Kill Faster...
Prajña | 20.05.2004 12:41
The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.
During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.
It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.
During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.
It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.
Original article:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/21201.htm
May 20, 2004 -- IN Iraq last month, I learned a great deal about the future of combat. By watching TV.
During the initial fighting in Fallujah, I tuned in al-Jazeera and the BBC. At the same time, I was getting insider reports from the battlefield, from a U.S. military source on the scene and through Kurdish intelligence. I saw two different battles.
The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.
During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.
It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.
The Marines in Fallujah weren't beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. By lies.
Get used to it.
This is the new reality of combat. Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops will have to go in the future. And we can't change it. So we had better roll up our camouflage sleeves and deal with it.
The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.
That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.
Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight.
With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up.
We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster now.
Even in Operation Desert Storm, the effect of images trumped reality and purpose. The exaggerated carnage of the "highway of death" north from Kuwait City led us to stop the war before we had sufficiently punished the truly guilty — Saddam's Republican Guard and the regime's leadership. We're still paying for that mistake.
In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us — despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us.
The global media disrupted the U.S. and Coalition chains of command. Foreign media reporting even sparked bureaucratic infighting within our own government.
The result was a disintegraton of our will — first from decisive commitment to worsening hestitation, then to a "compromise" that returned Sunni-Arab Ba'athist officers to power. That deal not only horrifed Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, it inspired expanded attacks by Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'a thugs hoping to rival the success of the Sunni-Arab murderers in Fallujah.
We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn't know what hit us.
The implication for tactical combat — war at the bayonet level — is clear: We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we're apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.
We have to speed the kill.
For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops.
We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.
Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them.
Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists.
To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.
Time is the new enemy.
Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides.
But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies.
The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us.
If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.
Retired Army officer Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad."
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/21201.htm
May 20, 2004 -- IN Iraq last month, I learned a great deal about the future of combat. By watching TV.
During the initial fighting in Fallujah, I tuned in al-Jazeera and the BBC. At the same time, I was getting insider reports from the battlefield, from a U.S. military source on the scene and through Kurdish intelligence. I saw two different battles.
The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.
During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.
It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.
The Marines in Fallujah weren't beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. By lies.
Get used to it.
This is the new reality of combat. Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops will have to go in the future. And we can't change it. So we had better roll up our camouflage sleeves and deal with it.
The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.
That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.
Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight.
With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up.
We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster now.
Even in Operation Desert Storm, the effect of images trumped reality and purpose. The exaggerated carnage of the "highway of death" north from Kuwait City led us to stop the war before we had sufficiently punished the truly guilty — Saddam's Republican Guard and the regime's leadership. We're still paying for that mistake.
In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us — despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us.
The global media disrupted the U.S. and Coalition chains of command. Foreign media reporting even sparked bureaucratic infighting within our own government.
The result was a disintegraton of our will — first from decisive commitment to worsening hestitation, then to a "compromise" that returned Sunni-Arab Ba'athist officers to power. That deal not only horrifed Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, it inspired expanded attacks by Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'a thugs hoping to rival the success of the Sunni-Arab murderers in Fallujah.
We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn't know what hit us.
The implication for tactical combat — war at the bayonet level — is clear: We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we're apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.
We have to speed the kill.
For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops.
We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.
Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them.
Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists.
To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.
Time is the new enemy.
Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides.
But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies.
The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us.
If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.
Retired Army officer Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad."
Prajña
Homepage:
http://www.DeclarePeace.org.uk/
Comments
Hide the following 10 comments
What they were saying only in private
20.05.2004 13:27
The NY Post is Rupert Murdoch's tabloid paper in New York, by the way, which might explain why this sounds so familiar.
These psychopaths are still fighting the Vietnam war. Who's going to protect us from them?
Ian
T.W.A.T
20.05.2004 13:27
a sinister fear driven blood cult is trying
to take over the world...
WWIV is the war between narrow theocratic polarized dogmas...
it is a deliberate ploy...
it is an empire built on an authoritarian global apparatus
Nation states are run by global corporate elitists
using war to drive a global fake central bank
run mandrake system economy...
they want the cake ...to eat it whole.
they want you to still
believe in countries and patriotism
while they chew up both the loyal & the demonized enemy
making Billions through global arms deals...
and puttin everyone in lifelong debt for the privelidge of living
in a police state...
victor ace
We won a long time ago
20.05.2004 14:19
The majority of those contributing here to IM are so far divorced from mainstream thinking as to be almost clasified alongside the Flat Earth Society. The call for so called "direct action" (which usualy results in little if any response on the day) is a clear indicator of the minority viewpoint that is left of centre politics. It says to the world,
"We can't get many people to agree with us so we have to make a fuss to make it look as though we and our views matter"
Sites like IM and Urban 75 reflect the world as it once was. The US now does what it wants, when it wants and the idea that "protest" has even the slightest effect on them is laughable.
The world changes forever after Sept 11 and there are those who still haven't realised. You may not like it, and you may well make a fuss about it but this is your future and the future of the world.
