Is That Legal?

Stuntz is echoing ideas enunciated by Carl Von Clausewitz in the opening lines of “On War”, in which he said “If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes, and the only limiting factors are the counterpoises inherent in war.” Howard and Paret translation.

Traditional military strategy is not applicable to our present enemy for two main reasons.

First, we don’t know who the enemy is. We generally see that we are fighting middle-eastern males, but they aren’t wearing nametags. In a normal war, the enemy might be wearing a red uniform, but we at least know where the capital of our enemy is.

Secondly, most theories assume, at the very least, that the enemy does not want to be destroyed; that the enemy would stop short of being killed. In other words, the military leadership is logical and will stop short of sacrificing a sizeable portion of the civilian population and infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is clearly not true with the current enemy.

Stuntz’s application of traditional military doctrine to the suicidal tribesmen of the Middle East, and his comparison of terrorists to the AMERICAN Civil War are wrong.

We already won the “war”. Our objective now in Iraq is poorly defined, but it apparently has something to do with nation-building or insurrection-suppressing.

But things are much simpler than that. Victory against terror will have been achieved by two simple measures: (1) preventing terrorist attacks against us; (2) preventing terrorist attacks against our allies. So far, we have been victorious at least regarding the first, and for this our military and intelligence are to be commended.

Regarding Iraq, consider Sun Tzu’s observations, in Book II of the Art of War:
1. Consider the costs of keeping troops on the road.
2. When engaged in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
From http://rhetoricaldevice.com/SunTzuAOW2.html

Stuntz is assuming that there's some relationship between the total number of our troops and the likelihood of our winning battles. There isn't. Sure, if the fighting were our entire army facing off against their entire army on a big field, then there would be some such relationship. When a "battle" consists of a couple of their guys hiding an IED beside a road and blowing up a couple of our guys, it doesn't matter in the least how many other guys each side has somewhere else.

Despite his claim that "the picture is clear," Stuntz's argument that increased troop strength leads to lower Iraqi casualties is statistical nonsense. Two data points don't prove anything, any more than the opposite is proved by the current situation with both troop strength and deathrate very high. He found two time periods that seemed to support his thesis, ignored all others.

As far as I can tell, Stuntz is attempting to prove that law professors, at least Harvard Law Professors, are better at military strategy than either economics professors or poker players.

Putting aside Stuntz's blatant sunk cost fallacy I have to ask: What military losses?

This may not have implications for the issue at hand, but I don't think that the Vietnam war is best viewed as America intervening in another nation's civil war. It is best viewed as America attacking another, almost-unified, nation. Vietnam was divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam after the French pulled out in 1954. They were to have a joint election, which the U.S. stopped because we knew that it would result in unification under the Communist government of North Vietnam. (Eisenhower acknowledged that, if I recall.) We propped up South Vietnam as our puppet; there might not have been a war otherwise. (This is how I recall it, but I am not a historian and am open to being corrected.)

I have been consistent in my opposition to the Iraq War.

But with respect to the Bush administration and its supporters saying we must stay the course in order to prevail, I would take the argument the other way with them.

The stay the course strategy is a failure. In response to them, opponents of the war should confront them with the true cost in manpower and resources needed to win the war. Put the onus on the War Party by asking them "this is what victory in Iraq is going to cost us. Are you prepared to ante up?"

I have a simple answer to Struntz: The Russian Front.

Hitler threw more troops at it. He still lost.

From a practical standpoint, good money after bad is just that. If we are going to lose a battle/war, the time to get out is early, when the damage to the army, and the nation, are less.

I've been to Iraq. It was a screwed up place. I have friends who are their now, They tell me it hasn't gotten any better.

I don't want them (or myself) to end up dead, injured, etc. just to prove we have the "will" to keep fighting.

As I said before, if we are going to lose, just take the lumps we've already been dealt, and walk away.

TK

It might be the right strategy, but the time for using it passed about three years ago. If the goal is to leave Iraq a smoking, bloody pile of rubble, then that strategy might work today, as well.

In military terms, both US war in Vietnam and Soviet Union war in Afganistan were successful. They were lost in political terms, not in native population support, but in domestic support. To win such wars both politically and military, the country that launch the offensive must also have adequate propagandistic and ideological support. This is the soft point of US democracy.

I think Stuntz's idea is a bit off the mark.

For one thing, like someone already mentioned the time for greatly increased troop strength in Iraq making any kind of appreciable difference is long past. I don't think a large increase in troops there would have the desired effect at this stage of the game. It is an unwinnable quagmire and common sense tells you that even if it DID have SOME positive effect it would be at the cost of greatly increased casualties, since more troops in harm's way is going to mean more targets for the Iraqi Rebels and others to hit.

For another thing, getting the levels of troops into Iraq that would be necessary even to have a ghost of a chance of pacifying that country would be far beyond the means available. A good rule of thumb is that in order to pacify a country as restive as Iraq it would require (bare minimum) 10,000 troops per every million in the occupied country's population, or roughly 280,000 troops occupying Iraq. Bare. Minimum. This is not even remotely possible; where are the troops to double the size of the force in Iraq going to come from? When they talk about maybe sending additional troops to Iraq, they are talking about another 20,000 or so, and this would be a drop in the bucket; I would expect NO noticeable difference there resulting from a tiny increase of 20,000 more troops. In order to even have a chance at doing what they want to do they would need a force twice (or more) the size of the force currently in Iraq. Not a realistic option. America's government needs to stop acting like it still has a conscript military; there are just some things that an all-volunteer military isn't able to do, and they need to admit this and pare down their expectations.