Dear Friends,
It seems to me, nations and states typically set up their armies and strategy to fight the last war. The French did this in WWII with the Maginot Line. It was an impregnable redoubt. So instead of crashing against an impenetrable barrier the Germans went around it. They did it using tactics written down by a Frenchman and adopted by the Wehrmacht. De Gaulle described the very tank warfare Guderian would use years later. Thousands of years before, the introduction of the Greek phalanx upended warfare. Later, the Mongol use of mounted archers changed the game. States, or more accurately, the people who run them, tend to lack imagination. They are instead dependable, conscientious, and unoriginal. So they optimize for what they see… not what they imagine.
People who become powerful within states tend to get more and more orthodox personally. This is because bureaucracies form the actual center of power. Bureaucracies are built of rules. That’s why they hire and promote rule followers. People with unique thinking tend to get overlooked. Ideas ravage bureaucrats like plagues. Lacking effective feedback, the ivory tower of bureaucracy becomes an echo chamber. This paradigm makes the smartest people stupid. They become captured by an idea, then protect it against logic, reason, and morality. In this, violence is acceptable if necessary, and people with little imagination often have to resort to violence. So even as the bureaucrats become ever better cogs, the ideas they promote become ever more absurd.
War is not simply politics by violence, but politics by any means available. State-on-state violence is only one means. There are many other ways to force a state to capitulate, or simply weaken it, that are not state-on-state violence. In this, outside-the-box thinking is paramount. Alexander didn’t have the biggest army… his army had the best general. Alexander always met the enemy on his own terms. Instead of crossing the Hydaspes river immediately, Alexander marched a small contingent every night back and forth up and down the river… forcing his enemy to match them. Until the enemy became complacent. Then Alexander lit as many fires as before, but had almost his whole army march up the river. Once out of earshot, Alexander crossed in force, overwhelming the tiny enemy contingent.
When the orthodox-minded administrators of a nation wage war, they see what they want to see, not necessarily what is. In Vietnam, the US was counting corpses while the North Vietnamese were counting propaganda victories. In the end it wasn’t corpses that won or lost the war… it was propaganda’s ability to wither the will. The orthodox leadership at the time couldn’t imagine they would lose that war. The kill ratio was 10 to 1, while the propaganda ratio was 1 to 10. The US wasn’t fighting a state… it was fighting an ideology. The tactics that would be necessary to win were unthinkable, although the strategy to win ideological conflicts had been established by the response to the anarchist movement at the turn of the twentieth century.
The problem of orthodox leadership fighting an orthodox war is exactly the problem we face today. They know we’re under attack, so they scrape around looking for a state to attack. In the future, our generals and leaders will be called idiots for not seeing what is so obvious in hindsight. One way to tell if our leaders are using effective tactics is whether the chaos diminishes. If it’s increasing, they are using the wrong strategy. A strategy to win a different war. The fact that the US lost two decades in Afghanistan is proof enough that conquering nations and holding them is ineffective in an ideological conflict. Our leadership needs to correctly identify the enemy, then craft a strategy to effectively fight it. General Black Jack Pershing fought ideology in the Philippines… and won.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
