Maundering

Now you turn your back on,
all the things that you used to preach.
Now it's let him live in freedom,
if he lives like me
--Which Way are You Goin',
Jim Croce
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Historically, combat is aimed at destroying an enemy's will to fight, thereby allowing you to successfully impose your will upon them.

By this paradigm there is a fundamental problem with the Iraqi and Afghanistan military projects: we will never destroy the will to fight of any country which we occupy unless we are willing to do a Ghengis Khan. Yet that objective is at cross purposes to the lie that we are there to democratize the population, a lie which restrains our military options.

Generals Lee and Meade did not engage at Gettysburg simply to kill each other's soldiers. The goal was to physically defeat and remove the opponent's ability to fight, and to destroy their will to fight.

The firebombings and bombings of London, Berlin, Dresden and tokyo in WWII and Hanoi in the Indochina Wars were primarily collateral efforts to remove the will to fight, while the maneuver armies were destroying their ability to fight.

We could destroy the Iraqi's and Afghani's will to fight by shutting down the power grid and denying food, water and electricity, but why would we do that? What is the justification, and what would we gain? We can not be both helping and fighting them -- these are incompatible projects.

Despite the rhetoric that everything changed after 9-11 and the new fly terminology (4 GW, systempunkt, asymetrical warfare) the objectives of warfare remain the same.

The U.S. military is proficient at seriously breaking things and killing people, but since 1947 the Department of Defense has yet to win a war in a meaningful manner. Grenada, Panama and Gulf War I can be viewed as training exercises with live ammo. No strategic victories there.

Forgetting Korea as it was a conventional war, the republic of Vietnam was clearly a conventional and UW loss that reverberates still through the Pentagon. The mistakes of RVN are also the mistakes of Mogadishu, Afghanistan and Iraq. That mistake is the inability to destroy the enemy's will to fight, or even to understand why they are fighting us.

In Mogadishu the adversary was a rag-tag collection of militia men loyal to a local warlord. The U.S. "Peacekeepers" conducted military operations that were pin pricks to the locals. Even after the fight that left possibly thousands of militia members dead, it was evident their will to fight had not been crushed. The Rangers quit the fight, not vice versa.

Mogadishu showed that killing a lot of "bad guys" was not a formula for success, but its lessons are often ignored.

Fast-forward to Iraq and Afghanistan, campaigns being marketed as a War on Terror, something new. In fact, they are tired old UW / GW campaigns reminiscent of Napoleon's campaign's in Spain, and OSS activities in Nazi-occupied territories of WWII. Malaya, the Philippines, Haiti and Nicaragua are also analogs.

Our own nation was won through the efforts of UW / GW fighters. Rogers Rangers, The Green Mountain Boys, Francis Marion, Light Horse Harry Lee, Morgan, Mosby, NB Forrest, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph are our heroes and we call them patriots. But when the shoe is on the other foot, we call the other side's fighters "terrorists." Truth be known, they are inheritors of a proud legacy of resistance.

These OIF and OAF are the centerpieces of the Phony War on Terror (©), but they are neither new nor revolutionary. They boil down to the following: Foreign armies of occupation attempting to impose their will and political agenda upon an unreceptive indigenous population.

Call them what you will in Iraq and Afghanistan, our strategic air command and our superior firepower can not remove their will to fight. In fact, the opposite is the case as our application of combat power only steels their will to resist.

The Battle of Roberts Ridge in Afghanistan is but one example. There, SOF assets engaged Chechens in shower sandals at high altitudes in freezing temperatures, but regardless of casualties claimed, U.S. combat power never occupied a battle area or denied hostiles from moving in the battle area.

In the Murphy MOH scenario (Operation Red Wing), hostiles engaged and destroyed U.S. SOF assets while remaining militarily viable. They were able to engage a U.S. Marine conventional battalion at task Force level, in effect, a reinforced battalion (battalion plus). Result: the U.S. targets evaded and escaped destruction by moving to a safe haven.

From the hostile's point of view, the U.S. is simply another foreign occupier in a long list, all of whom were ultimately defeated. The Marines can maraud and maneuver at will and the locals will sidestep, fight and evaporate until the Marines move on. Is this victory?

Same in Iraq, where U.S. forces may destroy and occupy Fallujah, but when we leave, the local fighters return. When the time is convenient, even the new Army of Iraq will turn on its U.S. sponsors. We are fighting by WWI rules, though no longer in the trenches. It is a war of attrition that does not favor the U.S.

We talk of COIN but fight battles of attrition which are meaningless expenditures of American lives. The hostile fighters know that U.S. forces are operating at the end of their tethers. They lack the assets and ability to fight protracted engagements. In addition, U.S. forces lack clear military objectives.

We have freedom of maneuver yet it leads to no quantifiable objective. Our freedom of movement gives the illusion we are winning when in fact it we are running through a meat grinder chewing up convoys and troops, a fact which enhances the enemy's will to fight and diminishes ours.

Ranger can not think of any instance of an invading army destroying a resistance movement's will to fight. The vaunted Nazi military could not eliminate the partisans in France, Russia and Yugoslavia, and the Brits never achieved dominance in Northern Ireland. The resistance perdured. Time is on their side.

We object to U.S. military operations that are not aimed at threats to the U.S.

Threats facing the U.S. include gas, food and housing prices, disappearing jobs, runaway budgets, falling student academic achievement and a depressed economy. These are real threats to the security of America.

--Jim