Winning Battles, Losing Wars
Off the Table
Then there is the question of restraint—the inability to use our full forces to their full effect, in the manner that we did in World War I or World War II. From 1945 to 1989 the Cold War defined and limited the rules of engagement, given the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union and its various trouble-causing clients who hid behind it. In Vietnam and North Korea there were certain options that were off the table because of fear the Soviets or Chinese might strike elsewhere or the fighting could descend into a nuclear exchange. “Limited” wars are now the new normal when so many countries can claim a nuclear patron.
Law, not War
But in the last twenty years there is an even greater restraint to operations—a moral, if not smug, self-restraint that has turned fighting from a quest for victory into a matter of jurisprudence in which how we fight a war is more important than what we actually achieve. The old Neanderthal formula — we will level your cities, defeat and humiliate your military, impose our system of government upon you, and then give you our aid and friendship as you reinvent yourself as a free-market capitalist democracy — certainly worked with Germany, Japan, and Italy.
But does anyone believe that we could have bombed Saddam as we did those in Hamburg? The country that tore itself apart over waterboarding three confessed terrorists who had an indirect hand in the murder of 3,000 Americans seems ill-equipped to inflict the sort of damage on enemies that in the past made them accept both defeat and redemption. War is now a matter of legality, or nation-building before, not after, the enemy is fully defeated, and that means, given the unchanging nature of man, that it is very difficult to win a war as in the past. Note, in this context, Obama’s drone campaign, which he expanded seven- or eight-fold upon inheriting it from Bush. Is it not the perfect liberal way of war? There is no media hand-wringing over collateral damage; no burned faces, charred limbs, headless torsos on the evening news; no U.S. losses; no prisoners at Guantanamo. There is only a postmodern murderous video game and a brief administration chest-thump that “we’ve take out 20 of the top 30 al-Qaeda operatives.”
Wars of Choice
We are forgetting yet another wild card: since World War II, all our serial fighting in Asia, Central America, the Pacific, and Africa has involved optional wars—fighting that did not question the very existence of the U.S. Other than a few stand-offs with the Cold War Soviets at places like Berlin or Cuba, the United States had not faced an existential threat since the end of World War II. September 11 might have posted such a challenge, since had bin Laden or his epigones been able to repeat the initial attacks, then air travel as we know it would have ceased, along with the idea of an open, modern commercial economy.
But other than the efforts to go after al-Qaeda, most of our fighting has been optional—whether in Somalia or Libya—and that makes it hard to galvanize the American public. (Which also explains why administrations try to hype WMD, or Saddam, or al-Qaeda, or Gaddafi, or the monstrous Assad in order to turn these peripheral threats into existential enemies.) In optional wars, the public can disconnect, as fighting can be conducted without disruption of the civilian economy. Victory or defeat does not immediately either please or endanger the public at home. And the result is that our leaders do not necessarily wage these wars all out, with the prime directive of winning them. (Note how the monster-in-rehab Gaddafi, whose children were buying off Western academics and putting on art shows in London, by 2011 was back in our imaginations to the 1986 troll, and how the Assads of Vogue magazine are once again venomous killers.)
Too Rich to Fight?
Then there are classical symptoms of Catullan otium: societies that become leisured like ours grow complacent (otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes). They see military activity of all sorts coming at the expense of social redistributive programs: each dollar in aid campaigning abroad comes at the loss of one less new expansion in Medicare or Medicaid. Why then spend money overseas, when we could redistribute it for bread and circuses at home? A cruise missile is not seen as a wise investment in deterrence, but as a boondoggle that means one less Head Start center.
In postmodern America, we are all removed from mayhem, the killing of game for dinner, the sight of blood altogether. War is something “they” do, not our far more sophisticated selves, who have far greater claims on the federal treasury. Given that the therapeutic society of iPhones and Facebook believes that human nature has transcended violence, and no longer is prone to Thucydidean irrationality like fear, honor, or perceived self-interest, we believe that Libyan rebels are sort of like errant protestors of Occupy Wall Street, or the sometimes corrupt Chinese communist apparat that can be persuaded to be nice to Tibetans. That means war no longer involves good and evil, much less the elemental dirty means of using the former to destroy the latter.
“A cruise missile is not seen as a wise investment in deterrence, but as a boondoggle that means one less Head Start center.”
Well, there is a difference. The cruise missile will do what it’s been advertized to do; Head Start? Not so much.
Great summary of why we have issues about winning, one I’ve tended to shake my head over quite a lot.
The “Saudi Organized Crime Syndicate” writes, and rewrites, “Sharia Law” to overthrow democracies.
If “Saudi written Sharia Law” gets into the constitution of any country, it will replace turn the government into a “Saudi Organized Crime Syndicate style Dictatorship”. Then the Saudi’s will own the oil under the ground, the drug trade, the opium in the fields, their utility companies, their military and their printing of money.
Obama and SoS Clinton left Saudi written Sharia Law in the constitutions of IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, EGYPT, LIBYA, TUNISIA, YEMEN AND KENYA. These now Saudi Dictatorships, not Democracies by any stretch of the imagination.
Now they want to put Saudi written Sharia Law in the constitutions of Syria, Iran, Israel and the US.
The “Saudi Organized Crime Syndicate” writes, and rewrites, “Sharia Law” to overthrow democracies.
If “Sharia Law” is put into the constitution of any country, it will turn any country into a “Saudi Dictatorship”. Then the Saudi’s own the oil under the ground, the drug trade, the opium in the fields, the utility companies, the military and the printing of money.
Obama and SoS Clinton left “Sharia Law” in the constitutions of IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, EGYPT, LIBYA, TUNISIA, YEMEN AND KENYA. These are all now SAUDI DICTATORSHIPS WHERE “DEMOCRACY IS JUST AN ILLUSION”.
Now the Saudi’s want to put “Sharia Law” in the constitutions of SYRIA, IRAN, AND ISRAEL, SO THE “SAUDI ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE” CAN OWN THEM TOO.
Obama and Clinton are spending OVER 50% OF OUR BUDGET, on these endless, anti-Democracy wars, to create “Saudi Organized Crime Syndicate Dictatorships”.
The Middle Eastern Population hates Americans because they know what it’s like to live under Saudi Rule. The Saudi’s have the worst human rights record since Hitler.
To turn these countries over to the Saudi’s, Americans and NATO have killed over one-million innocent Middle Eastern and African Civilians, borrowed and spent over 1 Trillion Dollars every year Obama has been in office, and killed nearly 10,000 American Soldiers. The Saudi Organized Crime Syndicate is laughing all the way to the bank as they increase America’s oil prices.
Nice summary. What do you plan to do about the problem?
Come on. Everybody knows what the real problem is.
Our most dangerous enemy is internal: radical leftists, as epitomized by barack obama.
Until that war is formally recognized by a majority of the country, and specifically by political leaders, then fought and won, it’s irrelevant to discuss other wars in any context.
It’s like chatting about losing a few pounds when cancer is destroying your lungs and stomach.
It’s true: while the exceptionalist elements are off fighting wars, we’re being Wannsee’d right out of our own country.
Unless you think we’re baggage handlers in the airport we built due to “stealing” the country from the Indians, stealing land from Mexico, etc. In that case, never mind. The Third World is full of R.S.V.P.s.
There is still a widespread impression that the West won “the Cold War.” But Revel thought otherwise, contending that there was no Cold War at all, in How Democracies Perish. See my summary here: http://clarespark.com/2011/04/09/jean-francois-revel-and-father-mapple/. There is an argument to be made that the Soviet Union fell for internal reasons, but perhaps the arms race was one of them.
Since WW2, the US has been weakened internally by the vast number of Stalinists and Stalinoids. As for war in general, worldwide development is uneven, often held back by resource deficits, religions, and tribalism, not “human nature” as VDH sometimes claims.
In very general terms, I’d always thought the Soviet Union fell because it bankrupted itself. But it also coincided with the rise of mini-nationalism, where every group started thinking of itself as a part that should be respected. Also, people within the Soviet Union simply started seeing how sad it was compared to other cultures. Why would people continue to back a system that was such an obvious failure?
However, they say a photo’s worth a thousand words, so here’s a mouthful.
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-59943.html
I like to think that we gave the Soviets a good, hard shove off the cliff, so to speak.
You are correct – spot on!
But you also need to know that our leftist enemies are solid allies of our Islamonazi enemies and our eco-radical enemies. We are facing a red-green-green axis.
Read SUN-SU THE ART OF WAR
A thought provoking essay Dr. Hanson. And thank you for it. On first reflection my observation as to why we seem to win battles and lose wars has a lot to do with an internal domestic enemy – the so-called mainstream media and its soulmate, the Democratic Party. Something happened between 1945 and 1965, roughly. An infection of sorts. Can you imagine a Walter Kronkite, reporting in excruciating and morale destroying detail the horrendous casualties from Omaha Beach. And a 1944 version of Harry Reid standing on the floor of the Senate, declaring that the war was lost? I think not, mainly because of the abundance of lampposts and rope that would have cooled the ardor of both.
What we have lost is not the physical ability to win, but the will to win. And that will has been sapped out of us, deliberately, by a media culture obsessed with undermining and loathing everything patriotic, joined by a political party that seeks advantage in exploiting the doubt that this loathing creates.
I once took an oath to defend the Constituion, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To be honest, I wondered about that last word, domestic (enemy). I was a young man and while motivated by patriotism, I wasn’t very aware of the import of that word. Weren’t we all Americans? Was it referring to a Benedict Arnold type, of whose treason I was only half aware? And how many of them could there be? I didn’t give it much thought but went on and did my duty standing watch, one of many, guarding against the menace from Communism and the East. All the while, true domestic enemies were inflitrating our institutions, quietly and subversively, chipping away at and corroding our self confidence and values to the point where we have now arrived, largely unable to define what it is that we stand for. And clearly, if you find difficulty in defining yourself, then you will have greater difficulty in defining where you want to go, what your goals are. In strategic military and geopolitical matters, doubly so.
I don’t know how we regain the values that made us great but I do know the first step comes this November. And it must truly be just a first step, followed by many more. Because it took years – generations actually – to bring us to this point and the infection runs deep. Only history will tell if it was mortal.
Having taken that same oath, LGoPs, I read you loud and clear….or, as we used to say,”five by five”.
With that in mind, I picked out this to ‘paste’ below from Dr Hanson’s thought-provoking article…
…”Remember, there is also an ironclad law about the Middle East, one we keep forgetting: Arab intellectuals (many of them educated or residing in Western universities) hate the U.S. for backing dictators; they hate the U.S. for intervening to remove them; they hate the U.S. for trying to impose postbellum democracy upon them; and they hate the U.S. for staying clear and letting Arabs be Arabs on their own.”
Everyone should read that very slowly, at least twice.
These resident, embedded, Arab intellectuals aren’t the only Muslims over here undermining this nation which has nurtured, and continues to nurture them, in the warm prosperity and material well being so vilified by their Koran.
This is why I call them, these resident Muslims, hypocrites – and I call them unwelcome here in our America. I call them a contemporary “Fifth Column”.
Then, I take this fact – a fact we Americans seem unwilling to admit publicly – as another solid-iron justification to remove ourselves from Central/West Asia and leave these Muslims, of whatever “degree” they may profess, free to butcher each other without further expenditure of our young lives….. and borrowed treasure, which must of course be repaid… in stopping them. Our young lives are gone forever.
Our Western ways are simply incompatible with the Central/West Asian mindset. We must accept this as a “given”, and tend entirely to our domestic needs….our domestic security. Other nations have been able to offer us token assistance where their precarious domestic finances and politics have permitted….this, as we see in Europe, is unsustainable. Also unsustainable is America’s presupposed “obligation” to be the World’s police force. I’m personally sick of this which seems to have started about 1917 and has continued since then.
When will the Iraqi’s and the Afghans repay us for our bales upon bales of cash? Forget the Pakistani’s. Has Kuwait reimbursed us with gratis fuel?
The Oath we took as young Servicemen should apply to civilians also. Our Muslim enemies are resident amongst us.
…..here’s a short Post Script…..
cf: Jihad Watch Website:
…..”Toronto school board pulls permit for madrassah after its website features Islamic antisemitism
May 19, 2012 01:50 pm | Robert”
….the Robert is Robert Spencer.
In addition I would add to Dr. Hanson’s ‘ironclad law about the Middle East’ the following:
- They hate us for trying to feed starving Somali’s
- They hate us for trying to end the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims
- They hate us for keeping the world’s oil supply, and its attendant profits, flowing freely, straight to Arab Muslim countries
- They hate us for promptly and unquestioningly providing massive aid and support to tsunami stricken Muslim Indonesia
Call me stupid but I sense a pattern here – a common denominator, so to speak – although I’ll be gosh darned if I can figure out what it is…
Oh, wait a minute…I think I have it. They hate. And they hate us for existing. I think it must be in their job description or something.
