Yes, where is General Eisenhower?Originally Posted by Coldstreamer
Yes, where is General Eisenhower?
Ah the good old days when we new what we stood for. Noo-Ku-Lar Combat!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ynY5NvYsZY
Last edited by slapout9; 06-02-2009 at 10:43 PM. Reason: add stuff
Building another military/industrial complex somewhere, no doubt....
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
The real "mess" in hyrbid wars
In the thread “ Is Irregular Warfare Really "Irregular" Anymore?” William F Owen made the comment that “The important thing is the political objective of the operations, and how to achieve them. Ways and means, not who and where”. I’d like to respond to this here in connection with co-called “hybrid wars” (about which, I too, for what it’s worth, am sceptical if not down right incredulous). Owen states that the political objective of operations is of central importance in military operations (agreed) but that it is “ways and means” not “who and where” that should determine operational planning (disagree). Very often the ways and means is determined by who and where; we would not fight tribal insurgents in Aden the same way we fought Hitler. The end states we fought for, the enemy we were fighting and the operational environment all affected how we fought as much as why. Borrowing from Clausewitz I’d like to make the following observations about so-called hybrid wars following on from the above. According to Clausewitz strategy is something that is framed within the remarkable trinity of People-Government-Army corresponding roughly to Passion-Reason-Violence. The European, or Western, way of warfare as it has historically developed (and this includes the laws of war) relies on a sharp bifurcation between the inside of the trinity (the state) and the outside (the environment composed of other states). In Schmittian terms this corresponds to the definition of friend/enemy. Thus State A fights State B for whatever reason (of state/ raison d’etat); it’s Us against Them. This form of warfare, call it conventional if you will, is predicated upon the assumption of relatively coherent political entities which can distinguish themselves from other entities regardless of the actual political composition of the state in question (thus whether a state is Absolutist, Dictatorial, Democratic, etc is irrelevant). But what I see as a crucial development is that such cosy bifurcations are no longer possible (and this has strategic effects) when the distinction between Them and Us breaks down. For instance, and this is really my point, would our current strategy in Iraq or more pertinently Afghanistan be different if there weren’t large number of Muslims living in NATO countries who can and do affect the policy forming process either passively (through threats of violence) or actively (by supporting left-wing or other parties that espouse policies more favourable to Muslims or by creating “moral panics” among our electorates or even providing intelligence and material support to their co-religionists)? Is our strategy abroad being hamstrung or held hostage by the representatives of the people we are fighting (abroad) at home and who claim the same rights (without fulfilling either the duties or responsibilities underpinning them) as Us and who use these to engage in what Brooke Goldstein calls “lawfare”? As William F. Owen and other qualified observers have noted, what we call hybrid wars, Irregular Wars, etc. aren’t really new phenomena. The British Empire, Russian Empire, the United States in its (dare I say, Imperial phase) of continental expansion all fought “irregular”/”asymmetric”/”whatever” threats. However, these threats did not have constituencies which they could rally to their cause within the political system of their opponents thereby undermining what Carl Schmitt called the will formation of the state (i.e., the government and the people). These, let’s call them, polemically, “fifth columns”, can undermine two legs or two corners of the trinity, the government and the people, by shaping their opinion or, even attacking it (i.e, 7/7 in Britain or Madrid or even the attempt in Britain to shame our brave soldiers returning from war who discover that, actually, our enemies line our streets booing us “over here”). This, I posit, is the real “mess” of Hybrid wars given that our (NATO) states are democracies within which, procedurally at least, minorities can exert political pressure upon politicians whose strategic sense is a long as their nose and who really only care about domestic re-election. This, I would submit is the real, or at least a significant factor, in the new circumstances within which we have to fight not the supposed tactical or operational asymmetries between our forces and those of our opponents. That’s just my penny’s worth, political correctness be damned, but it’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Cont for above
Also I should mention that what is happen at home (in the UK) at least qualifies as much as an insurgency as what is going on in Afghanistan (ndeed, they are interlinked). And that this is what, I at least, understand to be the real mess which one could describe as "Hybrid".
