Posted on 09/25/2012 3:46:18 AM PDT by RightSideNews
In view of the public frustration with a decade of largely unsuccessful U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impending cuts to the U.S. military budget, there is an active debate at present as to what military strategy and force structure should be fashioned for the future. Unfortunately, many taxpayers and most politicians are totally illiterate when it comes to the subject of warfare. (Judging from the dismal results in the last ten years, a similar conclusion might to drawn concerning the U.S. officer corps.) In an attempt to fill this critical knowledge void and perhaps raise the level of the on-going national defense dialogue, this essay is offered to provide the lay reader with an awareness of the basics of warfare. One qualifying note is that this essay will not deal with the morality of war or justification for going to war. While understanding “just war theory” is integral to the study of warfare, it is beyond the scope of this essay, which is intended to focus on the “how of war,” rather than the “why of war.” The appropriate place to begin a discussion of war is with the purpose of war as defined by Carl von Clausewitz in his masterwork, On War: WAR THEREFORE IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE INTENDED TO COMPEL OUR OPPONENT TO FULFIL OUR WILL . .
(Excerpt) Read more at rightsidenews.com ...
If we are hamstrung by humanitarian considerations and legalistic mumbo-jumbo that causes Americans to die needlessly, then it is time we level the playing field. We can do that by elevating our enemies, which is unlikely when dealing with mental and moral deficients like muslime, or we can get down in the mud and filth with them and prove once again that there’s nothing Americans can’t do better than their enemies.
Do we want to win Miss Congeniality or do we want to destroy those who would destroy us?
I’m with you, brother. Either we fight for real or we just don’t go. It’s like we’re always trying to prove we can win the war with one hand tied behind our backs.
Absolutely correct. IMO
Not just forbidding the mention of the true enemy - denying it’s very existance.
...and prosecuting anyone who should actually attack that unmentioned enemy.
Where we went wrong?
We stopped killing the buffalo.
The Plains Indians were brave, well led, highly mobile, and well armed. They were probably the best light cavalry in the world at the time. Forcing them into a decisive engagement (that we could win...) was pretty much impossible.
So we killed the buffalo; darn near all of them. By doing so, we eliminated their primary source of food and material. The Plains Indians were left with a choice between starvation and surrender.
That is the way you beat an insurgency - you kill the buffalo.
If the current crew had been in charge in Dec ‘41, the commotion on that famous Sunday would have been an “unfortunate accident while setting-up for the next Fourth of July fireworks display”.
I don’t think we went to kill all their food sources just to defeat them.
That is HOW you defeat them. Kill their logistics. Kill off their sources of beans, bullets, and bodies.
Killing individual warriors or jihadis is a waste of time; there are always more to take their place. But if they can’t feed or equip their fighters and if their families are starving and freezing in their camps, they can’t fight - you win.
If you want to win, you kill the buffalo.
Who’s selling them their guns? How are the weapons getting from source to user? Interdict and destroy the highways, trucks, gasoline supplies. “Disappear” the agents who broker the transactions. Intercept the weapons, sabotage them, then deliver the defective supplies to the enemy. Poison their food stores and water. Make every breath they draw a question mark.
Interrupt their money conduit. Track down their couriers and cut their throats. Then use the money yourself. Find the money sources. Convince them that their bucks can be spent more wisely ... like on insurance. Find out who’s getting paid and why. Make them hurt.
Compromise their intelligence community. Infiltrate. Disinform. Set them up. Ambush them with their own need to believe. Eventually all trust breaks down and the organization becomes paralyzed.
Destroy their command and control. They are fanatics and madmen with plenty of zeal but no direction. Take away the directors and you shatter their illusion of superiority. If we can get to bin Laden, the average raving diaperhead doesn’t stand a chance. Make them know that, dangerous as it is to resist the Taliban, it’s vastly more dangerous to piss off Uncle Sam.
Bingo.
Make war on their money. Find the donors, kill them and their families (no arrests, no trials). Find out who handles their money and ditto. State actors should be subject to massively destructive “black ops.” Spray poppy fields with most carcinogenic defoliants we can find.
Shut down NGOs providing food and medical care. Drive off the livestock, poison and demolish their wells.
Kill any “news” reporters or cameramen that try to help them with propaganda features.
IN the end, they need to be reduced to starving and freezing in the caves. Then, we’ve won.
Your post completely ignores the “half-assed wars” with France from 1798 to 1790, the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805, The Second Barbary War of 1815, the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848, the “Banana Wars” in central America from 1898 to 1934, the Philippine–American War from 1899 to 1902, the Russian Intervention from 1918 to 1920, action in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Grenada in 1983. All wars fought overseas.
Everyone thinks when the US goes to war it’s always total war with a million troops sent into the fray. The record shows that it’s more often a limited engagement with more modest objectives than unconditional surrender.
I bet Comrade Do and his cronies had a good laugh about Johnny when they went back to their offices.
The look on his (Do’s) face is clearly, “Who TF is this traitor”?
We’re not fighting to defend our lands at all. We don’t even know who is on them, and the administration is killing OUR buffalo. Dark times ahead.
