Copyright John T. Reed

In these military pages, I have listed several “doctrines” advocated by various military leaders regarding use of military force in the modern world. Eventually, I figured someone would demand that I say what I think the correct “doctrine” is. OK.

The issue, as you can see from reading my other articles on Rules of Engagement, various book reviews, and the nature of military expertise is how to deal with what British General Rupert Smith calls “wars amongst the people”—what others call asymmetrical wars.

Roughly speaking, the military delivers bayonets, bullets, and bombs on targets identified as legitimate military targets. The Navy and their two air forces—naval aviators and Marine Corps pilots—have done just fine in asymmetrical wars, because their weapons are so large, they are only used against clear enemy targets like aircraft, tanks, and military buildings. The same is true of the Air Force.

The problem is with the Army and the Marines. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Air do not have to mingle among apparent civilian air craft or ships that may suddenly try to kill them. The Army and Marines do.

Work should be done to improve the ability of the Army and Marines to identify which of those who claim to be innocent civilians are actually enemy fighters. As I say elsewhere at these military Web pages, the military or some other U.S. expeditionary police force, needs more detective type training and equipment. But that will take a long time. In the interim, I think the leaders of the Army and Marines have a moral and legal obligation to tell their civilian superiors that we do not have the skills, training, or equipment to occupy and pacify urban areas in which a mixture of enemy fighters and innocent civilians live. Some pertinent rules that I recommend:

• U.S. personnel should not drive down roads that might be targeted by command detonated mines including improvised explosive devices (IEDs). This applies to routine repeat travel and to travel to respond to an enemy provocation that does not risk allied lives or assets and which might be an attempt to draw U.S. forces into an ambush. Very simply, with present training and equipment, our personnel have no way to either detect or protect themselves from such mines. Furthermore, there is no worthwhile trade-off between the casualties incurred on such missions and the cost to the enemy in territory or materiel or personnel destroyed or captured. In the vast majority of such attacks on U.S. personnel, U.S. personnel and equipment are destroyed and the enemy suffers no loss whatsoever other than the artillery shell and cell phone that are destroyed in the explosion. Although it is true that men have always died in combat, they always did so as a trade for territory, material, or enemy personnel captured or destroyed. Travel by vehicle over roads that have IEDs is only a valid military maneuver if it is part of an offensive in which the expected U.S. and allied casualties from the IEDs are worth the expected gains from the overall operation.

• U.S personnel do not enter homes that may contain innocent civilians. This is a mission for native civilian police and civilian paramilitary units like S.W.A.T. By the nature of their training and equipment—grenades, machine guns, artillery, air-to-ground weapons, etc.—and the dangers they are trained and equipped to deal with, military personnel are too crude and deadly a weapon to be used in situations where civilians are close to enemy fighters and our civilian leaders do not want the occupied-country civilians hurt. The U.S. military should only be used in urban situations like the 2004 battle of Fallujah where the civilians were told to evacuate the city before the battle.

• U.S. personnel do not charge into rooms the contents of which they know not. Although this is standard with civilian S.W.A.T. in the U.S., they are typically awakening sleeping drug dealers who are surprised. In a war situation, the room may be booby trapped or occupied by enemy fighters who have guns aimed at the entrance. The military should use such methods as dogs, robots, periscopes for seeing around corners and cameras on the end of a stick to inspect the room if it is necessary to avoid damaging the room before going in.

• U.S. personnel pay no attention to civilian hostages, voluntary or involuntary, when engaging the enemy. According to the book We Were One, this was the policy of the Marines during the 2004 battle of Fallujah. Great! Although this policy would result in injury or death to civilians initially, in the long run it protects them by rendering their use as hostages worthless thereby ending such use.

• U.S. personnel will be allowed to attack any enemy sanctuary adjacent to the country in which we are fighting. This was a mistake we made in Vietnam and possibly in Korea. And it is a mistake we are currently repeating in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we were to attack such sanctuaries, the countries that provide them would put troops on the border to eliminate the sanctuaries so that the U.S. would not invade them. As long as we respect the sanctuaries, the neighboring countries will provide them and prevent us from winning the war.

• U.S. personnel do not fight in wars that have not been declared by Congress in accordance with the Constitution. See my article on this.

• U.S. military leaders must protest privately, but strongly, to their superiors when those superiors have not provided them with adequate training, staff, or equipment to accomplish their mission and protect the welfare of their men.

• U.S. military leaders must protest privately, but strongly, to their superiors when those superiors establish rules of engagement that prevent them from accomplishing their mission and protecting the welfare of their men. See my article on Rules of Engagement.

• Former U.S. military leaders have a freedom and a moral obligation to help their active-duty successors by protesting policies which should be protested.

