What Kind Of War Will We Be Fighting?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for an evaluation of the role, mission, and configuration of the Marine Corps. At roughly the same time he suggested the Navy needed to reconsider its needs and, presumably, its role in future wars. While being less direct (in recent weeks) regarding both Army and Air Force, the soon to be outgoing SecDef has clearly questioned the current postures and mission orientation of both services.

The subtext of Dr Gates' push to reconfiguration consists of two questions. What kind(s) of war will the US be fighting in the next couple of decades? What is the current and projected state of play regarding the relative supremacy of offense and defense?

No aspect of human endeavor better fits the Hegelian dialectic then does the relation of offense and defense in warfare. Every new thesis of offense calls an antithesis of defense into existence. And, the new defense summons a synthesis of offense. So the wheel turns.

The celebration of the defense got a boost recently with the widespread and breathless discussion of the new Chinese wonder weapon, a highly accurate anti-ship ballistic missile. The couch potato admirals, not all of whom were Chinese, gleefully decided the new, untested missile would make US naval force projection utterly impossible within a thousand klicks or so of the Chinese landmass.

Any number of pundits who have never heard a shot fired in anger weighed in with a pornographically precise description of just how the new system would neutralize the Nimitz class carriers should any make so bold as to come over to the Chinese half of the Pacific Ocean. The first incoming conventional warhead would "kill" the Nimitz class as a weapons system by wrecking its capacity for air operations. The second would nail the ship's propulsive system turning the monumentally expensive and complex ship into a umpteen thousand ton hulk. Then, missile number three would speedily dispatch the hulk to Davy Jones' locker.

Badda-bing! That's all she wrote. End of the US as the number one maritime power. Might as well surrender to the Trolls of Beijing now and avoid the mess later.

Of course this dystopian view depends upon a number of assumptions--all of them quite questionable.

The first is that the US Navy knows utterly nothing about how to play hide-and-seek in the vast expanses of the ocean. Next, the it's-all-over-with crowd seems to believe that there is no way the US could possibly exploit any of the numerous opportunities to perturb, spoof, spiel, or otherwise degrade the extensive C4ISR system(s) which would be required to support the missile. Finally, the proponents of imminent American naval defeat ignore the demonstrated ABM and ASAT capacities of the Aegis supported Standard missile as well as the improvement curve expected over the next few years.

(Oh, yes, they also failed to note the status of directed energy weapon research, development, and deployment as if that is somehow less relevant than the still far from IOC ready Chinese ship-killer.)

The saga of the Chinese super-weapon or at least its portrayal in assorted American and foreign media should be seen as an excellent illustration of an important ground truth. The Hegelian dialectic, the yin and yang of offense and defense is never a finished process. It is always the big wheel that keeps on moving.

The same is true with respect to amphibious forcible entry. In his assessment of the Marine Corps need for a review of its main missions, Dr Gates contended that the days of storming the beach were over. The secretary averred improvements in anti-ship missile technology assured that an invasion force would have to "away all boats" forty or more miles offshore. This, of course, was an order of magnitude greater distance than required during WW II or, sixty years ago next month, the last great amphibious operation in US history, the one at Inchon, Korea.

To Dr Gates the takeaway was self-evident. The distance, and the time required to transit it would be too great. In the future, large scale operations across a contested beach would be impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

Surely with his vast experience, Dr Gates knows better. He has both seen enough and, in all probability, studied enough to understand that there is no such critter as a stasis imposed by the unconquerable defense or the irresistible offense.

Being a contemporary of the Geek, the secretary must recall, for example, the confident expressions by experts of high rank and great experience of a belief that the helicopter was too slow, too low flying, too fragile to survive in a combat zone. He should remember the pronouncements to the effect that the Marine's doctrine of "vertical envelopment" would prove impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

The experts were wrong as battlefields from Vietnam to Afghanistan have shown. The great wheel of offense versus defense rolled on. Improvements in one drove improvements in the other. There is no reason to believe this dynamic will suddenly and abruptly change.

History is filled with other examples, very well known examples. The combination of artillery, machine guns, field fortifications, and barbed wire made ground offensives impossible. Sure, until the armored fighting vehicles were developed. The battleship was supreme. Sure, until the airplane and submarine proved otherwise.

