Asymmetric Warfare

I visited the sites of the revolutionary war battles of Lexington and Concord this summer, and was reminded of the old joke about the great game master arranging the terms of the war:

OK, you Brits will wear red, march in close formation, and use short range guns.

Americans, you wear camouflage, hide behind trees, and use long range rifles.

Ready, set, go!


So why don't the guerrillas usually win? Because it was discovered long ago that there is another side to the asymmetry. The more powerful force uses its superior firepower to destroy the means of sustenance of the population in which the guerrillas live. Thus Sherman broke the back of Southern resistance in the American Civil War by creating a swath of destruction across the South.

Collective punishment is a war crime, but war is always collective punishment.

Meanwhile, the world puts up with terrorism mainly sponsored by weak countries. A vast armada is deployed in a mainly futile effort to suppress piracy based in Somalia, but a tithe of that force could utterly crush the Somali pirate bases. If pirates originate in a village, destroy it and every boat near it. If many villages support piracy, destroy every boat and port in the country.

There is a tragic downside, of course. For every pirate destroyed, many innocent fishermen would lose their lives of livelihoods.

Somalia is a nuisance to the world, but Afghanistan is a bleeding wound for the US. We continue to lose American soldiers to an enemy largely based in a country that is nominally our ally. In Vietnam we found that the most massive bombing campaign in history was not enough to deter a determined enemy based in the North. It seems far less likely that the targeted assassination of a few enemies by UAV is going to prove a greater deterent.

I wish we had a Congress, Republican, Democratic, or Tea, that would bring the issue of Afghanistan up for debate. What's our goal there, and how to propose to get to it? Anybody who uses the word momentum in an answer should be summarily impeached.

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