Moral obligation of U.S. military leaders

Military leaders at all levels from squad leader to Chief of Staff have an obligation to tell their superiors when they think a military mission is beyond their capabilities. Here is an obvious example. Let’s say that when I was a platoon leader in the military one of my men got appendicitis. Let’s further say that my superior ordered me to perform an appendectomy on him. Since I am not a doctor, I would be obligated to protest the order and urge that the man be medevacked to a medical facility or that qualified medical personnel be brought to the location of the sick soldier.

Life and death

Most of the situations I am talking about are less clear cut than that, but the stakes are the same: life and death.

It is clear now that the U.S. military’s can-do attitude during the Vietnam war was dead wrong. Under the restrictions placed upon the U.S. military at the time, they could not win the war. That is not to say the military leaders do not bear much of the blame for the loss of that war. But now the military leaders claim it was the fault of the civilian leaders. Accepting that momentarily for the sake of argument, they should have said that then, not after the war. They did not say it then because they feared it would hurt their career or get them into some sort of immediate trouble—which is quite correct.

The problem is the cumulative effect of millions of military leaders placing their careers or their own personal situation head of accomplishing the mission (winning the war) and the welfare of the men (avoiding the deaths of 58,000 men and the wounding of hundreds of thousands) resulted in disaster for the nation in Vietnam. There is also the issue of the huge financial cost to the American people of conducting the war incompetently.

We cannot do this

Military leaders should have told civilian leaders we cannot do this unless you remove such-and-such restrictions. If the military leader in question was on active duty, he should have protested vehemently and privately up the chain of command all the way to the President, in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If no one listened to him, he should have resigned his commission in protest and then, when permitted by law, publicly protested on the same grounds to the Congress and media and direct to the people. Similarly, retired or former military people who had gotten out of the military before Vietnam should have protested to the extent they recognized an inappropriate approach being used there.

Only military personnel or former military personnel who made such protests at the time can have a clear conscience about the Vietnam War. Few did make such protests. I am talking here about the conduct of the war not whether the nation should have gone to war in Vietnam.

I felt then and since that the cause of preventing the Communists from taking over South Vietnam was a proper one. Lots of officers at the time protested against the whole idea of going to war in Vietnam—especially those West Point graduates who attended civilian graduate schools immediately after West Point. Although that was quite fashionable at the time, I never saw any logical basis for it.

The “killing fields” in Cambodia and the boat people of Vietnam spoke eloquently about who the bad guys were in that war and what the consequences of our losing were. The anti-war protesters never want to talk about those things.

It is ironic that after throwing us capitalists out of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China, who were allies and suppliers of North Vietnam during the war, and the post-war Communist government of Vietnam, all abandoned Communism for the most part and switched to free-market capitalism. Those who protested the war in Vietnam cite our losing it as proof they were right. I cite the enemy’s since adopting most of our core values as evidence that we were right to fight for them at the time.

The problem was not that the war was fundamentally wrong, Rather, it was that our military leaders at the time allowed us to lose the war.

Invaded the sanctuaries

Is was in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. During 1970, we invaded Cambodia and Laos where the North Vietnamese Army had sanctuary throughout the war. The artillery battalion in which I was a platoon leader moved up close to the Cambodian border in support of our invasion.

Prior to our invasion of Cambodia, I heard incoming (rarely) and outgoing (almost daily) weapons fire regularly. After we invaded Cambodia, I never heard another shot fired by either side for the rest of my time in Vietnam (until September 1970).

During the war, our civilian leaders were afraid to invade North Vietnam because they were allied with the Soviet Union and Communist China and we were afraid of starting World War II or of triggering another Chinese invasion like that which turned the tide of battle in the Korean War.

After the Cold War ended, the former Soviet Union and Communist China admitted publicly that they were bluffing when they suggested that they would intervene militarily if we had invaded North Vietnam.

With regard to our invasions of Cambodia and Laos, we should have done them sooner and stayed longer. Our civilian leaders were afraid to because of the accusation that they were “widening the war.” They should have been more afraid of the accusation that they were losing the war, which they were.

Fact is, the invasions of enemy sanctuaries in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were necessary to win the war and almost certainly would have won the war. Accepting arguendo that the decision not to invade those sanctuaries sooner in the cases of Cambodia and Laos or at all in the case of North Vietnam was the correct one given the information available to our civilian leaders at the time, we should not have gotten into the war at all.

Lebanon, Somalia

The same thing appears to have occurred in Lebanon and Somalia where many U.S. military personnel were killed or wounded because our civilian leaders think sending the troops is some sort of universal cure-all regardless of the details of the situation and the mission and our military leaders lack the moral courage to say to the civilian leaders, “This mission in this situation with these restrictions is outside our capabilities.”