Submarines were queens of the sea. You bet. Until effective technologies of detection and engagement were developed. The bomber would get through. Yes, until radar, controlled figher interception, and surface to air missiles arrived on the scene.

Technological lurches in and off themselves are not necessary and sufficient reasons to demand a review and reconfiguration of missions and mission postures. The only truly necessary and sufficient reason for this to occur is found in the nature of the wars most likely to be fought in the next few years, say the next couple of decades.

Way back when, well, at least before 9/11, a faculty member at the National War College challenged the Geek to make one of his (in)famous "fearless predictions." The Geek obliged, opining that the most probable type of war for the US over the next generation or two would be that of an interventionary nature. The kind of war now called "overseas contingency operations."

While the probability of a peer-to-peer conflict with, say, China could not be ruled zero, such was diminishingly small. Rather it was likely to highly likely that the US would find it necessary to involve itself in messy little, frustratingly inconclusive interventions ranging from the punitive to the humanitarian to the stability enhancing to the counterinsurgent. Nasty little wars of policy which would be critical to national and strategic interests but not in themselves existential or total.

To date the prediction has been borne out. Further, there is no reason to see the situation altering in any fundamental fashion for the next two decades. Not even an attack on Iran would result in a total war of national survival for the US. The probability of a peer-to-peer mid- to high-intensity war with China or Russia is no more probable today than it was fifteen years ago. Nor, absent some form of unilateral disarmament is such going to loom larger in the real world over the next two decades.

This global reality does demand a more effective configuration of American forces: Marines, Navy, Army and Air Force. The necessity and desirability of such a reconfiguration has gained greater salience from the experiences of the past ten years. Further stimulus comes from the only partially acknowledged fact that the advocates of violent political Islam have not lost their appetite for armed confrontation with the US and other civilized states nor their ability for horizontal escalation.

The Marine Corps can be employed as an example of the necessary reconfiguration of doctrine, force structure, and posture. It should be recognized that the Marines are quite unlikely to be engaging in amphibious forcible entries in the next few years. This assertion is based not on changes in anti-ship missile technology or the increasing availability of inexpensive, effective anti-ship missiles but rather on the nature of likely wars.

In this context it is necessary to remember that the Marine Corps has a wide, extensive, and highly successful experience with interventionary operations, particularly counterinsurgency. For most of the past one hundred years, the Marines have been more often employed in low intensity interventionary operations than in assaulting heavily defended beaches. To put it in perspective, the USMC spent less than three years seizing beaches during WW II and Korea while Marines fought for six years in South Vietnam and nearly that long in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as in the earlier "Banana Wars" of the Twenties and Thirties, the Marine Corps demonstrated the value of its tightly disciplined, flexible, down and forward approach to leadership in counterinsurgency. In all these deployments the Marines demonstrated a very rapid learning curve, a high degree of innovation, and a genuine competence at working with indigenous forces. The Marines have often exasperated higher command with their independence ("hell, the Marines are fighting their own war out there,"), but none have questioned their effectiveness.

In other interventionary operations, the Marine Corps' combination of high discipline, unit coherence, and integrated air and ground capabilities provided the necessary combination of lethality and restraint to accomplish difficult missions. (In this context it is helpful to remember the Marine operation in Lebanon in 1957.)

Had a Marine force been tasked with the neutralization of Somalian warlords in 1993, there would have been no possibility of the mission destroying "Blackhawk down" debacle. The very nature of Marine force posture and doctrine would have prevented the mounting of such a poorly planned and inadequately supported operation as that undertaken by Special Forces personnel at that time. (All that is necessary to keep in mind is that the Marines have organic armor, rotary wing and fixed wing as well as the necessary integrated command, control, and communication capabilities.)

In short, the Marine Corps brings to the table all the features and capacities necessary for short, sharp, constrained lethality operations. For humanitarian relief operations when risk of armed opposition exists, (bare in mind that Pakistani Taliban has threatened attack on relief personnel during the current flood) or a punitive expedition (such as the invasion of Afghanistan should have been) or stability enhancement deployments such as Lebanon in 1957 (or, absent the critical mistakes of mission definition and rules of engagement, Lebanon in 1982), the Marine Corps should be the lead force.

True, leaning on the Corps would violate the totem of "jointness" which has ruled supreme for the past several decades. If Dr Gates is serious he should kick start a review on "joint and combined operations" with a goal of eliminating those which are not genuinely required by the nature of the operation. He knows, (it is flatly impossible that he doesn't) the "joint and combined" fetish is driven not by any real strategic, operational, or tactical requirements but rather by the budgetary process.

