Army and Marine Corps are light constabulary forces designed to police Muslim Arabs and Afghans with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mines. The historic lessons of Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Palestine and Afghanistan have far more to do with avoiding the hazard of occupation in the first place and, thus, eluding the problem of insurgency altogether.īut armies are what they do, and, for the moment, the U.S. In truth, the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and a thousand other places are complex problems rooted in local societal and governmental failures, destructive social pathologies and widespread resistance not only to foreign military intervention, but to modernity in general. The notion that the generals have “discovered” a military solution to Islam’s societal misery in the form of counterinsurgency is untrue, but no one in the White House, the Senate or the House, let alone the media, is willing to challenge it. Today, stars will only fall on American Army and Marine officers who religiously embrace counterinsurgency inside the Islamic world as the future. Maurice Gamelin, insisted the French and British armies must prepare for the “long war” with an offensive in 1941 or ‘42. When French politicians asked why the French army could not attack Germany to support France’s Polish ally in 1939, the army’s commander in chief, Gen. “Methodical battle,” a concept of war-fighting emphasizing set-piece battles and the application of preplanned firepower over maneuver, was enshrined as the French national vision of future war. In France, where defense spending rose to account for one-third of all government expenditures by 1939, there was no shortage of modern equipment, only a shortage of competent senior leadership in the general-officer ranks.
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