We’ve heard Kerry make the claim “They had a plan to win the war but they had no plan to win the peace.”
Is that a major flaw in the way military heads the likes of Rumsfeld have?
It seems they see war as having enough firepower, going in and cutting the head off the snake, and the rest of the enemy will surrender.
I’m no historian but is that how wars used to be won say WWII and previous?
Is that how the Nazis went down? Take Hitler out and win?
Has modern warfare changed to keep up with a modern world? It seems wars like Vietnam and Iraq are/were much more complex than invade, take over, declare victorty.
Is the aftermath of insurgents and terrorists a new thing to war or is this a piece of history of past wars we don’t here much of anymore?
I’m sure someone will come along and explain this better, but If you were to be transported back 60 years the end of the war then would not seem so clear and final as we think it was.
Yeah. The problem isn’t with ‘war’ (which is more advanced than ever) but with the strategy surrounding it. A country shouldn’t get into military actions without well-defined and realistic goals. Without those the war-machinery (armed services, contractors, intelligence services, etc) is merely a blunt instrument for breaking things and killing people.
But go into it with clear objectives and you’ve got a clean and mean system of enforcing your will upon others.
I belive that the critical flaw in modern warfare is that weapons have become so powerful and accurate that no military force in it’s right mind would make it’s presence known on the battlefield. We have reached a point (or nearly so) where if an enemy can be seen, it can be remotely destroyed without placing your own forces in danger. Ths has turned most opposing armies into disbursed guerillas.
The flaw is that the enemy now has little if any centralized leadership or control. You surround a Nazi mechanised division in 1945 it’s leadership can make a decision to surrender in the face of certain defeat. An invaded country who’s leadership is still intact can surrender and tell it’s forces to stop fighting. Who tells dozens or hundreds of small disbursed bands of insurgents when the war has ended?
I think I’m the first to disagree here, but I do think the approach of modern warfare is flawed. The historian John Ralston Saul said that the military history of the 20th Century was pretty much the history of first-world countries losing to third-world ones – the world wars being an exception.
Generally, throughout the last centuries the more powerful countries went into each war with high technology and a total faith in their organization, and the weaker countries went in with speed, flexibility, adaptibility, and strategy.
The first world countries looked like a man trying to kill a swarm of bees with a baseball bat – the bat was large, and under ideal conditions, can easily crush a bee, but it’s almost totally ineffective against something small that moves fast and hits hard.
In short, guerilla strategy will generally beat superior numbers and shinier toys. We in the West have yet to learn this.
The Iraq war was doubly bad strategy, not only because of poor tactics on the ground, but because the American government failed to take into account that the people of the country didn’t want them there, even if they were happy to get rid of Saddam.
Nothing new about guerilla warfare, though. It’s partly what helped the US win their War for Independence against Britain.
“The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. Then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or wise make plan against it.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, written in 512 BC
Clausewitz saying: “It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.”
So when civilians forget political objectives and get over enthusiastic with military toys they win battles and lose wars. They forget that military might is auxiliary to political considerations and decisions…
Also when you talk of defeating Nazi or “regular” wars… those were between more evenly match military powers. Since no one is mad enough to openly fight the US… we now have assymetrical warfare. Also I don’t think assymetrical warfare is only guerrila warfare. It might include many other means of confronting a much superior military foe.
The issue with organized militaries fighting guerillas is most commonly one of different levels of commitment. Most frequently the organized military is an outside conqueror wanting control of the area for an economic or strategic reason, while the guerillas want the conqueror out because they want local control and autonomy for the country. Thus, the guerillas are more committed, they’re willing to sacrifice more, and there’s really nothing that can make them give up. By contrast, the conqueror will only continue fighting so long as they believe the final payoff once they win is greater than the cost of the war. If the guerillas can make the cost of the war high enough, then the conqueror will admit defeat and leave.
That’s what happened in the American revolution. That’s what happened in the Vietnam war. That’s what happened in the Spanish war for independence from Napoleon. That’s what’s currently happening in Iraq.
