https://web.archive.org/web/20031229131 ... D=69.topic
Subject: The will to fight
Posted By: declan64 Old Friend
Posted At: 3/14/03 5:49
The Will to Fight
With the upcoming war with Iraq, the second campaign in the war on terror, two sides have emerged. One is dedicated to eradicating the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein and the other is dedicated to stopping war at all cost’s.
Many have quite frankly missed the big picture. As stated by American diplomatic sources, the rounds of diplomacy taking place in the UN regarding the votes of the smaller nations that currently hold positions on the Security Council, is strictly to do with what comes afterwards.
The decision to engage in military operations regarding Iraq has already been made in Washington. Winning the peace is the only thing that these smaller nations can have any bearing on. What happens to the UN is going to be the next major campaign, in the war on terror. As with all conflicts in the past there are phases that each of the winning players have gone through.
Beginning, mid point and endgame is a simplified means of stating the chronology of a conflict. At some point diplomacy has failed and thus one or more parties has to be remanded back to the bargaining table by means of force. To do this one must have the will to fight.
Beginning
All conflicts regardless of nationality do not just start, they are an extension of a certain set of conditions that are described as CAUSE, in its most logical conclusion the result is the EFFECT, at which point soldier’s are deployed and sent to war.
In this day and age, the ability of a nation to achieve Strategic surprise is dictated by the time it takes to call up reserves, deploy combat formations, and place them in fashion that achieves tactical objectives, which make up strategic objectives.
While Strategic surprise is often impossible to achieve with the use of American forces, due to the free press and transparent government policies, it is very possible to achieve tactical surprise. During Operation Desert Storm, not one Iraqi fighter formation got off the ground to contest American domination of their airspace.
The first conflict with Iraq occurred over some very classic lines, enraged at the intransigence of the Kuwaiti government to negotiate in Iraq’s favour regarding the repayment of loans taken out for the war with Iran back in the eighties, the Iraqi’s decided to retreat from the bargaining table and simply annex the nation of Kuwait.
With the aid of American national technical resources, the government of Saudi Arabia was determined to cauterize the scope of the Iraqi objectives by requesting American and other coalition forces to first protect the kingdom from immediate invasion of Iraqi forces, which set up conditions to which Kuwait could be liberated.
For a period of six months the build up of American and Allied forces took place. Moving with dispatch, the then United Nations authorized the use of military force to expel Iraqi forces from the territory of Kuwait. With the culmination of Desert Shield, the ability of Iraqi forces to annex the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was averted. However had the Iraqi’s had a coherent set of strategic plans, its possible that today the Emirate of Kuwait could be part of a greater Iraq. But they lacked the will to fight.
The result is often cloudy, when one attempts to forecast the mind of one Saddam Hussein. The invasion of Kuwait was claimed by the Iraqi’s as being tacitly approved or at best not seen as a threat to the security of the United States. With the passage of the resolution requiring the removal of all forces from Kuwait, should have dispelled that notion and at least retrieved some form of control over the disposition of Iraqi assets and territory.
Yet the Iraqi’s made no concession on removing troops, returning properties and on the other side of the coin, made no move to retain or modify strategic goals. The distance between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is measured in mere miles, while the distance between the United States and the Middle East is measured in weeks of travel by ship for heavy formations.
While the Iraqi leadership may have had no idea that the western world would have reacted so badly, and with such force of will in placing light formations in harms way to provide a speed bump should heavy Iraqi formations set their sites on some city in Saudi. A competent general staff should have had plans in place for years, every nation does this as a training aid for junior officers, but they had up to 3 months unimpeded to rest, rearm and move against new objectives in Saudi Arabia.
While military analysts and experts could state with some reasonable accuracy that the Iraqi forces would have logistical difficulties in securing possession of Saudi Arabia, one cannot discount the propaganda aspects relating to the will to fight. The act of deploying American forces in harms way is never taken lightly. Had Saddam gambled on a roll over of Saudi Arabia, he may have constrained President Bush the first to kick the door in and go in on a frontal attack on one axis of attack or seek diplomatic solutions to the conflict that would have seen Iraq effectively win.
