WESTERN WAY OF WAR, IS IT DEAD OR NOT?!?

Is the Western Way of War Dead?
Not yet, but it may soon be irrelevant.
by Victor Davis Hanson

It is now becoming trite to write of the American military “failure” in Iraq. But recently this purported setback has been lumped together with the Israeli problems in southern Lebanon to suggest an end to the long dominance of the Western Way of War
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Supposedly the Islamists have not only evolved beyond the old, failed Arab paradigm of feebly copying Western conventional practice (remember the 1967 Six-Day War or Saddam’s disaster in 1991), but also have mastered a novel sort of jihad terrorism that, within the confines of urban fighting inside the Middle East, has nullified traditional Western advantage — and for good.
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I reviewed reasons why we should indeed be worried about the terrorists’ new adaptations.

Challenge Upon Challenge
As our enemies get more capable, so must we
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

In a Middle East awash in petrodollars, militias like Hezbollah can purchase off-the-shelf night-vision goggles, anti-tank weapons, and communications equipment that near parity with those of the Israel Defense Force. Jihadists in Iraq may not be able to make explosives, but they can easily buy them, adapt them into improvised explosive devices, and then blow up multimillion-dollar Abrams vehicles, along with their professional crews.

This is especially true when Western-generated expertise in munitions is freely available over the Internet or readily learned from study abroad in Western universities. Give a jihadist a sophisticated Russian anti-tank projectile or a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, along with a few hours of instruction, and he can destroy multimillion-dollar machines and their crews, each of whom has a million-dollar education.
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The West itself is also divided by worries about oil, terrorism, and commercial entanglements with the Middle East. At the United Nations, a France or Russia is as likely to oppose as support America. Europeans willingly sell Iranians the sophisticated machine tools necessary for nuclear fabrication. The European Union takes an odd psychological delight in seeing, and often seeks to profit from, American tactical reversals in the Middle East — as long as they do not impair the overall shared Western strategic advantage.
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But more importantly still, 30 years of institutionalized moral equivalence, multiculturalism, utopian pacifism, and cultural relativism in the West are felt even on the distant battlefield. While we are no longer surprised that an ex-president like Jimmy Carter can’t tell the difference between a democracy that is attacked and a kidnapping, missile-shooting terrorist cadre that starts a war, such constant criticism finally does erode our own confidence and emboldens the enemy.
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Of course, there are some reasons to worry when a nation of formidable military strength is unable to crush quickly an insurrection in the Sunni Triangle.
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it is not clear that the West, for all its hysteria, has actually lost anything.
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there are a variety of constraints on American power, but most are not military. In an ethical sense, Western publics object not merely to suffering losses, but increasingly to inflicting them on the enemy as well. [SISSYFICATION OF THE WEST, ed. A.I.]
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if there is another attack of the caliber of 9/11, Western moral restraint on massive retribution against sponsor states will vanish. [THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEE THAT SUCH RETRIBUTION WILL TAKE PLACE, ed. A.I.]
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it is wiser to look at larger cultural, political, and economic paradigms, of which military prowess, whether conventional or terrorist, is merely a reflection.
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the specter of American military paralysis in the Middle East is often raised as an argument to turn exclusively to diplomacy and politics.
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We may indeed witness eventually the end of the primacy of the Western way of war. Yet that demotion will not be due to the Islamic way of war, but rather to the specter of a thermonuclear exchange with paradise-loving enemies, immune to notions of deterrence — an awful situation in which conventional Western military advantage is reduced to nothing.

That scenario is one reason why we are fighting in such unsavory places to dismantle al Qaeda, as well as to isolate, or change, the jihadists’ patron rogue regimes that are so desperate for such weapons. The real problem is not that the Islamists have crafted a new way of warfare, but that we could lose this war at home without being defeated by the enemy on the battlefield.


Pertinent Links

1) Is the Western Way of War Dead?

2) AS OUR ENEMIES GET MORE CAPABLE, SO MUST WE