What you are really getting at (it seems to me) is if AMERICAN doctorine is flawed…no? I have to disagree with the majority here, which seems to be that it is. I don’t think you can base US doctorine on how the Iraq war was fought…especially how we handled the ‘peace’. This administration, for political reasons (IMO), decided to do the Iraq war on a budget…i.e. they wanted to win with the least amount of resources possible. They also, for GOOD political reasons, wanted to do the least amount of colateral damage possible to Iraq and to its ‘civilians’. In addition, the US army has never been an occupation army…so it was being used in a way contrary to its training and doctorine.
And even with all that, we STILL have managed to destroy the majority of the Iraqi field army, depose Saddam, and hold on (reasonable easily) to Iraq through over a year or intense insurgent/terrorist/guerilla warfare with around a thousand US deaths. Thats an unbelievable feat when compared to past undertakings of this magnitude…and done with a heavy handy cap to boot.
I don’t want to see the US military regularly become an occupation army, so I think our doctorine is what it should be. Certainly we should train our troops for this contingency in the future though…but I don’t think that Iraq is an example showing definitively that ‘modern warfare’, or US doctorine is fatally flawed…just the opposite in fact. It shows how very flexable US doctorine is that we have done as well as we have.
Could we have done better? Thats hard to say. I think with more troops (my own opinion is we should have gone in heavier), especially in the ‘invasion’ part of the campaign, I think we could have done more, secured more, and inflicted more casualties on the Iraqi’s. With troops given more latitude and paying less attention to colateral damage I suppose we could have inflicted more casualties too, though I doubt this would be a good idea.
In the end, no matter what we did, IF we were going into Iraq (which I still think was a mistake, though I think I now know more about WHY we went in) there was going to be a counter insurgency reguardless…and I think we’ve handled it as well as anyone could…certainly I can think of nothing ANY nation could do in such a case that would be ‘better’.
I never said that Iraq ‘just’ requires the US/UK ‘sticking it out’…there are many factors. However, thats where it starts…i.e. the US/UK HAVE to stay or else the whole situation goes tits up. There are many follow on things from there though that should/could changed to make it better.
Actually, that’s not really what happened in the Peninsular War. While the activity of the Spanish partisans was extremely valuable, the French didn’t leave because of a cost/benefit analysis. They left because Wellington handed them their asses at Salamanca and Vitoria, among other places. They were driven out by force of conventional arms. It is certainly true, however, that the guerillas tied down thousands of French troops and greatly disrupted French logistics, which may have tipped the balance in the major setpiece battles.
I seem to recall (but cannot find a cite for) some diplomat (Indian or Pakistani tickles the memory a bit) that the lesson they learned from Desert Storm I is that they absolutely must have nuclear weapons were they ever to fight the United States. Essentially what they saw convinced them that most any military is hopelessly outmatched versus the United States and nukes would be the great equalizer for them (or just keep the US at bay as it were if things came to that).
I wouldn’t know for sure, but I’ve always been taught in school that the spanish insurgency was the main reason why Napoleon gave up. Facing a regular army in a “regular” war wasn’t something Napoleon was generally thinking he couldn’t manage.
Now, I’m no expert on this issue, not even aknowledgeable, but the “peninsular war”, as you call it against the british is generally presented here as a sideshow to Napoleon’s military operations, when it is even mentionned (I wasn’t even aware of it before I began playing Napoleonic wargames) while the Spanish insurgency is generally well covered.
Maybe it’s due to a flaw in history teaching in France, but maybe too the flaw could be in the history teaching in the UK (and as a result in the perception in the US, generally very influenced by the british point of view as far as european history is concerned), overplaying the importance and achievment of the british involvment.
I also agree that the level of commitment is important. If the US populace were of an imperialistic mind, we’d have no shortage of volunteers and support for the attack and occupation of a sovreign nation. For this is the process of empire building.
