Weapons Of The New War

Once upon a time, wars were fought by nations who raised masses of men, gave them weapons and then repeated smashed them into each other until one of them gave up or ceased to exist. This worked because weapons were expensive and dificult to use. Only nations could afford the cost of procuring the weapons and training soldiers in their use. Ordinary people, if they dared resort to arms at all, usually made do with farm impliments. That meant that commoners had little say over who their princes and kings were. A war, if they survived it, just meant that someone else might be taxing them to death.

 

Weapons are much less expensive now, and that makes war much more complicated. Where armies once only took note of commoners as a source of cannon fodder or forage, now they have to worry about what side they are on. Now, when anyone in the war zone suffers a loss, they have the capacity to wage their own little war against whomever they see as their enemy. Now, armies cant just fight wherever and leave the survivors to pick up the pieces.

 

Our enemies understand this better than we do sometimes. That is one reason that we had so many problems in Iraq at first. We took away something bad, but we didn't replace it with anything better. The common people had come to terms with what was and had learned to survive. Then we gave them some hope for something better, but didn't follow through quickly enough. It was expected that those that were tied to the old regime would be upset enough to fight, but we also thought that the rest would be happy enough with the old regime gone. Instead, when we didn't deliver, a lot of them through in with the insurgency, in many cases because the "political" wing of the insurgency ran schools and clinics and provided jobs.

 

Too few commanders understood that the best weapon against an insurgency is money. It doesn't do any real good to directly bribe the lilttle powers - clan chiefs, sheiks, etc. At best that only buys a little time, and they use the money to arm themselves and get ready to extort more money down the road. Where money becomes an effective weapon is in building the infrastructure that makes peace better than war. People who have something to lose, have something to fight for. When what they would lose came from our enemies, they fought for our enemies. When we gave them something that our enemies could take away, they fought for us.

 

This is a difficult weapon to use, because there are no clear targets and no clear way to immediately tell if you hit the target. Sighting in the weapon so you deliver the right amount of money to the right place at the right time takes time and patience, and a lot of money because sometimes you miss and missing is just as expensive as getting it right. Too much money makes people dependent and disappointed when it doesn't continue. Too little is disappointing and makes people think your dont care enough to try. Any kind of miss can turn people against you. Fortunately, in Iraq we mostly learned the lesson in time to make a difference.

 

For a good lesson in the wrong way to handle things, please read Michael Yon's report from Afghanistan - "Death in the Corn". He makes his living living with the troops on the front line, first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan. In this post, he tells about the efforts of British troops to deal with a sniper that used to be a farmer, until he lost some trees and wasn't paid for his loss. He wasn't paid because the rate of compensation was set by accountants back in Britain so low, that he preferred revenge to what he considered theft. Sooner or later he will be killed, when he should have been and could have been a friend.

 

This is what I do in Basra. I have paid someone for a car that was totalled by an armored vehicle. I am building schools and hospitals so the Iraqis have something to lose by chosing war instead of peace. I am trying to be fair to a contractor so he will finish a job instead of turning to terrorism. There aren't enough troops here to suppress insurgency by force now. The fact that there has only been one attack in two months, means that the people here, for now at least, prefer peace. Hopefully that will last.