Now 3 Americans have been killed in Syria. Now what?

Before answering that, ask yourself how many lives this is worth. And by that, I don’t mean American lives, I mean Yemeni and Iranian lives. As strange as it may seem (or perhaps not so strange), the American population seems ready to see Americans come home in caskets.

But there is always this gasp of horror when it is learned that US forces killed “another 500 enemy troops” in some engagement, never mind when it turns out that a Mk-83 – 1,000lb bomb “went long” and hit a home.

So, ask yourself this question: what will the Houthis (and the Iranians) do if they manage to hit one of the US Navy ships in the Red Sea? Are they going to stop? No, the killing doesn’t bother them.

But the killing bothers us.

So, we – the entire nation – now find ourselves back at the basics: what are we trying to achieve? What is the goal of the US presence in Syria? In Iraq? In all the other countries where we have folks? There needs to be a clear goal that we are trying to achieve in each of those places. And we need to answer the question: How much are we willing to pay? Once again we have the very simple – and very accurate – explanation of strategy from a master practitioner – Frederick the Great – that a strategy is the bridge the connects assets to a goal.

That means you need to clearly define the goal. And you also need to identify what assets you are willing to commit to achieving that goal.

Here is where we continually fail, because we have a long-standing policy failure: we have adopted as policy the glaring problem of kindness. The great “philosopher of war,” Carl von Clausewitz, stated it clearly:

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. The maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect. If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes, and the only limiting factors are the counterpoises inherent in war.

To introduce the principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity.

This comes out on these wonderful strikes that have been flown against the Houthis to destroy their missiles. Don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with destroying missiles. But it won’t end anything.

We have, over the last 30 years or so taken a weird twisted view of warfare that the “breaking of toys” is a sufficient action. Thus, we had tomahawk cruise missies fired into this or that country – at 0100 local, when the buildings were empty, to demonstrate our resolve. How many times have we killed the janitors but left the generals and colonels untouched?

War is an unpleasant business. And if you are not prepared to be unpleasant, if you are not prepared to kill a lot of your enemy, don’t participate. Don’t think that you can participate and not kill anybody, or just kill the few “really bad people.” War in the end is about killing the enemy. War is about being very violent, and making the enemy understand that you have the means and the will to inflict all the punishment on him that is necessary to get him to stop doing what he is doing. Our inability to grasp that is why we don’t have a better won-lost record in the last 50 years.

And what that really speaks to is that we shouldn’t be involved in wars when we don’t really need to be. The folks who wrote the nation’s operators’ manual – the Constitution – understood this when they said that only Congress can declare war.

And that means that issues need to be debated and then Our Representatives get to vote… People can protest, picket, write their Congressman. And then, if we really – REALLY – need to go to war, we are quite prepared to pay the butcher’s bill.

But that is what we need to understand – war means killing. And if you want the other guy to stop doing what he is doing, the odds are that you will need to kill a lot of people.

So, don’t get involved unless you NEED to. And that means it should be discussed by Congress, not decided by some General or by some fellow working on the President’s staff. Congress needs to debate and Congress needs to vote on it.

Copyright 2024 Arrias
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