And, that, bucko, is a very, very poor way to plan and conduct military operations.

While the Deep Thinkers of the national security community are at it, they might consider the need for reconfiguring the American special and black operations capacities. As events of recent vintage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North or Northwest Africa have shown, there is an increasingly blurred line between the operational divisions of CIA and the blacker portions of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Complicating this is a corollary merging of the intelligence collection functions of CIA's HUMINT component and the equivalents in SOCOM.

Blurring, merging, overlapping between black or paramilitary operations and HUMINT collection is both dangerous and counterproductive. Almost as bad is the insensible, unplanned and reactive melding of the Agency's paramilitary or black operations capacities with any similar capacities in SOCOM. Clear lines of command, responsibility and tasking are necessary for effectiveness. So also is common doctrine, shared mindset and world view.

The separation with careful coordination between intelligence collection and operational execution is also utterly essential. As the record of WW II in Europe demonstrates convincingly, a carefully orchestrated and coordinated separation of intelligence and operations is utterly essential. Otherwise the spooks and the black ops types not only step on each others cloaks, but get stabbed with one another's daggers.

There are many other areas where our forces doctrines, structures, orientations and postures can be and should be re-evaluated and reconfigured. Dr Gates is definitely on the side of the angels when he urges such.

However, it is mission critical that any review, any reconfiguration, any structure, posture and doctrine changes be based not on changes in technologies, new turns on the wheel of offense and defense but on a realistic understanding of the nature of the wars we will be fighting in the years to come. To suggest otherwise is to assure an ultimate failure in the process.

The bitch of it all is the failure will not be evident until too many body bags come home in a war not yet fought. And, by then, it is way too late.

ADMIN NOTE: Comments are invited, welcomed and will be posted but due to spam comments the Geek has been forced to take defensive measures. He apologizes for any inconvenience or frustration.

Predators--The High Tech Knife In The Back

The American public is either supportive of or indifferent to the use of the Predator and Reaper UAVs in the war against Islamist jihadists. But, the indication given a few weeks back by the wave of indignation over the never employed CIA program to kill the same targets up close and personal using human operatives shows the same public would not accept assassinations of the more traditional sort.

A thoughtful--and thought provoking piece from the New Yorker has been posted on Cryptome.

The issues raised by this article are important and deserve wide consideration. Of particular importance is the ethical distinctions between the usual form of killing which requires some close connection between killer and target and the new, stand-off means provided by the UAV.

Assassination, or if you prefer the more sanitary term, targeted killing, is never pleasant. No matter how much the victim may merit this most extreme of sanctions and no matter how much the trigger-puller or knife-wielder agrees with the necessity of the operation, there is always a moment, at least a brief flashing instant, of trepidation before the trigger is pulled or the knife implanted. Or, there is a time afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, after extraction or exfiltration, after debriefing, after the celebratory drink that the pang of regret probes deep and hard in the mind, the heart, the soul. It passes, but its occurrence has the salvation of proving the contact between killer and the killed was fundamentally human in nature.

Of course, it must also be remembered that the killer, again regardless of training and experience, regardless of equipment and support, must take a risk, a very real risk of somehow losing as the encounter occurs. The target may not go willingly and quickly to his death. The sheep may turn into a lion when the ultimate moment comes. Or, his security people may be more alert--or lucky--than anticipated or planned for. Or, something, some little damn thing, goes wrong. Assassination, like war itself, rarely goes perfectly as planned.

The ethical objections raised to the use of UAVs in lieu of the traditional man-in-black seem to focus on the detached, sanitary, inhuman nature of the act. Likewise, the emotional reaction against the use of the tried-and-(Usually) True methods of targeted killing seems to focus on the fact that the act is uniquely human. That it demands one person in a calculated, planned, most cold blooded way take the life of another.

It is ironic to say the least that both proponents and opponents of the UAV in the sky, Hellfires at the ready, emphasize the (in)humanity of the act of killing. The proponent argues that the distance, the remote nature of the button pusher from his target makes the action both more controllable and less risky. The opponent contends that the lack of risk and the remoteness of the killer combine to denature the act of killing from any of the virtues normally associated with men at war such as courage, initiative, determination, and the willingness to place one's life at hazard in the pursuit of national goals.