Soviet national interest in NVN was opportunistic, and the Red Army was not a power projection force.
Without the port of Haiphong and with the Red River dykes breached and Hanoi underwater, there would have been no dry RPGs to send south. The VC and NVA in the south would have been reduced to survivalism and “true” guerrilla warfare living off the land, if they chose to stay and fight.
It was fully supplied NVA conventional forces that won the war, not the VC.
No beans and bullets, no war.
In response to your question why we chose to fight on the strategic ground chosen by the communists — we had a lot of foolish people in the White House who believed that the lessons of history didn't apply to them. Some things never change.
The antiwar, pro-enemy forces had years to organize and succeed because Johnson was gutless and dragged the war on and on with his limited war-nation building strategy. Some things never change.
You are correct about he the unsuitability of terrain for conventional forces in Vietnam. I went back to visit Vietnam with my wife in 2000 and an M-48 tank that got mired up to its fenders while I was there in '66 is still there, exactly where we left it. That mud is like glue.
You still sound like the Air Force. i.e., "we still could have won that thing if we bombed more". I don't agree. Bombing does have an effect but it is not decisive. Resilient people just dig in and work around. When the trucks were interdicted, they used pack animals (including elephants), bicycles, and increased sea transport. After the war, we discovered that they were transporting a large percentage of war materiel via coastal shipping despite our navy blocade. By the way, the idea of breaching the Red River dikes was bruited about by Jane Fonda in 1971 as an example of our war criminality. She was lying, as always: we were attacking the POL loading facilities on the dikes -using conventional bombs - a heavily defended and legitimate target, not trying to "flood the Red River basin to cause the genocide of the Vietnamese people" as she said then.
You underestimate the commitment and involvement of the Soviets and the Chinese during the war. They invested Billions to ensure that the "National Liberation War" in Vietnam was successful. The Soviets infused the area with state-of-the-art antiaircraft systems and advisors and the Chinese also had advisors in North Vietnam and even in the South. One of our snipers killed a Chinese advisor as he was standing in a sampan near us. The ring he was wearing was big enough to slip easily over my thumb! (I didn't get the ring).
The Soviets and the Chinese were heavily invested in a communist victory and we would have seen the Chinese ground forces if we had landed in Vinh as planned. The Chinese PLA is primarily foot-mobile and they have lots of soldiers to expend. As I am sure you remember, they were very competitive with the Soviets for the leadership of the Communist world at that time, so I believe that the threat of Chinese intervention was very real.
The pro-enemy/"antiwar" organizations were led by old-line communist cadres supported by the Soviets and later directly by the NVA. At the top of the People's Coalitionfor Peace and Justice and the New Mobe you will find Irving Sarnoff and Dorothy Healey and Bettina Aptheker and many, many more hidden faces who corresponded with the enemy throughout the war. They received money and direction and followed their lead. The press (like today) camouflaged the whole movement as a "spontaneous reaction to an unjust war" but it wasn't to the movement's leadership. They knew exactly what they were doing and the NVA called the tunes from the timing and placement of demonstrations to the "thrust" (theme) of each event. The FBI knew all of this but no Attorney General inconvenienced anyone. Interesting, isn't it?
“My country! May She always be right! But my country, right or wrong!”
There were and are traitors serving foreign powers and subversive agendas within the State Department and US military. They were there during the HCUA hearings and are still there today. The terrorist massacre by Nadil Hasan was entirely preventable.
Agree that you and I could discuss Vietnam for a long time. And I agree that the government under our Commander-in-Thief, Lyndon ‘Silver Star recipient’ Johnson, wouldn’t act against the pro-enemy leftists because they were basically the Democrat constituency.
But irrespective what you and I believe (I viewed the war from the Lt/Capt perspective), here is what the admiral who would have done the targeting in NVN, had it not been for old Silver Star Lyndon, believed. Adm Sharp is on the record that the US military could have successfully won the Vietnam War any time that President Johnson chose after 1966:
“Once the decision was made to participate in this war and engage Americans in the military conflict, I believe we should have taken the steps necessary to end the war successfully in the shortest possible time. It was folly to commit Americans to combat and then force them to fight without utilizing the means we so richly possessed to win an early victory. It is my firm belief, however, that we did exactly that by not using our air and naval power to its full effectiveness. . . . . We could have brought the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion in short order, early in the game, once the decision had been made by the civilian leadership to engage with US forces. All we needed to do was assemble the necessary force and then use it the way it was designed to be used. (I do not include atomic weapons in my definition of necessary force. In my view, there was never a need for employing nuclear devices in Southeast Asia, and I never recommended such.) In fact, we assembled the necessary force quite rapidly. By mid-1965 we had strong air power available. By 1966 we had the full measure of air power to do the job, and our ground forces were strong enough that in combination with such air power properly applied we could have forced Hanoi to give up its efforts to take over South Vietnam. But authority to use our air power to this end was simply not forthcoming.”
Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect, Presidio Press, 1978, pp. 2-3.
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