Scattersez:
URBAN GUERILLA WARFARE:
How Understanding the Enemy’s Methods Help Us
Okay, much of what you’ll read here are pretty well-selected for their value to us ordinary folks. There is absolutely nothing classified here. It’s not really UGW 101 or how to turn you into counterterrorists, but more in helping us understand HOW & WHY the enemy thinks and not WHAT they think.( We already know their main message)
(……..”Honey, do you mind? I just need this time with the computer.“)
Now ,how I came about the info…For the record, the men from whose shared stories certain valuable lessons for us have been conceptualized are faithful to the chain-of- command and are mission-oriented. The analysis expressed here are solely the responsibility of this blogger, who considers them the unheralded heroes of this War.This blog is dedicated to the men of our Special Forces (SF). (May your tribe increase!) For you Sun Tzu readers, there is value in knowing the enemy we face.
Some history review: Guerilla Tactics have been around since the the time of Alexander the Great when he used scouts to gather information on the size and strength of his opponent’s armies. We used Indian scouts against the British in the war of Independence. Experiences in guerilla warfare, however, were brought to monumental heights, when Mao Tse-Tung taking heed of military writer Sun Tzu’s earlier dissertation applied it in escaping the Kuomintang Army in his Long March. For the first time, the primal role of people (“masses”)linked to a guerilla army was introduced as the tables were turned and the Kuomintang had to settle in what we now know as Taiwan. America’s first major encounter with jungle guerilla warfare was of course, Vietnam, where the vulnerability of conventional forces to a guerilla force was experienced and our President then, LBJ was able to marshal his forces for a truce. Later, after major losses by Arab nations in conventional wars with Israel, the world was to witness guerilla warfare carried out by Palestinians in the concrete jungles of Lebanon. Here, urban guerilla tactics ,like closed-quarters fighting, were born and bred and later imitated in many parts of the world.
Excuseme.. “In a minute Honey, I’ll feed the cat later. I’m trying to solve the problems of the world here.” (Jeez) Where were we?
Some clarifications: Conventional Warfare , prime example of which is WWII where Clausewitz’s concept of Mass always comes to fore. You know, like, you have 4 divisions, I have 6 divisions..You have 400 tanks..I have 600 tanks.. You have your Kamikaze..I’ll give you the A-bomb. And so forth and so on. The one who ups the ante the most wins. That works so long as the opponent works along the same Clausewitz-ian line, as the old USSR once did.
But what if the opponent chooses not to play it our way? It becomes UNconventional or guerilla warfare. So, let’s get one thing clear at this point. Is the Al Qaeda a conventional force or an unconventional force? Who believes the Al Qaeda is a conventional force? (Raise your hands…) Com’on, let’s see some hands.. Let me get my binoculars for a moment (I peer) Hey, look.! I believe I see…some hands in Washington! Wave back everybody!
(just kidding)
A guerilla force always assumes that their enemy has the superior number of men, superior number of armor and firepower. So, flaunting our tanks , planes, and bombs at them won’t stop them. The Clausewitz concept of Mass just doesn’t follow here. They’ll just sit it out .(I know some SF who can stay for months on end on just dried fish and crackers and if these well-funded guys can do it, our more desperate opponents can certainly find a way to do it.)and when they feel that they’ve made you confident enough to display a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”, they come out and probe for targets of opportunity. We see it playing now before our eyes on the news report from Iraq as our conventional force slowly gets decimated. We may clear out Najaf for a time, occupy it even, but we’ll be dispersing the trouble to other places we thought had already been pacified.
In guerilla parlance, it’s called the one-step-two-step. You know, one step backwards, two steps forwards. Feign submission by immobility(one step backwards) until your opponent has been lulled into believing that he’s finished you off. Then when he starts relaxing and crowing about his victory, two steps forward comes and the enemy finishes you off with more casualties.
A guerilla force will encourage his opponent to spend his resources at the wrong target. (Sometimes he doesn’t have to do much encouraging) Mao said something about that in his red book. (I hope I don’t get a comment like. “I stopped reading when you said “Mao”). He uses deception and fear fairly well. So the intel info(esp. from the net) really has to be screened out unless we want to see ourselves chasing storms. We may have been doing exactly that lately. Couple that with the insistence that conventional warfare will work against guerilla warfare in this war on terrorism, and what will you have? It’ll be something like, “ Look, there’s trouble in Sudan”. Reply: “Send a force there”..”Look, they’re inciting Afghanis again”. Reply: “Send a force there” etc .etc. Sooner or later we’ll be occupying the whole planet. And when our forces are stretched thin, what does the enemy do? He hits us at home. Get it?
Prior to 9/11, there were several outbursts from the enemy from around the globe, Somalia, USS Cole bombing incident ,the US embassy bombings in Dar Es Salaam, Abbu Sayaf in Southern Philippines. They were all intended to beckon us elsewhere outside of continental USA, where their real target lay. I think we’d been duped long enough, don’t you?
