US QDR...

[Peter Cairns]

I've only started to read through the 113 pages, but It seems to ahve quite a few ideas that relate to how a CM:SF campaign will be thought, although you need to wade all the management speak to figure ut what it means.

Peter.

[John Kettler]

Peter Cairns,

So, Rumsfeld et al. are going to think us to victory in a future CM:SF type conflict. If past is prologue, then we're in deep trouble! It's only slightly better if the QDR addresses how a future conflict will be fought.

Sorry, too good to pass up!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Imperial Grunt]

Here is an article about the US Army's transformation and the mediem brigades...

Ralph Peters

[Imperial Grunt]

I liked this article too...

In Praise of Attrition

RALPH PETERS

© 2004 Ralph Peters

From Parameters, Summer 2004, pp. 24-32.

“Who dares to call the child by its true name?”

— Goethe, Faust

In our military, the danger of accepting the traditional wisdom has become part of the traditional wisdom. Despite our lip service to creativity and innovation, we rarely pause to question fundamentals. Partly, of course, this is because officers in today’s Army or Marine Corps operate at a wartime tempo, with little leisure for reflection. Yet, even more fundamentally, deep prejudices have crept into our military—as well as into the civilian world— that obscure elementary truths.

There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error than our rejection of the term “war of attrition.” The belief that attrition, as an objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the moment, is secondary. And to kill the enemy is to attrit the enemy. All wars in which bullets—or arrows—fly are wars of attrition.

Of course, the term “war of attrition” conjures the unimaginative slaughter of the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last year, when journalists wanted to denigrate our military’s occupation efforts in Iraq, the term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the enemy is a bad thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industry’s claims, seconded by glib military careerists, that precision weapons and technology in general had irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the nature of warfare never changes—only its superficial manifestations.

The US Army also did great harm to its own intellectual and practical grasp of war by trolling for theories, especially in the 1980s. Theories don’t win wars. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing effectively. Yet we heard a great deal of nonsense about “maneuver warfare” as the solution to all our woes, from our numerical

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disadvantage vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the “active defense” on the old inner-German border was political tomfoolery and a military sham—and, frankly, the best an Army gutted by Vietnam and its long hangover could hope to do.

Maneuver is not a solution unto itself, any more than technology is. It exists in an ever-readjusting balance with fires. Neither fires nor maneuver can be dispensed with. This sounds obvious, but that which is obvious is not always that which is valued or pursued. Those who would be theorists always prefer the arcane to the actual.

Precious few military campaigns have been won by maneuver alone— at least not since the Renaissance and the days of chessboard battles between corporate condottieri. Napoleon’s Ulm campaign, the Japanese march on Singapore, and a few others make up the short list of “bloodless” victories.

Even campaigns that appear to be triumphs of maneuver prove, on closer inspection, to have been successful because of a dynamic combination of fire and maneuver. The opening, conventional phase of the Franco-Prussian War, culminating in the grand envelopment at Sedan, is often cited as an example of brilliant maneuver at the operational level—yet the road to Paris was paved with more German than French corpses. It was a bloody war that happened to be fought on the move. Other campaigns whose success was built on audacious maneuvers nonetheless required attrition battles along the way or at their climax, from Moltke’s brilliant concentration on multiple axes at Koenigsgraetz (urgent marches to a gory day), to the German blitzkrieg efforts against the Poles, French, and Russians, and on to Operation Desert Storm, in which daring operational maneuvers positioned tactical firepower for a series of short, convincingly sharp engagements. Even the Inchon landing, one of the two or three most daring operations led by an American field commander, failed to bring the Korean War to a conclusion.

More often than not, an overreliance on bold operational maneuvers to win a swift campaign led to disappointment, even disaster. One may argue for centuries about the diversion of a half dozen German divisions from the right flank of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, but the attempt to win the war in one swift sweep led to more than four years of stalemate on the Western Front. In the same campaign season, Russian attempts at grand maneuver in the vicinity of the Masurian lakes collapsed in the face of counter-maneuvers and sharp encounter battles—a German active defense that drew on Napoleon’s

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“strategy of the central position”—while, in Galicia, aggressive maneuvering proved to be exactly the wrong approach for the Austro-Hungarian military—which was ill-prepared for encounter battles.

There is no substitute for shedding the enemy’s blood.

Despite initial maneuver victories against Russia and in the Western Desert, a German overreliance on maneuver as a substitute for adequate firepower ultimately led to the destruction of Nazi armies. Time and again, from Lee’s disastrous Gettysburg campaign to the race to the Yalu in Korea, overconfidence in an army’s capabilities to continue to assert its power during grand maneuvers led to stunning reverses. The results were not merely a matter of Clausewitzian culminating points, but of fundamentally flawed strategies.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, one of the most successful military campaigns in history, was intended to be a new kind of war of maneuver, in which aerial weapons would “shock and awe” a humbled opponent into surrender while ground forces did a little light dusting in the house of war. But instead of being decided by maneuvered technologies, the three-week war was fought and won—triumphantly—by soldiers and marines employing both aggressive operational maneuvers and devastating tactical firepower.

The point is not that maneuver is the stepbrother of firepower, but that there is no single answer to the battlefield, no formula. The commander’s age-old need to balance incisive movements with the application of weaponry is unlikely to change even well beyond our lifetimes. It’s not an either-or matter, but about getting the integration right in each specific case.

