Return to Article: FEATURES Hybrid Wars
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The article, I must admit, struck me as a tad schizophrenic. On the one hand, the U.S. military is castigated for shifting focus to a counterinsurgency operational mode specifically intended to meet the asymmetic challenges with which our modern, non-state enemies are confronting us because they know they can't stand up to us in conventional, massed formation, positional warfare. Yet on the other, criticism is lodged that the military, particularly the Army, is not spending resources to maintain its capacity for traditional, conventional combat operations in the interest of maintaining a "hybrid" capability. The Israelis get dinged for having done the same thing essentially; yet the challenge they faced in Lebanon would not have been susceptible to solution via traditional conventional warfare, at which they are accused of having become rusty. I guess it needs to be pointed out yet again that the Cold War's Fulda Gap scenario is - like massa -buried "in the cold, cold ground." The belated successes that we're achieving in Iraq stem from applying the hard won lessons of fighting in an asymmetic combat environment where our adversaries refuse to play to our traditional strengths. We either learn from that or suffer yet again the fate of General Edward Braddock in 1755 who was so contemptuous of the cowardly - as he saw it - "Indian" mode of fighting in the wilderness and paid the price for his rigidity.
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There is one clear lesson from Viet Nam, Korea, World War II and World War I. You cannot defeat any enemy by taking land by force, then give it back to your enemy, then taking it again and giving it back - again.
The Battle of the Bulge is a classic example, our troops stopped the German Army advance - then started systematically destroying the enemy and pushing the battle line back. Our soldiers didn't aiflift back to a rear area strong hold for the night and leave the Ardennes to the Germans until the next day.
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