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. Quartermaster
    December 30th, 2014 @ 9:31 am

    Japan was on the ropes before the Nukes. The nukes did not compel surrender. Curtis Lemay pooh poohed the idea.
    All wars are wars of attrition. The choice in what gets the attrition treatment is a matter of competence. Kill enough of the enemy, they will quit fighting.
    Vietnam was won in the field, but lost by scum bags in the DimoKKKrap party who wanted the reds to win. Add in the lies told by people like Walter Cronkite, who propagandized the victory of Tet ’68 into a loss, and you get the left screaming to stop. The loony left were the ones screaming to stop. Conservatives knew better.

  2. Quartermaster
    December 30th, 2014 @ 9:31 am

    At the gay Pride parade.

  3. Quartermaster
    December 30th, 2014 @ 9:40 am

    That’s why you bring people who will be seriously harmed if they are conquered on board with you.
    I doubt Lemay and the others would be dismayed at what the enemy has. Lemay and Patton saw what the Germans had, and fought anyway. Patton would ridicule your position on that.
    When the Marines went ashore at Guadalcanal, the issue was very much in doubt. The Japs were quite good at what they were doing, but they had several strikes against them after the loss at Midway. It was only the tenacity of the Marines that allowed them to hold on until relief by the 25th Infantry Division.

  4. Diggsc
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:18 am

    Thank you for your opinion, Obama. But we’d rather this discussion stay with the adults.

  5. Diggsc
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:20 am

    So we created Communism and islam?
    Uh, is this Al Gore writing under a pen name?

  6. Diggsc
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:23 am

    “…if you leave people alone, they will leave you alone”
    Thanks again, Obama. It’s good to know that Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor because we had…uh…well…

  7. Greg Toombs
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:25 am

    I really hate our politically correct Rules of Engagement. We fight with all 4 of our limbs tied behind our back.

  8. Donald Sensing
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:43 am

    Here is why:

    http://shoebat.com/2014/12/27/muslims-calling-revive-ancient-horrifying-execution-method-u-s-led-coalition-pilots-2/

  9. Steve Gregg
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:43 am

    Whatever happened to Communism?

  10. Steve Gregg
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:45 am

    Actually, South Korea was not lost and has become quite prosperous, particulary compared to the North. How did that strategy about leaving people alone work on Sep 11?

  11. How to defeat ISIS — It’s rather simple actually - TeeJaw Blog
    December 30th, 2014 @ 11:53 am

    […] Stacy McCain has a better idea.  It’s not the business of generals to understand what motivates the enemy unless it’s necessary to defeat him, which it seldom is. The only thing generals need to know is that the enemy wants to kill as many of us as possible, and the only way to prevent that is to kill more of them. […]

  12. Jim Nelson
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:00 pm

    Sadly, when politics intersects with military strategy, politics usually prevails. Our non-winning streak in fighting wars, that has been on-going since Korea, is primarily the result of political interventions that constrained the military from doing there job. The long term result is a PC military more concerned about social justice than defending the homeland. We need more Grants and fewer Nagatas and, more importantly, more Lincolns and fewer Obamas.

  13. Donald Sensing
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

    US Army Col. Harry Summers took part in the POW-release arrangements in Hanoi at the end of the Vietnam war. I had the occasion to converse with him in the early 1980s. He told me of his conversation with NVA Gen. Nguyen Giap, the overall head of the North Vietnamese military.

    Summers told Giap, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.”

    Giap replied, “That is true. It is also irrelevant.”

    We may want to remember that while the US lost 58,000 killed in the war, the North lost 600,000 killed, and still prevailed.

    It is not so easy to keep killing until they are all dead.

  14. Zexufang
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:14 pm

    As to –
    “As for North Korea …”
    I agree.
    Let me add – in ALL wars UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER should always be the sole objective.
    And – if – the United Sates does NOT have the intention to WIN:
    What are you fighting for…
    Smart Diplomacy?

  15. JeffS
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:29 pm

    Alas, all too true. The best strategy to defeat Daesh is Sherman’s “Total War”. That’s been drummed out of the military.

  16. Adobe_Walls
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:35 pm

    The superficial similarities between the KKK and organized crime were, are of little value in understanding German Nazism now or in the years leading up to and during WWII. Even in the last years of the war much of the discussion of how to solve the ”German problem” particularly within the military revolved around the need to eliminate the Prussian General Staff.
    Armageddon by Leon Uris was a good book when I read it in high school.
    You are wrong about using our rehabilitation of postwar Germany and Japan as a model for dealing with Islam. Those nations were civilized, cultured and modern. Even if it were possible to do the same in the Muslim world it would take the rest of the century if not longer and countless trillions of dollars. We have neither to spare on what would probably still be a fools errand. The correct policy for dealing with Islam is emasculation, containment and isolation.

