History of Armed Conflict Part I, or The Books Rummy Chickenhawk Did Not Read
Today, we are going to get historical and political.
Yesterday was relational. Not sure about tomorrow, but as promised will return to sex on Sunday, having been inspired by The Girl With a One Track Mind http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/.
Now there is a lady I wish I had met these past couple of years. Should have gone to London. Too late now, I went and found my soul mate. Still, that would have been a shag explosion.....
Ok, so Iraq. The neocon-artists and their mouthpiece, otherwise known as The Bush administration (hereafter referred to as "The Shrubs") promised us a quick, violent, Shock and Awe campaign, in which a very few good men and women (about a corps, for you technical types) and their trusty British sidekicks (who by the way and for the record are a very professional and competent group of lads) would overwhelm the stinko bathaast bastards in a blaze of star spangled glory. Freed from the chains of Saddam's oppression,the Iraqi people would come rushing into the streets to greet their liberators with flowers, chaste kisses and pots of sweet tea.
Humbled by this Cyclopedian display of raw, righteous western power, Islamic terrorists would collectively whack themselves in the forehead, exclaiming the Arabic/Persian/Urdu version of "what were we thinking". Together they would make a 180 degree right turn away from the Stone in Mecca and bow down to the New Neocon order. Democracy and McDonalds would flourish where the popular vote and cheeseburger has not been since at least the time of Themistocles.
(Did the Greeks have cheeseburgers? Oh well, artistic license)
Things have not turned out that way, not even close. That observation stated publicly will win you the "Obviousman" award and a tee shirt with a big "DUH". Many pundits debate the meat of this matter, from the academic to the psychotic, and the entire subject is too big for one blog.
Suffice it to say, in general, people prefer their own bastard to a foreign bastard, any day of the week. More on that in later blogs.
Right now my goal is to explore the question: How did a lot of supposedly smart defense department people get us into this mess?
Answer, they never served in any conflict, and because of that, they, like a lot of people who get their war from movies and books, hold fast to the myth of the "Decisive Battle".
Ah, the Decisive Battle, that wonderful moment when good meets evil on the field of honor, swords bright, banners fluttering. One charge, good routs evil, and the heros (minus a few fondly remembered comrades) go home with the girls to live happily ever. Pure Hollywood, pure drama, and in the 21st century, pure malarkie.
(The rest of this relies heavily on the writings of John Kegan, Maurice De Saxe, The Emperor Maurice, Erwin Rommel, and a lifetime of reading on the subject. If this were a paper, I would footnote, but in blog space I will just acknowledge that I am standing on the shoulders of giants.)
Primitive man fought primitive war mostly for cultural reasons: to give the boys a chance to prove their mettle, to get victims for sacrifice, for revenge, or maybe just to relieve a little tension or boredom. Short of the occasional ambush, the patters were the same; all the boys from the two tribes showed up, made a lot of noise, jumped around, threatened, bragged.
Much like what you see outside the pub at 2:00am.
Finally there would be some fighting, a couple of guys got hurt, a few were captured and the fighting stopped. Everyone went home to either sing their own praises or lick their wounds. The unlucky were tied to the stake and tortured to death to appease a god or two. Bottom line, very few casualties, nothing really changes. Most every one feels better, or at least calmer and almost every one lives to tell stories about the "great day".
Civilization changed this somewhat. Now Empires, Kingdoms or city states raised armies, trained and equipped professionals and led campaigns to acquire territory or slaves/subjects, booty, or all three. In a world of muscle power and edged weapons, success went to the professional/hereditary soldier. A Knight, Companion, Leigonarre, Cataphract or a member of Pharoh's guard was a man trained from an early age to his weapon, in excellent physical condition and mentally attuned to his craft.
For 4500 years armies of these soldiers for life fought in pretty much the same way. Form up in the spring, invade, maneuver against a critical object, maybe lay siege to a city or fort, and often tacitly agree with the opposition to choose a place of battle to decide the day. On that Day, both armies would draw up, make final dispositions, prepare a few suprises for the other guy, make speeches, strike up the pean, and close for battle. In the course of 4-5 hours they would slug it out, with suprisingly few casualties on either side, until out of fear or panic or shear exhaustion, one side would break and flee, pursued to slaughter by the victor.
Really, 4500 years. Alexander's army could have marched against that of England's Black Prince with a significant chance of success. He would have been surprised by cannon and muskets, but would have quickly grasped the infantry squares and saber armed cavalry of Napoleon. Maurice of Nassau build his new Dutch army on the writings of the Byzantine Emperor Leo, who was just re hashing the works of Maurice centuries before.
