Fifth Generation of Warfare (5GW) is "indistinguishable from magic"

[Woodsman]

Re: Fifth Generation of Warfare (5GW) is "indistinguishable from magic"

yankees and cowboys

[c1ue]

Re: Fifth Generation of Warfare (5GW) is "indistinguishable from magic"

Except that it would have absolutely occurred had JFK made it home from Dallas; of this I am certain, as was MacNamara.

Interesting - I would agree that the phased withdrawal plan would have gone begun had JFK gone home, however, the Galbraith review makes it seem like LBJ also had deep reservations about Vietnam - but felt compelled to 'make a statement' before initiating withdrawal. The latter seems in opposition to much of what I have seen (MSM wise and public school history book wise) concerning LBJ's actions and motivations.

I'd also note that the Gulf of Tonkin incident might well have had an impact - much as it did in on the record.

The Soviet Union in 1964 had begun widespread deployment of the R9, thus ending the previously one-sided ICBM nuclear delivery capability enjoyed by the US.

[don]

General Bolger

Dan Bolger is not looking to add to the debate over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The retired three-star army general, out of patience with unresolved conflicts, means to end it.

On Tuesday, Bolger will publish his 500-page attempt to make sense of both the wars in which he served. Its blunt title preemptively maneuvers conversation over the book on to Bolger’s terrain: Why We Lost.

Senior army officers tend not to use the “L” word, certainly not in public, despite one war stretching into its 14th inconclusive year and the other one restarting. Bolger is not used to being out of step with the army. A tall man who speaks deliberately, he is respected in military circles for being a historian as well as an officer. Bolger deadpanned during an hour-long interview with the Guardian that he won’t get any more Christmas cards from his old friends in uniform.

But Bolger considers a reckoning with the military’s poor record in Iraq and Afghanistan overdue. The army in which he soldiered for three decades comes in for the greatest amount of blame, a decision that flatters the military’s pretensions about being above politics but arguably lets the Bush and Obama administrations off the hook. Bolger, a senior officer responsible for training the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, includes himself in the roster of failed generals.

“Here’s one I would offer that should be asked of every serving general and admiral: general, admiral, did we win? If we won, how are we doing now in the war against Isis? You just can’t get an answer to that question, and in fact, you don’t even hear it,” Bolger said.

“So if you can’t even say if you won or lost the stuff you just wrapped up, what the hell are you doing going into another one?”

Bolger has several explanations for why the US lost. The post-Vietnam army was built, deliberately, for short, conventional, decisive conflicts, yet the post-9/11 military leadership embraced – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through miscalculation – fighting insurgents and terrorists who knew the terrain, the people and the culture better than the US ever would.

“Anybody who does work in foreign countries will tell you, if you want long-term success, you have to understand that culture. We didn’t even come close. We knew enough to get by,” Bolger said.

More controversially, Bolger laments that the US did not pull out of Afghanistan after ousting al-Qaida in late 2001 and out of Iraq after ousting Saddam in April 2003. Staying in each conflict as it deteriorated locked policymakers and officers into a pattern of escalation, with persistence substituting for success. No one in uniform of any influence argued for withdrawal, or even seriously considered it: the US military mantra of the age is to leave behind a division’s worth of advisers as insurance and expect them to resolve what a corps could not.

The objection, which proved contemporaneously persuasive, is that the US would leave a vacuum inviting greater dangerous instability. “It would be a mess, and you’d have the equivalent of Isis,” Bolger conceded.

“But guess what: we’re in that same mess right now after eight years, and we’re going to be in the same mess after 13 years in Afghanistan.” The difference, he said, is thousands of Americans dead; tens of thousands of Americans left with life-changing wounds; and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, injured, impoverished or radicalized.

“Moreover, you’d be doing a real counterinsurgency, where they’d have to win it. That’s what the mistake is here: to think that we could go into these countries and stabilize their villages and fix their government, that’s incredible, unless you take a colonial or imperial attitude and say, ‘I’m going to be here for 100 years, this is the British Raj, I’m never leaving,’” he said.