And our leftist media’s response to all this? To roll out the COEXIST mantra and smother US with it, no doubt.
Good discussion guys but, you have the money quote, LGoPs, They hate us for merely existing. We, and our way of life, are an affront to them. Always have been, always will.
They cannot be converted to a capitalistic, democratic society ’cause that would call into question over a thousand years of teachings and outright propaganda literally pounded into their heads five times a day by their prayer rugs.
Where we might be open to change and accommodation, their iconoclastic “religion” forbids it. To the point of suicide to promote it!
Only liberals think they can be persuaded to abandon this mindset ’cause, frankly, they do not have a clue as to what human nature really means. They think that if they can open their hearts to “get along” then, by golly, you can do it just as easily.
The dark secret though, is that liberals don’t want to “get along” any more than muslims in this context. Only if you agree with them are you welcome to the campfire. Exactly the same as muslims. These two cultures are going to have one God awful clash very soon (right now, they are actually “using” one another) But, watch France, Belgium, Denmark, any of the bastions of liberal socialism in the next 10-15 years. Liberals will lose, badly, ’cause they are not willing to die for their cause nor fight back in any meaningful way. Centuries of propaganda has taught them to get on their knees and that’s how they will die or pay the tax to islam.
Thanks Nick, I learn a lot on PJ Media and often times it is from the comments of other readers like yourself. Thanks for the insights,especially your last paragraph above.
Really good comments LGOPs – and the thing is, the media and the left wants to blame US for why the muslims hate us. Its somehow our fault that our country is successful and vibrant, whereas many Muslim countries seem to be living in the dark ages. They hate us because their religion teaches them to hate what we are. They hate us because our woman can be strong, make their own choices and do not have to be subservient to a man (though of course, that is a choice a woman can make if she so chooses). They hate us because their people see the lives we live, free from the oppressive nature of radical Islam. If I was a muslim growing up in squalor and being taught that the West was evil, I’d probably hate us too. That’s the problem – there’s no way to “fix” the issue, because you can’t change hearts that have been hardened by a radicalized religion, that quite frankly, is all they know.
The only way to deal with the Muslim world, at this point, is to stop sending them money and let them deal with their own problems, without our help.
P Jay Medilla triggered another thought on my part regarding this intense Muslim hatred. The thought is based on my – admittedly amateur – knowledge of human nature combined with observations I made during 5 year’s spent working in Saudi Arabia back in the ’90′s. The sex drive is one of the strongest drives in nature, no less so in humans. The Arab Muslim culture and accompanying mentality is, to put it charitably, medieval (the Saudi calendar commences Year One with the rise of Mohammed and thus is around 600 years behind ours). One can see this in the way they treat their women – covered in black (the abaya), no going out in public unless accompanied by a male relative (let alone working), no voting or driving or up until recently, education. Women are property and the man guards his fiercely. Now compare that Dark Ages outlook with the freedoms that women have in the West and you might get a glimpse into the existential threat – at the most fundamental sexual level – that we present to them. And they do think that we’re infecting them. This is a threat that, in the minds of some of them, perhaps warrants strapping bombs onto themselves, or worse, flying planes into skyscrapers.
I don’t in any way condone this. Quite the contrary, I think the clash of civilizations that this represents – and that is precisely what this is – is truly existential and I’m all for our side winning.
Just some thoughts based on my experiences.
“That’s the problem – there’s no way to “fix” the issue, because you can’t change hearts that have been hardened by a radicalized religion, that quite frankly, is all they know.”
No, actually there is 1 way to do it. We did it last century, to Japan. You bomb them back to the stone age. Then you demand that they lay down their arms or be exterminated. And mean it. When their political elite (in Japan’s case, the Emperor and the High Command, in the Islamic world that would be the top of the religious hierarchy) come to the conclusion that it is better to submit than to die, the fighting will stop.
What it all boils down to is our political elite lacks the will to do that.
May I suggest the best way to deal with the problems of too much money going to too many oil producers is to open the US to full unbridled production of all our oil and gas resources and tank the world oil price. Yes, that is right “Drill Baby Drill” could not only help our unemployment and balance of trade, it just might put a crimp in our muslim enemies cash flow. Remember it worked to bring the Russians to heal in the mid 1980s. The Reagan Administration old timers were doing a victory lap a few years ago about their intentional collapse of the world oil price in the fist six years of the Reagan Presidency and the concommitent collapse of Russia’s main source of revenue. Oil in 1985-1986 was in the $10/barrel range and it is difficult to fund worldwide insurrections against the US when your main revenue source is in the tank.
What you wrote sorely confuses me. Your premises don’t match up with your conclusions. Are you saying that because so many Western females are slutty feminist Sex-In-The-City wannabees, Saudi Muslims think they’re getting less sex from their own abaya-clad females?
All the way down to here, and further, are excellent, well-made points and my heart heats strong in agreement. Glad to know there are people in the nation with good sense.
It has been my observation over the years that people, being mammals, adhere to a very mammalian trait; That of “belonging”. And, the known leftists are absolutely crippled, perhaps even from their youth, into wanting to belong to the “cool kids group”. This can be keenly observed most often in high-school but, you can see it during company meetings when the person giving the presentation is a “geek” or not tailored to the “cool” end of the spectrum.
Thus, the desire to belong and to be liked is, I think, at the core of many leftists’ ideology. So worried about being accepted and liked by the cool kids, they never venture on their own into a hobby that might invite scorn and derision. I was a “separatist” since my early youth…encouraged by my parents to do that which I enjoyed, while not being afraid to try new things. I became quite good at building scale models, a hobby, curiously accepted in such places as Japan and Europe as art when done to such fine detail, is derided in the US as “kid-stuff” and laughed at.
But the uniform for the leftists is to be a green-monger, Prius-driving, lettuce-only eating, fashionista who believes that socialism (when applied properly) will save the world and stop capitalists from raising hormone-laced cattle and destroying gaia with CO2. Seems an awful lot to pay attention to but millions of people do. Why? So they’ll be LIKED.
What is it on Facebook that drives its engine? The “LIKE” button. Oh brother. If I had spent much time worrying about such a triviality, I would never have been in the military, never won any awards in model-building contests, never restored my first boat, which is now one of many.
The levels of wanting to be liked are many and sometimes rather annoying. As Rush mentioned today about leftists who are vegetarians, they demand that all meat be banned. They are not tolerant. They are the opposite of tolerant and to a degree that they would happily cripple others over it. They want you to THINK as they do and cannot accept that others don’t share their mindset.
Yet it’s odd that they so badly wished to be liked, they care not if they’re disliked by those who don’t share their worldview. But this is not exactly true. Where a social conservative really DOESN’T care that a leftist doesn’t like them, the difference is that the leftist will try to enforce power over the conservative while the conservative will let the leftist alone to do their own thing. Meanwhile, the leftist, feeling all hurt that they conservative pointed out their obvious illogic, runs off to their cloister of fellow leftists for re-validation that they are, indeed, “cool” and “with it” and it’s the conservative who is “uncool”.
But as has been pointed out, they are still the minority, which they know but feel strong when the media outlets spew their nonsense. They know it’s nonsense and it’s their own self-doubt that prompts them to yell louder than anyone else, to put on shows of ridiculous behavior and publish lies. Meanwhile they claim their mortal enemies do the same thing when in fact, they have simply stated the obvious and cited facts and laid out a clear, logical argument.
So coupled with the desire to be liked is the willful ignorance of detail and truth as well as the ability to be critical, both of self and of presented facts. Especially of self.
I do not know how to fix it because, like any addiction, the one addicted has to want to get well and do the hard things to do so. It requires discipline, self-critiquing, brutal honesty and the willingness to be wrong—A lot.
“It’s not that our liberal friends are wrong; It’s that they know so much that isn’t so.” Yet, often when faced with the truth, liberals have a break-down not unlike some cybernetic creation on Star Trek when given a logic problem to solve. It’s really kind of funny, actually.
However, I feel this wave is going to have to live out the remainder of its days in disagreement with the rest of us normal people who understand simple logic and good sense. It’s a curse we have had to put up with for decades and they have always walked among us and unfortunately, we have had to put up with it since, well, at least the 1960′s but like waves, they come and subside, then re-occur, sometimes weaker sometimes stronger. But they do keep coming.
Those who demand that others act the way they want them to. To not eat meat, not smoke or drink (but taking drugs is okay), to not burn gasoline or buy from republicans, or this or that. To this day I’ve never heard of a kid who died from eating a bicycle that was painted with lead-based paint. Childproof caps? Haven’t met a kid yet who couldn’t figure one out. Seatbelts? The number of highway deaths go up every year. Same with airbags. Yet thanks to regulations, cars are now 110% more expensive to make and because of union wages, they are 1000% more expensive than they should be. (Those are arbitrary numbers, used only for emphasis…I do not know the actual value, adjusted for inflation). But why should the average new economy car cost $20,000 in 2012 when in 1972, it was $2,000? Inflation, regulations, union-wages/benefits, etc etc.
But I digress.
Liberals want desperately to fit in with the cool kids. It trumps everything from being responsible to acting politely. But I have one for them, “Nothing is cruel if it’s funny enough” and I love the days when a leftist makes a fool of themself. Liz Warren, Bawney Fwank, Dingy Harry Reid, La-La Pelosi, etc.
Nicely stated P Jay. I agree with your analysis and would add that one big advantage that the ‘cool’ leftist’s have is the megaphone of the cultural media. This megaphone distorts and magnifies their numbers – and influence – far out of proportion to their real numbers. If we could only wrest that megaphone away from them they would take their rightful place, sitting in a small, remote corner of society, surrounded by nothing more dangerous than nerf toys to play with. Nerf toys without any pointy bits.
:)
Interestingly as LGoPS points out, the leftist brigade has almost full control of mainstream media channels, distorting their numbers in an effort to elevate other’s perception of their power. The Bolsheviks employed the same strategy during critical stages of the Russian revolution, compensating for relatively small numbers by rapid movement and overwhelming an area that was a hotspot within key strategic areas, making it seem like there were more of them then there actually were, instilling fear in the public and their political enemies. Just like the mainstream media trying to get everyone else to shut up that disagrees with them through any means possible. The difference in this current context is there is no fear; just lots of ignorance and intellectual laziness that can be exploited by the leftist menace.
Well said Sir. I was beginning to feel I was alone in my wariness of embedded muslims in our country. It’s good to know there are others that understand (5 by 5)the threat they are to America.
Charlie,
Wonderfully well-said. Thank you!
It DOES apply to civilian government workers. As for civilian private sector workers, the oath cannot be forced upon them, for it includes the words, “I take this obligation freely, without mental reservation, or purpose of evasion…” They have to choose it for themselves.
Cronkite…not Kronkite. Sorry…my blood was up.
….that’s OK, don’t apologize.
……you’re the newest technician broadcasting data of an impossibly impenetrable, opaque, immaterial thought process from outer space, Knt, or Kron-kite….it’s contagious, infectious, dangerous, and is widely adaptable in format. Apparently incurable, it can, however, be quarantined, and withers upon exposure.
The reason we seem to win battles and lose wars is that we do not know our enemy. We take action A and expect response B, but instead we get reponse X and we are baffled by it. So we try action C expecting response D, but instead we get response Y. It is a matter of cultural difference, and the debacle in Iraq is a good example of the cost of our own ignorance. We are very straightforward, for example, and we think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That is not true in some parts of the world and may even be considered irrelevant to anything important. We now, after some twenty years of operating in the Middle East, have some people, chiefly military, with enough experience to appreciate the problem. But our politicians as well as the general populace still do not.
This may sound a bit bloodthirsty but successful military strategists don’t worry overmuch about whether someone will like or accept what we impose. If they do then a military campaign would be unnecessary in the first place.
When the war began in 2001 I assumed that military occupation would require at least a generation. I assumed that we could not trust them to govern themselves because they never had- which events are proving now.. While I always had doubts I was convinced that this kind of timeframe was the minimum necessary to actually have a chance of changing the mindset.
Having said all that I understand that you do need to understand your enemy thoroughly to know where to apply the force effectively. And I won’t try to tell the planners how to go about it. But as a civilian I will demand that we not set ourselves up for failure with the resulting loss of men, morale, and material because some jackass-whether wearing stars or 3-piece suits-thought we could embark on a “Short Victorious War”.