Back to the campaign. The victor, now in possession of the field and of the only functioning body of lifetime soldiers, would then go on to finish the conquest or finish repulsing the repulsive invaders. Now you can argue the fine points of what is meant by decisive, but the reality is that campaigns were infrequent, battles rare, and in the course of 6 or 7 hours decided one way or another until the next campaign season.
So this mythos has grown up in us humans, in literature, in our history, in our collective conscience and unconscious of the "Day of Decision", Waterloo or the OK corral, all the same. It is the ideal, the archetypical moment of final glory for the Hero, pure Joseph Campbell, and it works because for so long, that in fact how it really was.
All this changed around the beginning of the 20 century, though there were hints of it in the American Civil War. The changes were profound, and gave us the horror that was the First World War. Three things, products of the modern era, combined to end once and for all the "day of battle", one logistical, one personnel and one technical.
On the logistical front, mass production created the vast surplus of material that allowed the raising and transporting of mass armies. No more the field of battle, now soldiers faced each other in continuous fronts that ran from sea to sea, in numbers that were unheard of only a generation before. Not only that, but as the conflict dragged on, more armies could be raised, equipped and deployed to replace the ones already used up.
On the personnel front, modern man created the first mass produced soldier. Lance, sword and bow take a life time of practice, training and study to gain proficiency. Making a Knight, or a Spartan hopilite took twelve years of training and understudy, but once made could be counted on to defeat 20 lesser men. In the world of guns and cannon, soldiers are tenders of machines, and most countries stamp out a competent infantryman from a farm boy or clerks son in about twelve weeks. After about a couple of weeks in the field, if he keeps his head down and lives, he is a veteran.
The technical is the machine gun, and its demon cousin, high explosives. Richard Poole, a former Gunnery sergeant and writer says it best when he points out that grazing machine gun fire changed forever the calculus of battle. Now, in the open, two 19 year old boys, crewing a single machinegun, can in the course of twenty minutes decimate a battalion, if not destroy it completely. Since the machine gun, a whole host of cheap, personal weapons have come out, assault rifles, machine guns, shoulder mounted rockets, mortars, grenades and mines of all types, not to mention the mayhem that can be created with commercial explosives and a little ingenuity. All of this stuff is cheap. For example, the Rocket Propelled Grenades we hear so much about are 20 year old technology that can be made for about six bucks a round, but they can stop a tank or shoot down a chopper.
Tie it together, and the picture changes a lot. Huge masses of citizens crewing incredibly destructive, easy to operate weapons with no room for manuever, fighting day after day after day. Whenever one man is killed, another can be stamped out and put into the line in weeks, just as deadly as the last.
The First World War was a blood bath fought continuously over four years and millions of square miles. A whole generation was chewed up before military minds even began to understand how to fight this new kind of war, and though there was a lot of fighting, heroism and even some pretty innovative and locally successful tactical innovations, in the end the Germans were worn out by four years of bloodletting and blockade, there spirits broken by a failed western offensive and the addition of a fresh combatant, The USA, on the allied side.
The interwar period was a search to re-discover the decisive battle, and the Germans came close once again. German Mobile doctrine, pioneered by Guderian and practiced by Rommel, Manstein and others led to lightening campaings in Poland and France, with few casualties, short timeframes and complete victories. Yet in the end, it was not so. Mobile war used armored forces and airpower to pierce the front and drive deep into the opponents rear, disrupting his formations, destroying his coordination and control and leaving the mass of his troops isolated, demoralized and ineffective. Against static opponents, like the Polish, or the war weary French, great things could and were achieved.
But as the war dragged on an as others quickly learned the lessons, the Russians, the British and the Americans, World War II returned to an attrition slugging match, albeit a much quicker one. The entire world threw its entire output of men and material against 60-70 million Germans, and finally killed enough people, burned enough cities and destroyed enough material to exhaust the nation and allow it to be overrun. By the time Germany had been overrun and the Japanese had surrendered, so much blood had been let that neither was in the position or had the will to resist.
This has been a long dissertation, but I wanted all of you dear readers to understand two things:
1. That we all are steeped in the myth of that glorious day of decisive battle between well met foes on the field of honorable battle.
And
2. That Day no longer exists, it is a myth and that modern war is a messy, continuous slugfest between peoples.
and
3. That this is true because the modern world, and modern weapons are very different from the previous 4500 years of history that, like it or not, often informs our beliefs.
Ok, so how does this tie into Iraq. Well for that, we need to go to part two, and talk about a guy named Mao, and his little book, " On guerrilla Warfare". Pick up a copy at Amazon, ten bucks, two hour read. In fact, maybe we should send a few copies to the neocon-artists.
