The US military has some nice buzz-word sets for use in conventional war. First there's, "Shoot, move, communicate!" This cap-busting, running around and talking has a goal. It's the second buzz phrase: Find! Fix! Destroy!
Kind of gives you shivers of excitement, doesn't it?
With superior surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering technologies find the enemy wherever he might be. Using superior air and ground mobility and air delivered firepower, make the enemy stand and fight. And, then, when he does--squash him like a grape with overwhelming firepower!
Now, that must really give the stay-at-home commander guy a real thrill between the legs.
Trouble is that these phrases don't matter in counterinsurgency. They have to be replaced by one which history dictates. One we Americans don't like--even though we won our independence using it. The new phrase is this: Presence, patience, persistence.
What do they mean, these words, presence, patience and persistence?
Presence means the counterinsurgent has to be there, on the ground, up close and personal. Not up above zipping through the sky. Not out there somewhere in the ocean. Right there in and among the humans which constitute the terrain where the war will be fought, won or lost.
Patience means being willing and able to spend all the time necessary. Waste time perhaps. Certainly to expend time without knowing if victory is coming measurably closer or not for this is a war without phase lines, lacking physical objectives. It is a war won or lost by intangibles, the gaining or losing of support, the increase or decrease of the will to keep on keeping on. Fought on human terrain, waged in human perceptions and beliefs, where time and patience like the slow wearing of water on granite takes its toll, either achieving success or acknowledging defeat.
Finally consider persistence. It is the twin of patience implying the capacity and the ability to keep eyes on the prize even if the prize is not all that might be desired. Insurgencies rarely end with a decisive victory, a peace treaty a triumphant parade. Hostilities, the shooting, bombing and killing subside, peter out, perhaps even stop formally with some form of armistice, but the struggle for political authority will go on. It may take years, even generations for the conflict finally to be resolved.
For example, when did the American War of Independence, a defensive insurgency using both conventional and guerrilla forces end? With the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown? The Peace of Paris? Or the Treaty of Ghent in 1815? Or the War Between the States, an unsuccessful (if you're Dixie bred and born) defensive insurgency. Was it the surrender of General Lee? Perhaps the surrender a few weeks later of Joe Johnson's well equipped and highly motivated potential guerrilla army in the mountains of North Carolina? Or was it with the end of Reconstruction over a decade later? (For bonus points, when was the North-South conflict resolved? Has it?)
The combination of presence, patience and persistence implies another area where one must get a grip. Counterinsurgency is a manpower heavy kind of war. It takes boots on the ground, and a lot of them. One hundred fifty thousand men would not be too many for Afghanistan. Four hundred thousand would not be extreme for Iraq.
That many men and women means a lot more targets for the black hats. More targets means more body bags (excuse me, the correct term is "human remains pouches".) It also means a lot more money, a lot more economic, social and political dislocation on the home front. Put the emphasis on "political" because that's the 900 pound gorilla.
The fear of political repercussions drove Lyndon Johnson with the full support of both parties in Congress to decide that the Vietnam War would be fought by draftees and not reservists and National Guardsmen. After all, the "kids" had always grumbled, but gone to war before. And, more importantly, the "kids" unlike the older Reservists, or Guardsmen didn't have wives, children, jobs, ties in the community. Hell, they didn't even have the vote yet. Of course, history records that LBJ et al were wrong as a soup sandwich about the consequences of the draft coupled with a long, long and seemingly inconclusive war.
The architects of the current wars thought that technology could effectively replace boots on the ground. They believed (wrongly as it has been turning out) that aircraft, ROVs, more lethal munitions than used in any previous war and the information handling systems at our disposal would allow us to fight a lean and mean war with minimal manpower.
They also must have thought that by limiting our boots on the ground, they would limit the body bags arriving at Dover AFB. Yes. And, No.
The planners in the bowels of the Pentagon and over at the White House failed to get a grip on another historical reality of war, particularly insurgent war. At some point in every war, it is the dead, not the living who dictate policy.
That's right. The dead dictate policy. In the back of commander guys' brains, in the back of many minds in politics and the media is the uneasy thought. "Can we admit these Americans died in vain, for nothing?"
So where's the problem? We had over 60,000 die for nothing at all in Vietnam. So far barely more than a twentieth of that have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The answer is simply that Vietnam on the one hand and Afghanistan and Iraq on the other do not share the same global political context. We could experience a defeat in Southeast Asia without any real, long lasting diminishment of our role in the world. A better state of peace did not depend upon our winning in Vietnam.
(This reality was predicted in 1964 by Sherman Kent the Director of National Estimates at CIA in a memo to the President. Kent told Johnson that it wouldn't harm our strategic interests in the slightest if "South Vietnam is taken over by the Communists." Strange to today's ears, but sometimes CIA gets it right.)
Right now, or at least in the next few months we the people have to decide if we are willing to sign the covenant with death, the death of more good men and women or will we accept the offered contract with defeat. To make the choice we have to get a grip on what the consequences will be, how either choice will effect a better state of peace than existed prior to the twin invasions.
That will come in Part 3.
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