COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Phil Carter correctly percieves that the whole flap about armored trucks is not a failure of the Rumsfeld Pentagon so much as a failure of several decades of Army doctrine writers at Ft. Leavenworth, Fort Sill, Fort Knox, and Fort Benning to forsee the nonlinear battlefield.

Actually, the problem runs much deeper than the current administration: it stems from the Pentagon's uneven effort over the last decade to turn a cold-war military into a force able to meet today's challenges.

For 40 years, Army doctrine centered on what's known as a linear battlefield. Combat units line up shoulder to shoulder across a broad front to face the enemy, which organizes its units in much the same fashion. Support units operate in relative safety in the rear, with only the occasional enemy infiltration to worry about.

Under this model, trucks in logistical units can afford to do without armor, and their drivers can make do with just an M-16 rifle; there's no need for Kevlar door panels or .50-caliber machine guns because the enemy is taken care of by combat units at the front. This was the way the Army won World War II.

Exactly correct, except that the failure is even worse.

World War II was NOT a particularly linear conflict.

Indeed, Heinz Guderian, the architect of the blitzkrieg doctrine in the German Army, pretty much did away with the linear battlefield. Where defenses were linear, they were almost uniformly failures on the World War II battlefield.

The Americans quickly adopted much of the blitzkrieg doctrine, and eventually improved upon it in France in 1944, under the command of Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley - a vastly underrated figure with the American public.

German troops played havoc with American rear areas during the Battle of the Bulge. And George Patton terrorized German rear areas right back throughout the rest of the fight, by moving faster than the Germans could battle track, and consistently operating inside the German decision cycle.

Erwin Rommel wrote in his memoirs: "in desert warfare, there is no front line. Or more accurately, it is front all around."

German rail lines were consistent targets of sabotage, especially on the Eastern Front (The French resistance, for all their obnoxious bragging and hopeless romanticization in movies like "Top Secret" was never very large, nor very effective. Most of their best members died in Nazi (and French!) torture chambers, anyway)

General Stillwell managed to go nonlinear in South East Asia. Mao Tse Tung revolutionized warfare by fighting nonlinear, guerrilla actions against the Japanese, who also had trouble securing outlying areas in the Phillipines.

Indeed, conceptually, the whole South and Central Pacific campaigns were exercizes in nonlinear warfare.

Soft areas--logistics support areas, command and control nodes--have been targets of warfare from the dawn of time. U.S. AirLand Battle doctrine and the USMCs "How To Fight" manual of maneuver warfare (I can't remember what it's called now, exactly, except that it was excellent reading for me as a platoon leader) both insisted on it, and held forth the concept that it was acme not to target the enemy's combat formations with your own--this is a failure of strategy--but to maneuvre around them and strike at the enemy's rear areas, and force them to withdraw or come to you.

But when you do that, guess who's between you and your own rear areas?

That's right: the enemy.

I remember standing in the motor pool one morning with a bunch of soldiers in Fort Stewart, GA, right before we deployed. We were initiating a round of PMCS on the vehicles, and I wanted to emphasize how important our maintenance effort was.

So I gathered people around and told them "let me tell you how the next battle's going to go."

I then predicted that our time in Jordan would be limited, and we would be called into Iraq. We would enter Iraq in a long, hellacious convoy along an MSR. A vehicle would break down, attracting crowds of curious Iraqis. One of them would have a cell phone, and call his buddies. In 20 minutes, we would be attacked.

The bottom line: DON'T be the guy who's vehicle breaks down! Do your PMCS, and do it right!

Most of that came to pass, except that we got lucky--when a vehicle broke down, it was usually out in the middle of nowhere. I've been wrong about a lot of things. But I was right about the Jordan mission becoming obsolete as soon as Baghdad fell, and I was right about the convoy from Hell getting into Iraq, I was right about the asshat with the cell phone, and I was right about the 20 minutes.

And I was right in suspecting that we would face an intifada style insurgency, and that it would largely target CSS assets. They'd be stupid not to.

So the failure of doctrine writers to anticipate that our convoys would be prime targets: that the battle would be nonlinear EVEN as we sought nonlinear battlefields, is a great failure indeed.

Now, what will be the nature of the NEXT war?

Splash, out

Jason