How to Win Wars

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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.

 

258 comments

  3. Well he’s right in that there are elite industrialists involved. On both sides. There always are. Big money to be made in war. But there are more important immediate concerns, to wit: killing those who wish to kill you first. Then you can always kill the evil industrialists later.

  4. They in fact have no infrastructure they consider their own. They need only pick-up trucks, gas, some food and some small to heavy caliber automatic weapons.

  7. /facepalm
    The United States Navy and the United States Marines were FOUNDED to protect American shipping from unprovoked attacks by Islamic pirates/slavers backed by several Muslim states (Morocco, Algeria, Libya being the main but not only ones.)

    The only thing America did to provoke those attacks was lose European protection.

  10. You forget that the Marines spent much of their time between the wars doing counterinsurgency in Central America.

  11. You have obviously never read a history of the region. For 1,000 years Islam probed and attempted to colonize the entirety of S. Europe from Byzantium to Portugal. They even raided as far North as the Faroes, County Cork and Cornwall in the 17th century. At that same time there were about 5,000 English citizens imprisoned in N. Africa. Aside from the abortive Crusades, no European power successfully interfered in the Middle East until well after a thousand years of such Islamic aggression. The first world-wide manhunt was for an English pirate who’d seized a Mughal treasure ship and the reward offered was by the East India Company so as to not anger the Mughals in Delhi. The English found 24 of them back in England and hanged 6 of them.

  12. Long before the Jefferson administration; he was so determined to stop paying tribute in part because of his experience negotiating the release of American taken as slaves when he was in the foreign service in France. This was back under the Articles of Confederation.

  13. See: Barbarossa and his naval legacy from the 16th century which still operated from the shores of Tripoli.

  14. That is not an obvious reality at all. History is full of invasions and counter-invasions and we live in that world.

  15. Do you see a surviving and prosperous Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact? The Cold War worked well enough despite the treasonous left in America.

  16. Perpetrating and funding terrorism. Stealth Jihad here and in Europe for starters that whole shores of Tripoli thingy. They exist for world conquest it is their sole purpose. It may be that we can never kill enough of them. We certainly can’t kill too many.

  17. South Korea survived just fine. North Korea is even worse off on the whole than when it was under Japanese occupation and Vietnam realized its folly, fought a short war with China and values its trade with the US and sure as hell doesn’t want the US Navy it’s neck of the woods. Of course without the treasonous left in this country there still would be a South Vietnam and with a China that used trade with the West to remake it’s economy to be strong enough to fight off the Soviets (the original idea of the Chinese embrace of market economics without free market democracy) odds are that a North Vietnam would have made a truce with South Vietnam and made nice with the US just to keep the US in the area and China off their backs. You do know they offered the US the big naval base in Cam Rahn Bay after the US left Subic Bay.

  18. The locals will get mad enough to kill the bums to avoid further pain and help us kill them as well. The mojo ISIS has is that they are evil crazy bastards with no boundaries. Just be a bigger bastard than they are and the hearts and mind will follow.

  20. Not true they rely heavily on Arty and have a significant anti-tank capability. Just because their ”logistical tail” is minimal compared to conventional armies doesn’t mean they don’t need any. They’ve captured significant oil fields from which they sell oil and do some refining for their needs. They have to utilize towns and villages. Do you suppose they take their slaves every where they go?

  21. Find their families and kill them. Do it enough times and they quit. As it is ISIS executed over hundred of their recruits lately for trying to quit now that the bastards are getting half-assed bombed. It looks like they are having morale problems.

  23. “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
    — Sun Tzu

    We tried a war of attrition in Vietnam, and that worked great, as long as the American public wasn’t paying too much attention. As soon as the enemy was able to bring himself into the public eye, support for the war, and hence our ability to wage it, evaporated. The North Vietnamese understood that the key was the American will to fight, and they successfully aimed at that.

