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Saturday, January 06, 2007
Peace Through Strength: Thoughts On American Military Preparedness
It's been said that generals are forever prone to refighting the last war. There's a lot of truth in that. Indeed, it's easy to see whence the tendency arises. It's clear that the next war will be different, but how different is all but impossible to foresee:
- New weapons? Almost certainly.
- New alliances? Almost certainly.
- New theaters of battle? Pretty likely.
- New targets and tactics? Pretty likely.
- New combatants? Pretty likely.
- New allegiances and kinds of allegiances among the combatants? Looks like it.
From the instant Ug discovered the fascinating secondary applications of the femur of an antelope, the evolution of armed combat has been uninterrupted. Human ingenuity being what it is, we may expect it to continue -- and to be maddeningly unpredictable even by those with the best claim to expertise in warfare.
Even to look forward a mere twenty years, a heartbeat in the history of human belligerency, is to peer through a cheesecloth curtain. The differences between World War I and World War II, separated in time by almost exactly that interval, astonished military planners and analysts of the latter day near to the point of mental paralysis. New weapons, new transports, and new modes of attack had invalidated virtually all the "lessons" of World War I. In 1940, the Germans had managed to innovate and adapt; the British and French had not. The Allied Powers won the war in much the same way as they won the earlier one: by hurling their entire populations and economies at the Axis in a win-or-die gambit. It remains the case that "pound for pound," it was the Germans who fought the smarter, more ingenious war. Had the resources of the Axis Powers matched those of the Allies, the inheritors of Hitler's Third Reich would rule Europe today.
World Wars I and II were "territorial wars." That is, the principal objective of the aggressors was to seize new territory and incorporate it into their polities. Because of the general ignorance regarding the history of warfare, most people believe that wars have always been essentially territorial. This is far from the case; indeed, territorial warfare is essentially a post-Industrial Revolution development. The wars of the pre-Industrial Revolution years were mostly about compelling policy changes on the part of an enemy state or state-equivalent. If we delve further back into history, we find that wars were often fought to garner hostages for ransom, to avenge personal insults, or to compel an enemy to make or honor a dynastic promise. The famous war of Henry V of England against Charles VI of France, which culminated in the storied battle at Agincourt, was fought over revenues, ransoms and to compel the King of France to surrender his daughter's hand in marriage to Henry V.
In short, the one certainty we may entertain about the wars of the future is that they will be different. The jokes about "military intelligence" notwithstanding, military analysts and planners have what might be the hardest job in the world. Those that do it on our behalf deserve our respect. Those that do it well deserve our applause.
Americans being a peaceably inclined, don't-trouble-me-and-I-won't-trouble-you sort of people, we tend not to think much about military matters unless there's a war in progress. At that point, about half the country turns into an armchair General Staff while the other half moans continuously about the imperative of peace. But the shape of most wars has been determined by conceptions and conditions that pre-existed those conflicts by a goodly number of years -- in other words, our state of preparedness.
Until the opening years of the Twentieth Century, the American military profile was relatively small and defensively oriented. The country had had its wars, of course, but except for the unbelievably gory Civil War, they were restrained affairs with limited objectives. Even the Spanish-American War, America's first extra-continental war, which began our brief flirtation with extraterritorial possessions, was a modest affair. It was with the arrival of World War I that the nation realized that its military was unsuited to the conflicts of its time, because its military objectives had been transformed by the emergent borderless geopolitics of the century.
One might spend a lifetime studying that conceptual shift, the first time in world history that nations had oriented their foreign policies to emphasize possessions and "spheres of influence" far from their contiguous soil, but it's not on your Curmudgeon's agenda today. What matters today are the changes it wrought in warfare. Because international commerce had woven its net around the entire globe, the war could not be confined to a land contest. Because long-range cannons could now deliver shells over distances of fifty to seventy-five miles, the notion of a "front" had acquired a nebulous cast. Because the trench, and its indispensable concomitant the medium machine gun, had given the defense a large tactical advantage, the war was destined to go on for years, which made the sustenance of the warring forces and populations a critical matter gravely threatened by blockades and submarine warfare. These considerations compelled dramatic adjustments on the part of all belligerents.
It was submarine attacks on American-flag vessels, plus the infamous "Zimmerman Telegram" in which Germany offered territory from the western United States to Mexico in exchange for taking up arms against us, that propelled America into World War I. At that time, our land military was tiny in comparison to those of Britain, France, and Germany. We were forced to ramp up on the spot, and because there was neither time to innovate nor a full comprehension of the differences between that war and previous ones, we went into battle as a Nineteenth-Century force: a million men with rifles, poised to hurl bullets, and perhaps their bodies, at the enemy, but not much else.
American military thinkers only grasped the major innovations of World War I in its aftermath. We embraced aerial and submarine weaponry; we built tanks; we learned to use distance communications during combat. We were slower to appreciate some of the tactical innovations, such as infiltration and the use of colonial fronts. And of course we failed to maintain our war army, allowing its complement to drop near to pre-1914 levels. All these things came more fully into play in the Second Round, for which we were almost as badly prepared.
