Tuesday - October 10, 2006

Category Image To Win the Long War


The Washington Times published a column yesterday (10 October, 2006) that compared the army and Marine Corps' recently published Manual 3-24 (somehow, this seems like an incorrect publication number) to the brilliant and influential works of Mahan, Douhet, von Seeckt and DuPuy.

I'm not much familiar with von Seeckt or DuPuy, but I can say this: He's right, this publication is very much like Mahan and Douhet. Because despite their influence, they're all equally wrong. I'm not sure why the columnist left out Jomini, because he was equally wrong.

Of course, all of these men had elements of truth and, excepting Douhet, brilliance. But they were all flawed, and generally for similar reasons.

Let's start with Jomini. It's been a while, but I remember him as a devotee of Napoleon. He was influential in the conduct of the US War Between the States. He had a lot of good points but today is mostly remembered for misinterpreting how Napolen was so successful. Of course, the premise is flawed and Napoleon ultimately failed. Jomini believed that wars were won by finally culminating in one big war-winning battle. Perhaps even Napoleon himself bought into this theory, which may be why he decided to fight at Waterloo. The belief was that this battle was so big that it would decide the outcome of the war and it should be fought for the reason that nothing else will so decisively determine a victor. In a sense, this is correct. Napoleon lost at Waterloo and was unable to continue as a political power much longer.

This mentality about seeking the big battle influenced militaries through to at least the first world war. Dominated by the heirs of Napoleon as the Strategic thinkers, the allies stubbornly tried to fight bigger and bigger equally futile battles, hoping to finally get to that one battle that was big enough and successful enough to finally convince the enemy to quit. Millions of men died. The war instead became a tactically brainless slaughter field, and German lost from attrition, not because of any one battle. If the allied generals understood the importance of attrition better, they could have changed their tactics and strategy and saved untold lives. But they stubbornly stuck to the Jominian ideology of seeking the grand decisive battle.

As much as I admire Mahan, he had a similar idea applied at sea. His understanding of how sea power is critical to national power is nothing short of brilliant. But he too believed that one big battle would bring the enemy fleet to submission and thus end the enemy's ability to wage and win war. As late as the first world war the navy fleets sought out the big battle, resulting in the battle of Jutland. In that battle, both fleets risked their ships in one big battle, hoping to thus win the war. Instead, half-way through the battle, both sides realized they had a lot to lose and withdrew to their own corners, the German fleet intact but unable to leave the vicinity of their harbors, the English fleet unwilling to bother them anymore. Neither side seemed interested in using naval power to chip away at the others' naval power, it was all or nothing.

Douhet came after these two, but had even more ridiculous ideas. He, with his acolyte Billy Mitchell, believed that air power was so powerful and unnerving that just the appearance of bombers over their adversary's airspace would cause such fear to make them immediately surrender. War was virtually impossible because of the invincibility of air power. He made this postulation when air power meant biplanes without even rudimentary bomb sights. It should go without say that Douhet couldn't have been more wrong, but still today he is idolized by the US Air Force and even the Secretary of Defense, who seemingly believes that a few special forces can call in air power and win a war. Douhet was proven wrong in the second world war, Korea, Viet Nam, with the USSR in Afghanistan, and Iraq today.

So what is this new publicaton and how is it like these famous military theorists? In a nutshell it explains how to fight a counter-insurgency war. As far as it goes, it's an excellent work. If you want to fight against guerillas, it has great advice, but this is hardly how to win a struggle with insurgents. It gives advice such as, be sure to get the population on your side by not over-reacting to guerrilla attacks, sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action.

I won't fault that advice for the limited use that it lends, but the main way to win the insurgency in Iraq is not through these methods. Winning hearts and minds didn't work in Viet Nam, and it isn't working in Iraq. What will work is depriving the enemy of its support.

What is the enemy's support? It has several sources and types of support. Financial support is probably coming from Iran, maybe Russia, maybe China or other places. You can't fight an insurgency without money. We need to destroy the ability of these other nation states to assist them. They are our enemy and it does us no good to ignore them as such.

The other main area of support is moral support. The insurgency gets it moral support from Islam. Our refusal to admit this is severely limiting our ability to win. If we continue to ignore the Imams' and clerics' power, their power will only get stronger. They are our enemies, and to win we must destroy their power.

Personally, I found it flabbergasting that we were forbidden to enter or bother any cleric or religious site such as cemetaries or mosques, yet everytime we went into a city the mosques blared incitements and instructions on how to fight us. The minarets not only broadcast military instructions, they also served as signal towers, armories, militia assembly points and headquarters. According to what the Washington Times calls a brilliant new way of fighting the war, we were not allowed to curb the power or strength of our enemy's strongpoints. They call this a new, insightful way of fighting war.

But they're wrong. There is nothing new about insurgencies. They've been around for millenia. They only succeed when the people are less afraid of the good guys than they are of the insurgents.

The equation for winning against insurgents is to be more brutal than the insurgents. It's not fair, it's not nice, but it works everytime and almost nothing else does. When terrorists come into a town and chop off peoples' heads unless the people help them, then we will not win unless we promise to kill anyone sympathetic to them. Abetting murderers is a crime and should be punished as such. Failure to fight murderers and terrorists guarantees that the terrorists will win.

Our current strategy is to bribe the people with money, good will, and happy thoughts. We put very few conditions on the gifts we give them, it becomes easy for them to get good things from us all the while they cooperate with terrorists so that their wives and children don't get tortured and killed.

This publicaton is not the answer to our overall problem. It's good for what it is, but it doesn't describe how to win the war, it only describes how to perpetuate the war without losing immediately.

The better military thinker that I think we should look to is Theodore Roosevelt, when he said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Fixing power stations and schools is speaking softly, but we also need the big stick, not just carrying safely in a scabbard, but wielding it on the heads of our enemy and his supporters and enablers.

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