Intro to the Tactics and Technique of Small Wars

[Jedburgh]

I’ll be the odd one out on this one. We did well in isolated banana wars that required relatively few resources (with the Philippines being an exception, but the Philippines remains a basket case politically and economically much like the other nations we had temporary success in) and they were not fought in the main stream media. Today’s battlefield is not yesterday’s battlefield....

Bill, I don't believe anyone is stating that in the "old days" they executed better - or that we are mirror-imaging ideals of yore onto the COE. However, I still argue that much of those hard-learned lessons of our predecessors, learned at the expense of blood and national treasure, were ignored by the conventional Army until we reached a crisis point. Despite the differences between now and then, there are many insightful pieces dissecting the many mistakes made at the time that have only been brought into professional discussion after we are faced with near-disaster. The almost complete ignorance/dismissal for so long of such a large chunk of material in the professional development of soldiers and leaders was inexcusable. Particularly in the light of the nature of ops we were executing even before OEF/OIF. Thankfully, we are doing much better in that regard these days. Although I would also state that there are still great gaps between operational reality and TRADOC POIs in how we are training many critical MOSs.

We didn’t do so well with small wars during the cold war because small wars became a global phenomenon and we didn’t have the resources to conduct legacy COIN strategies and nation building throughout S. America, SE Asia, and Africa....

We also didn't do so well with small wars during the Cold War era because we often focused too much on the bipolar superpower conflict in each case and ignored the real underlying issues in the conflict. This permitted the warring parties to manipulate the superpower standoff to gain support of one or the other to their own ends, and the superpowers went along with their focus narrowed by blinders....

That brings me to my point about our national security interests and small wars, and that is small wars are very expensive and resource extensive, and when played out in the mass media they are draining on our nation's psyche. Iraq is what it is, I don’t want to dwell on it, but when I look at it and other small wars we have been and are engaged in and the associated cost that usually only yields limited and temporary results (Haiti as an example), then I think we need to be very select in determining exactly what type of fight we want to engage in based on a number of variables.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Lack of proper planning and poor target selection achieves results commensurate with the effort. However, a massive chunk of that resides at the national political level and there is little the military can do except plan and execute to the best of its ability within the parameters that the political leaders provide.