Mid Point
One of the objectives of any military campaign is shock value. It induces command paralysis and slows down the effective management of troops and equipment moved to block, retain and eventually take back territory and move to the offensive.
From the time a conflict moves from the opening stages to the mid point, is now measured in hours, unless the state being attacked has defence in depth and space to absorb a blow. During Operation Desert Storm, coalition air forces engaged in systematic bombardment of primary, secondary and tertiary targets, effectively rendering useless the Iraqi government and military institutions.
Within seven days of aerial bombardment the war went from its opening stages to the midpoint of the war. Ultimately taking six weeks to complete preparatory bombardment, and followed by one hundred hours of ground combat, best described as a live fire exercise on the scale of kursk. However the midpoint had been achieved and no one person had any more thoughts of Iraq being able to throw back the United States and Allies, and was only a matter of time before the situation moved into endgame.
What could Iraq have done, not really much in my opinion? To start with, they blew any chance of retaining control, when they failed to pull out of Kuwait, and further blew it, when they had the chance to invade and cut off Saudi Arabia, and then failed to commence any type of spoiling raid or offensive on light American forces that had been sent to draw a line in the sand.
Until now, most people that have contemplated an attack on the United States, or going to war with the United States could be seen on the best seller list of the New York times, or Amazon dot com website. It’s a bad idea that should only remain in the fantasies of young angst ridden third world children. Having made that fatal blunder to fall under the impression that you can win a war with the United States, one would think that the last thing you do is to play to the strengths of the American Armed Forces.
Yet that is exactly what the Iraqi leadership did. During the cold war, one complaint of the Soviet Union comes to mind. It was not that the Soviets could not find information on any one particular Item of interest, but that they were inundated with a flood of information that could have been true or false or true and cancelled due to domestic reason’s.
Information on American equipment has been in open source publications almost as soon as the item comes off the assembly lines; in some cases other countries have had first hand information on the combat capabilities of American equipment under wartime conditions. In short, the opposing armies of today, have more detailed information on the T.O. and E of the American Armed forces than at any time in the past.
Comparing Iraq’s choice of counter measures with Serbia, who only a few short years later faced the same equipment and probably personal with the same equipment that the Iraq’s possessed and one sees night and day. Serbia’s should be noted, had at least detailed information on the aftermath of Desert Storm, and a competent general staff that recognized the threat and made attempts to counter American strengths.
Iraq could have made allowances for the ability of American systems, by taking a magnifying glass to the Arab-Israeli conflicts, as being a barometer of what American Forces may have been able to do. Yet in the opening days of the conflict, the Iraqi air defence network was shattered, while over Serbia, rules of engagement stated that the minimum altitude was five thousand feet and higher.
Clearly Serbia was able to retain control and cohesion of her armed forces, while Iraq was repeatedly pummelled. While Serbia may have taken a page from the battle of Britain, where the RAF decided to surrender control of the air to Germanys Luftwaffe, they failed to have an analog for the RAF’s contesting of the airspace. This may have had to do with the belief in the supremacy of their Surface to Air defence systems, but it along with the camouflaging of combat formations, plus the liberal use of decoys forced a temporary stalemate of the conflict.
Match, set and game. The Serbians were not prepared to launch a wider conflict with NATO, relying on political means of ending the conflict. The NATO forces were stalemated against effective Serbian counter measures that insured that a ground war would not be the walk over that Iraq had been.
Clearly something would have to give. What eventually occurred was that NATO changed its objectives from primarily defeating Serbian formations, to destroying the Serbian infrastructure? Bombing bridges, roads, and power stations allowed the resumption of the offensive without having to contemplate ground action. Once that action had taken place, effectively the Allies had crossed over the mid point of the war, and it was only a matter of time before Serbia eventually capitulated.
