perfidy

George Will discusses Marine General Charles Krulak, who is the son of Marine General Victor Krulak, who we have been discussing in relation to the CAP program in Vietnam. Will talks about Krulak the Younger's (sounds like a character in a bad fantasy movie) theories on modern warfare, which he describes as the 'Three-Block War':

In today's conflicts, he says, you can have a Marine wrapping a child in swaddling clothes. And a Marine keeping two warring factions apart at gunpoint. And a Marine in medium- or high-intensity combat. It can be the same Marine, in a 24-hour time frame, in just three city blocks.

"You can't," he says, "defeat an idea with just bullets -- you need a better idea." But first you need bullets. You need, Krulak says, the enemy "to be petrified," as were the Germans who gave U.S. Marines a name that stuck -- "devil dogs" -- as a term of respect when, at Belleau Wood, Marines blunted the Germans' 1918 drive on Paris.

There is a heart-rending ingenuousness to U.S. efforts at amicability, even to the point of encouraging Marines, before they entered Fallujah last month, to grow mustaches, as many Iraqi men do. Shiloh, where almost 24,000 Americans were casualties, was where both sides in the Civil War lost their illusions about its being a short and not-too-bloody war. After Fallujah, it is clear that the first order of business for Marines and other U.S. forces is their basic business: inflicting deadly force.