(The original sharpshooter myth explained US success in the revolutionary war with the claim that US soldiers typically used long rifles, which were much more accurate than the muskets used by british forces, so that a revolutionary could kill at longer range and with less expenditure of ammunition. The myth was recast to explain allied success in WW2 as a victory due to wonder weapons, even though for much of the war US ships, aircraft and tanks were distinctly inferior to the ones that the Axis was using. The real wonder was the industrial machine that cranked out tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks and so forth every year while still leaving enough population to raise food and send millions of soldiers overseas to fight. Late in the war, technical superiority did play a role, but not the overwhelming one of myth.

So these not-for-your-life wars have to be electorally compatible – i.e. low casualties : the infantry is trained to vaporize everything in a 1.5 km radius if they hear a firecracker, shelling, bombing are liberally used, etc.

Planning for conterinsurgency is planning to make the army close to an hostile environment. For the military, it goes against the “war is applying-overwhelming firepower from far away” mindset; for the politic it is accepting that soldiers will be more vulnerable, and that the war will last a long time.

I’m rather ignorant of military matters, but maybe that’s why they are discovering insurgency, again.
Blame Canada, i say.

That’s an answerable question, using the Maginot line principle. If the US gets into a war with an enemy smart enough to be dangerous, it will be fought on whichever of the different terms is most advantagous to the enemy.

soru

For the record, I don’t support the use of military force to overthrow functioning democratic governments. That sets me apart from, among others, Abb1.

I think that’s incorrect use of the terminology.

Very well—-I’m not going to get hung up on terminology. I believe my two original questions translate into, in Soru’s terms, “is 2GW or 3GW the best approach to conventional military conflict against large, organized national military forces?”, and, “is the US more likely in the future to be fighting large, organized national military forces, or the type of ad hoc irregular force that 4GW was designed to combat?”.

Your post was generally correct about the Millenium Challenge, but the link you provided has several of the details wrong. van Riper was given command of the Israeli forces, not the Iranian or Iraqi. After all, if the next decade’s warfare is going to be technology vs. technology then we should practice against (mostly) technologically advanced forces. And in comparison, the Israeli fleet is a collection of small boats. I believe van Riper only sank something like 1/3 of the US fleet, but the crucial difference (and the thing that makes this a serious critic of DoD theory) is how he did it. He launched all of the cruise missles at his disposal at the same time. The ammount overloaded the defensive survailance devices and ended up sinking a significant portion of the fleet, thereby demonstrating rather effectively that the Pentagon’s superior technology strategy was in fact not very good against technologically advanced opponents, which was who it had been designed to work against. The rest is fairly accurate. The commanders of the Challenge declared a do-over, and started sending van Riper instructions on how he was to conduct his part of the war, at which point he resigned his post. My source is an interview van Riper gave for a documentary produced by TheNewYorkTimes for ZDF (German TV) called “Perfect War”. All-in-all, there seems to be very little evidence that Transformation produces effective forces.

Keiran and I thought that commenting here meant you’d read the post.

Apparently we were all wrong.
.

soru

I think that’s incorrect use of the terminology.

In the 4GW model, there are three, not two, camps:

2GW: Pentagon and most of the US military, as best expressed in the Powell doctrine of deplying overwhelming force, pinning the enemy down, blowing them up, and advancing over their corpses.
This is really WWI tactics done right, with artillery and air support that technologically can do the job those tactics require of them.

3GW: Rumsfeld and his pet generals, as realised in the advance on baghdad. This is basically Blitzkreig, and seems to be what you are confusing with 4GW.

4GW: british-style counter-insurgency, presented in Pentagon-friendly buzzpeak to make it seem like a new thing.

About which Captain Blackadder would have had something to say.

soru

There was an excellent book published by a French serving officer on the implications of combined tank/infantry/air/artillery (which is sort of another name for Blitzkrieg) and various German officers have stated that they learned a lot from it to aid their own planning. Written by Charles De Gaulle.

A foreign leader is a-OK, if approved by Dan Simon. That’s the ultimate criterion. Otherwise – regime change. That’s what I call ‘democracy’!

