Thou shalt kill

From “In Praise of Attrition,” by Ralph Peters, published last summer in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly. Peters is the author of New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy, which will be published this summer by Sentinel Books.

A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy. All else is secondary. Theories don’t win wars. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing effectively. There is no substitute for shedding the enemy’s blood.

Of course, no battlefield is ever quite so simple as this proposition, but any force that loses its elementary focus on killing the enemy swiftly and relentlessly until that enemy surrenders unconditionally cripples itself.

Precision weapons have value, but they are expensive and do not cause adequate destruction to impress a hardened enemy. The first time a guided bomb hits the deputy’s desk, it will get his chief’s attention, but if precision weaponry fails both to annihilate the enemy’s leadership and somehow to convince the army and population it has been defeated, it leaves the job to the soldier once again. Those who live in the technological clouds simply do not grasp the importance of graphic, extensive destruction in convincing an opponent of his defeat.

Focus on killing the enemy. With fires. With maneuver. With sticks and stones and polyunsaturated fats. It’s difficult to persuade leaders schooled in caution that their mission is not to keep an entire corps’ tanks on line but to rip the enemy’s heart out. In the bitter years after Vietnam, when our national leaders succumbed to the myth that the American people would not tolerate casualties, elements within our military—although certainly not everyone—grew morally and practically timid.

By the mid-1990s, the U.S. Army’s informal motto appeared to be “We won’t fight, and you can’t make us.” There were obvious reasons for this. Our military felt betrayed by our national leadership during Vietnam. Then President Reagan evacuated Beirut shortly after the bombing of our Marine barracks on the city’s outskirts—beginning a long series of retreats in the face of terror that ultimately led to 9/11.

Things began to change less than two weeks into our campaign in Afghanistan. At first there was caution. Then, as it dawned on our commanders that the administration would stand behind our forces, we saw one of the most innovative campaigns in military history unfold with stunning speed.

But we’re still too vulnerable to the nonsense concocted by desk-bound theoreticians. A recent draft study for a major joint command spoke of the need for “discourses” between commanders at various levels and their staffs.

Trust me. We don’t need discourses. We need plain talk, honest answers, and the will to close with the enemy and kill him. And to keep on killing him until it is unmistakably clear to the entire world who won. When military officers start speaking in academic gobbledygook, it means they have nothing to contribute to the effectiveness of our forces. They badly need an assignment to Fallujah.

Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can’t kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing is a good interim solution.

We are, militarily and nationally, in a transition phase. Even after 9/11, we do not fully appreciate the cruelty and determination of our enemies. We will learn our lesson, painfully, because the terrorists will not quit. With hard-core terrorists, it’s not about psychological operations or jobs or deploying dental teams. It’s about killing them. The only solution is to kill them and keep on killing them. A war of attrition.

This will be a long war of attrition, stretching beyond many of our lifetimes. We must ensure that the casualties are always disproportionately on the other side. Nothing says that wars of attrition have to be fair. It’s essential to purge our minds of the clichéd images the term “war of attrition” evokes. A one-sided war of attrition, enabled by our broad range of superior capabilities, is a strong model for a twenty-first-century American way of war.

It cannot be repeated often enough: Whatever else you aim to do in wartime, never lose your focus on killing the enemy.

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