Biden Attacks Everything, Attacks Nothing
What Biden, Sullivan and Austin did has a long, though far from honored, tradition in modern military history. They have turned Carl von Clausewitz on his head. Always concentrate force at the key point of attack where you intend to break through and hammer the target mercifully until you break through and your enemy’s concentration of force is destroyed, Clausewitz taught.
When properly applied with focus, this doctrine made the German Army tactically invincible even against overwhelming odds for 140 years. The Soviet Red Army in World War II and the legendary Israeli Army from 1947 through to about 1982 applied the same lessons – Focus and Force.
Instead, Biden, Sullivan and Austin have unleashed a tactical idiocy comparable with that of President Lyndon Johnson, his demented secretary of defense Robert McNamara and his contemptible, rigid, stupid, abject and bungling [though always crisply and impeccably uniformed] commanding combat general William Westmoreland during the Vietnam War.
Reading the great military historian and psychologist Norman Dixon’s ‘s account of Johnson and Westmoreland’s strategy during the Vietnam conflict in his classic work “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence,” has an eerily familiar relevance today:
“In this most ill-conceived and horrible of wars there was the Commander-in-Chief, Lyndon Johnson, aided by his advisers, dreaming up policies and even selecting targets at a nice safe distance of 12,000 miles. And there was the man on the spot, General Westmoreland, … Together, the Machiavellian mind of the one, coupled with the traditional military mind of the other, produced a pattern of martial lunacy so abject and appalling that eventually it did for both of them.”
North Vietnam’s leader Ho Chi Minh and his extraordinary military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap “made the huge professionally trained and over-equipped army of their enemies look utterly ridiculous,” Dixon points out. “Ho and Giap relied on poor men’s strategies – surprise, deception and the ability to melt away. … And as Lyndon and ‘Westy’ got madder so that vast tracts of South-East Asia reeled beneath their rage, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong flitted round them and through them.”
Westmoreland of course, like Britain’s risible General Claude Auchinleck who lost every battle against German General Erwin Rommel and his far smaller Deutsche Afrika Korps he ever fought, never took any personal blame for the failures and the endless needless deaths of Vietnamese civilians and his own combat troops at all. It was always someone else’s fault.
Now Biden, Sullivan and Austin along with their pet field generals are eerily repeating history.
They are – apparently by deliberate design – not going after any key targets that would hurt Iran and its government at all. They are inflicting instead hyped, minimal superficial damage. Yet in World War II and Vietnam, the infliction of hundreds of thousands of casualties from sustained air bombing on a vast exponentially greater scale than last week’s showy, meaningless, indiscriminate strikes failed to bring Nazi Germany or even tiny North Vietnam to their knees.
Nor have Biden, Sullivan and Austin ever dreamed of concentrating their forces and going back relentlessly to destroy the key targets. This is how strategic air power finally worked decisively in World War II in the US Eighth Air Force’s final successful smashing of the German oil industry in 1944 and in the use of British and US heavy bombers to annihilate German rail and road communications in France before D Day and then during the decisive Battle of Normandy.
In World War II, the wars the Allies waged in the West against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan taught the same inexorable lessons.
General Douglas MacArthur liberating the vast swathe of the Western Pacific from Japanese control in record time and with minimal casualties understood this very well. Winston Churchill said about MacArthur that he conquered more territory, in faster time, with the least casualties than any general in the history of the world since Darius the Great 2,500 years before. With the exception of the fearsome and astonishing Temujin of the Mongols in the 13th century, who has come down in history as Genghis Khan, it was true.
Dwight D. Eisenhower never understood this at all. He threw away needlessly the lives of scores of thousands of American soldiers in his plodding efforts to advance on every front simultaneously.
Eisenhower’s far more capable battlefield commanders – Omar Bradley, George S. Patton, J. Lawton Collins, Lucien Truscott, Alexander Patch, Jacob Devers and Bill Simpson – kept having to bail him out. Products of the educational system and training that MacArthur had implemented for his young officers at West Point and then emphasized during his own five years as US Army Chief of Staff, they rescued Eisenhower and his own mentor and boss General George Marshall – who like Eisenhower had never experienced any combat command – from their witless follies.
As well as showing their gross ignorance of Clausewitz, Biden, Sullivan and Austin have also ineptly turned the teachings of another Prussian military titan, King Frederick II (“Der Gross”) on their head.
Frederick taught, “He who defends everywhere defends nowhere. Now Biden, Sullivan and Austin are demonstrating that he who attacks everywhere – like Eisenhower in Tunisia in 1943 and against the Siegfried Line in Germany in 1944 – attacks nowhere.
Biden, Sullivan and Austin will fail as ludicrously and contemptibly in their efforts to “send a signal” to Tehran with last week’s air strikes as uselessly as Johnson and Westmoreland – and after them Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger even more seriously did – in sending their precious “calibrated messages of escalation” (McNamara loved such meaningless terminology and weasel words: He virtually orgasmed on them) to Hanoi.
Do not expect the Iranians, the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah and their allies – let alone the Russians and the Chinese – to be impressed, let alone deterred, by these pathetic antics.
Expect Iraq and Syria, and eventually Saudi Arabia too, to slide rapidly into a still unimaginable rejection of the United States and everything she stands for.
The policies and military actions of these awful clowns allow no other possible outcome.