Extreme or factual or just plain wolf, wolf, wolf
typos-R-us views might seem a little extreme to many, and more relevant they seem undoable to most (myself included), but his heavy stick approach (total war), as he implied, was our approach during WWII, and we brought both the German and Japanese population to their knees, which resulted in only minor insurgency problems after the conflict ended. This was a view expressed by an Air Force field grade officer elsewhere in the Council as many of you will recall.
I have noted how effective the Hearts and Minds (HAM) approach worked with the Germans and Japanese after they were defeated, I’m sure that if we didn’t use the HAM approach we would have had serious problems (we would have pushed both of them into the Communist’s arms). However, I have seen little evidence where the HAM approach has worked on enemy’s who were not yet defeated (hard to define), and I would love to see some examples (if any group can find it, it will be this one).
I still don’t discount the HAM approach though, it may be we’re on the right track, but we’re simply doing it wrong? Obviously we haven’t won their hearts and minds if they’re still shooting at us (fairly obvious metric and a very functional one for every grunt out there). I think our HAM approach is frequently a checklist approach, for example, a commander was taught that in COIN he needs to win the hearts and mind of the people, the people are the center of gravity. What does he or she do? O.K. he will deliver some rice here (don't forget the camera), build a school there, deliver school books over there, and now I'm done winning heart and minds. What’s next? What we seem to miss is that the HAM strategy is actually a very complex endeavor. It requires many disciplines (security, civil affairs, psychological operations, interagency coordinated efforts, a functional understanding of the culture, funding, putting the right face on it, etc….). Yet, what do we do, build a school, deliver books, deliver rice, and then we’re done. We only made their life better for a few moments, then they have to return the real world, while we live in our fantasy world where we think we actually did something good. While I have seen little evidence that the HAM strategy has worked, I have also seen little evidence that we really know how to implement it. It is more than simple and random acts of kindness.
I agree with Francois that war is an extension of politics, of course in today’s age what does that really mean? Perhaps most importantly Clausewitz stated that a nation’s leaders’ must understand the nature of the war they are about to embark on. This is first and foremost, and if we get that wrong, the strategy we have will likely fail. We obviously got it wrong in Iraq, and I think in Afghanistan. We know this war is about defeating a radical ideology, one that can burn like a brush fire across Muslim populations world wide if it gets the fuel and wind it needs, which is exactly what would happen if we used typos-R-us approach. This war is not restricted to Iraq, every misstep in Iraq has repercussions worldwide from Lebanon, to Detroit, to Morocco, to Indonesia. It is hard to defeat a nation without borders with military might alone.