[Infowarrior] - Long Warfare Theory

[Richard Forno]

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2010/10/11/long-warfare-theory/
AntiWar.com
October 12, 2100

Long Warfare Theory
by Jeff Huber

“No nation ever profited from a long war.”
- Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu’s immortal The Art of War translates into a shade over 10,000 words
of American English, roughly 40 pages of aphoristic wisdom presented in
language that probably 75 percent of public-school third-graders could
understand. One hundred percent of our military officers should understand
it, but they don’t, partly because fewer than 10 percent of them have read
it.

The single-mantra version of Sun Tzu’s philosophy is “charge downhill, not
uphill.”* You’d think that even cadets at West Point and Annapolis and
Colorado Springs who graduate at the bottoms of their classes could retain
such a short and sweet maxim and comprehend its gist. Yet the history of war
is choked with case studies of generals who paid the consequences of
attacking uphill when they had every opportunity in the world not to.
Perhaps the most celebrated example of this was the Battle of Gettysburg,
where Robert E. Lee insisted, despite the strong objection of his deputy
James Longstreet, on attacking up not just one hill, but three of them
(Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and Cemetery Hill).

The drubbing Lee invited on himself at Gettysburg was the turning point of
the Civil War and the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. That Lee
continues to be our most revered and respected general despite having lost
both a war and a country by violating the most common gem of military wisdom
should tell us something about the kind of reverence and respect we show
generals, especially the Long War hooligans we have now.

A comparison between Lee and David Petraeus is as unavoidable as it is
ludicrous. If we rate Lee, his singular lack of judgment at Gettysburg and
all, as a 10, Petraeus weighs in somewhere to the right of the decimal
point, and maybe to the right of zero.

Petraeus is a bull-feather merchant who gained primacy in the U.S. officer
corps through sheer genius for self-promotion and wizardry at public
relations. Though he is celebrated as our “best general” and enjoys a
reputation as the military genius who “wrote the book” on counterinsurgency,
he has in fact been singularly and purposefully responsible for entangling
us in a long war that he himself admits cannot be won but that we will
likely continue to fight for at least another generation.

Bob Woodward’s latest book-length spin surgery, titled Obama’s War, quotes
Petraeus as saying “I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep
fighting. … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and
probably our kids’ lives.” Petraeus supposedly blurted this and other
uncomfortable revelations to Woodward “after a glass of wine on an
airplane.” If Petraeus’s tongue can be yanked that loose with a single glass
of wine, the guy’s as much of a drinker as he is a general. Maybe that
explains a few things, like how the 190,000 AK-47s he handed out to Iraqi
security force recruits vanished like a wallet on a New York City sidewalk
and wound up in the hands of militants.

If, as prominent warmonger Lindsey Graham suggests, King David Petraeus is
“our best hope,” our ship of state is already on a bow-first vector for the
ocean floor. Lamentably, the state of American military wisdom is so
pitiable that Petraeus may in fact be the sharpest utensil in a drawer
otherwise inhabited by spoons.

This is, in part, because of a lack of intellectual integrity in our
so-called war college system, the most prestigious icon of which is the U.S.
Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, R.I. NWC is home of the annual Global
War Game, the template from which all other U.S. military warfare
simulations are modeled. Lamentably, NWC war gaming hasn’t been a legitimate
test bench for actual war since the 1930s, when the likes of Chester Nimitz
and Ray Spruance devised War Plan Orange to defeat the Japanese in the
Pacific. During the Cold War, the Global game was rigged to “prove” that the
U.S. Navy would only lose a handful of aircraft carriers in a toe-to-toe
slugfest with the Russkies. After the Berlin Wall went Humpty Dumpty, the
Global game turned into a venue for validating whatever cockamamie doctrines
and weapons systems the three-star in charge of the college wanted to
verify.

Arthur Cebrowski, president of NWC from 1998 to 2001, used the Global game –
and every other war game he could influence – to promote his pet “littoral
combat ship” project, a key component of his project to transform the Navy
into a worldwide Coast Guard. After retiring from active duty, Cebrowski
became his pal Don Rumsfeld’s czar of military transformation, a platform
from which he propelled his network-centric warfare concept past everyone’s
tonsils. NCW (not to be confused with NWC, mind you) became the new truth
among the defense intelligentsia. Cebrowski declared it to be “an entirely
new theory of warfare,” one that involved a “system of systems” and that
turned “complexity” into a decisive principle of warfare. Cebrowski himself
confessed that NCW itself was too complex to define, but that whatever it
was, it made all previous thought about the art of war obsolete.

NCW critics correctly guessed that Cebrowski was displaying symptoms of a
decades-old dose of the bends. Indeed, NCW has never panned out to be
anything more than net-eccentric rapture designed to help a good-old-boy
network of networks sell pricey hardware like the littoral combat ship to
Congress.

Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade of the National Defense University
developed an NCW competitor doctrine now known far and wide as Shock and
Awe. One can most accurately understand Shock and Awe by picturing John
Candy and Joe Flaherty of the old Second City Television show sitting in
front of a flickering TV screen and chortling, “That Baghdad blowed up good,
blowed up real good.” Shock and Awe looked real good on cable news until we
discovered Operation Iraqi Freedom hadn’t given us anything but sticker
shock and buyer’s remorse.

But the most virulent warfare theory to infest our New American Century to
date has been the Army and Marine Corps’ “new” counterinsurgency (COIN)
doctrine, as manifested in “the book,” Field Manual 3-24. Contrary to the
details of his manufactured legend, the only part of FM 3-24 that Petraeus
actually wrote was his signature on the cover page. Maybe he did that so
everybody would have an autographed copy. The book’s real authors were a
team from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., who plagiarized much of its
material from older doctrines like the ones that worked out so ducky in
Vietnam.

COIN doctrine suffers from a fatal internal fallacy. A successful
counterinsurgency, the field manual insists, requires a legitimate host
government that is in control of an effective security force. But major
insurgencies do not occur in states that have a legitimate government and a
functional security apparatus. Attempting to create those two entities in a
country where they don’t already exist but an insurgency already does is
futile, as proven by our experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

America’s finest military minds (heh) have committed the best-trained,
best-equipped armed force in history to an unending, ruinous war against an
enemy that doesn’t have a single tank or airplane or ship and is led by a
handful of cave dwellers who don’t even have a fort to fart in.

We have to give Lee credit for one thing: in charging uphill at Gettysburg,
he was at least trying to gain a decisive victory because he knew his
country didn’t have the strategic depth to fight a long war. Petraeus and
his extended entourage in academia and defense think tank-dom not only want
to charge straight up every hill they encounter, they want to make
absolutely certain that their Long War lasts long enough to accomplish what
Lee could not: the collapse of the Union.

*The Lionel Giles translation reads, “It is a military axiom not to advance
uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill.”