Kill Faster! (So Says Ralph Peeters)

[MKSheppard]

KILL FASTER!

By RALPH PETERS
Retired Army officer Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad."

May 20, 2004 -- IN Iraq last month, I learned a great deal about the future of combat. By watching TV.

During the initial fighting in Fallujah, I tuned in al-Jazeera and the BBC. At the same time, I was getting insider reports from the battlefield, from a U.S. military source on the scene and through Kurdish intelligence. I saw two different battles.

The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.

During the combat operations, al-Jazeera constantly aired trumped-up footage and insisted that U.S. Marines were destroying Fallujah and purposely targeting women and children, causing hundreds of innocent casualties as part of an American crusade against Arabs.

It was entirely untrue. But the truth didn't matter. Al-Jazeera told a receptive audience what it wanted to believe. Oh, and the "Arab CNN" immediately followed the Fallujah clips with video of Israeli "atrocities." Connecting the dots was easy for those nurtured on hatred.

The Marines in Fallujah weren't beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. By lies.

Get used to it.

This is the new reality of combat. Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops will have to go in the future. And we can't change it. So we had better roll up our camouflage sleeves and deal with it.

The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.

That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.

Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight.

With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up.

We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster now.

Even in Operation Desert Storm, the effect of images trumped reality and purpose. The exaggerated carnage of the "highway of death" north from Kuwait City led us to stop the war before we had sufficiently punished the truly guilty — Saddam's Republican Guard and the regime's leadership. We're still paying for that mistake.

In Fallujah, we allowed a bonanza of hundreds of terrorists and insurgents to escape us — despite promising that we would bring them to justice. We stopped because we were worried about what already hostile populations might think of us.

The global media disrupted the U.S. and Coalition chains of command. Foreign media reporting even sparked bureaucratic infighting within our own government.

The result was a disintegraton of our will — first from decisive commitment to worsening hestitation, then to a "compromise" that returned Sunni- Arab Ba'athist officers to power. That deal not only horrifed Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, it inspired expanded attacks by Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'a thugs hoping to rival the success of the Sunni-Arab murderers in Fallujah.

We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn't know what hit us.

The implication for tactical combat — war at the bayonet level — is clear: We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we're apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.

We have to speed the kill.

For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops.

We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.

Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them.

Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists.

To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.

Time is the new enemy.

Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides.

But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies.

The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us.

If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.

NEW YORK POST

[Graeme Dice]

Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.

Excuse me while I stop laughing that anybody could actually believe that statement.

[MKSheppard]

Excuse me while I stop laughing that anybody could actually believe that statement.

Go read some Arab papers. THen get back to me

[Illuminatus Primus]

Excuse me while I stop laughing that anybody could actually believe that statement.

Go read some Arab papers. THen get back to me

I suppose your mind blocks out the words "in Europe," and also thinks that this comment somehow changes the extreme bias and the help the American media has given in helping carry around first Bush's fraudulent WMD charges, and then covering up prisoner scandals.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

Coverup?
What coverup?
This prisoner abuse scandal is running 24/7. Some fucking coverup!
The same was for the WMD charges. Mainsteam press poo poohed this from day one, calling it overhyped BS.
Coverups mean silence.
I defy you to find ONE mainstrean paper or news outlet NOT running this story. Or even a FRINGE one.
This has been dominating the front pages for weeks now. Coverup my ass.
FOX is running nonstop with this for crying out loud. They keep trying to play it down, and say it pales in comparison to what the "other side" is doing, but still gets hours of airtime.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Coverup?
What coverup?
This prisoner abuse scandal is running 24/7. Some fucking coverup!

No, moron, they knew for several weeks upto a month before it aired on 20/20. I suppose the fact we know now about Iran/Contra means that there was never any concealing it from the public? Fuckhead.

The same was for the WMD charges. Mainsteam press poo poohed this from day one, calling it overhyped BS.

Right. They all sang along, even preparing pretty diagrams for nonexistant "mobile bioweapons labs" months after we invaded and found nothing.

I defy you to find ONE mainstrean paper or news outlet NOT running this story. Or even a FRINGE one.
This has been dominating the front pages for weeks now. Coverup my ass.

Because it WAS covered up, and it since has broken, fuckwit!

FOX is running nonstop with this for crying out loud. They keep trying to play it down, and say it pales in comparison to what the "other side" is doing, but still gets hours of airtime.

Yup, I remember this story back when Al-Sadr's insurrection and the Fallujah siege was beginning...oh wait...

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

IP,
Just who is the "THEY" you refer to in stating '"They knew for several weeks upto a month before it aired on 20/20."
20/20 ? or others? Please name the others, by name, rather than the vague "They."
If it is only one news source, it wasn't a coverup, by the news source, but was a coverup by the guilty parties and administration. Maybe, IF they knew, (they in this context being 20/20)they were looking for confirmation, to protect their reputaion? (COUGHsackededitorphonybritishphotosCOUGH)
As to Iran/Contra, there was NO media coverup, but the guilty parties did cover up their crimes. Thus there was, (guilty parties) and wasn't (press) a coverup about Iran/Contra. Depends on how inclusive the term "They" is.
Is that what you mean? Because I am infering and mocking the idea that the media knew about it, ("It" in this context being the prison scandal) and was part of a coverup, not that the guilty perpatrators and their superiors in the US government were covering it up. (note that the word "it" is defined in my writing)
The very idea that PBS, the New York Times, BBC, or any of a large number number of news organisation were in any way shape or form covering up the abuse story, is just plain stupid. It may be a false conclusion on the extreme vagueness of the term, "They,." if you mean only the government.
PBS, the LA Times, and the New York Times*, (among others) have been consistantly giving the current administration the worst possible publicity at all times. To even suggest "they"* are helping the Bush administration by activly covering up the prison scandal is ludicrous. Was Mother Jones part of this coverup? CNN, the Guardian, or the Mirror? Don't make me laugh.