THE GENTLE GIANT:

Blitzkrieg 2003 (Martin Walker, 4/4/2003, UPI)

The battle FOR Baghdad is over. The battle OF Baghdad is about to begin.

The capture overnight of Saddam Hussein International airport, some 10 miles from the center of the Iraqi capital, brings to an end a stunning victory in two weeks of mobile warfare that reinforces the lessons of the first Gulf War and of Kosovo. The U.S. military machine is unstoppable--and looks set to continue the kind of global dominance that the British enjoyed in the century after their decisive defeat of France's naval power in 1805.

A technological generation ahead of any other military on earth, the U.S. armed forces have built on the lessons of the German blitzkrieg of 1940 to pioneer a new style of war. The German panzer divisions integrated tanks, artillery, mobile infantry and close air support with radio communications--and consistently defeated larger armies.

The Germans lost for three main reasons. First, they never understood sea power, and modern America does (having also learned the lesson of British naval dominance). Second, German logistics were poor. Most of their divisions in 1940 depended on horses to haul their guns, and their logistics failed miserably in the Russian campaign, when German troops froze to death in their light summer uniforms at the gates of Moscow. Third, the German military failed to nurture the national technological and industrial base on which military superiority depended. They produced magnificent weapons, but never enough of them.

None of these weaknesses applies to the current U.S. armed forces, which have long learned the importance of sea and air power. But the real genius of the modern American way of war is the way they have combined their logistics with the best of civilian technology, from communications to information technology. It is one thing to marvel at the way the Vth Corps post office in Kuwait delivers 100 tons of incoming mail a day, quite another to see the massed ranks of PCs in the giant hangars at Camp Doha, with GIs e-mailing home and surfing the Web to see what al-Jazeera or the British media has to say about their war.

The supply systems are stupendous, because the U.S. military has applied the technologies of commercial companies such as Fed-Ex and Wal-Mart to track the use of equipment, locate spare parts through bar codes, and start shipping them forward to the combat troops even before they ask for them. German troops froze for months in their Russian campaigns. American troops outside Nasariya were able to take hot showers less than 48 hours after they reached the place--despite the worst sandstorm in a decade.

As a result, the U.S. armed forces defeated the best army in the Arab world with one hand tied behind their back. The U.S. Army did not even field its first team. The 4th Division, the most technologically advanced of all, with a computer in every vehicle and TV camera on the helmet of every squad leader sending real-time images back to headquarters, never even arrived on the battlefield.

Along with the talk of American Empire (see below) there's a great fad of talking about inevitable American overextension and decline. Those who plumb this theme--besides their obvious overestimations of the futures of Europe and China, which, though each is a structural and demographic basket case, are typically offered as plausible rivals--make a truly bizarre assumption, that America will be the first militarily superior superpower content to die without a fight. So, for example, they spin out ludicrous scenarios where America's foreign debt has become so enormous that we could be toppled if these nations just demanded repayment or refused to lend more. This fundamentally misapprehends what genuine power is, because suppose we just said: no, we're cancelling these debts; collect them if you can. Sure, the world economy might collapse and we'd be affected, but the fact is they'd be affected more and no one could force us to change our behavior. That we do not choose to do such things, that we use our overwhelming power so sparingly and almost always in ways that benefits others as well as ourselves, indicates just how benevolent a superpower we are and puts paid to the complaints of the Left that we are some kind of global bully. Just imagine what a world would be like where the military imbalance described above obtained, but the dominant power acted only in its own self-interest? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2003 9:34 AM