PLAN FOR THE LAST WAR AND YOU'LL LOSE THE NEXT :

As Face of War Changes, Our Tactics Change, Too (Richard Brookhiser, NY Observer)

What a difference a war makes. My only dealings with the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. (the Army's equivalent of a postgraduate institution), occurred three years ago, when I sat in on the taping of a seminar there, for a documentary that is finally being aired July 4. The colonels and lieutenant-colonels were discussing President George Washington's decision to send 12,000 men (five times as many as he commanded at the Battle of Trenton) to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. One of the colonels referenced Colin Powell and, implicitly, the Gulf War by arguing that overwhelming force is the most effective--and most humane--way of the getting the job done.

Even as the colonel spoke, Osama bin Laden had lodged himself in his Afghan puppet state. Between the colonel's remarks and the air date, Mr. bin Laden struck-and we struck back, not with overwhelming numbers ˆ la Desert Storm, but with drones, native levies and Special Forces riding on horseback. We used much less manpower than we had in the Gulf War-or, for that matter, during the Whiskey Rebellion or the Battle of Trenton. But what we used was equally overwhelming.

Mike Daley sent this piece, by the excellent Mr. Brookhiser, at right around the same time that this piece came out, Fight Small! It's the True American Way of War : In this new (old?) world, an allergy to small, aggressive deployments may be literally self-defeating (Jonathan Rauch, 6/18/02, Atlantic Monthly) :

The opening shot in the war launched by Al Qaeda was fired not on September 11 but two days before. On September 9, two Tunisian Arabs, posing as journalists and carrying forged Belgian passports, insinuated themselves into the presence of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. As they began their questioning, they detonated a bomb hidden in a television camera. Massoud died a few days later.

With ample reason (though wrongly, as things turned out), Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies believed that taking out the charismatic Massoud might cripple the Northern Alliance. The bold, clever assassination seemed a case study in the kind of asymmetric warfare-that is, warfare aiming at key enemy vulnerabilities rather than at the enemy's main force-that had flummoxed American forces in Vietnam and might soon flummox them again in Afghanistan.

Here is something that Al Qaeda didn't know: For a century or more, the United States made a specialty of fighting small wars against elusive foes that used asymmetric tactics. And no one ever did it better.

As both pieces show and as Victor Davis Hanson has written, one of the greatest strengths that democracy provides to a military is a greater likelihood that it can be flexible. When the stories were recently leaked about how the Pentagon was saying we weren't ready to invade Iraq because we couldn't deploy the hundreds of thousands of men it would require, many understood this to be disinformation, meant to hide the fact that we were even then planning the invasion. Instead it is likely that the latter part of the leak was the true disinformation, that we have no intention of mounting a massive ground invasion but rather will use something like the unconventional methods that we utilized so brilliantly in Afghanistan. While Saddam plans for a replay of Desert Storm, we seem likely to be planning a war that's like nothing he's ever seen. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2002 3:09 PM