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The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War
EFL - read the whole thing, it's excellent. This guy really gets it.
2. You win by killing the enemy. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered. 3. Hi-tech beats lo-tech. Not lately it doesn't. Here again it's a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. 4. "Overwhelming force! Hit the insurgents hard enough, and they'll quit." Wrong. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. 5. People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff. No. In fact, HELL no! Look around the world and you'll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet's one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn't want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen. It's worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death. Posted by: gromky 2006-11-13 |
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