The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How to Win Wars

Posted on | December 29, 2014 | 258 Comments

Once, during Stonewall Jackson’s famous 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, some Union cavalry charged the rear guard of Jackson’s column and were nearly annihilated by a deadly volley of infantry fire. The officer who reported this action to Jackson was Col. John Mercer Patton (an ancestor of the famed WWII General George S. Patton). In conveying his report to Jackson, the colonel expressed “regret” at the enemy’s heavy losses. After he had finished hearing Patton’s report, Jackson asked him: “Colonel, why do you say you saw those Federal soldiers fall with regret?”

The colonel said he admired the courage and vigor the foe had shown, and felt a natural sympathy for such brave soldiers.

“No, shoot them all,” Jackson replied. “I do not wish them to be brave.”

That story, from R.L. Dabney’s famous biography of Jackson, came to mind today when I saw a story in the New York Times:

Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?
Trying to decipher this complex enemy — a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army — is such a conundrum that General Nagata assembled an unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. . . .
“We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” he said, according to the confidential minutes of a conference call he held with the experts. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.” . . .
This month, Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, said the increasing effort by the Islamic State to branch out to countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya “is a huge area of concern.” About 1,000 foreign fighters flock to Iraq and Syria every month, American intelligence officials say, most to join arms with ISIS. . . .

Good! Let every jihadi son of a bitch on the planet join ISIS, so that we can give every one of them a one-way ticket to Hell.

It has never been the case that the United States lacked the weaponry or manpower necessary to destroy our enemies. The problem in regard to Islamic terrorism has been (a) locating the enemy, and (b) maintaining the political will to keep fighting the enemy until he is defeated. Whatever the number of bloodthirsty fanatics in the Islamic world, the number is not infinite. If we kill every one of them we find, eventually the enemy will run out of volunteers for martyrdom.

Do these generals not study our own history? The Union was in peril of losing the Civil War until Lincoln put U.S. Grant in charge, because Grant understood war in the same simple terms as Stonewall Jackson and every other great commander in history. There is no such thing as an enemy who cannot be defeated, if you have able leadership, adequate resources and a determination to keep fighting until the enemy is destroyed.

All of us remember that chart from our grade-school history book, where the resources of the Union and Confederacy were compared — population, industrial capacity, railroad mileage, etc. Yet none of the North’s advantages seemed to make much difference for the first couple of years of the war, as the South won a stunning series of victories in the Virginia theater that seemed to offset the Union’s victories in the West. Even after Grant took Vicksburg and the South suffered a bloody defeat at Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee was still able to detach one of his army corps, sending Longstreet to reinforce Bragg in Georgia to defeat Rosencrans at Chickamauga in September 1863.

Despite the North’s advantages, after more than two years of war it was still by no means certain that the South could be defeated, until Lincoln made the decision to put Grant in overall command — and that made all the difference in the world.  Grant appointed W.T. Sherman to take over in the West, where Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston’s army in North Georgia defended the key city of Atlanta, while Grant himself went East to supervise the campaign against Lee’s army in Virginia. Grant and Sherman met at a hotel in Cincinatti to coordinate their strategy in March 1864, and Sherman later summarized the result of that meeting simply: “We finally settled on a plan. He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan.”

Very simple, and yet from the moment that meeting ended, only 13 months elapsed before Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

Here we are, 150 years later, and our generals believe that the key to defeating ISIS is to “understand the idea” behind ISIS?

Let me suggest instead that we make ISIS understand our idea: We’re going to start killing those sons of bitches, and we will keep killing them until there aren’t any more sons of bitches left to kill.

Problem solved.

 

Category: History, Military, Terrorism

Comments

258 Responses to “How to Win Wars”

  1. richard mcenroe
    December 29th, 2014 @ 7:29 pm

    I’d rather ask “what the fuck was that all about?” after winning the war than “How can we understand these peoples’ needs?” before losing the war.