Confusion arises when we conflate the terms “war” and “occupation”. We won the Iraq war handily, but we blew the occupation until very late. In war it is sufficient just to kill the enemy and push on to victory. Occupation requires knowledge of the populace and a different set of skills. We may still have blown it.
The reason we seem to win battles and lose wars is that we do not know our enemy. We take action A and expect response B, but instead we get reponse X and we are baffled by it. So we try action C expecting response D, but instead we get response Y. It is a matter of cultural difference, and the debacle in Iraq is a good example of the cost of our own ignorance. We are very straightforward, for example, and we think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That is not true in some parts of the world and may even be considered irrelevant to anything important. We now, after some twenty years of operating in the Middle East, have some people, chiefly military, with enough experience to appreciate the problem. But our politicians as well as the general populace still do not.
These are the underlying principles of American foreign policy.
1. Wars should be fought in foreign countries and never in the United States. All of North and South America is untouchable.
Foreign wars are best because we can walk away from them whenever we get bored. Can’t walk away from war fought on US soil.
2. We accept the right of foreign enemies to lobby/bribe congress and marshal US opinion in order to defeat the US war aims.
3. We do no collect tribute from defeated foes.
4. we do not rape, pillage and burn. We do not take slaves nor do we pay our troops with plunder.
5. We do not keep the lands we have conquered in Europe, Asia or Africa. If necessary, we will rent it. If we keep troops in a foreign country, we don’t expect the host country to feed, cloth and pay our troops. We do expect them to learn English. Quite often we add native words to our language.
6. Foreign aid to foreign countries is justifiable interference in a foreign government. Aid by foreign countries to the US is unacceptable (see Iran-Contra).
7. Victory is not a US war aim because when the time comes to end a war, we are never sure what victory is.
#6 is false. Saudi Arabia buys influence in our universities, high schools, Moslem communities, media, and our ambassadors. Israel has it worse; American leftists and European govenments fund the New Israel Fund, which works against both body and soul. Imagine if Britain and France were funding Code Pink and the ACLU.
MZK1: what you describe are steps to mold public opinion which is acceptable in the US under #2.
Congress likes to control the president by withholding funds which he needs to fight wars in other countries. The liberals in Congress supported the Soviet communist attempt to overthrow the goverment of Nicaragua. Reagan took money money from the Saudis to help the Nicaraguan government fight a soviet sponsored communist take over. The pro-soviet communist wing of the democrat party used Congress to hold the Iran=Contra hearings in order to aid the communists in Nicaragua.
Although the US routinely gives money to foreign governments to get them to do things that have strong internal opposition, the pro-soviet communist wing of the democrat party strongly opposes foreign funding of US anti-communist foreign policy.
We have the most powerful military in history. We also have the most expensive and least cost-effective military in history. Since 2001, fewer than 50,000 Taliban soldiers have been killed by the US military and its allies. The USA alone has spent over 500 billion dollars on military activities in Afghanistan. That works out to over one million dollars per Taliban death. We’d have saved 450 billion dollars by paying mercenaries and bounty hunters $100,000 per dead Taliban soldier. Will a “total victory” in Afghanistan be worth half a trillion dollars, three thousand dead American soldiers and contractors, twenty-five thousand wounded American soldiers and contractors, and fifteen thousand dead civilian?
We waltz into unneeded wars, spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and accomplish little (unless one considers fattening the wallets of defense contractors to be an accomplishment).
That’s true. Not to detract from our military men and women and their officers, but I think it would be interesting to find out how much it costs us to kill one Taliban. Then consider how much it costs for one Taliban to kill and American soldier. Our dictum seems to be “Spare no expense to accomplish the mission, keep our people safe and healthy, and maintain their morale.” We pride ourselves on giving our military the best of everything. But does it work? I know we have to maximize our strengths – training, equipment, technology, logistics – and use them to exploit our enemy’s weaknesses. But I think a cost/benefit analysis might be enlightening.
Not that costs don’t need to be counted, but that is a slippery, difficult path to follow.
First: our stated goals in Afghanistan and Iraq INVOLVED killing bad guys, but there were/are other goals (stable governments, etc.).
Second: only one “thing” accomplishes the mission, but it’s difficult to judge how effective all the ones that went before were. By that I mean, it only takes one bullet fired by a machine gun to kill a bad guy, but it may take a belt of ammuntion fired before that one bullet finds its way into the bad guy’s head. All the bullets that were fired before that one bullet were not “wasted,” but that final bullet would not have achieved its effect without the previous ones being fired… and other, effects accrued from the rest of the belt (suppression, hitting another guy, maybe unfortunately hitting a bystander, breaking windows, etc.), the import of which may not be immediately obvious (or ever known).
So, it is not unreasonable to look at dollars/dead guy, but looked at in isolation, it’s an inadequate objective measure (though it may support the argument you are trying to make at the time).
Now… all that does NOT mean that we don’t truly waste lots of blood and treasure… but to accurately anticipate which drop of blood, and which dollar will be wasted and which will contribute to the goal is the hard part.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re battling VC guerillas in the jungle, massed Soviet armies in the Fulda Gap, Iraqi tanks in the desert, or Taliban on the Pakistan border. We have one strategy, and that’s to go in heavy with as much high-tech equipment as possible. If the Taliban are hiding in caves, we don’t send in some Marines with flamethrowers; we spend billions of dollars to design an anti-cave smart-bomb that we can drop from an F-15E. That way nobody gets hurt and if the attack fails we can blame the bomb.
Everybody’s going on about sustainability. How sustainable is it to spend billions (trillions) of dollars to kill a bunch of medieval desert warriors armed with surplus AK-47s and homemade bombs? How many hundreds or thousands of dollars does it cost to get one bullet from an arsenal in the States to Afghanistan? How much did it cost us to train the soldier who fired the bullet? How much to keep him fed, sheltered, clothed up to the moment he fired the bullet? How much did the Government spend to design his new helmet or the new camouflage pattern on his uniform? How much C4I infrastructure did it take for him to locate a Taliban to fire the bullet at? How many radios, computers, drones, AWACS planes? How many Apaches, F-16s, AC-130s, or B-1s were giving him air cover while he aimed his rifle? All to put one bullet in one Taliban.
Now, how’s the budget look on the Taliban side? Something tells me nobody’s running up a deficit keeping him in bullets, roast lamb, and rice.
Win ?
Only of we have objectives.
Have any been articulated?
Other than establishing a time table for the next train outa Dodge!
Great article. It reminded me of a line from, what I thought was your book “A War Like No Other,” but have been unable to locate it exactly. The line was akin to “There is nothing quite so dangerous in war as being only, ‘half bold.’”
Thanks for all your thoughts on these matters. This is important stuff.
Yet the MSM – including Fox News – as well as both main parties are lined up to take America into a nice, distracting war with Iran and/or Syria.
I can’t escape the unhappy conclusion that’s been with me for about 2 years now – that we’re going to wind up just like Sparta, Athens, Macedonia and Rome.
At least, Iraq and AfPak were training wars, conducted at relatively low cost in lives, combat pay, and defense corruption.
Ours is now the only experienced Army in the world in dealing with Islam, notwithstanding some middle-aged Russian veterans.
Can’t attack a billion puppets or their backers all at once, you know.
Even if the Saudi’s are threatening to collapse your banks.
I believe Mr. Bush, with assistance from Mr.’s Greenspan and Bernanke, felt or was advised he could promote or even stimulate ‘growth’ to keep the dollar costs in line. Not a perfect job, but acceptable, considering the domestic opportunism and corruption.
I would’ve preferred a punitive expedition, but a larger Industry is operating here, and State spies like Bremer managed to really screw things up. I wonder how many former Soviet analysts were re-hired to analyze Iran, or who’s bailiwick needed to be bribed with organizing HomeSec and the TSA.
Thanks much to VDH for mentioning 1974. Nixon had achieved total victory in 1973; Democratic traitors like Cronkrite, Kerrey, Dean, and Kennedy be damned.
The North had agreed to all of our demands, such as free elections, travel, press, etc.
(Until the Dems pulled their journolista hatchet job of false accusations and dropped a dime to the plumbers, colluding with alcoholic communist spies like ‘Ghengis Khan’ Kerrey carrying a bullet-point atrocity checklist from Madam Binh in Hanoi)
I’m not actually sure that the drone strikes are so clean, relatively speaking. I think the main reason the media hasn’t covered them and played up the collateral damage is that a) it’s a Democrat doing it and b) they’re afraid to go to those places, because Islamists have a very nasty tendency to capture reporters and cut their heads off, which kind of discourages close reporting.
Probably best to dispense with the public timetables for withdrawal as well. I would not tell a burglar what time I plan on leaving for work; I don’t see any reason – other than political reasons – for us to advertise when we will leave a battlefield. We should stay until the job is done as swiftly and efficiently as possible, or not go in the first place.
Indeed.
Otherwise forget it.
“Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?”
That is not a difficult question to answer. We have terrible generals. Terrible generals who lie a lot.
Gee, Fer, I didn’t realize you were a respected military historian, capable of dismissing the careers of American Generals in one sentence. Thanks for the insight.
Bad generals? Let’s try a thought experiment.
I (for real) live on 7.28 acres of land. We will assume that the land has been fallow for the past ten years and that I now want to farm it. We will presume you have 25 yrs. experience, are the graduate of a prestigious agricultural college, and have an additional two college degrees in related subject matters. I have no experience or training in farming and want you to create my farm.
You will be expected to clear the land, prepare it for planting, plant a suitable crop, tend and nurture the crop, harvest the crop and market it. There are, however, a few limits on what I will let you do. (Bet ‘cha gettin’ a feel for where this is goin’, huh?) Let’s consider the limits:
1) Yes, I have a very nice large tractor in the barn, but you must use my electric riding lawn mower and attachments: the exhaust from the tractor is toxic and the noise unacceptable.
2) The ground squirrels cannot be killed. You will have to capture them and release them in a suitable area – be sure to find their nests and rescue the babies.
3) The three families of quail must also be protected – be sure to leave some cover at the edges for them.
4) When you clear the land be careful that no dust or debris gets into the air. There is a lady almost two miles downwind who needs an oxygen tank to survive and any air pollutants cause problems for her.
5) You may not use organic pesticides or herbicides.
6) You may not hire more than 2 people to assist you. Labor is expensive and the additional traffic annoys the neighbors.
7) You may not plant hybrid or genmod crops – heirloom tomatoes, beans, corn, and the like only. Further, I must approve any proposed crop.
Ah, heck, I don’t need to go on – I could do a Master’s Thesis on the problems you would encounter and the roadblocks I could create from the weather to the return of the ground squirrels to the union troubles at the compost plant. This is enough to make my point.
When all is said and done you would have delivered an unmarketable product one-sixth the size I demanded and I would have elected to let the crops rot in the field rather than spend more money to harvest them. Then I could go on the Internet and declare that my farm failed because YOU are a bad farmer.
Life is easy when there’s somebody else to blame.
Fred B. —- Meant this ‘reply’ to Feral not you. Sorry (my daughter insists I need an internet guardian).
(As is proven by this becoming poat #35 instead of where it belonged. Sigh.)
And I didn’t realize you had been off world for so long.
Fred, I’m not a PhD in mathematics either, but I do know that 2 + 2 = 4.
Sure 2+2=4. Six=year-olds know that. But ask those six-year-olds how they would evaluate the truthfulness of our generals and see if their criteria would match up with yours. They would? That’s what I thought.
Even most 6 year olds would have enough sense to be able to figure out at some point that Afcrapistan is an absolute disaster. This isn’t difficult. The conduct of this war makes Vietnam seem absolutely brilliant by comparison. Afcrapistan is Operation Enduring Insanity, the Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere. Only those who hate the troops want to continue it.
Fred, frankly, I don’t think you are thinking at all.
F.C. – but blaming ‘terrible generals’ fails to address the problem; unless you want to consider the current CIC a ‘general’. His latest decisions (no night raids, no drone attacks into Pakistan) are prime examples.
Right, Bob. Generals are like Privates in the sense that basically they go where they are sent and carry out orders from their superiors. Some of our patriots here seem to have a rather sunny view of U.S, warfare, they seem to think Generals call the major shots. MacArthur overstepped his authority and tried to control the key strategy of the Korean War: attack China or not, so Truman fired him.
The high-level promotions come from and the buck stops in the White House. A high-ranking General can do one of two things when it seems mistakes are being made in the White House: the General can resign and/or retire or continue to do duty as a soldier, making the mistakes as least costly within the command as possible.
What are the responsibilities of a leadership position in the Army? The non-commissioned and commissioned officers are very simply responsible for everything their troops do or fail to do. In wartime that responsibility must weigh a ton.
