Sunday, January 02, 2005
The will to wage war
Early [in the history of warfare] it was simple: you won when you had either killed all your enemies, or enough of them that they gave up. It was expensive, but it usually was decisive. One won by destroying the enemy's ability to wage war.
As warfare grew more and more sophisticated, however, other ways of achieving victory that didn't involve wholeslaughter developed. Fighting wars began to require not just masses of bodies, but weapons and tools and equipment. Whole industries grew up solely to support a nation's war efforts. And a second vulnerability was introduced -- one could win by attacking those means of support. One now could win by destroying the enemy's ability to sustain war....
But then a new way of winning a war evolved. It was not possible to achieve victory by bypassing the actual combatants themselves and attack their support mechanisms. One could lose every single battle in a war, and still win, if one could get the enemy's populace to grow sick of the war and simply want it over. In brief, one could win a war by destroying the enemy's will to sustain the war.
Our ability to defeat our enemies now depends substantially on our willingness to do so. Elements in our society that sap our willingness to fight are undermining our national security. It is as simple as that.
This is not to say that we should brook no criticism of the conduct of a war, or even the propriety of a war. Criticism of the conduct of a war might take the form of suggestions for more efficient killing of the enemy, or for a more subtle campaign to win the support of allies, or for a program to diffuse the proclivity of enemies to attack us. Criticism of the propriety of a war might take the form of a rigorous examination of the assumptions that led us to conclude that a war was necessary or appropriate in the first place. There have been a great many sober and analytical criticisms of the war or its conduct, many of which have received a respectful airing on this blog.
However, a huge amount of the criticism -- or even press coverage -- of the current war, whether it is defined as the "great war on terror," the campaign in Afghanistan, or the effort to transform Iraq, is obviously intended to sap the will of the American people to continue the fight. This is because opponents of the war or its conduct were trying to defeat President Bush in the election, and they thought that the best way to do that was to fill Americans with despair. Since the campaign for the presidency is now virtually perpetual, the promotion of despair over the war continues after the election. It would be a great shame if it succeeded.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Jan 03, 04:25:00 AM:
I suppose the same could happen to the States one day: in 60 years, say, after the decline of the American empire, an enemy state could destroy the Yankee spirit by making daily life so difficult, so miserable, that Americans might actually surrender control of their economy and natural resources to a bellicose and radically foreign culture. Under a sufficiently miserable occupation, American citizens might help a conquering enemy hunt down the "insurgents" in their midst.
The Koran contains some fascinating material on the nature of muslim resilience. Penguin publishes a nice paperback translation. It's a short read, really, and it's an eye opener.
Peace.
By , at
Mon Jan 03, 08:36:00 AM:
All of what you write is true, but it is too hastily assumed that the will of the American people can be easily sapped by wimpy, know nothing, immature journalists. In fact, consider this:
1) During Vietnam, a poorly waged tactical campaign which cost the US enormous treasure, 50,000 lives and a lost economic decade...and although LBJ lost the political will to continue the fight he effectively started, the nation overwhelmingly returned Richard Nixon to office in 1972 after he had expanded the war to Laos and Cambodia. The anti war camp was utterly devastated electorally.
2) 70% of the country supported our initiation of hostilities in Iraq. And while one of the 3 main stated theses for going to war has not yet turned out to be correct, the other 2 have been empirically proven -- Zarqawi is al Qaeda in Iraq, sheltered by Saddam, and Saddam was massively in violation of the 91 cease fire. So guess what? The US returned Bush to office despite a well waged campaign by a bright but flawed opposition candidate (certainly Kerry was more effective than McGovern as a candidate, though not much different).
As long as we have vibrant media with distribution for the varying points of view, and no false pretenses of "objectivity," the truth will out. Rupert Murdoch's business brilliance is the following -- he noticed that all of his main competition were more liberal than the customer base...so he has now captured one hundred percent of the non-liberal watcher crowd -- without competition!
By , at
Mon Jan 03, 01:40:00 PM:
Anonymous, I suspect you might be missing the point of my reply to this blog entry. I was engaging the sentence in bold from the quotation, so I was inviting the reader to imagine an occupied America where downtrodden citizens collude with a foreign military.
In other words, I don't believe 'simplifying' this issue is the right approach.
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=827
The Koran contains some fascinating material on the nature of muslim resilience. Penguin publishes a nice paperback translation. It's a short read, really, and it's an eye opener.
Peace.
