**Virtuous Destruction, Decisive Speed**

**By Ralph Peters**

**The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC
2020 project**

**are those of individual participants. They are posted for discussion
purposes**

**only and do not represent the views of the US Government.**

Prepared for the NIC, May 17, 2004

**Virtuous Destruction, Decisive Speed**

**By Ralph Peters**

The next two decades will challenge us with technologies we cannot
anticipate, with implacable, anti-Western enemies we cannot dissuade and
with no shortage of regional crises we cannot discourage. Yet, the
greatest military obstacles facing the United States are, and likely
will remain, of our own making: Misconceptions about the nature and
demands of warfare as morally obtuse as they are intellectually lazy.

There is no power on earth, nor will there soon be one, that can defeat
the United States. But, as we seem determined to prove in Iraq, we are
wonderfully adept at defeating ourselves.

This brief paper discusses only three of the obstacles we must overcome,
but the fundamental message is that it is never a moral act to allow
ourselves to be defeated, and that military behaviors which appeal to
the prejudices of the networked classes in the West result, in the long
run, in greater carnage, deepened hatreds and, at best, transient
solutions.

The lessons of recent wars, which we willfully misread, are many. Among
them are that there is no substitute for shedding the enemy's blood in
adequate quantities; that an enemy must be convinced practically and
graphically that he is defeated; and that speed of resolution in
tactical encounters has emerged as a crucial determinant in strategic
success.

**Attrition Works**

The phrase "wars of attrition" calls to mind the slaughter on the
Western Front in the First World War. We are conditioned to react with
repugnance to the very words. Yet, World War II was also a war of
attrition, as are all serious conflicts. Attrition is what warfare is
about: killing the enemy. War is a knife fight, not a game of chess. We
have entered a new age of attrition warfare which we refuse to
recognize. Our unwillingness to acknowledge the reality confronting us
guarantees flawed results, at best, and, increasingly often, strategic
defeat after initial operational success.

Attrition is the essence of warfare, not something to be avoided---and
no rule says that attrition must be fairly distributed. The well-fought
war inflicts catastrophic attrition on the enemy, while limiting
friendly casualties to numbers that can be readily sustained. The notion
of bloodless war enabled by technologies is a mirage and will remain so
past our lifetimes. An enemy must *see* his ranks reduced until he is
helpless---or fears an impending helplessness so profoundly that he
bends unconditionally to our will. The problem with bloodless victories,
even if they were possible, is that the enemy would not *feel* beaten.
Only tangible losses convince an enemy that his cause is doomed. And
some enemies---not least religious zealots---cannot be convinced of
defeat under any circumstances, but must be killed.

Foolishly, we have allowed ourselves to be lured into visions of warfare
as we would like it to be, rather than as it is. We dream of achieving a
prowess so daunting to opponents that its initial display provokes the
enemy's surrender. But failing the vigorous application of that prowess,
what is the incentive to an enemy to surrender if he knows (as Saddam
Hussein did) that he has no future in the peace we would impose? Or if
the enemy is a terrorist who believes he is fulfilling the will of his
god and who regards death as a promotion?

We want a war without serious consequences for either side. But that is
not war. Our enemies know it, even if we deny it.

Our enemies are irrational in their goals, but practical in their
techniques. We are idealistic in our goals and impractical in the limits
we impose upon our own power. Only cataclysmic events are likely to wake
us from our intellectual languor---we will not learn to make war
consummately again until we have suffered disastrously.

Our enemy's alacrity, pitted against our own reluctance, will continue
to shape the coming years and, perhaps, decades. Religion-driven
terrorists and other extreme warriors are determined to win at any cost,
while we wish to win at a minimum cost. We hope to make war and, at the
same time, to make people happy. It is, perhaps, the most illogical
strategic position in history, and we end by waging war insufficiently,
while alienating populations anyway. Despite our latent power, our
approach to post-modern conflict is not a formula for American success.

Even the recurring infatuation with the notion of non-lethal weapons is
based on a fallacy: non-lethal weapons cannot deter committed opponents;
on the contrary, they encourage the enemy to take greater risks. If we
do not even intend to kill those who would kill us, why shouldn't they
do their best to attack us?

Warfare was, is, and will be about *killing* the enemy until his cause
is no longer viable. The enemy must be convinced of his defeat---or, in
the case of ultra-terrorists, defeated by being killed to the last man.
There is no way to soften the matter. The crucial question is: How long
will it take the National Command Authority (NCA) to recognize the
requirements of even limited victories?