Although no two campaigns are identical, the closest we can come to an American superpower model of war would be this: strategic maneuver, then operational maneuver to deliver fires, then tactical fires to enable further maneuver. Increasingly, strategic fires play a role—although they do not win wars or decide them. Of course, no battlefield is ever quite so simple as this proposition, but any force that loses its elementary focus on killing the enemy swiftly and relentlessly until that enemy surrenders unconditionally cripples itself.

Far from entering an age of maneuver, we have entered a new age of attrition warfare in two kinds: First, the war against religious terrorism is unquestionably a war of attrition—if one of your enemies is left alive or unimprisoned, he will continue trying to kill you and destroy your civilization. Second, Operation Iraqi Freedom, for all its dashing maneuvers, provided a new example of a postmodern war of attrition—one in which the casualties are overwhelmingly on one side.

Nothing says that wars of attrition have to be fair.

It’s essential to purge our minds of the clichéd images the term “war of attrition” evokes. Certainly, we do not and will not seek wars in which vast

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casualties are equally distributed between our own forces and the enemy’s. But a one-sided war of attrition, enabled by our broad range of superior capabilities, is a strong model for a 21st-century American way of war.

No model is consistently applicable. That is—or should be—a given. Wars create exceptions, to the eternal chagrin of military commanders and the consistent embarrassment of theorists. One of our greatest national and military strengths is our adaptability. Unlike many other cultures, we have an almost-primal aversion to wearing the straitjacket of theory, and our independence of mind serves us very well, indeed. But the theorists are always there, like devils whispering in our ears, telling us that airpower will win this war, or that satellite “intelligence” obviates the need for human effort, or that a mortal enemy will be persuaded to surrender by a sound-and-light show.

Precision weapons unquestionably have value, but they are expensive and do not cause adequate destruction to impress a hardened enemy. The first time a guided bomb hits the deputy’s desk, it will get his chief’s attention, but if precision weaponry fails both to annihilate the enemy’s leadership and to somehow convince the army and population it has been defeated, it leaves the job to the soldier once again. Those who live in the technological clouds simply do not grasp the importance of graphic, extensive destruction in convincing an opponent of his defeat.

Focus on killing the enemy. With fires. With maneuver. With sticks and stones and polyunsaturated fats. In a disciplined military, aggressive leaders and troops can always be restrained. But it’s difficult to persuade leaders schooled in caution that their mission is not to keep an entire corps’ tanks on line, but to rip the enemy’s heart out. We have made great progress from the ballet of Desert Storm—“spoiled” only by then-Major General Barry McCaffrey’s insistence on breaking out of the chorus line and kicking the enemy instead of thin air—to the close-with-the-enemy spirit of last year’s race to Baghdad.

In the bitter years after Vietnam, when our national leaders succumbed to the myth that the American people would not tolerate casualties, elements within our military—although certainly not everyone—grew morally and practically timid. By the mid-1990s, the US Army’s informal motto appeared to be “We won’t fight, and you can’t make us.”

There were obvious reasons for this. Our military—especially the Army and Marine Corps—felt betrayed by our national leadership over Vietnam. Then President Reagan evacuated Beirut shortly after the bombing of our Marine barracks on the city’s outskirts—beginning a long series of bipartisan retreats in the face of terror that ultimately led to 9/11. We hit a low point in Mogadishu, when Army Rangers, Special Operations elements, and line troops delivered a devastating blow against General Aideed’s irregulars—

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only to have President Clinton declare defeat by pulling out. One may argue about the rationale for our presence in Somalia and about the dangers of mission creep, but once we’re in a fight, we need to win it—and remain on the battlefield long enough to convince our enemies they’ve lost on every count.

Things began to change less than two weeks into our campaign in Afghanistan. At first, there was caution—would the new President run as soon as we suffered casualties? Then, as it dawned on our commanders that the Administration would stand behind our forces, we saw one of the most innovative campaigns in military history unfold with stunning speed.

Our military, and especially our Army, has come a long way. But we’re still in recovery—almost through our Cold War hangover, but still too vulnerable to the nonsense concocted by desk-bound theoreticians. Evaluating lessons learned in Iraq, a recent draft study for a major joint command spoke of the need for “discourses” between commanders at various levels and their staffs.

Trust me. We don’t need discourses. We need plain talk, honest answers, and the will to close with the enemy and kill him. And to keep on killing him until it is unmistakably clear to the entire world who won. When military officers start speaking in academic gobbledygook, it means they have nothing to contribute to the effectiveness of our forces. They badly need an assignment to Fallujah.

Consider our enemies in the War on Terror. Men who believe, literally, that they are on a mission from God to destroy your civilization and who regard death as a promotion are not impressed by elegant maneuvers. You must find them, no matter how long it takes, then kill them. If they surrender, you must accord them their rights under the laws of war and international conventions. But, as we have learned so painfully from all the mindless, left-wing nonsense spouted about the prisoners at Guantanamo, you are much better off killing them before they have a chance to surrender.

We have heard no end of blather about network-centric warfare, to the great profit of defense contractors. If you want to see a superb—and cheap—example of “net-war,” look at al Qaeda. The mere possession of technology does not ensure that it will be used effectively. And effectiveness is what matters.

