Annihilation or Attrition?
Facing Iraq.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
February 11, 2002 8:30 a.m.

hroughout the history of Western warfare, strategists have attempted to find alternatives to the deadly tactics of annihilation. This trademark Western propensity to focus its superiority in discipline, weaponry, and logistics through head-on battles has historically shattered enemies in a matter of hours. Indeed, when Western forces met foreign adversaries that were the products of very different military traditions — the Persians at Marathon (490 B.C.), the Aztecs at Tenochtitlán (1521), or Mahdists at Omdurman (1898) — usually such hammer blows resulted in a crushed enemy and the war's end. And even during occasional setbacks such as Cannae (216 B.C.), Little Big Horn (1879), and Adowa (1896), temporarily stunned Western powers rarely lost the larger wars themselves.

Yet in internecine fighting between European or Westernized powers, what had seemed a decisive way of war turned into a bloodbath between like armies. Whereas a few minutes of pitched battle at Marathon had checked Darius I's entire invasion of Greece, Athens slugged it out with Sparta for nearly 28 years. The Roman civil wars killed more Italians than the prior three centuries of colonial campaigning had. The Boers, for example, killed far more Englishmen in a single week (December 11-16, 1899) of the Boer War — nearly 1,800 at Magersfontein, Stormberg, and Colenso alone — than did the Zulus during the entire war of 1879! We all know the sad history of the 20th century when Western armies squared off against one another in Europe.

Consequently, some Western strategists have always sought to avoid such costly fighting. They preferred wearing down an enemy through indirect attacks on his homeland, base of supplies, or allies — anything in hopes of avoiding Pyrrhic victories in which winners lose as many as the defeated. Sherman sought to avoid battle and instead march through Georgia and the Carolinas, ruining property, demonstrating the impotence of the Confederate government, and causing social and psychological turmoil. He hoped to end the war without the carnage of head-on charges that were going on in Northern Virginia between Lee and Grant.

Advocates for both strategies claim the moral high ground of reducing losses and ending conflict decisively. The practitioners of annihilation — throughout our own nation's history the more dominant and preferred tactic — argued that victory was accomplished only if the enemy was targeted, met head on, and wiped out in pitched conflict. Their critics rejoin that too often such decisive battles end in the Somme or Verdun rather than a Lepanto — and never completely rob the enemy of its civilian infrastructure to the rear that ultimately fuels war. Instead of mimicking an Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, they favored the more varied strategy of Pericles, Belisarius, or Gustavus Adolpus. The great champions of the war of maneuver and attrition — Hans Delbrück, B. H. L. Liddell Hart, and J. F. C. Fuller who had seen the carnage of the First World War — added that killing conscripted adolescents on the battlefield in endless meat-grinders was not more moral than surrounding enemies from the rear or bombing cities and civilian infrastructure.

Supporters of Grant would argue that he destroyed the Southern army without attacking civilians; Sherman's advocates would counter that their hero preferred not to have adolescent draftees killed on either side, and so unplugged the power to the rear that ran the war. Critics of Grant's tactics of annihilation argue that he was a butcher; Sherman's policy of attrition earns him the equally dark sobriquet of a "barn-burner."

How does such an age-old antithesis between direct and indirect attack apply to possible action against Iraq — a battle that will not be waged this time for the liberation of Kuwait, but for the far higher stakes of Saddam Hussein's head. Confident traditionalists would point out that Iraq is hardly a Westernized Soviet Union or China. Thus, a sudden, head-on blow — massive air strikes, coupled with armored columns, and perhaps airborne drops of special forces — might knock the Hussein regime out of power in a matter of days. If we were to annihilate the Iraqi air force, scatter the Republican Guard, and destroy the military and psychological will of the enemy to resist, in theory the bewildered country could be liberated in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months.

A quick, decisive battle would make it clear to the Iraqi population — and millions in the surrounding region — that Saddam Hussein was utterly defeated on the field of battle, rendering his tyrannical government in the eyes of his subjects an object of humiliation rather than fear. A stunned world — whether the U.N., the EU, or moderate Arab states — would be presented with a fait accompli rather than a swamp, and more likely would support rather than criticize our victory.