On the contrary, we have very good Generals – good at getting promoted. The proof of this is the fact that they are Generals. The question you need to ask is who promoted them and why.
The skills that get you up to General or in charge of anything in peacetime aren’t the same as those that make you a good commander in war or conflict. It is pretty well known how many “perfumed princes” Lincoln went through, but Lee likewise went through a lot of brigadiers and even major generals; even Lee himself was not a combat commander at the beginning of the War, and it was only Johnson’s being wounded that brought Lee to command what became the Army of Northern Virginia.
In WWII, virtually every peacetime Army commander was wiped out with the first exposure to combat. I don’t know the subtleties well enough, but perhaps the Navy has a better system of segregating the ship captain and task force/battle group leader level from the more political types who see themselves in the Pentagon.
In government, and the military is just another government agency with less diversity in how people dress once you get past the small minority that are actually combat troops, conflict of any sort quickly rearranges the informal org chart and often the formal one as well. In my own area of labor relations, I saw this three times in a 20 year period. Since collective bargaining began in ’72, coincident with oil development, Alaska’s labor relations policy had been pretty close to “ask the unions what they want.” Oil development brought a lot of Republicans and libertarians into the once very liberal Democrat res publica, and the times were a’changing. The oil price crash of the mid-’80s and increasing Republican influence in the Legislature provoked an all out war between State government and the major unions beginning with the ’86 legislative session which refused to fund the negotiated increases in the third year of a labor agreement. The next time the largest unit of employees got a raise or even worked under a contract was six years later, and then represented by a different union. That war went to full heat with the election of, remarkably, a Democrat governor who when he saw just how bad the State’s finances were, said, “All bets are off” to his union friends. The people who’d come up to positions of responsibility in the “ask them what they want” days were clueless about how to deal with the new paradigm and all save one, the director, were gone by midway the governor’s term. The director responded by closing his office door and letting the new staff, I among them, do pretty much as we pleased. Fast forward to the mid-’90s; oil prices are still in the toilet, the major union has been at war with a Republican governor since their contract expired in ’92, but they buy themselves a Democrat governor in ’96. The Democrat Administration announced that they’d promised the unions a more “Union Yes” sort of labor relations function so all us warriors were to be fired. Well, we were merit system employees, not appointees, so firing us was easier promised than delivered; they never fired any of us, but we wouldn’t work for them any longer than we had to and dispersed to other agencies or in my case to the Legislature. The Democrats promote a bunch of kids and hacks and put them in charge because peace had broken out forever all over the World now that Democrats were in charge. Fast forward to the late ’90s: the biggest union hasn’t had a raise since the last one in ’92 because while they bought a Governor, they couldn’t buy a Legislature; the oil companies already owned it. The union is at war with both the Administration and the Legislature – I’m working for the Legislature. The Administration is getting hated on bad by their union friends, doesn’t like it, and hires me back to bring the unions to heel. I start by running off all the kids and hacks the Democrats had hired and promoted and bringing in people who are loyal to me so that by the time we get a Republican Governor in ’02, I have a private army in place hired and trained by me. We had four years of peace but when it became apparent that the new governor in ’06 was either going to be a return of the Democrat from ’94-’02 or The Divine Mrs. Palin, all the old hands, I among them, decided that retirement or employment elsewhere was indicated. That said, people I hired and trained still run it, one of my former subordinates just got appointed Commissioner of Labor but she’ll have a Helluva confirmation fight, but one day there will be another Democrat governor, and the whole game will change again.
“In WWII, virtually every peacetime Army commander was wiped out with the first exposure to combat. I don’t know the subtleties well enough, but perhaps the Navy has a better system of segregating the ship captain and task force/battle group leader level from the more political types who see themselves in the Pentagon.”
Art, is this a fair translation? “Army generals should have won every single battle in WWII just as the Navy Admirals did. I don’t know much about the details, but I’ll express my uninformed opinion anyway.”
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
Since VDH is a Historian i am curious why the book was not mentioned or brought up in the essay. The Basics of the book are well defined, and if strategy / costs cannot be defined then it is not a battle or war that can be won.
The question is, do our leaders even want to win a war again? Any of them?
Progressives like us to fight “wars of liberation”, or “wars against poverty”, or any other metaphoric sort of “war” you can think of. Kosovo was a case in point, as was Somalia. (As P.J. O’Rourke observed, Somalia was supposed to be a “war against hunger”. To which he responded, quite rationally, “What are we supposed to do? Shoot lunch?”)
What progressives cannot, and will not, tolerate is a war that is in our national interest. I’m sorry, but we had no interest in Somalia. And today, it is still a dog’s breakfast, and in addition a haven for piracy on a par with the Strait of Malacca. Big improvement, there.
(The Obama administration’s response to the latter was interesting. Namely, buying modern armaments for the Somali Navy. Oops- they didn’t have one. Most of the goodies ended up with the pirates. Double oops.)
The main reason is that progressives are thoroughly invested in a romance with any philosophy they can identify as “not Western”. It doesn’t make any difference what it is, and most of them can’t distinguish one from another, anyway. All they know, or care about, is that any worldview that isn’t our “evil, materialistic, unfeeling” Western one is automatically good. (If, like socialism, it gives those on top, like themselves, absolute power, even better.)
When we fight against an enemy they identify as “morally superior”, by virtue of believing in a non-Western philosophy, our “enlightened elite” want us to lose. Period. In the belief that doing so will allow them to remake our society into something more to their liking.
This was at the heart of the Vietnam dabacle’. It wasn’t so much that our enlightened ones didn’t know the North Vietnamese were Stalinists, as it was that they simply didn’t care. Their war was against their opponents here; to them, defeating the “near enemy” was the priority. We see the same phenomenon today, in relation to the Islamic world.
As for modern-day “conservatives” (And I’m talking about the ones in DC), they see wars that need to be fought to remake nations. News flash; Professor Hanson is right. Unless you are willing to pursue a scorched-earth policy, followed by martial law, the imposition of de facto colonial rule, and the ruthless elimination of the previous power structure, it doesn’t work. To see what this looks like, consider very carefully what Sparta and her allies did to Athens after they won the Peloponnesian War. It wasn’t called the rule of the Thirty Tyrants for nothing.
Yes, we do have the ability to win wars, on the ground, in the air, and at sea. (Probably in space, too, for that matter.)
What we do not have is a leadership that sees war for what it must be. The destruction of an enemy, to render them incapable of harming us. This cannot be done if the leaders either are not willing to use the necessary level of force, or worse yet are carried away by a romance with the other side’s philosophy that overrides common sense.
clear ether
eon
Odd how those who wish to liberate other nations from Western oppression end up very, very rich, often rich enough to begin liberating their own country from domestic capitalist pig-dogs.
The liberators find a need to stay in the liberated country, wisely managing its resources, or even need to keep the money machine- excuse me, the conflict- going so they may fund continuing liberation at home and abroad.
The ‘remakers’ then find themselves ‘forced’ to copy or outdo the ‘liberators’,
rather than just tell the taxpayers who and what the liberators are…
(and usually waving flags and bibles around to mask their opportune inability to name names)
Colonialism is a rather good thing, if it’s welcomed in voluntarily- that’s called customers.
I’d prefer the Right not simply try to harvest the ‘gains’ of the Left.
That’s what the Left does- let the first wave consolidate power, then steal said gains all at once.
Similar to an Emperor sending his army, to loot an army, that had looted a town.
The town never seemed to get it’s stuff back, and just paid more for the ensuing protection.
Just a small dissent on a matter of interpretation. One can view Vietnam as one of the most strategically successful American wars. LBJ and Nixon were right to want to prevent the fall of the dominos in SE Asia, though they probably never foresaw just how important the consequences would be. The ten years of war gave breathing room for the consolidation of dynamic capitalism and rapid economic growth throughout the rest of pro-American East Asia – Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. Ultimately these were the models that forced Deng to realize that China also had to abandon communism and take the capitalist road. Now Vietnam too is an eager part of the global capitalist order (and a nice element of the American balance of power to neutralize rising China). This was the thesis in Michael Lind’s book “Vietnam – the Necessary War”, which I think is correct. Sometimes the cunning of history overrides all human designs.
This was Lee Kwan Yew’s view. A professor of mine, Walt Rostow, had a letter from him expressing it.
You know, you’re absolutely right.
The Seven Tigers were once the hope of the global economy, until the Clinton-Soros communists collapsed their currencies in the baht contagion.
LBJ did break the Klan political machine (as did television, see below) and attacked Communism.
The Demmunists ruined him for that.
Nixon sundered the Sino-Soviet Bloc in ’72, and won Vietnam in ’73; I think
our traitor Demmunists may have hired OPEC to strike back, in part.
Although both were martyred, these two CIC’s (and our good young men) held back the darkness for millions.
As one Vietnamese woman said, “The GI’s don’t remember me, but I remember them. A night spent sleeping on bags in their hut was the only safety I knew. My father’s last thoughts, many years later on his deathbed, were of gratitude to the Americans.”
Gods, I wish the communists and their Arab mercenaries would go away.
If only Republicans were patriots, who would NAME OUR ENEMIES.
Vietnam was sorta, kinda a mixture of Mahan and Acheson. Indochina is one of those vital corners of navigation that while you don’t have to control, you can’t let an enemy control. If you’re turning the corner out of the Indian Ocean and Southern Asia into the Pacific, you have to go through some tight waters; it is a center of piracy even today for that reason. So, whether you’re relying on Mahan’s ideas of projecting sea power or Acheson’s ideas of containing the Soviet Empire, French Indochina and its surrounds was an Amerian interest.
I turned 18 and got my “greetings and salutations, you are hereby ordered…” letter in the fall of ’67, so I had an acute interest in the doings in Vietnam. I’m smarter than the average bear, read papers, and watched the evening news even as a college freshman. Looking back, I was absolutely clueless about the reality of Vietnam. The only picture we got in America was of pajama-clad peasants rising up against a brutal and corrupt government backed by the US for reasons US leaders had a hard time explaining. The communists in Vietnam, China, and the USSR didn’t defeat the US in Vietnam, the communists in CBS and NBC did (ABC wasn’t really a player in news in those days.).
Something VERY important happened after World War II: Americans got television. And then, in the 1960s with satellites, Americans got global television.
Vietnam was the first televised war–and the effect on Americans at home was dramatic.
Soldiers know that “war is hell”–they’re trained to deal with that. But now in the 1960s, reporters could broadcast images on the battlefield directly into every American home on TV, where American civilians were not trained to cope with what they were seeing: Maimed soldiers, dead civilians, burned villages, the fog and slog of war. And when the enemy struck back–in the Tet Offensive–Americans sitting at home watching TV while eating TV dinners were shocked. (And President Johnson never prepared Americans for potential counterattacks, that we had to take them in stride as we had the Battle of the Bulge.)
The Gulf War took this a step further. Now, American reporters on CNN and other networks were actually sent on location to report the war from the *enemy* side. As U.S. bombs were falling on Baghdad, there were American reporters in Baghdad reporting how the bombing was affecting the population there. All on TV in real time; CNN could report the bombing and the effect on the city simultaneously.
One wonders if Americans would have had the stomach for World War II, if they had television back then and could see on TV what Allied bombs were doing to Dresden and Tokyo, all in real time.
Global television has caused a major change of thinking among the civilians in the U.S. and other Western democracies: When we go to war, Americans living at home get to see on TV that the enemy are not Japs, not Krauts, not gooks, but *human beings like ourselves*: They have families and children who mourn the deaths of everyone we kill. And we get to watch their suffering and their sorrow, up close and personal, now on HDTV and even on viral videos on YouTube.
If your population is schooled in fanaticism, as the Nazi and Japanese and Islamist populations are, this doesn’t present a problem for them. But it presents a problem for Western values which consider human life to be precious–and now get to see what a waste of human life war can be.
The solution to this is NOT to try to turn war into a kind of humanitarian enterprise with nation-building. The solution is a President who understands the “CNN effect,” and is constantly on TV and the radio explaining and beseeching the American people that war is always an ugly brutal business, and they must steel themselves for what they are seeing on TV.
Attempts to “clean up” war with cruise missiles and smart bombs are actually contributing to this problem. The fantasy that we can make war surgical, precise, clean and neat can’t be sustained in real combat. Missiles go off course; civilians can be living or working in areas of strategic importance that we bomb. Then the world howls as those images are broadcast worldwide.
The U.S. Government should do the reverse: Be honest about the brutality of war.
The solution to this is NOT to try to turn war into a kind of humanitarian enterprise with nation-building. The solution is a President who understands the “CNN effect,” and is constantly on TV and the radio explaining and beseeching the American people that war is always an ugly brutal business, and they must steel themselves for what they are seeing on TV.
