Evolving strategies on both sides of this war
...It is interesting to see the media which resist even the hint of a PR campaign by the US, march in lock step with the enemy media script. Their biggest problem is the association of violence with significance. To them every violent act is significant regardless of whether it effects our military's ability to function. The media has a double standard on war crimes and torture also. It blew the hazing at Abu Ghraid way out of proportion while it ignores the enemy's torture manual and actual victims. In doing both it was following the enemy script by making victims out of the enemy and ignoring their war crimes. How many stories have you seen on enemy war crimes in Iraq? Yet, their main strategy is based on a war crime by focusing their efforts on murdering non combatants and then getting the media to blame the US for not stopping the "violence."The terrorists' immediate goal is to get us out of Iraq. Their actions against us at every level of warfare contribute to that purpose:
* At the tactical level, they concentrate on killing and wounding our soldiers and on restricting our movements. Their weapons, such as roadside bombs, contribute to both objectives, while suicide bombings against civilians make the streets we can't drive ungovernable.
* At the operational level - the hinge between tactics and strategy - they exploit the media's appetite for sensational images and anti-Americanism to get out a message that amplifies their power. Their tactics directly support this operational effort.
* At the strategic level, they leap over our forces to influence our population and, through them, our government. The operational-level focus on the media directly supports the strategy.
The terrorists know where they want to go and they have a plan to get there. We don't. No one in Washington offers a detailed, persuasive answer to the Iraq question.
Bring the troops home! OK, then what? No one will tell you. Give the surge time! All for it. But what is the specific end-state we hope to reach, and are our means sufficient?
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The advent of military aircraft changed warfare, expanding the battlefield into a third dimension while dramatically deepening the area that could be attacked. Air power alone was rarely decisive (despite the claims of its advocates), but control of the skies became vital.
What's the postmodern equivalent of air power, the new revolutionary development? It's the proliferation of the 24/7 media in all its formats. And the terrorists realize it. They learned to trump air power and all the detritus of the last revolution by refusing to mass together and by submerging themselves in urban seas. Then they went one better by grasping the power of irresistible weapons that came free of charge: the media.
Yes, the media were able to influence a war's outcome back in the Vietnam days. But the Cronkite-era media were the equivalent of World War I biplanes. Today's media are a sky full of B-52s, cruise missiles and stealth fighters - with unlimited ordnance.
The terrorists know they can't beat our forces on the battlefield. Their purpose in engaging our troops is to generate a body count, graphic images and alarmist headlines. They've created a new paradigm of warfare that's cheap, effective and defiantly hard to defeat.
Meanwhile, our own military isn't even allowed to slip stories to the bribe-driven Arab press. And the global media credit every perfunctory claim by the terrorists that the target we just hit was another wedding party.
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