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Concentration of forces is the most basic law of military science. Victory on the battlefield is won by amassing as many troops as possible at the key point of attack, or ‘schwerpunkt,’ as it’s known in German.
Unfortunately, the amateur strategists in the White House seem to have been studying social anthropology and women’s issues instead of basic military science. What they want is, to use the term coined by Russian poet Yevtuschenko, a half war.
This week, Pentagon chief Ash Carter, announced the US would send about 200 more special forces troops to Iraq and Syrian to fight the Islamic State. After vowing not to send troops to the Mideast, President Obama has by now deployed 3,500 new US soldiers to Iraq for “training.”
The best way to lose or at least prolong a war is by committing penny packets of troops. The US did precisely this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – and lost all these wars. Now, we’re on to more half-measures in the Levant.
President Barack Obama’s first instincts to avoid any more wars were absolutely correct. But the course of political events and the Paris massacre have dragged him into more rather than less military misadventures in the Mideast and Afghanistan. Obama’s senior strategic advisors, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, have been steadily providing wrong-headed, even calamitous advice.
America’s mighty – perhaps almighty- military industrial complex, the Republican war party, neoconservatives and imperialists – keep impelling the US towards new wars in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria in spite of Obama’s desire to end America’s addiction to foreign conflicts. Some of these cranks want a full-blown war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Washington has been infatuated by special forces daring-do, believing commandos can win small, imperial wars without involving the nation in a larger, costly conflict. Special forces are the new golden-haired boys in Washington, filled with swagger over their lopsided victories against lightly-armed tribesmen with no air cover or artillery.
Just as the British Army was after its 1890’s Sudan campaign against Fuzzy-wuzzies armed with spears and swords – until the Brits met German regular infantry in World War I.
What too few in Washington understand is that it is the US Air Force that is decisive weapon of US world power. Infantry – and special forces – merely serve to fix enemy troops for air attack and target US air strikes.
All those buffonish Republican candidates calling for US troops to be sent to Mesopotamia should be asked: what is the military objective of a new Mideast war? Military science teaches that the object of war is not to kill the enemy, as so many Washington sofa samurais believe, but to achieve a favorable political settlement.
Does anyone in Washington ruling elite know what this would be? Given fluid warfare in the Mideast against the irregular forces of ISIS and al-Qaida, will US troops there remain on a permanent deployment hunting irregulars, rather like the 19th century Indian Wars in the American West?
Will the US re-garrison Iraq’s Sunni regions? What will happen if Iraqi Shias turn on US forces and oust America’s puppet regime in Baghdad? Is Washington ready to get sucked into Syria’s maddening religious, tribal and regional conflicts? Are Israel and the US planning to partition demolished Syria?
And of course, the 64,000 dinar question…why should American stick its head again in this Mideast hornet’s nest?
To what gain? Can America afford such expensive imperial games when it is mired in debt? Or risk clashes with nuclear-armed Russia?
The imperialist camp will cry “stability,” that old code word for the Pax Americana. The neocons will howl that murderous ISIS must be stopped, ignoring that the US ally in Egypt, “Field Marshall” al-Sisi, killed more civilians in one day than ISIS did in Paris. No one will admit that most of ISIS’s attacks are revenge for US and French bombing of their towns and villages, nor that their gruesome executions of prisoners are meant to recall Guantanamo’s prisoners.
The American plan in Iraq and Syria is merely to kill as many “bad guys” as possible. Such sterile, juvenile strategy helped lead to America’s humiliating defeats in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. One would wonder what US special forces “trainers” have to teach Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians about war?
Arrogance and ignorance led the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Heedless of past mistakes, Washington is again rushing in where wisemen fear to tread.
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As the saying goes: “You can fool me once, but you cannot fool me all the times”.
Iraq is not a toothless state as in the past under Saddam Hussein. American brutal occupation of nine years, have made Iraqis hate US government and military most. Furthermore, Iraqi Shia majority has full backing of Iran against US and its Sunni Arab poodle regimes.
In 2012, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey speaking to journalist in London rejected French-Turkish call for enforcing a ‘no-fly-zone’ inside Syria by NATO. He warned the implications of establishing a no-fly-zone inside Syria, saying: “Syria is not Libya“. Now Assad has the backing of not only Iran and Hizbullah but Russia too.
Americans, like Israelis never kill “bad guys” – they have the history of “carpet bombing” of unarmed civilians.
Last month Russian president Vladimir Putin revealed that the US forces have not bombed a single ISIL target in the last three years.