  2. Political Rift » How to Win Wars
    December 29th, 2014 @ 7:33 pm

    […] Robert Stacy McCain Once, during Stonewall Jackson’s famous 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, some Union […]

  3. SausageAway
    December 29th, 2014 @ 7:36 pm

    better yet, how about- why fight a war for no purpose?
    American wars of choice have no moral purpose that hte country is not happily contradicting elsewhere. Its all about getting the public to die for corporate wealth.

  4. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 7:48 pm

    I don’t think choosing Grant was a matter of philosophy so much as nerve. Previous Northern commanders had thought in terms of how not to lose rather than in how to win. That was a matter of competence, not strategy. Obviously pre-Grant commanders chased Lee, and then lost their nerve or had no tactical abilities to articulate their divisions. My understanding is that Meade was actually the tacitical lead and that Grant supplied the nerve and direction Meade didn’t have.

    Pinning down an enemy and writing their forces down won’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor with ISIS. There is no one to pin down, no rivers and ports to blockade, no South to march through. ISIS is independent of all those things for the simple reason they are no more than a militia which does not particularly give a rat’s ass for the populations they move among.

    There is no particular reason to understand the ideology of ISIS; it is the same as the Huns or Mongols. But we don’t speak the language or understand the culture and there is no one to surrender. You cannot control such an area without a massive and permanent ratio of force to space. Other than picking areas to defend, we cannot defeat such a foe. Defensively, they simply melt away, and with the entire countryside in which to do so. That scenario may have happened after Lee surrendered, but he wouldn’t allow for more destruction for no purpose. The difference is ISIS doesn’t care if you destroy the entire area. They are purpose-built to be rats that move within destroyed infrastructures.

    And what’s the ultimate point: to back up Sykes-Picot and Balfour, or Saudi Hashemite Dynasties? They’re having their own civil war to unBalkanize the region. Let ’em fight it out.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:03 pm

    Japanese soldiers were brave too. Eventually the Marines (and a couple of atom bombs) turned them from this to this.

  6. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:12 pm

    For frick’s sake.

    Nuke em again to see if they grow some balls.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:16 pm

    You deal with ISIS the same way the British dealt with insurgents the Malaya conflict, you hunt them down and kill them. It is easier to do that in Syria and Iraq than it was in Malaya and Indonesia.

  8. robertstacymccain
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:16 pm

    Let me explain that I am really more a paleocon than a neocon, but when it comes to military strategy, the point is that we would have to fight fewer wars if our potential enemies understood that we were always willing to do whatever it takes to win. My ancestors fought for the South, and never apologized for it, but they also were not willing to repeat the experience. That had a lot to do with why, during the intense drama of the civil rights era 100 years later, tensions didn’t erupt into an all-out war. And I think most people nowadays have forgotten just how tense it got during the 1950s and ’60s. Eisenhower actually sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock at one point, in case anyone has forgotten.

    Defeating Islamic terrorism is possible, but only if we make it clear we are determined to prevail at all costs.

  9. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:18 pm

    http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-and-banzai-charge-1.png

  10. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:19 pm

    They have the sex drive of pandas. No need to do anything.

  11. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:22 pm

  12. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:27 pm

    Two points:
    1) We haven’t really won a war since we changed the War Department into the Department of Defense. We haven’t really won a war we haven’t declared.
    2) We don’t have to understand an idea to kill it. You kill an idea by killing everyone who holds it

  13. robertstacymccain
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:34 pm

    Other than picking areas to defend, we cannot defeat such a foe. Defensively, they simply melt away, and with the entire countryside in which to do so.

    Yes, but you see that in Iraq and Syria now, ISIS is on the offensive. They are capturing towns and cities. In doing so, they choose the battlefield.

    Fine, then, bring the war to them with utmost ferocity. No need to worry about the opinion of the “international community” — ISIS has no influential friends there — and so we have basically an open season on those sons of bitches. We ought to seize this opportunity to deliver a lesson on the topic of Peace Through Superior Firepower.

  14. Jim R
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:37 pm

    I hope (oh, do I hope) that GEN Nagata wants to “understand” ISIS in the way that GEN Abrams, Ambassador Bunker and Mr. Colby came to “understand” the VC… so they could organize the Phoenix Program to root out their infrastructure and more efficiently destroy them.