Brilliant analysis, and a synopsis of what was W’s singular failure as president.
He had the bully pulpit, he could have used it, and did not. WRT the Gulf War and so many other things.
In 1962, TV broke a domestic enemy without a war.
When saw the screeching segregationists live, for the first time, Klan membership dropped from two million to 20,000 in months. The Democrat political machine was broken for good.
They regrouped and reached out to Soviets and corruption for help,
sparking black seperatist movements and advocacy journalistas.
Unfortunately. You are absolutely right that much later, Dubya lost the essential bully pulpit.
So much could have been done without bullets, bombs, or the TSA.
I just noticed something, writing this.
Exposure, for a free people, seem much quicker, more efficient, and less costly in lives and dollars than bloodshed. Another unintended consequence of freedom?
“One wonders if Americans would have had the stomach for World War II, if they had television back then and could see on TV what Allied bombs were doing to Dresden and Tokyo, all in real time.”
We lie to ourselves about US morale in WWII. After the breakout from Normandy, the rest of the campaign in Northwest Europe was a slow, tedious slog by men who didn’t want to be the last one to die and both morale and performance were low. There’d been way too much foolish talk about being home by Christmas. It is a very good thing we didn’t have to pack those men up on troop ships and send them to Asia.
Once Germany was defeated, civilian morale plummetted as well; we were a very war-weary nation. Who knows what a slogging match in Japan would have been like or whether we’d have been able to hold to “unconditional surrender.” I’m morally certain that had it gone on long enough for true conflicts of interest to develope between the US and the USSR in Asia, the very robust American Left and the Comintern would have made the US a living Hell of demonstrations, work stoppages, boycotts, etc. just as the left had stymied Western involvement and war production during the days of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact. The nuclear bombs quickly ended the war before the cracks widened and stayed the USSR’s hands in Asia until it, too, had a nuclear bomb.
About those nuclear bombs. I worry that someday they’ll be used because nukes provide quick devastation, so quick that by the time newshounds can get video and the Amy Goodman-type commies (hard- or soft-core) can organize faux-outrage and protest marches, the conflict is over.
The Article and commentary surpasses excellence !! I wonder if Obama, Biden, HClinton, Pelosi, Ried or the top US Generals might read ( and if they did, understand ) any of it. Thank you all for a fine lesson in past, current and future ( I can hope!) history.
God Bless the U S A !!!!
Appreciate article & comments, especially C. Griffith above.
A couple of years ago, I read of a service medal being given out by the Obama administration which recognized military personnel for kind & gentle interaction with Afghan villagers, my characterization, but you get the gist.
Debasing Our Military, One Politically Correct Moment After Another
Middle Eastern intervention by the US is to keep the supply of the region’s oil flowing. We are making these countries rich without exacting a price for their protection. Keeping a large military base in Iraq makes strategic sense for an extended period until we raise our domestic production. We should immediately start drilling everywhere oil exists in our country including offshore and Alaska.
Refineries in the Dakotas would make sense if you could get the EPA out of the way. After are domestic production increases, maybe sooner we should extract payment from the Saudis, Emirates, Kuwait for our protection. We are crazy to protect them for free. Quid pro Quo. Machiavelli for Secretary of State. We could even stop the Ethanol nonsense and raise corn for food.
One wonders how many military blunders we have been led into because of the non-military blunders that proceeded them. Iran is the perfect example of this. We had it within our grasp to develop Iran as pro-western and pro-American economic powerhouse and then came Jimmy Carter and the usual “who are we to impose our values on them” liberal sob-sisters. What a different and better world this would be if only we had Iran as a military and trading partner with a remarkably intelligent population base that admired America(and still does, truth be known). We could have but we blew it. On the list of colossal blunders the loss of Iran ranks at or near the top.
Can We Still Win Wars?
Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question.
Not silly, VDH. But the wrong question, perhaps.
The question as I see it, are these States still united? And who would constitute the “we” in your question in bold above?
If the “we” consists of Jeremiah Wright exploding at the pulpit that bin Laden’s murder of our innocents was our “chickens coming home to roost” and asking God to Damn America…then no, “we” cannot win wars, because we can’t properly identify the true enemies…foreign and domestic.
If the “we” consists of the Propaganda and Lies Ministry that called the first Iraq war a “quagmire” two days into the engagement, that started counting “grim milestones” and tearing at the public’s morale and support like an industrial strength Tokyo Rose, then no…”we” cannot win wars, because we don’t identify traitorism for what it is, we ignore it at our peril.
If the “we” consists of the AP and UPI and Reuters and BBC that stage “news” scenes with Green Helmet Guy and photoshop phony pictures and make up composite witnesses like Captain Jamil and feed the world a false, fake, phony picture of those wars, then no…”we” cannot win because lies from the battlefields feed the world the enemy’s propaganda and pass it out like candy.
If “we” consists of Bill Ayers and Sean Penn and Van Jones and other committed small c communists in academia, Hollywood and media, tearing at the corners of free market democracy with their snarling teeth, then no…”we” cannot win wars overseas, when we don’t even recognize the overthrow right beneath our very noses.
If “we” consists of a conspiratorial media fighting against the truth at every turn, an academia that is an indoctrination farm fighting against us at every turn, a legislative body that doesn’t read it’s own submissions, doesn’t bother to produce a budget, and lies to its constituency with impunity, a rogue Senate and a renegade White House…then no…we cannot win a war against OTHERS, because we are losing the war against ourselves.
“WE” are full of traitors. “We” are filled with propaganda and lies slandering our once great nation. “We” are being ruled, not governed. “We” are in the midst of an overthrow that “we” are not fighting against.
These States are not united. They are deeply divided. By design.
And no war overseas will ever achieve an objective, because no objective will ever be allowed that has our interests at heart. Not by those who do not have any of the interests of this land of ours at heart in the first place. They want to apologize for our existence and “transform” us and “redistribute” our bounty to those from whom it was “stolen” by us.
What objective of yours does that goal coincide with?
Me neither.
The war we should be winning is the one we are not fighting. Right here at home.
Great post.
(Is it just me or is the refresh on PJM really slllooooowww today? I note other sites download properly).
CF, you have posted a very good comment. As you note the mainstream media is nothing more than the Ministry Of Propaganda and, as such, is at the root of the fact that we are a Balkanized nation. In my comment directly above I write of the tragedy of our loss of Iran as a potentially strong ally. In the early 1960’s I lived in Iran and traveled the country extensively. My contacts with the general populace were close and personal as well as cordial and friendly. Then in later years I listened and observed as the mainstream media described the unfolding and deteriorating events as Iran descended into a radicalized hellhole. I could not believe the contrast with the reporting of the media versus what I knew to be true from intimate personal experience. It was then that I began to gravitate from a distrust of the mainstreamers to my present loathing of the bastards. In my opinion they are the main body of the enemy that we must defeat if we are to ever become a reasonably united USA. The good news is that we can defeat them thru our rapidly growing alternative information sources. Then backed by that victory we begin to close down the liberal education establishment. The only question is can we move fast enough?
And this just today (Drudge)….Brian Williams, “”Our politics are broken,” he told the graduating class at George Washington University. “Remember, there’d be no constitution in this country without compromise. We wouldn’t have been formed without compromise. Going without compromise makes you a highly principled person, but it can often lead us to a government that is not attuned to the needs of the people.”
You’ve got it, Brian. We need more welfare state government and we would have it if only those radical Tea Party types would just “compromise” with the socialist/Marxist in the White House. You know, socialism/Marxism on an orderly time scale. Just like Europe. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those pesky right-wingers would just sellout and compromise with the left? Gee, if only Dick Lugar and Olympia Snowe could have stayed in the game.
True, the were enormous compromises in the making of a ratified constitution. But the founders did not compromise on individual freedom and liberty. They didn’t meet despotism half-way as you are asking us to do.
Brian Williams. Obama’s enabler. Also, an overpaid and under-educated jackass and a major threat to liberty and unity in the USA.
Yes, great post.
Thank you.
Well, there is a lot of truth to that statement regarding our chickens coming home to roost. Did we really have to build military bases in Arabia? That came back to haunt us, big time.
The Saudi government asked for our assistance and we gave it. You’re not smart enough to know that Osama bin Laden himself petitioned the Saudi government to have his men invade Iraq; he opposed American presence on Saudi soil not because he viewed it as “imperialism” (this criticism came later, when he realized the enormous market for such sentiments among the Western left), but because he opposed non-Muslims in the land of Mecca. So unless you share bin Laden’s racist premise that only Muslims can invade other Muslims or help defend other Muslims, you have no case.
I think we need to redefine “Win”. I’m from Ann Arbor, with lots of END the WAR bumper stickers, STOP this ENDLESS WAR, etc. The only way a war ends is if one side surrenders (or is rendered incapable of responding, ie killed). There is no “other side” in the current wars, just a vague collection of ideas that we are fighting against. We defeated National Socialist Germany in WW2 (they surrendered), but the Nazi ideas live on (in Germany and elsewhere). The only way to make an idea surrender is by ridicule. The Three Stooges did a lot on that front, but we can’t ridicule the current ideas we struggle with because of our internal handicap on religious freedom (ie, PissChrist is art, but try and make a political cartoon of the prophet…). So we can end the war by surrendering, win it piecemeal by killing those that hold onto the idea that they should kill us, or declare a real war and send the Three Stooges to ridicule the ideas on the other side . My $0.02
Interesting concept when you consider Nathanial Greene’s Southern Campaign during the war of the Revolution.
Greene understood the tenuous logistical situation that the British were in so he utilized a strategy to keep the British out of supply. Essentially he never won a battle, but he won the war. (in the south)
No, no, that can’t be; the war was won by the gallant patriots from states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Slave-owning Episcopalians and Baptists from Virginia to Georgia couldn’t have had anything to do with it; America was founded by proper people, or didn’t you get the memo?
The military is full of conservatives. They know that there are limits to what they can accomplish. Bombs and bullets are great a destruction, not nation building. We hate mission creep and BS peace missions.
The government is full of statists who cannot conceive of limits to government power. They are convinced that they can change peoples, build nations, whatever. The failures of the last generation of statists doesn’t phase them in the least.
And how about proving to the American people that the country we’re about to fight actually is a clear and present danger to the United States? If it is, what’s so terrible about declaring war and demanding an unconditional surrender from that country if we win the war? Think about how much different the war in Afghanistan would have been if we had initially gone in there with one million troops, totally destroyed (i.e., killed, not sent to Guantanamo Bay) all the Taliban and al Qaeda troops we could find, declared victory, installed a pro-west government in Kabul, and then just left? One thing about the Afghans, if you teach them a horrible lesson they generally leave you alone. And you could have warned them that if they forced us to come back, we would have totally destroyed the country, leaving nothing but dead bodies and destruction. Have you ever noticed that the Afghans or the Taliban never allow acts of terrorism against Russia? Why do you think that is? Because they know that the Russians would love to come back and flatten what’s left of that pathetic country because of what happened to Russia in the 1980s. And the Russians wouldn’t hesitate to use whatever weapons were needed to do the job, even nuclear weapons. With a guy like Putin in power, I don’t think the Afghans would be smart to see how serious Russia was in defending itself.
And whatever happened to declared wars? Why doesn’t Congress determine when we go to war and NOT the United Nations or just the president? Obama took us to war in Libya and we never had a vote on it in Congress, much less a declaration of war. I must be one of the few people around who actually agrees with the War Powers Act, because if the President can’t convince Congress in a timely manner that we should be going to war, then odds are that we shouldn’t be there in the first place. Ninety days seems like more than enough time to bring a war resolution to Congress for them to approve.
And under Obama have we now ceded all of our sovereignty to the United Nations? Will we only go to war when they tell us to, as in Libya, and will we NOT go to war even if our interests are involved, simply because the UN does NOT want us to? These are serious questions we need to answer and soon. Because we’re going to have to make some serious decisions about Israel attacking Iraq. That has the makings of the next “Cuban Missile Crisis” in terms of scale and we’d better be sure how to deal with it before it happens.
Greetings:
If I may, as a homage to a beleaguered US Marine, back in the dark days of Iraq 2.0 whose graffito read:
America’s not at war.
The Marine Corps is at war.
America is at the mall.
Since the end of the military draft in the ’70s, America has been sending out an implicit message to its menfolk that they no longer have an individual responsibility to protect their country. Through the supposed miracle of the “all-volunteer” military, America is now dependent of the smallest of population percentages to impose its military will. And even that small percentage is heavily diluted by increasing numbers of women and, most recently, blatant homosexuals.
When was the last time you came across a reference to the manpower shortages during those darkest of days in Iraq?