But what about here ? Remember what happened to the urban landscape of Lebanon, once called the Paris of the Middle East after urban guerilla warfare? Compare that picture with what you now see of the New York skyline – an urban guerilla’s heaven. A virtual Amazon jungle with all its nooks and crannies to hide in. What are targets of opportunity in America? (and I don’t mean just targets to bomb) What are the weakest links in our social fabric? Our ghettoes ? Could they provide sanctuary for an outside guerilla force until they’ve more or less, studied the terrain ? Are we allotting any funding equivalent to the funding we’re giving for our conventional force in Iraq in making our ghettoes less of a target of opportunity? Why use a conventional force against a guerilla force anyway?
The best answer to a guerilla force is a guerilla force, not a conventional force. And all these can be done without trumpeting our intentions to the enemy You know, journalists embedded in tanks giving the minute-to-minute positions of our forces through CNN. ( No wonder the muslim clerics were cheering). I mean I have nothing against right to information but if a responsible officer just met with the media and explained that we’re just concerned about security of our forces, they would’ve understood. And the best guerilla force is the one that knows the terrain. Who knows it better than people affected by terrorism in their own country?
We don’t necessarily have to commit our own forces to do the job, we just have to be committed to training dedicated people defend their own country using the tactics the enemy uses since this’ll be a long-drawn affair. Who knows ? We might even learn more about UGW from them. ( To be fair, we are involved in training in allied countries for counter-insurgency, but it’s not being given the emphasis it should be given. Instead, what’s given emphasis are the high-profile battle-geared recruits in Iraq who serve as perfect targets for an enemy snipe or RPG attack.)
One very important thing, when I said dedicated people and by that I meant people who really share the same democratic ideals we’ve lived by, and who know Islamic Fundamentalism cannot be anything other than UNDEMOCRATIC. Look, we trained Bin Laden when he fought with the Afghan forces against Russian occupancy. See how he used that training against us? We trained a number of other jerks..Noriega…Saddam (Jeez, when will we stop?) We aren’t really choosy, are we?
The enemy is ideologically bound. They can move against us even if it means blowing themselves up. If we are to train a force against them, we need to answer the ideological base that’s holding them up. How do we do that when we don’t really understand what this Islamic Thingamajik is? Com’on, our ideology can’t just be rock and roll?
This might require another blog, but suffice it to say Item No.1 in the training curriculum for our guerilla force is ideology. It’s not just finding out what binds us together, but what binds the enemy up. We have to understand how another avenue to God called Islam mutated to its present from of Terror and that can best be taught to us by Muslims themselves. In the final analysis, the ideological answer to Islamic Fundamentalism has to come from Muslims.
Any Muslim reader here ? It’s alright, we won’t shoot. Seriously, not all of them are Fundamentalists and they understand the differences. It’s just the Fatwas and all that that makes them deathly afraid.
Finally, some tips for ordinary folks like us to remember:
Probably ,the first thing we have to remember is DO NOT RACIAL- PROFILE. A lot of the guys I’ve seen treated who sacrificed life and limb for dangerous SF missions may really look like Arab terrorists. Remember, they’re not sporting crew-cuts like the regular forces (and they’re usually quieter) but Members of the 9/11 Al Qaeda group, if you review their airport terminal photos on the monitor, were pretty much decently dressed – beard shaven and all. If you remember some time back, a Caucasian with a British passport, Richard Reid, was utilized ,in attempting to sabotage a passenger flight by lighting his shoe-bomb. They understand racial-profiling and bigotry and can use this to go around the system. It would help our guys a lot if we just went about our business like we always do and not make dark stares at every guy with Middle Eastern features. You won’t lose anything by being friendly and polite with your seatmates. It keeps you in control.
Second, try to contact anybody you know that might influence the policies on how this Terror Alert Level is to be used. What purpose does this serve , anyway?
You telegraph your moves to the enemy so that they won’t attack when the alert level is orange or red?
Even if that would really deter him, why make him aware and inhibit his moves? Don’t we really want these guys who hide to make themselves visible so that law enforcement agencies can detect and even apprehend them?
If there really are mechanisms in place for law enforcement everytime the Terror alert is orange or red (it never goes to yellow, anyway) then let it be for law enforcers’ eyes alone. Making that thing public only serves to give folks like us two different degrees of scare everytime, you know: an orange scare (“let’s hurry up with those groceries”) and a red scare (“Son, you take the old Volkswagen and Mom gets the house.”) It’s bad for the health and ruins the economy.
For awhile there, I thought it was just an advertising ruse to panic the people and get people to buy home or building insurance. But it’s not an electoral ruse to get people to vote for you-know-who, is it? No? Oh, OK.
Lastly, OPEN our minds to cultural differences and change. America, no matter how we romanticize about its past, cannot sit still and has to evolve with the changing times. Great civilizations have withered because they couldn’t adapt to the changing times. READ. Read a lot. On our past..on our enemy’s past..on our ideals as a people and what people from different walks of life and cultures think. It helps to remind us that we’re just really one planet and eventually we’ll just have to learn to live with each other. It won’t hurt.. It’s not that difficult..
It’s like….like feeding the cat… “Here…kitty…kitty…kitty”