In 1918, Germany was defeated. It could not carry on the war and had no
hope of winning or even of fighting the allies to a stalemate. But war
had not touched the German heartlands (except, briefly, in the east).
The Germans on the homefront had not seen war. Yes, there were painful
casualties, food shortages and common sacrifices. But the Second Reich's
propanganda painted a picture of events contrary to reality until the
armistice was agreed upon\--and the intact state of the country never
made the population feel it had been defeated. The military lied,
insisting it had been betrayed, not beaten. So we saw the rise of the
*Dolchstosslegende*, the "stab-in-the-back theory," holding that Germany
had been a victim of treachery even as its armies were winning
victories. The situation made another war inevitable.

On May 8, 1945, the German people knew they had been defeated. The
aftermath of that war was profoundly different.

After the end of our first Gulf war, Saddam Hussein could claim he had
not been vanquished. And he was correct. He retained power. Afraid of
"world opinion" and blinded by the fallacies of obsolete
balance-of-power politics, we stopped the war before his army was
destroyed. A dozen years later, we reaped the harvest: The need to fight
again (as well as the distrust of Iraq's Shi'as).

Incredibly, we talked ourselves into doing all we could to minimize
enemy casualties and physical destruction *again* in Operation Iraqi
Freedom. We didn't even send enough troops for the comprehensive task we
undertook. As a result, cities and towns in the Sunni Triangle never saw
the war, never tasted defeat. Many didn't even see a U.S. military
vehicle for weeks or even months after the war's conclusion---or if they
did see one, it drove by in haste. The Sunni Arabs didn't feel defeated,
didn't feel a serious occupation presence, and were allowed to do much
as they pleased when no patrols were passing. The result was an Iraqi
variant of the stab-in-the-back theory.

Now, tragically, we have made a collosal strategic error in the course
of a tactical engagement. Our unwillingness to finish the job in
Fallujah, to cleanse the city of our enemies (and to live up to our
public threats to do so), has not only allowed the insurgents and
terrorists to claim success, but has given them a palpable victory. No
matter our insistence that we could have defeated them. We didn't. From
their perspective, they fought the U.S. military to a standstill. And
they are correct. Even if the decision to halt the fight was made on
political grounds, they are in control and we are not. The unwillingness
of our leadership---including some of those in uniform---to fight has
brought us a defeat the implications of which few seem to realize. From
the enemy's perspective, we can be beaten---it isn't even difficult.
Fallujah was a turning point in Arab and extremist perceptions. We no
longer appear militarily invincible (and perception is virtually
everything in the Middle East). We will pay for our fumbling in the
months and years to come.

A fundamental rule about such conflicts is that, if you are unwilling to
pay the butcher's bill up front, it will be much higher in the end.

If we cannot recognize the obvious truth that we must be willing to kill
our most implacable enemies whenever and wherever they present
themselves to us, all our power will be for naught. If we lack the
strength of will to kill our enemies, they certainly do not lack the
will to kill us.

Their model is 9/11. Ours is the moral cowardice, confusion, slovenly
good intentions and lack of resolve we displayed at Fallujah.

**If you do not Mean to Fight to Win, Stay Home**

Certainly, there were political considerations at Fallujah. There are
always political considerations. And moral considerations. And
public-relations considerations. But success is forgiven. Failure is
not. What we perceive as moderation is seen as our deadliest enemies as
weakness. They are right on that count, too.

If we are to prevail in the conflicts with which the coming decades will
present us, we must overcome the notion that we can force warfare to
conform, psychologically and practically, to a comfortable etiquette. We
cannot simply persuade our enemies that they have been defeated. We must
convince them.

**That Means Attrition**

The Global War on Terror is a war of attrition in its essence. If one
religious fanatic is left alive, he will continue to try to strike us.
This isn't an argument for resignation or an expression of
hopelessness---simply of reality. Fundamentalist terrorism, with its
roots in catastrophic regional and civilizational failure, is akin to
drug abuse or crime in at least one sense: It cannot be eliminated, but
aggressive action can significantly reduce it as a threat (fighting
crime, especially, has always been a war of attrition). Even if we can't
"kill our way out of the problem," we can make the problem a great deal
smaller by killing the right people.

But conventional wars also remain wars of attrition. They cannot be
resolved without the willingness to shed the enemy's blood. To pretend
elsewise is to embrace defeat before the first gun is fired.

**Virtuous Destruction**

Related to attrition is the need for graphic evidence of an enemy's
defeat. In our determination to avoid collateral damage, we have gotten
the psychology of warfare exactly wrong: We want to please our enemies
before they have been beaten.

There is no formula for how much physical destruction must be on
exhibition before an enemy feels hopelessly defeated. In the case of the
Germans (and Japanese), the destruction required was extensive. In
countries---especially failed states---where the population feels less
of a unified identity and is less firm in its allegiance to the
government, the amount of destruction may, indeed, be considerably less.
Nor do we fully understand the psychology of defeat. But we certainly
underestimate the power of creating a visual sense of defeat---despite
the hyper-visual age in which we live. Even physical deprivation may be
less debilitating to the enemy's consciousness than demonstrations of
destructive power---and the unflinching will to continue destroying
until the enemy's despair paralyzes and disarms him.

