War with Implacable Foes: What All Statesmen and Generals Need to Know

Army, May 2006 by de Czege, Huba Wass

Precision firepower enthusiasts of the air and naval services grossly underestimate the difficulty of controlling enemy activity on the ground. In a standoff fight at sea, or in the air, the enemy is relatively easy to find with modern sensors, and when the target is struck it either sinks or falls out of the sky. Battle damage assessment is simple and almost instantaneous. Even though the Desert Storm coalition was able to enforce no-fly zones in Iraq for nearly 10 years, it was not able to control circumstances and events on the ground below.

Not only are valued targets difficult to find on the ground, but it is also difficult to know how successful a strike may have been. For instance, it is difficult to differentiate a real kill from a mobility kill, and it is hard to know if the two people with their hands up speak for the entire enemy outfit or not. Ground battle damage assessment through standoff technical means is a murky science and will remain murky in the future. Standoff precision engagements require a longer period of bombardment and more raw overall destructive power to achieve the same end. The combined difficulties of finding valued targets and assessing results through standoff technical means contribute to greater delays in local outcomes. Major operations and campaigns conclude more slowly because local outcomes are exploited later. Multiple delays compound to produce longer wars. Only close combat can absolutely foreclose the enemy's ability to delay defeat at any point.

Often it is not enough to force the enemy to quit sooner rather than later, but it is also important to force acceptance of specific terms and to create acceptable enabling conditions for the peace to follow. At the tactical and operational levels not only will a subsequent action depend on the timing of the completion of a previous one, but a specific piece of ground or area needs to be held, a population center must be secured, or access to lines of communications or air and ground avenues of approach have to be assured. When reacting to aggression on allied soil, the safety of the population from even defeated, retreating and dispersed enemy soldiers has to be guaranteed. When the strategic aim is a change of regimes, it is not enough for the former regime and its soldiers to melt into the general population. Rather, the enemy regime must have no choice but to comply with the terms of the peace. In other words, the leaders of that regime, its means of resistance and the entire apparatus of control over that society must be brought under tactical control. Having destroyed the previous regime, the conqueror has to fill the power vacuum in villages, towns and cities across a foreign country to maintain social order and basic necessities of life. Only a strong contingent of soldiers and marines on the ground can suppress social breakdown, organized crime, organized resistance and incipient insurgencies. The key to the successful transition from a successful military occupation to a successful new government is to begin with more than enough soldiers and marines at the outset to ensure power on the ground during the first golden days and weeks of an occupation, and then to draw down as transfer of tactical control to local authorities permits. To begin low and increase as trouble boils up leads to two problems. Troop strength will always be behind the requirement because of delays, and such increases will run counter to natural expectations of progress both at home and among the occupied.