Pick this up tomorrow.
Yesterday was relational. Not sure about tomorrow, but as promised will return to sex on Sunday, having been inspired by The Girl With a One Track Mind http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/.
Now there is a lady I wish I had met these past couple of years. Should have gone to London. Too late now, I went and found my soul mate. Still, that would have been a shag explosion.....
Ok, so Iraq. The neocon-artists and their mouthpiece, otherwise known as The Bush administration (hereafter referred to as "The Shrubs") promised us a quick, violent, Shock and Awe campaign, in which a very few good men and women (about a corps, for you technical types) and their trusty British sidekicks (who by the way and for the record are a very professional and competent group of lads) would overwhelm the stinko bathaast bastards in a blaze of star spangled glory. Freed from the chains of Saddam's oppression,the Iraqi people would come rushing into the streets to greet their liberators with flowers, chaste kisses and pots of sweet tea.
Humbled by this Cyclopedian display of raw, righteous western power, Islamic terrorists would collectively whack themselves in the forehead, exclaiming the Arabic/Persian/Urdu version of "what were we thinking". Together they would make a 180 degree right turn away from the Stone in Mecca and bow down to the New Neocon order. Democracy and McDonalds would flourish where the popular vote and cheeseburger has not been since at least the time of Themistocles.
(Did the Greeks have cheeseburgers? Oh well, artistic license)
Things have not turned out that way, not even close. That observation stated publicly will win you the "Obviousman" award and a tee shirt with a big "DUH". Many pundits debate the meat of this matter, from the academic to the psychotic, and the entire subject is too big for one blog.
Suffice it to say, in general, people prefer their own bastard to a foreign bastard, any day of the week. More on that in later blogs.
Right now my goal is to explore the question: How did a lot of supposedly smart defense department people get us into this mess?
Answer, they never served in any conflict, and because of that, they, like a lot of people who get their war from movies and books, hold fast to the myth of the "Decisive Battle".
Ah, the Decisive Battle, that wonderful moment when good meets evil on the field of honor, swords bright, banners fluttering. One charge, good routs evil, and the heros (minus a few fondly remembered comrades) go home with the girls to live happily ever. Pure Hollywood, pure drama, and in the 21st century, pure malarkie.
(The rest of this relies heavily on the writings of John Kegan, Maurice De Saxe, The Emperor Maurice, Erwin Rommel, and a lifetime of reading on the subject. If this were a paper, I would footnote, but in blog space I will just acknowledge that I am standing on the shoulders of giants.)
Primitive man fought primitive war mostly for cultural reasons: to give the boys a chance to prove their mettle, to get victims for sacrifice, for revenge, or maybe just to relieve a little tension or boredom. Short of the occasional ambush, the patters were the same; all the boys from the two tribes showed up, made a lot of noise, jumped around, threatened, bragged.
Much like what you see outside the pub at 2:00am.
Finally there would be some fighting, a couple of guys got hurt, a few were captured and the fighting stopped. Everyone went home to either sing their own praises or lick their wounds. The unlucky were tied to the stake and tortured to death to appease a god or two. Bottom line, very few casualties, nothing really changes. Most every one feels better, or at least calmer and almost every one lives to tell stories about the "great day".
Civilization changed this somewhat. Now Empires, Kingdoms or city states raised armies, trained and equipped professionals and led campaigns to acquire territory or slaves/subjects, booty, or all three. In a world of muscle power and edged weapons, success went to the professional/hereditary soldier. A Knight, Companion, Leigonarre, Cataphract or a member of Pharoh's guard was a man trained from an early age to his weapon, in excellent physical condition and mentally attuned to his craft.
For 4500 years armies of these soldiers for life fought in pretty much the same way. Form up in the spring, invade, maneuver against a critical object, maybe lay siege to a city or fort, and often tacitly agree with the opposition to choose a place of battle to decide the day. On that Day, both armies would draw up, make final dispositions, prepare a few suprises for the other guy, make speeches, strike up the pean, and close for battle. In the course of 4-5 hours they would slug it out, with suprisingly few casualties on either side, until out of fear or panic or shear exhaustion, one side would break and flee, pursued to slaughter by the victor.
Really, 4500 years. Alexander's army could have marched against that of England's Black Prince with a significant chance of success. He would have been surprised by cannon and muskets, but would have quickly grasped the infantry squares and saber armed cavalry of Napoleon. Maurice of Nassau build his new Dutch army on the writings of the Byzantine Emperor Leo, who was just re hashing the works of Maurice centuries before.
