LB,
LTC Cuculla is a US Army Special Forces Officer so it should be no surprise that we agree. I find his presentation of the problem and the solution to be outstanding and quite insightful. As I have written here, so far we have failed to substantially transition to unconventional warfare and the new general (Petraeus) lacks the background to do that. Therefore I don't see it happening anytime soon. We remain locked into a mentality where conventional forces fight insurgents in the cities and SF establishes safe areas in the wilderness (so to speak). In Nam we called the SF Outposts "strategic hamlets". The concept worked for securing the hamlets, but did not stop the infiltration by the NVA. We continue to apply similar tactics to the current situation. I still maintain that until and unless we cut off the infiltration of insurgents from Iran and Syria, we cannot establish security. The reason is obvious to me. There are 150 million militant Muslims. We have 1.2 million in our armed forces. We cannot afford to be in a war of attrition as we are now because we cannot win it.
The following three paragraphs are a sample of the entire article which may be viewed at the link.
Better, Faster, Smarter
By Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 17, 2007
1. Much is being made, and properly so, of President Bush’s changes to top-level military and intelligence service leaders. In some ways such moves follow logically from the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It makes sense that with a new strategy being formulated and implemented the new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, will want his own team on the ground. In time of war when dealing with scarce resources and even more precious soldier’s lives, who wouldn’t want people who supported his strategy at the point of the spear?
2. Again, Phillips observes, “the fight in Washington…has not just been over whether more or fewer troops are needed in Iraq. It’s also been over a major difference in strategic perception.” It is that same strategic conundrum that Fred Gedrich and Paul Vallely question. “The United States has to transition from a conventional to an unconventional war footing,” the authors write. They further note that “in January 2003, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld designated the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as the lead military organization to prosecute the global war on terror but unfortunately that has not materialized.”
3. By restricting ourselves to artificial, bureaucratic geographical division of responsibility, by thinking only in terms of conventional battlefields, and by relying on gentle, media-friendly tactics we are trying to fight our sworn enemies with unacceptable – indeed potentially fatal - mental and physical constraints. If victory is our objective then we must fight the war to win, using forces specially configured and trained to employ an effective strategy to defeat this terrible an enemy. Those forces are found in the special operations community and the sooner we call on them to take charge the better chance we have of winning this war.
frontpagemagazine.com |
