Canadian Cincinnatus

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on (Part III)

How could the War on Terror have been fought better? 

For what it’s worth, I think George W Bush’s greatest mistake was that he didn’t strike hard enough, fast enough and go far enough when he could. Obviously this view contradicts the conventional wisdom of Bush’s usual critics. The main piece of evidence for my hypothesis is that the biggest national sponsor of international terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is still standing (though suffering from significant internal dissention).

Machiavelli taught that when you strike, you must strike as hard as possible. Half a heart digs the grave deeper. Conventional military wisdom concurs when it advises field commanders that it is not possible to apply too much force at the crucial point in a battle.

This strategic principle forms the basis for my own ideas on how the War on Terror should have been conducted. I developed my thoughts within the first several months after 9/11 so I can’t be accused of 20/20 hindsight. 

At the time, I envisioned using a much larger force – basically the entire US military – to crush not only Saddam Hussein but to use Iraq as a springboard to take out Iran and Syria, rounding up all terrorists that could be found there, providing as much help as possible to any pro-west elements and then getting out while the getting is good. Prior to coming home, and while there would still be about 10 divisions residing in the Middle East, I would have demanded from all the Middle Eastern regimes that hadn’t been invaded (such as, say, Saudi Arabia) that they turn over all the terrorists who live within their borders or kill them - or you’re next. Such a message, sent out at the very pinnacle of victory would result, I think, in maximum cooperation.

While I would have used much more force than George Bush, I would have counterbalanced this by setting a hard time limit (privately, of course) on the operations: about 2 to 3 years. I would not have engaged in counterinsurgency or nation building (but I would have left a small special forces presence to continue to hunt terrorists). As a result, the shooting war would have been more intense but would have ended much quicker - by the 2004 presidential election, at the latest.

I believe the more intense nature of the fighting would still have resulted in a decisive-battle-style moral victory that the much-longer Iraq insurgency struggle ended up providing. Where I think where my plan is superior is on the domestic front. The weakness of George Bush’s strategy was that, by pulling his punches when he didn’t have to, the hot wars dragged on for far too long. If you look at how America responds to wars - and indeed the history of how democracies in general respond to war - the populace tends to support full-scale wars but not the kind of low intensity conflicts that drag on seemingly forever. The people understand perfectly well the need for an occasional war. What they cannot stomach is perpetual war. This is the reason for the apparent paradox that intense conflicts like World War II enjoy popular support while relatively low intensity affairs like the Boer War, the Philippines’ insurgency and Vietnam become enormously unpopular over time.

P.S. Most of this series has been about Iraq. My take on the Afghan war, and the strategy that should have been employed in that country, has already been explained abundantly and can be found here, here, here and here.

 

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19^th century Prussian strategist composed his masterwork, On War, to distil the military wisdom he learned from the Napoleonic Wars, in which he participated. One of his key insights was that the purpose of war is not to occupy ground but to defeat enemy forces. This led him to the concept of a decisive battle. As he saw it, war consists of two armies manoeuvring for advantage and only engaging with the enemy when they think they can beat them. Therefore, in battles that are decisive, the battlefield itself and the land surrounding it is irrelevant, except as to how the lay of the land contributes to defence and movement. The only thing that is important is who wins and who loses – and by how much.

The classic example of a decisive battle is Gettysburg, fought over an insignificant town in Pennsylvania but where the Robert E Lee’s invasion of the north was stopped and the cause of the south doomed because the Confederacy could never make up the losses they suffered on those three days. Another example is Stalingrad. The town itself was an irrelevant place, in the middle of nowhere, of no strategic significance and reduced to rubble while the battle was being fought. It was only significant to the dictators of the opposing sides because the place was named after one of them. But still, the battle fought there was decisive because the loss of the Sixth Army forced the Wehrmaht to be on the defensive from that moment onwards. 

Conventional wisdom says that the doctrine of the decisive battle is irrelevant to counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare and terror campaigns. In ‘asymmetrical warfare’, the battlefield is the hearts and minds of the local inhabitants. On Sept 12, 2001 I agreed with this view.

But in retrospect, I think it is not true, or rather, it isn’t necessarily true. Looking back at the Iraq campaign, I see that a decisive battle was fought there, one that has proven to be the Gotterdammerung of Al Qaeda. The conventional wisdom about Iraq is that because the nation building and counterinsurgency can never really be concluded decisively, the war will drag on forever unless America unilaterally withdraws, which would be a huge moral defeat. Therefore, Iraq must be a failure. One can counterargue that the success of General Petreaus’ surge bypassed both horns of the dilemma, but I think a more fundamental point can be made: that the war over the Iraq insurgency was a decisive battle, and Al Qaeda lost. 

I think the reason many people don’t see this is because of how we usually interpret the phrase ‘hearts and minds’. We usually think of the hearts and minds of the peasants, among whom terrorists and partisans can find sanctuary and operate. Our counterinsurgency boffins believe they can be won over with non-military efforts such as road building and school construction to demonstrate to them that we are ‘nicer guys’ than the enemy. Sometimes this approach is correct. But there is another sense to the phrase ‘hearts and minds’: it means the morale of the enemy. 

At the end of the day war is a destructive enterprise. You do not win over the enemy by appealing to him. World War II was not won in the public opinion polls of Imperial Japan or the Third Reich. You don’t win the enemy over - you destroy his will to fight. This is what decisive battles do. It can safely be said that on Sept 12, 2001, Islamic terrorists were the very opposite of demoralized. They were exultant, they were triumphalistic, they thought victory was in their grasp and that their enemy was weak and vacillating. They imagined that the only response the US was capable of was a Clintonian cruise missile strike. They thought that they had won a decisive battle.

By taking the battle directly to them in Afghanistan, George W Bush disrupted Al Qaeda’s command and control, crippling their ability to launch a follow-on strike. But I don’t believe that the initial victory really demoralized them. It was too quick and bloodless to do that. What truly demoralized them was the protracted 6 year (2004 to 2009) insurgency they launched in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and which they ultimately lost when the Surge succeeded. While the US lost about 3,000 men there, the US military killed hundreds of thousands of insurgents. Unfortunately for the Islamists, the US proved more resilient than they had expected, and the US soldier an order of magnitude better fighter than they are. It is easy to find men willing to die for a winning cause; it is much harder to find somebody to die for a hopeless cause. Even the most committed warrior doesn’t want to die for nothing. After 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s best and brightest are now dead and the ultimate victory of the Caliphate is further than ever.

On September 12, 2001, Al Qaeda was moralized. Today, they are demoralized.

Part II of this essay tomorrow.

News item: 550 tons of Saddam Hussein’s enriched uranium arrives in Canada for disposal this Saturday.

Read about it here.

Good thing Iraq didn’t have a program to develop weapons of mass destruction!

Marine Corps "overrun by recruits" as the Corps expands to cold war size

Story in Strategy Page.

a graphic illustration of the low casualty levels in Iraq

(image by Wiseguy)