Sounds a bit like the Tinkerbell strategy.

This willpower is, to be sure, both immensely powerful and completely impotent. It supposedly suffices to bend the entire rest of the world to our will, but it is utterly insufficient to bring americans to pay higher taxes, drive more efficient cars, or send anyone to war who would be more comfortable doing something else and doesn't have a current military obligation.

This willpower is, to be sure, both immensely powerful and completely impotent. It supposedly suffices to bend the entire rest of the world to our will, but it is utterly insufficient to bring americans to pay higher taxes, drive more efficient cars, or send anyone to war who would be more comfortable doing something else and doesn't have a current military obligation.

In other words, one of the (though certainly far from the only) problems we face is that there is very little of Der Wille zur Macht present in the actual US civilian population. Very little desire to transform our economy and our lives into one that can support the kind of Total Effort that really would, to the extent that it is useful to do so, demonstrate Will.

So there's an extent to which we really are seeing that one of the things that is lacking in our war efforts of the last four years is Will. Bushites might fetishize it, but they cannot synthesize it. It's not there, they haven't make a true effort to rouse it (because they know the US public is only interested in world conquest to the extent that it doesn't make them late to dinner), and they're trying to fake it.

Now, I believe that obviously more than Will is needed to make a successful war effort, no matter if one's war-making and ends are just or unjust. Nobody, I think, will claim that Napolean or the Wehrmacht had insufficient Will. But it's a necessary precursor to a truly total war effort. Which is why the (appropriately, IMHO) Will-lacking US is making a decidedly less-than-total war effort.

This makes sense in another way, with Rumsfeld's focus on a "modernized" military. Basically he has DARPA, MIT Media Labs and the rest working on developing green power rings, the only problem being that they (missile defense, drone-based assassinations, etc.) don't really work.

Also - it's a key misunderstanding of the DC Comics universe. It's pretty clear that to the extent that this administration and the 101st Fighting Keyboardists have a place there, they're the bad guys, meglomaniacal mad scientists and the like.

Of course, people seem to forget this period in Green Lantern's career...

Will does one very little good when you have no idea what your objective is. I've long asked, "What would victory in Vietnam have looked like?" And the same can be said of Iraq sevenfold.

This is why the raging id of the Right keeps slipping off message from 'freedom is on the march!" to "Kill them all!". They have no idea what the good outcome in Iraq is, except in negative terms: nobody shooting at us. And that's not a Nietzschean aspiration--though it is an Oan one.

"Conan, what is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"

Doubt there are many on the right who'd disagree.

This one really ought to be on the front page.

Well, if they'd have seen "Red Dawn", they would have realized how fast an insurgency can arise and why.

"What's the difference between us and them?"

"Because we LIVE HERE!"

And he shoots the Russian soldier...

Which makes Patrick Swayze a "terrorist" and a "dead-ender", according to Don Rumsfeld.

Not to mention the Cuban general who looks at a line of dead soldiers, and recites "Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, etc. - But these are MY MEN!"

"Uncommon Valor" was pretty good, too - especially the part where the politician threatens the industrialist with tax audits if he goes ahead supporting the rescue effort - and then the gang gets nearly arrested by the Thai police working with the CIA.

Hell, it ain't a Milius movie, but drag in "Rambo: Part 2", where the CIA deliberately sabotages the rescue effort.

You can learn something from these movies - don't trust the state.

Currently, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, an American, is encountering difficulty because he is violating the airspace of foreign countries while chasing after criminals.

American military power can, pretty much, achieve any plausible military objective.

I dunno.  We could roll to Baghdad pretty good, but can we do that and take Tehran and take care of North Korea all at once?  Doubtful.  One of John Murtha's key points is that the Iraq war has degraded the US military.

I agree with your main point about the confusion of military and political objectives, but I disagree that our military power is without limit. 

Considering that he spent most of his time fighting for the CIA in Cuba, East Germany and elsewhere in the Sixties (according to his back history), that was a little disingenuous of him, but basically correct given his alleged position as a "mutant terrorist" at the time he said it.

It doesn't have to be disingenuous.  Just because he fought for the CIA doesn't mean that he didn't acknowledge some of the harsh realities of fighting, including the fact that half of what your own side syas is propaganda.

