Article

2002-08-25 Axis of Evil

8 killed, 9 wounded in U.S.-Brit strikes in Basra...

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Fred Pruitt 2002-08-25 11:32 am|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1
By the way, have you seen this 1996 "Warning from the future"?

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/569nzbrd.asp?ZoomFont=YES

Came across it via http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=3883#comments

I'd like to know what you think of the outlined scenario.

Thanks.

Posted by Jay 2002-08-25 14:10:10|| 2002-08-25 14:10:10|| Front Page Top

#2 I saw the same article and he raises a good many points that we should be taking as warnings. At the point we're at now, I don't think the Bad Guys are going to win, but if they eventually do it'll be because of many of the points Col. Dunlap brings up. Some of them were laid out by Abu 'Ubeid Al-Qurashi earlier this year and we can probably take them as al-Qaeda doctrine.

My own opinion is that the gravest mistake the Bush administration has made to date has been to let the memory and the anger fade. If I were president, which luckily for the nation I'm not, I would harp on it every day. When he does express his revulsion at the Evil opposed to us the nation backs him and respects him for it; he just doesn't do it often enough, at least not in public. A part of this is predicated on diplomatic concerns, but he should also be pushing the point that the time for talk, compromise and understanding of the other side's position passed when the first plane hit the first tower of the WTC. It's my opinion that we shouldn't be talking to the people on the other side, and that when a person's membership on the other side is established communication should cease on the spot. That applies to the Paleostinians, to the Saudis, to Iraq, to the Pak jihadi parties, and virtually to anyone who says a kind word about them. The rest of the world should be in the position of trying to appease us, not vice versa. But I'm not in charge, the National Security Council never called and asked my advice, and probably they know someting I don't know.

But letting people forget, letting the anger die away, also makes them forget their willingness to take casualties in the defense of the nation. At some point those casualties are going to come; people are going to spend too much time grieving and fixing blame, and not enough counterattacking and killing our enemies in droves.

Col. Dunlap raises the point of women in combat, which is an argument that's been going on since I was in the Army. It's an argument that's performance-based on one side, and politically based on the other. It's an argument the military has been losing, one bit at a time - and they're not the side pushing the politically-based argument. Feminists and their supporters push the position of what should, theoretically be; the military responds with what is, that is, empirically, what's empirically observable. Eventually we're going to pay a big price for losing that argument, and the women who're going to be the means of making us pay the price wholesale are going to suffer horribly retail.

He's also right that information superiority is a temporary advantage to our side. We've effectively lost the export encryption battle - it was a battle we knew we were going to lose. And the availability of sophisticated weapons to unsophisticated enemies is going to continue to be a problem as long as we still have warfare.

I think what he discounts is the superiority of an actual soldier to a guy holding a gun - the warrior. I've mentioned this in passing, and Steven den Beste has addressed it on a couple occasions. One-to-one, the warrior actually has an advantge: he's the one who's got to prove him manhood, never retreat, take bloody revenge on his enemies, all that stuff, while the soldier is reminding himself that retreat is a perfectly acceptable military maneuver. The advantage to the warrior drops markedly when the numbers get above a dozen, say, enough for a good gang fight. Soldiers are disciplined, warriors aren't. Soldiers are task-organized, warriors aren't. Soldiers train under arduous conditions until they're bored with it, then train some more. That's why the Israelis regularly beat the snot out of the Paleostinians and all the Arab armies they've fought. It's why the Gulf War was a rout, why the Taliban collapsed.

The task organization part of it at this point covers all three services - Army, Navy and Air Force. Thanks to the Soviets, who invented the concept, the U.S. military's been working on the idea since the mid-70's, almost 30 years of refinement. Only when it comes together is it obvious, and most of the time it's training in parts. It's so overwhelming that it causes the hand-wringing brigades to worry about "push-button wars" and "Nintendo wars." They don't understand that the objective of war isn't to have your infantry come to grips with his infantry, but to kill the Bad Guys, preferably in large enough quantities that the whole shebang gives up. Had we attacked Sammy with ground forces on January 16th, Gulf War I would have gone much differently.

So I'm not as worried as Col. Dunlap is in his article. I don't think he is in real life, either. I think the article's more a warning to stop doing stoopid things with the military and to recognize that Fouth Generation War is predicated on avoiding concentrations of force, which produces the kind of targets Combined Arms operations like. But at the same time, if you can't concentrate your forces you can't deliver the kind of blow that breaks the enemy. You're stuck relying on war of attrition. That raises more problems, but as soon as you move from attrition to maneuver, you're shot.

Posted by Fred 2002-08-25 18:52:00|| 2002-08-25 18:52:00|| Front Page Top

05:01 Tom Roberts
18:52 Fred
14:10 Jay
14:05 Fred
13:41 freddie
09:30 Nuke Nightmare