And sorry guys, but I started reading a lot these last weeks... A little quote from Sun Tzu:
(in this part of the book, he is warning the general from a few kinds of threats he should keep an eye on)
- The second (threat) is to value too much its own life.
We think that we are necessary to the whole army (war effort). We do then everything to not expose ourselves to harm. For this reason, we dont dare to use enemy supplies; everything is scary, everything is then dangerous. We cant take decisions. We wait for a better opportunity.
But the enemy, who is watching everything, will use this caution to his own advantage. He will surround him (the general), and then he will cut him from his supplies and will destroy him by using his love for his own life.
(sorry for the translation)
This part made me think... A lot actually.
I see that the enemy, the Taliban, or the insurgency... Isnt giving up. They are ready to sacrifice many people to kill one enemy soldier. And I dont think that our professional soldiers are ready to sacrifice one soldier for 50 insurgents/Taliban...
Why is that? Valor? Military discipline making the soldiers live to fight another day? But what if it was some kind of superiority complex?
The enemy is poor, poorly equipped, poorly trained, from a poor destroyed country, with no future, no hope of victory... backward thinking, following an inferior version of a hated religion... etc etc...
It's like asking lions to hunt rats... But it's true that there is a huge huge gap between our civilizations. One is extremely rich, developed and using a powerful and expensive technology to wage war... And the other have... Nothing... Absolutely nothing.
Why are they even fighting? We dont really care about the people we are supposed to be helping... Honestly... We wont sacrifice much for their lives. And they know it.
And to fight them, we have to be on the ground... On the same ground. Are we on the same ground as our enemies?
I know no one in the Western world who would share the same ground as the Taliban or as the insurgency in Iraq... We live in different worlds.
How can we make them join our world if we dont want them in our world and if we dont to share their world?
It's a battle to the death... We dont want to change them, we cant afford that. And we dont want to bring them to us, and we dont want to join them... We want to silence them.
And violence is noisy... Even silenced weapons provoke noise... Screams, suffering people, crying widows and sometimes noisy manifestations in our streets...
Do you think that unconventional tactics will solve the problem? that being best at killing people will give us better results...
We didnt even try conventional warfare... We ignored the price of war. We sent things that have no value to our eyes... Like tons of money and a few soldiers' lives... Nothing we really possess or care about...
And then, we ask why it's not working out...
We need minds to win the war. Right now, our methods to count success are just not adapted to the wars we are fighting.
Our enemies are fighting us on the moral ground...
And we are in the financial ground. We are disconnected from the reality.
We are counting like idiots while our enemies are raping us on the moral ground, pushing us to do mistakes.
They are at the very bottom, they have nothing to lose, they are god damned terrorists...
And we, on the other side, are losing a lot. Because the master-dumb-minds who rule us and control the war effort as asking about results we can count, like statistics... Less dead soldiers, more dead enemies, less money spent, more people voting in the elections for some puppet government... etc...
And I know what you call unconventional warfare... Special forces types, more like black ops... They are here, but they are not there. Assassination squads, torture units, kidnapping units, no military justice, no civilian justice, attacks on families, hiring local thugs to do the nasty work etc etc...
Yeah yeah... Way to go... The problem is that you are not in a game where the winner is the guy who kills more than the enemy...