  17. Harry Taft
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:54 pm

    If we don’t hate them enough to ignore collateral damage to noncombatants, then why fight them at all? What is the purpose? Putting all kinds of crap in the Rules of Engagement can only get our guys killed. Do it right or don’t do it. And I would rather we didn’t do it.

  18. PDQuig
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:59 pm

    Your assumption that our actions create the enemy is so flawed as to be laughable. You have obviously read nothing about Jihadism (try Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower” to begin your education). Why have Sunni murdered Shiia and vice versa by the hundreds of thousands in the past few decades? They murder anybody who they consider an infidel. Period. Polls show that anywhere from 10-20 percent of Muslims support violence to further Islam’s goals. That translates to roughly 120-240 million Muslims. To suggest that they have been radicalized by what we do rather than what we are is to display a profound ignorance that you would do better to conceal.

  19. Jim R
    December 30th, 2014 @ 12:59 pm

    While there are Muslim “countries” (defined by lines on the map, not by any particular conviction of the people who live there) that are uncivilized / uncultured, I think that there are others such as Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria that could be rehabilitated a la postwar Germany. I don’t say that it would be easy or cheap, but I THINK that people generally value, if not liberty, then at least peace and quiet over beheadings and brutal theocracy. Else, the entire Muslim world would be one big civil war.
    After all, the British were able to, with great effort, conquer India, which was a big conglomeration of small, squabbling princely states with a variety of religions, castes, etc.
    As for the more obdurate islamofascists, I am entirely of your way of thinking: they need to be isolated as well as we are able (which means putting pressure, including military pressure, on the various states that sponsor them as cats paws), contained in such areas as they’ve managed to control, and squeezed out of existence. These clowns need to learn that behaving like brutes and gangsters – beheading people, suicide bombings, &c. – will lead to nothing beyond death for themselves and misery for their people and that, if it comes down to it, we can be FAR more vicious than they.

  20. The Thinking Man's Zombie
    December 30th, 2014 @ 1:30 pm

    […] McCain has a terrific post on war policy.  He illustrates the nature of victory in war that was also mirrored by a recent quote of the day […]

  21. buddy larsen
    December 30th, 2014 @ 1:37 pm

    The ARVN was holding its own in the field, against the Paris Treaty-smashing NVA, until the new Watergate Congress reneged on every support deal USA had made after the treaty signing, even the ammo-supply deals, and the ARVN literally ran out of ammo on the firing line. The Democrats didn’t just abandon the war, they actively subverted the nation of South Vietnam, in de facto service of the enemy, the communist invader, the neighbor to the north, North Vietnam. Uncle Ho.

  22. buddy larsen
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:06 pm

    –to that, observe that the CinC is doing juuust enough against ISIS to fig-leaf the MSM’s resolute determination to ignore the fact that ISIS was supposedly built (“Benghazi” for starters) to take down Iran’s ally Assad, meaning there is no Valerie Jarrett at the west wing breakfast table every morning.

    For example, CinC is STILL not supplying the Kurdish Peshmerga with arms (oh, a face-saving trickle), nor the several large anti-ISIS Sunni tribes ISIS is subduing/has subdued, and the given reason for the anomaly is that coalition army-in-training that won’t be ready to try a little fighting “until mid-2015” and is far too small anyway, and according to reports is not much motivated in any case.

  23. Don Meaker
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:24 pm

    It is common to sympathize with the enemy, especially for those in the Intelligence side of staff work. A great commander can shut that noise off. The right place for sympathy for the enemy is when the memorial statues are put up, after you win.

  24. Don Meaker
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:28 pm

    The US didn’t create islamic terrorism. That has been around since the 8th Century. The US didn’t create Communism, nor the terrorist organizations that were funded by Communism, like the Baader Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, or the Viet Cong.

  25. Don Meaker
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:30 pm

    Actually we won the war in Vietnam. Peace treaty that was to stop NVA aggression, and everything.

    And after we won, we went home. The war the North won wasn’t against us.

  26. Don Meaker
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:32 pm

    No. Most wars start with limited goals, and if those goals are obtained, the war can be stopped, to the benefit of the world.

  27. Don Meaker
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:34 pm

    We never had South Vietnam either. We won the war, got a peace treaty. And then went home. SV then lost.

  28. Dana
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:34 pm

    How did the Allies defeat Germany? Yeah, we slaughtered their soldiers on the battlefield, but we also bombed their civilians and their productive capacity from the air. We killed most of their fighting aged men, along with a whole bunch of their women and children. We kept killing them and killing them and killing them until they couldn’t fight any more, and we killed so many of them that the boys growing up were of no mind to resume the fight once they grew up.

    Japan? The same thing.

    This is why it has been a mistake to say that Israel won its four wars with the Arabs. All that they did was agree to let the Arabs quit fighting after an initial butt-kicking, leaving the boys who were still too young to fight thinking that yeah, they could whip the Jews once they reached fighting age, and damned if they didn’t grow up and try.

