The Interactive Nature of Warfare

The first couple of paragraphs here are quoted from a comment I left on another blog. After that I expand upon them, as is my wont.

It is unfortunately true that one's adversary seldom consents to sit immobile while one maneuvers against him. Here is a quote, from the book I recently reviewed on my blog, which doesn't blame the mess in Iraq on President Bush, but on our failure to recognize that there are other actors in this drama, and not just props. "After Vietnam, the U.S. military had vowed never to wage a counterinsurgency war again - indeed had largely stopped preparing for the possibility. In the year since Chiarelli had arrived in Baghdad, however, he had learned what so many commanders before him learned, and always the hard way: The enemy has a vote." Martha Raddatz, The Long Road Home (2007), page 291.

There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing. The Chinese winter assault in Korea comes to mind, as does the Battle of the Bulge. But there are also counterexamples: The enemy, too, is human and has his weaknesses. Ulysses Grant tells the story, in The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, of his first days as a colonel of Illinois volunteers in 1861. Grant was sent to confront a band of Confederate raiders who had crossed the river from Missouri. He was quite naturally concerned about his chances. His troops were green, they were not well-equipped, and their officers had little experience of command. Imagine his reaction when he came over a hill above the Confederate camp, to find his opposite number had packed up and fled. Grant, in what might have been the one great insight of his life, realized that his adversary had been as frightened of Grant as Grant had been of him. From that moment on, he stopped thinking of his opponents as supermen.

As to finding out more about our enemy, his plans and objectives, one of the books I read this summer related to U.S. national security and the war in Iraq was The Looming Tower, a rather good study of Al-Qaeda, its predecessors and genesis, its attitudes, objectives, and assumptions. It's a good starting point.