It isn’t a question of whether or not we want to fight a war of attrition against religion-fueled terrorists. We’re in a war of attrition with them. We have no realistic choice. Indeed, our enemies are, in some respects, better suited to both global and local wars of maneuver than we are. They have a world in which to hide, and the world is full of targets for them. They do not heed laws or boundaries. They make and observe no treaties. They do not ex-

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pect the approval of the United Nations Security Council. They do not face election cycles. And their weapons are largely provided by our own societies.

We have the technical capabilities to deploy globally, but, for now, we are forced to watch as Pakistani forces fumble efforts to surround and destroy concentrations of terrorists; we cannot enter any country (except, temporarily, Iraq) without the permission of its government. We have many tools—military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, law enforcement, and so on—but we have less freedom of maneuver than our enemies.

But we do have superior killing power, once our enemies have been located. Ultimately, the key advantage of a superpower is super power. Faced with implacable enemies who would kill every man, woman, and child in our country and call the killing good (the ultimate war of attrition), we must be willing to use that power wisely, but remorselessly.

We are, militarily and nationally, in a transition phase. Even after 9/11, we do not fully appreciate the cruelty and determination of our enemies. We will learn our lesson, painfully, because the terrorists will not quit. The only solution is to kill them and keep on killing them: a war of attrition. But a war of attrition fought on our terms, not theirs.

Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can’t kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing every terrorist we can find is a good interim solution. The truth is that even if you can’t kill yourself out of the problem, you can make the problem a great deal smaller by effective targeting.

And we shall hear that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists. This is sophomoric nonsense. The surest way to swell the ranks of terror is to follow the approach we did in the decade before 9/11 and do nothing of substance. Success breeds success. Everybody loves a winner. The clichés exist because they’re true. Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups metastasized because they were viewed in the Muslim world as standing up to the West successfully and handing the Great Satan America embarrassing defeats with impunity. Some fanatics will flock to the standard of terror, no matter what we do. But it’s far easier for Islamic societies to purge themselves of terrorists if the terrorists are on the losing end of the global struggle than if they’re al-

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lowed to become triumphant heroes to every jobless, unstable teenager in the Middle East and beyond.

Far worse than fighting such a war of attrition aggressively is to pretend you’re not in one while your enemy keeps on killing you.

Even the occupation of Iraq is a war of attrition. We’re doing remarkably well, given the restrictions under which our forces operate. But no grand maneuvers, no gestures of humanity, no offers of conciliation, and no compromises will persuade the terrorists to halt their efforts to disrupt the development of a democratic, rule-of-law Iraq. On the contrary, anything less than relentless pursuit, with both preemptive and retaliatory action, only encourages the terrorists and remaining Baathist gangsters.

With hardcore terrorists, it’s not about PSYOP or jobs or deploying dental teams. It’s about killing them. Even regarding the general population, which benefits from our reconstruction and development efforts, the best thing we can do for them is to kill terrorists and insurgents. Until the people of Iraq are secure, they are not truly free. The terrorists know that. We pretend otherwise.

This will be a long war, stretching beyond many of our lifetimes. And it will be a long war of attrition. We must ensure that the casualties are always disproportionately on the other side.

Curiously, while our military avoids a “body count” in Iraq—body counts have at least as bad a name as wars of attrition—the media insist on one. Sad to say, the body count cherished by the media is the number of our own troops dead and wounded. With our over-caution, we have allowed the media to create a perception that the losses are consistently on our side. By avoiding an enemy body count, we create an impression of our own defeat.

In a war of attrition, numbers matter.

Regarding the other postmodern form of wars of attrition—the high-velocity conventional operations in which maneuver and firepower, speed and violent systemic shock, combine to devastate an opposing force—the Army and Marine Corps need to embrace it, instead of allowing the technical services, the Air Force and Navy, to define the future of war (which the Air Force, especially, is defining wrongly). We will not live to see a magical suite of technologies achieve meaningful victories at no cost in human life. We need to oppose that massive lie at every opportunity. The 21st century’s opening decades, at least, will be dominated by the up-gunned Cain-and-Abel warfare we have seen from Manhattan to Bali, from Afghanistan’s Shamali Plain to Nasiriyeh, from Fallujah to Madrid.

The problem is that the Department of Defense combines two fundamentally different breeds of military services. In the Air Force and the Navy,

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people support machines. In the Army and Marine Corps, machines support people. While expensive technologies can have great utility—and Air Force and Navy assets made notable contributions to the Army-Marine victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom—the technical services have a profoundly diminished utility in the extended range of operations we are required to perform, from urban raids to extended occupations, from foot patrols in remote environments to peacemaking.

The Navy is struggling hard with these issues, but the Air Force is the strongest opponent of admitting that we face wars of attrition, since it has invested overwhelmingly in precision weapons designed to win a war by “deconstructing” the enemy’s command networks. But the only way you can decisively cripple the command networks of terrorist organizations is by killing terrorists. Even in Operation Iraqi Freedom, airpower made an invaluable contribution, but attacking military and governmental infrastructure targets proved no substitute for destroying enemy forces. When, in mid-war, the focus of the air effort shifted from trying to persuade Saddam Hussein to wave a white handkerchief (which he had no incentive to do) to destroying Iraqi military equipment and killing enemy troops, the utility of airpower soared.

It cannot be repeated often enough: Whatever else you aim to do in wartime, never lose your focus on killing the enemy.

