Hat tip to the Small Wars Journal editors ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") for bringing this Ralph Peters article to my attention.
A word about Ralph Peter first.
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a strategist, an author, a
journalist who has reported from various war zones, and a lifelong traveler. He is the author of 24 books, including Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World and the forthcoming The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.
Retiring as a lieutenant colonel, Ralph Peters was a military intelligence officer. He's written (and obviously read) extensively on the topics of strategy and conflict in the world that's come to be since the end of the Cold War.
LTC Peters is, in some respects, sort of like that crazy uncle in the family who says the impolite-but-true things at family gatherings. If we didn't have him around to say those things, to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, we'd have to invent him.
During the Cold War, there came to exist whole professions of people whose business it was to think the unthinkable and plan for the unspeakable. By and large these were decent, educated, moral people, trying to keep their countries and their families alive and free. Their moral and spiritual heirs exist today throughout the military and intelligence services.
The opener:
"The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves."
Allowing attorneys to pronounce on the acceptability of targets and objectives is an awful misstep, very difficult to retract, and incredibly has become necessary due to the scapegoating-in-hindsight which has come to be the norm in American politics today.
Some money quotes:
"(I)rregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win."
"(C)ollective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. .... I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today."
Rwanda. South Sudan. Democratic Kampuchea. Darfur. Teheran. Mexico.
"(E)nding the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely."
Thank CNN, gun camera footage, and video games. Everything looks like it's neat and settled and then cut to commercial break. Mysteries are solved and the inscrutable unscrewed in either 30 or 60 minutes time.
"Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue."
Intelligence analysts have lots of terminology for the sort of mental biases endemic to this sort of thing: mirror-imaging, rational actor bias, &tc. Long before I ever heard of such a thing, it was very apparent to me that some of our national policy leaders seemed to think that their counterparts had all attended the same seminars at Harvard's Kissinger School or something.
"(H)istory is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief."
Even within the military, intelligence, and foreign-policy services, the poverty of our educational system has resulted in a deficit of historical knowledge and perspective among the people who need it most. The good ones spend their careers playing catch-up, trying to fill in the intellectual potholes which are the legacy of public education in America.
"We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.
One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you."
In war, the enemy gets a vote. The truism about no battle plan surviving contact with the enemy is true for a reason. The enemy has his own plan and it's not one you're likely to favor; that's why he's called "the enemy."
"(O)ur expectations of war’s results have become absurd. Even the best wars do not yield perfect aftermaths."
A truly brilliant opponent would melt away before a Western invasion, shower the liberators with roses, pop-up with a democratic collaborationist government, and then quickly usher the Westerners back out of the country. Sort of a double-reverse Grand-Fenwickian strategy.
"Expecting Iraq, Afghanistan or the conflict of tomorrow to end quickly, cleanly and neatly belongs to the realm of childhood fantasy, not human reality. Even the most successful war yields imperfect results. An insistence on prompt, ideal outcomes as the measure of victory guarantees the perception of defeat."
Lack of clearly communicated objectives in war only makes it easier for the media and for opposition politicians (but I repeat myself) to move the goalposts and declare a quagmire.
"We have the power to win any war. Victory remains possible in every conflict we face today or that looms on the horizon. But, for now, we are unwilling to accept that war not only is, but must be, hell. Sadly, our enemies do not share our scruples."
The American political public really only has a visceral grasp of the last half-dozen of the nation's war. Anything earlier than World War II is essentially pre-history not quite rising to the level of mythology, other than Washington crossing the Delaware (why didn't he cross on one of the Interstate highway bridges?) and Martin Sheen losing at Gettysburg.
So our national knowledge of war is limited to World War II (a global, existential struggle between good and evil), Korea (reruns of M*A*S*H but nobody's quite sure why we were there), Vietnam (we lost and that's a good thing, right?), &tc.
No wonder there's ignorance and confusion about the nature of war.
We're supposed to win, except when we're not, and the enemy population should greet us a liberators (none of them were really nazis). And in the hindsight of three-score years things like the Marshall Plan and the German economic miracle look easy.
"The willful ignorance within the American intelligentsia and in Washington, D.C., does not stop with the mechanics and costs of warfare, but extends to a denial of the essential qualities of our most-determined enemies. While narco-guerrillas, tribal rebels or pirates may vex us, Islamist terrorists are opponents of a far more frightening quality. These fanatics do not yet pose an existential threat to the United States, but we must recognize the profound difference between secular groups fighting for power or wealth and men whose galvanizing dream is to destroy the West."
Islamist terrorists do not yet post an existential threat to the United States, but.....
They'd like to.
(Honor the threat.)
"The problem is religion. Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it. We are in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to. They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name. We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses. Setting aside the point that a devout believer can behave cynically in his mundane actions, our phony, one-dimensional analysis of al-Qaeda and its ilk has precious little to do with the nature of our enemies—which we are desperate to deny—and everything to do with us."
Having taken prayer out of the schools in homage to the second-most-easily-offended religious group (i..e, atheists), with the Ten Commandments taken out of the courthouses, Christmas displays from out of the town squares, and memorial crosses out of national and state parks, it's no wonder that our political classes are so clue-less about religion.
"The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away. U.S. intelligence agencies and government departments go to absurd lengths, even in classified analyses, to avoid such basic terms as “Islamist terrorist.” Well, if your enemy is a terrorist and he professes to be an Islamist, it may be wise to take him at his word."
Honor the threat. It's not up to us to define our adversaries; our adversaries will do that nicely enough for themselves. It is up to us to avoid willful blindness in that regard.