Alan
yawn
20.05.2004 14:45
Yes, the world is changing. We think many of those changes are for the worst. Do you suggest we sit back and let them happen, or continue working hard to spread (not impose) our diverse views and to concretely resist the drift to fascism?
I know which I'm going to do, and it doesn't involve sitting on my arse while the world goes to hell, doing nothing but slagging off those trying to make a difference.
.
Carry on
20.05.2004 15:15
It makes no difference. The world has changed and you have been left behind
Alan
No Alan
20.05.2004 16:06
this is how they will win of we're not vigilant
get well soon :)
tekno anarchist
you're right
20.05.2004 16:13
However capitalism is still a system based on infinite expansion (must grow, growth, growth, growth) or collapse, meanwhile we live in a FINITE ecosystem. think it through.
Our 'sucessful' capitalism has emerged in the last 100 years in that period we have used up most of the oil reserves on this planet (laid down over millions of years)
All of our transport systems are based around oil, our fertilisers are made from oil, plastics are made from oil. Oil is a 'meta' resource...
But now the age of cheap oil is coming to a end. (dont take my word for it read the research of a petro-geophysicist http://planetforlife.com/End%20of%20Cheap%20Oil.htm )or yesterdays frontpage of the wall st journal.
once you have read the material in the link above have a look at this : http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
and ask yourself if you should be feeling so smug, were you planning to have any children? grandchildren?
apologist
If that's winning ...
20.05.2004 17:59
Morgues full to the brim with women and children
Infrastructure degraded[sic]
The arab and wider world aflame and in deep hatred for western 'values'[sic]
The environment lurching from bad to worse
Pollutants filling our lungs, bodies, children and survival systems
Ecosystems being extinguished
Radioactive substances multiplying - without any idea what to do with them for the next hundred generations (drop 'em on a third world country!)
The gap between the rich, the super rich and the unimaginably rich wider than ever (without mention even of the destitute (and who mentions those nobodies anyhow?)
The infantile approach rules ... we're winning your not {blows raspberry ..)
Gosh - it defies belief sometimes, just exactly how stupid some clever folk can be ...
A brief golden period for a fraction of the worlds inhabitants ... winning?
TWAT.
jackslucid
e-mail: jackslucid@hotmail.com
And don't forget...
20.05.2004 19:05
All that's holding capitalism together is the massive defense expenditure, consumer goods sales racked up on credit, and of course the good old cash cow of third-world loansharking, still sucking interest out of the southern world from loans to the dictators the capitalists installed in the 70s. If just one of these pillars goes suddenly, the western economy will be utterly fucked.
But maybe it will seem better if you keep chanting what you've read in the Sun about how fucking marvellous it's all going for capitalism, heh heh.
Ian
WOW, what a wonderful thread ...
20.05.2004 21:01
Infantile behaviour is due to infantile moral development. If you do a search on "Lawrence Kohlberg, moral development" you will see that he describes various stages of moral development: from the "Stage of Punishment and Obedience" - stage one, good is what you get rewarded for and bad is what you get punished for; to the "Stage of Universal Ethical Principles" where:
"Particular laws or social agreements are usually valid because they rest on such principles. When laws violate these principles, one acts in accordance with the principle. Principles are universal principles of justice: the equality of human rights and respect for the dignity of human beings as individuals. These are not merely values that are recognized, but are also principles used to generate particular decisions.
The reason for doing right is that, as a rational person, one has seen the validity of principles and has become committed to them."
Perhaps the neocons are at stage one, infantile, "Stage of Punishment and Obedience". Reading more into what Kohlberg had to say about stage one we discover that children, at this stage in their development, believe that laws (right and wrong) come down from heaven and from Grown Ups; they just are, you can't question them and the only way you can tell what is good and what is bad is that you get rewarded for one and punished for the other. And, sure enough, this is what your Christian fundamentalists are teaching their children.
Maybe I am doing them an injustice and they are really at stage two or even three – their behaviour and rhetoric display elements from a number of the lowest levels of moral development.
There is a rather fine summary of Kohlberg’s stages at http://www.ccp.uchicago.edu/grad/Joseph_Craig/kohlberg.htm
We simply need to find the courage to encourage these people to develop a little. That is the task.
And now for a little light relief: - a poem:
WAR ON DISSENT
Excuse me, Sir, I think there’s an error
It says here you’re fighting
A war against terror
Major Smith says, and Bush just repeated,
That one day you’ll have
This terror defeated
But I don’t believe that it’s terror you meant
It looks like you’re fighting
A war on dissent
You state that your aim
Is Full-Spectrum-Dominance
Global Supremacy
USA Prominence
You’re killing for peace and imposing democracy
Imprisoning freedom
That’s blatant hypocrisy
It’s blindingly clear
As we huddle in fear
Whether we protest
Or whether we cower
We’re crushed by the heel
Of American Power.
Love, peace, equality
Prajña Pranab
http://www.DeclarePeace.org.uk
Prajña
Homepage: http://www.DeclarePeace.org.uk/