Lessons? From Our Wars

The United States has fought a bunch of wars in the last one hundred years. Some have gone by almost unnoticed--interventions in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Others have undergone intense scrutiny--World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as our current undertakings in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From all these wars lessons of a sort have been learned not only by our military but by We the People as well. Some of these lessons have been real, material, and have served to improve both decision making about entering war and our war fighting capability. Other lessons have been misleading, or even down right false.

The Geek thinks it might be time to take a look at some of these lessons, both true and false and see how they can be used to evaluate the American position today. The exercise might help us to more accurately assess probabilities for war in the near term.

The First World War sits astride history as the Great Fault Line, a total discontinuity between that which existed before August 1914 and that which happened after November 1918. That war gave rise to many of the problems bedeviling the world today in the Mideastern wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The American public took one great and greatly wrong lesson from World War I. It went by one word--Isolationism. The World War did not deliver a conclusive victory from the American perspective. Neither did it result in a better state of peace, again from the American point of view. The world was not safer for democracy. Russia became the Soviet Union. The seemingly undefeated nature of the German Army gave rise to the "stab in the back" theory which was so important to the rise of National Socialism less than twenty years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front.

The American military did learn some few but valuable lessons. These included the centrality of being ready to go to war before you went there. Not that it mattered. We the People and our representatives assured that this lesson would go for nothing as we hunkered down in an Isolationist "Fortress America."

World War II caught us not only by surprise (although it shouldn't have) but unready for real war against real gun-toting enemies. Hard fighting--and an enormously efficient industrial plant--along with the ability of the Russians to die in great numbers while killing lots of Germans brought victory in Europe. Industrial capacity reinforced by very hard fighting against an opponent inferior in numbers but superior in his willingness to die brought success in the Pacific.

We the People learned a very big--and very misleading--lesson from WW II. To be successful, a war must be total in nature. All restraints must be cast off. Total dedication, total ruthlessness of force application brought total victory. Victory through unconditional surrender.

For us the paradigm of war was established. War was forced on us by an absolutely evil enemy. We mobilized our total capacity and total political will. We fought with the determination to inflict maximum death and destruction upon the enemy at the lowest possible cost in American lives. The enemy was totally defeated, left naked and defenseless. At our mercy.

With our sword at the enemy's throat we Americans said, "Rise. Go hence. Sin no more." Ruthless in war, we were merciful in victory. That was the Good War.

The military learned some long lived lessons from World War II as well. Rapid maneuver so as to bring overwhelming firepower to bear on a single critical point in the enemy's defenses all orchestrated and controlled by effective technologies of command, control, and communication assured the quickest, lowest cost victory possible.

Ever since WW II, the American military and naval forces have emphasized moving, shooting, and communicating so that time and lives might be saved. In a war between opponents having rough parity in technology, industrial capacity, and social/political organisational complexity, this is appropriate.

The question left hanging in the air by both the popular and military lessons learned from WW II is simple: How often has the WW II paradigm been operative? How often in our history before or since WW II has the US engaged in total war of a bloody and decisive nature with the outcome being the unconditional surrender of the enemy?

The overlooked answer to the unasked question is one word--none. Not even the War Between the States qualifies. The end state was not unconditional surrender. Not even the vengeance ridden Republicans such as Thad Stevens could make it so. The reasons are self-evident.

Less than five years after V-J Day we were at war again. In Korea. The war no one wants to remember. The war of false lessons for both We the People and the military.

The Korean War was arguably the most important war we Americans fought in the 20th Century. It, not WW II, represented the true paradigm of war.

The Korean War was a limited war in support of policy. That is the big lesson to take away from the three blood soaked years on the ridges of the Land of Morning Calm.

The US policy goals in Korea were simply to apply the Doctrine of Containment to the Far East and to effectively establish the UN as an instrument for supporting that doctrine. It was not a grand crusade to eradicate communism in Asia despite what some Republicans of the day thought.

Contrary to what Douglas MacArthur (in)famously said, there was a substitute for victory. After the Peoples' Liberation Army rudely cured us of a bad case of "victory disease," the US government, if not We the People, understood that not losing was the best possible substitute for victory.

Specialists in the foreign policy community of the Cold War learned one lesson from Korea. It was that limited wars in support of policy were possible provided they were short in duration, low in casualties, and, most importantly, public support could be maintained.

The military relearned that firepower kills and maneuver in rugged terrain requires air transportation capacities far greater than those possessed in the early Fifties.

Vietnam challenged the lessons of Korea and WW II alike. First of all the war was not "forced" on us. Even in Korea we could assure ourselves that war had been forced upon us by a seemingly unprovoked North Korean invasion. Second, the generation coming of draftable age between 1965 and 1970 was different in several salient respects from earlier cohorts of draftees.