"You say I'm a dreamer.  We're two of a kind.  Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"

Given his obvious sense of US Exceptionalism, I think Bush is probably more a fan of the Galactus Doctrine:

"I am he who is Galactus! My every whim is living law throughout a thousand thousand worlds! And if Earth must die that I shall live... so shall it be! For, am I not... Galactus?"

"think of how the British use of military force against some ticked-off colonists eventually resulted in Britain losing those colonies."

Of course, it was the British use of military force that resulted in Britain holding those colonies for centuries in the first place.

It was a combination of British resource bankruptcy after two world wars, along with the collapse of the intellectual underpinnings of colonialism, that resulted in loss of their colonies.

George Ball ran the numbers in early 1965...

That is in the running for weakest evidense yet in one of our countries longest arguments.

=== The necessary ratio is quite a bit lower for an advanced military today, due to advances in military technology, ===

I would seriously have to question this, and I would point to the current Iraq situation as counter-evidence.

sPh

While I think Americans have a cultural bias towards wanting to believe that "the Occupier" always loses, the historical record is much more complex than that. (Sorry, as a historian I can't help myself from saying that!)

Two pre-modern examples that are noteworthy, in addition to the Norman occupation of England (that one deserves an asterisk because of eventual complete assimilation, though I wouldn't venture to say how long that took).

First, the suppression of Catharism in southern France, which also represented a political takeover of the south by the French north. It's fascinating for several reasons, including the overt religious dimension. The short answer is that 40 years of war (without overwhelming force, but with substantial advantage after the half-way point) did end resistance. However, the key element was not military force: it was the intervention (indeed, the invention) of some extremely powerful and sophisticated methods of discovering and suppressing dissent, methods that intelligently built on an existing base of Catholic acceptance, mobilized and transformed that (tolerant) Catholic population into an intolerant third force, and ruthlessly hunted down dissenters for the better part of a century. We call it "the Inquisition," and it has proved its effectiveness many times since.

Example 2, with more ambigous overtones: the suppression of independent Bohemia after 1618, with the concurrent elimination of Protestantism. The Habsburgs, working together with a church that had kept improving its tools, succeeded splendidly in suppressing resistance. In fact, (like Southern France), Bohemia is almost entirely Catholic, to this day. But I have to tell a story about visiting Prague in the mid-1980s, and touring the Hradschin. Our guide was an extremely educated and pleasant man. As he led us towards the castle gate, he gave a brief introduction. The early history of the Bohemian crown, the glory days of Charles the IV, the struggles over Jan Hus and his ideas...it was all there. He continued: "In 1532, the Habsburgs became Kings of Bohemia....[pause for a beat]...In 1918, ...."

Yes, you can suppress both resistance and dissent, given sufficient military force for conquest _and_ sufficient (and sufficiently ruthless and motivated) ideological support mechanisms. But suppressing memory...THAT's hard!

It's hilarious you bring him up, since Thanos - my "Main Man" in the Marvel pantheon - recently literally gave Galactus a LECTURE about how Galactus can do whatever he wants, but even HE can't stand against a universe united against him - something Thanos himself went through quite a few story arcs to learn (and it's not yet certain that even he believes it).

The lecture could have been given to either Bush or Israel with equal applicability.

You need to reread the recent articles on the past British occupation of Afghanistan - and how 16,000 of their troops were massacred there.

The longer you use military force to hold onto a colony, the worse your defeat is going to be.

THAT is the lesson. It's not a lesson that can be used to justify the initial conquest, however long historically that may have been in certain instances.

"Whatever one thinks of Wolverine, you gotta admit he knows the harsh realities of fighting, as one of the earliest examples of the "crazy superhero" subgenre.

It still isn't clear what his political views really were back then - or whether he was just fighting because he liked to fight, which I think is the most likely. Not to mention that he was brainwashed on top of it.

He fought against the Germans in the Spanish Civil War, though, apparently by choice, which says something."

Um, guys this is getting WAY too close to a RedState paen to "Jack Bauer" and Protein Wisdoms use of Kaiser Sose (Usual Suspect) as a "authority" on bad-assitude.

Everything wolverine "says" is actually being said by Comic Book writers who mostly don't have a clue about how any of this works in the real world. His words are NOT coming from an experienced vet - they are coming from a guy who went to art school.