Serbian reliance on passive counter measures plus the effective capitulation after the war, at least gave them some leverage on the aftermath of the conflict. While the then Federation of Yugoslavia was broken up, it was able to salvage some manoeuvring room.
But the main thrust comes back into play. They did not have the will to fight. Once they surrendered to the belief that they could not defeat American and Allied forces in a general conflict, they became trapped in a paradox. They failed to keep the conflict in the diplomatic arena where they had some parity with the United States and its NATO allies, and yet when it came to blows, they failed to at least attempt to blunt the main effects of an already well documented American air force, one that has not had any major opposition since the Viet Nam war. Secondly they did not attempt to widen the scope of the war in an attempt to win by audacity.
END GAME
At some point in the conflict, the center of gravity will shift towards the side that eventually will win, or prevail. With now only time being the major factor regarding victory, nations must inevitably reach down into the national psyche for the will to win. If conditions have been met, or are in the process of being met, then strategic goals have to shift to the political landscape of victory.
One always hears that more victories have been thrown away by the politicians than have been exploited. This has mainly to with the fact that two dissimilar strategies are being put into play during the conflict. Force is always an extension of diplomacy and diplomacy is conflict without actual shooting.
While in conflicts of the past this may have been a sound strategy, strange as it may sound, the battlespace of today relegates that approach to the dustbin of history. The will to fight must entail all organs of state offensive capabilities, rather than a pell mell approach to fighting a conflict.
While modern conflict requires fast furious and lethal approach to a war, one has to be aware that the peace is what ultimately crushes the enemy’s will to fight. For a person to wake up in Germany in 1946 and see still the destruction wrought by the hands of modern combat forces, he or she is less likely to engage in future wars.
This requires that the post war period have to be tailored to the individual nation. What worked in Europe was as much a reflection on World War one, as it was a military objective that Germany would never again threaten Europe or the greater world. In the current state of affairs in Iraq, already the conflict has not even begun, and yet the pro-consul or military governor has already been chosen and plans are underway for the reconstruction of damaged facilities.
Thus the strategic objectives are already determining the offensive capabilities of the armed forces. But looking at Iraq is a short-term vision of the future. The future must entail the formation of the peace in the region, with the victory in Europe lasting almost fifty years and the conflict in the Pacific theatre lasting just as long, its not really a stretch to think that the middle east could be brought back into the history books with a legacy of peace just as long.
Should we look at individual players, or should we look for pressure points. With the destruction of the present Iraqi regime, and the removal of non-state actors, the political landscape of the Middle East will not have changed very much.
With the destruction and occupation of Iraq, it is likely that the shockwaves will still be felt for at least a decade. One can assume that the majority of forces will have redeployed back to the United States and allied nations, leaving only a garrison force to enforce the peace. Despite protestations of Iraqi civilians turning into partisans and attacking American forces, the reality is more likely to be the opposite.
Twelve years of constant pressure from sanctions, plus two conflicts with the United States and one with Iran, have left a weary population in its wake. To be sure that some incidents are going to take place involving disgruntled Iraqi’s, however this will not encompass the whole of the Iraqi peoples. Again this is where all organs of state power must come into play. The pictures from Saddams personal palaces, plus his sons, should show the Iraqi and other persons around the world, the stark difference between how the people and the leadership lived. Only a free press can achieve that goal.
One tends to get fixated on the tanks and armoured personal carriers and helicopters that an American heavy formation brings to a battle, while ignoring the very frighting weapons of war that America would bring to any given theatre of operations. Weapons such as free speech, transparency in government, meritocracy. To the peoples of Iraq, these would be like water to a parched man in the desert. But in other parts of the Middle East, this is going to sound the death knell of the old way of doing business.
While the axiom of a picture is worth a thousand words, a television station will provide the striking power of an army corp. Pre 1991 Iraq was not a poor third world country, it was a second world country that would have been striking for first world position in a matter of decades. Literate, industrial and healthy, Iraq was only rivalled by Iran, in standards of living. As the long night is lifted, but under more solid foundations, Iraq will set the standards by which the common Arab peoples can aspire to.