Once again, when forced by developments into the fray, we had to ramp up right on the spot. The Germans remained technologically and tactically ahead of us all the way to the finish line; their fighting forces remained "pound for pound" more effective than ours almost to the end of the war. That necessitated one of the cruelest devil's bargains ever struck between nations: the alliance between the United States and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, which armed the manpower of that prison-state with American weapons and dollars, put it into service on the Eastern Front, and propelled the Soviet state to a superpower status it would maintain for half a century.
The overarching lesson of the World Wars ought to be plain, though it isn't: In a world haunted by powerful gangster-states unconstrained by morals from extending their hegemonies by military means, free nations must refuse the temptation to "beat their swords into plowshares." It simply isn't safe to assume that the "arsenal of democracy" will always rise to meet a military need as quickly as it might be needed. At least our military planners have grasped this, though a goodly fraction of our populace has not.
The proxy wars of the post-World-War-II era were another unsettling development. In a way, this one was foreseeable: a nuclear-armed nation can only go to war against another such directly if it's willing to gamble its national existence on victory. But the intensity of the conflict between the political and economic systems of the United States and the Soviet Union was such that entirely peaceful jockeyings against one another were not to be expected. It was inevitable that there would be wars, and that they would be fought on the soils of other nations. And indeed, there were, and they were.
The Soviets conducted their campaigns largely through insurrectionist movements and political subversion: a new technique, when wielded by a nation-state in its own interests. The United States proved to be inept at meeting those tactics, which delivered China, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Tanzania, Afghanistan, and several other states into the Communist orbit one after another. Our responses, when we made them, were almost always conventional World-War-II military responses, against opponents that maddeningly refused to wear uniforms or meet us in battle.
Perhaps the most surprising development of the era was how the Soviets learned to use our own media, and the fraction of our populace that disdained to fight for American interests, against us. Vietnam was, of course, the iconic example of this technique: propaganda transmitted through the print and broadcast media, contrived to divide our national will and sap our desire to remain in the field. It succeeded brilliantly, not merely to the detriment of the people of Vietnam but to the near-catastrophic (but thankfully temporary) reduction of our influence in the world.
Warfare had acquired an unprecedentedly large informational component. It wasn't about concealing the movements of one's forces from the enemy while struggling to discern his; it was about what Sun Tzu called "perfection in warfare:" the destruction of the enemy's willingness to fight, such that he surrenders before battle is joined. The Soviets plied this technique even when lead was nowhere in flight; their propaganda campaign on the inevitable Communization of the whole world remained continuous into the Reagan years, nearly up to the fall of the Soviet state.
Ultimately we prevailed, because propaganda is no match for economics. The Soviets could not maintain themselves without either expropriating other, weaker countries or begging the assistance of free nations; thus, when Reagan took office and implemented a confident posture of opposition to Soviet expansion and rallied much of the world behind him, the conflict mutated into one in which we held a killing edge.
But our eventual triumph must not be allowed to obscure the other critical lessons of the Cold War:
- Proxy wars must be fought in a matter appropriate to the venue, not according to our preference for the sort of war we'd like to fight.
- National will is the indispensable requirement for victory; if Americans, or the people of the country America is struggling to defend, are not fully committed to the contest, the contest is already lost.
Unfortunately, recent developments suggest that these lessons have been learned incompletely at best.
The wars of recent, post-Soviet years have been bizarre things, hardly comprehensible by the American mind. The most significant of these conflicts is, of course, the Long War with jihadist Islam. This is a completely asymmetric war:
- On one side is a loose coalition of nation-states, led by the United States; on the other is a gaggle of pseudo-religious jihadists, whose numbers are large but unknown, whose objectives are totalitarian and genocidal, and whose tactics are unprecedentedly suicidal.
- Most democratic nation-states, even those most at risk in the event of the jihadists' victory, are unwilling to align with the American coalition, because of the invasion-by-immigration they've permitted to the populace from which the jihadists spring. However, nearly every totalitarian state in the world has aligned with the jihadists against us, by providing aid that ranges from verbal encouragement, through covert financial assistance, all the way to arms, supplies, and clandestine camps where the jihadists can train, rest, and refit.
- Battles of the "conventional" variety -- that is, between armed, uniformed forces -- are all but unknown in this conflict. Most of the violence is perpetrated by jihadist "martyrs" upon civilians and their property.
- The sustaining population of the American coalition has all but bared its throat to the propaganda and subversive tactics of the jihadists, while the sustaining population of the jihadists is almost perfectly insulated against our own informational campaigns.
- The American coalition fights under the most restrictive rules of engagement in history, while the jihadists deny themselves no tactic or target, however vile in the eyes of civilized men.
We were unprepared for these asymmetries. It's unclear that we've learned much about how to counter them. In part, this is a refusal to adopt the lowest tactics of our enemy, which is wise both for moral and practical reasons. But in part it stems from an unwillingness to alter our mindset, formed by the victories of our past and the aptitudes and preferences of our people, which is other than wise.
