Sake White

Neo brought back up the subject of Abrams and Vietnam.

Big gap in posting for me. Was on a trip to Miami last week. Haven’t had much time for posting blog posts, only comments on various websites.

Why did it take so very long to learn a lesson we should have learned in the 70s in Vietnam?

Because people don’t tend to emulate the losing side’s tactics and strategies. That’s just one of the many advantages to losing, if you ask the Socialists.

They argued that the military should fight only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy the enemy.

That’s called the Bigger Hammer approach, in which everything becomes a nail when you are only using hammers.

After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war.

Well, that was kind of obvious. Most Americans, especially young ones, think the United States is invulnerable to invasion. Why did I bring that up in relation to the quote? Because the United States is only safe from invasion so long as the military Keeps Winning Wars. You lose too many wars and you end up like Carthage. Your military will break itself because in their minds, they have already lost. Then where will your precious invulnerability be then.

Nagl states that, in fighting against counterinsurgencies, “there really isn’t much new under the sun.” If so, then, why then did the counterinsurgency wheel have to be reinvented, and why was there such a delay in doing so?

Because the Bigger Hammer approach isn’t American Total War. Instead of a way to usher in more resources, Colin Powell’s doctrine is designed to save money and munitions by hitting people harder in the beginning.

Every great general was able to usher in and allocate large portions of available resources to the battle lines. Meaning they were very good at logistics, as well as strategy and tactics. Insurgency is simply a problem with logistics. And any great military leader already knows about how to take care of logistics, friendly and enemy. Because fundamentally, war is about human beings. And when a general understands human beings and how they will behave in war, the general is able to predict problems ahead of time. A military genius already has all of your moves planned out for you. For every action the genius takes, he has already calculated your response to the third tier.

He has to have a correct understanding of not just human nature, but your nature and personality and behavior, in order for his intelligence to grasp ahold of victory in war.

So if you look back at American history, you will see that American Total War was fought by Washington via guerrila tactics, Sherman via counter-insurgency and psychological warfare, Pershing via counter-insurgency vs the Moros, WWII via pooling the total resources of a nation towards victory, and so forth. Regardless of which war you are fighting, you need to be able to win and avoid losing. Insurgency is just a poor man’s way of attempting to win a war, when they don’t know how to fight conventionally.

Historically, the same dichotomy existed between the horse archers from the Asian and Russian steppes and the Roman Empire. Rome lost several legions to the hit and raid style of warfare practiced by horse archers. Because Rome had primarily heavy infantry, they didn’t fare too well in the desert while the hardy steppe ponies could ride around all day long shooting arrows at the Romans. In the end, Rome’s soldiers got tired and mentally exhausted, while the Parthians and the other tribes just needed to bring more arrows.

However, you have to realize that hit and run tactics like that will not win the battle for you. You can have 10,000 horse archers against 5,000 heavy infantry, and while you can kill and wound plenty of the infantry, you won’t be able to rout and destroy them completely without heavy cavalry or heavy infantry of your own. It has to do with mobility, or why humvees have many disadvantages when uparmored. Armor protects you, but only when you can hit the enemy. Otherwise, it’s just a way of making yourself tired. Because heavy infantry is heavy because of the firepower and armor they carry, you need equally formidable cavalry to run them down. Otherwise the infantry will pull you from your seat.

The more armor a horse archer puts on, the less stamina it has and the less effective at hit and run tactics. Even if you put on more armor on a HA, he still won’t be a match for legionaires in full body armor. Which is why the Parthians, the predecessors to the Iranian Sassanids, came up with heavy shock cavalry. Cavalry armored so much, that both the man and the horse is armored in laminated steel and bronze plates. The man needs a footstool to get on top of his horse.

Thus the only way for lightly armored horse archers with only secondary melee weapons up against Rome’s finest heavy infantry to win, is for Rome’s infantry to give up and run away. There’s no way they could do a Hannibal at Cannae. 10k horse archers can surround 5000 heavy infantry, but trying to kill that infantry without heavier support would be very hard.

This is easily applied to Iraq, given that while you need light and mobile infantry to seek and find terrorist locations, it is the main battle tank that you bring in when you finally locate a target. Or the Apache or the Spectre Gunship or the AC 130 or the GPS guided bombs. Infantry without that kind of firepower will take heavy casualties against insurgents or conventional forces. Apaches and airpower without infantry support, will never find the enemy to kill them.

The basic weapon system of melee vs range is still applicable. Meaning the farther away the enemy is, the easier you have a time of killing him in safety if you see him. The closer the enemy is, the easier a time a low tech enemy has killing a high tech longer ranged opponent. The technological advances of the US increases our weapons range, but that just means terrorists need to get up close and personal, detonate a bomb, and we suffer a defeat.

Roman legions excelled at killing up close and personal. Yet barbarian horse archers from the steppes outmaneuvered and defeated them time and time again. The US military has found out that against people who like to kill close up, it is a better idea to kill them from afar. Instead of searching house to house and looking for firefights. You get intel on the locations of enemies and just bomb them.

The basic faced by people on the steppes against horse archer raiders is very easy for us to understand. When the raiders strike, they strike fast and at unprotected towns and villages. Just like terrorists. By the time reinforcements and armies can get to the site being attacked, it is far too late. And because horse archers can strike afar, you can’t exactly run them down with infantry or even other horses. So in order to truly defeat horse archers… you needed archers and horse archers of your own. That’s just like insurgency. To defeat insurgents… you need insurgents of your own. In this case, those insurgents were the former Sunni nationalists and rebels that once fought us. Funny how historical coincidences like this occur.

Let’s hope we’ll be quicker to learn the next time.

If the US can avoid another defeat, that shouldn’t be a problem.