Another school of argument against the use of UAVs takes a more abstract view. Yet it is still a view anchored in the reality that warfare is a fundamentally human endeavor. This more rarefied argument holds that the lack of risk, the absence of casualties, allows, even encourages a government to use lethal means in support of policy in a hidden way which evades the normal controls and constraints on a president's ability to wage war without let or hinder on the part of the public or congress.

Proponents of the Predator way of war answer that the lack of friendly losses serves to liberate the necessary conduct of policy from artificial limitations imposed by the fear of friendly losses. The UAV is a safe way to neutralize individuals whose existence necessarily presents a clear threat to US national and strategic interests without high cost to the country either in lives or prestige.

There is much merit in this contention. The UAV option does allow the removal of obnoxious personalities without the high visibility of manned air operations or even relatively low signature special forces or black ops. A well conducted UAV strike or campaign of multiple strikes can be conducted without a high profile which automatically invests national prestige with potentially disastrous effects.

The counter is self-evident. A UAV hit is not invisible to the people on the downrange end of it. Since very few such strikes kill only people in real need of killing, the excess deaths will attract attention--and opposition. The UAV is just as likely as a manned airstrike or a misdirected artillery round to create more people hostile to the US than it removes from the game.

Another purely human based argument against the UAV and its attendant bravery of being out of range comes from the cultural reality that it is seen, particularly in tribal and similar societies, as being singularly "unmanly," and thus it rouses more contempt than it generates fear within the recipient population. The result of the bootless cruise missile attacks so beloved by the Clinton administration are illustrative of this contention. They aroused a certainty within the Islamist jihadists of Taliban and al-Qaeda that the Americans were so afraid of dying that they could be defeated by terror.

The cruise missiles were used in order to both punish and deter the Islamist jihadists. That they failed in both missions is obvious. The record to date on the Predators and Reapers is not so clear cut. At least not yet.

The strikes have killed genuine bad guys. There is no doubt but their existence has served to lessen both combat efficiency and morale of the Islamist jihadists to some extent. But, counter measures have already been devised--and posted--by the jihadists. And, the loss of even a major figure such as Baitullah Mehsud had no lasting effect on either the political will or will to combat of the Islamist jihadists.

At the same time there can be no denying that the UAV attacks have killed non-combatants. The figures are soft and contradictory, but at least three hundred civilians have been killed so far this year by Predator strikes in Pakistan. There can be no denying that these unintended deaths have brought with them a swelling of pro-Islamist jihadist sentiments which are real albeit exaggerated by the Pakistan government for its own reasons.

In short, lethal Predator attacks have a utility, a limited one, but quite real. They are a useful tool but no more than that. The same may be said of the traditional approach to carefully targeted killing. Assassination is a tool, a useful one, but limited.

From the perspective of ethics there is no real choice between the two methods. Both have a tinge of distastefulness to the ethically tender. Both reduce war to a form of single combat. In that respect both are preferable to the mass encounter of armed men.

Properly conducted, either method can allow a president to pursue necessary national and strategic interests in a low visibility way which limits but does not eliminate the possibility of invoking national prestige to an undesirable extent. The most essential difference comes in the effects upon the collective mentality of the recipient population.

If the use of UAVs has a counterproductive effect in the way the Clinton administration's cruise missile attacks demonstrated, then the bravery-of-being-out-of-range option must be eschewed no matter how gee whiz attractive it may be. After all, the purpose of assassination either up close and personal or from a distance is to have a positive effect upon the enemy, to cause him to bend to our political will.

The tool has to be matched to the task. As one does not use a sledgehammer to pound in a tack, one does not use a method which produces more enemies than it kills. That is the real criterion for assessing the use of Predators and Reapers in Pakistan or Afghanistan--or anywhere.

The crux of decision making is not which will give a sanitary distance to killing, or which will give the president more options and greater deniability. It is which will have the greater probability of bending the enemy to our political will.

The Road To Victory

Well, bucko, how about a little bit of historically derived military theory? You know, strategy and all that. It might be rooted in the past, but the implications for today are as obvious as a hippo in the bathroom.

As the coach said, "We gotta get back to the basics!"

