>CBC military analyst and antiwar conservative; seems to have a better
>track record and more credibility than iraqwar.ru. (Column is dated 3/30,
>but that's a mistake; it was posted this morning.)
>
><http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_apr6.html>http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_apr6.html
do you have money on this? :)
M I L I T A R Y M A T T E R S W A R B U L L E T I N no. 3
Doctrines & Developments April 4, 2003 by Stan Goff
As this is written, mechanized Army and Marine units have closed to within shouting distance of Southern Baghdad along the southern axes of advance through the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. There are as many accounts of actual disposition, composition, strength, location, and morale of forces on both sides of this conflict as there are reporters - with one exception. The US mainstream press is giving the single monolithic account, since all their accounts are vetted by the US Department of Defense, and most of their guest blatherers are now retired US generals.
The one crack in this otherwise seamless connection between the corporate press and the Pentagon is a crack within the Pentagon itself, and that is the cat fight that has broken out between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his ground force Generals over doctrine.
It is important to understand what this quarrel is and what it isn't, as well as understanding the overarching assumptions shared by both sides - assumptions that, in my opinion, point to fundamental weaknesses in US military doctrine that are social and political as well as inescapable.
Vietnam was a formative experience for me. I was hardly more than an adolescent there, barely able to sport a thin mustache. I have struggled hard with the whole episode, and succeeded in many ways at accepting the experience for what it was, accepting that I cannot rewind and re-record, and getting beyond the morbid self-absorption that characterizes much of the reflection and discourse (as well as a lot of bullshit posturing by people who spent their tour in an air conditioned hooch with Jimi Hendrix black light posters on the wall) about that war.
Before I go any further, I want to say that this war in Iraq is not the same as Vietnam, for reasons too numerous to count. I also want to warn my comrades on the left not to fall into the trap that Bushfeld has fallen into, and that is selective observation; seeing what you want to see and hearing what you want to hear, and sifting out the content that challenges your premises or explodes your fantasies. Iraq does not have the logistical capacity, the political leadership, or the battlefield experience of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese Army in Vietnam, and it is still highly probable that Iraq will be defeated militarily and occupied by the United States.
The moral high ground does not substitute for-- well, the high ground.
There are some who might have a hard time swallowing this bitter pill, but socialists have no such excuse. Our distinct responsibility for the interpretation of this war on the world is to connect the material realities of the battlefield with the material realities elsewhere, to describe the current conjuncture - and not merely isolated aspects of it - as an evolving complex of interpenetrating relationships, and to determine what this means politically.
People like Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Tommy Franks see military action as something that can be hermetically sealed, separate from political phenomena. This was the misconception that led to the historical defeat in Vietnam. And it makes me wonder if the defeat at the end of this road, probably a political one, won't be as destructive to the foundations of the US ruling class as Vietnam was. Maybe more.
One of the Vietnam flashbacks I seem to be getting these days is language like "hearts and minds," which our military geniuses apparently think can be won by blowing off arms and legs. Actually, this is just one surface form of a deeper contradiction in US military and political doctrine, now under revision by Bush, Rumsfeld, et al. Of course, they don't really buy their own lies, but that they have to tell such whopping lies is an indication of just how big the political stakes are in this war.
That's Vietnam, baby!
We can begin to unpack this contradiction by looking back at Colin Powell's Vietnam experience.
Powell's first real career test as a young Black major was as deputy assistant chief of staff (public affairs) for the Americal Division. He had done one hitch as a platoon leader in Vietnam some years earlier, six months in the field, and six on staff.
With Americal, he was given the difficult and dubious task of damage control after revelations about the My Lai massacre, where US soldiers tortured, raped, and eventually slaughtered 347 unarmed civilians in a remote Vietnamese hamlet. He performed brilliantly in that role, showing a real talent for negotiating politically sensitive bureaucratic and diplomatic mazes, and was noticed by one Caspar Weinberger, who would eventually appoint him his deputy security adviser, when Ronald Reagan appointed Weinberger Secretary of Defense. Powell was then personally groomed to become the youngest, and only Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Powell never forgot the "lessons" [he imagined] he'd learned from Vietnam:
--that there needs to be some simple and clear criteria for "national interest" that determines when military force will be used;
--that the full weight of government and press influence should be mobilized to ensure public support of the military action;
--that there must be some clear "exit strategy;
--that overwhelming and devastating force must be employed against the entire society, if necessary, with whom we are at war.