But that’s not what the average ‘merkin is about. Joe wants to be left alone to pursue his personal agenda. If there is a threat of someone coming to America to raise hell and get in his way, then Joe is OK with kicking a little ass. A large number of us are even willing to project the desire for such freedom on other peoples, and (I’m being kind here) remove oppressive leaders that squash the hopes and dreams of their subjects. Doing this without first making sure that freedom is truly desired by those peoples is a mistake. Doing so the way we have in the past–by use of large-scale invasion–is also a mistake. It’s much harder to convince someone that 50,000 heavily armed killin’ machines have just landed in their neighborhood and destroyed the infrastructure to protect their human rights than it is to convince those same people that the force is actually an invasion bent on asserting the will of a foreign government over them.
We have Delta, SEALS, and others. Small, elite, agile & invisible. But it seems that we don’t use them when we ought to. If removing Saddam & Sons was a good idea, and I believe it was good for the Iraqis, then it should have been done surgically and quietly. Not by annihilating the neighborhoods we thought they were hiding in, but by annihilating the individuals themselves. If that means killing Saddam and all his body doubles in one fell swoop, then so be it. The people of Iraq wake up one day and there’s a greasy spot where the despot once was, which would be unsettling, but their infrastructure would still be intact. Why Kim Jong Il is still standing positively mystefies me.
Not since WWII have we taken issue with the PEOPLE of another country. Since that time we’ve had issues with the LEADERSHIP. If It’s the PEOPLE that you feel are dangerous, then we have a wonderful machine for exterminating them.
All that wind boils down to: No, our methods of warfare are not current with our needs. Our resources would be better spent if we focused on developing our humint assets and the personnel, equipment and tactics necessary to effect the greatest amount of change with the lowest possible profile. Eliminating high profile and ham-fisted invasions would also go a long way in building trust and thereby the cooperation of humint sources abroad. Any time you try to manipulate the behavior of another country you’re going to meet some resistance, but I reckon we’d meet *less *if we were viewed with mere suspicion as opposed to outright hatred with plenty of examples to contradict any messages of goodwill we might try to send.
Certainly the Peninsular War was of less importance than happenings in the east. Sideshow wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. In fact, very probably the single most decisive factor involved in the French retreating from Spain was the debacle in Russia, what with the massive losses in manpower and materiel. However, it’s simply inaccurate to describe the French retreat as being a voluntary giving up on Spain, unless you are viewing it from the perspective of deployment of troops throughout the French empire - that is, theoretically at least the French could have held off the British/Spanish advance by denuding the eastern front of troops, though of course this would have been suicidal. In any event, the French army in Spain retreated out of the country in the face of Wellington’s advance, and the concluding battles of the campaign took place on French soil, where so far as I know there were no Spanish partisans to be found.
I’m quite certain that Bonaparte would have been of the opinion that he wouldn’t have lost all those battles that Wellington won in Spain, and likely blamed the retreat from Spain on the partisans and the incompetence of his own generals rather than the British army. However, as history tells, Napoleon’s confidence that he could have beaten Wellington may have been ill-founded.
Can we focus on why guerilla warfare never emerged in the classic 20th-century conflicts? Why didn’t the Germans keep killing the Allies via sporadic guerilla tactics for months or years after the formal surrender? Why didn’t the Japanese? I saw a program recently on the US Civil War which detailed how General Lee, horrified by what guerilla warfare had done to Missouri during the course of the war, refused to order his men to melt into the hills and continue the fight against the North forever (which was a distinct possibility, and a course advocated by many of his fellow officers). What causes guerilla war to be undertaken?
Desire? A segment of the population continues to struggle for change despite official conclusions; unofficial popular support of such operations are pretty much mandatory if we are to make the distinction between guerillas and simple outlaws. My guess is that the majority of Germans who were capable of combat after WWII did not want to do it (either because they were truly defeated or because they were never supportive of Hitler’s agression to begin with). IIRC there were some Japanes on various islands that were determined to continue their end of the conflict, but also the main island Japanese probably didn’t much care to continue the war.
Who would want to continue a war with an opponent who was willing to drop nuclear bombs on civilian populations? I don’t want to come off sounding like Colonel Kurtz, but I do think that our failure to totally commit (and accept that we’re going to pay a high price, both in casualties and money) to this war (and even Afghanistan) was a bad strategy.
(Please don’t construe my post as meaning that I supported the invasion of Iraq–I didn’t and I don’t.)
