Navy Commander and platoon of artillery men converted into infantry seek to enter valley to do some nation-building. Local police chief strongly advises against plan for there be bad men in the valley who had not invited the good guys for tea. Navy commander disagrees and enters the valley anyway for he fears no one. A little while later his command is hammered... The artillery men fight well and disengage with small loses. Doesn't matter though for the word spreads quickly that a band of local fighters has defeated a great invading force. More young men rally to the cause.My immediate reaction is that the US is behaving like the redcoats on Lexington Green in 1775, i.e. lining up in neat rows with showy coats to face irregulars hiding behind trees. An example of imperial hubris.
Our Navy commander feels betrayed and tells the district police chief that the local police chief betrayed him and his men. How else would the bad men know that they were coming? The local and district police explain to the Navy commander that EVERYONE knew that he was coming and that EVERYONE knew what would be the result. EVERYONE knew except the Navy Commander. Both the local police chief and the district chief state that they tried to explain to the Navy Commander what would happen... They speak from experience.
The district police chief offers a solution. He explains that he knows people who could take care of the problem. These people for a price could enter the valley and kill two men which would solve the problem for a while. The Navy Commander is taken aback. He refuses to provide the funds to hire the assassins and states that WE DON'T MURDER. A couple of days later another patrol is ambushed. Close Air is called and 17 civilians are killed.
Arithmetic on the frontier. Why kill 2 men? Maybe the 2 men were the leaders of this band of troublemakers? Makes sense to kill the leadership. How long does it take for a leader to emerge from within a potential band of fighters? The potential leader must prove himself and be recognized by others. He must execute a number of confidence targets so that others may begin to trust and follow. How long ... 2 weeks ... 2 months ... maybe less.... A window of opportunity for the Navy Commander to enter the valley and do some of the voodoo we do so well.
Type A personalities may not be the right type to conduct irregular warfare, COIN, FID or CT... especially when we refuse to stop, listen and learn from the locals.
It reminds me of the US going into Vietnam fighting the same fixed battle plans used by the French at Dien Bien Phu and leading to the same bogged down battles. This is classic big power hubris coming in to fight a war on its own terms while ignoring the locals, the lay of the land, and the actions of the irregulars being faced. In short, it is a recipe for failure. And the US has been following this recipe to a "T" for 8 years and losing and it still hasn't learned any "lessons".
I may be a fool, but my view is that if you are going to fight a war, it should be a fight to the death. You mobilize everybody. You stop all civilian partying and "normal life" and you tax the hell out of the population to pay for it. You focus the whole society on the one objective: fight, win, and get out. You send in everything you have. You lay havoc and death until either you or the enemy plea for mercy. War is serious business. And it is a full time job for everybody until it is done. That way everybody realizes it is a sacrifice and nobody will be eager to indulge is a "pretty little war".
You don't play at it buy hiring mercenaries (which is the current US strategy of using its poor and dispossed -- and foreign nationals promised citizenship -- to fight its wars in lieu of mobilizing the full society and spreading the burden on everybody, including raising taxes to pay for the war). You don't do it part time like Bush did -- and Obama continues to do -- in Afghanistan. And you don't linger. You are in to destroy enemies and then get the hell out because it isn't your territory and the locals are going to hate you.
You do it because you have a moral right (not like Iraq where Bush picked a "pretty war" to win and discovered he had entered a snake pit, something that real experts -- not the neocon fools he surrounded himself with -- could have told him). As Sherman infamously noted "War is hell". So you must only enter war as a very last alternative, a bitter choice taken when nothing else can substitute, and it must be taken up as a burden by the whole population, a serious burden.
Modern wars are won by a levée en masse, i.e. a total mobilization. That is how revolutionary France, faced by hostile powers on all sides first fought off invasions and then, under Napoleon, took revolution (and empire) to the rest of the continent. War is a full time, fully bloody undertaking. The pretense by leaders today that it is a party time dilly-dallying is dangerous foolishness. It leads to the kind of idiotic leadership shown by the Navy commander in the above story by Ricks. (By the way, why is the "Navy" out fighting a ground war in Afghanistan? Am I the only one to find that extraordinarily odd? Either the US is so depleted of fighting forces that it is taking men trained to fight on ships and putting them into rugged mountains, or the leadership is so dazzled by military "theories" that it thinks the fighting men are chess pieces to be moved about at will, ignoring their training and expertise.)
When you have leadership that never had to face war or its horrors, and when you have a "professional army" (i.e. mercenaries or a small segment of the population forced by poverty into soldiering as a "job") then there is a temptation to see war as a "policy alternative" or a "strategic choice". This is the road to perdition. And the US since WWII has walked a ways down this road again and again and not learned the lesson. (Presumably the Powell Doctrine was the "lesson learned" from Vietnam and honoured by Bush 41. But under Bush 43, with Powell as his Secretary of State, this "lesson" was completely ignored. But what else could you expect from a privileged son of a politician? A coddled son who hid from Vietnam in the Air National Guard and didn't even complete his duty as required in that "pretend" military position?) Leadership that distances itself for those doing the fighting and dying, leadership that doesn't learn lessons, is condemned to the repeated "tragic miscalculation" that will eventually lead to the destruction of the US.
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