There is nothing more basic than understanding the four ways by which military strategy has sought victory during the long and very bloody history of the human race. While most of the examples referenced are drawn from Western experience, trust ole Doc Geek, war and the four avenues to victory have existed everywhere wars have been waged.

The most basic avenue to victory is that of annihilation. The target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the total destruction of these forces in one climatic battle, or as an alternative, a short series of battles.

Back when armies were small and combat was always face-to-face, the battle of annihilation was quite possible. The most often used examples of the battle of annihilation were those of Hannibal against the Romans during the Punic War. Not once but twice Hannibal encircled and obliterated the hapless Roman legions, thus establishing the paradigm of what has been the general's wet dream ever since.

The growth of mass armies and industrialized warfare seemed to spell the end of annihilation as a viable avenue to victory. But, when a massive asymmetry exists in firepower, mobility as well as the integrity and efficiency of command and control systems, the battle of annihilation can still be brought to pass. This was demonstrated dramatically during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Now for the bad news. Annihilation does not bring victory in the sense of successful hostilities termination. What happened to Hannibal following his two splendid little victories? Yep, that's right, nothing. He and his small army wandered around Italy for awhile, went home, and eventually his successors were destroyed by a Rome which had never lost its political will even when its legions were gone.

You see the parallel with Iraq, right? No victory parade regardless of "Mission Accomplished" banners and presidential grins. The political will of those Iraqis who feared, loathed, or hated the US and other foreign interlopers made their position plain. Sectarian rivals (which really means political opponents) did the same. The result was no hostilities termination let alone conflict resolution. (That's right, the two terms are not identical with implications which will come later.)

Although the term got a bad rep during World War I and an even worse one in the course of the American War In Vietnam, attrition is a perfectly valid and often employed avenue to victory. Once again the target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the progressive reduction of these forces over a relatively long time. This implies the winning side can kill its opponents faster than they can be replaced--and faster than the opponent can do the same to the eventual winner.

It is important to note that while the strategy of attrition is valid, it has never been responsible in and of itself for victory. Attrition has always looped into one of the next two avenues.

The third route to victory is erosion. Implementing the erosion strategy requires the target be the enemy's material capacity to wage war. This means destroying or disrupting the enemy's factories, agricultural base, transportation infrastructure, and other facilities critical to the continuation of the war. In the process, the enemy's forces in the field are attacked only in so far as doing such serves to overstretch and eventually break the lines of supply and the goodies fed into those lines.

The Anaconda Plan developed by Winfield Scott for defeating the Confederacy was primarily one of victory through erosion. The strategic bombing campaign of World War II, particularly in Europe, also sought victory by emphasizing erosion. The enormous resilience of industrial states with a large infrastructure and a population which can be mobilized effectively for the war effort can successfully resist erosion. This remains true even when it is multiplied in effect by attrition of the forces in the field.

What is remarkable about World War II in Europe is not that Germany was defeated. What is remarkable is the amount of time, effort, and blood the job required.

Parsed closely all three avenues outlined point to the supremacy of the final route to winning--enervation. Enervation, the progressive reduction of the enemy's political will to continue the war--is the most effective of the several alternative approaches. It is also the least well understood by military and governmental decision makers and planners. It is also the avenue least likely to be consciously chosen.

Even though the American War of Independence was won because the British elite lost the will to continue, Americans refused to accept the reality that it was not the Americans winning but the British losing which brought independence in its wake. Nonetheless, it was an American, William Sherman, who first implemented the strategy of enervation with deliberate premeditation.

Sherman, who had lived and worked in the south, understood the conflict of loyalties which could be created in the mind of Confederate troops if their homeland seemed wide open to Yankee threat. He conceived his March to the Sea as being the mechanism which would cause the collapse of morale in the Confederate forces as well as the will to continue the war in the minds of civilians generally.

The immense success of General Sherman's concept can be seen in several ways. One of the easiest is to look at one surrender. No, not the famous one of Lee to Grant. Rather the surrender to Sherman of Johnston's army, which at the time it surrendered was intact, under arms, well ordered, and securely ensconced in the mountains of North Carolina from which it could have waged guerrilla war for years. But, all hands saw no point in the exercise after the great sweeps of the March to the Sea and its successor, the March Upcountry.

Centralized, authoritarian regimes are both more and less able to resist enervation than democratic, decentralized ones. This can be seen in World War II.

