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Posted on 12/13/2001 12:23:19 AM PST by TheMole

GI Joe has never looked better

David Warren

Ottawa Citizen

In a sense, Afghanistan has been a classic colonial war. The United States has been sparing of its own troops, instead taking sides and choosing local allies as its proxies, while using its own incontestable technological superiority for a quick win. The resemblance to the way the British took India in the 18th and 19th centuries -- one tribal patch or princely state at a time -- ends there. The Americans have no long-term plans to rule the place, and are happy to let anyone else send peacekeepers.

This is what the Europeans and Canadians turn out to be good for this time around. We have the equipment, the manpower and the budgets to do sentry duties. (As a retired Canadian officer told me after the federal budget was tabled Monday, "It's all very well for the Americans to spend a fortune on defence, they have to defend the free world from terrorism. We only have to defend our own smugness.")

Except for the most elite British special forces -- a small handful of men -- help would just get in the Yankees' way.

Moreover, the two percent or less of the West's Afghan campaign that was off-loaded on the British (and a few French special forces) was essentially unnecessary. The help was accepted as a political favour, in answer to British and French supplications.

This was probably made clear when the British Defence Secretary, the aptly named Geoff Hoon, told BBC breakfast television on Sunday that if Osama bin Laden fell into British hands, he would not be turned over to the United States for trial -- unless the United Kingdom first received assurances that Osama would not face the death penalty. I would have liked to be a fly on the line when George Bush called Tony Blair about that one. I doubt we'll be hearing anything so unctuous from Mr. Hoon again.

Offers of British and other NATO aircraft were politely declined. They have inferior equipment and pilots, and as the United States learned over Serbia, you can't really fight a war while waiting for 19 different defence ministers to sign off on each target.

What has changed in the past decade, and especially in the past two years (technological developments since the Balkan campaign in 1999 were greater than those between that and Desert Storm in 1991), is the status of the United States as a military power.

At the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the world's only superpower. Now it has become what the French call a hyperpower. It is not only at the top of the international Top 10 in military spending. It outspends the other nine combined, and can afford to, given the scale of the U.S. economy. Not the British, at the height of their empire, nor even the Romans, contesting with distant Medes and Parthians, enjoyed such military predominance.

And yet, this quantitative comparison actually understates the U.S. advantage. For there is a real qualitative difference, not only in equipment, but in the skills of its troops. The Pentagon made use of the contractions in general manpower through the 1990s, and applied the peace dividend to hone a much more skilled and variously specialized fighting force. The United States does not employ "grunts" any more, only soldiers who call themselves "grunts" with a droll pride.

At the officer level, Europeans visiting the U.S. military academies have been tremendously impressed by what they have seen over the past decade. And one may see this for oneself by visiting the various institutions on the Internet. Unlike his European or Canadian opposite number, the contemporary West Point or Naval War College graduate is familiar with Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Fuller, Liddell Hart -- and with Sun Tzu and Mao Zedong, for that matter.

Nor is it just a showy book-learning, for the courses are designed to make the students apply what they study, consistently and imaginatively, to the circumstances the United States might face today. I have been tremendously impressed to read theses posted on the Net by young cadets who could obviously skate rings around your average politically correct humanities professor.

On the ground level, in Afghanistan, it is increasingly evident that the United States was able to parachute troops who could speak Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Urdu. They needed these both for making contacts with potential allies and for interrogating prisoners who fell into their hands. They could also use translators effectively (this is actually a skill), as well as ride fast horses and put pack mules to work carrying high-tech gear.

A remarkable interview The Washington Post obtained with Capt. Jason Amerine, an injured member of the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group, on his sickbed in Landstuhl, Germany, gives some hint of the ground capabilities. This unit went into the mountains of Oruzgan to rendezvous with Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's prime minister-designate. (They didn't need Pashto because he speaks fluent English.)

In five weeks, this vanguard of fewer than a dozen men, mostly in their mid-twenties, could recruit, organize and (through air drops) equip an Afghan fighting force that liberated the provincial capital, and then marched on Kandahar. They ordered and set up distribution for emergency food and medical supplies for civilians, while calling down airstrikes on a Taliban convoy and other positions, almost in their spare time.

"We could go in there naked with flip-flops, and as long as we have good radios we could do our job," Capt. Amerine said of their survival training. His unit made up for unfamiliarity with the local physical and cultural landscape with a crash course in Pashtun anthropology in the days before going in.

Hunks, yes, but these are nothing like Europe's idea of GIs. Indeed the U.S. Marine general force now camping in the Rigestan Desert are probably up to the special forces calibre of a generation ago.

Technology plays no small part. Some 91% of munitions the United States has dropped in Afghanistan have been pinpoint targeted -- compared with 6% on Iraq. Even gravity bombs dropped from B-52s can now be placed within a few metres of the crosshair, thanks to advances in computer calculation.

And yet the garage-workshop spirit is kept alive with the invention of weapons such as the daisy-cutter -- hand-made with old-fashioned welding tools, and perhaps the most awkward-looking 15,000-pound explosive we shall ever see (it resembles the water-tanks on the roofs of old New York City apartment buildings).

The U.S. armed forces are thus not only strong, but extremely adaptable. Yet even this is to understate the U.S. advantage, for it is likely to grow in the coming years.

Before Sept. 11, the U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was fighting a nearly impossible uphill battle against Congress to transform the whole organizational structure of the U.S. military. His goals are to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, replace surviving conventional with many more special forces, and vastly increase the capacity of the military to respond to unexpected threats or recover quickly from unexpected hits. The terrorist strikes on New York and Washington, and his performance since, have vindicated his position, and the overhaul is proceeding.

The French might have to invent a word for what comes after a hyperpower.

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