We cannot defeat the jihadists with a World War II offensive. We can't even compel them to meet us on the field. At this time, we're in a reactive position: we wait until they come to strike us. Their lack of moral constraint, their massive numbers, and their ability to shelter within a huge, nominally non-combatant population have been the critical factors in the conflict to this point. We have not yet succeeded in neutralizing any of those assets.
Your Curmudgeon doesn't claim to have specific, detailed answers to our current crop of military conundrums. All he can do is point to where there's work to be done, and to make a few general observations about the nature of the problems and their ultimate solutions:
- The will to prevail -- motivation plus resolve -- remains the most important element in all conflicts. Approaches that ignore this factor are destined to fail, no matter how tactically brilliant or technologically advanced they might be.
- Information warfare will play a larger role in future campaigns than in previous ones. This will include espionage, concealment, disinformation, and propaganda. Since all of these are human arts deployed by technological dissemination, they must be approached in a manner compatible with both those elements.
- The lack of moral constraint on the part of an adversary will continue to be problematical, especially if he can avail himself of shelter in a nominally innocent population. It is imperative that such shelters be eliminated wherever possible. This applies with the greatest force inside our own borders, which must not be permitted to grow cancers of the sort that have emasculated the states of Europe.
- A problem to be solved for both the present and the indefinite future is the restoration and reinforcement of Americans' conception of themselves and their nation as the good guys. This might be the area where the info-war against us has done the most damage, by emphasizing the crimes of individuals -- Abu Ghraib and the like -- as if they were representative of our national character, when nothing could be further from the truth.
There may yet be more "conventional" wars between nation-states, but America is more than adequately prepared for those. Indeed, our fighting forces are so much the superior of any others anywhere in the world that the rest of the world united in alliance against us could not defeat us. But our cadre of military thinkers, which deploys and tasks those forces, remains shackled by last-war conceptions and approaches. If we are to remain free and secure, we must go beyond them -- and quickly.
Comments
An uplifting and inspiring post. Thanks!
Posted by og on 01/06/2007 at 01:16 PMmore--a brilliant post, clear and concise.
Unless we can win the media war (or, perhaps stop the media war against the West)we’re going to lose this fight.
The insane rules of engagement, the refusal to what’s necessary rather than what’s acceptable to leftist lawyers and editors are a guarantee that we will lose.
There simply isn’t time to do this thing by trying to change public perceptions through the media, even if the MSM would co-operate.
Maybe the use of proxies is the way forward, if the performance of Ethiopia against Somali islamists is any guide?Posted by Keith on 01/06/2007 at 03:00 PMI think that you are missing a critical point, because you are an essentially decent person who wants to fix small problems before they become large problems: we have already lost the will to win this war. Moreover, we have insulated ourselves against moral outrage sufficient to change that attitude from anything the size of, say, 9/11 or smaller. It is going to take something very, very large to solidify the American mindset: we may lose New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago.
And when that happens, we will simply start doing what we do best: killing by the hundreds of thousands and by the millions rather than killing people one on one. It is simply the case that it is easier to kill the 100000 or so probable jihadis by killing the population of a billion or so that shelters them than to find the individual thousand or so leaders who really need to die, and when the time comes, those that say that you cannot kill a billion Muslims will find that, indeed, we can.
I just wish that we would be honest enough with ourselves now, so that that was unnecessary later. But we are supreme at self delusion, in our affluence and security, so we will eventually lose many battles before we decide that we are ready to fight The War. And then, we will be terrible, and the jihadis will learn what “terror” means.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 01/06/2007 at 09:54 PMEssentially decent, Jeff?
No, I haven’t overlooked that aspect of things. I simply don’t regard our will to prevail as irretrievable at this point. In fact, I don’t think it’s sunk that low; it’s more likely that we’re being deceived by persons whose job it is to represent us as to ourselves as defeated in our own minds.
The day may yet come when we have to slaughter Muslims in Biblical numbers to eliminate the venomous tenth that shelter among them, but I don’t think it’s here yet.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 01/06/2007 at 10:55 PMOh, I don’t think that day is here yet. It’s just that I don’t see much likelihood that we’ll retrieve our will to win without a major setback first. We simply do not, as a people, feel threatened enough to fight like winning is more important than being well-liked, even by the enemy.
Consider, for example, what would happen were President Bush to announce that under the 2001 Congressional authorization to fight terrorists, and under the 2002 Congressional authorization to fight Iraq (and given Iran’s commitment of troops into Iraq against us and the Iraqi government), he was in the process of attacking Iran. Now, strategically, that’s a sensible thing to do. In military terms, it’s the right way to fight. But would the President be widely lauded for good judgement, or impeached? My bet is that the latter is far more likely.
There is an alternative to sliding towards genocide; actually, there are two: either President Bush could show leadership and start making the case for war continuously; or if we make it to 2008 without a catastrophe, one or both of the major-party candidates for President could show that leadership. However, in today’s political climate, I find that unlikely, and thus stick with my analysis above.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 01/07/2007 at 10:17 AM
