Paradigm Shifts in Military Strategy: Part One

The war in Iraq has now been going on for four years and three months, making it one of the longest wars in US History. Only the Revolutionary and Vietnam Wars were longer. If you include the war in Afghanistan as part of the greater War on Terror we have been in a continuous state of war for five and a half years.

At first this, so called, War on Terror went well. The armies of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein were no match for the worlds surviving super-power and they fell quickly. However, since then, things have grown progressively worse. The death count, both in American military personnel and the civilian population has continued to rise and the stabilizing effects of democracy and economic progress have failed to materialize. Instead, both nations have been thrown into chaos, with rising sectarian violence, diminishing security and economic collapse. Life in both of these nations was difficult before the war under the rule of a tyrannical dictator in Iraq and a fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan, but most would acknowledge that the tyranny of the past is in many ways preferable to the chaos of the present. To make matters worse, the people of the world, who were, for the most part, sympathetic with the US after 9/11 have grown increasingly distrustful of our policies and Anti-American sentiments have begun to spread like wildfire.

Despite our tremendous military and economic advantages we find ourselves locked in an un-winnable war in an increasingly hostile world.

What has brought us to this state? Are the terrorists so strong that they can actually defeat the most powerful military force the world has ever seen?

When I was in college I decided to take a course through the ROTC program titled “American Military Strategy from the Revolutionary war to the Present”. On the first day of class, the professor wrote this sentence on the board. “Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancements in technology and tactics.” We didn’t understand what this meant at the time but as the weeks unfolded we saw the echoes of this statement across the battlefields of Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, Dunkirk and Saigon.

“Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancements in technology and tactics”.

To understand what this means you need look no further than 1776 and our war of Independence. After all, our nation was born out of the inability of one great military power to adapt to a paradigm shift in military tactics.

We all know the story. The red coated armies of the British Empire marched in perfect unison, confident that they would easily defeat the poorly trained rabble that opposed them. What they did not know was that the world had changed. New, more accurate weapons allowed for new tactics and despite their tremendous military advantages the British were unable or unwilling to adapt their strategy to changed circumstances. The best trained, best supplied, best led army in the world was losing.

They could’ve shifted strategies, abandoned their rigid tactical systems for more flexible ones but they didn’t. It’s one thing to be surprised by unusual tactics for a few battles but the British doggedly held to their traditions right up until the disastrous end. After eight years of fighting, the most powerful Army of the time was forced to withdraw from an inferior force using tactics and technology that they couldn’t adapt to. Sound familiar?

More tragic examples of this inability to adapt to new paradigms can be found in the American Civil war. At that time, Napoleonic tactics were considered unbeatable and one of the hallmarks of those tactics was the bayonet charge. Soldiers would fix bayonets (long knives) to the end of their muskets and sprint full speed to the enemy’s line where they would engage in hand to hand combat. This was effective in Napoleon’s era (and earlier) because the smooth bore muskets of the time could fire accurately only up to about 100 yards. Then after each shot the weapons had to be cleaned and reloaded which made for a slow firing rate of only 2 or 3 rounds per minute. The average soldier, armed with his bayonet, could run through the 100 yard kill zone in under 20 seconds which meant he would only be exposed to only 1 or 2 rounds of fire before he was close enough for hand to hand combat.

However, When Union generals ordered their men to fix bayonets and attack the Confederate position at the first battle of Bull Run, they were unaware that the nature of war had changed. Soldiers on both sides were armed with rifled weapons, which could fire 3-4 rounds a minute and were accurate at up to 300 yards. Now, instead of a 100-yard sprint, the civil war soldier had to run 300 yards against a much higher rate of fire. The result was nothing less than slaughter. 1500 Union soldiers fell in that first battle, one quarter of the total Union force, clear evidence that the bayonet charge was obsolete, but the lesson was not learned.

Battle after battle, year after year, despite the unbelievable death toll, generals on both sides continued to fall back on outdated tactics. Soon, the 1500 casualties of the first battle of Bull Run seemed like a skirmish. Shiloh: 23,000. The Wilderness: 25,000. Chancellorsville: 30,000. There were more Americans killed in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg than were killed in the entire history of the Vietnam war. The most disastrous action of that battle was when the greatest general of the era, Robert E. Lee ordered 10,000 men to fix bayonets and march across a mile of open field to attack a fortified Union position. He gave this order despite the fact that he had watched the slaughter of countless Union soldiers as they had attacked his fortified positions over the previous three years. This tragic maneuver, which came to be known as Picket’s charge, would haunt him for the rest of his life and was one of the deciding moments of the war.

