Target Centermass

Author: Gunner

  • Iraqi Unrest May Delay Elections

    Iraqi and American officials have now stated that terrorist activity is endangering the Iraqi election timeline.

    Elections in Iraq scheduled to take place by Jan. 31 may be postponed because of continued widespread violence or a coordinated boycott by Sunni Muslims, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

    “I believe we have a good chance of still meeting the target,” Iraqi Ambassador Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaidaie said at the United Nations. “If, however, at the time it is determined that we need a bit more time, then that situation will be reviewed” by policy makers.

    Under Iraq’s interim constitution, voters would cast ballots by the end of January for a national legislature, which would form a permanent government and write a lasting charter.

    President George W. Bush said Nov. 13 that successful elections in Iraq would be “a crushing blow” to terrorists, and “inspire” democratic change throughout the Middle East, ultimately making the U.S. more secure.

    Security has worsened in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle up to the northwestern city of Mosul, one U.S. official said.

    “We’re worried that in some areas — again, not all, in some areas — it would now be difficult to have elections,” said Bill Taylor, director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office. “And it’s that kind of work that we need to do between now and January so that we can have elections in the entire country.”

    Asked about the threat by Sunnis in central Iraq to boycott the election of a 275-member national assembly, Sumaidaie said there might be a delay “if all the Sunnis act as a group.” He added that such unity is “unlikely” because the Sunni leaders who have threatened the boycott don’t represent the entire religious minority of Iraq.

    Unrest spread just after U.S. and Iraqi forces attacked the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Nov. 8.

    Air Force Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, today disputed a statement by Marines Lieutenant General John Sattler that the Fallujah siege had “broken the back” of the insurgency, saying it was too early to tell.

    ….

    Sumaidaie said his confidence that elections can be held in January grew after the U.S.-led incursion into insurgent-held Fallujah. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s decision to increase the number of the election advisers in Iraq also was a good sign, he said.

    “The position of the Iraqi government is that we should plan on holding the elections on time,” he said. “We accept that there continues to be violence in different parts of the country, but the outcome of the recent military operation in Fallujah has been very positive. We clearly have reduced the terrorists’ ability to launch an organized campaign. What happens in the next weeks will be important.”

    Sumaidaie said the UN is about to increase its staff in Iraq to about 60 workers, double the number there now. That should be enough, he said, for the UN to play an important “supervisory” role in the elections.

    UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said that, while Annan is deploying more people to Iraq, he was “not aware of any decision by the secretary-general to raise the ceiling further.”

    Sumaidaie said he is confident that next week’s international conference on Iraq in Egypt would also improve the security situation by producing new commitments from Iran and Syria to secure their borders to prevent terrorists from entering.

    This ain’t good news. That delays at this point in the ballgame are even being considered can only come across as weakness to both the terrorists and the Iraqi people. The gloves are slowly coming off, with the taking of Fallujah and today’s raid on a Mosul mosque. However, the Iraqi government better be willing to shift into ruthless mode pretty damn quick.

    To further counter the instability and danger presented by the terrorists, the US is likely to up the number of American boots on the ground as the elections near.

    Commanders in Iraq probably will expand their troops by several thousand as the January elections approach, the No 2 commander of US forces in the Middle East said yesterday.

    Lt Gen Lance L Smith told a Pentagon news conference that no final decisions have been made and that the size of the troop increase will depend in part on whether the insurgency grows or weakens in the aftermath of the Fallujah offensive, which he called a major success.

    Smith estimated that commanders would ask for about a brigade’s worth of extra troops, which would be roughly 5,000. He said that probably would be achieved by keeping some units that were scheduled to serve 10 months in Iraq for an extra two months. He did not name the units.

    There now are about 138,000 US troops in Iraq, he said.

    “We will make a further assessment as we get a little bit closer” to the elections scheduled for late January, “and as we understand what the impact of Fallujah is on the entire country,” he said.

    Smith said he believed that terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still in Iraq but that the US-Iraqi offensive this past week had eliminated Fallujah as a Zarqawi base of operations.

    Any substantial delay in the elections must absolutely be avoided. The Iraqi people need to feel the government is their own.

  • Study Claims E-Voting Irregularities in Florida

    Hey, guess what? Are you sitting down? Good. It seems some folks at UC-Berkeley apparently have issues with the presidential election results.

    Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that used electronic voting machines in this month’s election may have awarded as many as 260,000 votes more to President George W. Bush than were expected, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

    The Berkeley researchers claimed on Thursday that their findings raise questions about the accuracy of voting results in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties, all of which have more voters registered as Democrats than Republicans. According to statistical models, voters in those three counties delivered between 130,000 and 260,000 more votes to Bush than were expected by a post-election analysis, the researchers maintain.

    “Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida,” says Michael Hout, a sociology professor, who led the research effort.

    Hout says that the odds of the Florida irregularities happening by chance were less than 1 in 1000, and he calls for an examination of the results. “It’s like a smoke alarm and it’s beeping,” he says. “We call upon the voting officials in Florida to determine whether there’s a fire.”

    The irregularities do not account for enough votes to give the state to Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, who lost to Bush in Florida by more than 377,000 votes.

    The possibility of problems with e-voting was a topic much discussed before the November 2 election.

    To obtain their results, the Berkeley researchers analyzed publicly available voting data from all of Florida’s counties using a technique called multiple-regression analysis, which accurately identified butterfly ballot problems in Palm Beach County during the 2000 election, Hout says.

    The technique involves building a statistical model to predict voting patterns based on a number of factors, including history of voting, median family income, age, and race. Hout’s team conducted its study using data compiled from the November 2 election.

    “We noticed that three counties stood out from those expectations,” Hout says. “These were counties that had a significant departure from what we would expect, statistically, given the patterns in all those other counties.”

    Using their statistical model, Hout’s team forecast that Bush should have received 28,000 fewer votes in Broward County than he received there in 2000. However, Bush received 51,000 more votes than he did four years ago. In Palm Beach County, where Bush gained 41,000 votes, the Berkeley research suggested a loss of 8900 votes. For Miami-Dade County the research showed Bush should have gained 18,400 votes. In fact, he gained 37,000 votes.

    The counties in question used e-voting machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems.

    It seems that the factors the study was based on left out a series of intangibles that the Berkeleyites either couldn’t measure or didn’t want to face, such as 9/11 and Bush’s steady leadership since in the war against Islamist terror, an inept campaign by an irresolute Democratic candidate, and all-too-transparent media hatchet jobs, for starters.

    Would their models have me, an atheist who voted for the Libertarian candidate in each of the four general elections I’ve previously been of age to vote in, now casting a ballot for President Bush? I doubt it, and it seems I’m not the only one with questions about this academic piece of work.

    A spokesperson for the Information Technology Association of America, an IT vendor group, dismissed the Berkeley results, saying that the study appeared to ignore the political, social, and economic factors that affected the vote. “It is unclear to us that the technology, which is the one factor the authors appear to have focused on for this study, should be viewed as causal above the many other factors that could affect a voter’s decision,” said Charles Greenwald, an ITAA spokesperson, in an e-mail interview.

    Greenwald also criticized the study for not being peer reviewed.

    The Berkeley research has already been informally reviewed by academics at Harvard University, and will no doubt be scrutinized now that the results are posted on Berkeley’s Web site, Hout says. He declines to provide the names of researchers outside of Berkeley who are familiar with the results, saying they asked not to be identified.

    Because there is no paper audit trail for the e-voting machines used in Florida, it may be difficult to ultimately explain the irregularities. “Our statistical approach is just about the only way we have to uncover what went on in Florida or in any other state that uses e-voting as it exists today, except Nevada where there is a paper trail,” Hout says.

    The model found an even larger discrepancy when certain factors weighing the data in Bush’s favor were removed, bringing the total possible discrepancy to 260,000 votes, Hout says.

    The team did not, however, find this level of irregularity in 12 other Florida counties that used e-voting machines, he says.

    Hout is unable to explain why some e-voting counties would experience irregularities while others did not, but he says that the irregularities were more likely to occur in counties that voted for Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000. “This becomes an important clue that investigators who know something about both the software and the hardware can use,” he says.

    Hmmmmm … can’t explain why Bush made gains in Democratic areas? See my above comment.

    The Berkeley study also appeared to debunk speculation about voting irregularities in several heavily Democratic counties that voted Republican in the 2004 election. After applying the statistical model to Dixie County and Baker County, both of which bucked party affiliations and voted overwhelmingly for Bush, Hout’s team found nothing amiss. These counties, which used paper ballots that were optically scanned, have historically voted Republican in national elections, Hout says.

    Hout’s researchers also examined the election results in the hotly contested state of Ohio and found no irregularities there. “Our results do indicate that Ohio probably did get it right,” Hout says.

