کتابچه شخصی من، دفترچه یا چیزی شبیهش

Military strategy is the practice of reducing an adversary’s physical capacity and willingness to fight, and continuing to do so until one’s aim is achieved.

A brief verbal exchange that purportedly took place between an American colonel and a North Vietnamese colonel in 1975 during the negotiations that ended the Vietnam War illustrates the importance of good military strategy. The American colonel, Harry G. Summers Jr., said: “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” His North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, paused a moment, then replied: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
This exchange is often cited—perhaps too often—to highlight shortcomings in U.S. strategic thinking during the Vietnam War. Winning wars is not just a matter of winning battles. One needs a military strategy capable of making one’s victories count. The United States spent valuable resources winning many of the key battles in the Vietnam conflict only to lose the war, and the assumptions underpinning U.S. military strategy were partly to blame.
No military strategy can guarantee victory, but an inappropriate one all but ensures failure. Even if a decisive success is beyond one’s grasp, a suitable military strategy can increase the odds of a favorable outcome. Military strategy is relevant to any type of conflict, or use of force. Novel technologies, such as nuclear weapons or cyberspace, have brought new possibilities and constraints into being, but they have not diminished the importance of having a good strategy.

The nineteenth-century Prussian military writer Carl von Clausewitz drew a sharp distinction between tactics and strategy: he defined the former is the use of armed forces to win engagements; the latter is the “use of engagements to achieve the purpose of the war."

In his timeless but controversial masterpiece, The Prince, the sixteenth-century political writer Niccoló Machiavelli warned his readers: “It is simply not sufficient to kill the ruler and his close relatives, for the rest of the nobility will survive to provide leadership for new insurrections.” His words ring true even today, underscoring as they do the basic vulnerabilities of two popular and closely related strategies: decapitation and targeted killing. These military strategies attack an adversary’s willingness to fight and physical capacity to do so. However, both are vulnerable to assuming that removing a leader or specific individuals will solve the problem rather than making it worse; sometimes a great deal more time and effort is needed to achieve peace.

Decapitation and targeted killing are increasingly attractive to Western policymakers largely because of the increased reach and greater accuracy of modern airpower. Weaponized drones and stealth aircraft, especially, seem to offer the possibility of conducting precise attacks against hostile leaders, thereby affecting radical political change from afar but with much lower risk than typically is involved with using ground forces. As an example, military advisors and defense pundits enthusiastically discussed the possibility of decapitating Saddam Hussein’s regime through airpower alone before the First Gulf War (1990–1991). As General Michael Dugan of the U.S. Air Force argued, Saddam Hussein was a “one-man show” in Iraq and without him, Iraqi troops would quickly “lose their legitimacy and … be back in Iraq in a matter of hours.” By destroying targets in Iraq, Dugan added, the U.S.-led coalition would “convince [the Iraqi] population that [Saddam Hussein] and his regime cannot protect them,” thereby undermining his leadership and authority. However, the White House rejected the idea on the grounds that it meant expanding the war beyond the coalition’s objectives (i.e., the liberation of Kuwait), and Dugan was summarily relieved of his post. Nor was it clear who or what would have filled the resultant power vacuum in Iraq or how—with a crippled communications infrastructure—that person or group could have ordered the Iraqi army’s withdrawal from Kuwait, if in fact that army did not disintegrate as Dugan predicted. Although his ideas were dismissed, they were not unusual for airpower theorists at the time.

[M]ilitary strategies fail when they lack some of the elements crucial to success, namely, objective assessments, sound courses of action, expert military commanders, and war plans coherent enough to pull everything together. During the Second World War, Germany and Japan each had capable commanders and disciplined military forces; however, their hubris, combined with the racial biases and antipathies inherent in their ideologies, made it difficult to produce objective assessments. Consequently, their military strategies and plans were based on faulty assumptions regarding the reach of their own armed forces and what they could conquer and hold, as well as their underestimation of the willingness of the Soviet Union and the Western democracies to continue fighting in the face of heavy casualties.

Many strategic dialectics end without a clear winner or loser, but with each party getting enough to justify its sacrifices and to claim victory. Some military strategies, such as deterrence, may continue indefinitely, in “quasi-win-win” situations, where the aim is to dissuade attack. Others, such as decapitation, ultimately may benefit both parties by leading to better relations, regardless of the original cause of hostilities. Still others, such as targeted killing, may persist because neither party possesses the wherewithal or the willingness to do more; one party may simply find it politically beneficial to have a manageable threat at hand rather than to eliminate it altogether. Therefore, the general assumption that half of all strategies must fail (since only one side can win) is simply not always true. Neither war nor strategy is necessarily a zero-sum game. Many armed conflicts end in negotiated settlements, and, in the grand scheme of things, these arrangements might produce only a temporary peace.

This is a good book on why the US is acting this weird. Though not too short, but too introductory. If you need a copy, you could let me know.

Peace, A.Y