Sure. It's about how to really use force to make the world a better-for-us place.
On the one hand, a lot of it is about the willingness to act quickly and with clear objectives. The usual round of diplomatic escalation is no good in most modern situations. Unfortunately, the culture still thinks diplomacy is a kind of macro social work - that generatonal lack of experience of a nastier world makes people reluctant to send soldiers in early; war is nasty, but they don't see the nastiness that it will avert.
On the other, he thinks that we'll never return to the set piece battles of yesteryear, and even if we did, it would be decided by air power and missiles, not tanks. He says modern armies still act as if they're preparing for WWIII, and always act surprised when they need to do "war amongst the people" for which they are poorly trained and incorrectly equipped.
I mentioned it in this context because I'm curious about your take on his ideas.
On the one hand, a lot of it is about the willingness to act quickly and with clear objectives. The usual round of diplomatic escalation is no good in most modern situations. Unfortunately, the culture still thinks diplomacy is a kind of macro social work - that generatonal lack of experience of a nastier world makes people reluctant to send soldiers in early; war is nasty, but they don't see the nastiness that it will avert.
This is my main point. We shrink from small to medium-sized wars now; we shrink before even ludicrously-light casualties in the field; and we (amazingly) agonize not only over innocent but enemy losses (what's worse, we seem to have forgotten the whole concept of "enemy" where losses are concerned, conflating civilian and enemy deaths into one huge total and then abusing ourselves with the guilt of having inflicted them): but we do not seem to be taking seriously either our own likely losses in a surprise nuclear attack from a Terrorist States, and still less do we grasp the phase-shift that will occur in our
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On the other, he thinks that we'll never return to the set piece battles of yesteryear, and even if we did, it would be decided by air power and missiles, not tanks. He says modern armies still act as if they're preparing for WWIII, and always act surprised when they need to do "war amongst the people" for which they are poorly trained and incorrectly equipped.
Depends on the foe and the phase of the campaign. National armed forces exist to prevent the matter reaching the stage of national guerilla wars. One must first defeat the enemy's army in the field before one can even hope to fight a "war amongst the people," which certainly proved true against the Iraqis. Also, once a defender has been reduced to guerilla warfare, the defender almost never wins without considerable intervention against the attacker from other countries. How far would the Iraqi rebels have gotten had Iran and other Muslim Terrorist Staters not supported them? And note that the Iraqi rebels still lost, despite such intervention
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His paradigm was the Malay Conflict: Not making new enemies and winning over the supporters of the enemy while having a clear objective.Political muddle is the problem today. Hearts and minds works, but only if you do it right and have some sort of exit strategy that's realistic, and not PR.
Hearts and minds works, but only if you do it right and have some sort of exit strategy that's realistic, and not PR.
I mislike the concept of "exit strategy," because it substitutes in the minds of too many for "victory." What was America's "exit strategy" from the territories we took from Mexico? Or Rome's from Cisalpine Gaul?
One should not go to war unless one has a realistic plan for victory: the attainment of one's objectives at an acceptable cost. "Exit strategy" seems to me to be an excuse for accepting defeat.
On the other hand, the Interwar air prophets were right in that airpower became much more important as an element in warfare: they simply failed to grasp that one would still need ground forces to take advantage of the opportunities that air superiority opened. As for Korea, it was our own self-restraint that hobbled our airpower there: we chose to limit the fighting to the Korean Peninsula and hence robbed ourselves of the power to smash the Chinese supply lines all the way back to their points of origin.
I don't think humping the Communist supply lines would have been that decisive, particularly after all intention of liberating the entire peninsula had been put aside and when considering how adept the Commies got at preserving their supply lines even in the face of overwhelming air power. I'm not even sure the USAAF would have had the capability to smash everything and keep it smashed.
Before you come to this conclusion, consider that our "intentions" were changeable at our will (in other words, we could have chosen to return to the aim of liberation of the entire peninsula); consider that the air campaign we did wage actually hamstrung the PLA because it robbed them of the supplies needed to conduct an offensive, and consider that we chose NOT TO BOMB TARGETS DEEP INSIDE CHINA, which was purely a self-imposed limitation. Corpses manning wreckage in ruined and depopulated cities cannot move many supplies
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I'd rather win wars with less bloodshed, but the key is that we have to establish that attacking America brings death and more death until either all the attackers are dead or broken. That is what we established in World War II, but we were scared off doing this in the Cold War by fear of nuclear war with Russia (scared off, in fact, even before Russia had a signficant nuclear arsenal at all), and then allowed us to be habituated into the sort of self-destructive self-restraint that has allowed enemies hit with pinpricks to live long enough to resent and retaliate against the pinpricks, rather than thanking God that they survived our firestorms and lighting off for exile in Argentina.
The problem is that we are not facing "lower-intensity but still open war." We are facing unlimited war in which our enemies are limited only by their weakness, and will move to mass destruction as soon as they gain greater armaments. The fact that the likely consequence of their doing so will be their own annihilation, where they would otherwise merely be allowed to surrender, is irrelevant: they are howling barbarians, not Russian chessmasters.
On the one hand, a lot of it is about the willingness to act quickly and with clear objectives. The usual round of diplomatic escalation is no good in most modern situations. Unfortunately, the culture still thinks diplomacy is a kind of macro social work - that generatonal lack of experience of a nastier world makes people reluctant to send soldiers in early; war is nasty, but they don't see the nastiness that it will avert.
On the other, he thinks that we'll never return to the set piece battles of yesteryear, and even if we did, it would be decided by air power and missiles, not tanks. He says modern armies still act as if they're preparing for WWIII, and always act surprised when they need to do "war amongst the people" for which they are poorly trained and incorrectly equipped.
I mentioned it in this context because I'm curious about your take on his ideas.
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This is my main point. We shrink from small to medium-sized wars now; we shrink before even ludicrously-light casualties in the field; and we (amazingly) agonize not only over innocent but enemy losses (what's worse, we seem to have forgotten the whole concept of "enemy" where losses are concerned, conflating civilian and enemy deaths into one huge total and then abusing ourselves with the guilt of having inflicted them): but we do not seem to be taking seriously either our own likely losses in a surprise nuclear attack from a Terrorist States, and still less do we grasp the phase-shift that will occur in our ( ... )
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Depends on the foe and the phase of the campaign. National armed forces exist to prevent the matter reaching the stage of national guerilla wars. One must first defeat the enemy's army in the field before one can even hope to fight a "war amongst the people," which certainly proved true against the Iraqis. Also, once a defender has been reduced to guerilla warfare, the defender almost never wins without considerable intervention against the attacker from other countries. How far would the Iraqi rebels have gotten had Iran and other Muslim Terrorist Staters not supported them? And note that the Iraqi rebels still lost, despite such intervention ( ... )
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I mislike the concept of "exit strategy," because it substitutes in the minds of too many for "victory." What was America's "exit strategy" from the territories we took from Mexico? Or Rome's from Cisalpine Gaul?
One should not go to war unless one has a realistic plan for victory: the attainment of one's objectives at an acceptable cost. "Exit strategy" seems to me to be an excuse for accepting defeat.
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Before you come to this conclusion, consider that our "intentions" were changeable at our will (in other words, we could have chosen to return to the aim of liberation of the entire peninsula); consider that the air campaign we did wage actually hamstrung the PLA because it robbed them of the supplies needed to conduct an offensive, and consider that we chose NOT TO BOMB TARGETS DEEP INSIDE CHINA, which was purely a self-imposed limitation. Corpses manning wreckage in ruined and depopulated cities cannot move many supplies ( ... )
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