My dear friend Printer Bowler is a former army captain who served with psychological operations units in Viet Nam (1966-67). He was attached to the Third Marine Amphibious force, I Corps near the DMZ. He’s a perennial history student, now teaching, writing and pumping out radical troop-support propaganda from his home in Montana. It’s a pleasure to post this missive from God’s country:

Da Nang, 1967: Capt. Bowler offers a Camel to a buffalo

The bone yard is full of our delusions

What a concept! Respect your adversary, know who’s boss, see what you have in common and make a deal. Everybody does it on a daily basis—from personal relationships to corporate takeovers.  Everybody, that is, except the Pentagon and DOD. So ironic that it’s been left to Steven Pressfield, one our most respected historians and my favorite literary rock star, to remind our leadership of this perennially ignored reality. 

Since WWII, military strategists and clueless politicians have been addicted to high-tech shock-and-awe strategies, the delusion that remote-control warfare does the job. Of course, initially it can tenderize battlefields . . . but then what? “Mission accomplished!” someone announced from an aircraft carrier. Not even close. That was the beginning of the Iraqi/Afghan quagmire, not the end, which is still searching for itself in a distant fog.   

Success or failure, the buck stops at management

Troops, while you’re out there getting sniped at, roadside bombed and ambushed, our leaders have been glued to their video war games and computerized spread sheets. They still think they can blast their way into foreign neighborhoods and suddenly be top dog. Only recently have they looked up and noticed that drones and smart bombs alone often create far more “enemies” than they neutralize. Like it or not, almost every bomb dropped in Iraq and Afghanistan spawned a hundred new al-Qaeda and Taliban recruits, killed and alienated dozens/hundreds of formerly neutral civilians. Stupid plan, stupid results.

Until we wise up and join forces with their key (tribal) leaders, as Alexander and others discovered, we’ll keep losing lives, confidence, respect and Treasury bills. Experience, our poor ignored teacher, is getting very frustrated with us Americans!

Déjà-vu minus 40 years:  Didn’t hear you, say again?

I’m a Viet Nam vet and I still cringe at the disaster our British Redcoat toy soldier mentality made of that poor little country. Our strategy there was shock-and-awe by whatever name: B-52 carpet bombing, relentless tactical air strikes on suspected VC/Viet Minh positions (often hamlets full of innocent people). Plus, massive aerial applications of Agent Orange in a preposterous attempt to destroy every non-rice plant in the country so there’d be no place to hide. Seriously! This was Defense Sec’y McNamara’s number-cruncher game plan taken to an extreme level of absurdity. Meanwhile, our infantry units were grinding through one booby-trapped jungle nightmare after another, getting hammered and going nowhere.

The result?  With our brain-fart assistance, Ho Chi Minh and the black pajama people—with their little bags of rice, SAMS and AK-47s—brought the mightiest military power in the world to its knees.  Just like the Afghans did to the Russians less than two decades later. (It’s crazy, but think about this: What if we had made a deal with Ho Chi Minh’s tribe instead of those incorrigible French colonial losers and their South Vietnamese collaborators?) 

Time to wheel and deal our way out

Think also about this: what if we made a deal with the Taliban, like Reagan did in the ’80s? And how about a new deal with the Iranians, like we could have done countless times instead of overthrowing their democratically elected leader (Mossadegh, 1952) and mounting our oil-lackey Shah in his place.  All the radical Imams we’re fighting now came to life as rebels against the Shah and us, his sponsors.  They finally overthrew his regime and have been the big roosters ever since. Hating us ever since.  Face it—we, and our British predecessors, essentially gave birth to present-day radical Islam in Iran. We have done nothing to earn their trust or respect, and done much to terrorize and isolate them. Don’t want to believe it? Lose Fox News and read your history. It always has been and still is about oil. In Iran. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. In America.

In the Islamic mind, the past lives in the present. Muslims remember the events of their entire history, good and bad, as if it all happened last week. It’s a tribal thing. We Americans seem to forget everything that happened before last week. We should know by now that even our super hi-tech military arsenal can’t save us from such an oblivious approach. We have to wake up and start making smart, mutually profitable deals with the main players—especially those we call “enemies.” Come back, Sun Tzu, we need you bad!  

Very important people are MFA (missing from action)

Where are the children of Congresspeople and Pentagon/DOD people?  Fort Lauderdale? They need to be in uniform, camped out with our troops, getting up every day and facing the shrapnel and snipers right in the thick of it. Until the talking heads running this war have a personal stake in it, it will remain a CYA paper game in far away Washington. Until the microcosmic “Tale of Two Captains” becomes national policy, and not just isolated acts of resourcefulness and goodwill, our troops have to carry the DOD’s job on top of their own. Hey, who said world peace was going to be easy?