"To make enduring progress against Islamist terrorists, we must begin by accepting that the terrorists are Islamists. And the use of the term “Islamist,” rather than “Islamic,” is vital—not for reasons of political correctness, but because it connotes a severe deviation from what remains, for now, mainstream Islam. We face enemies who celebrate death and who revel in bloodshed. Islamist terrorists have a closer kinship with the blood cults of the pre-Islamic Middle East—or even with the Aztecs—than they do with the ghazis who exploded out of the Arabian desert, ablaze with a new faith. At a time when we should be asking painful questions about why the belief persists that gods want human blood, we insist on downplaying religion’s power and insisting that our new enemies are much the same as the old ones. It is as if we sought to analyze Hitler’s Germany without mentioning Nazis.
We will not even accept that the struggle between Islam and the West never ceased. Even after Islam’s superpower status collapsed, the European imperial era was bloodied by countless Muslim insurrections, and even the Cold War was punctuated with Islamist revivals and calls for jihad. The difference down the centuries was that, until recently, the West understood that this was a survival struggle and did what had to be done (the myth that insurgents of any kind usually win has no historical basis)."
Even some of the insurgents believed in common knowledge to have won, did not, as a matter of history, do so in fact. The Viet Cong did not defeat South Vietnam and the U.S. military. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Viet Cong were essentially obliterated and rendered permanently non-combat effective. Most of the "insurgents" from that time forward were actually NVA regulars infiltrated south from the DMZ. South Vietnam fell to armor-heavy regular forces from North Vietnam.
"When the United States is forced to go to war—or decides to go to war—it must intend to win. That means that rather than setting civilian apparatchiks to calculate minimum force levels, we need to bring every possible resource to bear from the outset—an approach that saves blood and treasure in the long run. And we must stop obsessing about our minor sins. Warfare will never be clean, soldiers will always make mistakes, and rounds will always go astray, despite our conscientious safeguards and best intentions. .... we must return to the fundamental recognition that the greatest “war crime” the United States can commit is to lose."
I pray for the safe return of American citizens trying to exit some of the Middle Eastern countries which are now experiencing uprisings and other instability. Some of our fellow citizens may well experience something of what it's like to "lose" in a war, as four yachters recently experienced off the coast of Somalia.
"Yet another counter-historical assumption is that states have matured beyond fighting wars with each other, that everyone would have too much to lose, that the inter-connected nature of trade makes full-scale conventional wars impossible. That is precisely the view that educated Europeans held in the first decade of the twentieth century."
Globalization is not new. It wasn't new when Marco Polo was working the issue. It's a process and a tendency. It's not a panacea or an immunity.
"(W)e need to remember that the apparent threat of the moment is not necessarily the deadly menace of tomorrow. It may not be China that challenges us, after all, but the unexpected rise of a dormant power. The precedent is there: in 1929, Germany had a playground military limited to 100,000 men. Ten years later, a re-armed Germany had embarked on the most destructive campaign of aggression in history, its killing power and savagery exceeding that of the Mongols. Without militarizing our economy (or indulging our unscrupulous defense industry), we must carry out rational modernization efforts within our conventional forces—even as we march through a series of special-operations-intensive fights for which there is no end in sight. We do not need to bankrupt ourselves to do so, but must accept an era of hard choices, asking ourselves not which weapons we would like to have, but which are truly necessary."
Recall that in 1929 Germany was doing everything in its not-inconsiderable power to hide its ability to rearm and to make war. It did so quite successfully, with horrific results for its neighbors and the world.
"Whether faced with conventional or unconventional threats, the same deadly impulse is at work in our government and among the think tank astrologers who serve as its courtiers: An insistence on constantly narrowing the parameters of what is permissible in warfare. We are attempting to impose ever sterner restrictions on the conduct of war even as our enemies, immediate and potential, are exploring every possible means of expanding their conduct of conflicts into new realms of total war."
If you don't believe this, start reading some of the stuff posted over at Opinio Juris. Those are some big-brain lawyers over there, who really know their international law (if there can be considered to be such a thing, which is another debate), and some of what they write about amounts to a handicapping system weighted against Western powers involved in armed conflict. I know they mean well but they really need to go on some patrols on the bad side of Basra for a few weeks, or take a long field trip to the Kandahar valley in winter.
"Our homeland’s complex infrastructure offers ever-increasing opportunities for disruption to enemies well aware that they cannot defeat our military head-on, but who hope to wage total war asymmetrically, leapfrogging over our ships and armored divisions to make daily life so miserable for Americans that we would quit the fight. No matter that even the gravest attacks upon our homeland might, instead, re-arouse the killer spirit among Americans—our enemies view the home front as our weak flank."
Adm. Yamamoto understood the risk, and paid the ultimate price, for awakening the sleeping giant.
"Our potential enemies believe that anything that might lead to victory is permissible."
And so it is. The laws of land warfare and other codes of conduct clustering around the various Hague and Geneva conventions are Western artifacts, not laws of nature. The American experience fighting practicioners of, for instance, the code of Bushido, was very instructive in this regard. These strictures are not meant to be suicide pacts (at least not the earlier ones) or strait jackets, but ways to minimize the suffering of innocents during wartime. When fighting an adversary who, in the main, respects these norms, we should by all means return the courtesy. When not so fortunate, we must dust-off those articles of war dealing with reprisal and apply them with strict interpretation.
"Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media."
The unbiased media. On my way out of Iraq in 2004 was when I was first exposed to "unbiased" and "objective" journalism as it was then practised by such networks as CNN and MSNBC. Their reporting was so at odds with the reality of Iraq as I had just spent the prior year experiencing, the cognitive dissonance so awful, that I became an immediate convert to the Fox News Channel. I had colleagues who, upon their return home, actually broke their television sets they were so angered by the biased reporting. Most just turned them off.
"The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures."
Daniel Pearl. Lara Logan.
"Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters."
&
"We need to regain a sense of the world’s reality.
Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking. "