    Look, they can’t argue the state was stolen, as their study’s questionable numbers are insufficient to alter the Florida vote. They can’t support previous allegations in Ohio. They have no evidence other than their own projections and expectations. In short, they ain’t got diddley.

    This is just only another in a series of attempts to try to create an air of illegitimacy over the election, the sanctity of our republic be damned.

  • Iraqi Militant Group Threatens Election

    I blogged last night that the pending elections have the terrorists fighting not only the American and Iraqi forces but also the clock in Iraq. Today, the terrorists made it quite obvious that they know and fear this.

    An Islamic militant group in Iraq warned Muslims to skip the country’s coming elections, and said anyone who runs for office would be branded an infidel and “punished in the name of God.”

    ….

    The militant group, Ansar al-Sunna, said in a statement published on its Web site: “We ask all Muslims to respond to God’s calling and avoid showing up at the election posts.”

    The group warned that voting sites would be targeted “because they are infidel posts.”

    Iraq’s interim government plans to hold elections for a transitional parliament in January, and the offensive against insurgents in Falluja was meant to restore interim government control over that area ahead of the vote.

    “We warn everyone who will run in this election that by doing so, he chose to be an infidel and that he will be punished in the name of God,” Ansar al-Sunna said. “The same will go to the American crusaders and their allies, their collaborators who support these elections.”

    The group claimed responsibility for the October killing of a Kurdish police chief in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, calling it a warning to Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani. The militants consider Kurdish leaders traitors for cooperating with U.S.-led forces in the invasion of Iraq.

    It also claimed responsibility for the killings of three KDP members in September and 12 Nepalese contractors in August.

    The group said elections were meant “to deceive the people that they are free and that they can elect their own president and government in a democratic and free approach.” It also denounced efforts to bring democracy to Iraq as an “infidel curriculum.”

    The statement said Muslims had a duty to fight U.S. troops and “to work on establishing the rule of God in our country.”

    These are not hollow threats, as the terrorists in Iraq are more capable and more internationally supported than their counterparts who could not affect the Afghan elections in October. It should be noted, though, that every suicide attack, every dead terrorist, every bit of arms seized between now and the election is a hit on the impact the Islamists and Saddamists can have immediately prior to and on election day. However, to lay low, bide their time and conserve their assets would be counterproductive to their need to maintain an atmosphere of terror and lawlessness. The coalition’s efforts are against them, time is against them, and the Iraqi people are not for them.

    If you’ve ever wondered how Denzel Washington’s character in the movie Fallen felt as the evil spirit Azazel hopped from person to person, each in turn hauntingly serenading Denzel with the Stones’ Time Is On My Side, ask one of the Islamists in Iraq. (Great, now that song’s stuck in my head. Damn you, Azazel!)

  • North Korea Drops Use of Most Laudatory Kim Title

    Kim Jong-il, doomed to be a nut from day one, has either chosen or been forced to have his public image presented in a more subdued manner.

    North Korean media have dropped most laudatory references to leader Kim Jong-il, just days after reports that his portrait had been removed from some public places, an analyst at Radiopress, a Japanese news agency that monitors North Korean media, said on Wednesday.

    Instead of being referred to as “dear leader of our party and our people” as had been customary, Kim has been merely called by his job titles, said Noriyuki Suzuki, chief analyst at Radiopress.

    The omission, in both radio and print media, was especially glaring in a report on Wednesday by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Kim’s visit to a military unit.

    Kim was referred to by his three main job titles — Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Chairman of the National Defense Commission.

    The change comes amid reports that portraits of Kim Jong-il, ubiquitous in homes, offices and public buildings across North Korea, had been removed from some public meeting halls.

    “It’s still hard to say, but taken in context with the reports about the portraits, this dropping of the most laudatory title may be an attempt by Kim to play down his cult of personality,” Suzuki said.

    He added, however, that the apparent curtailment of Kim’s personality cult did not suggest anything major had changed in the power structure of the reclusive communist state.

    Hmmm. Laying low for diplomatic reasons or fear of becoming a non-person? I think he’s just ronery and blame Team America.

  • Probe of Marine’s Disappearance Re-opened

    I refrained from posting on the swarm of allegations around the disappearance and subsequent resurfacing of US Marine Hassoun when the story originally was made known. Now, in the wake of the Fallujah campaign, there’s this news.

    Military investigators have re-opened the case of U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Wassef Hassoun after several personal items — including his military ID and civilian passport — were found in Falluja, the city where he disappeared in June.