It is there that Bolger plants his flag in an interminable debate within the army about the wisdom of counterinsurgency. He savages its proponents, chiefly Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, for overpromising and under-delivering in Iraq and then recycling the formula to brew a weaker tea in Afghanistan. It leads Bolger’s book to some dubious places, like comparing the pre-Petraeus Iraq commander George Casey to Ulysses S Grant, the savior of the union, even though Casey under-promised and under-delivered.

Some in military circles view Bolger’s book as the first shot of an internecine fight to purge the army of counterinsurgency, much as the post-Vietnam generation attempted. It is an uphill struggle. While many officers of Bolger’s generation share his views, the Iraq surge saw the greatest tactical results of either long war past the invasion phase. Repudiating it is difficult without conceding the futility of either conflict, as Bolger has done, which, for much of the contemporary military, is a psychological step too far.

John Nagl, a retired army lieutenant colonel and prominent counterinsurgency advocate, praised Bolger as a “smart, dedicated army officer” while rejecting his thesis.

“While I haven’t yet read his new book, I don’t agree with him that we lost, and find it hard to believe that he does,” Nagl said.

But if the wars succeeded, Bolger said, “how come two or three years later, everything’s a pile of crap?”

One of the reasons was an “unstated assumption” that undergirded the American construction of the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, supposedly the US ticket out of both wars.

Bolger, who led the training of Afghan soldiers and held a senior post training the Iraqis, said US trainers banked on being present alongside their foreign charges for decades, guaranteeing their performance and compensating for weaknesses.

“The thought was to leave a conventional division, Korean-type model and you’d be there for 40 or 50 years with a mutual defense treaty and all that kind of stuff. Hey, the Korean army in 1953 was not very good. It takes a generation to build a good army: you need to retrain leaders, you have to build a non-commissioned officer corps,” he said.

The anticipated length of the US training helps explain the immaturity of both forces. The collapse of entire divisions of the Iraqi military against the Isis advance this year sent shockwaves through Washington. The Afghans are judged to lack critical air support, medical evacuation, intelligence and other capabilities, which helps explain how 9,000 soldiers have died in two years, as a US general revealed last week.

Yet never has an administration official or senior military officer – to include Bolger – told the American people to expect a half-century stay in a hostile foreign country. Instead, officials vaguely discuss a “long war”, leaving the actual anticipated duration unstated, to say nothing of the price in money and blood.

Surveying the latest war against Isis, Bolger sees the same pattern repeating.

“Here’s what wasn’t said: we never had the discussion where we said, ‘Hey, Mr President, you realize you’re signing up for a 50-year commitment, or plus, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where was that discussion? We talk about surges, but those are all short-fuse things. We’re still not having that.

“Has President Obama come to the American people and said, ‘By the way, this fight against Isis is going to last 30 or 40 years. You guys good with that?’”

[shiny!]

Re: General Bolger

Good find, Don. Got a link for it?

[don]

Re: General Bolger

Good find, Don. Got a link for it?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...an-why-we-lost

[shiny!]

Re: General Bolger

Thanks.

[jk]

Re: General Bolger

iirc shinseki didn't talk about the time required, but he did testify that iraq would require several hundred thousand american troops. of course that didn't change anyone's mind, it just cost shinseki his job at the time.

[sutro]

Re: General Bolger

iirc shinseki didn't talk about the time required, but he did testify that iraq would require several hundred thousand american troops. of course that didn't change anyone's mind, it just cost shinseki his job at the time.

It would have required that many troops to topple the regime and stabilize the country during the transition period. But what if the real goal, or the "unintentended" consequnece of the seemingly botched invaison, was actually the breakup of Iraq and sowing chaos in the middle of the Middle East?

[jk]

Re: General Bolger

It would have required that many troops to topple the regime and stabilize the country during the transition period. But what if the real goal, or the "unintentended" consequnece of the seemingly botched invaison, was actually the breakup of Iraq and sowing chaos in the middle of the Middle East?

we should be careful to avoid the intentional fallacy of assuming what happened was what was intended. i'm not so impressed by the competence and predictive abilities of the people who made these decisions in the past, nor frankly the ones making decisions now. given the low esteem in which i hold them, i tend to view the consequences of their actions as indeed unintended.

[don]

Re: General Bolger

we should be careful to avoid the intentional fallacy of assuming what happened was what was intended.

