More Feedback On Military Preparedness And Understanding War

The original post on military preparedness, Is America Ready For War?, continues to draw informed comment. Since its such an important topic—one which is widely misunderstood—and is so topical, I’ll continue to present some of this commentary. I have some additional related material as well.

First, a briefer—but pointed—comment from a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous but who has long experience in the field:

The US military is incapable of going to war, and I mean just getting to the war. We financed twenty years of misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan through deficit spending. We "deferred" maintenance on our existing major systems (aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, communications, advanced weapons systems, everything). The majority of our fighter, bomber, and heavy lift aircraft are grounded (I don't know the precise numbers, but an educated SWAG is that less than 30% are airworthy). Our pilots don't get enough flight hours to remain mission capable. The same is true for all major systems.

The military that did back-to-back combat tours for years no longer exists. All those folks are gone, retired or just got out. The military today is inexperienced. In the US military, you want to know someone's priorities, observe how they spend their time and money. The US military doesn't spend time and money preparing to fight.

Meanwhile, the Russians, Chinese, and even the Iranians have spent the last quarter century modernizing their capabilities. 

The author of this next comment formerly taught at the National War College, so it’s unsurprising that he presents a “bigger picture” overview. He begins from von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is politics by other means:

With all do [sic] respect to LTC Robert Fausti, his comment might be a bit misleading:

We haven’t had effective military planning for years. We proceed on political assumptions. [Again: sic. Should = “We need to proceed …”?]

There is no purpose to military planning without a political objective (and assumptions).

See Dead Carl (von Clausewitz)

To quote Christopher Bassford (https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Bassford/Trinity/TrinityTeachingNote.htm):

Clausewitz’s trinity comprises three specific elements. The identity of those elements is readily evident to anyone who actually reads the first paragraph of his description: It is “composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason....” (emphasis added). This set of elements is usually labeled “emotion/chance/reason”; sometimes “violence/chance & probability/rational calculation”; or, even more abstractly, “irrationality/nonrationality/rationality.”

However, this enumeration of the elements of the trinity—whichever set of words one chooses for shorthand—is not universally understood. Prior to the American debacle in Vietnam, no one writing in English had paid any serious attention to the trinity. The term first achieved prominence in somewhat skewed form in U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr’s influential 1981 study, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (written at the U.S. Army War College).*2Summers focused on a secondary set of elements that seemed extremely relevant in the specific circumstances in which American military thinkers found themselves during and after the defeat in Indochina. This useful secondary trinity consists of the people, the army, and the government.

We need a political objective, then a military aim.

C R Krieger

Now, anyone who has been exposed to Neocon strategery will recognize that they typically deploy blizzards of theorizing and ratiocination. Nevertheless, the fact that all their supposed strategery has repeatedly led the American Empire into dead end debacles is a clear sign that they have not internalized von Clausewitz’s trinity—specifically, the third element of rational calculation. They are driven by desire, by wish, by raw emotion, which they present in the deceptive form of a rational theoretical policy framework, but which in reality misses the most fundamental requirement: a policy goal that is realistically attainable. That’s a dead giveaway that, for all their superficially rational calculations, it’s raw emotion that’s driving their calculations—not reason.

Doug Macgregor has stated this repeatedly. For example:

in Washington there is almost a non-stop drum beat for war with Iran. it's really quite disturbing. again there's no thinking--it's all emotion.

In another outstanding monologue today Danny Davis makes the same point in his own way. The lack of truly rational planning is the thread that runs throughout, but here near the end, where he speaks of doing things “wisely”, of taking past experience into account, rather than being driven by chest beating emotion:

[15:57]

I'm here to tell you, if we thought the Iraq War was bad--and it was--if we get sucked into a war in the Middle East against Iran it will be so much worse than you think, and all of these big proud guys who beat their chest and talk about how, 'Yeah, we're gonna show Iran, and we're going to be tough to them!' they have no clue what's going to happen after the bombs drop. See, they want they want to tell you, they want to imply, that Iran is just a paper tiger and they would just shrivel and stop the first time some bombs hit. But for God's sake we've got so much experience on the ground that shows that [things don't] work that way. If anyone had any doubts, just look at what's happening right now with Hamas and and Israel. They keep getting pounded heavily, over and over, and they don't quit. They just keep going. And the risk of war with Hezbollah in Lebanon is rising. The possibility of Iran coming in--you already have the Houthis down in the Red Sea. Everywhere you want to look there's the risk of War this is the time, folks, this is the time right now, on the 6th of January 2024. There is no war that we're sucked into yet. We have the chance at this moment to back out of this wisely, to protect our flanks, to get our troops out of harm's way, redeploy them to places they're more protected and less vulnerable to any of these Iran backed groups. Get our troops out of Iraq. Let's do it responsibly. Let's do it in synchronization so it's not this willy nilly run dash to the exit like we did in Afghanistan.

Lastly, I’ll provide a simple link. We’ve cited Jacques Baud’s views in the past. Baud is a former Swiss army colonel who specialized in intelligence and who, in the past, worked closely with the Ukrainian military. He has written a book, which is being translated into English. The first chapter is available online in English, and the topic seems highly relevant:

The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat

This passage will give you an idea of the theme of the book, as well as how it ties in with some of the comments we’ve published on preparedness—because preparedness is about a lot more than just weapons systems. Baud begins, if I may interpret a bit, by distinguishing between the use of reason as geared to true understanding, and a merely superficial appeal to rationalization:

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

That is why we lose our wars. For so many Americans, history and philosophy and political theory that goes beyond tactics to win elections is … boring. Not so for Putin. Putin is winning.