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 ne
of the great trends of the modern world has been a blind faith in
the overwhelming power of technology and material wealth. In military
matters, of course, it is natural to equate prowess with plenty
of high-tech weapons — as we have seen from the one-sided devastation
in the Gulf, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. But just as important
as sophisticated guns, armor, and planes are discipline, logistics,
communications, morale, and the larger values that sustain militaries
— culture, government, economics, and social structures.
In 1991 our
tanks were far better than Iraq's. But had the American crews been
in outdated Russian models — and in turn had the Republican
Guard attacked in our superior Abrams tanks — I am not sure
there would have been much of a difference in the final outcome.
Tankers die unless they are highly disciplined. They must be taught
fire control, remain in constant communication, and be adept at
mobile tactics. Their machines require maintenance on rigid, almost
hourly schedules. And their crews must feel, if only in a vague
sense, that they are using their expertise gained from long hours
of personal sacrifice and physical exhaustion for a good cause —
one that reflects not only the professionalism of the U.S. Army,
but also is consistent with the values of America.
In that larger
context, culture, morale, and training can trump both modern weapons
and numbers on the battlefield. The Rangers and Delta Force operatives
who were trapped in Mogadishu — like similarly beleaguered
and encircled soldiers from Rorke's Drift to Khe Sanh — were
vastly outnumbered. While the Somalis lacked the innate ability
to fabricate modern weapons, their imported automatic arsenal nevertheless
ensured that there was not that much difference between the rate
of fire and lethality of an AK-47 and an M-16. RPGs downed two multimillion-dollar
attack helicopters.
What, then,
gave the Americans the edge, and allowed them to kill over 50 of
the enemy for every one soldier lost — and to escape from an
urban hellhole? Not numbers — nor familiarity with the local
terrain, nor ease of logistics, nor, as it turned out, surprise
or even superior tactics. Clearly, the answer was that the Americans
were far better disciplined to fight in close cohesion and in small
units. They were much better trained to follow orders and to communicate
and exchange ideas freely with officers and subordinates alike —
and much freer to change preconceived ideas and alter tactics at
a moment's notice. The outnumbered and surrounded Americans —
who were denied the use of armor by the Clinton administration —
even enjoyed better morale. They surely felt that their cause —
feeding rather than stealing from the starving — was the more
moral and lawful mission.
The study of
war also tells us that often large, well-equipped armies can crumble
quite easily. Thousands of Saddam's infantry in 1991 simply surrendered
to hovering helicopters. In spring 1940, the French army was Europe's
largest — with good weapons, fighting on its home soil, and
anchored by elaborate fortifications. Its previous heroics in World
War I had proved that Frenchmen once had the ability to keep German
invaders out of Paris. Yet their divisions dissolved in little more
than six weeks. Why? Fear, despair, and confusion — the harvest
of some 20 years of pacifism, moral relativism, and socialism.
Darius III
led one of the great armies of the ancient world against Alexander
the Great at both Issus and Gaugamela. Despite outnumbering the
Macedonians by at least 5-1, holding the high ground, defending
his home soil, aided by local populations and possessing keen knowledge
of the surrounding landscape, the multicultural imperial army disintegrated
in little more than an hour. Alexander's phalangites — who
were trained to march in time, to define discipline as keeping in
rank rather than rushing out to engage in individual combat, and
to march and retreat on orders — simply tore apart any enemy
contingents foolish enough to charge their sea of pikes. In the
same manner, the élan and discipline of the Companion Cavalry
— mostly horse lords who felt themselves on a near par with
their twenty-something leader Alexander — meant that they could
plunge into and break apart the Persian line, with little worry
that they would be overwhelmed by tens of thousands of enemy infantry.
In the mother of all battles, Alexander led his men at Gaugamela
from the front; Darius, like his predecessors in earlier invasions
of Greece, scrambled for safety to the rear at the first hint of
danger.
The Zulus in
1879 outnumbered their British invaders by at least 50-1. At Rorke's
Drift they were equipped with the finest weapons in the British
Empire — stolen after their surprise slaughter of a British
column the night before at Islawhanda. Nevertheless, less than 100
able-bodied British-surrounded 5,000 Zulus for 16 hours of continual
firing. The key to the British victory was not their superb single-shot
Martini-Henry rifles — the Zulus had more of them than did
the British. The edge, as in the case of automatic weapons in Mogadishu,
was in how they were used.