A number of the problems we have faced in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom arose because we tried to moderate the amount of destruction we inflicted on the Iraqi military. The only result was the rise of an Iraqi Dolchstosslegende, the notion that they weren’t really defeated, but betrayed. Combined with insufficient numbers of Coalition troops to blanket the country—especially the Sunni triangle—in the weeks immediately following the toppling of the regime, crucial portions of the population never really felt America’s power.

It is not enough to materially defeat your enemy. You must convince your enemy that he has been defeated. You cannot do that by bombing empty buildings. You must be willing to kill in the short term to save lives and foster peace in the long term.

This essay does not suppose that warfare is simple: “Just go out and kill ’em.” Of course, incisive attacks on command networks and control capabilities, well-considered psychological operations, and humane treatment of civilians and prisoners matter profoundly, along with many other complex factors. But at a time when huckster contractors and “experts” who never served in uniform prophesize bloodless wars and sterile victories through technology, it’s essential that those who actually must fight our nation’s wars

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not succumb to the facile theories or shimmering vocabulary of those who wish to explain war to our soldiers from comfortable offices.

It is not a matter of whether attrition is good or bad. It’s necessary. Only the shedding of their blood defeats resolute enemies. Especially in our struggle with God-obsessed terrorists—the most implacable enemies our nation has ever faced—there is no economical solution. Unquestionably, our long-term strategy must include a wide range of efforts to do what we, as outsiders, can to address the environmental conditions in which terrorism arises and thrives (often disappointingly little—it’s a self-help world). But, for now, all we can do is to impress our enemies, our allies, and all the populations in between that we are winning and will continue to win.

The only way to do that is through killing.

The fifth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines to “attrit” as to “wear down in quality or quantity by military attrition.” That sounds like the next several years, at least, of the War on Terror. The same dictionary defines “attrition” as “the gradual wearing down of an enemy’s forces in sustained warfare.” Indeed, that is exactly what we shall have to do against religious terrorists. There is no magic maneuver waiting to be plotted on a map. While sharp tactical movements that bring firepower to bear will bring us important successes along the way, this war is going to be a long, hard slog.

The new trenches are ideological and civilizational, involving the most fundamental differences human beings can have—those over the intentions of God and the roles of men and women. In the short term, we shall have to wear down the enemy’s forces; in the longer term, we shall have to wear down the appeal of his ideas. Our military wars of attrition in the 21st century will be only one aspect of a vast metaphysical war of attrition, in which the differences between the sides are so profound they prohibit compromise.

As a result of our recent wars and lesser operations, we have the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped, and most experienced ground forces in the world in our Army and Marine Corps. Potential competitors and even most of our traditional allies have only the knowledge of the classroom and the training range, while we have experience of war and related operations unparalleled in our time. We have the most impressive military establishment, overall, in military history.

Now, if only we could steel ourselves to think clearly and speak plainly: There is no shame in calling reality by its proper name. We are fighting, and will fight, wars of attrition. And we are going to win them.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books, as well as of hundreds of essays and articles, written both under his own name and as Owen Parry. He has experience, military or civilian, in 60 countries, and is a frequent contributor to Parameters.

[Splinty]

Ain't that the truth!

[Bigduke6]

Truth it ain't. That is claptrap and superficial thinking.

Killing the enemy sounds very nice, but in an insurgency the lines between enemy, civilian, ally is not clean at all. This isn't college football, people move back and forth across lines of loyalty all the time.

It is impossible in just about any insurgency, and certainly any overseas insurgency U.S. forces can be expected to be involved in in a major way, clearly to discern the "enemy".

Peters' arguments are a classic example of having a nice shiney hammer, and little else, and seeing all your problems as nails.

The U.S. has a powerful military but it just sucks, absolutely sucks, at things like learning languages, understanding foreign cultures, engaging allies, building effective police in another country, and mustering popular will for a long-term commitment to fighting an insurgency abroad.

All of these things are critical in controlling, and defeating, a foreign insurgency. The skill of military units and soldiers is really secondary. If you can find the insurgents it really doesn't matter whether you just send in a battalion of recruits or level the place with thermobarbic bombs. You're the superpower, you have plenty of both recruits and thermobarbic bombs.

Peters is pretending his thinking is original, but in fact it is little more than a plea for increased defense budgets. Since, according to him, tactical units need "to kill", the automatic conclusion is the U.S. should continue a policy - pay attention, not just a military policy but a general foreign policy - of fielding tactical units good at killing, at the expense of other solutions to Islamic fundamentalism.

For instance, there is no need to back off on support to Israel, Saudi Arabia. There is no need for a crash national program for study of Islamic culture. There is no need for a sober review of the limits of military power. No, all we need to do to win wars, is field units that can "kill" efficiently.

The gaping hole in this guy's arguement is that an effective airland battle doctrine and well-trained, experienced trooops are not nearly enough, in and of themselves, to overcome an insurgency. If he was really thinking originally, he might say something like: "What we need to do is stop training so many Marines 'to kill', retrain some of them to speak Arabic fluently and stick thousands of them in the Peace Corps in villages all across Iraq, and take a ton more money from the U.S. defense budget and just jack up the living standard of average Iraqis."

