Text 24, 182 rader
Skriven 2004-07-27 19:59:45 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
Ärende: Killing the Enemy to Win - Part Two
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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 allowed
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 countö 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, 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
“deconstructingö 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.ö
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 “expertsö 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 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 “attritö
as to “wear down in quality or quantity by military attrition.ö That sounds
like the next several years, at least, of the War on Terror. The same
dictionary defines “attritionö as “the gradual wearing down of an enemy’s
forces in sustained warfare.ö 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. 

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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. 
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John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
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