“George Ball ran the numbers in early 1965 and came up with an occupation of 1,000,000 men for 5 to 7 years to defeat the insurgency.” – Petey

I cannot imagine what kind of calculation could be made to quantify such a thing. The variables involved would be overwhelming. There are the obvious tangibles such as: terrain, geographic area, population (but this is not static in number or location), number of troops (we know ours, but not theirs), weaponry (we know ours, but not theirs). We would have to have unlimited omniscience to conclude some things. Then you have to consider weather conditions, time of day for operations, amount of resources (both men and materiel) to apply to each situation. Of course, you are not the only one who gets to determine when, why, where, or how an action will take place.

I have a Vietnam experience I have some reluctance to share, but I believe it is illustrative of why it isn’t realistic to say a certain friendly to enemy troop ratio will win over an insurgency:

Two platoons of Marines went out on an operation from our battalion base at Camp Carroll. It was determined by our Intelligence people, somewhere in Da Nang, that there might be an NVA infiltration route in the area. Our area of operation extended out from Camp Carroll northeast to Cam Lo, and west to the Rockpile. We ended up in very dense hilly jungle. My platoon was winding its way down into a narrow jungle valley, while the other platoon was somewhere above us on a ridge. We did not know each other’s exact locations. No GPS in those days, and maps were old, not accurate, and useless in such jungle. But the denseness of the jungle, and the high hills made it impossible to know exactly where we were, let alone the other platoon’s position.

I was the Platoon Leaders (Lt.) radio operator. He ordered us to stop our patrol, and to see if I could raise the other platoon on the radio, to get an idea where we were in relation to each other. I did this. And yes, they were somewhere above us on that ridge, but we still didn’t know exactly where. We sat at our location for about five minutes when the Lt. said to me: “Corporal we’ve sat here too long, I don’t like this, we’re moving out, now”! The Lt. stood to give the order to move out.

At that very moment a short burst of automatic rifle fire came at us. Two Marines had been leaning, talking, side-by-side, against a tree, about six feet away from the Lt. and I. The first was killed instantly, the second severely wounded. Immediately, we returned fire into the trees above us, but we had no idea where this fire had come from. We assumed a sniper was in a tree. The sniper could have been in a “spider” hole in the side of the opposite hill, but we had no way of knowing. Then an urgent “cease fire” came over my radio. We had fired into the other platoon above on the ridge. Fortunately we inflicted no casualties on them. But we now knew their position.

It was getting late and would be dark soon. We had to get the body and the wounded Marine to a place for a Medi-Vac. We also had no idea whether this was a lone sniper, or part of a larger force that now knew our position. We made our way up the ridge to find the other platoon. We did, and we linked up. Unfortunately, it began to rain hard, it was getting dark fast, and there was no time to find anything to be made into a clearing for a helicopter. But by then the wounded Marine had died, too – no need for a Medi-Vac, now.

We did the only thing we could at the time: the terrain, hardness of the ground, the fast oncoming darkness, made digging fighting holes impossible. We set out positions, as best we could, to provide fields of fire in a 360. We did the only thing we could do for the night; sit awake, nearly shoulder to shoulder, and hope there would be no NVA attack on us. There wasn’t. The next morning we found a place along the ridge for the Medi-Vac. The Battalion commander called off the operation, and we returned to Camp Carroll.

I realize this is a long, round about way to make a point, but that point is this: We were two rifle platoons, with some men from the weapons platoon included. I guess we were about 60 in number. We suffered two KIA, and the operation was halted. Our air superiority, or artillery from Camp Carroll would have done us no good in that rainy, dense jungle. Especially since we weren’t sure of our location. We had a ratio of 60 to 1 over the enemy, and yet we had the situation turn on us in a bad way.

How do you calculate for these kinds of things – you can’t. And they are frequent occurrences in insurgent warfare. Most of us were extremely lucky on that day – luck, another variable you can’t quantify. Several weeks later we were not so lucky, and lost almost 80% of our Battalion; including the Battalion CO, and the Sergeant Major. Would a higher ratio of us to them change that outcome? Who knows? We didn’t know how many NVA were in the fight, but they knew where we were, and maybe our strength, too. They had better intelligence; their fields of fire were too well planned – not easy to quantify field intelligence, either. It’s been said “the plan” is the first thing to go in a battle – how do you factor that into the calculation?