The latter - devastating force - is opposed to "proportionality", the bugaboo that many-including Powell-incorrectly hold responsible for the US defeat in Vietnam. It's the notion that is taught as a Principle of War, called "Economy of Force" in one context, but for Powell and his ilk it means the unwillingness to unleash overwhelming destructive force to destroy an enemy.
Proportionality was resurrected to explain the defeat of Task Force Ranger in Somalia. It is now being called "war on the cheap" to critique Rumsfeld's military weird-science.
Rummy better watch his back. When this critique gets deployed, a goat gets slaughtered to shrive us of our sins.
Implicit in the Powell Doctrine, with its heavy public relations emphasis, is obsessive minimization of US casualties. It is called "force protection" and it can make or break an officer's career.
This casualty minimization is part of Powell's (and the bourgeoisie's) ahistorical interpretation of the political side of war. (The bourgeoisie hates history, so it substitutes myths for it.) US civilians don't have the stomach for sacrificing their children. Civilians are seen as meddlers. Their role is to sign the checks, watch the Ken & Barbie news, slap a flag decal on their cars, and let the experts handle it, even though now that the military's greatest minds are nightly displaying a primitive hucksterism that should make us all tremble. It made me tremble aplenty when I was on active duty, I can tell you.
The upshot of the Powell Doctrine - one that is left unarticulated for pretty obvious reasons - is not to get involved in combat that requires decisive ground action. There are two ways to accomplish this; avoid engagements where the opposing force has any real capacity to fight, or if they do, devastate the whole society - including civilian infrastructure - from afar with air strikes and missiles.
Things didn't go according to plan in Iraq, that is, the perverse Iraqis reorganized for a fight, and the US ruling class is saying, "Oh shit! Tar baby!" They anticipated a Powell Doctrine fight, using Rumsfeld Doctrine methods, with Iraq as a kind of testing ground for his Network Centric Warfare, and now that the Iraqis have torn up their script, the thieves are falling out.
From a strictly military perspective in Iraq right now, there is a way for US forces to regain the initiative: audacious, aggressive, and sustained ground actions. What we have had are cautious advances supported by overwhelming air superiority and weapons technology even at the grunt level that is advanced over the Iraqis' by three decades of very expensive R&D.
The argument between Rumsfeld and his officers - many of whom are Powell Doctrine devotees - is not an argument about the "force protection" fetish of the Powell Doctrine. Casualty minimization and spin control, Powell Doctrine stand-bys, are also part and parcel of Rumsfeld's Doctrine.
Aside from the setbacks related to the ability to open a Northern Front, delays in the UN, Iraqi combativeness, and weather, the loss of initiative by the US forces in Iraq, which will be regained through the immensity of force over a protracted period, is not a consequence of Rumsfeld's goofy affinity for cyber-warfare. Had Powell been the Secretary of Defense, the same situation would exist, in my opinion.
Powell is as big a fan of "modernizing the force" as Rumsfeld is. If there is a difference that matters, it is not the modernization of weapons systems, but Rumsfeld's decision-making software, that is replacing human leadership on the ground. The whole operation was programmed with a cyber-Saddam, but the real one seems not to have consented to play by the rules. This is having a real effect, and I don't want to minimize it. In fact, I have said before that this may be a decisive problem for the US, if not in Iraq, someday soon.
In a sense, then, the generals are pointing their finger at the right guy for the wrong thing.
But part of the problem remains Powell-Rumsfeld Doctrine, which is really a political phenomenon, and one the generals haven't even questioned.
The US has adequate combat power on the ground right now to bring the whole military matter to a quick resolution. US soldiers are better equipped, better fed, better trained, better paid, better everything than the Iraqi military. US air power is unmatched anywhere and at any time in history.
Audacious, aggressive, sustained offensive operations against the Iraqi military would yield rapid tactical victories, but it would inevitably cost "friendly" lives, and thereby risks losing the unseen but essential element in all military operations-the support of the civilian population at home.
Bush has his eye on the 2004 elections, and anything that slows the pace of the Iraq occupation is a profound and direct threat to the little frat fuck's political future.