More importantly we should not avoid consideration of "Victory Accomplished" as being truly the case and intent. Can't forget the West Point map of a "new" ME, fragmented to fit a new Great Power reality.

[sutro]

Re: General Bolger

More importantly we should not avoid consideration of "Victory Accomplished" as being truly the case and intent. Can't forget the West Point map of a "new" ME, fragmented to fit a new Great Power reality.

I forget where I came across this. If it was here, forgive me for the duplicate post. Some folks have been thinking about the porspects of breaking up the currnet order for while now.
http://crashrecovery.org/fischer/article0005345.html

[don]

Re: General Bolger

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Nationalist states always bad, puppets best.

[sutro]

Re: General Bolger

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Nationalist states always bad, puppets best.

Right ho! In confusion there is profit. And which country depends on Gulf oil the most?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

Dan Bolger is not looking to add to the debate over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The retired three-star army general, out of patience with unresolved conflicts, means to end it.

Bolger, a senior officer responsible for training the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, includes himself in the roster of failed generals.

If General Bolger feels this strongly about it, why did he wait until retirement to go against the grain? Where was the intestinal fortitude to speak truth to power when he still held active rank?


The post-Vietnam army was built, deliberately, for short, conventional, decisive conflicts, yet the post-9/11 military leadership embraced – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through miscalculation – fighting insurgents and terrorists who knew the terrain, the people and the culture better than the US ever would.

“Anybody who does work in foreign countries will tell you, if you want long-term success, you have to understand that culture. We didn’t even come close. We knew enough to get by,” Bolger said.

General Bolger is both right and wrong. The US conventional army was built to destroy the Warsaw Pact in a short and sharp full spectrum combined arms conventional war(as seen briefly in Desert Storm 1.0 the Prequel).

US Army Special Forces, a US Army Branch that General Bolger appears unfamilar with, are custom built to train foreign forces specifically trained in their language and culture and unlike any other resource available as an effective US foreign policy tool.

As the lead for training host nation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lack of knowledge, experience, or even acknowledgment of this capability is telling for those with experience.

for disaster to use a sledgehammer(hastily retrained US conventional forces) when the appropriate tool is an adjustable wrench(US Army SF).


More controversially, Bolger laments that the US did not pull out of Afghanistan after ousting al-Qaida in late 2001 and out of Iraq after ousting Saddam in April 2003. Staying in each conflict as it deteriorated locked policymakers and officers into a pattern of escalation, with persistence substituting for success. No one in uniform of any influence argued for withdrawal, or even seriously considered it: the US military mantra of the age is to leave behind a division’s worth of advisers as insurance and expect them to resolve what a corps could not.

I would agree completely with Afghanistan in late 2001 being a light footprint domain of specialist forces(US Army SF/SMUs) and we failed when we went full retard conventional heavy foot print allowing the Pakistanis(who have the ability to cheaply prevent Afghan success) to gain a crazy amount of leverage over the US. It still would have been a very long term commitment, but a much more compact and cheaper(lives/treasure) commitment.

Iraq in 2003, once committed...should have seen the instantaneous support of regular Iraqi Army/Police(instead of their disbandment by Bremmer) and the quick transition to a palatable strong man.

The objection, which proved contemporaneously persuasive, is that the US would leave a vacuum inviting greater dangerous instability. “It would be a mess, and you’d have the equivalent of Isis,” Bolger conceded.

I reckon why President Bush Senior didn't push straight into regime change against Saddam in 1991 is because of the sectarian instability risk combined with the influence/control opportunities it would offer to Iran(as seen post 2003).

“But guess what: we’re in that same mess right now after eight years, and we’re going to be in the same mess after 13 years in Afghanistan.” The difference, he said, is thousands of Americans dead; tens of thousands of Americans left with life-changing wounds; and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, injured, impoverished or radicalized.

“Moreover, you’d be doing a real counterinsurgency, where they’d have to win it. That’s what the mistake is here: to think that we could go into these countries and stabilize their villages and fix their government, that’s incredible, unless you take a colonial or imperial attitude and say, ‘I’m going to be here for 100 years, this is the British Raj, I’m never leaving,’” he said.