    Hassoun reappeared July 7 in Lebanon, where he was born and has relatives.

    What happened to Hassoun during that time has been a mystery to military investigators who recently closed two separate investigations into the disappearance.

    Because of the new evidence, the case of Hassoun’s disappearance is unexpectedly open again. Investigators are assessing the evidence found in Falluja.

    After the initial report that Hassoun was missing, military officials assumed he had walked away from camp. He was listed as a deserter.

    His status was changed to captured after the release of a videotape that showed him blindfolded with a sword suspended over his head. A few days later, a posting to three Islamist Web sites claimed Hassoun had been beheaded.

    Hassoun denied being a deserter and staging his own kidnapping.

    A Marine Corps official said representatives of the Naval Criminal Investigative Services did not interview Hassoun until after he completed his 30-day home leave, following his repatriation back to the United States.

    Hassoun may now be interviewed again, the official said.

    Hassoun’s civilian passport, military identification card and his military uniform were all found, sources said.

    The uniform was described by those familiar with the case as being in “remarkably good shape.”

    Other items with Hassoun’s name on them, but which the sources declined to describe, were also found. It appeared that some items of identification were altered, the sources said.

    Hassoun’s personal weapon disappeared from the camp just outside Falluja at the same time he did. It was never recovered.

    Also, an amount of cash he had has not been found, sources said.

    Two weeks ago, the NCIS presented its findings on two ongoing investigations into Hassoun’s disappearance.

    One investigation was a missing-person case. The other was a criminal probe into whether there was a breach of national security or classified information.

    Marine Corps officials would not say what those findings were. The findings were presented to the top commander of the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Camp Lejeune, Hassoun’s unit.

    While not restraining from posting it, I will continue to refrain from commenting on it and will advise others to do the same. There is so little publicly known at this time that an innocent Marine may be harmed or an Islamist investigation may be impaired. No prediction. No guessing. No opinion. At this time.

  • Japan’s LDP to Propose Self-Defense Force

    Japan, having long paid its penance and then some, is about to consider strengthening its national role in its own defense.

    Japan’s ruling party is considering constitutional revisions for setting up a self-defense military force and also making the emperor the head of the state.

    The Liberal Democratic Party agreed Wednesday to start full discussions on revising the constitution based on a draft outline calling for these measures, the Kyodo news service reported.

    Under the revisions, Japan will be able to exercise the right to collective self-defense and the Self-Defense Forces will be allowed to take charge of domestic security when mobilized by the premier and use force as part of international peacekeeping efforts.

    Under its present constitution, Japan is forbidden from exercising the right to collective self-defense.

    Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said efforts to realize the preliminary proposals will start in the fall of next year. But the proposal may have a tough time in parliament because of opposition from other parties.

    The draft also proposes allowing a female member of the imperial family to take the throne. Koizumi told reporters at his office, “I think the Japanese public mostly accepts it.”

    This is long beyond due, and needed to match the country’s economic and diplomatic importance in the Pacific Rim region and worldwide.

  • UK: Got Lard?

    If not, Brits, you can apparently blame the E.U.

    Bakers of mince pies, Christmas puddings and other traditional British treats have been warned that they might be facing a lard-free Christmas this year.

    Supermarkets say stocks of the shortening, made from rendered pig fat, were running low due to surging demand from pork-loving new members of the European Union.

    Jamie Sitzia, spokeswoman for the Somerfield supermarket chain, said this week that the admission of 10 new EU countries in May had been followed by “unprecedented demand from Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary for the cheapest cuts of pork to meet their demand for sausages, salamis and pies.”

    The countries are buying EU-bred pork to avoid tariffs on imports from outside the union. The result, Sitzia said, was “a serious shortfall in lard production throughout the European Union.”

    A spokeswoman for Sainsbury’s, another large supermarket chain, said the company had seen a reduced supply of lard in stores and was advising customers to switch to butter or margarine where possible.

    Despite Britain’s reputation for stodgy food, lard is increasingly shunned by health-conscious cooks. Consumption fell from 2 ounces per person per week in 1971 to 0.3 ounces per person per week in 1998, according to government statistics.

    But many still swear by it as the secret to light, flaky pie crust and delicious roast potatoes.

    Somerfield spokeswoman Sitzia advised lard lovers not to panic.

    “We are now getting more volume through from suppliers and if customers do not panic buy we should have enough for everyone,” she said.

    I’m dreaming of a rendered-pig-fat Christmas….