When I think of America in the world these days, what comes to mind is a lion, the proverbial King of the Beasts, trying to protect his meal from a pack of hungry hyenas.
I prefer the wisdom of the Iraqi street guy: Shoot the paymasters.
Instead of nuking the Kaaba in Mecca, assassinating Iran’s IRGC and the Rebel 6 Princes who used 911 to take over the KSA, we prefer to make hay in a continuing revenue stream.
Now we’re copying the Soviets.
They nearly owned 2/3 of the world in 1970 with ‘nation-building’.
An example would be the 1973 Afghan Marxist Party overthrowing Afghanistan’s 400 years of peace under a monarchy family. Undermine, then rebuild to suit.
Oddly similar to Cloward-Piven strategy.
Stalin ‘supported’ Israel’s creation so he could use her as a target to recruit Muslim generals.
We keep Israel’s enemies strong enough to keep Israel dependent, and recruit Muslim petrodollar recycling.
A slow motion ‘Iranian Missle Crisis’? Been working since 1979.
The brilliant, humanitarian Shah wanted to pull the non-Arab majority of the Muslim world into a trade bloc, but Demmunist Carter replaced him with the Arabist Lenin, Khomeini. The Demmunists are recruiting Arab mercenaries just as EuroSocialists, Soviets, and Nazis did.
They ain’t working for us, and the so-called Republicans just make noise when they want to increase their cut of the action. Don’t expect it to stop or reform anytime soon. It’s just transnational Biznis.
I’m a VDH fan but wouldn’t mind seeing a few mea culpas from him. I remember the glory days of 2003 to 2008. VDH depicted OIF as a success on the order of VE day and Petraeus and Ordierno as the new Grant/Sherman or Eisenhower/Patton. Unfortunately he also didn’t really call W on the carpet for not taking out Iran and Syria, the patrons of our enemies in Iraq and the current planners of much worse for us and our allies.
During the Clinton administration, the magazine Foreign Affairs had a cover story titled, “Foreign policy as Social Work.” That pretty much summed it up. The less a country was a threat, the more the left wanted to invade.
We’ve gotten where we are because we have tried to apply a moralistic code to the one thing lacking any morality – war. If we had Brian Williams with “live streaming Predator feed” from the latest missile attack in Pakistan followed by a dronie reporter with the carnage aftermath, we would have more wailing and cry of “war-mongering innocent baby killing”.
The US military CAN fight and win – the US political system CANNOT fight and win. They don’t have the guts. We go in and fight with the right hand whilst simultaneously “nation building” with the left. We need to fight with both hands, and deal with fewer remnants for re-building. We also need to define “the enemy”. OEF would have been different had we gone in and said “anyone with a weapon is a threat and will be killed” instead of letting the beaten masses return home with their AK’s.
But as cf said above the current state of “we” in the US would preclude winning – far too few have skin in the game – Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson tribal clan members ain’t fighting and dying, Rosie O’Donnell isn’t wearing camo, and Nancy Pelosi’s grandkids aren’t graduating from Parris Island.
“Remember, there is also an ironclad law about the Middle East, one we keep forgetting: Arab intellectuals (many of them educated or residing in Western universities) hate the U.S. for backing dictators; they hate the U.S. for intervening to remove them; they hate the U.S. for trying to impose postbellum democracy upon them; and they hate the U.S. for staying clear and letting Arabs be Arabs on their own.” A truer statement that sums up the mindset of “Arab intellectuals” could not be made.
But your brilliant summation, Dr. Hanson, does not go nearly far enough. After years of travel to the Arab world (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait) dating back to the early 80′s, I can say with certainty that this same sentiment is virtually universal among the Arab business and merchant classes as well. Nothing the US accomplishes is ever viewed as a success and our motives are wholly suspect. No US action or policy will ever be viewed positively by educated Arabs–be they well-travelled US college graduates or local shop owners who have never ventured further from their Riyadh homes than Mecca. And if you think it’s all because of the Israeli-Palestinian situation–think again. I’ve never heard a one of them utter a word about the Palestinians.
The Middle East is genuine “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” place for America and the West. The cultural gap is a “Bridge Too Far” and our policy should be one of “strictly business” with the whole of the region.
We can win wars, and do. However, when the military is turned into a police station and everything become a crime instead of a battle, we then become a political structure that cannot win but only hold the line.
This started with the Truman administration and the UN in 1949, the Korean War that was called a police action, Grenada,Panama, Viet Nam, Kosovo, the list goes on and on. We are good at winning wars, but lousy at the policing of the world.
This is the game of not declaring War, but fighting without the approval of Congress. Look at Libya, Egypt Etc.
We are becoming King makers with the use of our superior military.
The rest of the world wants the USA to police them, but under the guise of the UN. This would destroy our sovereignty and would demand that our military be controlled by the UN, with people we have no way of holding accountable.
What could possibly go wrong? Possibly use our own troops on us to take our Guns? Fun to see the future but, frightening to understand the consequences of these actions.
A war is truly won only when the enemy is annihilated. God commanded the Israelites to annihilate the pagan tribes occupying the Land of Milk and Honey. All twelve tribes failed to do so.Thus the war continues, 3500 years later.
We all but wiped out the Japs and the Nazis in WWII and compelled their unconditional surrenders; and have had no more trouble from them since. In Granada and Panama we struck with overwhelming force and prevailed.
Otherwise, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, eg, we have been timid and halfhearted in warring, and have spent lives and money for nothing.
If we fight, we must totally destroy our enemy as quickly as possible. That enemy must be motivated by an overwhelming fear of further contact with us.
Otherwise we continue to waste lives and finances purposelessly. Which is the strategy of the New World Order traitors in the current administration and also with the leadership in the Repukeican Party, as well as the Demonrats.
We must stop fighting unnecessary wars, refrom the electorate and find us an Andy Jackson.
in the words of prof terguson – “good answer, i like the way you think”
Fred B. —- Meant this ‘reply’ to Feral not you. Sorry (my daughter insists I need an internet guardian).
Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities.
- Joint Chiefs of Staff, 26 May 1954
Congress was in part the prisoner of events. The leaders of the United States in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s failed to come up with a strategy that would produce victory. Instead, they simply poured in more and more US troops and materiel into South Vietnam. They misled the public by insisting we were winning the war and thereby prepared the war for defeatism and demagoguery later on. The American people could not be expected to continue indefinitely to support a war in which they were told victory was around the corner, but which required greater and greater effort without any obvious signs of improvement.
Norman Podhoretz, who believes that American intervention in the Vietnam War was “an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses,” has concluded that “the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether.” His judgment, in retrospect, appears to be as reasonable as any. The United States intervened in the Vietnam War on behalf of a weak and incompetent ally, and it pursued a conventional military victory against a wily, elusive, and extraordinarily determined opponent who shifted to ultimately decisive conventional military operations only after inevitable American political exhaustion undermined potentially decisive US military responses. Even had the United States attained a conclusive military decision, its cost would have exceeded any possible benefit. Vietnam was then, and remains today, a strategic backwater, and the US decision to fight there in the 1960s was driven by a doctrine of containing communism that in the 1950s was witlessly militarized and indiscriminately extended to all of Asia. Bernard Brodie observed in the early 1970s that “it is now clear what we mean by calling the United States intervention in Vietnam a failure. We mean that at least as early as the beginning of 1968 even the most favorable outcome could not remotely be worth the price we would have paid for it.”
The key to US defeat was a profound underestimation of enemy tenacity and fighting power, an underestimation born of a happy ignorance of Vietnamese history, a failure to appreciate the fundamental civil dimensions of the war, and a preoccupation with the measurable indices of military power and attendant disdain for the ultimately decisive intangibles. In 1965, Maxwell Taylor confessed that “the ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We still find no plausible explanation of the continued strength of the Viet Cong.” Four years later, Vo Nguyen Giap commented that the “United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they’d have already exterminated us.”
The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.
- From the US Army War College Quarterly, Winter 1996-97
The articles I see suggest that the US government does have operations in Syria… to help arm various groups of Muslim thugs.
I’m told by VietNam vets that the USA was definitely winning the war there, until we stopped bombing the North VietNamese. Not bombing the other side in the war? Ridiculous. Give me what you describe as Neanderthal modes any time. They also tell me that the Tet Offensive was a terrible disaster for the North, but the leftist propagandists in the USA turned it into a loss for the USA.
Yes, we knew that the Middle East fighting would be guerrilla/terrorist war. We knew that it would be nasty and messy, that, as in all war, there would be collateral victims. Once again, it is the leftist media which at least pretended not to realize these things and then to bemoan them and not see beyond to the aims and goals.
I think the cure is to speak up early and often, to remind them of the stated goals, aims and expected difficulties in a general way that does not tip off or give ideas to the other side. I agree with White Tiger: avoid unnecessary wars, but once in, totally destroy the enemy as quickly as possible. VietNam may have been an unnecessary war, but not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran. Once committed by a resolution of congress, we should, as in your book on the 3 great liberators, do what is needed to get the job done.
Any American who still supports staying in Afcrapistan, the longest war in American history, needs to have his head examined and if our generals were Pinocchio their noses would extend past the moon by now. General grade officers have been carefully selected for their willingness to worship the “COIN” idiocy, which tops even global warming for shear stupidity, and to lie to the American people and to their own troops which they regard as little more than Lab Rats in their Mad Hatter COIN Sociology Experiment which should be rightly called Operation Enduring Insanity, The Ultimate Trillion Dollar Bridge to Nowhere, in Afcrapistan. How many more must lose life or limb for these despicable men’s hubris?
See H.R. McMaster’s book “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam”
See the article by LTC Daniel L. Davis “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan” in The Armed Forces Journal.
“There is nothing new under the sun”.
Actually, MG H.R. McMasters is closely associated with GEN Petraeus and with COIN. McMasters executed one of the early successful COIN operations as a regiment commander at Tal Afar, Iraq. Petraeus subsequently utilized McMasters as a senior plans/staff officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and tapped him to head TF2010/TF Shafafiyat (counter-corruption, a thankless job in Afghanistan but an essential part of a successful COIN strategy).
To the best of my knowledge LTC Davis is a reserve logistics officer who never commanded a combat unit larger than a company (120 soldiers) and whose official duties in Afghanistan involved US Army units, not ANA or ANP units. That being said, some of his descriptions of Afghan conditions match what I saw, although I found his conclusions to be a bit broad.
IMHO, COIN strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed due to the unwillingness of the US government to eliminate insurgent cross border safe havens in Syria, Iran, and Pakistan.
There is, or at least was, an old saying in the army, “You can’t shine $hit” and COIN in the muslim world is $hit, and even McMaster can’t shine it.
As to LTC Davis, if you are going to dismiss what he says because he doesn’t have the service record of a Patton or an Audie Murphy, then you should completely dismiss VDH. Petraeus doesn’t exactly have a big combat record either. I prefer to go with what makes sense rather than “credentials”. The stupid Operation Enduring Insanity in Afcrapistan has been going on for over 10 years, the longest war in our history, and with no “victory” in sight, so obviously it’s been not exactly a brilliant campaign.
Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down
By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
http://armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030
What was the latest war we actually won? Most likely WWII.
Why did we win? Not winning was unthinkable. We had an all-out committment.
What did we learn? War is a great way to break a Depression. Keynes on steroids.
How did we adapt the lesson? By using semi-wars, police actions, interventions, stabilizations, limited wars, as an economic tool to jump start stagnant business cycles.
The ultimate lesson? The war to guarantee our four freedoms has done more to provide for their destruction. Consider that many freedoms were subugated to security needs and then considered a casualty of that war when they were not fully returned. That war (WWII) built a bureaucracy which never permitted its own dismantling.
Yahweh, David Petraeus
Would never okay the way you do your thing
Ding ding ding, ding, ding, ding
And you’ll get yours, David Petraeus
Coddlin’ and even sidin’ with that Islam stuff like you do
Boo hoo hoo, boo hoo hoo
Where have you gone, General George S. Patton?
Our nation turns its longing eyes to you
What’s that you say, David Petraeus?
You have banished ‘ol Blood and Guts far away
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Coo coo ca-choo, Mr. Pentagon
Mohammad appreciates you more than you will know
Woo woo woo, woo woo woo
Allah uses you, yes, Mr. Pentagon
He may grant some short reprieve to those infidels who humanity betray
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
CCR Soldier Boy, Circa 2012:
Just about ten years ago I set out on the Afghanistan road
Seekin’ my fame and glory, lookin’ to turn the Mullah’s Hemorrhoid into a pot of gold
Well, things got bad, and things got worse, I guess you will know the tune
Oh ! lord, stuck in Afghanistan yet again
Flew in yet again on a big plane, I hope I’ll be in one piece flyin out when I go.
