Victories Overruled
by Stan Goff
Being generally averse to war stories, I'll just start with a couple of stories about war games.
In 1985, I beat the shit out of Delta Force in a military exercise in Panama, and in 1989 I captured the key aircraft in an exercise against 2nd Ranger Battalion in Florida.
Okay, there were some mitigating circumstances from their points of view. In both cases, I knew the modus operandi - because I was a member of Delta and a Ranger Battalion respectively. But the truth is, I defeated a unit from Delta with two squads of young Rangers playing the part of Colombian guerrillas under my command, and I captured the key aircraft with my own platoon against two companies (eight platoons).
The common denominator in each case was simplicity.
In the former case, we simply waited until after dark, built a big fire to white out the night vision equipment of any observers, then unobtrusively faded into the night two-by-two to rejoin at a rendezvous point less than two kilometers away. The sun came up, and we were gone. Game over.
In the second instance, again at night, we attacked a small strongpoint that we could easily overwhelm. Instead of seeking cover afterward to hide from the swarm of "killer eggs," AH-6J helicopter gunships that were buzzing overhead to provide cover for their Rangers, we stripped the infrared "I'm-an-American" glint tape from the helmets of those we had "killed," fixed it on our own heads. We strolled straight down the middle of the airfield, blending into the beehive of activity on the "secure" airfield and we climbed right up on the aircraft. "Hi, guys. You have just been captured." Dead simple.
In the latter case, we were told to leave, and everyone pretended that we hadn't done it at all. A lot of really important people were watching this exercise, and it had to succeed.
So I was mightily amused to read this past September about retired Marine General Paul Van Riper. Van Riper is another simple guy, who was selected to play the Opposing Forces (OPFOR) Commander named Saddam Hussein for a 3-week-long, computer simulated invasion of Iraq, called Operation Millennium Challenge. Van Riper had the same experience I had back in 1989. He won, then his victory was overruled.
He defeated the entire gazillion-dollar US electronic warfare intelligence apparatus by sending messages via motorcycle-mounted couriers to organize the preemptive destruction of sixteen US ships, using pleasure vessels. Motorcycle couriers! At that point, the exercise controllers repeatedly intervened and told him what to do. Move these defenders off the beach. Stop giving out commands from mosque loudspeakers. Turn on your radar so our planes can see you. Because every time Van Riper was left to his own devices, he was kicking their asses.
While all this is surely amusing, what does it really mean? Can the Iraqis defeat the US during an invasion?
Certainly not! Not even if, as some now report, Yugoslavs are giving Iraqis advice on how to "passively track" US warplanes in order to tease them in close enough to shoot, as the Yugoslavs did in 1999 against an F117 Stealth Fighter - cost: $2.1 billion a copy, and that's not including maintenance. The decoys the Yugoslavs used on the ground were...microwave ovens, at $150 a copy. The differences between Iraqis, Yugoslavs, and Afghan-based al-Qaeda would be instructive in assessing the so-called "doctrinal" shift of the US military that played out so badly against Retired General Van Riper, but that's a separate column.
The Iraqi military won't prevail because they can't. They are weak, under-resourced, poorly led, and demoralized. They will come apart like a two-dollar shirt. I could be wrong about that, but I doubt it. So do Bush and Rumsfeld. If they thought the Iraqis could really resist, they wouldn't be cooking up this invasion.
This is Donald Rumsfeld's second tour of duty as the Secretary of Defense. His first was under Gerald Ford, where he was already demonstrating his deep affinity for big-ticket, high-technology military acquisitions. He had wrangled his Ivy League background into a job as a Navy flight instructor for three years in the mid-50s - a ticket any really ambitious politician will punch in peacetime. That close identification with expensive war toys has stayed with him.
Even in 1977, his priorities as SecDef were that "U.S. strategic forces retain a substantial credible capability to deter an all-out nuclear attack," and he indicated three key areas of concern: (1) U.S. submarine and bomber forces (2) preventing the appearance that the Soviet Union had a greater strategic capability than the US, and (3) increasing and upgrading America's nuclear arsenal. This fascination with and faith in military high-technology as a strategic panacea has been a Rumsfeld constant. He is protected in that faith by those who will not allow Van Riper to beat the US military in their computer game.
But there is another constant at work here. Bullying. That's why the appearance thing was a priority. Bullies depend on appearances.
Most of us know what bullying is. It's the cheap gangsterism we have encountered in school yards, shop floors, and offices, where a clique who has the literal or figurative size to get away with it beats down the smallest among us in order to intimidate everyone into compliance with their wishes.
Let's revisit Yugoslavia for a moment.
NATO claimed they had killed 300 or so tanks in the massive bombing attacks that followed the Kosovo provocation, but the number was actually 14.
The war was won by bullying, not combat. By bombing unarmed civilians and civilian infrastructure mercilessly, and in violation of the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention, the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Charter, and the Laws of Armed Conflict.