It is there that Bolger plants his flag in an interminable debate within the army about the wisdom of counterinsurgency. He savages its proponents, chiefly Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, for overpromising and under-delivering in Iraq and then recycling the formula to brew a weaker tea in Afghanistan. It leads Bolger’s book to some dubious places, like comparing the pre-Petraeus Iraq commander George Casey to Ulysses S Grant, the savior of the union, even though Casey under-promised and under-delivered.

It's quite interesting to read General Bolger savaging General McChrystal. While McChrystal made an incredibly rookie mistake in terms of media relations and managed to get himself fired like a modern day MacArthur, McChrystal developed and executed an incredibly successful modern urban warfighting doctrine that effectively destroyed the Hydra headed insurgency by ruthlessly targeting middle management and effectively disrupting insurgent operations enough to allow capacity building efforts to gain traction.

McChrystal changed the game by developing the fusion teams that were able to consistently kill the bad guy middle management faster than it could be replaced. Even McChrystal critics often agree to his clear successes. What exactly has Bolger done, besides having a whinge post retirement?

Some in military circles view Bolger’s book as the first shot of an internecine fight to purge the army of counterinsurgency, much as the post-Vietnam generation attempted. It is an uphill struggle. While many officers of Bolger’s generation share his views, the Iraq surge saw the greatest tactical results of either long war past the invasion phase. Repudiating it is difficult without conceding the futility of either conflict, as Bolger has done, which, for much of the contemporary military, is a psychological step too far.

What's truly frightening is that there isn't a single mention of the positive effects and outcomes delivered by one of the smallest branches of the US Army, US Army Special Forces. The very branch who conducts the training of host nation forces and foreign internal defense as two of it's core missions. US Army SF are operating in over 100 countries around the world continuously......mostly in training roles, capacity building, and relationship building. But receives little to no notice for what has been a huge bang for the buck return on investment over the last 62 years.

John Nagl, a retired army lieutenant colonel and prominent counterinsurgency advocate, praised Bolger as a “smart, dedicated army officer” while rejecting his thesis.

“While I haven’t yet read his new book, I don’t agree with him that we lost, and find it hard to believe that he does,” Nagl said.

But if the wars succeeded, Bolger said, “how come two or three years later, everything’s a pile of crap?”

One of the reasons was an “unstated assumption” that undergirded the American construction of the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, supposedly the US ticket out of both wars.

Bolger, who led the training of Afghan soldiers and held a senior post training the Iraqis, said US trainers banked on being present alongside their foreign charges for decades, guaranteeing their performance and compensating for weaknesses.

One of the most telling problems of General Bolger holding the most senior post for training foreign forces is his complete lack of ANY training to conduct that highly specialized role. The same goes for nearly everyone who worked under his command.

“The thought was to leave a conventional division, Korean-type model and you’d be there for 40 or 50 years with a mutual defense treaty and all that kind of stuff. Hey, the Korean army in 1953 was not very good. It takes a generation to build a good army: you need to retrain leaders, you have to build a non-commissioned officer corps,” he said.

Once again with the conventional force hat squarely on an insider the box thinking head. Asian culture lends itself to highly rigid and large formation military formation/indoctrination as often seen in western force structures as well. Arab cultures do not lend themselves to effective performance when mimicking traditional/conventional western force structure models. Quite telling, but in an unintended way.

The anticipated length of the US training helps explain the immaturity of both forces. The collapse of entire divisions of the Iraqi military against the Isis advance this year sent shockwaves through Washington. The Afghans are judged to lack critical air support, medical evacuation, intelligence and other capabilities, which helps explain how 9,000 soldiers have died in two years, as a US general revealed last week.

One of the main reasons why Iraqi forces folded would be due to the fact that many soldiers and Marines were literally annointed trainers of Iraqis(and Afghans) with little to no specific vetting for the role and little to no cultural/language training for the role. Again, using sledgehammers that can't communicate and can't seem to avoid cultural faux pas.....instead of using an adjustable wrench that speaks the language with intercultural training on how to avoid blue on green attacks.

Yet never has an administration official or senior military officer – to include Bolger – told the American people to expect a half-century stay in a hostile foreign country. Instead, officials vaguely discuss a “long war”, leaving the actual anticipated duration unstated, to say nothing of the price in money and blood.