War had changed, but despite Hundreds of thousands of wasted lives, the generals did not adapt their philosophy to the changing nature of combat.

Fifty years later in the trenches of World War I, the most terrifying order to go down the line was still “Fix Bayonets!”

“Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancement in technology and tactics”.

Today it seems as if we are in the midst of a new paradigm shift. The rules of war have changed, but, like the British in our revolutionary war, we are unable or unwilling to adapt. The truth is our strategies and tactics are the result of fifty years of military planning that simply no longer apply.

The current American military was born out of the cold war, a time when two superpowers were building fleets of aircraft carriers, Submarines, long range bombers, and weapons so powerful they could destroy every living creature on earth. We trained missile experts and built fallout shelters. We built an army that could take on any traditionally organized force in the world. Luckily we never had to face such a war. Instead we are now in the midst of a very different kind of struggle. One without organized armies or massed troop movements. There are no front lines in the war on terror, no clear objectives to be captured and controlled. Like the British before us, our well organized, well trained, well supplied troops are languishing in a chaotic terrain where every friend could be an enemy and the difference between an atrocity and self defense is merely a matter of perspective.

The result is nothing less than tragic. 3600 American Soldiers killed. Over 30000 Americans wounded. And those numbers don’t compare to the number of Iraqi and Afghani dead, which estimates place at between 150 and 600 thousand. To make matters worse, our Global war on Terror, like our war on drugs, shows no signs of ending. If America is to have any hope of surviving this war, much less winning, it is imperative that we understand how terrorism works on a basic, fundamental level.

So, what is terrorism? It is an important question and one that is rarely asked. The first misconception we must address is that the word terrorist describes the members of a unified group. It does not. We tend to describe all “terrorists” in Iraq and Afghanistan as members of Al Qaeda. They are not. Al Qaeda is a loosely structured organization of Sunni extremists. There are also Shia terrorists, Palestinian terrorists, secular Bathists and literally dozens of other small groups using violence to further their agenda.

Frequently what we mean when we say “Terrorist” is Arab or Muslim, as if only those groups produce terrorists. Nothing can be further from the truth. Almost every culture, religion or philosophy has produced extremists willing to do anything to achieve their ends. From Timothy McVeigh to Zionists fighting the British occupation of Palestine, there have always been people who see violence as the only way.

Some people believe that terrorism refers to the killing of innocents, like the victims of 9/11. We find the idea of killing civilians repugnant, and yet, the reality is, our army has killed far more civilians, men, women and children, then were killed by the terrorists on September Eleventh.

When we think of terrorism we think of sleeper cells and secrecy. We see men among us armed with everything from chemical weapons and dirty nukes to box cutters and shoes bombs. But those are not the true weapons of the terrorists.

Terrorism is not a nationality or a philosophy. It is neither religious nor secular. It is not left or right, liberal or conservative. Terrorism does not involve the use of any particular weapon or even any particular of target.

Terrorism is a tactic.

It is a tactic used by groups who cannot possibly fight their enemies in any conventional way. Terrorism is the tactic of the helpless, the hopeless. After all, only someone without hope would strap dynamite to their chest or fly a plane into a building. It is the weapon of someone with nothing left to lose.

But the power of terrorism, does not lie in bombs or guns or weapons of any kind and the damage of terrorism cannot be measured by broken buildings and murdered people. Because the truth is nothing terrorists can do can destroy the United States of America. Even the most destructive of terrorist attacks, the dirty bomb or biological weapon, would not be enough to destroy us.

The truth of terrorism is that when you fight the most powerful enemy in the world there is only one thing that can defeat them.

Themselves.

After all, there has not been a terrorist attack on US soil in almost six years, but those six years have been far more damaging to the United States than anything that happened on September Eleventh 2001.

Continued Next Week with Part II: Gandhi, Osama and the true Nature of terrorism.