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August 27, 2004
Tommy Franks on Friction
Tommy Franks reflects on Operation Iraqi Freedom in his autobiography American Soldier (p.544)
The terrorists at large in Iraq, and around the world, will continue to attack our forces where they're most vulnerable. And with each man or woman killed or wounded, with each crisis, with each investigation, the Washington blame game will be extended a few more innings. Bush should be booted; Rumsfeld fired. I am constantly amazed at the shallow thinking that underpins such commentary. Things go wrong in war. If war were easy and convenient, there would be too many of them. American's fight wars only when we are threatened. I wouldn't want it any other way.
I was amazed about how during Operation Iraqi Freedom the so-called "operational pause" was turned into a major coalition defeat. I was astounded that a week into the Afghan campaign pundits were talking of a "quagmire". These same journalists seemed to have learned nothing from Desert Storm a decade earlier.
Perhaps we should turn to our classics, to the Prussian general who understood the difficulties of war:
Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war...Countless minor incidents - the kind you can never really foresee - combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal...Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.
Karl von Clausewitz as quoted by Col. Harry Summers.
Guess what? War isn't easy. Things don't always work out the way we hope or think they will. Battles that despite careful planning defied our expectations; Anzio, Tarawa, First Bull Run, the list is endless. Assumptions are destroyed without hesitation. When we first went into Vietnam we did so with fighter aircraft unarmed with guns. We had assumed that all air-to-air battles would be fought with missiles, and that we'd be shooting down Soviet bombers. Assumption demolished.
Perhaps we should end this post by reflecting on the words of another general who was all too familiar with warfare;
It is well that war is to terrible, or else we should grow too fond of it.
General Robert E Lee
Posted by Tom at August 27, 2004 9:12 AM
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