Text 23, 234 rader
Skriven 2004-07-27 19:53:23 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
Ärende: Killing the Enemy to Win - Part One
===========================================
The following is from the Summer 2004 issue of Parameters, the magazine of the
US Army War College.  This is excellent stuff, don't pass it up.


In Praise of Attrition 

RALPH PETERS © 2004 Ralph Peters 

“Who dares to call the child by its true name?ö    — 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.ö 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 attritionö 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
warfareö as the solution to all our woes, from our numerical disadvantage
vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the “active defenseö 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 “bloodlessö 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 
“strategy of the central positionö—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 aweö 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
attritionö evokes. Certainly, we do not and will not seek wars in which vast
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 “intelligenceö 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—“spoiledö 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.ö 

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—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
“discoursesö 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,ö 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 expect 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 

============== continued in Part Two


John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
Go to www.madgorilla.us for all your Domain Name Services at the lowest rates.

--- Msged/386 TE 05
 * Origin: We are the Watchmen of our own Liberty! (1:379/1.99)