None of this is pleasant to contemplate. And, of course, the global
media would revel in such destruction (of which more below). But we
cannot have it both ways. If fighting a war of serious dimensions is
worth our while at all, we cannot shy from the price of victory. If the
enemy feels he has escaped the conflict with only a light spanking, he
will misbehave again.

Our unwillingness to create a psychological atmosphere of defeat also
guarantees us that, if we wish the object population to continue to
behave, our troops will have to remain on the scene for years---perhaps
decades. America's military can afford the costs of war, but not the
ever-rising costs of one flawed peace after another. First whittled down
and now devoured by occupation duties, from South Korea (still) to
Afghanistan and the Balkans, then on to Iraq, we have robbed our
strategic reserve in order to deploy sufficient babysitters with
bayonets. Gulliver is presently tied to the ground by the Lilliputians.

How much physical destruction is required to bring conflict X to a
decisive conclusion? Again, there is no easy answer. In particularly
oppressive states, a thorough, graphic destruction of the military and
security apparatus may suffice. When faced with hostile populations, far
more destruction may be required to achieve our goals and insure that
the achievement will last.

Even the notion that we must preserve the enemy's infrastructure is
often misguided. Such a policy not only complicates the achievement of
victory, but extracts no serious price from the population. Consequences
matter. Enemy populations must be broken down to an almost childlike
state (the basic-training model) before being built up again. But war
cannot be successfully waged---especially between civilizations, as is
overwhemingly the case at present---without inflicting *memorable* pain
on the enemy.

At the same time, we need to break ourselves of the assumption that we
must always stay on to rebuild or to nurture the defeated society. When
the stakes are sufficiently high, that may well be the case. Generally,
though, we are entering a new age of *punitive expeditions*. And a
hallmark of a successful punitive operation is its brevity. It leaves a
deep impression, not a deep commitment. We need not accept
responsibility for any society that has attacked our own, directly or
indirectly. The assumption that we can leave little Americas behind us
is deadly nonsense. It did not even work in Europe. There are times when
the wisest course is to leave ruins.

This is a hard message for the American sensibility. But we will come
around. Reality will drive us to it. We may wish to wage war by
teaspoons, but our enemies have Armageddon on the menu. If we cannot
learn on our own, they will teach us what we need to know.

**Essential Speed**

The global media is occasionally acknowledged as a new strategic factor,
but the military---as well as the NCA---has yet to grasp the immediate
and enduring implications for combat operations.

Combined with instantaneous communications and the unrealistic
expectations of the networked classes, the global media has
fundamentally altered the acceptable timetable for tactical combat.
Speed of tactical execution has emerged as the new critical demand upon
our forces. While much attention has been paid to developing more
rapidly deployable forces, virtually nothing has been done in doctrine,
training or structure to develop the capability to destroy enemy forces
with greatly accelerated speed at the street-fight level. Our current
model is fluid strategic power and tactical finesse. The model the
future demands is fluid strategic power and swift, devastating tactical
effects.

We remain locked in a make-sure-all-the-buttons-are-buttoned approach to
warfare. Unquestioningly, we assume that haste must make waste. And, in
our present condition, dramatically increasing the pace of tactical
encounters would likely produce more friendly casualties (in the short
run), while worsening collateral damage. Nonetheless, the present
approach is incompetent when faced with the new battlefield equation. We
can no longer win by fighting slowly.

We must win fast. Today, a hyper-swift victory that inflicts high enemy
casualties (with attendant destruction) would be vastly easier for the
world to accept than operations stretching over weeks and months---even
if the casualties and level of destruction were markedly lower in the
latter case.

We must win before global opinion can induce second thoughts in
decision-makers, at home and abroad. Even the most junior soldier or
Marine today fights both against his tangible enemy and against a
stopwatch held by the global media. A significant share of world opinion
will *always* oppose U.S. military operations, no matter how justified
or necessary. Best to act swiftly and deal with the complaints
afterward. Hesitation or delay at any level, once the decision has been
made to strike, exponentially increases the chances of flawed results or
even outright failure.

The power of televised (and internet) images---even if they are utterly
unrepresentative of ground truth---is such that a cameraman can now stop
a military operation. The most recent example is our self-imposed defeat
in Fallujah---although the pattern goes back at least to the "highway of
death" that derailed Operation Desert Storm short of decisive victory.
Even the most determined American leaders will feel great,
ever-increasing pressure to moderate or even abandon U.S. military
efforts as they drag on. Foreign heads of state, domestic opinion polls
and our return to knife-fight politics in Washington (the loss of our
tradition of unity in wartime is grievous) guarantee that the amount of
drag inflicted on the system will make it difficult to sustain resolve.