Sorry, having a real dyslexic moment here
What I’m saying in a nutshell is that insurgency isn’t just being fought over there but over here too. The home front is as much a battleground as the foreign AO.
argh.. egad.. Tukhascevskii don't take this wrong but paragraph breaks... Pretty please?
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
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Well this pertains to my "ways and means" and not who and where. What insurgency is occurring within the UK?
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
I’m just going to do a stream of consciousness thing and see where it leads us (although I thought my original post was too all intents and purposes, for a blog at least, self-explanatory).
Firstly a working definition of insurgency, with which to begin answering your question (more for my benefit than yours), would probably go something like this, as per FM 3-24-2, “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict [/B][/I]. The key distinction between an insurgency and other movements is the decision to use violence to achieve political goals. An insurgency is typically an internal struggle within a state, not between states. It is normally a protracted political and military struggle designed to weaken the existing government’s power, control, and legitimacy, while increasing the insurgency’s power, control, and legitimacy”. Though I have issues with this I'll leave it as a heuristic steering mechansim for what (I think) I want to say.
More directly I do believe that Muslim communities constituting ‘parallel societies’ are engaged in an insurgency within their host societies. The mass of Muslims, passive though they may be (taking a backseat for the moment), provide the more politically active members of their community with an ample base from which to draw support (there are few Muslims, IMO, who would refuse mobilisation, in whatever form, once that call has been invoked with explicit reference to the Quran, the Hadith or the Shari’ a). Furthermore, the religion itself is incompatible with Western Democracies as Islam defines itself as a complete political system (this is not an invention of Qutb but is traceable to Mohammed) not merely a system of religious belief (I for one am apt to define communities as they themselves understand themselves rather than how we would like to them to understand themselves/behave). Loyalty for a Muslim is to his/her Ummah first (normatively speaking), everything else comes second.
The idea of Islam’s supremacy over any and all other political systems is “hardwired” into the Islamic mentalité. After all if you want to know what makes an Islamist you only have to look at Islam (as the COG). What is a “Radical” Muslim if not someone who has taken the Quran it its word (or Muhammad for that matter). Islam, after all, means “submit!” (it is the verbal imperative form of the root verb “he submitted”, sa-la-ma). Any system of belief that has as its title, to say nothing of its contents, the command to submit (or what? one asks?) is suspect in my eyes. Perhaps I’m prejudiced but then there’s a lot to be said for prejudice pace Burke:
"Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and duty becomes a part of his nature‟ .
As for insurgent acts; Muslims born in Britain have been found fighting their supposed compatriots (the British Armed forces) in Afghanistan; the failed Glasgow airport suicide attack; the 7/7 attacks ; the establishment of Shari ‘a courts and the declaration of the Muslim Council, now the supposed Muslim Parliament, that Shari’ a law supervenes UK constitutional law (i.e, that Muslims are beyond and even above the law of the UK) and thus directly threatens the legitimacy of parliament and constitutional democracy as the sole representative mechanism for the UK, etc. We could quibble over the distinction between the above as acts of terrorism, insurgency or political activism but I’d rather see them as forming a continuum rather than as distinct activities per se. Very often insurgencies abroad (one thinks of Afghanistan and Pakistan here but also in the wider ME) are appealing to a support base in the West drawn from their own communities who can, if activated, become proxies in the rear areas of their host states (sort of like Soviet Partisans). And let’s not forget the funding, equipping and even training of insurgents (whether that be at “paint-balling events” or hiking) undertaken or provided by Islamic charities (which see the case of the Holy Land Foundation and its relationship to CAIR in the US at the NEFA website).
Interestingly over at the blog-them-out-of-the-stone-age-blog the site founder (whose name currently escapes me) claims that the civil rights movement spearheaded by Martin Luther King qualifies as an insurgency, counter-intuitive yes, but I believe there’s a grain of truth in there and similar thinking/reasoning can be made for what’s happening here in Blighty.
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