Sun Tzu’s immortal The Art of War translates into a shade over 10,000 words of American English, roughly 40 pages of aphoristic wisdom presented in language that probably 75 percent of public-school third-graders could understand. One hundred percent of our military officers should understand it, but they don’t, partly because fewer than 10 percent of them have read it.
The single-mantra version of Sun Tzu’s philosophy is “charge downhill, not uphill.”* You’d think that even cadets at West Point and Annapolis and Colorado Springs who graduate at the bottoms of their classes could retain such a short and sweet maxim and comprehend its gist. Yet the history of war is choked with case studies of generals who paid the consequences of attacking uphill when they had every opportunity in the world not to.
And then takes to task the revered Robert E. Lee for failing to follow this basic military dictum at the Battle of Gettysburg:
Perhaps the most celebrated example of this was the Battle of Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee insisted, despite the strong objection of his deputy James Longstreet, on attacking up not just one hill, but three of them (Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and Cemetery Hill).
The drubbing Lee invited on himself at Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War and the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. That Lee continues to be our most revered and respected general despite having lost both a war and a country by violating the most common gem of military wisdom should tell us something about the kind of reverence and respect we show generals, especially the Long War hooligans we have now.
As always, Huber is highly (and rightly, to my mind) critical of U.S. General David Petraeus, while also faulting the integrity of the last 65 years of war games held at the Naval College:
If, as prominent warmonger Lindsey Graham suggests, King David Petraeus is “our best hope,” our ship of state is already on a bow-first vector for the ocean floor. Lamentably, the state of American military wisdom is so pitiable that Petraeus may in fact be the sharpest utensil in a drawer otherwise inhabited by spoons.
This is, in part, because of a lack of intellectual integrity in our so-called war college system, the most prestigious icon of which is the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, R.I. NWC is home of the annual Global War Game, the template from which all other U.S. military warfare simulations are modeled. Lamentably, NWC war gaming hasn’t been a legitimate test bench for actual war since the 1930s, when the likes of Chester Nimitz and Ray Spruance devised War Plan Orange to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific. During the Cold War, the Global game was rigged to “prove” that the U.S. Navy would only lose a handful of aircraft carriers in a toe-to-toe slugfest with the Russkies. After the Berlin Wall went Humpty Dumpty, the Global game turned into a venue for validating whatever cockamamie doctrines and weapons systems the three-star in charge of the college wanted to verify.
Finally, he gets to the heart and soul of his constant criticisms of the underpinnings of U.S. military strategy and theory (emphasis mine):
But the most virulent warfare theory to infest our New American Century to date has been the Army and Marine Corps’ “new” counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, as manifested in “the book,” Field Manual 3-24. Contrary to the details of his manufactured legend, the only part of FM 3-24 that Petraeus actually wrote was his signature on the cover page. Maybe he did that so everybody would have an autographed copy. The book’s real authors were a team from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., who plagiarized much of its material from older doctrines like the ones that worked out so ducky in Vietnam.
COIN doctrine suffers from a fatal internal fallacy. A successful counterinsurgency, the field manual insists, requires a legitimate host government that is in control of an effective security force. But major insurgencies do not occur in states that have a legitimate government and a functional security apparatus. Attempting to create those two entities in a country where they don’t already exist but an insurgency already does is futile, as proven by our experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
America’s finest military minds (heh) have committed the best-trained, best-equipped armed force in history to an unending, ruinous war against an enemy that doesn’t have a single tank or airplane or ship and is led by a handful of cave dwellers who don’t even have a fort to fart in.
And thus, day after day, the long war continues, the Marines advertise how to "be all that you can be" on all the major (and minor) sporting events going down, another troop or two get killed every day, or kill themselves, and slowly U.S. citizens find their standard of living, the prospects for job security, health care, education slipping, slip-sliding away, while the talking heads give us "the elections" most of which are too close to call, because the candidates are in fact pretty damn close on "the issues" (at least the issues they can comfortably talk about) so there's a large focus on the money raised by the candidates - the money race.
And if any one of us thinks it's gonna start getting better any time soon before it starts getting worse for most of us, well, then, I'd guess you're right, but then I'd also guess that you're in the Disaster Capitalism business where perpetual war and ongoing disasters make for alarming levels of profit.
One trillion dollars spent for national defense? Good heavens, it's almost as if two oceans, a benevolent neighbor to the North, and a bunch of drug gangs to the South of us aren't enough to provide a pretty good starting place.
Save us from the capitalists
Whose insatiable need for ever more profits
Will eat away from all of the government services provided
Privatiziing education, transportation, law enforcement,
They eat their own kind
They are cannibals
And as long as they are well fed
With lots of shiny toys
They are happy
And the rest of us, be damned
Well it's a one, two, three what are we all fighting for
(Long War)
Don't ask me now I don't give a damn
(Hell no)
Next stop is South Yemen
Well it's five, six, seven open up them pearly gates
Now there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee we're all gonna die
Give us an L
"L"
Give us an O
"O"
Give us an N
"N"
Give us a G
"G"
Give us a W
"W"
Give us an A
"A"
Give us an R
"R"
What'cha got? LONG WAR
What'cha got? LONG WAR
What'cha got? LONG WAR
