The Science of Insurrection and Irregular Warfare

[BSB]

The science of civil war

What makes heroic strife

Computer models that can predict the outbreak and spread of civil conflict are being developed

http://www.economist.com/printedition/kallery

[Plane]

    I recently read Sun Tzu "Art of War" and he makes a compelling case that the burden of the battle , including the financial cost should be as much as possible placed on the enemy population.

    This seems quite opposite to "winning hearts and minds" or any other of the policys we have used for counter insurgency in the last few decades.

     Is Sun Tzu wrong , or can we not call any population an enemy?

[BSB]

What do you think? Is he wrong? Is the general population, the water, that allows the fish to swim in it, the enemy? What does the use of drone strikes and night raids by SF and Seal teams say about this? Do you answer your own questions? Did you read the report in The Economist? Did you read The Art of War at one sitting? How would rate your understanding of te wars this country has been fighting over the last decade on a scale of 1 to 10? 1 being no understanding, 10 being a very high level of understanding?   


BSB

[Plane]

  I have worked in and for the military for my whole career and my thirty year pin is old.

   I probly rate 50% understanding, maybe.

[BSB]

You give yourself a 5? That's pretty high.

What is gained by IDing localized populations?

BSB

[Plane]

  Controll.

   The Viet Cong and the Taliban were/ are not as shy as we are about confiscating their need or causing damage to the innocent in areas that THEIR enemy controlls.

     We are not as free as they to conduct total war.

     We used to fight as if winning mattered most, we shot a lot of buffalo, we shelled Richmond , we burned Atlanta , we firebombed Dresden and Tokiyo, pretty much we did whatever it took.

      I think that sometime during the period that we have been the main superpower we started to feel that the whitemans burden for us ment that we would suffer more than minimum casualtys on purpose if it ment we would win friends and influence people.  Something other than winning matters most.

     There is one thing( and perhaps only one thing) I agree with Bill Clinton about and think Bush got quite wrong. Clinton went to war in a manner to win at minimum financial and human cost to OUR side .

    BTW no I did not read past the intro of "Art of War" at a single sitting, it is not that easy .

      I got the impression that Sun Tzu would never have been promoted by the US Army.(Not in recent decades anyhow.) He has more in common with General Grant and Sherman than general Swartzkoff.

[BSB]

Well, Grant, Sherman, and Schwarzkopf were conventional warriors. The Civil War and WWII were conventional wars. We bombed the population centers in Japan but in the European Theater we bombed the industrial targets primarily and England bombed the population centers. It was done that way because frankly we were appalled by the amount of civilian casualties England was willing, indeed wanted, to cause.

So while no one can say Sherman was shy during the Civil War, and no one can say McNamara and LeMay were shy during the air campaign in Japan, our pre-Vietnam military history is not as ruthlessly bloody as some think it is.

As for Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, these are/were counter-insurgency wars.
The tables were turned in Iraq by a campaign of assassination against the IED and bomb makers. It wasn't won by dishing out extended punishment to specifically targeted civilian centers.

The reason you identify different population groups within a country like Afghanistan, or Iraq, is so you can find where the local insurgents are most likely going to operate from. Than you can begin to assassinate them. That's what all these drone attacks and night raids are all about. Penalizing the population doesn't help in that endeavor one wit with one exception. If your friend becomes collateral damage during a night raid or drone attack than you might think twice about hiding an insurgent in your house. So that's a beneficial punishment.


BSB

[Christians4LessGvt]

There is one thing( and perhaps only one thing) I agree with Bill Clinton about and think Bush got quite wrong. Clinton went to war in a manner to win at minimum financial and human cost to OUR side .   

Plane you are 100% correct! Kosevo was a brilliant strategy....although to this day I am not sure we were on the right side....but jezzz play to your strengths and thats what we did in Kosevo....and that same strategy would work in other places like Iran.....it was basically what was used in Libya....although again not sure we were on the right side there either.

[BSB]

There's one tiny factor concerning our involvement in Libya. We were on the side of the insurgents and fighting a conventional foe. And there's one tiny factor concerning Iran. There isn't an active insurgency going on.

Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. He was right. Well, you fight the war you have, not the war you wish you had. GW Bush tried for years to fight the war he wished he had in Iraq, and failed.  Than he woke up and decided to fight the war he actual had, and it got turned around. 

