Prevailing Cost
Over time, as technology has improved and engineering has become
a science, the strategic emphasis of war has migrated from
spirituality to fortification and weaponry. Although evinced
earlier, this tendency was clearly exemplified in World War One,
when matched forces checked opposing maneuvers, and trench
warfare proliferated. A strategic stalemate of armaments led to
an exploitative inspiration of revised tactics, from conventional
to infiltrational, as an expression of rededicated spirit. The
determinant rule seems to be that whenever all other factors are
equal, one should depend upon moral force or will power to carry
the impetus ... except that no armies are ever equal. Even when
stymied, some evolutionary or revolutionary progress will alter
the balance, some maneuver will create an opportunity, some
intelligence will reveal an unsuspected lacuna. The tactical
contrasts between Scandinavians attacking Russian tanks with
Puukko knives and Moro tribesmen assailing Leathernecks with kris
swords, between Indochinese peasants assaulting American
artillery with bangalore torpedoes and Slavic hussars charging
Nazi armor, cannot be rationalized by the dictum to waste
ordnance or matériel instead of lives. Employing
helicopters to demoralize tenacious resistance couldn't subdue
barefoot guerrillas who would rather retaliate with crossbows
than repudiate their objectives. Between the battles of Waterloo
and the Somme, the front enlarged, combat time expanded, weapons
multiplied, and accuracy increased, with a concomitant increase
in casualties. More supplies, improved weapons, and increased
discipline cannot alleviate bad strategy nor compensate for weak
leadership; but every device and engine becomes a lethal weapon
in the arsenal of dedicated troops. Tactics change with
redefinition, because availability often creates need, and
utility justifies expansion. Whenever recon teams operate outside
artillery fans, and secrecy inhibits close air-support, then
ground encounters must be avoided, or the contact broken and the
enemy out-run, because the rules of engagement must fit the
available resources. Our hubris never reconciled the power/spirit
dichotomy; so we believed that a helicopter army would always
prevail over a crossbow people, and we could not believe that a
crossbow people could long resist a helicopter army. The question
is not how can they resist?, but
what must be done to
prevail over their resistance?. Spirit
transforms the battlefield, and transmutes civilization ...
leaving the dispossessed demoralized by their destroyed
assumptions, their shattered treasures, their wrecked
institutions. When the cause is right, the price will be paid ...
if not with hot blood and cold steel, then in whatever coinage
the national treasury reserves, in whatever value the populace
preserves. The persistent onslaught of blunted esteem against
unshielded rapacity is a fight lost by moral bankruptcy,
regardless of its proclamations or praises, tallies or trophies,
acquisitions or awards. History has shown that war and peace are
not counterbalanced reciprocals, with one repaying the debts of
the other, because the accounts for war are always unbalanced,
like all economies, but in favor of carnage.
by Pan Perdu
... who is a former soldier and VA counselor; this work has been
excerpted from Fragmentations, a book in progress.
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