That might help, although if Peters were really thinking clearly, he also would conclude even that policy is a forgone failure, because the U.S. civilian population is not willing to pay for a huge hike to Iraqi living standards. They would prefer to have a huge hike of U.S. living standards. So if Peters was really thinking "out of the box", he might say "This war is militarily unwinnable. We can muster the national support for a powerful military, but we cannot must then national support for a Marshall Plan for Iraq, nor are we likely to in the future."

A less clever but still reasonable example of orignal thinking on the topic might go: "Well, it would be nice to do the Iraq Marshall Plan, but it's a non-starter because the country is so corrupt, if you give them money all you're doing is flushing money down the toilet. After all, where the Marshall Plan worked, U.S. forces were in full, effective, occupation of an absolutely defeated nation unwilling to fight for any reason. That ain't even close to the situation in Iraq."

But Peters is myopic. He is all hot and bothered about "killing," but conveniently ignores the question of, how do you "kill" without pissing off too many civilians? That's where the insurgents are hiding. Every time you bust down a door in the middle of the night you are not just "snatching a bad guy". You are also invading the privacy of a home, waking every one up in a neighborhood, demonstrating the foreigners can do whatever they damn please to people in their own country, and demonstrating the arguement that you are a peace-loving, democratic nation is a lie.

(This is not to say I think the U.S. is undemocratic. This is to say I think pretty much any Iraqi civilian exposed to U.S. anti-insurgency operations is going to draw negative conclusions on the U.S.)

The traditional solutions for dealing with an insurgency are a combination of massive police work, strong economic developement giving the population a stake in the status quo, and the priority use of intelligence collection, rather military operations, to hunt down the insurgents.

This is not the route taken by U.S. policy-makers in Iraq, and that is a big reason why U.S. efforts to control the insurgency have failed.

Peters' article is so crammed with baseless assumptions that it's hard to pick just one for illustrating how flawed his logic is, but here's one:

"While sharp tactical movements that bring firepower to bear will bring us important successes along the way, this war is going to be a long, hard slog."

Please. "Sharp tactical movements?" "Bring firepower to bear?" "Important successes?" "Long hard slog?"

What planet is this guy on? Iraq is not the NTC, it isn't the Central German plain, it isn't West Front 1940-45. Iraq isn't even a conventional war; it arguably almost never was. How "killing" in Iraq, when you have little idea whom you're killing and even less of the social implications of the killing, and yet less ability to think through what it means if you are running around a foreign society killing; well it is just beyond me how all this wonderful "killing" will contribute anything towards winning the war.

Sure, there will be plenty of successful battles. The U.S. military will eventually go home and tell itself: "We did our job great, we won all the battles"

Well, that may count for soldiers company level and down, but for the field grade officers and higher that's probably false, and for the real professionals - the generals - that's absolutely false. Their job is winning wars, not winning battles. If the generals elect a strategy that cannot win a war, and indeed lack the imagination to come up with a strategy that can win the war, then they are doing a disservice to their nation and their soldiers. They are throwing away their soldiers' lives and national treasure because they are either too stupid to come up with a strategy that works, or too career-minded and mindlessly loyal to the organization "to rock the boat".

Military men have a moral obligation to say when the war is lost. It is one of those lines between competence and greatness: Gudarian told Hitler the war was lost, Manstein told Hitler the war was lost. Kluge and Paulus were smaller men, when the handwriting was on the wall they took the easy, mindless way out, and just followed orders.

Peters is just as slavishly following orders pounded into his head by the Marine Corps about two generations ago, and he isn't even in uniform. I guess loyalty to the corps trumped moral courage. It happens.

I also can't let this whopper go by, any one writing a sentence like the following pretty much disqualifies himself from claim to any ability to make intelligent military analysis:

"We have the most impressive military establishment, overall, in military history."

This is just incredible. Peters is actually claiming the U.S. military, right now, on the basis of two campaigns against a fifth-rate power like Iraq, is more impressive than:

The Roman Legions 100 B.C. - 200 A.D.

The Mongol nation 1200 - 1300

The German Army 1869 - 1945

The French Army 1795 - 1815

And that's just for starters.

[juan_gigante]

I agree with Bigduke. Simply killing the enemy certainly fights the symptoms of international terror, but, especially in a local area like in Iraq, the causes for people to join up with terrorists are more likely to because they are, as Peters says, a "jobless, unstable teenager in the Middle East and beyond.". Here is a BBC article on how the Iraq insurgency is 90% local. It's not the only one - most of the defense establishment acknowledges now that most of the insurgency are Sunnis who fear their sect will be marginalized.

Anyways, I agree with Bigduke.

[Peter Cairns]

On a slight tangent I was reading a bit about the free trade agreement that the US just signed with one of the latin american countries. It allowed them access to the US for about 60,000 tons of sugsr, and the US access for 50,000 tons of processed chicken.

Now I don't know much about farm prices but I am pretty sure that the chickens worth a lot more and that while selling the sugar will help a few big guys who own platations , but probably not there workers, the chicken imports will drive thousands of small holders to the wall.

Given that almost everything south of the Rio grande is moving to the left, is there no one in Washington that realises that allowing US business to screw third world countries like this really isn't in ther long term political interest.

Look at AQ and Iran, the basis of much of their support and venom is that the West has stole their oil and soverignty, and if you look at South America, that same feeling is making itself felt on the streets.

The US doesn't want to be a colonial power like Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France were, but if it acts like one economically it will end up making enemies.

Peter.