On the other hand, those who argue for a ratcheting up of our present tactic of attrition against Iraq call for more indirect attacks over a long and sustained basis. The northern and southern fly zones would be expanded — daily chipping away at Saddam Hussein's freedom of operation. Each week he would continue to lose face among his neighbors through his growing inability to rid his skies of loud enemy jets. Indigenous resistance by Kurds, Shiites, and democratic liberationist groups would be well supplied and encouraged — ultimately by the insertion of rapid-moving American special forces — to carve away territory on the ground and undermine the symbols of Hussein's reign. Instead of trying to end his power in hours, we would envision months of gradual erosion, as we slowly assembled a coalition of supportive powers, and tightened boycotts, sanctions, and blockades that ensured that few Americans would be killed in pitched battles.

Both strategies offer their respective advantages and drawbacks, both militarily and politically — and are not always clearly antithetical rather than complementary. My guess, however, is that Pentagon planners may well opt for the far riskier and more dramatic strategy of annihilation. While possessing Western weapons, the Iraq military is not Western in the manner of its war making, as was shown in the Gulf War. There is little chance of thousands of casualties in a mother of all battles even should we meet head-on the remnants of his Republican Guard.

If overwhelming force were applied to its key assets, both through air and ground assault, the entire military could collapse in days. Past history, the terrain of Iraq, and breakthroughs in U.S. bombing — as evidenced in Afghanistan — suggest that another Vietnam would be unlikely. In the long run a massive initial attack would invoke less worldwide criticism than months of piecemeal attacks, in which pictures of "millions" of starving Iraq children and U.N. melodramatics could slowly sap even domestic support for the conflict.

We shall probably see more of an air campaign akin to Afghanistan than what was unleashed over weeks against Serbia. Massive air strikes would target barracks and bases, command structures, rather than water, power, and sewage that will only harm the welfare of the civilian population. In Afghanistan we were able to destroy the Taliban, but keep the power grid and water supplies of the major cities pretty much intact. Indeed the wreckage that is now characteristic of the landscape there came from decades of wars of attrition, rather than the attacks of aerial annihilation that began on October 7.

Special operations might be sent in to decapitate the officer corps of the Iraqi military and the political elite loyal to Saddam Hussein. At the same time, tactical air strikes by ground-support aircraft and helicopters would accompany armored columns — perhaps 40-50,000 conventional troops — in mobile pincer attacks aimed at preventing any concentration of opposing troops and the assurance of a very public arrival of forces of liberation.

Key to such an overwhelming initial strike aimed at destroying the Iraq military in one blow would be a commensurate political and cultural information campaign. Before, not after, we go in, there would be some sort of provincial democratic government of exiles already in place. Radio, television, and print media then would more likely characterize such an assault as a liberation rather than an attack, making it clear that we do not want Iraqi land, oil, or even coerced alliance, only the presence of a consensual government that will ensure that the country is no longer a regional terror or a potential rogue nuclear or biological state. The quicker we act, the less likely would be missile attacks against Israel or gas used on the battlefield — or even worse still. We should not expect help from our European allies. Their public outrage and private acquiescence are enough, coupled with the use of Turkish bases in the region.

If at all possible, we should neither request nor accept direct or indirect aid from Saudi Arabia. We move against Saddam Hussein to annihilate his murderous and terrorist state, and so we must accept that the Saudis themselves are forever tainted with terrorism — their citizens have killed thousands of Americans, their elite has bankrolled the murderers, and their government has either winked at or been negligently ignorant of this iniquity. Indeed, the liberation of Iraq is the proper centerpiece of our own evolving strategy toward encouraging radical changes in Saudi Arabia in the post-9/11 world.

As a rule, sober diplomats and wary veterans of battle often opt for more gradual attrition, praying therein to avoid the slow enervation of a Vietnam. Those uninitiated with "the terrible arithmetic" and confident in firepower think they can pull off a war of annihilation that won't end up like the butchery of Passchendaele or Okinawa. But history rarely tells us in advance which problem calls for which type of proper solution. All we can be sure of from the past is that once the shooting starts few events transpire as originally planned — and that the most astute minds of our enemies are thinking just as hard to do to us what we seek to do to them.

So while our own strategists are pondering their best options, a madman in Baghdad with his life on the line is also conjuring up his worst strategies — everything from sending missiles into Tel-Aviv, an alliance with the tottering mullahs in Iran, and torching the region's oil fields to preparing nerve gas for our troops, a Mogadishu-like shoot-up in his capital, and terrorist attacks on our civilians.