Clausewitz lives in the US Army War College. Here is a Clausewitzian war strategy published in _Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly_:
***** Imposing Peace: Total vs. Limited Wars, and the Need to Put Boots on the Ground
WILLIAM R. HAWKINS
From Parameters, Summer 2000, pp. 72-82.
...North Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap called this the triumph of "people's war," a form of total war aimed at the "liberation" of land and population. It defeated the "aeronaval war of destruction" waged by the United States in an effort to "subdue our people" through the use of "huge amounts of bombs and shells which they believed nothing could resist." Giap correctly ridiculed the US strategy of "limited war" for failing to consider the "moral and political unity of our people."[8]
Part of this failure of the "aeronaval" campaign as a coercive weapon was due to restrictive rules of engagement, but its failure as a means for winning the war was due to an unrealistic expectation of what airpower alone could do. Bombers are like long-range artillery. They can destroy targets and soften up an enemy's defenses by shock and attrition, but they lack the ability to exploit the opportunity created to change the political facts on the ground. In his book Breaking the Phalanx, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. MacGregor writes about the air campaign over North Vietnam:
Again and again, fighter-bombers would clear away surface-to-air missiles and fortifications and lose planes and pilots doing so. But no American ground forces would move through the breach. As a result, in a few weeks, the enemy would rebuild the defenses and more American aircraft would be lost in the process of attacking them all over again.[9]
Physical infrastructure and networks of political control could be disrupted by air attack, but the enemy could always regroup, rebuild, and regain the initiative as long as he ruled the territory and its people.
Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., blamed the failure of airpower in Vietnam on its inability to attack the enemy's center of gravity. Clausewitz defined the center of gravity as "the hub of all power and movement on which everything depends . . . the point against which all energies should be directed." The top two candidates for this designation are the enemy's army and capital. As Colonel Summers argued, the United States could not effectively focus on either: "The center of gravity could not be the North Vietnamese Army because we made the conscious decision not to invade North Vietnam to seek out and destroy its armed forces. For the same reason it could not be Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital."[10]
Unable to strike with decisive effect to end the war at its source, the American effort was reduced to a campaign of attrition measured by body counts and bomb tonnage. Unfortunately, US public opinion (another of Clausewitz's centers of gravity) was more sensitive to the costs of attrition and prolonged conflict than were Hanoi's leaders. Even so, within the limits imposed by the strategically defensive US stance, General Creighton Abrams' emphasis on control of territory was more successful than General William Westmoreland's prior emphasis on "search and destroy" operations in driving enemy forces out of South Vietnam.
War is about politics, and politics is about the governing of land and people. Enhanced sensors and precision-guided weapons may have greatly improved "search and destroy" operations, but technology is not strategy. When the smoke clears, it still takes "boots on the ground" to consolidate a victory that really matters. In that respect, two millennia of scientific progress has not made the cruise missile a more effective tool of high politics than the Roman legionnaire....
There is no appreciation of this in the reportedly new "strategy" being drawn up by the National Security Council.[11] The NSC is still thinking in terms of limited war, even as it talks of being "prepared and willing to use all appropriate instruments of national power to influence the actions of other states and non-state actors." It demonstrates this by endorsing the reduced conventional force levels of the present posture, which has produced indecisive wars and open-ended peacekeeping operations. This is particularly evident in the shrinking Army, as ground troops are essential to the overthrow of hostile regimes and their replacement with friendly, democratic governments.
The NSC accepts that current force levels are inadequate to meet the challenge of two nearly simultaneous regional wars. Rather than call for a rebuilding effort, however, the NSC retreats from this two-war standard. Yet the continued downsizing of the heavy ground combat units needed to fight major regional wars also reduces the forces needed to capture enemy capitals. This would be further aggravated by any trend to make active Army units lighter, training and equipping them more for the policing of peace agreements than for the fighting of wars....
The United States needs a strategy that targets hostile regimes with the objective of removing them and liberating their people for inclusion into the expanding democratic community of nations. Such a strategy will require a renewed focus on the use of ground troops to take and control territory. This means not only a larger Army, but one with increased training for urban warfare, since cities are the center of government, finance, and civil society.
To pursue such a realistic, "boots on the ground" strategy, the role of airpower will need to be shifted from Douhet-style "strategic" attacks against social and economic targets to more tailored strikes against regime and military targets in support of Army operations. Planners will have to recognize that a friendly successor regime will need intact infrastructure and a populace not embittered by indiscriminate civilian casualties. The Navy will have to give more priority to the rapid sealift of ground forces and the reorganization of the Marines to provide a sea-mobile heavy force that can not only deploy rapidly but fight inland in cooperation with Army mechanized and airmobile units....
<http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/00summer/hawkins.htm> *****
Just as opinions of professors of social sciences are practically ignored by the US power elite, opinions of strategists of the US Army War College go unheeded (as shown by "rolling start," the longest supply lines in 200 years, etc.). -- Yoshie
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