[Imperial Grunt]

Consider our enemies in the War on Terror. Men who believe, literally, that they are on a mission from God to destroy your civilization and who regard death as a promotion are not impressed by elegant maneuvers. You must find them, no matter how long it takes, then kill them. If they surrender, you must accord them their rights under the laws of war and international conventions. But, as we have learned so painfully from all the mindless, left-wing nonsense spouted about the prisoners at Guantanamo, you are much better off killing them before they have a chance to surrender.

The author was not addressing the Iraqi insurgency and Iraq only, but the War on Terror as a whole. The ones that the US is locked into a war of attrition with are the radical Islamic terrorists, aka Al Qeda, Jamal Islamyyiah, etc..

And I complety agree that past US inaction only encouraged the likes of Bin Laden. And I completely agree that the best defense against radical radical terrorits is to annhililate them through offensive actions. But that is just me.

Iraq and Afghanistan might not last a long time, but the War on Terror will. It has just started really.

And in 1950, no one had any idea how economics would make Germany and Japan prosper to become incredible countries. No one could imagine that the Soviet Union would fall apart and its citizens would stop believing in communism. Today, no one can predict how things will turn out, but I am optimistic and I see a parallel.

[juan_gigante]

A parallel that we won't know what will decide the war on terror? A parallel that we won that one and will also win this one? To say that we'll win just because we won last time is a little silly. Now, I personally feel that, if we do the right thing, we are capable of winning, and I hope we do. But I also recognize the potential for us to screw this up.

I guess my fundamental problem with the author is that he discounts hearts and minds out of hand. I do think he has a point in some areas - for years I've decried the Navy and Air Force's bloated and useless budgets, wasting money on things that aren't necessary. I wholly agree that modern military theorists sometimes convince themselves technology can win battles by itself.

Originally posted by LtCol West:

Iraq and Afghanistan might not last a long time, but the War on Terror will. It has just started really.

I absolutely agree. But right now, they're the biggest "front" on the WoT. And, I'd argue, Iraq is serving as the incubator and training ground for a new generation of terrorists in the same way that Afganistan and the Soviets did in the '80s. We'll feel the real repercussions of losing in Iraq (which, IMHO, we are - I define US withdrawal in the face of civil war as a defeat) in 10 years when that Iraq-trained new generation strikes back at America. Looking at it at a very simple level, I think a progression like this is pretty true:

1. Terrorists dislike America

2. Our current course is making more people dislike us

3. Hence, more terrorists

As I see it, we want the people of the Middle East to be happy and to like America, and to promote freedom, democracy, etc. at the same time, and to protect our oil interests (which, like it or not, are in the ME and are very, very important to us), and to remove horrible despots. The problem is that the first one and the last three are really, really hard to do simultaneously. Hell, I think we've proven that promoting freedom and such is tough, no matter how you cut it.

But to say that the feelings of individuals don't matter is silly. You can kill terrorists quickly, easily, and cleanly, but if every time you kill a terrorist, you create two more, then you're just wasting bullets.

What this is all building up to is that a far, far more effective way of fighting terrorism is to remove the reason for anyone to become a terrorist. I disagree with the author's assessment of why people become terrorists. Yeah, OBL and the other higher-up clerics and such are nutsos, but the foot soldiers, especially in Palestine, Chechnya, Afganistan, and Iraq, but in global terror networks as well, are ordinary people who have really crappy lives. They're poor, are unemployed, have to live under an oppresive regime, and terrorism gives them an easy out. The cleric says, "Hey, your life sucks? It's America's fault. You wanna hurt them back?", and the kid, who really has nothing else to do, says sure, I'll see what you have to say, and gets indoctrinated.

What if all those poor, unemployed, oppressed kids had money, jobs, and freedom? They'd recognize the clerics are wack jobs, and firstly, OBL and company would be out of a supply of recruits, and secondly, they wouldn't complain when we hunt down OBL and company and capture them. Honestly, I think that until the living conditions of the terrorist breeding grounds goes up, they'll stay terrorist breeding grounds, and keep on pumping out terrorists faster than we can kill them.

To say that somehow, there is finite number of terrorists or potential terrorists in the world, and that if we kill them all, we'll be sitting pretty is a kind of silly thing to say, I think.

To say that somehow, if we remove the motivation for becoming a terrorist, people will stop becoming terrorists, and then we'll be sitting pretty - I think that makes more sense.

[Imperial Grunt]

Juan, you are confusing the Islamic terrorits types with the insurgents in all of the countries you have mentioned. Hearts and minds is absolutely vital in fighting the insurgencies, (which we are not losing, but things are difficult in key areas of the country). And you cannot engage an insurgent without thinking about the repercussions of the collateral damage. You dont want to kill one insurgent and make his family into 10 more. At the same time, doing nothing has a similar price, as it emboldens insurgents. By the way, dont think of the insurgents as Washington's or Lee's army. Most are really just fighting gang style for their piece of stakes. They are not fighting for a free Iraq. Even the Sunni insurgents are very divided amongst themselves into their various tribes.

But none of that works with AQ types. And you are right, changing the Middle East so people are free to pursue happiness and a better way of life is the long term solution. Making democratic governments in the Arabic culture is difficult, but making pro-US, benign governments that promote free enterprise is much more doable. And, in my humble opinion, that economic equation will finally snuff out Islamic extremists (there will always be some, just like the David Koresh types in the US), and more importantly, the mainstream Muslims in those countries will completely reject them.