The Germans never lost political will. Not until the Russian tanks and Mongolian infantry were in Berlin and the Anglo-American forces in Western and Southern Germany did the Nazi remnants toss in the sponge. Mass surrenders by German troops did not occur until the last few weeks of the war when the prospect of being taken captive by the Russians served as the stimulus to call out "Kamerad" as the Yanks or Brits drew near.

The Soviet central regime showed the same characteristic as their Nazi opponents. Once Stalin recovered his nerve a few days into the invasion, the Soviets never lost their will to resist and re-conquer. (Even if the Americans always feared the separate peace and based too much policy on this self-generated delusion.)

The story in Imperial Japan was quite different. Here the High Command, both civilian and military, was, in the main, in favor of fighting on even in the face of probable defeat. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not alter the views of these men. The mushrooms over Japan did change the mind of one man--the emperor. Hirohito made the call, "we must bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable."

On occasion enervation may occur without intent. This is what happened in August 1918 at the battle of Amiens. The British breakthrough so unnerved the war lords, Hindenburg and Ludendorf, that they advised the Kaiser the war must be ended as they could no longer guarantee the capacity of the Army to continue.

The German army had a lot of fight left in it as was shown in the aftermath of Amiens. The German population was suffering under the twin scourges of the "famine blockade" and the coming of the great flu pandemic, but the army could have kept on keeping on just as the Americans and the Allies expected. But, nerve once lost, political will once abandoned, cannot be regained. The road to Allied victory was paved by the weak knees of the German High Command.

The US lost its war in Vietnam through a case of self-inflicted enervation. This does not excuse nor ignore the raw fact that the US military fought the war in the wrong way so as to hand the political will advantage to the North Vietnamese. Nor were the antiwar protesters in and of themselves particularly responsible for the loss of political will stateside.

The sapping of American political will came from a complex of reasons poorly understood at the time and not deeply investigated by historians through the present. Basically, the combination of the draft, high American body counts, and the absence of any particular likelihood of anything approximating success were responsible for the steady loss of political will. Americans were used to "crusades" against an identifiable "evil" enemy against which we would muster all our strength and see "good" prevail in short order. We were not particularly enthused with limited wars in support of policy as the Korean War had shown a few years earlier.

Political will is a tough critter to target. This is particularly true when the enemy is a set of self-organizing groups bound together by nothing more tangible than a series of religiously rooted beliefs. In comparison to the motley and ever changing assemblage of Islamist jihadist groups and their individual members, the US is a soft target for enervation.

Absent the spur of an attack upon us or strong, decisive leadership capable of articulating a compelling reason for continuing a seemingly endless war with no prospect of anything approaching a "victory," American political will is fragile, easily enervated.

It is not surprising that support for the war in Afghanistan is slowly dropping. The surprise is that it lasted this long.

The US will not win against the Islamist jihadists whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere by enervating their political will--at least not in the foreseeable future. We can, however, defeat ourselves by losing our political will.

The real foreign policy challenge for President Obama and the others in his administration is not the specifics of a strategy for Afghanistan where success will remain quite elusive if one wants success to be defined by a Taliban surrender or the creation of a fully functioning state governed from Kabul. The real challenge is maintaining the political will of We the People lest we travel the avenue to victory called "enervation"--a victory for the jihadists.

The Importance Of Afghanistan Isn't As A Sanctuary

Paul Pillar, a former counter-terror heavyweight with CIA and now the jefe grande of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, has written a provocative op-ed piece in today's WaPo. In it he questions the cost-benefit ratio of our seeking to deprive Islamist jihadists of a physical sanctuary in Afghanistan.

He advances two cogent arguments in support of his conclusion that the benefits far outweigh the price of preventing Islamist jihadists from acquiring a "safe haven" in Afghanistan. The first is that the jihadists do not need a physical sanctuary in order to plan and execute their operations. The second prong is directed specifically at al-Qaeda. Pillar contends that there is no longer any central command and control echelon but rather Osama bin Laden et al are iconic and thus, in a sense, universal.

He could have added a third component to his appraisal. Potential "safe havens" are proliferating. The geographic expression called "Somalia" is one. The dissolving country of Yemen is another. The vast emptiness of Western North Africa represents yet a third. And, Sudan is always waiting in the wings for another chance to be a center of Islamist jihadist activities. Nor can the ever present facilities of the Gaza Strip be ignored (except at great peril.)

