January 4, 2007--Coming Clean
Finally some candor from the military. Upon reflection about the miscalculations and missteps that occurred while attempting to control the insurgency the head of all military forces spoke publicly about what went wrong. And even more remarkably, took responsibility.
As reported in the NY Times (article linked below) he said:
Though hundreds of terrorists had been killed . . . the military made serious errors. It relied too heavily on air power and delayed too long in sending in enough ground troops to defeat the enemy.
Though the chief of military operations did not resign, which in another day would have been expected or demanded, this refreshing acknowledgement of strategic and tactical errors is an essential first step in remedying the situation since there can be no new course while living in a state of denial.
The only problem was that these words of admission came not from our President, Vice President, Secretary of State or Defense, and not from the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, but from the Chief of Staff of the Israeli military as he reflected on the lessons from the botched 34-day war Israel waged in August in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Missing, though, from his analysis of what went wrong, is also missing in our debate about what to do in Iraq and how to equip and train our forces for future wars. There is the cliché, which is actually more of an insight, that today’s wars are fought with yesterday’s army.
I grew up at a time when public school history courses taught us, with essential accuracy, that America was the only great power never to have lost a war—from the revolution through World War II. But at the time we were struggling to a standoff in Korea and soon after that lost a war in Vietnam, and of course the same thing is happening now in Iraq.
What we have failed to learn thus far, and adjust to, is that one cannot wage conventional “shock-and-awe” wars against indigenous “enemies” who are driven to resist by strongly-held ideologies; ethnic, tribal, or nationalistic pride; or religious fervor. I am not talking about wars between Civilizations but rather against “insurgents” or “freedom fighters” who do what they do, fight as they fight because they are inspired by what they believe or to defend their culture.
We have been certain that we will win because of our superior weapon systems—our dominant air power, laser-guided projectiles, our stealth technology and “smart” bombs, our GPSs, our wireless communications capacities, and of course our belief that “God is on our side.”
But we should have noticed that belief-driven opponents are ironically capable of winning by turning our very strengths against us—we should have learned this from how vulnerable the French and British were to similar tactics in their colonies. Our open system allows rebels and guerilla forces to gather information without the need for any formal intelligence apparatus and they easily turn some of our technology against us, using, as one example, cell phones to set off deadly, “improvised devices.”
When will we learn the most basic lesson of warfare—that it is about a history of one weapon system overcoming another: suits of armor defeated lances and arrows which in turn were rendered useless as weapons by guns and bullets which in turn were thwarted by tanks and other forms of armored vehicles which were impeached by bombs dropped from airplanes which could subsequently be located and shot down by radar-guided missiles which in turn were . . . . And now we see low-tech insurgencies defeating cyber-powered armies.
Of course the lesson we should really be seeking is how to live peacefully together and make all forms of warfare obsolete. But until that time, if we want to protect ourselves (not project ourselves), we need to fess up to what’s not working and get to work fixing it.
As reported in the NY Times (article linked below) he said:
Though hundreds of terrorists had been killed . . . the military made serious errors. It relied too heavily on air power and delayed too long in sending in enough ground troops to defeat the enemy.
Though the chief of military operations did not resign, which in another day would have been expected or demanded, this refreshing acknowledgement of strategic and tactical errors is an essential first step in remedying the situation since there can be no new course while living in a state of denial.
The only problem was that these words of admission came not from our President, Vice President, Secretary of State or Defense, and not from the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, but from the Chief of Staff of the Israeli military as he reflected on the lessons from the botched 34-day war Israel waged in August in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Missing, though, from his analysis of what went wrong, is also missing in our debate about what to do in Iraq and how to equip and train our forces for future wars. There is the cliché, which is actually more of an insight, that today’s wars are fought with yesterday’s army.
I grew up at a time when public school history courses taught us, with essential accuracy, that America was the only great power never to have lost a war—from the revolution through World War II. But at the time we were struggling to a standoff in Korea and soon after that lost a war in Vietnam, and of course the same thing is happening now in Iraq.
What we have failed to learn thus far, and adjust to, is that one cannot wage conventional “shock-and-awe” wars against indigenous “enemies” who are driven to resist by strongly-held ideologies; ethnic, tribal, or nationalistic pride; or religious fervor. I am not talking about wars between Civilizations but rather against “insurgents” or “freedom fighters” who do what they do, fight as they fight because they are inspired by what they believe or to defend their culture.
We have been certain that we will win because of our superior weapon systems—our dominant air power, laser-guided projectiles, our stealth technology and “smart” bombs, our GPSs, our wireless communications capacities, and of course our belief that “God is on our side.”
But we should have noticed that belief-driven opponents are ironically capable of winning by turning our very strengths against us—we should have learned this from how vulnerable the French and British were to similar tactics in their colonies. Our open system allows rebels and guerilla forces to gather information without the need for any formal intelligence apparatus and they easily turn some of our technology against us, using, as one example, cell phones to set off deadly, “improvised devices.”
When will we learn the most basic lesson of warfare—that it is about a history of one weapon system overcoming another: suits of armor defeated lances and arrows which in turn were rendered useless as weapons by guns and bullets which in turn were thwarted by tanks and other forms of armored vehicles which were impeached by bombs dropped from airplanes which could subsequently be located and shot down by radar-guided missiles which in turn were . . . . And now we see low-tech insurgencies defeating cyber-powered armies.
Of course the lesson we should really be seeking is how to live peacefully together and make all forms of warfare obsolete. But until that time, if we want to protect ourselves (not project ourselves), we need to fess up to what’s not working and get to work fixing it.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:39 PM
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