    We want our wars too be too nice, too sterile, and are only willing to hurt the actual combatants; we are unwilling to slaughter their wives and their children and destroy everything that they have, we are unwilling to destroy them so thoroughly that they quit because they can’t fight any more.

    The main article skimps on that point: the Confederacy was defeated just as much because the Yankee invaders devastated the Southern economy as well as killing our soldiers. The Confederacy was always inferior to the Union in manpower and industrial plant and the things needed for war, but the war was really lost because it was fought in the South, because it was Southern agriculture and Southern industry and Southern civilians who were in the middle of the war.

    General Lee never understood that. He brought our troops into Pennsylvania not to devastate the North, but to flank Washington, DC, to win the war by forcing the surrender of the capital. General Sherman understood things differently.

  29. Dana
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:38 pm

    No, the Marines eventually turned the Japanese Imperial Army into a bunch of corpses; the Marines turned heir children and grandchildren into a bunch of businessmen who like to sing Karaoke and young boys who like Hello Kitty and cross dressing.

  30. Dana
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

    A very much left-wing professor of mine in the middle 70s put it this way: they were more willing to die for their country than we were willing to keep killing them.

  31. Adobe_Walls
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:46 pm

    Well that answers that question.

  32. Dana
    December 30th, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

    No, that’s not what happened. We were there, and after the Cambodian offensive didn’t whip the Communists, President Nixon was simply looking for a face-saving way to cut and run, and the Communists figured that sure, it would save them some men and money. So we agreed to a treaty that let us have “Peace With Honor™”, and pledging that we would return to defend the Republic of Vietnam if the Communists broke the treaty, knowing full well that, once out, the Congress would never let us go back in to honor our obligations.

    The Communists gave President Nixon the barest of fig leaves to cover cutting and running.

  33. skeets11
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:06 pm

    I don’t believe Gen. Nagata meant we had to understand the enemy in able to get along without fighting. One has to understand an enemy to defeat them. Lincoln understood the south, he knew the Emancipation Proclamation would help weaken it by encouraging slaves to leave and by framing the war directly on the slavery issue. This eliminated Davis’ ability to scream the war was about state’s rights. Grant understood that the south had a limited ability to resupply and keep its armies up to fighting strength so a total war of attrition had to be instituted, regardless of Union casualties.

    In the same way we have to understand what IS is all about so we can implement the proper tactics and strategic effort to win. Just going in and killing does not solve the problem long term. We have to be able to defeat them and then put in place a structure that will work to keep future generations of Islamists from fighting. The real problem here is the will to fight is not there, it was squandered by George Bush in Iraq.

  34. skeets11
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:11 pm

    Truman was replaced by Ike and I don’t recall Ike calling in the dogs on China. He, like Truman, knew Korea was not worth more American lives and they were right. The communists had to be stopped, but there was no way we were going to march north into China, fight it and possibly the Soviet Union and win. None of our allies were up for the kind of fight, most were still wasted from WW2 and then there is the fun chance it could have gone nuclear damaging the entire planet. Instead we do have a stalemate in Korea, but for the most part nothing much has happened outside of the NKs getting a little crazy every now and then.

  35. skeets11
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:13 pm

    We did not lose in Korea, it is a stalemate. There is a difference.

  36. trangbang68
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:13 pm

    Sad that a general in charge of special ops has to ask stupid, politically correct questions like this. Why is ISIS what they are? How about they’re wretched goat rapers, plumbing the depths of human depravity in demented service to a medieval pedophile baptized in blood. Kill them with impunity. Get it done before baseball season. The Dodgers made some nice nice pickups this winter.

  37. trangbang68
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:15 pm

    Kill enough jihadis and you will create mass desertion from the cause.

  38. trangbang68
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:16 pm

    Only an idiot believes that human history teaches us “that if you leave people alone, they’ll leave you alone”

  39. trangbang68
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:19 pm

    Islam is the enemy of everyone who doesn’t embrace their barbarianism

  40. trangbang68
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:25 pm

    What’s going on Buddy?

  41. Quartermaster
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:51 pm

    There was little that Ike could do. US Forces had already been pushed back down below the 38th parallel and it wasn’t worth fighting to go further as we had the Red Chink Army sitting up there, 700K strong. Primitive, but shear force of numbers had pushed us south of Seoul again before Ridgeway pushed them back and stabilized things again. Most of the casualties of Korea took place under Ridgeway because of the fecklessness of Truman and his idiots like Acheson.

  42. Dana
    December 30th, 2014 @ 3:57 pm

    I don’t know if they can be goat rapers, because goats never say, “No!” Yeah, if they tried it with horses, they might get “Neigh!” for an answer . . . .

