perfidy

Are war and battle synonymous? Is there not more to war than confrontations on the field? The Soviet War in Afghanistan is the perfect example of drawing victory by selectively avoiding battle, yet perfecting other elements of warfare (especially diplomacy and resource extraction).

Well...I don't think the words are synonymous, but I am likely guilty of having used them interchangeably in the course of general conversation. Our language is permeated with martial flavor: the War on Poverty, the War on Crime, the War on Homelessness, you name it, just as we have the Battle to Lose Weight or the Campaign Against fill-in-the-blank. I'm sure I've used them this way too.

When we're talking about actual military topics though I try to be more careful about words like these. For example, a "battle" to me means a clash that seeks to achieve some desired tactical or operational end-state. Battle is the action that drives the war, itself conducted to achieve a desired strategic end-state.

If those definitions, loose as they are, only exist in my head, that's ok. But it's enough for me to read the orginating article and say to myself, hey wait a minute, was this even a battle? Is this even a war? That is, what is the desired tactical end-state that is met by hacking up children today who weren't hacked up yesterday? Or stealing from people already poor as dirt?

It rings more like crime to me, albeit crime writ large.

I believe Bismarck said that if the British army tried to invade Germany, he'd have the local police arrest them.

There is nothing neatly separating war and crime. Of course, they are different, but one can easily evolve into the other. At least in Germany, France and Austria the creation of police forces and citizen armies were two sides of the same pattern of development, the police at times dealing in military matters, the army dealing with policing matters. Similarly, an insurgent group can look like both a revolutionary army or the mafia.

The War on Terror illustrates this dualism quite well. The government struggles to differentiate it as a war rather than a police action, then backtracks when it must justify policing tactics in the conduct of a war.

Bram: I don't have to admit it. To most of this type, taking shit from old men and raping young girls is the real fun. By comparison, fighting other armed insurgents offers few rewards.

GL: Your forces vs. my forces is the old way of fighting, and it yielded higher casualties because combatants had to face other armed forces with courage. The (so-called) soldiers who fight these wars in Africa and the Middle East aren't trained soldiers. They may or may not be ideologically involved in the fight. But for the most part, they are taken from the families in the middle of the night, given a rifle, and told to shoot, lest the rest of their family is murdered. They don't call in armed reinforcements. They don't call for air support. And the only positive incentive they have to fight is the fun of hacking up a body or raping a young girl. Or they are out for retribution (the pattern of the Taliban's ascent). They don't do well against organized forces: they scatter quickly because they lack discipline. The warlords who control them are aware of their limitations, and use them to extract resources from the population; they are told to avoid other armed groups. In some places, the national army is not much different from the guerrilla forces they try to hunt down, and they tend to fight the same way. Mogadishu is an interesting example, but is an outlier.

As for language: let's not forget that new words and images evolved from WWI and WWII because those conflicts were completely new to them. The soldiers who fought them struggled to find the words to describe them, and often felt that they were alone. The tendency for earlier wars was small forces, short battles, and wars with few encounters. A medieval king couldn't move more than a few hundred men across his territory with any effectiveness (Harald may have been an exception). A battle between two armies ended at sundown.

WWI and WWII will probably remain unique experiences. Asymmetrical strategies aim to frustrate the opponent, not confront him.

NDR - You have to admit that armed men do have a nasty habit of shooting back, which may make shooting them more exciting but generally less enjoyable than the unarmed types.

I think that there is something to what GL is on about - consider that when the Black Hawk down incident happened, a small force of Americans killed hundreds in the space of hours. When western military forces get down to "serious fighting" the casualties typically register larger numbers. Victor Davis Hanson goes into a rather detailed look at this, it is the premise of several of his books that there is a uniquely violent western way of war that involves unchecked application of force, applied by highly trained individuals.

It was the use of language that got up my ass more than the ineffectiveness of the forces in question.

But to take the second point first: if you're gonna fight, fight. I get my guys, you get your guys, and let's get our war on. The fact that opposing forces are still at it, 20(?) years on suggests that they're not doing something right.

As for the first point, what happens when it's time to write about or discuss those "yesterday's wars"? If 40 guys and an artillery battery constitute a fierce battle with large casualties, what language are we left with to describe the truly titanic armed struggles of the past?

This post also gave a chance to repost those pics from Liberia that everyone hearts so much, so there's that too.

Your link didn't include the best one, though, the one with the guy in the pink prom dress. I remember seeing it along with some of those same pics.

Whit deh...you're gonna say that and NOT post the pics?

C'mon man...

I have better things to do with my time than search through the internets for a pic.

Wait, no I don't. But I couldn't find it.

That's what I meant. They don't want real firefights fought to a conclusion.

I can still recite the Marine Corps Infantry Mission - "to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy... " As VDH talked about, we western types like our battles fast, bloody, and conclusive. That way, we don't end up living in a third world shithole with a continuous civil war.

Which goes toward emphasizing my original point. If they're not really soldiers, then perhaps it follows that they're not really fighting battles or wars either.

Instead of using martial language, maybe we all ought to use legal language. Maybe instead of a "ferocious battle that yielded 20 dead", it would be 20 counts of murder, or multiple counts of first degree aggravated assault with a firearm, or something.

Maybe they had "fierce" expressions on their faces as they blasted off unaimed shots.

All the more disappointing that in an indirect fire duel the other side is sure not to see your ferocious face.

Never ending wars like this just don't make any sort of sense to me. It's as if the Underpants Gnomes wrote a tactics manual:

1: Shoot
2: ??
3: Victory

In context, it is a big battle. Most of these small force wars actually have small numbers of casualties among combatants because, unfortunately, they tend to make war against the unarmed civilians rather than against other guerilla forces. If there were forty dead, it meant that both commanders decided to stick out the battle when they normally would have scurried quickly away. And for fighting of the type, these would be unacceptable losses. Most fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is on this scale (comparable to gang wars writ large). Normandy was yesterday's war.

[ETA] You should check out Herfried Munkler's __The New Wars__

...thus proving the old (von Clausewitz?) adage, "Making shit up is simply war by other means"