While the hearts and minds offensive is underway by the civil affairs folks, the main thrust of the military should be to construct several bases in which to police the region. If the region is to see a lasting peace, then the old governments of the region must be swept away. As the region is volatile, people have been polite about not mentioning the C word, or crusade. For a true change, the region must be bathed in fire and blood to achieve a shift in the tectonic plates of Middle Eastern politics.
This does not mean that active involvement of American military forces, but that is where the shadow warriors operate beneath the surface and the state department and the economic advisers will operate in the light of day. Used properly, a subtle subversion of economic and political foundations of all the remaining players in the region should bring about turmoil that can be exploited. Once Iraq has been subdued, time becomes an ally of the western world, and an enemy of the forces of Islamises. When the day comes that Osama bin laden is the most reviled name in the Arab nations, then victory will have been achieved.
Conclusion
Archimedes once wrote, give me a long enough lever and a stone to rest it on, and I shall move the world. Our task is no less difficult, but we hardly have to move the planet. What we have to move is the weight of world opinion, from seeking meaningless political solutions to finding the will to fight.
Of all the problems that the world faces is apathy in the face of distant danger is the greatest. The first incarnation of the league of nations was formed for this sole purpose, and yet it did not stop the invasion of china, it failed to put down the rise of the new German empire, and it failed to even curtail the ambitions of communism in its budding state.
The fault of this has to lie in the battlefields of France, where great armies clashed not yards from each other, body counts as high as a million troops were the norm, and the new budding weapons of mass destruction took form and snuffed the lives of many French, English, Belgian and German boys.
One could think about placing themselves back into that time of heady peace, when the noble ideals of mankind could be brought into the light of day and the so called scourge of war eradicated. To use the parlance of today, our leaders of yesteryear would break the cycle of violence and bring about conflict resolution by peaceful means, that all men were capable of sitting down and working out differences.
That did not happen, war continued to be the norm for nations that had failed to resolve differences at the table. Strongmen seen weak men and plans were made. Little baby steps were taken, such as the condor legion in Spain, the Japanese invasion of China, and the invasion of the sudatenland, and yet people still preached that conflict could be avoided at the bargaining table.
One wonders what would have happened, should France alone have found the will to fight, and invaded Germany. Would Hitler have taken a more reasonable approach, or would he have been deposed by loyal patriots seeking never to put Germany through humiliation again.
The one thing that history really does not do is to judge. The casualty count at the end of WW2 worked out to Fifty million dead, and yet this is a conservative figure that probably would not have included the dead of Spain, in her civil war. Nor the casualties of China in the Japanese invasion. The war crimes trials in Nuremberg hanged some men. But the ones who could be considered accomplices in deed rather than name, nothing ever happened to them, never brought to trial. Who were these people, if you watch today’s news, you would get an indication that these people are everyday persons, just like anyone else. In short, it was we.
One could think that back then, they would have had no idea of what they had unleashed. That they were doing it for the good of man, rather than the end result that happened. They brought the world to the abyss and yet the long dark night seemed to be just like any other night up till then.
We on the other hand, have the advantage of history. We have seen what happened and we have good documentation on the cause. We have a real time media that never existed previous to World War Two, mass graves on the scale of the katryn massacre could not happen today could it. The spy satellites roaming near earth orbit would spot the death camps as they arose, heat sensors would determine the speed of production.
Unlike our forefathers, we have the knowledge of what the abyss looks like and unlike them, we would be culpable of murder if we do not find the will to fight and step into the breach because it is right, not because it is in our interests.
On this eve of the greatest event in recent times, the United States is massing troops and equipment on the boarders of Iraq. By having the will to fight the American people once more are going to pick up the lever and pin it against Iraq and they shall move the world.
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If you have read this to the end, my thanks. At 3600 odd words, I have a new appreciation for people who write 5000 word essays
Declan O’Reilly
doreillyi@sympatico.ca
Remember, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to speak French.