  • Iraq Insurgents on the Run but Not Gone

    Almost as if dismayed that the terrorist activity in Iraq did not cease immediately with the commencement of the Fallujah operation, the Associated Press is taking an oft-dubious look at the American and Iraqi efforts against the radicals.

    U.S. commanders in Iraq say the insurgents are on the run. The problem is that when the insurgents are chased from one place, such as Fallujah, they pop up elsewhere, to deadly effect.

    It happened in Mosul this week and in Baqubah — with car bombings and attacks on police stations — as well as in Ramadi, a provincial capital just west of Fallujah. The scope of violence in those places is far smaller than in Fallujah. It also shows that the overwhelming technology and firepower of the U.S. military have not broken the back of the insurgency.

    It appears unlikely that the Pentagon will send substantially more troops to Iraq than the 140,000 already there. U.S. commanders believe a bigger force would just give the insurgents more targets.

    The Pentagon seems likely to stick to its current approach: confront the insurgents wherever they appear, building up the number of U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and other security forces, and hoping the political footings of a democratic Iraq take hold quickly.

    In the meantime, the U.S. death toll continues to grow. It now exceeds 1,200 since the war began in March 2003. At midmonth, November ranked as the second deadliest month for U.S. forces, with more than 90 dead.

    The central question, many believe, is more political than military. Will support for the resistance grow or shrink as a result of what happened in Fallujah, which was the insurgents’ main base? More broadly, will enough Iraqis accept the Americans’ lead to form a viable government?

    I know it’d be extremely difficult to gather and is rather ghoulish of me, but I’d like to see some reasonable estimates of bad guys bagged. I’ll wager it would go far into putting the American deaths into perspective.

    I feel it would behoove our efforts to at least publish more information on the prisoners taken to date, information such as breakdowns of nationalities and, among the Iraqi nationals held captive, data on their backgrounds (e.g. prior criminals, Saddamists). This could crush any notion both home and abroad that we’re opposing a popular movement of the Iraqi people fighting occupation and are, in fact, facing the brutal, desperate efforts of thugs and radicals with either selfish or Islamist motivations.

    “Whether the sparks (from Fallujah) light other fires all over Iraq or burn out” is still a question, said Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    The signs so far appear unfavorable.

    On Wednesday a suicide car bomb killed 10 Iraqis in the northern city of Beiji, U.S. forces fought insurgents for three hours in Ramadi. In Fallujah, there was sporadic fighting. On Tuesday a prominent Iraqi insurgent claimed the battle for Fallujah was only the start of an uprising.

    Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a senior Central Command officer, said in an AP Radio interview Tuesday that once the Fallujah offensive began, the insurgents attacked in other parts of the country to show “they still were a potent force.” In his view, they lost more than they gained.

    To hear him and other American officers tell it, the U.S. plan is working. They do not expect to end the insurgency. Rather, they aim to suppress it enough to permit people throughout the country to elect a national assembly, which would draft a new permanent Iraqi constitution.

    Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, said during a visit to Iraq this week that the Fallujah offensive was a major blow to the insurgents. He said the only way the U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies can be defeated is if they lose their will.

    “But we are also under no illusions. We know that the enemy will continue to fight,” he told the Pentagon’s internal news service.

    Unlike the traditional guerrilla warfare scenario where the insurgents win by not losing and those in power lose by not winning, today’s Iraq stands as an exact reversal of that military rule. The closer the government and the Iraqi people get to representative democracy, the more they grasp self-rule and freedom, the greater the chance of failure for the terrorists. Just as the Americans and the interim government is on the clock to pull off elections, so too are the terrorists up against the wall to prevent public belief in the democratic concept and acceptance of any election results. An elected government that the Iraqi people feel they have a vested interest in would be greatly detrimental to the efforts of the so-called insurgency.

    Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the outcome ultimately rests in the hands of the Iraqi people rather than the U.S. military. He predicted that a “tipping point” will be reached that changes the momentum in favor of those who want democracy to succeed in Iraq.

    “More and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists … and they won’t like it,” he said recently. “They’ll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they’ll turn on those people.”

    The Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, made a similar point Wednesday in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

    “This ultimately is not going to be won in the kinetic sense — in battle. It’s going to be won in having Iraqis taking ownership and investing their own personal sweat and blood,” he said.