Back to the campaign. The victor, now in possession of the field and of the only functioning body of lifetime soldiers, would then go on to finish the conquest or finish repulsing the repulsive invaders. Now you can argue the fine points of what is meant by decisive, but the reality is that campaigns were infrequent, battles rare, and in the course of 6 or 7 hours decided one way or another until the next campaign season.
So this mythos has grown up in us humans, in literature, in our history, in our collective conscience and unconscious of the "Day of Decision", Waterloo or the OK corral, all the same. It is the ideal, the archetypical moment of final glory for the Hero, pure Joseph Campbell, and it works because for so long, that in fact how it really was.
All this changed around the beginning of the 20 century, though there were hints of it in the American Civil War. The changes were profound, and gave us the horror that was the First World War. Three things, products of the modern era, combined to end once and for all the "day of battle", one logistical, one personnel and one technical.
On the logistical front, mass production created the vast surplus of material that allowed the raising and transporting of mass armies. No more the field of battle, now soldiers faced each other in continuous fronts that ran from sea to sea, in numbers that were unheard of only a generation before. Not only that, but as the conflict dragged on, more armies could be raised, equipped and deployed to replace the ones already used up.
On the personnel front, modern man created the first mass produced soldier. Lance, sword and bow take a life time of practice, training and study to gain proficiency. Making a Knight, or a Spartan hopilite took twelve years of training and understudy, but once made could be counted on to defeat 20 lesser men. In the world of guns and cannon, soldiers are tenders of machines, and most countries stamp out a competent infantryman from a farm boy or clerks son in about twelve weeks. After about a couple of weeks in the field, if he keeps his head down and lives, he is a veteran.
The technical is the machine gun, and its demon cousin, high explosives. Richard Poole, a former Gunnery sergeant and writer says it best when he points out that grazing machine gun fire changed forever the calculus of battle. Now, in the open, two 19 year old boys, crewing a single machinegun, can in the course of twenty minutes decimate a battalion, if not destroy it completely. Since the machine gun, a whole host of cheap, personal weapons have come out, assault rifles, machine guns, shoulder mounted rockets, mortars, grenades and mines of all types, not to mention the mayhem that can be created with commercial explosives and a little ingenuity. All of this stuff is cheap. For example, the Rocket Propelled Grenades we hear so much about are 20 year old technology that can be made for about six bucks a round, but they can stop a tank or shoot down a chopper.
Tie it together, and the picture changes a lot. Huge masses of citizens crewing incredibly destructive, easy to operate weapons with no room for manuever, fighting day after day after day. Whenever one man is killed, another can be stamped out and put into the line in weeks, just as deadly as the last.
The First World War was a blood bath fought continuously over four years and millions of square miles. A whole generation was chewed up before military minds even began to understand how to fight this new kind of war, and though there was a lot of fighting, heroism and even some pretty innovative and locally successful tactical innovations, in the end the Germans were worn out by four years of bloodletting and blockade, there spirits broken by a failed western offensive and the addition of a fresh combatant, The USA, on the allied side.
The interwar period was a search to re-discover the decisive battle, and the Germans came close once again. German Mobile doctrine, pioneered by Guderian and practiced by Rommel, Manstein and others led to lightening campaings in Poland and France, with few casualties, short timeframes and complete victories. Yet in the end, it was not so. Mobile war used armored forces and airpower to pierce the front and drive deep into the opponents rear, disrupting his formations, destroying his coordination and control and leaving the mass of his troops isolated, demoralized and ineffective. Against static opponents, like the Polish, or the war weary French, great things could and were achieved.
But as the war dragged on an as others quickly learned the lessons, the Russians, the British and the Americans, World War II returned to an attrition slugging match, albeit a much quicker one. The entire world threw its entire output of men and material against 60-70 million Germans, and finally killed enough people, burned enough cities and destroyed enough material to exhaust the nation and allow it to be overrun. By the time Germany had been overrun and the Japanese had surrendered, so much blood had been let that neither was in the position or had the will to resist.
This has been a long dissertation, but I wanted all of you dear readers to understand two things:
1. That we all are steeped in the myth of that glorious day of decisive battle between well met foes on the field of honorable battle.
And
2. That Day no longer exists, it is a myth and that modern war is a messy, continuous slugfest between peoples.
and
3. That this is true because the modern world, and modern weapons are very different from the previous 4500 years of history that, like it or not, often informs our beliefs.
Ok, so how does this tie into Iraq. Well for that, we need to go to part two, and talk about a guy named Mao, and his little book, " On guerrilla Warfare". Pick up a copy at Amazon, ten bucks, two hour read. In fact, maybe we should send a few copies to the neocon-artists.
Pick this up tomorrow.
posted by Maurice_Basilius at 2:20 PM
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