    Hell, look at the Pacific War. Attrition was able to get us some islands, at terrific cost, but would never have won the war. Only a near-mystical super-weapon — which, at the time, we no longer had! — compelled Hirohito to surrender.

  24. Great essay –but in the capital H History passage, may I point out the typo in the name Rosecrans, where a second ‘n’ has slipped in.

    For the buffs, there is a great full memoir online of a private soldier in Joe Johnston’s army. If you search ‘Company Aytch’ (without the apostrophes) you will find the whole thing at several sites, Gutenberg, Fullbooks, and such, plus a first-class 2013 essay on same in the New York Times, titled “Private Watkins’ War”.

    The narrative is wonderful as a story, but the style is just as interesting. Save it for a cold winter’s night.

  25. This “Phony War” will continue until something happens to alter peoples’ perspective, most likely a nuclear explosion in Israel or the U.S. that will be traced back to Pakistan or Iran.

    Even then, refusal from broad swathes of the population to face facts will be fierce, like the truthers denying the reality of 9/11.

  27. Yes. The French hate us because of McDonalds. Really, you can look it up. And Islam really does hate us for Hooters, and other similar reasons. You need to get out in the world some.

  29. If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. ~ Sun Tzu

    It was true thousands of years ago, and it’s still true today.

  30. I see this at least in part as a false-flag operation in which the Turks are using ISIS much the way Lawrence of Arabia used the Arabs against Turkey.

    ISIS seems to concentrate on Kurdish populations. Those areas are looked at by Turkey as a crucial cross-border refuge and source of supply for PKK Kurdish Turkish rebels. Look at a map; where does ISIS get its ammo if not Turkey?

    Turkey is concerned Turkish Kurdish areas will outstrip Turks locally in demographics and eventually form a break-away state. That will be much more difficult if the PKK has no support and refuge in Kurdish Syria and Iraq. Almost nowhere is ISIS not butted up against Kurdish areas – as if like a leech – in a belt all the way from N. Syria to the outskirts of Baghdad. Most of the ISIS areas to the east and south is meaningless open desert.

    Look at an ethnic map of Syria/Iraq. Why is ISIS so heavily involved in Kurdish areas? No one cares if ISIS plunders these areas – not the Sunni Iraqi Arabs, the Turks, Iran, no one. Sure, ISIS has its own goals and those include seizing Baghdad, but that can be financed from Kurdish assets and Kurdish areas used as a base from which to launch attacks south.

    Unless one thinks of the U.S. as a de facto S.W.A.T. team and Salvation Army of mercy for that area, I don’t see how it benefits us to get involved. An ISIS Iraq will almost certainly go to war with the Iraqi Shi’ite south backed by active Iranian military units. Like they say: “Let it burn.” None of these players have my interests in mind. According to William Darymple, it cost us more to keep two Marine battalions in Kandihar than we pay annually to Egypt. Let Iran burn it’s economy in Iraq instead of we ours.

  31. I’ve forgotten nothing of the kind. Those forces didn’t have access to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material to create roadside bombs which accounted for 60% of our casualties in Iraq. That’s not counting light automatic weapons the rebels can make like we make custom bicycles machined in local shops. The post-WW II world is far different from that which came before because of the proliferation of arms and light explosives. That truth was crucial in the formation of Israel as the Jews were able to appropriate enough of that tech to make themselves self-sufficient.

  32. They would be shocked by having that modern technology in the hands of their enemy. Remember those marines were a well-trained but lightly armed and unsupported force, much like ISIS itself. The marines did well on Guadalcanal because they heavily outnumbered the Japanese who were themselves not jungle fighters and fought traditional tactics. Those marines also had superior tactical leadership on neutral ground. Iraq is a different story for the simple reason we don’t know who is the enemy and don’t range outside urban areas much. There just isn’t any comparison there. Iraqi culture and language is far more impenetrable than Latin America.