The day boots hit the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq BEYOND just SF/CIA/SMU/Support light footprint operations is the day they both became multi decade investments.

Surveying the latest war against Isis, Bolger sees the same pattern repeating.

“Here’s what wasn’t said: we never had the discussion where we said, ‘Hey, Mr President, you realize you’re signing up for a 50-year commitment, or plus, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where was that discussion? We talk about surges, but those are all short-fuse things. We’re still not having that.

“Has President Obama come to the American people and said, ‘By the way, this fight against Isis is going to last 30 or 40 years. You guys good with that?’”

General Bolger raises some valid points.

But the MOST telling are the ones he fails and/or chooses not to raise....I suspect a bit of both.

Anyone who sees the world for what it is knows that Afghan and/or Iraq wars or not.......there is a multi-layered "forever war" going on in the region.

Ask an Afghan Pashtun and they will tell you stories of British loss in Afghanistan in the 1800's as if it happened more recently than the Soviet forced entry on Christmas Eve 1979.

Ask certain folks in certain places in the GCC/ME and you'd think the days of TE Lawrence, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Battle of Karbala occurred last week, 3 days ago, and 4 months ago respectively.

The wars that already happened, have happened.

General Bolger might have some relevance if he were to actually put it on the line and talk about how technological advancement and peer/peer mass communication play to the historical success/strengths of Arab cultural in irregular warfare and how the risk of repeating another regional "fall of the Shah 1979 Iran" is rising quickly in recent years.

But then General Bolger has clearly shown his comfort staying inside the box, rather than outside of it.

Just my 0.02c

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

Right ho! In confusion there is profit. And which country depends on Gulf oil the most?

I wonder if Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a relevant example of what may happen over the next 25-50 years?

When Souther Rhodesia declared Universal Declaration of Independence in the 1960's, the Rhodesians were left with one major ally(apartheid South Africa concerned about it's northern buffer ally).

The US, Israel, and even Iranian money from the Shah helped in very small ways until the inevitable collapse against two distinct and massively funded Communist(Soviet and Chinese) backed insurgencies...especially after the opening of the Mozambique front when Portugal folded up and quit it's colonial properties virtually overnight.

Fast forward 5-6 years after and the world celebrated a free Zimbabwe.

The Shona(Chinese backed ZANLA) slaughter the Matabele people(Soviet backed ZIPRA) turning a 3 way war into a short 2 way domestic dispute the world conveniently ignores to this day.

Fast forward another 34 years and the clear winners of the last 34 years have been in place since that first 1980 election.

Mugabe and his close regime continuity players...and China.

China won Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

Yet nearly all view the conflict as black and white........they completely miss the broad range of quite relevant grey.

A Chinese backed Mugabe has lasted 34 years.

US backed GCC regimes have lasted even longer.

How technological change with one to billions instant communication will combine with the full spectrum of structural stresses in the region to effect change is hard to gauge.

If Iran imploded from a combination of sycophantic and egregious financial mismanagement, increasing freedom for the opposition to distribute millions of Ayatollah audio tape messages, and external pressure(President Carter) to reduce violence to ensure regime continuity it seems safe to say that a future situation involving the risk of GCC regime failure will be met with decisive efforts to prevent internet/mobile networks becoming tools for the opposition as well as increasingly harsh reprisals on domestic opposition with virtually no limit on regime violence to maintain control.

If there are ANY Machiavellian lessons to be learned from the fall of the Shah, the falling of Assad's Syria, and the regime continuity of Zimbabwe's Mugabe and Cuba's Castro is that you do not offer any real substantive improvements in mass communications freedom and civil liberties or any reductions in regime violence to ensure continuity.

Once past the point of no return, once you step off the throat of the oppressed the results are pretty consistent.

The US has some history of encouraging regimes to improve freedom of the press, civil liberties, and a reduction in regime continuity violence.......much to the regret of regimes that follow it.

I would think a similar pattern of US behavior towards the GCC states in the near future could act as a catalyst to accelerate the shift in superpower sponsorship from the US to China.

"There will be blood" may not only be a movie with Daniel Day Lewis in it, but a quite blunt and accurate title for a near future documentary on the GCC regimes.