THEY PLANNED FOR THE WRONG KIND OF WAR

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld carefully planned for the war in Iraq.

And, like generals since time immemorial, they carefully prepared for the wrong kind of war. They assumed that wars are won by winning battles, blithely ignoring history’s great lesson: Win every battle and still lose the war.

Genghis Kahn won every battle his hordes fought in sweeping through Asia and Europe. But he quickly lost control of his vast conquered territories.

Napoleon beat the Russian army at Borodino, winning every battle on his drive into Moscow. The Russian capital was occupied, but the little corporal lost the war, and his grande armee to boot.

British General Howe, on his return to London, bragged that he had won every battle he fought against the American rebels. But he lost the Revolutionary War to George Washington, who had been defeated in most of the battles he led.

The Americans defeated the Philippine army in 1899, suffering fewer than 400 casualties. But in the three-year insurgency that followed, over 4,000 Americans died fighting rebels armed with spears and machetes. The rebellion on the Island of Mindanoa continues more than one hundred years later.

The French general staff prepared for World War I with doctrine based upon centuries-old military technology. Despite possession of the quick-firing Maxim Gun, the French never used it, suffering incredible casualties against the Germans, who were quick to use their version of the machine gun. About to lose the war to German General Ludendorf, the Yanks arrived just in time to tip the scales of war in favor of the exhausted British and French troops.

The French general staff repeated its failure to adjust military doctrine to new technologies prior to World War II. Despite having more tanks than the Germans, the French scattered their tanks among their infantry battalions instead of concentrating them in armored units as the Germans did. The armored blitzkrieg destroyed the huge French army in a matter of days.

Prior to World War II, American admirals rejected General Billy Mitchell’s concept of aircraft carrier warfare in favor of outdated theories of battleship fighting. But the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and sank the entire US battleship fleet. Much to the consternation of the admirals, the pivotal Battle of Midway was fought by aircraft carriers and not battleships. And there would be no battleship conflicts during the entire four years of the war in the Pacific.

During the long Vietnam War, American generals claimed that their army had won every battle it fought. But what the generals glossed over was, like Genghis Kahn, we had never been able to control conquered territory for any length of time. Winning every battle for eight long years, the U.S. still lost the war.

While most people like to compare Iraq to Vietnam, it appears to me that what is happening in Iraq resembles our experience in the Philippines more closely.

• In both wars, the insurgency killed far more troops than did the battles.
  
• In both wars, the insurgents were able to fight small skirmishes and quickly melt away into their familiar turf (Philippine jungles/Iraq neighborhoods), where we had great difficulty distinguishing between warriors and civilians.
  
• In both wars, intelligence was hamstrung by our inability to cope with language and cultural barriers.
  
• In both wars, supply and transportation costs became a great burden to the U.S. Treasury.
  
• In both wars, Republicans (the war party) narrowly defeated the Democrats (the peace party).
  
• In both wars, military equipment was ill-suited to the needs of the American soldier. Leather boots rotted in the Philippine jungles. Desert Storm boots fell apart on the harsher terrains of Afghanistan and Iraq.
  
• Long Springfield Rifles were cumbersome, awkward and ineffective in the close-quarter jungle combat of the Philippines. Eventually, the .45-caliber sidearm was rushed to the U.S.’s beleaguered soldiers as a “Moro stopper.” In Iraq, long M16 weapons were found to be cumbersome, awkward and ineffective for troops fighting from within close-quarter vehicles like Bradleys, Humvees and Abrams tanks. Military vehicles were poorly designed to protect against rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. And tank guns could not be sufficiently elevated to hit insurgents fighting from rooftops.
  
• In both wars, we failed to anticipate the resultant insurgency and thus failed to send a sufficient number of troops to maintain order after all the battles had been won.

As Santana said, “He who ignores history is condemned to repeat its mistakes.”

But they don’t seem to teach much history to the cowboys of Texas and Montana.