There is something vaguely comical about this report: “The White House is considering a bipartisan commission to tackle the nation’s swelling deficit, as it seeks to show resolve on a problem that threatens its broader agenda.” So as the White House and Congress — the real government — spend and tax us into oblivion, they are also planning to set up a shadow government to behave responsibly and counteract the damage the elected leaders are inflicting on us.
When you hear that they want to bring ”Republicans and Democrats together to make tough decisions about how to cut costs or raise revenue in areas including Social Security, Medicare and taxes” or that the White House thinks this will “show that the Obama administration is serious about tackling the deficit while postponing any real moves until after the 2010 elections,” you have to marvel at the low regard with which they hold the voters.
Apparently, the urge to do all this heavy lifting themselves, beginning with a plan to halt the march of the hugely irresponsible ObamaCare, is one easily stifled. And they expect that the public will actually give them credit for shirking their responsibility to govern. Sen. Judd Gregg isn’t buying any of it: “You’ve got to look at their actions, not their words, and their actions are to massively expand the government.” And if the White House and the Congress were really serious about halting that massive expansion, they wouldn’t be spending nearly all of their time on a government takeover of health care. But maybe the voters won’t notice, right? Hmm. I think they’ve got that one wrong.
As I’ve argued before, one of the greatest obstacles to overcome in adjusting our military for “hybrid wars” is the basic understanding of war harbored by the American population. By far the biggest reason we have never designed a military — in advance — to successfully occupy foreign lands, and fight in their streets and grain fields, is that, as Americans, we don’t WANT to.
We want wars, if they are necessary, to be fought and won with rapid, decisive combat power; and to leave behind them political situations that are at least defined without our direct, continuing intervention between civil factions, if we can’t achieve something more categorical. The armed truce on the Korean peninsula is one thing: patrolling villages in a non-linear battlespace another.
For all our continental scope, we think like a maritime power, preferring to effect abrupt change through expeditionary force. We have a constitutional distaste for armed babysitting, and I doubt the day is coming soon when, as a people, we will be politically ready to choose it in advance, as the model for which we resource our armed forces.
Nor is this a stupid perspective. It is quite correct to perceive the guerrilla/civil strife aspect of hybrid wars as being prone to becoming lengthy, indecisive, politically ambivalent, bloody, and morale-breaking. Petraeus and our forces in Iraq are, we hope, overcoming the sense that it HAS to produce failure. But the fact that hybrid wars will always be characterized by length, and a unique susceptibility to ambiguity in measures of effectiveness, cannot recommend them to Americans as the model for our national warfighting concept.
Military officers — I’m a retired one myself — justly argue that we do injury to ourselves as a nation, by constantly arming and training our military to fight rapid, decisive conventional wars, and then asking them to fend off guerrilla forces in occupations with ambivalent or incremental objectives. The problem, though, will be getting the people and their representatives to accept that planning for occupations and guerrilla fighting is a feasible, acceptable, and suitable AMERICAN national security posture.
Let’s not make the opposit error, however.
Each situation, each opponent requires its own unique analysis and solution. We can’t make the mistake of applying the solution of Iraq automatically to other situations, like, for instance Hezbollah in Lebanon. I would gladly hear from more informed and expert sources on this, but the chief problem with Israel’s approach to Hezbollah in 2006 was that it played right into the strengths of the terrorists. When dealing with a well-entrenched enemy in heavily fortified positions, you do not confront them head-on. We tried that on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and paid heavily for it. Instead, as the Germans showed in 1940 and Patton showed in 1944, you encircle and envelope the enemy and turn his fortifications against him by trapping him there and cutting off his supplies and lines of communication. Instead of Israeli forces stumbling forward, head-on into Hezbollah traps and bunkers, they should have used their superior mobility to go around those positions and occupy Hezbollah’s rear areas. This would not only have kept Israeli casualties down but civilian ones as well. And, perhaps most critically, would have allowed the Israelis to dictate the terms of any cease fire by having troops on the ground, surrounding Hezbollah, forcing the terrorists to either starve and die or come out of their holes and be annihilated by IDF’s superior fire. In that position, a cease fire is to Israel’s advantage because it puts all of the burden on Hezbollah to remove themselves from their fortresses or slowly die. In the meantime, the Israeli air force and reconnaisance could have developed clear, Hezb. targets and used precision munitions to put constant pressure on the terrorists to stop the missile attacks. This would also, incidentally, have been a huge embarassment for Hezbollah to be trapped in a web of their own making (outsmarted again by the Israelis) and for Syria/Iran who would be under enormous pressure to come to the aid of their terrorist allies.
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