    I HOPE.

    How do these ISIS goons get from their home countries to Syria, Iraq, &c? Who pays them, and how? Where do they get their beans and bullets? How do they communicate plans and objectives down their chain of command, and results and requests and lessons learned up it? What IS their chain of command? Who’s in charge?

    If we can cut off their money, make it more difficult (better still, impossible) for recruits to get to ISIS, and destroy their C4I structure, we’ll beat them that much faster.

  15. Jim R
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:38 pm

    Well said!

  16. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:40 pm

    You will end up killing the most brave, most fanatical ISIS troops first. The rapists and craven thugs will be left and will be first to turn tail and run when they realize they are about to meet Allah.

  17. Jeanette Victoria
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:41 pm

    I advice my friends NOT to join the military one might go to jail for doing the right thing like killing the enemy http://dcxposed.com/2012/07/11/u-s-soldier-michael-behenna-sentenced-to-25yrs-in-prison-shooting-al-qaeda-op/

  18. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:41 pm

    The way to deal with radical Islam is this:

    1) don’t let them in your country!
    2) if anybody already in your country shows a hankering for Sharia law, “encourage” them to leave by whatever means are expedient – they are your enemy and will use your own misplaced tolerance against you if you let them
    3) stop making excuses for the “religion of peace” every time one of its adherents commits a murder – make them collectively prove they are a religion of peace by their actions
    4) if terrorists attack you, commit massive retaliation against them (if still alive), their allies, and their families. This is a horrible, nasty business but you can’t defeat terrorism by pussyfooting around. You have to use greater terror. Make the cost of attacking you so high, so awful, that their parents take pains to raise their sons *not* to be jihadis.
    5) the job of the armed forces is to kill people and break things – anything to do with handing out aid parcels in a multiculturally sensitive way, “nation building”, or somehow getting 11th century tribesmen to adopt liberal democracy is a waste of time
    6) the only rule of engagement when fighting any foreign enemy is: kill the enemy. Kill as many of them as possible using whatever weapons are available. Restraint is an evil vice in warfare, it only prolongs the conflict and gets more of your own people killed.

  19. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:42 pm

    It’s for their own good. I *like* the Japanese, I don’t want them to go the way of the dodo.

  20. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:46 pm

    There’s still been no satisfactory explanation as to how Osama Bin Laden came to be living it up in Pakistan under the noses of their military establishment. And nobody seems very curious to find out.

  21. Jim R
    December 29th, 2014 @ 8:55 pm

    I think we all know: he was a cats paw for Pakistan’s intelligence agency, managed to escape from A-stan, and they hid him. In order to maintain the highly dubious alliance we have with Islamabad, we didn’t look very hard.

    My thought is that Pakistan is playing the same role in A-stan that North Vietnam did with South Vietnam fifty years ago. It would serve our purposes to… um… neutralize Pakistan. Peacefully if possible, with overwhelming and permanent violence if that’s how they want it.

  22. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:11 pm

    I’m not usually one for pedantry but calling Japanese – who are Nipponese – “Nips” is no different from calling Yankees “Yanks.”

  23. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:14 pm

    There is no way for us to tactically and strategically do 4 and 6.

  24. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:20 pm

    If you carpet-bomb Mosul you are effectively killing people with far less of a connection to ISIS than Germans had to their cities. There is no getting around the fact ISIS is a mobile pack of mercenaries with little more connection to the countryside than the Grand Catalan Company had to Greece. Killing Greeks would’ve accomplished nothing. Even the Franks and Grand Catalan Company had castles to assault and fielded armies willing to engage one another. You have nothing like that with ISIS. Their only loyalty is to themselves.

  25. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:27 pm

    In fact it’s not. The British were a colonizing force which lived there. I have already argued elsewhere that colonizing Iraq or having a permanent occupation force would be the only way to defeat ISIS.

    Imagine the East India Company defeating Hindu armies while not actually based there. Never would’ve happened.