A thriving Iraq will economically crush Iran and Syria and it would spread a dominoe effect. It would still take time, but the entire world is moving towards globilization, like it or not. Maybe true democracy will follow, but the economics will flourish the fastest as soon as it can start.

But the core terrorists, the ones killing more Iraqis than US military personnel, the ones that will do anything to hurt the US and any other non-believer, the ones who use kids as suicide bombers, those are the ones that we need to continually hunt. Day and night, for as long as it takes.

[Peter Cairns]

I find it hard to believe that there are people in the US that think they can ever make Iraq in to the kind of country they want.

Do most Iraqi's want the US to leave as soon as possible.... Yes.

Do most Iraqis dislike US involvement and control of their oil.....Yes.

Do most Iraqi's dislike and oppose the state of Israel..... Yes.

Did most Iraqi's support the countries asperations to nuclear weapons... Yes.

Do most Iraqi's feel closer to Iran than the US..... Yes

Do more Iraqi's favour an Islamic state than a secular democracy... Yes.

The problem with the US vision for a future Iraq is that it hardly looks anything like the future the Iraqi people would choose for themselves.

When the US goes the Iraq that developes will almost certainly be much more like Iran than the US, and there is every likelyhood that it will tolerate if not actively promote terrorist and militant groups that will try to target the US.

What then do you wait till the attack a US target and invade again.

Peter.

[juan_gigante]

Originally posted by LtCol West:

Juan, you are confusing the Islamic terrorits types with the insurgents in all of the countries you have mentioned. Hearts and minds is absolutely vital in fighting the insurgencies, (which we are not losing, but things are difficult in key areas of the country). And you cannot engage an insurgent without thinking about the repercussions of the collateral damage. You dont want to kill one insurgent and make his family into 10 more. At the same time, doing nothing has a similar price, as it emboldens insurgents. By the way, dont think of the insurgents as Washington's or Lee's army. Most are really just fighting gang style for their piece of stakes. They are not fighting for a free Iraq. Even the Sunni insurgents are very divided amongst themselves into their various tribes.

But none of that works with AQ types. And you are right, changing the Middle East so people are free to pursue happiness and a better way of life is the long term solution. Making democratic governments in the Arabic culture is difficult, but making pro-US, benign governments that promote free enterprise is much more doable. And, in my humble opinion, that economic equation will finally snuff out Islamic extremists (there will always be some, just like the David Koresh types in the US), and more importantly, the mainstream Muslims in those countries will completely reject them.

A thriving Iraq will economically crush Iran and Syria and it would spread a dominoe effect. It would still take time, but the entire world is moving towards globilization, like it or not. Maybe true democracy will follow, but the economics will flourish the fastest as soon as it can start.

But the core terrorists, the ones killing more Iraqis than US military personnel, the ones that will do anything to hurt the US and any other non-believer, the ones who use kids as suicide bombers, those are the ones that we need to continually hunt. Day and night, for as long as it takes.

I agree that the small core of extremely dedicated terrorists won't be deterred by winning hearts and minds. But I believe that 99% of terrorists (and I use that term to describe Palestinians suicide bombers, Iraq insurgents, who are terrorists in my mind, AQ foot soldiers, and more) joined originally because of fundamentally economic reasons.

Here's another way of putting it. You mention "the ones who use kids as suicide bombers". What if no kid wanted to be a suicide bomber? What if instead of blowing themselves up, they had a job and a prospering family? How long would it be before society marginalized the AQ types itself?

How things are going in Iraq is a debate I don't think we should get into today.

I just don't think you can separate the WoT into "The part where you win hearts and minds of the ordinary people" and "The part where you kill terrorists". Each affects the other.

[Imperial Grunt]

Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

I find it hard to believe that there are people in the US that think they can ever make Iraq in to the kind of country they want.

Do most Iraqi's want the US to leave as soon as possible.... Yes.

Do most Iraqis dislike US involvement and control of their oil.....Yes.

Do most Iraqi's dislike and oppose the state of Israel..... Yes.

Did most Iraqi's support the countries asperations to nuclear weapons... Yes.

Do most Iraqi's feel closer to Iran than the US..... Yes

Do more Iraqi's favour an Islamic state than a secular democracy... Yes.

The problem with the US vision for a future Iraq is that it hardly looks anything like the future the Iraqi people would choose for themselves.

When the US goes the Iraq that developes will almost certainly be much more like Iran than the US, and there is every likelyhood that it will tolerate if not actively promote terrorist and militant groups that will try to target the US.

What then do you wait till the attack a US target and invade again.

Peter.

Unless you have gone over there to take a poll, I do not think all of your answers are correct.

A great video to watch is called "Voices of Iraq". It was aired on PBS awhile back and it is very telling of the true realitiy. It is not necessarily pro-US, but it is not anti-US, with the exception of the part of the documentary that were filmed in the Sunni triangle. More than anything it is very human and it shows families just trying to survive the situation.

Voices of Iraq

The insurgents and the terrorists are very different groups of people. And the Iraqis are killing terrorist as well, because they do not want them in their country. But the terrorists use terror tactics (go figure) to imtimidate and coerce the populations of villages and communities because they can due to the painfully slow development of the overall level of security.

