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Why Bush Lost The Iraq War

(cross posted at Daily Kos)

Recently, while browsing another blog's comment thread I was brought up short when I came upon this statement:

It’s still unclear where the main source of our problem in Iraq lies.
Gosh, where do we start?

But let's cut the snark and try to answer the man's question. Because until we can do that, not only will we have lost the Iraq war, we will have embarked on a path that will lead to one disastrous war after another, being bled dry by "leaders" who want one thing only: ultimate power.

First of all, let's stipulate that the main source of our problem is that we went into Iraq in the first place, OK?

But now that we're there, the question is how do we get out while maintaining our nation's long-term best interests?

All that said, I believe that the main source of the problem in the Iraq war is that we are fighting a third-generation war, while our enemy is fighting a fourth-generation one.

Let's define third-generation war by providing an example:

The highest form of third-generation war is the blitzkrieg:

an initial bombardment followed by the employment of mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from implementing a coherent defense.

Sound familiar?

The US executed a third-gen war plan in the so-called "Battle of Iraq" and won that battle...

...and lost the war because the enemy pivoted quickly and morphed into fourth-generation warriors.

We acted (and continue to act) as though we never saw it coming. Meanwhile the enemy gets stronger and stronger.

What is fourth-generation warfare?

[It is characterized by] a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, peace and conflict, battlefield and safety...Unable to withstand direct combat against bombers, tanks, and machine guns, non-state entities used tactics of secrecy, terror, and confusion to overcome the technological gap...

[A] fourth generation war is most successful when the non-state entity does not attempt, at least in the short term, to impose its own rule, but tries simply to disorganize and delegitimize the state in which the warfare takes place. The aim is to force the state adversary to expend manpower and money in an attempt to establish order, ideally in such a highhanded way that it merely increases disorder, until the state surrenders or withdraws.

...and so forth.

After the initial "Battle of Iraq," the enemy morphed and evolved very quickly into a decentralized force and/but one that was highly networked and interconnected.

We were still expecting a war of mass on mass; they were (and are) increasingly prepared for a war that is "everywhere, all the time."

Our combatants are easily identified and move about in a largely predictable way; their combatants could be anyone, anywhere, at anytime.

John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and a Senior Consultant for the RAND Corporation:

The warfare of today is not mass on mass...You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network...

The social behavior of a network is quite different than a hierarchy, in that decision-making is often consensual in nature; that is, what people choose becomes the path they take. It's not very centrally controlled by any means.

The most successful networks don't have a step-by-step script of their actions, even though they have a sense of a great goal that they want to achieve. It's a little bit like ants, who identify the carcass of a worm that they want to get. The word comes back to others, "the worm is over there," and ants will send out many, many different trails. The ones that turn out to be the easiest, the quickest, turn out to be the ones that more people go to, but there's an absolute multitude of trails that are set up.

Our work there is called swarmed intelligence. The people in the entomology business have figured out a lot about cross-connections and networking. Ants do it, of course, with their pheromones; we do it with our cell phones.

Sound familiar? Recent examples include (but are not limited to) US vs. Vietnam, Soviets vs. Afghanistan, Israel vs. Lebanon, and US vs. Iraq.

Conclusion:

Going forward, we need to confront our enemies in a way that is appropriate for the kind of threat they represent. Thinking that a "surge" in Iraq will solve the problems we face there is grossly mistaken and doomed to failure. Anyone who believes this does not understand modern warfare.

Our next president must not make the mistakes that this president has made, chief among them underestimating the nature of the enemy that we face.

Our leaders have to understand that conventional military solutions do not work anymore against an enemy that can implement fourth-gen war.

Comments

I actually think it was lost even before we put boots on the ground.

By selling the war on the WMD-al Qaeda-imminent threat lie and relying on a single, highly dubious plan to install Ahmen Chalabi at the head of a puppet government, the administration failed to prepare and prepare the public to commit the huge force necessary to stabilize the country and secure the weapons that are now blowing-up Iraq.

That, and their idiotic, oxymoronic in-your-face diplomacy and rush to war to meet Karl Rove’s electoral schedule strategy also meant that we would ultimately fail to secure the international backing that would have helped maintain the moral high ground and supply the troops and money needed to accomplish the mission.


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