God bless all you troops, and keep a heads-up out there.   • 

Thank you for your Weekend Mashup suggestions.

A few of the blogs I’ve been introduced to this week include Global Guerrillas, Ink Spots, Sosh-P and Building Peace. When I saw T.X. Hammes mentioned in Building Peace’s July 13 post, I was sold. All four are great blogs. Suggest you visit if they are new to you.

Over at Small Wars Journal (SWJ), the announcement of an $8,000 Writing Competition was just posted:

“Winning entries and select others will be published in future special volumes of Small Wars Journal. For each of the two topics, a $3,000 Grand Prize and two $500 Honorable Mentions will be awarded. Hence $8,000 total purse.”

Check out the web site to learn more about the competition and the topics.

The SWJ editors note:

“We greatly respect the works and insights of the usual suspects from the many DoD-centric writing competitions and anticipate some great and hard-to-beat entries from them. We would really like to see some stiff competition from fresh new voices and experience sets not often heard. Please spread the good word about this competition to the far reaches of the empire of important participants in the vastly broad and complex field of small wars. This is a level playing field, and let’s get all the players on it.”

Another article from David Wood this week, titled “Happy Talk About War Doesn’t Fly With Troops on the Ground.” In it, he asks: 

“Should presidents and their administrations be relentless cheerleaders after they send young Americans into combat? Or should they risk losing public support by passing on the bad news from their commanders?”

Later in the article, David quotes Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson:

 “‘What we’ve said is . . . where we go, we stay; and where we stay, we hold; and where we hold, we build . . .’ Nicholson told reporters this week in a video teleconference from Afghanistan.

 

“‘I mean, I’m not going to sugarcoat it,’ the Marine commander added. ‘The fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough Afghan forces and I’d like more. Right now I’ve got 4,000 Marines in Helmand with about 600 . . . 650 Afghan forces. Imagine if I had 4,000 Marines with 4,000 Afghan forces!’”

I prefer the uncoated truth. You?

In his Washington Post article “A Fight for Ordinary Peace,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran also discusses Brig. Gen. Nicholson’s request for more troops:

“He has been promised more troops, but they will not start rolling in until next year. In the interim, he has asked his superiors for permission to arm young men and train them to serve as a local protection force. It is similar to the Sons of Iraq initiative the Marines created in Anbar that resulted in locals turning against foreign fighters in the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

 

“But senior commanders have shown no sign of approving the request. They feel Helmand has too many overlapping tribal rivalries. Arming groups of young men could exacerbate tensions and lead some factions to turn to the Taliban for protection.”

Back to the tribes. How do we work with them and encourage them to work together?

Foreign Affairs Magazine ran Eliot Cohen’s “What to Read on Fighting Insurgencies.” While you are checking out Foreign Affairs, also read Andrew Krepinevich’s article “The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets.”

On the blog Ghosts of Alexander, the question was asked: 

“During the Soviet-Afghan War, some prominent Afghan families strategically placed one son in the mujahideen and one son in the communist government (and perhaps sent off one son to get a spiffy professional education). Basically, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ applied to your children. It says a lot about self-interest versus ideology.

 

“Who wrote about this? It was a rather small mention in a long article or book. I’m in the US without my books or notes and I’m trying to go off of memory. And it’s not working.

 

“Can anybody help on this one? I’m leaning towards someone who’s been writing for a while like Rubin, Dorronsoro or Roy…”

If you know the answer, post to his blog—or post here. I’d like to know the answer, too.

In a post earlier this week, I pulled a quote from the book In the Graveyard of Empires. Newsweek ran a Q&A with the author, titled The War Is Still Wide Open. Check it out.

On a lighter note, Books for Soldiers is another site I was introduced to, and I was reminded of the great series at the Pritzker Military Library. Watch some of their webcasts—or visit the library the next time you are in Chicago. Thank you for the reminder @CFOXTROT. Was also reminded of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s blog.

Over at Twitter . . . Was introduced to a number of fantastic photographers. There are two in particular that I’d like to point out. Please visit their sites and check out their work:

On Matt Brandon’s (@mattsahib) site The Digital Trekker, you can see his photography from around the world. Check out the picture of the young girl in “The Gujjars” section of the site. It reminds me of Steve Curry’s picture of the young girl from Afghanistan, which ran on the cover of National Geographic—but with less fear in the girl’s eyes this time.

David duChemin (@pixelatedimage) features his work on his site, Pixelated Images. Check out his work for World Vision in particular.

That’s it for this week.

Please continue sending your comments for next weeks Mashup.

Hat tips to “Wisner,” Gordon Daugherty, Andrew Lubin, “da kine,” “Kestrelrising,” Dom Santoleri, Morgan Atwood. I will continue checking out all of your suggestions.