I was yet again just passin’ through, must now be yet another 5 tours or more.
Running out of time and patience [Not to complain but whatever the hell happened to my youth?!"], looks like they took still more of my friends.
Oh ! lord, Im stuck in Afghanistan yet again.
The Hope and Change man in the White House said yet again I was on my way.
Somewhere I lost his connection, he ran out of words to say.
I came into Kabul, yet another one year stand, looks like the plans fell through yet again
Oh ! lord, stuck in Afghanistan yet again.
Mmmm…
If I only had a woman ["Hey Jack, do you remember what a woman is?"], for evry tour Ive done.
And evry time Ive had to fight while Obama sat back home cheered on by CINOs empowering Islam and power drunk.
You know, Id like to catch the next plane back to where Im from.
Oh ! lord, Im stuck in Afghanistan yet again.
Oh ! lord, Im stuck in Afghanistan yet again.
I think people have forgotten what wars are like. How many times did France fight Germany? Few wars are permanent.
Back in the early days of “The Simpsons” Side Show Bob was sent to prison for robbing the Quickee Mart and trying to frame Krusty the Clown. As he was being hauled away he shouted “You can’t keep a Democrat out of the White House forever and then I’ll be back!”
I attribute the fact that we don’t seem to be able to win wars any more to the Side Show Bob effect.
Thanks for the article mr. Hanson. I am not a history professor but I did study the second world war. I found that 99 % depends on resources and logistics. (Grant) The Germans lost the war for 1. because they made mistakes in calculating the true dimension of Russia as it is curved around the globe, and about Bomber Harris when after the war it was discovered the 6 years of bombing Germany have had no effect what so ever on the German war industrial output, and that the alleged policy of the US and Britain not to open a western front Stalin had asked for so many times in order to have both Germany and the Soviet Union to become weaker which in reality turned out they both became stronger and stronger despite the gargantuan loses they both suffered etc. etc.
Today I am advocating to put the islamic world behind an Iron Curtain until islam is abjured. The US islam oil dependency for military reasons and the OPEC high oil price monopoly and the Russian gas price coupling has to be abjured too he he. But the Great People of the United States knows since decades of the connection of what essentially is the crony capitalist conglomerate of the arms & military complex, their scientific community and research centers, their Trade Unions, the automobile industry & Big oil, their lobbies, cronies on the Hill etc.
In 1973 the oil price and therewith the income of Gulf States like Saudi Arabia was raised in return for arms contracts in the US to compensate for the fall out of US arms systems contracts at the end of the Vietnam war.
So let’s concentrate on the scientific community and their state of the art research centers inextricably connected with this conglomerate in relation to the fact that austerity in this field will actually stagnate scientific and intellectual development.
So the US military complex is both crony capitalism as well as the cutting edge innovative venture capitalist in one. Next to advocating the neurological disease Islam behind an Iron Curtain .. I also advocate a research for mass scale scientific and industrial innovation like Terra forming Mars or mining all 5.000+ Near Earth Objects to compensate for the fallout of scientific research as a result of ending arms contracts from the Gulf States when the US, Europe, Japan were to end dependency from Islam oil …
Forming the USAF in 1948 decapitated the military. Heads rolled into Joint Chiefs, and advisory group. Civilian secretaries now in charge of military. All speak with voice of White House or are civilians in 24 hours. If the Army says something about it is swell in Afghanistan, it is a ventriloquist act.
When the new ground commander in Korea came in to replace Gen. Walton Walker, KIA, Truman learned of the 5 amphibious landings planned by the USN and the Army which would have transformed the Chinese Army in N. Korea into terrified suchi. Truman ordered that henceforth there will be no more amphibious landings in the Korean Peninsula. Now I wonder why that was.
President Kennedy signed the Laotian Neutrality Treaty, putting Laos, as neutral as Poland was in 1961, off limits. Bombing N. Vietnam was governed by White House targeting, done under odd theories which did not work.
The draft became evil as the Congress found ways to protect its sons. We had enough religious studies exemptions to service the spiritual needs of 20 million troops with chaplains. The draft can no longer be done because VP Gore’s “government efficiency” office stopped the Department of Labor in maintainnig their DICTIONARY OF OCCUPATIONAL TITLES. As it coded all jobs in the US with over 100 different parameters, it could be used to support or deny exemption claims to protect vital industries or blow away bogus reasons for avoiding the draft. It was also vital for Social Security disability determinations, but that is another subject. If the draft is needed, it will not work. The Civil War system should be used again. A person’s pre-inductgion physical and mental testing and vocational profile would be used. If they do not want to serve, they can find another person with an equal or better profile to serve in their place. The price paid to the substitute would be determined by the two of them agreeing on a price.
Was it the late 1980s? The latest Soviet fighters, avionics, radar, and missiles had been sent to Syria, and Soviet operators were still helping. Syrians picked a fight with Israel Air Force. The older (by then) F-15s with their US-Israeli avionics showed up. Syrian-Soviet planes were erased, Soviet missiles hit nothing, Soviet radar was foxed, and Israeli missiles worked. No F-15 was harmed in this process. The USSR and Red China realized their air defense was feckless. An Israeli aircraft with Western avionics could fly unnoticed or unstopped to Moscow and shovel cow poop down onto Red Square. Lenin’s doctrine of stealing from the filthy capitalist powers had failed. Capitalist progress was too rapid to steal and replicate. They had to be original and needed giant amounts of funds to do it. Where can the money come from? Chinese tinkered at the bottom of economics, allowing people to make things and do business under strict supervision. It looks like it works well. The Soviets tried Perestrioka and Glasnost, tinkering at the top of economics, the philosophy of the Nomenklatura and we know how that worked out.
My peference would be to handle the rise of Later Verse Enthusiasts by following some of the 8th-12th Century doctrine. The world is in two states, the world of Islam,and the world of war where the Later Verse Enthusiasts proceed with Jihad to expand the world of Islam. It is not a sin for the faithful to be in the world of war as all such are to be colonists. We should get the dhimmi out of the world of Islam. We should fortify the world of Islam by cutting ties. Their students should not study anything in the West that is not blasphemy in the Koran, such as science. Their colonists should return to the world of Islam to prevent future conflict. Muslims would all be happier if separated from that which triggers negative responses. A purer content of Islam will enable their society to grow according to Sharia and be prosperous as noted by Allah in various places. The Dhimmi world can proceed along in its degredation, practising the blasphemy of science and thinking evil thoughts such as not noticing that all natural law is blasphemy and doing what they want. The world of Islam can perhaps achieve the uniform function and prosperity of North Korea and other uniformly blessed places.
‘Again, state the proposed mission, debate the need and envisioned cost, articulate the strategic outcome, and then obtain it with overwhelming force—or otherwise forget it.’
If only we could.
Why don’t we win wars anymore? Because we do not fight wars anymore WWII was the last war. When we had North Korea on the ropes the politicians would not let the Generals finish the job, how much has that stupid decision cost the American people over the last fifty years? The way to win wars has not changed in two thousand years, you destroy and kill until the other side says enough. Every conflict since WWII has been a proxy war with China, Russia, Iran and others.
Re: “critiques of Gulf War I and Gulf War II:”
More laughable strawmen from the Professor.
Go into Syria? Iran? Iraq again (#3)? Remain in Afghanistan? Who are they killing – not counting our troops in the ‘Stan and Iraq – over there? Other Arabs/Persians, etc. Whose businesses are being blown up? Theirs. Whose oil wells are burning? Theirs. Why should the U.S. do anything? I hear it: “Oh, the children, the innocent men, women who only want freedom and democracy!” What about in Africa? What about in Venezuela? What about … you get my point? Let them fry in the fires of their own making. Maintain enough military force to turn any plausible alliance against us into radioactive rocks and let them rot! A million Afghanis or Iranians or Iraquis or Saudis or any of them are not worth the life of one single American. Let them kill each other until they either learn better or stop or kill each other off. We stay out and mind our own business. For instance: what can be done to civilize and make employable the millions of Americans who have been given the “Detroit Treatment” and consequently can’t spell their own children’s names? What can be done to dispel the notion that all of the problems of Black Americans come from the racism of White Americans? What can be done about the Federal, state and local government debt that is slowly choking our nation? What can be done about the foolish notions about what good government can do for creating jobs, making people “love” one another, and force us all to live longer and happier lives by way of ukasks from our self-proclaimed known-it-all elites?? Those problems affect Americans; the nonsense in the Middle East doesn’t. Fix American problems and the rest of the world be damned!
“Fix American problems and the rest of the world be damned!”
Our “esteemed” small-c globalist political elites will hear nothing of that!
Our political class no longer has the will or the moral courage to win wars. Likewise, the top rung of our military is infested with the PC-addled (think Mullen, Casey and Dempsey) who tell the political class what they want to hear instead of the unvarnished truth. Take Afghanistan- once we toppled the Taliban we should have left and told the key players in the region if we have to come back we come back with absolute destruction for any government/entity involved in another attack on the US. Our political class is too timid to even think of articulating that.
Beryl Crowe wrote in the 1969 “Tragedy of the Commons Revisited” that “the technology of guerrilla warfare has made it evident that a state cannot win wars of values. The coercive force of the modern state cannot be sustained in the face of the active resistance of 10% of the population. And that unless the State is willing to employ a policy of genocide against the dissident group it cannot end the conflict.”
Wars in history ending with the atomic bombing of Japanese cities were won by smashing the will of the civilian population to continue the fight or support of the dissident faction. Crushing the organized army was only half the battle.
If you are not willing (or able) to crush the civilian population support your opponent, you will be out-waited by an enemy willing to die for their cause.
The Japanese and Germans were orders of magnitude more powerful that the North Vietnamese soldiers or Muslim insurgents, so World War II would never have ended had the Americans and Russians not reduced the Japanese and German population to ruin. As a rule of thumb, it is necessary to decimate (kill–not injure–kill 10%) of a population to force its surrender.
Not willing to do that? Then don’t start a war you won’t win.
But just to kill for the numbers puts you in the position of brutal dictatorships like the one of Stalin or Mao.
You can win the civilian population (or give little incentive to help the enemy while your in their area) when you treat them at least a bit better than the enemy does his civilian population. Of course you don’t put up utopia (where all their wishes become true) and you eventually don’t do much more than treat them at least a bit better because otherwise you would end up with a stupid form of the rules of engagement for your troupes (like we have them now).
Stalin and Mao won.
Give an example where “winning hearts and minds” has prevailed, even one example. COIN is a flawed idea and failed strategy, Sherman and Patton would agree.
Bush won his war in Iraq because he was fairly merciless about it. I knew the Democrats would lose Afghanistan.
I hate to tell y’all, but the main problem in Afghanistan is that our wise and paternal leadership in COngress and the WH do not realize that we are in a war with Pakistan, and that Pakistan is a client state of Saudi Arabia.
The ISI in Pakistan has created a front in Afghanistan in the same way – and with the same end goals – as the one in Kashmir.
Pakistan is also trying very, very hard to cozy up to China, in order to have some sort of counterweight to the USA and India.
If there’s ever going to be an actual thermonuclear war, it will be in the next 10 years between pakistan and iran.
We haven’t actually won a war since WWII. Indeed, we’ve not declared war since WWII.
The current U.S. military war strategy is a manifestation of America’s modern foreign policy, begun during the Korean War. That foreign policy dictates that the interests of the United States are secondary to the interests of foreign nations and their citizens. That policy is responsible for murdering tens of thousands of American soldiers in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and currently in Afghanistan and is responsible:
· For the debacle of our retreat from North Korea because we refused to annihilate the Red Chinese army with battlefield nukes (as General MacArthur had strongly recommended to Truman).
· For getting us into the Vietnam War (to save the Vietnamese from communism, not to protect the USA).
· For prohibiting our military, once in the war, from bombing enemy facilities in Laos and Cambodia—from which the enemy launched attacks against our troops in the South (in much the same way as the Iranians are currently doing in Iraq)—and for barring our troops from crossing the DMZ and invading North Vietnam (as our current leadership is now barring any attack on Iran).
America’s foreign policy is the ethics of self-sacrifice put into practice.
Bush upheld that policy on 912 when he refused to declare war on and nuke Iran. (Incidentally, declaring war would have placed any subsequent political action within the boundaries of the Constitution, limiting any laws intended to protect national security (such as the Patriot Act) to the duration of the war. That’s how one preserves a nation’s freedom while fighting for its security.) On 912, there was no one this side of a village idiot—not even George Bush—who had any doubt who was responsible for the attack upon the United States on September 11th. Iran had been making war on the US since 1979. It still is:
· In 1983 the Iranian government financed the truck bombers who murdered 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut, Lebanon.