  43. Diogenes' Lamp
    December 30th, 2014 @ 4:06 pm

    Mr McCain, I urge you to read this article by David Goldman. He makes the same point as you, but with more background about why it is the right course of action.

    http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/08/12/shermans-300000-and-the-caliphates-3-million/

  44. Adobe_Walls
    December 30th, 2014 @ 4:24 pm

    A little outdated but still a fine weapon.

  45. cloud_buster
    December 30th, 2014 @ 5:08 pm

    “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.” . . .

    Here’s a really crazy suggestion: listen to what they say. They are hard-line Muslims, imposing an Islamic state and punishing apostates and infidels in accordance with the dictates of their evil, despicable religion.

    There, was that hard?

  46. Fail Burton
    December 30th, 2014 @ 5:28 pm

    Goldman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There was no reason to invade Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place. Having done so, we put a guy in charge of the de-Baathification of Iraq who’d never been to the middle east. That’s like the president of France from Argentina being shown a postcard of the Eiffel Tower and being told “This is France.”

    Iran has nothing to do with it. They are like the white Tea Party militias that never come. What we basically did was try and create a democracy by disenfranchising the 25% Sunni Arabs that had ruled Iraq for decades. Had we instead included them in a confessional-style gov’t like Lebanon with allotted equal representation between Sunni, Shia and Kurds, none of this would’ve happened.

  47. Fail Burton
    December 30th, 2014 @ 5:42 pm

    How do you fight a phantom army that accounts for 60% of your casualties when you are not even tactically engaged? Think about that. The majority of your casualties come when you are not even tactically deployed. On the other hand, this phantom army is tactically deployed and engaging you on their terms in order to level the playing field.

    This general asking these stupid questions reveals he still hasn’t solved that tactical equation, and the reason we haven’t gone back in is because of that reality. Tactics is always tied to political will and goals and money. What goals do we have in N. Iraq? None. What strategy do we have to defeat ISIS? None. You cannot defeat mercenaries who disperse and don’t care about anything or anyone but maintaining their own solvency. You cannot bomb a person who is not there and who refuses to assemble and concentrate except at the last moment when they then assault a city and disappear within its precincts, mingling with the population.

    This is for all intents and purposes a free-floating mercenary army you cannot pin down on a battlefield except when they lay siege to a city. The only way to defeat them is to interdict their money, arms, food and gas. Already the price of cooking gas, food and gas is skyrocketing in Mosul. ISIS cannot exist like that. They will disperse and fade away into greener pastures closer to their smuggling routes and friendlier less open terrain in Syria. Syria is another story.

  48. robertstacymccain
    December 30th, 2014 @ 5:49 pm

    “What we basically did was try and create a democracy by disenfranchising the 25% Sunni Arabs that had ruled Iraq for decades.”

    Bingo. In this, we repeated the mistake of Radical Reconstruction, which disenfranchised (and banned from public office) much of the South’s leadership class because (naturally) they had supported the Confederacy.

    In fact, this basic problem recurred in Germany after WWII (it’s referenced in the movie Patton) where “de-Nazification,” carried beyond a reasonable limit, had the effect not only of depriving postwar Germany of qualified officials (bureacrats, civil engineers, etc.), but also resulted in key roles being filled by Communists, who were much our enemies after the war as the Nazis had been during the war.

    Defeating an enemy military force is one thing, pacifying a conquered territory is another thing. The key to the latter, really, is to make clear that the conquering force will remain in place as long as necessary to achieve pacification. If the defeated enemy (or any other hostile force in the territory) gets the idea that the conquering force can be driven away by a terrorist insurgency, there will certainly be a terrorist insurgency. One might view the KKK in the post-Civil War South in that light, and you can also see how Radical Reconstruction helped empower the KKK. Our leaders should know this history, but they don’t teach actual history in schools any more, they teach liberal attitudes and distort history to justify those attitudes.

  49. Fail Burton
    December 30th, 2014 @ 5:52 pm

    How would Patton outflank and Lemay bomb things that aren’t there? There is no military solution to Iraq unless you engage the former ruling bureaucracy or are prepared to stay as an occupation force for decades.

  50. robertstacymccain
    December 30th, 2014 @ 6:01 pm

    It was not Lincoln’s proclamation that freed the slaves, it was the North’s victory. The proclamation was a political document that served political purposes — purposes necessary to the continued prosecution of the war — but it would have had no practical effect had it not been for military victory.

    In the same way, the Declaration of Independence did not secure America’s freedom — it was Washington’s army which did that.

    There is no substitute for victory. All the words of politicians are just noise compared to the deeds of soldiers in securing the conditions of peace within which the politician exercises influence. The true statesman understands this, and governs accordingly, both in domestic and foreign affairs. Churchill was such a statesman, and so was Reagan. The true statesman is a rarity in any age, but they seem to have become increasingly scarce in recent decades.