More important is structural changes.

This sounds intuitively correct, but I believe that the distinction you emphasize is much less significant in practice than in theory. The very worst regimes—-the ones worth toppling by military force—-are generally either personality cults or party/oligarchy-based totalitarian governments. In either case, the foot soldiers—-the secret police and so on of which you speak—-are directly loyal to the person or group at the top, not to the government as a whole, much less the nation. Cut off the top of the pyramid, and the tyranny collapses, making “structural changes” inevitable.

Mind you, that’s no guarantee that what emerges will be North Atlantic-quality liberal democracy. But between “removing a brutal tyrant, and changing nothing else” and “establishing a Scandinavian-style parliamentary system”, there’s a lot of room for intermediate outcomes that are none the less welcome for being less than perfect.

I figure the character of whoever winds up on top is going to be something of a tossup. Look at US presidential candidates, the range goes from the integrity of Barry Goldwater all the way down to Bush.

More important is structural changes. If you could somehow destroy the secret police, you’d have a big change. Whoever winds up on top without a secret police is much less on top.

Similarly, in a democracy if you can get into the files of the secret police and publish all the blackmail material, you’re close to a structural change. Show the public how the representatives have been blackmailed in mass, and they’ll surely reconsider something or other.

If somehow all of J Edgar Hoover’s blackmail material had been exposed, then not only would Hoover have been dumped immediately, but the various legislators who still had to the end of their terms might have shown what they could do when they had initiative. And maybe we’d have tended toward rituals to encourage legislators to come clean and have some chance for some forgiveness, so they wouldn’t be such blackmail targets.

If a nation has been using its conventional army to threaten its neighbors and you get rid of that army, then the threat is gone. A structural change, coming just from beating the army.

Most times, that isn’t enough. We didn’t install Putin or Karzai by defeating an army and going home. We didn’t catch Saddam that way either. I guess the point of defeating the army is that it lets you do other things. If you wanted to walk into the FBI headquarters and look at the files, they’d stop you. If you brought enough force they couldn’t just stop you, they could call the police. Bring enough force to get by the police and … the mayor calls out the National Guard? I’m not clear how that works for DC. It builds up until you have to beat the US Army before you can do the one simple thing. Beating the army means the army doesn’t stop you from doing stuff. But then usually you need to occupy them to do the stuff their army can’t stop you from doing.

Sure—I just focused on the ones Hammes juxtaposed, according to Ted.

The trouble is, if we just defeat an army and go home, what have we accomplished?

In some cases, not much. In many others, a great deal. It all depends on who takes over next. In my view, it’s generally not worth taking down a government if subsequent governments can be expected to be just as bad. However, my notion of “just as bad” is somewhat more exacting than some others’.

For example, I don’t think Vladimir Putin—thuggish autocrat that he is—is “just as bad” as whoever would have replaced Gorbachev following the 1991 coup. Nor do I think that Ahmed Karzai is as bad as Mullah Omar. Finally, I find it highly unlikely that anyone as bad as Saddam Hussein will rule Iraq anytime soon. I therefore consider the Cold War, the Afghan operation, and the Iraq war each to have accomplished something quite substantial.

Like, third-world national armies are mostly conscripts. Why kill them? If we want to destroy the army, find a way to kill the officers and let the troops go home to their families.

But then, if we want to destroy third-world dictators, we’d do better to find a way to destroy their secret police. Leave the secret police intact without an occupation and the secret police will probably just pick a new dictator. Destroy them and the dictator has to rely on favorable public opinion to stay in power.

Anyway, people keep talking like the big threat in the next 5 years is china. I don’t know whether that means we’re supposed to invade them or if they’ll come across alaska, but if they’re the big threat we need to find a way to deal with them.
Or is it a modernised russian army we’ll face? In russia? That’s more like what we’re ready for, assuming they stand and fight. Russia, china, third-world dictators, it really doesn’t matter who we fight as long as we get to just defeat their regular armies and go home. The trouble is, if we just defeat an army and go home, what have we accomplished?