"What Would Clausewitz Say?"
America's Firepower Industrial Complex
storms into the Middle East... again...
by Bill Bonner
“No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so –
without first being clear in his mind what he intends
to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.”
- Carl Von Clausewitz
Normandy, France - "This is not an ideal time to take the ferry from Ireland to France. Most of the passenger ferries aren’t running. Your only choice is to go with the Polish truck drivers on the Stena Line. And then, when you get out in the Atlantic, the sea is rough. The clouds are low. The wind is stiff. All you can do is to lie in your berth, and let the gentle, or not so gentle, rock of the boat put you to sleep.
Last night, the on-board restaurant was nearly empty. The truck drivers have their own restaurant. There were probably only 4 or 5 passengers who were not truck drivers on the ship, including one older man with wild white hair, who resembled Albert Einstein in later life. We could not linger over dinner. The ship was beginning to rock and roll too violently. So, we made our way down the corridor, bouncing from one side to another, to our cabin.
There, we hastened to bed. Lying flat seems to be a good way to avoid getting sick. Then – except for the crash of the waves against the hull…and the creak of every piece of metal above the water line – you can imagine that you are on a hammock softly swinging in a summer breeze. But here we are. It is still very gray and cold. But, there’s work to do. Reckoning to reckon with. Dots to connect.
Ready, Fire…Aim: If you’re going to have any hope at all of understanding and anticipating what’s coming our way…you need a framework – a structure on which to hang the baubles and bangles of the daily news. For example, in the news last week was this, CNN: "President Joe Biden’s decision to strike 85 targets in Iraq and Syria on Friday in response to the death of three American soldiers last weekend amounted to a middle ground: short of a direct strike inside Iran, which would almost certainly spark a wider war, but still more expansive than any action the US has taken so far against the groups it accuses of destabilizing the region."
Whether the 125 precision-guided missiles fired over 30 minutes Friday night will have the effect of preventing further attacks on Americans is a question officials aren’t yet ready to answer. “I think it is a real strong deterrence,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and Iraq War veteran. “We’re saying: Listen, we don’t want to go to war. But have a little taste of what we can do. Here you go. Eighty-five targets. And I think that that is part of the balancing act that we need to be engaged in right now.”
Eighty-five targets? One hundred and twenty-five missiles? Show them what we can do? We pause for breath. To the clowns currently listed on ballots across the country must be added the jokers who run America’s military machine…aka, the firepower industry. Between them – civil and military authorities – these deciders have the wherewithal to ruin the economy and bring the empire to its knees. What to make of them? Are they not nature’s way…like mold on yogurt…to turn a wholesome dessert into sickening slime?
A Military Maxim: What is the likelihood that the same intel geniuses who missed 9/11 and the Hamas attack have now peered into the dark hearts of ‘terrorists’ in 85 separate locations? Where is the risk/reward calculation that tells us it would be a good idea to kill them…even at the risk that the survivors will become sworn, lifelong enemies of the USA? Where in the US Constitution does it give a president the right to start a war on his own say-so?
And what would Clausewitz say? Where is the plan? What are the war aims? Have the pros and cons been debated by the peoples’ representatives? ‘You shoot at everything…you hit nothing.’ It’s a military maxim that applies to the rest of life. You try to do everything, you end up getting nothing accomplished. That’s why Clausewitz has been so popular with business schools. Commerce, like war, is competitive. The competitor who tries to be everything to everyone gets nowhere. The winners are those who know where to attack…and do so precisely. Military power, too, needs to be focused…on particular, achievable objectives. It’s not meant to be hurled around like cheap threats in a Saturday night barroom.
Smart attackers do not disperse their firepower, they concentrate it on specific points for specific reasons – to cut off the enemy from his supplies, to capture (or destroy) a vital bridge, to eliminate a small force before it can join with others, and so forth. As Clausewitz explains, there’s ‘emotion’ involved in war. And chance. But they are tempered and directed by reason. Where’s the reason in Biden’s missile barrage?
Forever Wars:The logic of Generalissimo Biden’s war must be to ‘send a message’ to Iran. But this is the same kind of numbskull thinking that had the US bombing the hell out of Laos and North Vietnam…threatening to send them ‘back to the stone age.’
It did no good. In Laos, US bombing killed a tenth of the population. No advantage was gained. In Vietnam, the ‘enemy’ bobbed and weaved…in a kind of lightweight military ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy. The Pentagon’s amateur bean counter - Robert McNamara - could do all the body counts and pain assessments he wanted. But in the end, the US had no alternative but to run away…with a final, disgraceful retreat by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.
And anyone who thinks the ‘terrorists’ will now back off – in shock and awe at American firepower – is just not paying attention. The Iraqis have had more than a “little taste” of US firepower; they got a full meal of it during America’s war to liberate them. Now, they want the US to get the hell out. And the Houthis are regarded as the heroes of the whole Muslim world…and much of the rest of it. They’ve been taking US-made ‘incoming’ fire for the last 20 years. They’re not going to stop now that it is coming directly from the US rather from its proxies in Saudi Arabia.
What outcome is likely? What would Clausewitz say? More to come…"
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