Al Qaeda had a perfect model for it, and before Bush made the response look easy, an awful lot of pundits and politicians were considering al Qaeda's model virtually indestructable.

But we have risen to the challenge. I think what the Iraqi and Afghan wars demonstrate is that America is supreme at all kinds of wars. American culture is the most flexible, creative, dynamic and decentralized in the world. Those qualities are nowhere so evident as in the ability of our military strategists, planners and soldiers to adapt to virtually any conflict configuration that an enemy will throw at us.

[Seydlitz]

This writer is absolutely correct. The US military did a great job in Iraq, but we weren't up against a top-tier opponent. Instead, we were up against a demoralized, disorganized bunch of conscripts and amateurs who haven't had access to modern military equipment, or even spare parts for the old stuff, since 1990.

North Korea or Red China won't fold so easily.

The minute that we imagine ourselves to be unbeatable is the minute we become vulnerable.

[Billthedrill]

Actually, the author has himself devolved into classical theory when he invokes guerilla warfare as the answer to conventional military superiority. In fact what has happened is that even this is questionable - I cite the different results in Afghanistan between the U.S. and the Soviet interventions as an example.

The real lesson, or rather one among many, of the Iraq intervention is rather counterintuitive but perfectly valid - with this level of military superiority it took 12 years to get us to employ it there and 3000 dead in a mass murder to get us to employ it in Afghanistan. What is significant is that the dog is not barking in the night - that the real sign of power in the 21st century is economic and technological, not military. A lot of people are still trying to come to grips with that.

[q_an_a]

I think something you and more than a few others are overlooking is that a man earning $10 a month to fight a war is not very likely to want to be killed for his salary, or for the country that forces him to be in the military, i.e, NK and RC.

All those arabs dopes that went to fight in Iraq thought Sadaam would be sending home money to the family, like in palestine. They where wrong. The Russsians saw that poor kids won't fight, in Afganistan or anywhere else, unless as in America, the future looks better than the past.

[fourdeuce82d]

The minute that we imagine ourselves to be unbeatable is the minute we become vulnerable.

Bingo. Some of the comments suggest this guy is some whining lefty- not familiar with his stuff, but TCS is not a lefty site by a long stretch. I think your comment sums up his overall point quite well.

[Jim Noble]

This is not a leftist argument or concept.

The world is full-full-of bad guys and wannabes. A lot of them are smart, and patient-particularly in East Asia.

Jeff Head is writing a brilliant five-book future history about just how someone who studied our weaknesses instead of our strengths could (almost, I hope) take us.

It is an error to make victory in Iraq a reason to lower our guard.

[marron]

Future war has to be four-dimensional. Our enemies already know this. We had better learn it.

Just as we have proven that a successful infantry campaign requires control of the sky, we are going to have to recognize that in future engagements we need control of information. Our biggest failure has been our inability to get our message out in Arab capitals and Western capitals alike. The news and communications media have been almost uniformly hostile, as have been the universities, and it has created a space in which our enemies are able to operate at will. Chirac and Chretien, for example, have news agencies that deliver the information that supports their position; there is no counter voice. The situation is even worse in Arab countries.

At one time the need for political action on the part of our intelligence services was well understood. We used to be fairly good at establishing political parties, and unions, and pressure groups, to compete with Communist controlled groups. We need to re-discover this old talent. Our enemies are no longer controlled from Moscow, but the problem is the same. Our enemies largely control the organs of public opinion in most countries. We need to confront them and defeat them on that ground.