So, saying we would have won Vietnam if only we had a 10-1, or 20-1, or even a 50-1 ratio may have been the “gold standard 40 years ago”, it just seems to me to be wishing away reality – and I see us doing it yet again. I truly don’t expect the outcome to be any different this time, and putting more of our “boots on the ground” is not going to change that. George Ball may have been right about many things in his life, but this is not one of them.

Indeed - that "10-to-1" ratio I think implies ten to one in COMBAT troops, not combat AND support troops.

So the ACTUAL ratio is 100 to one, given the ten to one ratio in support troops to combat troops.

I've heard that even at the height of our forces in Iraq, there were only 20,000 or so combat troops in Iraq. And of course, some of those were guys from the motor pool doing duty as convoy guards or whatever - not exactly the point of the 10 to 1 ratio against insurgents.

Whereas the ten to one ratio for combat troops to insurgents implies ten actual combat troops versus one insurgent - and that is merely to make it difficult for the insurgents to operate "at will" - not to actually defeat or kill them all.

In Iraq today, you'd need at LEAST TWO MILLION troops to limit the insurgency's ability to strike at will given the insurgency strength at 20-40,000 and a ten to one ratio of combat troops backed up by a ten to one ratio of support troops - and I'd say even that is unlikely given the urban nature of the conflict.

Interesting. While I recognize the Inquisition was created partially to deal with the Catharites, between the Albigensian Crusade and the lack of replacements when your core believers are celibate, would the Cathars have survived long even without the Inquisition? Did they still have critical mass after Beziers and Carcassonne?
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Don't forget "Red Scorpion," a piece of work by Jack Abramoff.

Tagline: He's a human killing machine. Taught to stalk. Trained to kill. Programmed to destroy. He's played by their rules... Until now.

Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will.

And this was precisely the revisionist argument after Vietnam - that we didn't have the will to complete the job. Plus ca change....

Insurgencies can be defeated, and occupations can be successful, but they require a very heavy boots on the ground profile.

The fatal mistake of both LBJ and GWB is to mismatch war objectives with resource commitments. Doing these things halfway is an almost certain guarantee of failure. As with the favored rac cover military motto, hope is not a plan.

I agree with your main point about the confusion of military and political objectives

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I don't mind that Obama and Congress aren't achieving all their aims, since most of their goals are harmful IMHO. Having said that, I'd be more impressed with Yglesias's defense of Obama if Obama had really tried hard to get his legislative vision enacted. Obama might have laid out a specific plan and made numerous speeches trying to sell his ideas to Congress and to the public. George W. Bush did that successfully with respect to invading Iraq and cutting taxes. Bill and Hillary Clinton failed in their effort to sell health reform, but at least they really tried.

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People don't give President Obama enough credit for his accomplishments. As he said in his Oval Office address last week, we don't know where we're going, we don't know how we'll get there, but we're making great time!

I think what the right-wingers are up to is more subtle and a lot more dangerous. American military power can, pretty much, achieve any plausible military objective. The right-wing goal is to expand the notion of a military objective into what are normally thought of as political arenas. This is both wrong, for the reasons you note, and phenomenally dangerous from both foreign and domestic political car transport standpoints.

I dunno. We could roll to Baghdad pretty good, but can we do that and take Tehran and take care of North Korea all at once? Doubtful. One of John Murtha's key points is that the Iraq war has degraded the US military.

I agree with your main point about the confusion of military and political objectives, but I disagree that our military power is without Search Engine Marketing limit.

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I think what Yglesias is saying is not that the military *is* like a power ring, but rather the people using it *thought* it functioned like one. So in keeping with a comic theme, it's as if Hawkgirl *thought* her mace scjp dumps functioned like a power ring. After hitting Doomsday with it and not having the desired effect, she would attribute the failure to her will and not the fact that it might not be the right tool for job. Which would lead her to try over and over again with greater "commitment", which ultimately would not be good either for her or more cisco certification dumps importantly in the analogy, not good for the mace either. Apologies if the comic analogy's not great, I'm still new to the genre.

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lol, i love the analogy to a comic book. And your right, it's a silly as trying to defend the country with flowers instead of weapons. The realities of the dysfunction of politics is most of the masses and yet the powers that be often use these complicated scenarios to lie to the masses because they feel they want understand or like all the subtle shadiness involved in war time situations.

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