British junior
officers maintained strict fire control. Redcoats, again like the
Americans in Mogadishu — were masters of firing in concert,
knew intimately the range and variance of their weapons, and protected
the comrades at their sides. In contrast, the courageous Zulus —
like the Somalis — attacked in uncoordinated packs, lacked
an overall centralized command, often shot randomly and without
careful aim. Few seemed to have any training or knowledge about
either the proper tactics of small-arms fire or the standard use
and maintenance of modern firearms. Any would-be killer can be given
a sophisticated weapon — whether a Somali irregular, an Iraqi
tanker, a Zulu warrior, or an Aztec lord — who attempted to
turn captured crossbows against the conquistadors — but the
proper use of such weapons, not their mere existence on the battlefield,
determines whether they turn out to be haphazardly dangerous or
instead uniformly deadly.
In 1967 pre-battle
accounts in magazines and newspapers showed regional maps of the
Middle East with scary tables "proving" why Israel could
not win: its tiny military had far fewer tanks, planes, and infantrymen
than had the collective Arab world. But such fact sheets could not
reveal what is inside a man's heart, or how he aims a gun, or what
he does with a radio, or how he relates to his comrades under fire
— or the type of nation that raised, supported, and will cure,
pension, and bury him. Had graphs existed to chart morale, gauge
past training, calibrate discipline, assess command, and evaluate
tactical flexibility, then pundits could have predicted a preordained
Arab defeat. A Middle Eastern mob chanting and screaming for blood
in the street seems a scary thing; an Israeli armored column or
squadron of jets is a deadly thing.
Such age-old,
unchanging, and absolute laws are critical when we consider the
fascist regime in Iraq. A decade ago, even sophisticated observers
simplistically counted tanks and planes. They echoed media accounts
of imported Iraqi high-tech antiaircraft-guns and field artillery,
related all the horrific stories of the Iranian war, and then without
much debate concluded that Saddam's battle-hardened veterans might
kill "20,000 and more" Americans. Instead we were "surprised"
that we lost less than 200 soldiers — nearly as many to friendly
as to hostile fire.
You see, few
military historians had reminded us that Iraqis previously had fought
Iranians, not Americans; that their conscripted 18-year-olds did
not want to risk being incinerated for a mass murderer — unless
they knew that there was some chance of winning or at least profiting
from the battle; and that even the best imported weapons can fail
if they are not rigorously maintained and constantly modified and
modernized. The same bloodthirsty Iraqis who gleefully looted, raped,
and tortured the unarmed in Kuwait were weeks later defecating,
weeping, praying to their god, and on their knees before Apaches,
Abrams tanks, and grim-faced American infantrymen.
If the
United States feels that an attack on Iraq is in its national interest
and will save lives in the long run, and if the American
people believe that their children are fighting and dying to rid
the globe of a murderer who in a few years may try to murder them,
then the result is absolutely predictable — despite the hysterics
of the Arab street and the table-talk in Paris and Brussels. We
Americans are lectured to by the angry Muslim world that we are
arrogant, and by the envious Europeans that we are hubristic. In
fact, most of us are completely unaware just how strong our nation
has become in the last two decades — culturally, militarily
and economically. In some 2,500 years of Western civilization there
has rarely been a single world power that enjoyed such overwhelming
military superiority as does the United States at the millennium
over both its adversaries and allies — and yet in the last
20 years has used its imperium so consistently to promote democracy,
the general tranquility, and world freedom.
Saddam will
have the greater number of troops in the theater, the easier logistics,
and the more intimate familiarity with local landscapes and people.
And like Darius III he too will lose badly. True, the perennial,
unpredictable wild cards of battle — inclement weather, unforeseen
new deadly weapons, sudden coups, the appearance of an unknown Iraqi
Hannibal or Guderian, horrible accidents and rampant confusion —
may well alter the planned sequence and progress of our attack.
But ultimately we will fight as we live. Thus our military will
simply be an expression of our larger values of freedom, consensual
government, secular rationalism, capitalism, religious tolerance,
individualism, group discipline, civilian audit, self-critique and
egalitarianism. And so we will win decisively a war that we did
not seek — allies or not.
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