That's the trouble with conservatives. No matter how much things change they want to conserve what was. Life doesn't work that way. No matter how much you may want to home again, you can't. The Pilgrims are all dead.  1776 is over two hundred years ago. WWI and WWII came and went. Afghanistan isn't Libya. Iran isn't Iraq. One strategy works in A but doesn't work in B. Playing to a strength in A would turn into a weakness in B.  Change, change, change.

The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and others like them, will fail in the end because they can't except change. Don't be foolish and dream the same dream. 

BSB

"Assume nothing" Buddha

[Christians4LessGvt]

There's one tiny factor concerning our involvement in Libya. We were on the side of the insurgents and fighting a conventional foe. And there's one tiny factor concerning Iran. There isn't an active insurgency going on.

what worked in Kosevo would work in Iran
of course no two conflicts are 100% identical
The Mullahs just like Milosevic in Kosevo could be brought to their knees from the air.
We do not want, nor would we need to have ground forces in any conflict with Iran
Destroy infrastructure, destroy military bases, destroy military ports, all from the air
With a devastated military no longer able to protect them the Mullahs would soon
be dealing with their own survival from within.

[Xavier_Onassis]

=Plane you are 100% correct! Kosevo was a brilliant strategy....although to this day I am not sure we were on the right side.
=====================================
I find that somewhat appalling. So you think we maybe should have been helping Milosovic defeat the Albanian minority in Kosovo?

I suppose we should have helped the Chetniks murder the Bosnian Muslims as well.

I really, really fail to see why we should have done that.

[Xavier_Onassis]

what worked in Kosevo would work in Iran
=================================

The support we gave Kosovo was by bombing Serbia until it withdrew.

Iran is NOTHING like that. Iran has not invaded any other country. Iran is persecuting some of its own people, but not for religious reasons, and the main problem is that Iran's saber rattling about nukes it does not have is giving the Israelis the heebie jeebies.

Serbia is a small country, Iran is rather large, both in area and population. Attacking Iran would rally the Iranian people around the government and against the US.

[BSB]

Look, CU4, Iran has their agenda and we have ours. They don't exactly mesh at the moment, but Iran has done nothing that would prompt the kind of action you're talking about. Iran's leadership isn't as stupid as some like to think they are. 

Anyway, you're confused. You're having a fever dream. It happens to the best of us. Take two asprin and call 3DHs in the morning.


BSB

[Christians4LessGvt]

I find that somewhat appalling.
So you think we maybe should have been helping
Milosovic defeat the Albanian minority in Kosovo?

Hey moron....I said I was unsure....do you not understand what "unsure" means?
it means I am undecided....quit jumping to illogical preconceived conclusions.
but I tend to give somewhat more credence to this guy than you....

"The siege of Sarajevo wasn't a genocidal Serb attack on defenseless peace loving Muslims like our news media led us to believe. The Muslims deliberately put their civilian population in the crossfire so that NATO would intervene against the Serbs on "humanitarian" grounds.

NATO took the bait because our news media shamelessly shilled for the Islamic cause. Our journalists dutifully reported that Muslim civilians were killed in Sarajevo by Serb artillery fire, but they failed to report that the Serbs were provoked by Muslim artillery fire emanating from the city.

The story of Srebrenica is similar. We've been told the half-truth that the Serbs over-ran a UN safe area and killed thousands of Muslims, but we weren?t told that the Muslims of Nasir Oric's 28th Infantry Division used that safe area as a base to launch attacks from. They massacred the Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica and they fled back into the warm bosom of the UN Safe Area when they were done "safely behind the UN's skirts" and out of reach of Serb retaliation.

In July 1995, when a column of 15,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica ventured out of the safe area to attack the Bosnian-Serb frontlines in an operation to break-through to Tuzla, the Serbs weren't inclined to be friendly. The Serbs shot and managed to kill thousands of their Muslim attackers, and now we're being told that they committed a so-called "genocide".

One has to wonder what kind of "genocide" it was when most of the bodies being pulled from the mass graves around Srebrenica are military aged men. Thousands of bodies have been exhumed and there isn?t a single woman among them. Can you think of any other "genocide" that spared women and children? If exterminating Muslims was the goal, why not kill the women and children? The story of Srebrenica doesn't make a lot of sense until you realize that it wasn't genocide at all. What happened in Srebrenica is simple: the Muslims attacked the Serbs so the Serbs shot and killed them, some died in battle and others were executed. It might not have been pretty, but it?s ridiculous to call it "genocide".