Even more alarmingly, the domestic and global media exacerbate
competition between different departments and instruments of our own
government. In Iraq, military effectiveness has been seriously degraded
by the intervention of the Coaltion Provisional Authority, other
government departments and even the NCA in low-level tactical
engagements. The chain of command is often-vague, unfocused and subject
to the intervention of conflicting bureaucratic interests---a situation
with which a streamlined media can play havoc, even if it does not
consciously intend to do so (we all should dread the day when the global
media truly recognizes its power).

Fallujah is an example so perfect it's paradigmatic. We announced, as
biliously as Colonel Khaddafi in his prime, that we were going to avenge
the mutilation of the bodies of four U.S. contractors and cleanse the
city of terrorists and insurgents. And military operations conducted by
the Marines were going very well. But the pace was too slow to allow a
military decision under the complex circumstances in Iraq. Too many
restrictions were imposed on the Marines (including by their own
commanders). Concerns about collateral damage and alienating an already
thoroughly alienated population led to handwringing worthy of the middle
acts of Hamlet. Even senior Marine officers became engaged in political
machinations when they should have been winning the battle. Cease-fires
reminiscent of Vietnam-era bombing halts were imposed. The enemy
regrouped and reinforced. Combat grew more difficult. Results seemed
ever more costly. And all the while the global media---with the regional
media and al-Jazeera in the vanguard---painted an utterly inaccurate
picture of innocent Iraqis suffering (while saying nothing of the Arab
expulsion of Fallujah's Kurdish minority).

In the end, we essentially surrendered. Unwilling to win quickly, we
lost slowly. We were not defeated militarily, but as General Giap
remarked about an earlier war, that was irrelevant. We turned Fallujah
over to senior officers from the old regime, left the terrorists in *de
facto* control of the city, and lived up to none of our threats. The
message we sent---which our enemies enthusiastically amplified
throughout the Muslim world---was that the U.S. military could be fought
to a stalemate or even beaten. We will pay for that perception for years
to come.

Nor is it sufficient for the military to decry "outside" interference.
It is unlikely that we will ever return to battlefields where presidents
are not looking over the shoulders of our sergeants. And the media will
be looking over the shoulders of the privates.

Our military must learn to win very, very fast. Indeed, that purpose
should become the top priority for our tactical experiments. It is going
to be very difficult to move forward swiftly without painful mistakes,
but there is simply no alternative to reinventing our approach to
tactical combat. If we are unable to develop the capability to strike
with literally dazzling speed in the tactical arena---urban or
otherwise---we will win ever few significant encounters.

The development of the capability to win at hyper-speed (by today's
standards) would do several things: It would relieve pressure on the
NCA; rob the innately hostile global media of the time to build a
critical mass of negative opinion; reduce the friction of
intra-governmental competition; and it would force the NCA to think hard
before committing U.S. forces, given that the results would be powerful,
swift and irrevocable. While causing a spike of casualties in the short
term, swift-win techniques would reduce them dramatically in the long
term. Such a capability would help deter all but the most determined
enemies.

Much has been written over the years of the need to operate inside the
enemy's decision cycle. Except in the case of terrorists and other
irregular forces, with their different operational clocks and calendars,
we have become adept at this. But the real requirement today is to
operate within the impact cycle of the media---and the brevity of this
"global information cycle" will only tighten across the next generation.
The longer any encounter goes on, even at the lowest tactical levels,
the more drag the media's need for sensational headlines will impose.
The equation is straightforward: Lengthy military operations plus
increased media scrutiny equals U.S. government internal friction, then
entropy.

If we cannot win fast, we will lose. The next decades will only
abbreviate the media-driven event-report-cognition-reaction cycle.
Despite much progress on many fronts, our military still thinks at a
20^th^-century pace in tactical encounters. Meanwhile, the global media
is defining 21^st^-century strategic speed.

Second thoughts are the enemy of decisive achievement. Increasingly,
presidents live in an age of nearly instant second thoughts, induced by
the uncontrollable power of the global media. It will be increasingly
difficult for the NCA to see any bloody tactical engagement through to
the necessary result---unless it can be finished at hyper-speed. The
residual power that has for so long been America's greatest strength is
nearly irrelevant in many contemporary conflicts. The power
*immediately* applied, the resolve behnd that power, and the speed of
decision are the essential ingredients of postmodern victory.

This is far easier to write about than it is to address "on the ground."
The practical challenges are many, and the results of our best efforts
will be imperfect. But unless we vigorously embrace the need to win
swiftly at the tactical level, our strategic advantages will be of
slight worth in the decades of conflict to come.

Bemoaning the influence of the media is a waste of time. This is the new
strategic reality. Its demands will only intensify. We must conform to
the requirements of today's---and tomorrow's---global information
environment, or we will lose at the level of strategic decision because
we failed to win promptly at the range of the rifle or knife.