The Sunni tacit support of AQ is seriously undermining their own cause. Especially with the attack on the mosque and the sectarian violence that it spurned. While it is not very PC, I would just sit back and let the Shia's wipe out the Sunnis insurgents, it would probably take just 45 days, (even less if the Kurds came down for some payback) and just ensure the government survives the ordeal.

Iranian influence in Iraq is definetly present, but it is not nearly as strong as is commonly illustrated in the media. And a far majority in Iraq do not want a religious state. They want a vibrant and strong and rich Iraq. To send their kids to college in Europe and the US, etc... Maybe we can find a Brit who has served in Basra to weigh in on that. By experience only goes down to Al-Hillah, a major city south of Baghdad.

[Moronic Max]

Given that almost everything south of the Rio grande is moving to the left, is there no one in Washington that realises that allowing US business to screw third world countries like this really isn't in ther long term political interest.

They're not in the business of long-term thinking. Taking positions that will be of great benefit a decade or two down the road doesn't help them win the current election--or so the theory goes. Short-term fixes are the name of the game.

[Peter Cairns]

I am not talking about those attacking US forces, or incomming terrorists.

The opinions I discribed could pretty much be that of the majority of people in every street from Casablanca to Karachi,

When Saddam fired Scuds at Israel people celebrated across the arab world, when Pakistan detonated it's atomic bomb, there was dancing in the streets. The reality of public oppinion in the middle east bears little relation to the vision that the US has for Iraq.

Thats why I don't think it can work. A couple of years back the BBc had a multinational discussion programme about the US and what people thought about it. They had an invited audiance of people from countries around the world, and they conducted opinion polls in ever part of the world to see what people thought about America.

There were two broad conclusions.

People envied and aspired to the US standard of living.

People didn't like the US way of life and didn't want to be like Americans.

What you say about Iraqi's wanting a strong prosperous country is true, the belief that it will be pro let alone similar to America is false.

Peter.

[Abbott]

Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

People didn't like the US way of life and didn't want to be like Americans.

Peter.

How are Americans?

[Peter Cairns]

Abbott,

Well as recall it they fought that americans were more concerned about money than family and were hypocritical as they all went to church but produced more porn than any other country.

I don't particularly agree with it but what matters isn't that it's highly accurate but that people outwith America believe it. Whether it be their perception of you or your perception of them, if they are at odds or wrong you have problems.

Saddam didn't think the US would fight for Kuwait, the Argentinian Junta didn't think the British would fight for the Falklands.

I am not at all sure that the Iraqi's want the kind of country the US wants to make, or that the one that emerges will be one that the US wants.

Peter.

[Tagwyn]

PC: Did you get that nonsense from the BBC? Tag

[Imperial Grunt]

Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

Abbott,

Well as recall it they fought that americans were more concerned about money than family and were hypocritical as they all went to church but produced more porn than any other country.

I don't particularly agree with it but what matters isn't that it's highly accurate but that people outwith America believe it. Whether it be their perception of you or your perception of them, if they are at odds or wrong you have problems.

Saddam didn't think the US would fight for Kuwait, the Argentinian Junta didn't think the British would fight for the Falklands.

I am not at all sure that the Iraqi's want the kind of country the US wants to make, or that the one that emerges will be one that the US wants.

Peter.

The US used to have a part of the State Department that specifically delt with the US's world public image. But it was done away with. Since then, there has been almost no effort in even telling America's side of the story. In my opinion, that alone has caused enormous damage to the US.

As far as the emerging government in Iraq, I agree it will more than likely be a compromise between what the US wants and the what the Iraqis want. I do not agree that it will be an Islamic state or another dictatorship.

But when it starts to thrive and exist on its own, it will continue to shape the course of history in the Middle East in a different direction than how things were going before Saddam was removed from power. Same for Afghanistan.

[Imperial Grunt]

Actually, all this speculation is worthless. The next big war will be against robots. And man will eventually lose.

They are already among us!

Robot Grunts

[Kurtz]

"Never send a human to do a machine's job"

[Peter Cairns]

LtCol West,

Man will probably never fight with Robots, though we will use them in our fights.

If they ever develop conciousness based on logic they they will almost certainly show their superiority by realising that war is damaging, distracting, wasteful and rarely solves anything.

I have my doubts that robots will ever be built, or allowed to be built that can " think" Like us, but if they are they should be smart enough not to repeat our mistakes.

Some of the best of Azimovs Robots stories are near the end of the series when it becomes clear that by a combination of impersonation and economic control thay have actually taken over and are ruling us for our own good, and have been doing it for years and no only haven't fired a shot, but we didn't even notice.

Peter.

[Imperial Grunt]

Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

LtCol West,

Man will probably never fight with Robots, though we will use them in our fights.

If they ever develop conciousness based on logic they they will almost certainly show their superiority by realising that war is damaging, distracting, wasteful and rarely solves anything.

I have my doubts that robots will ever be built, or allowed to be built that can " think" Like us, but if they are they should be smart enough not to repeat our mistakes.

Some of the best of Azimovs Robots stories are near the end of the series when it becomes clear that by a combination of impersonation and economic control thay have actually taken over and are ruling us for our own good, and have been doing it for years and no only haven't fired a shot, but we didn't even notice.

Peter.

I was not actually being serious about the whole war against robots thing...

[Tagwyn]

AWK!!!! The Cylons are coming, the Cylons are coming!!!!!!!!!!!