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June 13, 2005

Faster, Please

I've been thinking quite a bit about how we are faring in the war, and this has led to two thoughts. The first is depressing, in a way, and encouraging in another way: the United States is not at war in the total war sense (that is to say, a committed society whose every effort strives to victory), but in a Cold War sense (that is, we have an ideological foe that we intend to defeat ideologically over time). That is a long subject for another post. The second thought is what this post is about.

It is clear that the enemy in Iraq started losing late last year. I think Fallujah was probably the turning point; since then the enemy has been shifting tactics to less and less strategically-significant attacks (from attacking US troops and overrunning Iraqi police stations, to attacking Iraqi police and National Guard units, to attacking civilians), while we have been shifting more and more to the offensive in Iraq. While the elections accelerated the political change in Iraq, it is the battle for Fallujah that appears to have ended the enemy's capability to undertake offensive actions at above the platoon scale with any coordination or apparent effect.

Wretchard writes about the balance point we are at right now, between the theater defense we were playing while setting up the Iraqi government, and the choice between setting up a strategic defense and going on the offense to achieve a faster, but more expensive (in soldiers' lives) victory. Wretchard talks about the enemy's strategic game as well. I'd like to talk about where I think we need to go strategically, and how to upset the enemy's strategic game.

I should note that this is moot, if our goal is to hold in place in the hopes that we can outlast our enemy in a war of wills, betting that we can democratize the Middle East (by osmosis, except for Iraq and Afghanistan) faster than the enemy can Islamicize it. I should also note that, given the partisan politicization of the war, and absent a Democrat leader able to move his party into support for the war, we cannot win such a war of wills. Eventually a Democrat will be elected to the Presidency, and if he is not behind the war effort, or is willing to sacrifice that for domestic political points (ahem, LBJ, ahem), then we will lose the battle of wills at that point. Our only winning strategy is a steady offensive strategy.

Our center of gravity is the will of the public to continue to fight. And the enemy's most powerful weapon for striking at that center of gravity is our press, ever willing to accommodate the enemy's need for spectacular headlines because of its own need for spectacular headlines. So in considering our strategic posture, we need to consider both how to effect the enemy's center of gravity (which is most likely, in the strategic sense, their confidence in their literally God-given right to victory) and how to draw attention away from our own center of gravity.

In other words, we need to fight the war primarily in terms of humiliating the enemy and making him lose confidence, while at the same time drawing attention away from media fights we cannot win with a press that is determined to see the US government in general, and the military in particular, as somehow being simultaneously bumbling liars and diabolical, secretive schemers of the highest order.

There are some other factors that need to be considered, of course, such as our means and our long-term goals. Our army is about as committed as it can be for the long term. Since we have not raised active-duty troop levels (in fact, we are a corps short of where we were at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, which is about the same number of troops as we actually have in Iraq currently!) since 9/11, and have not declared war in order to maintain the National Guard and Reserves indefinitely on active duty (and could not now declare a war absent a huge new provocation, on the scale of 9/11, for political reasons), we are at the extent of our possible sustainable ground forces deployment. We can use troops other than those in Iraq for short-term missions, but cannot keep the normal rotation of 1/3 in combat, 1/3 training up, and 1/3 refitting while taking on another long-term, high-force level mission. This means that we need to extend our ground forces commitment in the Middle East, rather than starting a disconnected engagement elsewhere. We have ample air and naval assets - these are barely involved in Iraq - for anything we could contemplate, although a significant uncommitted air and naval force has to be maintained in the event of a crisis in Korea or the Taiwan Straits.

In addition to the force issues, we also have no effective allies to count on. While we have many allies actively contributing to existing missions, and the British have some reserve force that could be deployed into, say, Africa, there is no effective deployable ground combat capability among our allies that is not already being used. So whatever we do will be our show.

It seems to me that we can accommodate all of these concerns, while at the same time helping the theater situation in Iraq. The next move for us, if we have seriously learned the lessons of Viet Nam and if we care about winning, is to make tactical strikes into Syria and Iran. In actual fact, simply threatening this in a credible way might be enough to get serious concessions from Syria in particular. But if not, we should bomb known Syrian safe houses, raid training camps, destroy infrastructure near the border, bomb known terrorist organization offices in Damascus and in Iranian cities, and stage spoiling and punitive raids across the borders.

We should make clear that since Iran and Syria are ignoring the border and interfering in Iraq, we reserve the right to ignore the border and destroy the terrorists in Iran and Syria. As long as we kept to stealth bombers and smart bombs over the major population centers, and minimal engagement except in the border areas, we should be able to avoid pushing either Iran or Syria into starting a naval war in the Gulf, or attacking Israel, or doing something else to widen the war dramatically. I am not suggesting we take on both at once. For both political and military reasons, it would be better to pick one fight at a time.

Me, I'd start with Syria. Not only are they already teetering internally, but they are more involved, apparently, with actually supporting the insurgency. Capturing a few Iraqis running the insurgency from inside Syria, or some major terrorists there, would be a big win that would give us a lot of freedom of action to continue. There is also a good case for Iran first, if we coupled the border raids with strong and unequivocal statements that we consider Iran a natural ally of the US, and perfectly acceptable as a nuclear state, once the people removed the mullahs and returned control to the people, where it belongs. This would disarm the mullah's biggest rhetorical weapon against us, and strengthen the Iranian democrats considerably.

Both options are full of risks, of course, but the payoffs are large if we are successful. And in war, winning requires risks; the timid side always loses.

UPDATE: It was late, and I forgot to add my second point. We need to demystify Islam. Stop treating the Koran as anything other than a book. We shouldn't go out of our way to mistreat it, but we should stop apologizing for handling it without gloves, dropping it on the floor, etc. Same thing with how we used to not let female soldiers drive in Saudi Arabia (and still wouldn't if they were stationed there). Screw that: our troops are our troops, and they are of our culture, and we shouldn't be bending over to the minor nits of other cultures when they will not acknowledge the most basic tenets of our culture. There is no reason to treat Islam or the Koran any better or any worse than we would treat Christianity or the Bible.

And that includes entering mosques to search them as necessary. We must remove these as safe places to store munitions, plan attacks and hide fighters. In the midst of battle, we have largely been willing to do this. We need to do it when we're not in battle, as well. If a mosque in Iraq has an imam preaching jihadi ideology, it needs to be searched regularly.

UPDATE: Praktike has a good post on where to go, as well. I think that Iran is our natural ally, if we can get rid of the mullahs. Since the Iranian people apparently hate the mullahs, too, we may be able to help them in this regard, without any kind of military action. Simply standing up and saying that if the mullahs were out of government, we would consider Iran our natural allies and would not object to their nuclear program - this alone would go a long way.

Posted by jeff at June 13, 2005 9:26 PM

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Posted by: nemesisenforcer at June 14, 2005 12:20 AM