    This is from memory but from the Battle of Plassey in the mid-18th century to only 30 years later, the EIC increased their troop strength from 3,000 to 80,000, (majority indigenous sepoys) and they all lived there. Tipu Sultan ultimately was defeated by the EIC because he had lands with revenues to defend and fell back on the citadel from which he ruled those lands.

    So again, you had citadels to assault and field armies to defeat. You have nothing like that with ISIS. ISIS is completely independent of infrastructure. The only way to fight them is when they assemble to assault a city. Then they have fixed positions one can assault until they actually enter the city.

  26. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:31 pm

    They get/got much of their bullets/equipment from us via vetted rebels and collapsing Iraqi forces. They probably get as least some of their beans from humanitarian aid either by purchase,extortion or theft.
    It would have been extremely difficult for the North to defeat the South if the UN was feeding the civilians living there. Even if we hadn’t targeted civilian areas as a matter of policy in WWII, our strategic bombing would have killed a lot of civilians in Germany. We also killed Frenchmen bombing French railroads because they were an asset to the Germans. We need to squash the notion of proportional response and replace it with obscenely disproportionate over reaction.
    Trying to understand the ”ideas” of Daesh sounds supiciously like trying figure out how to win ”hearts and minds”.

  27. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:35 pm

    Sure there is.

    4 – the Israelis didn’t sit on their hands when their athletes were murdered in Munich
    5 – this was the widely understood role of the military until fairly recently, when it was turned into a social justice playground
    6 – the Japs were nuked twice in WW2. The Krauts were incinerated and starved into submission. There’s no need to go even that far in fighting Islamic terrorism.

    The only impediments are legal and political. And those aren’t tactical or strategic problems, they’re artificial manmade ones.

    Edit: oh, I misread you. I don’t think 4 and 6 are mutually exclusive, but they apply to different contexts. 4 is how to react to terrorist attacks in order to stamp them out.

    6 is how to win a foreign war as quickly and decisively as possible. The wisdom of fighting a foreign war in the first place is another matter.

  28. SausageAway
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:35 pm

    Defeating an enemy your very actions creates?> Thats insanity, its failed against Communism and it is failing against terrorism. It is succeeding in making the US look ridiculous and squandering its economic and moral advantage- know when to quit a failed cause.

  29. Jim R
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:40 pm

    That’s what worries me. There’s a line between exercizing restraint in the interests of keeping our honor clean and not creating more enemies (“the gentlest gamer is the soonest winner”) on the one hand, and trying to fight a war like some kind of half-a$$ed hippie commune debate on the other.

  30. Fail Burton
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:40 pm

    That Israeli counter-intelligence initiative is shrouded in myths, and in no way considered an obvious success. Secondly, who are you going to nuke – Mosul? Why?

  31. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:41 pm

    The key is finding their pain points, and applying pressure to them.

    ISIS aren’t mythological creatures or emotionless robots. They’re flesh and blood human beings with hopes, ambitions, and fears of their own.

    They can only operate with both moral and material support from their sympathisers.

    So, destroy their support system.

  32. Phil_McG
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:43 pm

    I’d hope not to have to nuke anybody.

  33. Quartermaster
    December 29th, 2014 @ 9:50 pm

    I strongly urge kids not to go into the military. It isn’t worth it as the military is simply a PC mess these days.

  34. Quartermaster
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:06 pm

    Unfortunately the failed war against the Commies didn’t work because of treasonous bastards like McGovern, Mansfield and Kennedy. Vietnam, for example, was won on teh ground, but the three named above betrayed the south and refused to honor treaty commitments. Truman bunged up Korea because of the traitors left over from the FDR maladminstration who were passing on MacArthur’s plans, which the maladminstration required be passed to them before execution. hundreds were killed because of the betrayal of those plans to the enemy. The Red Chink commander said he was confident that he could push MacArthur back because he knew that the traitors in DC would not allow Mac to meet them on anything like an even battlefield. As a result, he was able to commit his entire Army knowing he wouldn’t have to worry about Mac getting around him.

    Bluntly, when you say it didn’t work against the commies, you have no idea what you are talking about. Truman and the later Dims didn’t allow anything to work, and that’s how the fellow travelers and useful idiots did their work.

