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Essay: History Lesson For Military Superpower, by Stewart Nusbaumer

During recent travels "zipping through Germany on a super-smooth train", Stewart Nusbaumer took a good look around. A very good look. What struck him was how well the Germans have learned their lessons from history. In stark contrast to the U.S., the cities were clean, prosperous, not gutted-out. Also absent were the "abandoned factories, legions of homeless, and armies of criminals". Pondering these vast differences between the two countries, Stewart's thoughts turned to how America does not learn from its sordid past. He remembers fighting a futile war in the rice paddies, steamy jungles and villages of Vietnam, not unlike the futile wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan today. America the 'superpower' possesses the planet's most expensive war machinery, yet it is once again at war's losing end. The costly mistakes of Vietnam are repeated, the horrors continue, thousands of lives are lost, the awful tragedy continues.

In this powerful essay, Stewart Nusbaum, veteran of 'that other needless terrible war', passionately asks: "when will superpower Americans learn?" This is a question every American should be asking. --- Annamarie


Opponents fight one type of war, our military fights another type of war, there is a military stalemate and eventually the U.S. returns home. Is anyone learning anything?
By Stewart Nusbaumer
Posted Tuesday, October 18 on Intervention Magazine

Frankfurt, Germany -- There is an awful truth stalking America -- one too uncomfortable for Americans to speak, even to think, and too dangerous for the mainstream media to report.

Americans spend $450 billion annually on defense, which is nearly as much as all of the world’s military budgets combined, yet our astronomically expensive military cannot catch a 6’5” Arab in a small corner of the world? Our awesomely powerful military can blow up the world, yet it can not subdue a few dizzy fanatics setting off crude road bombs that has spiraled into a full fledge insurgency? We have the most expensive and most the powerful military, but can it do anything?

I’m thinking this while zipping through Germany on a super smooth train -- unlike our roller coaster kidney mixers crawling at camel speed. I’m looking out at a prosperous and secure Germany. There are not gutted-out cities here, not abundantly abandoned factories, not legions of homeless and armies of criminals, not a depopulation of the impoverished heartland as in America. And there is not a public that would elect as president an ignorant nut case. Germany has moved on, but it learned from its horrible mistake. And today Germany is being rewarded for learning from its history.

Meanwhile America is moving backwards. It refuses to learn from its ugly past, so today it is in another ugly mess. The disaster in Iraq was clearly foreseeable, it would have been avoided if Americans, especially George Bush and his handlers, respected history. But George Bush doesn’t like history. History is confining, history talks of limitations and says, “Don’t do that!”

In Vietnam our troops blew up rice paddies and then the Vietnamese attacked us from the jungle. We defoliated the jungle and they attacked us from rice paddies. We blew up both the rice paddies and defoliated the jungle and they attacked us from the village. We leveled the village and they attacked us from the city. When we arrived in mass, they dispersed; when we departed, they massed again and then attacked. U.S. strategy had our highly mobile military racing all over Vietnam, often to where the enemy was not -- until we fell into their attack trap. Frustrated and tired, eventually we gave up and left Vietnam.

And did America learn? Did our military change? Take a wild guess.

What Was Not Learned

According to the mainstream media, the primary lesson of the Vietnam War is that Americans should not spit in the faces of our returning soldiers, a bogus lesson since Americans never did. On the other hand, little is said about the lesson of not getting our soldiers faces blown off in a useless, immoral war. The bogus is everywhere in America, the crucial is hardly heard. The American media doesn’t like history either.

Learning genuine lessons requires studying history, which superpower America won’t do. So today in Iraq a limited if not primitive military force is applying asymmetrical warfare and has stymied the world’s most powerful military. The Iraqi insurgents avoid our massive firepower, the U.S. searches for them mostly unsuccessfully. The guerrillas rely on stealth mobility while the all-powerful U.S. depends upon advanced technology. When our troops attack, the Iraqis disperse; when our troops leave, the insurgents return. The Iraqi opposition is not fighting our type of war and the U.S. military refuses to fight their type of war. The result will be a military stalemate. In military stalemates, however, the visiting army almost always loses.

Unwilling to burden the continuing cost in blood and money, both of which are huge for our expensive military machine and our vulnerable modern soldiers, the U.S. will quit this endless stalemate. But Iraqis will remain, it is their home. It is their country, not our country. And the discredited local government installed by the departed United States will fall like a stack of cheap Vegas cards.

All this is written in history, the history that all Superpowers refuse to read. After our defeat in Vietnam, the Soviet Union rushed to defeat in Afghanistan, now we are on our way to defeat in Iraq, possibly Afghanistan. Superpower militaries don’t change how they fight wars even when losing wars -- hey, they have super power!

The awful truth that Americans do not face and the media is uninterested in discussing is although we spend a fortune on defense, although our military has the most sophisticated and expensive weaponry in the world, although our troops are the best trained, our military is lousy at fighting today’s wars.

Osama bin Laden and his crew run free in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Security and order was never established in Iraq, now the country is in total chaos. Forces with little money and crude weapons outsmart our military leaders, fighting wars our military cannot fight, wars our arrogant, bloated, corporate-led military leaders refuse to fight. And when defeat is confirmed, when our troops return home in defeat, our generals will again, like after Vietnam, blame those “traitorous antiwar demonstrators,” our “liberal media,” those “back-stabbing politicians,” but never their outsmarted selves.

Of course the U.S. military has tinkered with its war strategy. For a while now the hot buzz words have been “special operations,” but for those who seek to challenge the U.S. on the battlefield, all war is special operations. While we talk they act. The Pentagon has made changes in troop training, but nothing to alter its cherished “way of war.” Yet our conventional war is successfully circumvented by our opponents -- well, Saddam Hussein didn’t in the Gulf War, but the world watched that slaughter and learned the lesson not to fight that kind of war against the U.S. military. There is new equipment, but more sophisticated and expensive -- great for defense corporations’ profits, but lousy for fighting the unconventional wars of today.

We have quarter-billion dollar B-1 bombers sitting in Kansas, yet our soldiers in Iraq do not have simple armor for their vehicles. The Army’s 10th Mountain Division was ill prepared to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan, sluggish and disorganized. Some Marines are already on their third tour in Iraq, which will exhaust and degrade our elite corps. Soldiers speak of not understanding how to win a war where there are no boundaries and the enemy is unclear, their officers say push on. And Americans ask, why are our soldiers dying? Answers from Washington have stopped coming.

When the U.S. finally leaves Iraq -- after massacring thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis, after insuring the country degenerates into a vicious civil war, after earning the disrespect of nearly the entire world -- Americans will then evade these awful facts as it evaded the awful facts of Vietnam and the media will rush to a new disaster in the world which makes the avoidance relatively easy. And the U.S. military will return to training the best soldiers in the world and equipping them with the most expensive hardware imaginable, while the generals return to planning a new invasion of some Normandy. And in history, everyone will read about the terrible mistake Germany made, and how the Germans learned from their terrible mistake.

Perhaps all of us, elected representatives, military generals, regular citizens, need to take a trip to Germany and learn not what Germany did but what it is doing. What it is doing is not doing the awful that it once did. When will superpower Americans learn that?


Note: Stewart Nusbaumer is editor of Intervention Magazine. You can email Stewart at Stewart@interventionmang.com.

** This essay was republished here with the kind permission of its author. You will find a link to Stewart Nusbaumer's Intervention Magazine on this page under LINKS. His magazine contains many poignant, penetrating, insightful, compelling, wonderfully-written articles, essays, commentary, photos and links to interesting books. Definitely well worth the read!

posted by Annamarie at 12:46 AM