    However the AP tries to balance (read spin negatively) the news, progress is being made. We are killing the insurgents. By the freakin’ bushel. The effects of anger in the Arab world over the filmed shooting of a wounded bastard by a US Marine will be tempered by anger within Iraq at the execution of humanitarian worker Margaret Hassan. There is no more reporting of no-go zones for the US military. Every day is a day that the Iraqi national army grows in size and proficiency. Each Iraqi civilian death caused by the terrorists will become a sign of the terrorists’ impotence against those they actually wish to fight.

    In short, we are not losing the peace and, because of that, we are winning it.

  • My Dog Speaks

    Trying this out on my dog Ilsa, a Shiba Inu. Picked it up today for $8 at a toy store going out of business.

    So far, the bitch has barked, “Give me your best shot” at some people a little too close to the apartment balcony. This could be entertaining.

  • The Age-Old Problem During, Between and After Wars

    War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

    —Winston Churchill

    The above quote is most assuredly true and unavoidable. War is a series of traps, a string of opportunities for error. Perhaps the most difficult pitfall to avoid actually begins before combat commences. In fact, it begins immediately in the aftermath of the previous conflict, be it a small engagement or a worldwide conflagration of hostility, and continues on into the next conflict. Put simply, the mistake I write of is the misuse or neglect of possible lessons to be learned. I’ll leave it to Cyril Falls to put it more eloquently:

    Those who study warfare only in the light of history think of the next war in terms of the last. But those who neglect history deprive themselves of a yardstick by which theory can be measured.

    The obvious mistake is to misinterpret or neglect the abundant information available, be it from failures or successes. An example of this would be the successful torpedo-plane attack on Taranto in early World War II. The Japanese chose to learn from the British air success against a shallow, sheltered harbor, while the Americans learned little or nothing from the sinking of three Italian battleships. Result: five American battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor, less than thirteen months later.

    The more subtle trap is to fall into the thinking that the next war will be fought in the manner of the previous one. This leads to limitations on both strategic and tactical thinking and their subsequent effect on training and preparation. Drawing from WWII again, an easily identified example is that of the French. Having seen the trench warfare, relatively stable fronts and bloody results of attacks against fortified positions, the French relied too heavily on this experience with their dependence on the fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. Result: the capitulation of France to Nazi Germany in just six weeks.

    During my time in the National Guard, I saw first-hand this type of thinking, at both a strategic and tactical level. Even into the latter ’90s, much of the US armor training was based on the planned defense-and-counterattack of the anticipated massive tank showdown with the Soviets in Europe. On a small-scale level, my platoon was going through a move-to-contact engagement on the tank simulators at Ft. Knox (I’m talking about the old platoon-to-battalion level SimNet, which may or may not still be in use). The exercise was late in the day and the platoon reacted poorly to the eventual enemy attack. Overnight, the platoon leadership planned for the same exercise, anticipating the meeting with the OpFor to be in the same location. Sure enough, as the engagement was rerun the following morning, the enemy were in the same location and were decimated. We had made a mistake and been rewarded for it — wrong lesson learned.

    Military history is replete with examples of both lessons that were failed to be grasped and lessons that were learned too rigidly. How best to avoid this trap? Learn the lessons of the previous conflict but don’t allow them to exclusively dictate doctrine or tactics. Innovate while anticipating innovation. Despite the above case of Pearl Harbor, along with my own examples and many more throughout our history, the modern American military has generally been pretty good about this, overcoming the potential pitfalls with flexibility and innovation. One of my old lieutenants liked to say, “We train in chaos.” (He also, in his fair share, was fond of saying, “I’ll get the next pitcher.” He’s still a dear friend.) This has been noticed by our foes as well, as a Soviet military document apparently held the following gem:

    One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine that the Americans do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligations to follow their doctrine.

    So far in the war against Islamist terror, this potential trap has played to our advantage. In Afghanistan, the Taliban felt secure without a build-up for a repeat of the Soviet engagement. In Iraq, Saddam and his military seemed paralyzed when the ground onslaught took off without a lengthy air campaign, as was expected from the first Gulf War. In both, the US used innovation and adaptation to overcome the enemy without allowing them the luxury of benefitting from their acquired experience.

    A trio of historical examples are driving today’s war — Viet Nam in general, Tet specifically, and Mogadishu. The Islamists are hoping that a slow bleed or a sudden hemorrhage will cripple the will of the American public.

    Which is stronger — the will of the American people to succeed or their fear of the failures of our history? The hopes of our current enemy based on our past or the future imaginative actions of the American military?

    I anticipate having children someday. They and their children will live in the world that results from the answer to that.