Many lives and much national treasure were lost in those military adventures—for nothing. Again, although the civilian leaders were mainly at fault, they no doubt consulted with the military leaders who either did not protest at all or who protested too little. I recall no military leader at the time publicly stating that those adventures were beyond the capabilities of our military under the rules of engagement they operated under.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Now the same thing that happened in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia appears to be happening again in Iraq and Afghanistan: thousands of lives lost, ten thousand wounded, huge amounts of money being wasted, all because the military has been sent into a combat situation with inadequate training and equipment for a mission which might not be doable with any currently known training and equipment.

The military requires known targets to shoot at. Ordering our military to wander around among a mixture of innocent and quasi-innocent civilians and enemy fighters who are posing as civilians is not a viable military mission. It is native police work.

Our military should say,

We will be glad to shoot at confirmed targets—even to risk our lives in the process. But we are not interested in wandering around within a few feet or yards of disguised bad guys. We do not know how to do that in an intelligent manner that will accomplish any military objective at an acceptable cost.

Sanctuaries

Once again, our enemies have sanctuaries, this time in Syria, Iran, and the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border. Our military cannot succeed against an enemy that has nearby sanctuaries. The sanctuaries must be invaded and denied to the enemy. If we cannot or will not invade those sanctuaries, we cannot fight the war successfully and therefore should not have gone in to begin with.

As the British say,

In for a penny. In for a pound.

Adequate vote in Congress

The vote in Congress for the current Iraq war (Operation Iraqi Freedom) was 373 to 156—and we do not seem to be doing very well in it. How does that vote compare to the wars where we have done well? Here they are:

• Spanish-American War (we kicked butt): 352-41
• World War I (we won): 455-56
• World War II (we won): 470-1 against Japan and 481-0 against Germany

And here are some wars where we did not do so well:

• War of 1812 98-62
• Vietnam War 504-2
• Lebanon 307-202
• First Iraq War (Operation Desert Storm) 302-230
• Afghanistan War 518-1

There is not a clear pattern here. But I still think the doctrine should be that we do not go to war with a 51% vote. of Congress. In fact, except for Desert Storm, it appears that we should not have gone to war any time ten or more Congresspersons voted against it. That would have still left us in Vietnam.

It would have kept us out of World War I, but when you think about it, we did not need that war. We want to war then because they sank some of our ships and asked Mexico to go to war against us. Our ships were in the war zone. The Lusitania, which was sunk and was the main event that got us involved in World War I, was carrying ammunition. That was illegal under the rules of war because we were supposed to be neutral. Both the British and the American lied about the Lusitania carrying ammunition both before it was sunk and after it went down in 18 minutes from one torpedo. It went down so fast because of the ammunition it carried exploding. The Mexicans did not have the slightest intention of declaring war on the U.S.

It would have kept us out of the Spanish-American War which we won, but was probably the war we least had grounds to start. the Battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. We blamed Spain and declared war on them but to this day there has been no evidence they did it. They had no motive to do so.

It would have kept us out of the War of 1812. We fought that war because the British restricted our trade with France, with whom they were at war, Shanghaied American sailors into the British Navy, and supported American Indians who were at war with us. In retrospect, it sounds like stuff we could have waited out or dealt with diplomatically or with lesser actions than war, like taking British sailors prisoner to trade for the Americans.

It would have kept us out of Desert Storm. That is one war we should have fought. The world would have been a much more dangerous place if we had let Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait stand. The same is true of the Korean War. Both Desert Storm and Korea were U.N.-mandated wars.

• We don’t go to war if more than ten Congresspersons vote against it unless it’s under a U.N. mandate.

Duration of the war

The stronger pattern and correlation is that we should not have fought any long wars other than the first one: the Revolutionary War.

If the war is relatively fast and has progress throughout, the American people will support it. But if it becomes amorphous and drags out with little or no progress, the American people will withdraw support.

World War II Major General Fox Connor said:

• Never fight unless you have to.
• Never fight alone.
• Never fight for long.

Amen

Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered his own list of military policy criteria in the 11/3/08 Newsweek. He also addressed the war duration issue in that list.

Victory needs to be defined as an outcome achievable in a time period sustainable by American public opinion.

Like I said: three years.

‘Paper tiger’

Osama Bin Laden and others have referred to the U.S. as a “paper tiger.” That’s ridiculous. Unleashed without restrictions, the U.S. military is the most ferocious and deadly “tiger” ever known. But the U.S. is an impatient tiger. Shame on U.S. military leaders for being oblivious to that lesson after nearly twenty years of such no-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel wars.

American military and political leaders need to move our wars rapidly to victory.

C’est la guerre
• Once we declare war, we need to prosecute it ferociously as is the nature of war. Restrictions on civilian casualties that prevent or slow victory must be eliminated. If they cannot be by reason of international law or other political reasons, do not declare war.

John T. Reed

John T. Reed’s Succeeding book, in part, relates lessons learned about succeeding in life from being in the military

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