These differences between the Vietnam and earlier wars were not factored into the lessons learned by either We the People or our military. The American public, its government, and to a significant extent our Armed Forces agreed on a slogan, "No More Vietnams!" They disagreed on just what this slogan might mean in practice.

To some it meant simply keep the troops home, or on the Trace facing the Crimson Tide on the yonder side of the Iron Curtain. No more little wars. No more interventions. No more adventures in counterinsurgency.

To others, particularly those in the military, the big lesson of Vietnam was: We Ain't Goin' Nowhere 'Less We Got Two Things!"

The two things?

Monolithic public support and political will was first. The second was simply overwhelming force. Force enough, lethality enough, to assure a quick, decisive, and, above all, cheap victory.

The military gave full form to its lesson learned from the Vietnam experience in the so-called Powell Doctrine prior to Operation Desert Storm. It worked. The war was short, seemingly decisive, and very low cost in American lives.

Overlooked initially was the simple reality that the war had not resulted in a genuine defeat of the Iraqi government. We had accomplished our minimum necessary goal--the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Other, more expansive, goals had been quietly forsworn as the US invasion hit its hundredth hour.

Korean War style "not-losing" had taken precedence over WW II model "victory." Prudence prevailed over any crusading impulse.

Move, shoot, communicate in order to find, fix, and destroy the enemy were reinforced in the US armed forces as the sovereign recipe for the kind of war the American public would support. That is a war which is short, bloodless, and appears to be decisive.

Off to one side, the rising generation of neocons, not yet the ninnies they would become, drew their own lesson from Operation Desert Storm as well as a superficial review of the performance of the Israeli Defense Forces in the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars. When combined with the WW II paradigm and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, their mis-guided lesson learned would give rise to the "shock and awe" approach to war put into practice in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Remember, the expansive goals enunciated by George H.W. Bush in the run-up to Operation Desert Storm regarding the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and so on were quietly abandoned as the realities of combat in urban areas were considered. It was at least tacitly acknowledged within the Bush Administration and Pentagon that we had no plans and no capabilities for a prolonged occupation of Iraq. The diplomatic, military, and economic resources were simply not there for both a WW II type unconditional surrender by the Iraqis and post-war rebuilding of the country.

On the sidelines over the next eight years, the neocons (now evolving into ninnies) grumbled that the war had not been finished. It would have to be ended--correctly, some day in the future. The nagging increase in terrorist actions by groups typified by al-Qaeda as well as the humiliating spectacle of American troops put to the knife by rag-tag thugs in Somalia boosted the neocon conviction that the Cold War winning US would have to permanently abate the growing nuisances in the Mideast.

A final misleading lesson was learned from the application of air delivered firepower in the Bosnian intervention. Seemingly, a handful of precision guided munitions from American and NATO platforms forced an end to the intransigent regime in Belgrade and brought low-cost democratic peace to the long violent region.

The events of 9/11 met the WW II paradigm. War was forced on the US by a palpably evil enemy. Diplomacy proved useless. Only the military option remained.

If the neocons of the White House and Pentagon had stopped to review the actual as opposed to the ostensible lessons of the American wars of the 20th Century, they would have realised that the WW II paradigm was not actually applicable. The Korean War model was the one to use.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a limited war in support of policy. Our policy goals were twofold. The lesser was the capture or death of Osama bin Laden and others directly associated with the 9/11 attacks. The greater goal was the demonstration that Islamst groups or regimes would not be immune from an American retaliation. In short, the larger goal was deterrence.

By not examining the good and substantial reasons why Operation Desert Storm stopped short of "total victory," and considering what would be required on the days, months, and years following the moment of invasion in Afghanistan, the neocon ninnies assured that not only would victory prove elusive, but that simply "not losing" would be very difficult.

It is true that firepower kills. but killing does not necessarily result in victory. Similarly "shock and awe" may have a very short-term success, but in and of itself does not assure either victory or not losing.

The decision to invade Iraq cannot be attributed to any historical model. The Baghdad regime had not even appeared to "force" war on us. There was no reason for the exercise in regime change. Beyond those self-evident considerations, the current administration gave no apparent considerations to the actual requirements for reconstituting Iraq as a fully functioning state following any successful US invasion.

In Iraq, the neocon ninnies have created something new in American history--a paradigm of how to throw away a war. If they had set out to create a pattern labeled "How to Lose," they could not have done better.

In recent weeks, the American military has been charged with a mission unique in its history--retrieving victory (or at least not losing) from the jaws of defeat. As a policy, the invasion of Iraq richly deserves the failure to which it was plunging only a few months ago. As a nation, we deserve better. The world deserves better of us.

Right now, the military is doing the right things on the ground to give us and the world the better which we deserve. If these efforts bring at least some semblance of success, it will be interesting to see what new lessons We the People, our representatives, and our armed forces learn.