US army officers learn harsh lesson in history

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/03/wirq03.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/03/ixnews.html

On an office door at the United States army's Command and General Staff College someone has scrawled: "You can't see the forest if you burn down all the trees." Alongside is another titbit of advice to the hundreds of officers studying how to wage a counter-insurgency: "It should be obvious that there is a gigantic difference between defeating an army and running a country."

Fort Leavenworth, a sprawling base on the Missouri River, is in ferment as the army frantically tries to learn the harsh lessons from Iraq. This is the cauldron of a revolution in the US army's psyche. But as the grim reports of massacres of civilians by marines have made all too clear, the shift cannot come too soon.

"We've been an army that for years was very good at breaking things," said Joseph Fisher, who teaches at the college. "Now we have to repair them. The army was so focused on Europe; everything was quantified right down to the size of the tank. Now we are in a world of grey."

His students, majors from across the army, are researching historical analogies - including the Boer War - for the Iraqi insurgency. They learn that Gen Kitchener corralled the families of the Boer commandos into the world's first concentration camps in a brutal but ultimately successful strategy.

[leveymg]

1. And I thought the Boer "Bitter Enders" eventually took control of SA

through electoral means, despite the Maxim guns and concentration camps.

Similarly, didn't the Boer War signal the decline of the British Empire?

Yes, maybe the U.S. Majors should study history.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. That's correct

Just as the Confederates ended up taking over the U.S.

The Boers did it faster, though.


Whether or not the Boer War signalled the decline of the British Empire, it did apparently mark a turnaround in the opinion of the public in Britain regarding empire, turning them against the very idea of it. Which was then presumably a major factor in the empire's decline.

[teryang]

2. All the king's horses and all the kings men...

The notion that there is a "technique" to correct the outcome of strategic blunders and war crimes is ludicrous.

I've been an officer in various roles over the years. The most striking experience is when a higher ranking officer or government official makes a false move that cannot be fixed. I'm sure you all can think of many. I won't repeat the litany of blunders. Then the shit moves downhill principle kicks in and lower ranking officers, usually politically expendable ones who are noted to have remarkable ability are chosen to come up with a solution. When those officers inform superiors there isn't any as a practical matter, they are placed on the persona non grata list, and everyone starts running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Although, I have no experience with it, what happened in New Orleans is a textbook example.

This scenario in Iraq has reached the point where the recognition of military defeat and the necessity of withdrawal is already reality. The rest is nothing but spin to protect a defeated ruling class with a bogus plan for world domination.

I'm in a survival mode now. Recession will come. Taxes will go up. Interest rates will go up. Inflation will go up. Perhaps another greater war to disguise the current military defeat. Good luck to all.

[Bigmack]

4. Remember the term "nation building"...?

and how the Repubs were against it?

Remember how Clinton was going to kill off our troops and get us into a quagmire in the Balkans?

Now the Repubs want the army to suddenly learn to "nation build".

And those assholes say Kerry wears "flip-flops"!!!

[bemildred]

5. This is horseshit.

It is not the people at the school in Leavenworth that got us into this stupid fucking mess, it's the civilian bozos at the Pentagon. What has happened was predicted by LOTS of knowledgeable people, and those predictions were ignored, and in some cases the prognosticators were removed for speaking up.

[onager]

6. "It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions..."

Now this is one of the dumbest things I've read in a while:

The main objective was to ensure that students understood that counter-insurgency was "more of a political problem than a military problem," said Col Tom Weafer, a college director.

Cold War textbooks have been thrown away and on arrival all officers have to read an analysis of the Algerian war of independence, by a French veteran.

Hello? The US military has been teaching "counter-insurgency" as a political problem since the 1950's. Anyone remember Vietnam? Hearts and minds? The Civic Action Program? All that stuff?

The whole raison d'f!cking etre for creating the Green Berets was counter-insurgency. And that was when, 1960?

All of that started precisely BECAUSE of the Cold War. I guess maybe they're throwing away the old Anti-Gook Counter-Insurgency Manuals and replacing them with spiffy new Anti-Raghead Counter-Insurgency Manuals or something.

And that analysis "by a French veteran?" I bet it's the very one I just read in Egypt, where I'm working. My Battle Of Algiers by "Ted Morgan." Ted Morgan is the English pen name of Sanche de Gramont, the only French writer to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism.

As a young man Gramont spent some time with the Negroponte family in New York City. In the book he notes that Bushbot John Negroponte, an infant at the time, "has always been a crybaby."

:rofl:

Gramont served in the French Foreign Legion. First as an infantryman in rural Algeria, and later as a sort of press (read: propaganda) officer in the city of Algiers.

Great book, but I'd suggest something more to the point. Like Robert Fisk's Iraq, 1917:

Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that "taking Mesopotamia...means spending millions in irrigation and development". Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in 2003.

But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. "I imagine," the correspondent for The Times wrote on 23 September, "that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."

Within six months, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal...

TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that "it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions".

Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer "maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb".

He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, Charlton "knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6337.htm