In short, ready made "safe havens" abound. Travel between them is quick and easy. The soil of combat is well plowed, so a crop of new martyrdom seekers can grow rapidly and proliferate with ease.

Pillar's assessment is accurate. It is also irrelevant.

The actual importance of the US led war in Afghanistan is emblematic. Had the Deep Thinkers of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld days not been so ideologically blinded by the bright and misleading sun of neoconism, they would have sent the troops to Afghanistan on an old style "punitive expedition" with the prime goal being the destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban government which sheltered them.

They didn't. Instead the great global war on al-Qaeda et al foundered in a morass of strategic overreach, insufficient boots on the ground, and too much bowing and scraping to the presumed needs and wishes of the Islamists within the Pakistani military and government.

The result of the failed US approach was clear to anyone with a historically based appreciation of the dynamics of armed political unrest--the bad guys would be back, bigger, bolder, and badder than ever. Now we are stuck with dealing with that unfortunate reality.

And deal with it we must. We must demonstrate convincingly to Islamist jihadists everywhere that the US cannot and will not be defeated by force of arms. We must show beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that the US has both the political will and the material capacity to wage long, long, long fights against those hostile to us.

The notion of fighting long, long wars without a prospect of a clear victory marked by unconditional surrender documents and appropriate parade based celebrations has never sat well with We the People. And, it still doesn't.

In a very real way the fighting in Afghanistan is not about holding terrain. Nor is it about nation building. The fighting is about political will. About the capacity to have unending political will. About resolve. Dedication. The ability to sacrifice, to take casualties, to take them and keep on coming.

There is a precedent for this approach to war. The progenitor of the sort of war being fought in Afghanistan today--a contest between opposing political wills and the ability to accept casualties while keeping on, keeping on--is found in the Korean War.

After the line of contact stabilized and the seemingly endless truce talks commenced, there were a number of seemingly pointless battles over terrain features of no military or political import. The sanguinary effusions at places like Pork Chop Hill, Bloody Ridge, and Heartbreak Ridge had no inherent meaning. None represented breakthrough battles. None had the slightest potential for altering the course and final outcome of the war.

So, why were they fought? Why were the Chinese (and the Americans in response) willing to expend thousands of lives over hills without value?

Because they had value. An indirect value. An emblematic value. To the Chinese, the assorted bloody battles they precipitated were tests of American political will. American resolve. The American capacity to accept casualties and keep on coming. By measuring our political toughness in battle the Chinese hoped to gain advantage in the truce talks.

There is a direct and--in the boring transcripts of the endless palaver--quite evident linkage between the conduct of American forces at Pork Chop, Heartbreak and the rest and the Chinese negotiating stance. Had the US not contested the hills without meaning and lost lives in so doing, the truce would have been longer in coming and not so favorable in outcome.

We Americans tend to understand war as a clear contest in which success can be measured in terrain gained. In phase lines accomplished. In a final surrender by the enemy. But, not all wars fit this pattern.

Wars are contests not of armies, nor of governments. They are, at root, battles of political will. Our own experience demonstrates this. The War of Independence ended when the British lost the political will to continue. The South surrendered when its population and leadership lost their political will to continue.

World War I ended when the German high command lost its confidence. When the loss of confidence on the part of Hindenburg and Company translated to a loss of political will on the part of the All Highest, as Kaiser William liked to be called.

World War II, the paradigmatic war for many if not most Americans, was the rarity, but only in part. It ended with the obliteration of one hostile government--Nazi Germany, but with the other enemy--Japan losing its political will.

Korea ended because both sides had better things to do and the potential gains were not worth the cost. The Vietnam War came to its sad conclusion because We the People and our government lost our political will to continue.

In the entire sweep of our military and diplomatic history, only one half of one war ended with the total destruction, the complete defeat of the enemy. All the others ended because one side lost its political will.

So it is in Afghanistan. Should the US lose its political will and give victory to the Islamist jihadists the result will be an emboldened enemy and a weakened Western community. This is what is critical about Afghanistan: Which side has the greater political will? The US and its partners or the Islamist jihadists?

How that question is answered will dictate the type of world we live in for decades if not generations yet to come. It is unfortunate that Mr Pillar could not see beyond the superficial question of "safe havens."

It is to be hoped that Mr Obama and others in his administration and political party are not so short-sighted, so superficial.