So one of the big deals in the last few years has been the issue of war in Iraq. It's been on the minds and tongues of just about anyone with a degree of political awareness, and a whole bunch of people who have none but like to hear themselves speak anyway. More recently, a discussion with a friend of mine in the army brought up the idea of being able to wage war through robotics via the click of a mouse, so I got to thinking about what was wrong with how we wage war.
I am not an anti-war advocate. Actually, I'm more of a pro-war advocate - but an advocate of smart war. War fought to win, and war fought to minimize casualties - both on our side, and on the opponents side, and war fought for reasonable, measurable policy objectives.
So what's wrong with how we wage war, and how can we make wars more efficient, and less costly in materiel and human life, while still protecting the policy objectives that we wage war to protect or enforce in the first place?
I think to answer that question that we need to look at a history of war - not a history of tactics and strategy, but a history of what war is. From time immemorial, wars have been fought between opposing armies on a battlefield of one form or another - from the trenches of Vimy Ridge or Paschendale, the jungles of Korea or Vietnam, to the desert of Afghanistan or Iraq, and even in the cities in Iraq, Kosovo, and even, to a certain extent, Ireland. These wars are won through the capture, death, or forced surrender of the opposing army - of necessity costing thousands of lives, but furthering the political will of the leadership of those armies. Essentially war is fought with a battlefield mentality that has remained unchanged over millenia, however has adapted itself as weapons modernize, and tactics with them.
So what options exist that would allow military leadership to escape the idea of a "battlefield" mentality? The one I would like to look at is a concept I will call a "covert ops" army. So what is such a force, and how would one operate? To answer this question, let's look at the current covert operations teams that exist. Using the Americans as an example, their special forces exist as the Navy SEALS, the Army Rangers, the Green Berets, and the Airborne units - in all respects troops exquisitely trained in covert warfare, and supported as needed by the main branches of the army. These forces are generally used in counter-terror operations, as well as covert/intelligence ops abroad. So how does one fight a war with a force made up of these well trained, well equipped foot soldiers?
How does one kill a snake? Remove the head, and the snake quickly dies. Do the same with an army or a government, and the government, like the snake, quickly dies. Let's further this concept by looking at modern war, but considering a "covert ops war" on the ground. We keep, as our standing army, an elite unit comprising soldiers trained and equipped for covert infiltration, execution, and extraction. Rather than sending our tanks, infantry, artillery, etc in to fight and destroy our enemies armour, infantry, artillery, etc, would we not be better to use the covers of silence and darkness to take down the command structure of the opposing forces - both in the field and at the office? Why not carry that a couple of steps further and use the same strategy to take the leadership of the belligerant power? Ultimately, this change in overall wartime strategy should lead to both a reduced financial cost for a state at war, as well as a significant reduction in loss of life - civillian and military - for all parties involved.
In the end, this strategy comes through two concepts not unknown to combat operations - speed and stealth. Victory through a covert strategy requires a number of factors. First, the operations against the opposition have to go of within a short period of time - striking down the odd person here or there will leave the opposition too much time to find a replacement for that person or those few people. Taking down a larger number of targets in a limited time frame allows for a much smaller response time for the opposition, allowing both for greater disruption to their military operations, as well as a greater chance of successful escape of your own operatives. Second, a sufficient number of operations actually have to succeed to sufficiently destabilize the nations government and military structure to not allow them the option of continuing their belligerance.
Sun Tzu spoke of the value of surprise and stealth many times throughout his treatise - this is, I believe, the logical conclusion of that.
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Hey, just gave this my first read-over. It's interesting from a strategic position and the reduction in numbers of civilian casualties is a definite bonus. My only concern (and probably the concern of international governing bodies were this to be considered for codification in international law) is that it breaches the accepted rules of military engagement. War must still be declared by all involved parties before violent action can be taken. Naturally, that would make it exponentially more difficult to mount a secret campaign. Thoughts?
First of all, a formal declaration of war is not technically necessary for the beginning of hostilities between states - although it certainly is good manners. Second of all, a secret campaign can still be mounted with all the niceties through the matters of timing and pre-declaration preparation.
To give an example, if the forces in question were set for rapid deployment to their respective targets prior to the formal opening of hostilities, declaration of hostilities was made in such a fashion that, through the effective use of time zones and media blackouts can essentially achieve a "surprise" strike. Furthermore, an effective long-range bombing campaign (cruise missiles, long range artillery, etc) immediately after the formal announcement of hostilities can act as a highly effective cover for covert teams to operate in.
Hey man. I need to remember to check back here more often.
I agree with your basic proposition...smarter wars, not harder ones. It's especially suited for the North American aversion to casualties. Today, Americans scream blue murder over three or four thousand dead. 150 years ago, in the Mexican War, they lost one in ten, an enormous casualty rate that has never been seen since, not even in Vietnam.
But the trouble with taking out the command structure is that the result is usually chaos.
When I was younger, during the days when the Americans were bombing Saddam every week but otherwise leaving him to his murderous devices, I was appalled. Why, my teenage self cried, did my heroes not invade his ass?
Then I watched a press conference with Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, and he said the objective was not to eliminate Saddam, because who would replace him?
'Course, we know the answer now. A weak, necessarily autocratic government that wouldn't last five minutes without an American garrison desperate to withdraw back to their stateside barracks. One of the first things the Americans did was dissolve the entire structure of the Iraqi government and military. All this did was create an anarchic situation made worse by the hundreds of thousands of armed men now out of work, armed and desperate.
This could conceivably have been avoided by flooding Iraq with the million or so men it would have taken to institute absolute martial law, similar to what happened in post-war Germany. This would have created order, certainly, but would never in a million years be possible now. We don't fight wars the same way we did even 50 years ago, largely as a result of a delicate world order that doesn't countenance much rocking of the boat.
The other option would be to eliminate the command structure and just not invade. That would be even worse, as where before there was a hostile, yet more or less orderly state, now there would be a bloodbath that would spill into other countries. Iraq, which WAS occupied, is now the world's premiere terrorist training ground, more of a threat to world peace than Saddam on his own could ever have been. Imagine if the Americans had just eliminated Saddam and his Ba'athists and then just gone home.
In the film "crimson tide" (one of my all-time favourite war movies), Denzel's character says to his trigger happy nuclear submarine captain, Gene Hackman, that the greatest enemy these days is war itself.
He was talking about nuclear war between states, but the same is true of any war now. The world has crystalized into a delicate balance. Even one war between states, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan war, would create such instability that whatever policy gains could be made would create such chaos and human suffering that the result would be more violence, whether through fullscale invasion or the more surgical elimination of the command structure.
And the balance is so complicated that the results of any war would be impossible to predict, or defend against. If there's ever a mushroom cloud over an American city, you can bet the historians of the future would chalk it up to the wiseguy who thought eliminating the bad guys altogether was a good idea.
I can definitely see the problem with simply removing the command structure and not replacing it. The real key, I think, to finding a true and meaningful victory through this method of waging war is to eliminate the extant command structure to replace it with something else that is more in line with your policy objectives. The fact is that using military force to remove a dictator for the good of the people of the country is a nice thing to do. Stupid, but nice (stupid for the reasons that you've just mentioned). But what if one was able to remove the extant command structure, to then replace it with another of their own? Not necessarily pleasant for the common people in the country in question, but definitely a viable strategic aim.
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