"Force protection" severely restricts and stifles tactical initiative at every level of command, and by default centralizes operations, not through doctrine, but through career pressure. For the ground tactical commander, ever mindful of the priorities of his or her superiors, the standing order for "force protection" translates into a powerful reluctance to engage in decisive combat, or to even risk combat, and timidity at every level of command.
The US population is fed "information" not to inform, but to gain their acquiescence for military action. They tend to remain quiet until American bodies begin to be flown home, then they start to ask questions. They will also ask questions when George and Don's Excellent Adventure drags out too long.
Regaining the tactical initiative depends on a type of action-one with a higher probability of "friendly" casualties-that could threaten domestic acceptance of the military action.
It is important to note that a key and integral part of the Powell Doctrine-one of the predominant thrusts of current military doctrine in the US-is this information/spin control. Controlling the public's perceptions of operations is as important a part of military operations, under this doctrine as logistics or intelligence. One of the primary difficulties for the US military, for example, in Haiti, was that Haiti's porous borders allowed swarms of uncontrolled international reporters loose across the country. Not so in Iraq, and not so in Afghanistan.
I don't want to overstate this. There are independent reports coming out of Iraq, and there are also propaganda reports coming out on behalf of the Iraqis. I strongly suspect the GRU reports that are now being translated from Russian almost in real time and widely disseminated across the Internet are designed as propaganda to undercut the US government, and that they overstate US casualties on a regular basis.
(Leftist conspiracy theorists are constantly contending these days that there are vast numbers of unreported US casualties in Iraq and even in Afghanistan.
My contention that there are no secret mass American casualties is based on the fundamental impossibility - in the US, circa 2003 - of containing such information. The government quite simply doesn't have the capacity to silence the families and friends of these masses of secret KIAs and WIAs. And the vast majority of GIs, alas, have never been able to keep secrets.)
In fact, the low US casualty rate is part of the reason for the snail's pace of the war. And given the outrageous disparity of forces, it is a snail's pace. The US is now involved in slow, incremental murder.
I do not intend to disparage the courage or prowess of fighters on either side of this war. The Iraqis are defending their nation from an aggressor, tenaciously, and it matters. The GIs are being used as pawns in the big game of the big bourgeoisie.
This is doctrine we are talking about, and how it is failing to correspond to the political development of the war.
Now that troops are pulling up outside Baghdad, the political pressure will begin to mount on the Bush regime. That political pressure will translate directly onto the battlefield. Political pressure will increase from within through a combination of war weariness, eroded official credibility, and the economic tidal wave that is hitting. Internationally, the political crisis is already afoot. The US is an international pariah.
For now, on the battlefield, the three main courses of action that exist for US commanders are all fraught with political danger.
The US forces could attempt a siege, which would vastly protract the war, as well as give Iraqi forces an opportunity to regroup, refit, or even begin to infiltrate/exfiltrate to switch strategies. US static positions would be subjected to reconnaissance, and in short order, pinprick attacks would be waged against them from maximum standoff. Meanwhile, the veritable cascade of daily lies from the administration will begin to break down, and with it their legitimacy, and finally the support for the war.
The US forces could attempt to clear Baghdad house to house. Let's review the bidding on that option. Baghdad, population 5 million, sprawling across the valleys between two great rivers. A division is less than 18,000 soldiers. Three divisions, then, less than 54,000 troops, and not all combat arms. Home court advantage to the defenders. Neutralization of much air cover in close quarter battle. Everyone in the city becomes sniper bait. This is, in my humble opinion, not even on the table. And this is in addition to the many cities, like Basra, which they have yet to control along the principal line of communication, all the way back to Kuwait.
Finally. Powell's preferred solution. Bomb 'til they scream. Rumsfeld's little cyber-experiment is history.
Death from above!
The US military will have to reduce Baghdad from the air. Holy collateral damage, Batman! We had to destroy Baghdad to liberate it.
General Westmoreland, is that you?
Stan Goff's expertise is derived from over two decades in Special Forces in the US military, from Viet Nam to Haiti. He is the author of Hideous Dream, a penetrating first-hand account of the 1994 US intervention in Haiti which contains rich lessons about the operation of US imperialism, the culture of the armed forces, questions of military doctrine, and the resistance of the Haitian people. It is available from Soft Skull Press.
All of Stan's Military Matters columns can be found at http://freedomroad.org/milmatters.html