Misunderstanding the Iraq War

You may have heard of “friction” referred to as a component of war. Clauswitz, the famous—and still authoritative—Prussian military philospher, defined “friction” mainly as resulting from human frailty thusly, “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.” Thus, human frailty can lead to errors which in turn lead to complications in war that slow things down, gum up the works, make things more difficult than they need to be. Absent perfect soldiers, battle plans and all the devilish little details of war cannot be conducted perfectly.

(Of course, friction can also refer to difficulties of terrain, weather, logistics, etc., that are met as uncontrollable circumstances change.)

On a slightly different subject, here’s an article by someone who’s not a military professional considering the “fog of war”.

An excerpt:

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Silicon Insider: The Myth of the Mistake-Free War

Has the Digital Revolution Led to Expectations of a Perfect World?

Commentary
By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 28, 2004 — Compared to the vague, imprecise analog world, digital offers the powerful, addictive incentive of continuous, measurable improvement. We see that improvement all around us: personal computers that are twice as powerful this year as last, credit card sized MP3 players that hold 10,000 songs, GPS systems that can place you to within three feet anywhere on the planet. Compare that with the rate of change of the old record players, tape recorders and printed maps…

…A dangerous form of this perfectionism has, I think, infected the presidential campaign this year. It regards the war in Iraq. I’m not here to take one side or another about whether the war was justified, only to suggest that the premise of the debate has been dangerously skewed by our perfectionist thinking.

Large parts of modern warfare, especially as practiced by the United States, have been digitalized — from battlefield communications to precision weapons to satellite surveillance — and it is easy to be lulled into the belief that war, too, can be perfected, that it can be made sterile and clean and, most of all, free of any mistakes. But nothing could be more wrong-headed or dangerous. War is still, as Sherman said, “All Hell” — messy, brutal and riddled with the mistakes made in the fog of war.

But you would never know that from this year’s campaign. President Bush has been excoriated for not anticipating every contingency in the most complicated of all types of warfare, fighting insurgents. He has been blamed for not fighting this war perfectly, something never demanded of FDR or Ike or Bradley. Every single casualty is a defeat; every truck bomb deepens the quagmire…

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An interesting layman’s understanding of war, written for other non-military folks like me. Much more at the link NOTE: the most telling line associated with the article wasn’t written by the author of the article. Since this article is one of the few, the very few, I have seen that reflects any kind of sensible comment on the Iraq War, naturally the editors of ABCNews needed to append this statement:

“This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.”

No duh.

Clausewitz, again, this time on the “fog of war”:

“All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”

Now, while Clausewitz did not specifically use “fog of war” in any of his writings, the description given above fits the modern use of the term: that which is unknown is always larger than that which is known, and the unknown always distorts our understanding of what is known in ways we cannot anticipate.

That is one of the reasons why a general staff works better than a micro-managing Alexander or Lee in modern war. Setting goals and giving the boots on the ground latitude in achieving the goals is simply more realistic than directing minutiae from afar, given the complexity of the tasks of war. And the friction and fog of war demand that modern soldiers be trusted to operate with flexibility, to the best of their abilities—and make human mistakes!—within the minimally controlled chaos that is war.

And so, to Iraq.

I’m not going to argue the “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time” aspect. Hindsight applied to fixing blame (for purposes of personal gain) is only good for people who are going backwards. No. We are there. And if, in looking back, we see mistakes made by the boots on the ground, we see also phenomenal successes. In spite of the inevitable friction of war, a large majority of Iraqis are much better off in terms of safety and freedom than before the war. About 400,000 tons (of the 1,000,000 tons of munitions Saddam purchased from France, Germany, Russia) have been destroyed and more is under Coalition control and even more being discovered regularly. The Kurdish north is probably safer than downtown Detroit.

And much of this is due to a President who knew he was not competent, who knew NO ONE is competent, to micro-manage the boots on the ground. Did President Bush make some mistakes in setting strategy and in making appointments to implement the strategies that were set? I believe so. But even given that (and that I would rather the U.S. have spent the $$ that were spent on this war on other things), is there evidence that Islamic jihadists have been severely damaged by this war and that the U.S. is safer because of it? Yes, there is. We are safer in the most important metric: not the number of terrorists convicted of crimes but the number of terrorists killed. Every dead jihadist taken out by a Marine sniper or killed by a well-targeted air strike is one less Islamic jihadist planning or executing a terrorist strike on our soil.