Only a fool would believe that the Muslims were striving for a democratic and multi-ethnic Bosnia. Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, was seen in the company of Osama bin Laden by Der Spiegel?s Balkan correspondent Renate Flottau and by London Time's war correspondent Eve-Ann Prentice in 1994. According to the 9/11 Commission report, four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were veterans of the Bosnian jihad against Radovan Karadzic and the Serbs.

A report published in 1996 by the US House Committee on International Relations says, "Iran ordered senior members of its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite force used to advance militant Islam, to travel to Bosnia to survey the military needs of the [Izetbegovic] government". IRGC trainers taught the Muslims how to use anti-tank missiles and helped with troop logistics and weapons factories. The IRGC also incorporated religious indoctrination into military training. Iran used this leverage to urge Hizballah to send foreign fighters to the region as members of the Mujahideen. The effort was successful and a force of thousands drawn from several pro-Iranian groups and other Islamic Opposition movements assembled in Bosnia.

Radovan Karadzic was fighting the good fight in Bosnia. He was fighting to keep his people from being subjugated by an Islamic regime in Sarajevo that had ties to Osama bin Laden and the Iranian government. Anybody who believes that the Muslims enlisted the help of Osama bin Laden and the Iranians for the sake of multi-ethnic democracy is hopelessly delusional.

Radical Islamic groups supported Izetbegovic's regime because he shared their fundamentalist views. In 1990, two years before the war started, Izetbegovic published his book "The Islamic Declaration" in Sarajevo. In that book Izetbegovic advocates Sharia law and the establishment of "a united Islamic community from Morocco to Indonesia". He wrote that the establishment of an Islamic order was his "incontrovertible and invincible aim". In Izetbegovic's view "the Islamic movement should and can, take over political power as soon as it is morally and numerically so strong that it can not only overturn the existing non-Islamic power, but also build up a new Islamic one?. He branded Western feminists a depraved element of the female sex and said, "There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions".

Under the circumstances, the Bosnian-Serbs had every right to break away from Bosnia and re-join what was left of Yugoslavia. To call the Serbian war effort an aggression for "Greater Serbia" is grossly dishonest. The Bosnian-Serbs had the same right to leave Bosnia and re-join Yugoslavia that West Virginia had to break away from Confederate Virginia and re-join the Union during the civil war.

The rhetoric that our media and our political establishment have used to describe the Bosnian civil war is some of the most malicious propaganda ever conceived. To illustrate the point I'll use their "Bosnia rhetoric" to describe the American civil war: "In 1861 Abraham Lincoln committed an aggression against the Confederate States of America. Over the course of the war, Lincoln's thugs systematically seized Confederate territory in a genocidal quest for "Greater America". Lincoln's war killed more than 600,000 people and left millions homeless. Lincoln, better known as "the butcher of Gettysburg", was not brought to justice for his crimes until he was slain by a Confederate loyalist named John Wilkes Booth in 1865.?

Obviously, that tendentious description of the civil war is one of the most intellectually dishonest things ever written. Unfortunately, our news media and our political establishment describe what happened in Bosnia in precisely that fashion. It is time to call these people out, the next bleeding hart that bemoans ?Karadzic?s genocide in Bosnia? and smugly applauds his capture as "a victory for international justice" needs to be put in their place.

No matter what you've been told, there was nothing especially evil about the 1992-95 war in Bosnia compared to any other war. The war killed about 100,000 people including the civilians and soldiers from each side. While that's a lot of people it's not a remarkable death toll for a war. It certainly isn't indicative of genocide or anything even close.

When the United States firebombed Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 we killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in that one night of bombing alone. Does that mean Franklin Roosevelt was a genocidal monster? Coalition forces estimate that they killed 100,000 Iraqi troops during Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. Does that make George H.W. Bush guilty of genocide? If it's absurd to accuse Bush and Roosevelt of genocide, then it?s equally absurd to accuse Radovan Karadzic.

Radovan Karadzic's fight to keep his people from being ruled by Islamic extremists is no less valid than the U.S. war against Imperial Japan or the U.S. campaign to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. If anything Karadzic had more of a right to stand and fight on the territory where his people lived than the United States had to take the fight halfway around the world to Japan and Iraq.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is pretty well known that the Serbs got most of the Yugoslav Army's weapons and rounded up Bosnian Muslim men, put them in camps and starved and executed them.

Kosovo was mostly populated by Albanians before the Serbs decided to grab it back.

Of course, both sides fought with the arms they had.

I fail to see why the US should have attacked the Kosovars. Bringing down Milosovic was a wise decision, and benefited Serbs and Kosovars alike.