(These are the same laws, by the way, that ostensibly protect American soldiers should they be captured in combat. Those soldiers should pay attention. The people who are ordering these serial violations of international law, like Bush and Rumsfeld, will never face capture. They will make belligerent manly noises from comfortable rooms while US prisoners are having the electrodes attached to their testicles. Hey, what goes around, comes around. They're not my bosses any more, troops. They're yours.)
The Department of Defense (I always smile at the humor in this name) claims that Apache helicopters were never used in Kosovo because of a deployment glitch. Bullshit! They were not sent into combat because they fly close to the ground, where some very competent and motivated soldiers were hiding with a decided willingness to fire.
Look at where the US has engaged in combat since the US defeat in Vietnam, then look at the type of combat and the opposition. Massive bombing, including of civilian targets, characterized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq had been bled white by a decade of trench warfare with Iran, and Afghanistan was a backward, starving nation, shattered by internecine rivalry.
The only substantial ground combat in Iraq was the surprise attack [@ <http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/05/15/hersh/index.html>] ordered by General Barry McCaffrey (again in violation of every international law and convention) to slaughter tens of thousands of demoralized Iraqi military and civilians two days after the cease fire, when the Iraqis were conducting an orderly retreat. Iraqi soldiers were actually sunbathing on the Baghdad-bound tanks - tanks whose main guns were reversed and locked into non-combat positions - when McCaffrey's lethal "turkey-shoot" began.
Ground operations in Afghanistan have been a series of military blunders [@ <http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006DA98.htm>] that are the stuff of sick humor, including the vaunted Operation Anaconda [@ <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/2002-March/002913.html>] that turned into Operation Blind Garter Snake, a wedding that was converted into a mass funeral [@ <http://www.nwwp.de/engl/news_gb/usbombing.html>], and the cover-up of US-supervised war crimes at Mazar-i-Sharif [@ <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/afgh-a01.shtml>].
Other battlefield glories include the illegal coup de main against the superpower of Panama, in which thousands of civilians were killed in the process of defeating the "formidable" Panama Defense Forces, the invasion of Grenada (population, 90,000) to secure the world's strategic supply of nutmeg, and Reagan's other adventure in Lebanon - where engagement on the ground with credible opponents resulted in another disaster. For anyone interested, I wrote a book about the invasion of Haiti in 1994 that bathes the US military in glory (which Dennis will provide to you for a nominal fee (-; ).
The point is, of course, that the US military is restricted to attacking defenseless opponents, what Pepe Escobar recently referred to as "theatrical militarism" [@ <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/DL04Aa01.html>] ...bullying.
Beat up weak people to show what a tough guy you are.
Note! The US didn't pounce on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea when DPRK announced it has bomb grade plutonium. Wasn't this one of the Evil Axis, admitting it had weapons of mass destruction? But...DPRK has a very tough and disciplined military that is close enough to Seoul to throw rocks at it, and a lot of American GI's are between the DMZ and the capital. The US seems disinclined to commit conventional ground troops to Colombia. That's because the FARC-EP and the ELN fight. I'll go out on a limb and say they won't send troops to Venezuela either. I've seen the Venezuelan Army, most of whom are still loyal to populist President Hugo Chavez, and they didn't strike me as pushovers.
Bullies avoid people who won't put up with them. Were it not for the US capacity (on the wane now) to bully economically, our foreign policy establishment would be honored with a lot of middle-finger salutes.
There's a new term popular in military circles, even being repeated by the Wolf Blitzer-type, self-appointed, self-reverential military experts that have become an artesian spring of important-sounding military jargon in the info-tainment media. "Asymmetrical warfare."
It applies to suicide bombers and guys who hijack airplanes with box cutters. Get it? It's kind of a double entendre. Asymmetrical force. Asymmetrical bang for the buck. It's also asymmetry of technology, but Donny Rumsfeld hasn't grasped that implication yet.
It's funny that we never heard of the "asymmetry" of Barry McCaffrey's slaughter of the Iraqis, or the "asymmetry" of the United States invading Grenada, an island nation with the population of Cary, North Carolina. But that's a moral digression.
The principle behind "asymmetry" is Simplicity.
Simplicity, as any officer who paid attention in Military Science 101 can tell you, is a Principle of War. "All other factors being equal, the simplest plan is preferable." That's what Van Riper understood. That's how I beat the Army's supreme commandos. That's what happened to the Twin Towers (I am in no way endorsing the attack of September 11. I'm talking about cold, calculating, military success.).
The reason Van Riper's victory had to be overruled is that it tears the scary mask off the bully, and lets the whole world see the fundamental weakness of the vastly complex and expensive US military monstrosity. The one that will invite not less but more "asymmetrical warfare," the very monstrosity that is already mortgaging our children's future.
Then whose victories will be overruled?
Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press [@ <http://www.softskull.com/>], 2000), an account of the author's personal experience as a member of 3rd Special Forces in Haiti, 1994, which also recounts a number of formative experiences in the military, reaching all the way back to the author's tour of duty in Vietnam.
<http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_4_victoriesover.html>
-- Yoshie
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