  35. They have no anti-tank capability useful outside restricted bombed out heavily urbanized areas in Syria. They are up against no tanks in Iraq. In Iraq ISIS operates almost completely in a military vacuum, which enhances their reputation far beyond that of a raggedy militia, which is what they are. Don’t let the sheer incompetence or lack of will of Iraqi and Syrian forces fool you.

  36. They and their allies destroy tanks frequently in Syria. Daesh also has tanks in both Syria and Iraq, but since they now have to worry about airstrikes in both countries they do try to stay hidden in populated areas. They don’t have to shoot tanks in Iraq because the Iraqi tankers just jump out of them and run away. Sometimes they take the keys with them.

  37. It’s ‘Cincinnati’, BTW, after the Roman farmer cum general.

    ‘Kill ’em all; let God sort ’em out’ should be the only doctrine worth considering.

    The problem with the upper echelons of the armed forces today is that there aren’t enough trained killers among their ranks. The enlisted men, who later become NCOs, probably receive the best training and weaponry with which to inflict maximum harm on a foe.

    The service academies and the ROTC program spend huge amounts of time and effort in turning out middle managers to run the Pentagon and administer its bureaucracy, but very little time cultivating a warrior spirit in the officer corps.

    You won’t see the likes of a Halsey, a Patton, or a LeMay again anytime soon in uniform. Men like these are too wildly un-PC to exist in the new armed forces. Even should someone like them slip into the officer corps, they are quickly weeded out. Sure, a few will find slots available in special service units, but they are vastly outnumbered by the managers.

  38. Somewhere along the line, being a nation of warriors went out of style. Now we have a pussy-whipped black radical CinC. What do you think he’s been busy doing to our military leadership and morale for 6 years?

  40. Well, you’re insulting all of the good and hardworking ignorant idiots out there by lumping the Sausage in with them.

  41. It’s not a question of being warriors but of being able to fix an enemy in place and destroy them in detail.

  42. A world that insanely criticizes Israel for its actions against Hamas in Gaza cannot win any war. Thank God General Dempsey at least had the honesty saying that the IDF went to extraordinary lengths to not harm civilians in Gaza. At least one man had the courage to say the obvious truth.

    The US cannot beat ISIS and it cannot beat Islamic terrorism. How can you defeat something which you pretend does not exist? The President says ISIS is not Islamic? Then he cannot be a leader for victory.

  43. It’s funny to read this in comparison to James Fellow’s recent article in The Atlantic, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” which all but blames our war failures on the professional officer corps. While Fellows might be correct on some issues, in reality the craven civilian leadership in this country has done the arms services a complete disservice for the last twenty years.

    I long for the President and leader who will actually “let slip the Dogs of War” and pursue the enemy to their bitter end.

  44. I agree. I regret very much that we had to do some of the things that we did, but not only did they start it, they threw the gloves off first and more thoroughly than we (there are times when I think that we should have razed Germany and Japan to the ground and put their inhabitants to the figurative sword over such things as Auschwitz and Nanking).

  45. Sure we did. After all, we had experience in our own country with organized crime and the klan, two organizations very similar to naziism (though without such huge tailoring bills). IMO, the best treatment for a member of any of those filthy, corroding, thieving and murderous institutions is a burst – no, a full friggin’ magazine – from a tommy gun. Or a rope.

    If you’ve never read it, Cornelius Ryan’s “Armageddon” is a good novel about how we knew about naziism… and took great and effective pains to stamp it out in post-war Germany. The second half of the novel is about the hard lessons we had to learn – and damned quickly – in understanding the soviets. Perhaps I’m wrong, but how we handled the occupation of Germany and the Cold War seem to me good models for dealing with islamofascism.

  47. We also did far better with less than the Red Army. The latter is a combination of attitude and technology. The Brits were also arrogant like the Soviets later. We better understand how the culture works out on the ground.

  48. We defeated an Islamic terrorist group in the Philippines (the Moros) in the early 1900s. Our troops, armed with Krag-Jorgensen rifles, had a motto in that conflict: “Civilize them with a Krag.”
    The lessons of history are there, for all to see.

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