|
 once gave a lecture
on Clausewitz to a group of servicemen in which I referred to the
famous Prussian's admonition not to have wars without bloodshed.
An infantry officer in the audience shrugged and said, "Just
so long as it's their blood." Until this weekend, it
seemed as though the war on terror would see very few allied losses
— but then came Operation Anaconda. Just when the public was
beginning to focus on other matters, and when politicians sensed
it was safe to begin to devise ways to criticize the commander-in-chief,
the United States was faced with its first cluster of combat casualties
— as of this writing, nine dead and 40 wounded.
The largest
number of KIAs were seven soldiers in two MH-47s (the
special-operations version of the CH-47 Chinook). Details of
the engagement are conflicting. Anaconda is a long-planned, large-scale
operation aimed at cleaning out a nest of Afghan, Arab, and Chechen
al Qaeda fighters, possibly including leadership elements, who have
established fortified positions in the mountains near Gardez in
eastern Afghanistan. The Chinooks were reportedly inserting special-forces
teams and supplies in support of the operation when they were hit.
The first chopper lost one soldier when a rocket-propelled grenade
(RPG) temporarily downed it. The second, coming to assist the first,
was riddled with small-arms fire, and six more soldiers died on
the snow-swept Afghan mountainside.
Inserting heliborne
troops in the mountains during active operations is dangerous business.
In the 1980s, the Soviets used to drop Spetsnaz units behind
the mujahedeen during major offensives, to cut off escape
routes and generally cause havoc. The Afghan guerrillas eventually
learned the Soviet pattern and began to stake out probable landing
zones with small teams armed with RPGs and, later, British blowpipes
and American stingers. They would hit the choppers when they were
preparing to land, when they were relatively stationary and most
vulnerable. They also figured out the probable routes of ingress
and would place men along high ridgelines to shoot down at low-flying
targets, aiming for the fragile top and tail rotors. Today, fighting
the same type of enemy in the same terrain, the tactics — both
allied and al Qaeda — have a familiar ring.
These soldiers
were not the first allied service deaths in the war (not including
9/11, that is). Air Force Master Sgt. Evander
Earl Andrews lost his life in an accident October 10. The first
combat death was Mike
Spann, on November 25. The first soldier killed by the enemy
was Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan
Ross Chapman, on January 4. Many others have died
in the theater, by accident or from friendly fire. And ten days
ago, an MH-47 carrying eight soldiers and two
airmen went down in the waters of the southern Philippines during
exercises in support of Philippine operations against the Abu Sayyaf
terror group. No, this has not been a casualty-free war, far from
it.
The circumstances
of the recent tragedy bring to mind another battle in which a group
of elite forces came to grief, the October 3, 1993 battle in Mogadishu
that left 18 dead and 84 wounded, lately brought to the screen in
Black Hawk Down. The story makes for good cinema — American
servicemen in a bad situation, their plan gone tragically wrong,
pinned down in enemy territory, fighting for their lives. But there
are dozens of similar stories from many different wars. The significance
of that battle, the thing that made the tragedy complete, was what
took place afterwards — the U.S. pullout from Somalia. The
tactical mishap in Mogadishu had grand strategic consequences. It
became a post Cold War symbol of American feebleness, of unwillingness
to make sacrifices in pursuit of national objectives. Thereafter
casualty aversion became not simply a force-protection measure but
a guiding principle, a strategic sine qua non. It shaped
— even dominated — American political-military planning
throughout the 1990s.
The lesson
was learned quickly by our enemies. Less than two weeks after the
events in Somalia the U.S.S. Harlan County, carrying 200
US troops to Port au Prince, Haiti, and denied permission to use
force, was compelled to turn away in the face of a mob of machete-wielding
Tontons Macoute on the pier chanting "Mogadishu! Mogadishu!"
Osama bin Laden also internalized the message. His experiences of
US responses to his provocations — to the Cole attack,
the African embassy bombings, the Khobar Towers blast — all
seemed to confirm this belief. The al Qaeda leaders believed that
the American reply to 9/11 would be a post-Somalia style assault,
a cruise-missile volley or bombing raid, easily survivable in their
many secure bunkers. He never expected the Americans to pay him
a visit in person, and even if they tried, their will would weaken
after suffering a few casualties and they would give up as they
had in the past. Ayman Zawahri, leader of the Egyptian Jihad group,
stated as much on his portion of the October 7 bin Laden video,
noting that the US had "fled in panic from Lebanon and Somalia."
The "Crusaders" had no stomach for real war.
But the September
attacks redefined the terrain, and a new team of leaders were on
hand to map it. The existing contingency plans were brought out,
reviewed, then scrapped. New guidelines were formulated to meet
new objectives. Casualty infliction replaced casualty aversion,
and in the process of planning and executing their revolutionary
style of war, the Bush team found that they could have both.
Alas, no plan
is perfect. No operations go off without a hitch. Sometimes the
circumstances are fatal, as they were yesterday. But the differences
between this shoot down and Mogadishu are vast. Yes, men died, soldiers
were sacrificed, but this time not needlessly, not in vain. In both
cases the enemy received worse than they gave, but this time we
will see the operation through to its completion. The word from
the top is unequivocal. "We intend to continue the operation
until those al Qaeda and Taliban who remain are either surrendered
or killed," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said Monday. "The
choice is theirs." As Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard
Myers added, "It seems they have chosen to stay and to fight
to the last, and we hope to accommodate them." Moreover, resolve
at the front is equally plain — of the 40 men wounded in Operation
Anaconda, half have already returned to battle. Let the world well
mark the meaning of March 4 — Mogadishu is history.
|