On December 1, the US Defense Secretary, Ash Carter, kosher Gentile, announced that the US is dispatching more “special forces” to fight ISIS/ISIL in Syria and Iraq. He also claimed that request came from Iraqi government. The ridiculous claim had been refuted by Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi.
http://rehmat1.com/2015/12/03/more-us-forces-to-defend-isis/
If we were Thomas Jefferson’s nation of yeomen artisans and farmers we could withdraw from the world and let it stew in its juices. But we are not.
We are the nation that took the Southwest from Mexico, freed the slaves and became an industrial colossus.
We are the nation that beat back a rising Germany in 1917 and became the World Police after WWII.
Now we tire of the role. But, to mix my metaphors, we have a tiger by the tail. Does Mr. Margolis propose that the tiger will not turn on us when we let go of its tail?
I think that the German word 施韦朋克特 is more accurately translated as “center of gravity.” If I recall my Clausewitz, the objective of the commander should be to seek out and overthrow the enemy’s center of gravity as the most expeditious way of winning a war. I think that the military science “principle of the objective” is closer to the German concept of 施韦朋克特 than is concentration of forces. I have no idea where the enemy’s schwerpunkt is the Middle East and I’ll bet no one else does either.
Another shiny American invention – Samantha Power and Susan Rice in place of Clausewitz or McArthur. What can possibly go wrong? Heeding advice of two menopausal women is a sure way to win the war…That’s the “Obama way”.
You are off the mark with “Just as the British Army was after its 1890’s Sudan campaign against Fuzzy-wuzzies armed with spears and swords – until the Brits met German regular infantry in World War I.” What led to reform of the British Army was, on the contrary, the performance of the Boer Commandos in the South African War. I can see why you didn’t cite that: it would be an argument for Special Forces.
Your historical point is excellent. The British did so badly against the Boer commandos at the beginning of the war that wholesale changes had to be made. The British Expeditionary Force that participated in the 1914 campaign may have been, man for man, the finest soldiers in the world at that point, but there were very few of them, and the Germans were pretty good themselves. BEF actions at the First Battle of the Marne were very important in saving France.
The oil fields.
“where the enemy’s schwerpunkt is the Middle East”
It’s bi-polar: Tel Aviv and K St.
Iranian sectarianism us part of the problem. It facilitated the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is now working with Russua, Hizbullah to protect the minority, heterodox terror and murderous regime of Bashar Assad. Apparent Iranian verbal attacks on the US are meant for Muslim audiences. Otherwise it is following a policy of hypocrisy and dissimulation.
How’s life in Riyadh these days?
Actor playing your president called ISIS a “cult of death”.
Who do you think slaughtered more human beings since invention of the cult of Jewish carpenter, his followers or followers of the younger cult of Islam?
The cult of Theophilus gave birth to your “nation” and is your guiding light to this day, which is evident by the actions of those who claim to represent you.
Margolis, it puzzles me why, after all these years, you have yet to figure out that America does not fight wars to win them. America has not done that since 1945, when they screwed up and won that war before arriving at the realization of the painful and expensive consequences it produced. Since the end of WW 2, what America has specialized in, is creating and fighting wars for the purpose of producing massive profits for the MIC, a major component of which are Wall Street Banksters who serve as indispensable enablers for wars that could never be fought without their eager willingness to finance them. If you ever get around to seeing the big picture, you will begin to acquire and understanding of why the Federal Reserve Act was passed into law in 1913, and why less than 3 years later, the American people found themselves embroiled in the first of a series of senseless wars of slaughter that, in reality, have never ended. That is to say, with WW 1 leading directly to WW 2., which in turn, led to the Korean “police action”, the Vietnam War and on and on it goes to the present day. Among many important lessons Wall Street Banksters learned from mistakenly winning WW 2, is that wars produce massive profits that cannot be matched by any other investment, and that it is a very bad idea to win a war under any circumstances.
I have no idea where the “concentration of forces” is in Syria can be found, but I have the feeling that Vladimir Putin is well on the way to finding out.
Another important historical fact relating to the Boer War, is that it produced the very first concentration camps constructed by the Brits for the purpose of corralling and starving to death in unsheltered enclosures the wives and children of Boer commandoes who were, at the time, applying a shellacking on to the soldiers of the world’s sole super-power. But unlike the concentration camps constructed during WW 2 by Germany, the concentration camps constructed by the Brits contained no warm barracks, no concert halls,no swimming pools, no mess halls, nor 1st class medical facilities provided for the purpose of guarding the health and well-being of valuable Jewish munitions workers consigned to these work camps.