· In 1994 then Iranian “president” Hashemi Rafsanjani, declaring war on American interests worldwide, urged Arab terrorists to hijack planes or to blow up factories in Western nations.
· In 1998 the New York Times reported: “Evidence suggests that Iran sponsored the attack” in 1996 that killed 19 U.S. soldiers in their barracks in Saudi Arabia.
· In 1999 (and every year since then) the State Department reported Iran to be “the most active state sponsor of terrorism” in the Mid-East.
· In ***May of 2001***, in Teheran, an amalgam of the world’s foremost terrorist groups met and resolved to unite against the U.S., declaring a “Holy War” against America.
· In 2007, American military commanders discovered that Iran was arming the Afghan Taliban while training and arming proxy soldiers and sending them into Iraq to attack our troops.
The only explanation for the stupidity of our leaders is that they are following—as do most of you—an ethical code that declares self-destruction noble.
American policy sucks at nation building. The military does win wars and then the state department snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Rules of engagement are unhappy jokes. Perhaps the key error in liberating dictatorships is that the people who they are rescuing have no inkling or desire to be free American democratic exceptionists. The democratization of the Mideast was as likely as putting lipstick on a pig to teach it to whistle.
I just have one question to ask. Whose sons and daughters are dying in these convenient wars? Certainly are not our elitist bettors in the Democrat or Republican Party.
Bugs @ #5 wrote: “Now, how’s the budget look on the Taliban side? Something tells me nobody’s running up a deficit keeping him in bullets, roast lamb, and rice “.
Although insurgent/terrorist warfare is certainly cheaper than fielding a military with full spectrum, global capabilities, it’s often incorrectly depicted as dirt cheap. Mike Braun, former DEA Operations Chief, did a good job of explaining this in recent testimony to the US Congress (http://www.spectregiweb.com/~thinkaes/spectregiweb.com/sites/all/modules/ckeditor/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Statement%20for%20the%20Record%20Drugs%20Terror%20Nexus2%20(2)(5).pdf):
“In the context of funding a terrorist organization, it is important to understand that the cost of
an actual terrorist attack is minimal … On the other hand, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the care and nurturing of a truly global terrorist network. Operatives must first be recruited and indoctrinated; they must be trained in all manner of clandestine activity, usually in very remote, secretive locations; they must be armed by global arms traffickers; safe-houses must be acquired and operated around the world; counterfeit documents must be acquired; alien traffickers must be paid to transport operatives across borders; terrorists cannot operate effectively without the latest in costly telecommunications and other communications and navigation equipment; and finally, they must be paid and provided with large amounts of operational funding, including huge quantities of money to corrupt government, military and intelligence officials. “.
This helps to clarify why insurgent and terrorist groups are drawn to narcotics trafficking. It is all about the money.
INS and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan also received substantial assistance (according to media sources) from the goverment of Iran and from Pakistan’s ISI because it suited the foreign policy objectives of those parties.
So, we are not just fighting goatherds with rubber sandals.
Response to Feral Cat @ #39:
My point in giving you some background on McMasters is to note the irony that this historian of the failure of senior Vietnam era general officers to resign or object to stupid policies is now closely associated with a general officer (Petraeus) from Afghanistan and Iraq who could fairly be accused of doing the same thing (“H.R. McMaster – The Warrior’s-Eye View of Afghanistan, The two-star general wrote the book on Vietnam and showed the way for the surge in Iraq. Now he’s back from 20 months in Afghanistan—and says the war can be won”, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577392281146871796.html). BTW, I’m not sure I agree with the above position of McMasters on Afghanistan, but I read his opinions with great interest.
In comment #29 above I briefly discussed one explanation for the failure of COIN, despite operational level successes, to provide long-term stability in Iraq and Afghanistan: COIN theory requires addressing insurgent (INS) safe havens. The US failed to neutralize INS safe havens in Iran, Syria and Pakistan.
You are welcome to lay out your own theories on what you see as the failure of COIN in the Muslim world (would you grant that it can be successful in on-Muslim countries?), but you should try to account for the apparent operational success in campaigns such as the Anbar Awakening.
Regarding LTC Davis, I didn’t comment on whether he had any combat experience. For all I know he may have spent his younger days laying out L shaped ambushes and sending rounds downrange. That would be impressive (in an infantry sergeant) but is not an adequate background for operational or strategic analysis. My point is that his lack of experience (no combat unit command larger than a company, no focus on combat ops or training/liaison with Afghan units) did not give him an impressive background with which to conduct analysis of our Afghan operations or the quality of Afghan forces.
As I understand it, he was a Bagram or Kabul based staff officer responsible for US Army logistics (the Rapid Fielding Initiative (RFI)). In that capacity he traveled to various US Army units around USFOR-A. During his travels he may have spoken with some officers and enlisted men and even participated in some patrols, but his mission focus was US logistics. I did write that some of his reporting of conditions seems correct for some locations. Nevertheless, I don’t see either his professional experience or the limited number of incidents that he saw or heard about gave him the credibility or capability to make the sweeping conclusions he presented.
Regarding VDH’s value as an analyst of military strategy, it is the product of years of well regarded academic work.
Response to Feral Cat @ #39:
My point in giving you some background on McMasters is to note the irony that this historian of the failure of senior Vietnam era general officers to resign or object to stupid policies is now closely associated with a general officer (Petraeus) in Afghanistan and Iraq who could fairly be accused of doing the same thing (“H.R. McMaster – The Warrior’s-Eye View of Afghanistan, The two-star general wrote the book on Vietnam and showed the way for the surge in Iraq. Now he’s back from 20 months in Afghanistan—and says the war can be won”, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577392281146871796.html). BTW, I’m not sure I agree with the above position of McMasters on Afghanistan, but I read his opinion with great interest.
In comment #29 above I briefly discussed one explanation for the failure of COIN, despite operational level successes, to provide long-term stability in Iraq and Afghanistan: COIN theory requires addressing insurgent (INS) safe havens. The US failed to neutralize INS safe havens in Iran, Syria and Pakistan.
You are welcome to lay out your own theories on what you see as the failure of COIN in the Muslim world (would you grant that it can be successful in on-Muslim countries?), but you should try to account for the apparent operational success in campaigns such as the Anbar Awakening.
Regarding LTC Davis, I didn’t comment on whether he had combat experience. For all I know he may have spent his younger days laying out L shaped ambushes and sending rounds downrange. That would be impressive (in an infantry sergeant) but is not an adequate background for operational or strategic analysis. My point is that his lack of experience (no combat unit command larger than a company, no focus on combat ops or training/liaison with Afghan units) did not give him an impressive background with which to conduct analysis of our Afghan operations or the quality of Afghan forces.
As I understand it, he was a Bagram or Kabul based staff officer responsible for US Army logistics (the Rapid Fielding Initiative (RFI)). In that capacity he traveled to various US Army units around USFOR-A. During his travels he may have spoken with some officers and enlisted men and even participated in some patrols, but his mission focus was US logistics. I did write that some of his reporting of conditions seems correct for some locations. Nevertheless, I don’t see either his professional experience or the limited number of incidents that he saw or heard about gave him the credibility or capability to make the sweeping conclusions he presented.
Regarding VDH’s value as an analyst of military strategy, it is the product of years of well regarded academic work.
America should not have been in any of the wars since WW2.
Not Korea, Not Vietnam, Not the Balkans, Not Mid-East.
In response to Micha Elyi, who wrote:
“What you wrote sorely confuses me. Your premises don’t match up with your conclusions. Are you saying that because so many Western females are slutty feminist Sex-In-The-City wannabees, Saudi Muslims think they’re getting less sex from their own abaya-clad females?”
No that is not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that Saudi Muslims see the freedom that our women have as the existential threat. And they fear that that freedom will infect their women, who will consequently be harder to dominate and control. This frightens them and makes some/many of them want to lash out at us.
How if we know if we can win wars if we never try?
In Korea our aims were limited, and the result has been a never-ending problem on that peninsula.
In Vietnam our leaders never attempted to win, but were eternally obsessed with “sending messages” to an enemy who, unlike us, was intent on victory.
In the Gulf War, with Iraq on the run, we simply stopped for political reasons. The result was a problem that festered over the next decade.
In our current war the objective seems to be to sacrifice some requisite number of American lives prior to cutting and running.
Complaining about handouts crippling our national defense is missing the point . If we got rid of the minimal handouts we have (and yes compared to Europe its pretty minimal) those 40 million people, now without food or employment are more than enough to put some charming extremists into power.You think we have leftist problem now? That would make it much much worse.
As for Social Security and Medicare, I don’t think people understand how they work. They are designed to front run spending and decrease savings. That sounds counter intuitive but we have ample evidence of what happens when there is no strong safety net. Asian countries like that despite being massive net exporters have super low birth rates and far too much savings to support real long term growth.The world simply cannot support another net exporter
So much of Conservative policy seems to ignore the fact people everywhere with any education now exercises family planning and worthwhile people, the kinds of educate their kids and invest time in them are not going to pop out kids like some illiterate farmer.
City people simply are not going live in a crowded tenement so the military can have warm bodies and cheap labor now that they don’t have to.
The way around all this is get wages up. Given that wages have roughly been cut in half since the 1970′s, http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html this means to get larger families with higher investment (i.e the kind of people both the military and private sector crave) the business people have to basically increase wages (double would work) and job stability.
In this case, most Americans who are fairly natal will have larger families, the quality people now hitting 1.5-1.8 will probably hit 2 maybe 3 in some less crowded areas
This increase if done right reduces demand for government services and to some degree savings and growth. This will also allow a larger pool of scientists and engineers which will allow us to increase our technological edge at a faster rate,
This increase is very important. While it will be a while before potential foes catch up, they are at a stage with a higher ROI on investment and as we are internally rotten they don’t have to be as sophisticated to win if we defeat ourselves.
After this we need to look at doing something about the most burgeoning part of our population, the double digit IQ types. This means confronting race and education in ways that rankle but its a necessity. Continuing failure to do so hurts our economic, intellectual and social capital and creates the internal contradictions that will end us much as Rome was ended
We haven’t really fought a real “war” since world war ll. Let me explain. In none of the “conflicts” or “police actions” which characterize our uses of military since World War ll, there has been no will of any kind exhibited that indicates an appropriate understanding of wars entered into for moral purposes. Real Wars: Fought to punish real “enemies” for behaving immorally. Here is a quote that describes the sentiment behind real wars:
“For most Americans, the war was about revenge against the Japanese, and the reason the European part had to be finished first was so the maximum attention could be devoted to the real business, the absolute torment and destruction of the Japanese. The slogan was conspicuously Remember Pearl Harbor. No one ever shouted or sang Remember Poland.”
—Paul Fussell, Wartime
In real wars, the enemy is annihilated and tormented to the point where there results a complete lack of will to defy the will of the winner. Nothing….NOTHING…in the police-type probes into Iraq and Afghanistan indicates an understanding of just war theory. In both places, the enemy is allowed virtual safe passage. There is a primary goal of reducing civilian casualties, not to anihilate the enemy and cause them to permanently renounce war for generations. This is the outcome we created with Nazi Germany and Bellicose imperial japan.
Nothing we have done in the middle east comes close to succeeding. It is all tepid, limited and ineffective police actions to maintain the status quo above all.
Re: “IMHO, COIN strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed due to the unwillingness of the US government to eliminate insurgent cross border safe havens in Syria, Iran, and Pakistan.” MarcH, I am a military historian, and if there is one thing that Vietnam should have taught the U.S. military (and civilian policymakers for that matter), it is that one cannot win a guerilla (fourth-generation, in today’s lingo) war if the enemy possesses sanctuaries into which it can flee, but into which you are unwilling to follow. In Vietnam, LBJ et al. prohibited going into Cambodia and Laos on a sustained basis; in the Afghan War, policymakers have prohibited going after insurgent strongholds in Pakistan, Iran, et al. Any combat arms leader worth his rank knows this fundamental truth and it should be the duty of such officers to tell it to their civilian counterparts. Petraeus et al. should have fallen on their swords, professionally-speaking, before agreeing to fight a war that could not be won – but they didn’t do that. Instead, they saluted smartly, did an about-face, and send our boys into battle (some to their deaths) knowing that our grand strategy was irredeemably flawed. In short, Petraeus and his cohorts behaved as what the late Col. David Hackworth called “perfumed princes,” and not trust-worthy senior officers and combat leaders.
Yeah, that’s what he has to do to compete, but do you think you can get that through his thick headed skull. He is really starting to piss me off! Obviously, he doesn’t have a very high intelligence level or he would have done this already.