  35. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:09 pm

    These guys aren’t desert nomads, they do have infrastructure. They stay in towns, but these towns have residents who in theory aren’t supporters or members of Daesh. There are functioning electrical facilities in the areas they control. We keep pin-pricking their little makeshift refineries but leave the oil fields themselves alone as that would hurt the ”innocent civilians” and would take time to rebuild.
    Perhaps we need to translate into Arabic various writings on the glory of Russia’s scorched earth tactics in repelling Napoleon. We could drop leaflets and put videos on You Tube.
    While they need and have far less infrastructure than us, doesn’t mean they need or have none. We just refuse to attack it and them because of who else is there and might need it later.

  36. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:10 pm

    We didn’t create Islam.

  37. Anon Y. Mous
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:12 pm

    All of us remember that chart from our grade-school history book, where the resources of the Union and Confederacy were compared — population, industrial capacity, railroad mileage, etc.

    Clearly, we attended different grade schools. I didn’t see any kind of analysis of the strategic strengths and weaknesses of the opposing sides until high school.

    Perhaps there is less of a need (obsession?) to figure out what went wrong among the Yankees?

    But as to your main thesis – Yes, a thousand times yes! The most immoral war is the one that is fought half-heartedly. It is inexcusable to send young men to fight and die in a war that we are not fully trying to win.

  38. Quartermaster
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

    Nagata is being an idiot. SOP for the morons Prez Zer0 has been appointing.

    Nagata does not have to understand the ideology, just how things work out on the ground. Isolating the battle field from outside support, and using those who will suffer from the presence of ISIS to point out those that need to go is all you need. Accept any surrender that is offered. Once it is over, kill every last prisoner, cremate the bodies and scatter the ashes to the 4 winds. Leave nothing to rally around and make it clear that’s how we will do business with anyone that crosses us again.

    The Brits used to fly large flags when they went to the field. They didn’t do it because they were so proud of the Union Jack. They did it as a warning to anyone tempted to mess with them. If they messed with them, they would earn a punitive expedition that would see the punishment of those who originated the attack on British people. Our enemies should see the US flag and get the same idea.

  39. SausageAway
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

    Islam has not been any enemy to the US until the US foreign policy went insane. Think about it, who started interfering in whose countries? WHo was propping up tyrants, who was bombing countries and organizing coups with impunity? It surprises you that there is blow back?

  40. SausageAway
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:15 pm

    No really, the war against communism lost you Vietnam and Korea. It was fought over lies and only profited the war lobby. Same with Iraq and Afghanistan. US foreign policy creates enemies through its actions. Idiots support those actions despite hte obvious reality that if you leave people alone, they will leave you alone.

  41. Quartermaster
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:22 pm

    You obviously have a very serious reading comprehension problem. You simply have no idea what you are talking about either. Publik skools didn’t do you any favors.

  42. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:23 pm

    It’s been Americas enemy since the Jefferson administration, probably before then but that was Britain’s problem. They’ve been everyone’s enemy since Mohammad went back to Mecca

  43. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:27 pm

    You can’t kill your enemy where they aren’t.

  44. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:39 pm

    Nah, He’s only a triple L Libertarian or a hippie. I’m betting on hippie.

  45. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:39 pm

    Bull shit. Sorry Fail Burton, but the only reason ISIS has any success is we created a vacuum for this disease to thrive.

  46. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:41 pm

    Who said carpet bomb Mosul (other than you). I said go engage and kill ISIS. Of course, this would not be necessary but for Obama giving them an invitation to come back and cause mayhem.

  47. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:43 pm

    As someone point out to me a few months ago. You can still extract oil through twenty feet of glass.

  48. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:43 pm

    I do not think calling Japs and Nips bad names, given what happened in WWII is all that bad. Americans have forgiven the Japanese for the war…the Philippines, Chinese, Koreans, and Thais, not so much.

  49. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:45 pm

    Can we send a legion of feminists to take on ISIS?

  50. Adobe_Walls
    December 29th, 2014 @ 10:46 pm

    As a matter of historical fact we didn’t understand Nazism either.