This New Kind of War

Tom Ricks says T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War is "The book to read about the Korean War"...

...if only for one passage: "You may fly over a land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life -- but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud." This should hang on a wall somewhere in Washington.

Perhaps it should. I read this book while I was in Korea, sometime around 1991. From then until 2003 the US strove mightily to ignore that axiom with regards to Iraq. One can argue the motives, but it's undeniable that a (rarely noticed) twelve-year standoff war followed our removal of troops from Iraqi soil after Operation Desert Storm. Likewise, that the war intensified from primarily diplomatic to increasingly military throughout that period, achieving maximum lethality during the final years of the Clinton administration - all with no indication that its stated goal of "regime change in Iraq" (downgraded to "containment" for 1999 even as near-daily kinetic strikes continued) was achievable. Lest anyone mistake this for Clinton bashing it's worthwhile to recall that this long-distance war began with a deliberate choice by the first Bush administration not to march on Baghdad at the head of a very large coalition of the willing.

After more than a decade his son would decide that Fehrenbach had it right. As a result of acting on that decision, one could draw a conclusion that the only answer to the question "how long does it take to achieve goals in a standoff war?" currently available is "unknown - but twelve years is not enough".

But Fehrenbach was right on other related points, too - as other results of acting on that same decision would reveal.

The people of the West - stunned by reports of failure and retreat in the earliest days of the Korean conflict - had changed, he tells us from 1963. "They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will."

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of truth why the United States was almost defeated.

Nothing has happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand - at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life -- but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

Fehrenbach offered and rejected an alternative, back in 1963:

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order - our own decent order - in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

And so "pushbutton war has its place", Fehrenbach argues - and will in fact be a popular option in a future - as he saw it from 1963 - wherein Americans care not for wars and rumors of wars - - with a few exceptions.

"There is another kind of conflict - crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose... If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.

Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war - against militarism, against fascism, against Bolshevism...

Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions - as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except in this world there are tigers.

But not the sort we would care to confront face to face. If Fehrenbach was correct, the political ramifications would be too extreme for any leader to actually execute any option other than long range warfare a la Iraq in the 1990's. Post-2003 events may be perceived as indication that this is so.

Elsewhere on our modern internets today, other discussions:

The humanitarian benefits of precision targeting are far more obvious than the more remote and abstract suppositions of their humanitarian costs. Their direct policy consequence is to introduce greater discrimination in targeting than full-scale military assault and large-scale war permit, through targeted killing using high technology. There is a clear humanitarian advantage favoring the use of targeted killing over full-scale war. Advancing technology allows for more discrete surveillance and therefore more precise targeting that is finally better able to minimize collateral civilian damage.

The result is a strategic incentive for targeted killing, for Predator strikes, and for increasing the quality of technology to make targeted killings both more precision targeted and more standoff. Precision targeting and standoff delivery are each independently desirable and, in combination, considerably increase the incentive. The Obama policy team did not quite run on a policy of targeted killing - but it did run on a policy of taking the fight to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in a targeted way.

Plus we won't track the mud from our boots on our nice new clean floors.

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