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A tour of duty in WWII thus became: Take the most direct route possible to the center of power and influence in Germany, dismantle that power base, imprison its leaders, and replace it all with a functioning government that would, from that point forward, serve society and the world.

If one looks at the war in the Pacific the same is true. All of the little engagements from Port Moresby to the Aleutian Islands and more were nothing but maneuvers designed to find the most expedient way to march America’s Army across the Pacific to the steps of Tokyo, there to dismantle the government that existed and imprison its leaders. In terms of a tour of duty for a soldier in the Pacific, it was little different from that of his fellow soldier in Europe, except, of course, for the geography, heat, humidity, and perfidy of the enemy.

Defining a tour of duty this way may strike some as an oversimplification, but we would say not. The fact is that when the task was accomplished, in both Europe and the Pacific, the tour of duty ended… and when it did the soldiers were returned home… to their families and loved ones. And if this still does not convince you that the form of the tour of duty an American soldier had says a lot about America’s goals in fighting its wars, we would point out that not only was this the case in WWII, it was also the case in WWI, the Indian wars, and the Civil War. America’s policy in fighting all of its wars has until recently been simple and direct: drive to the seat of the enemy’s power, dismantle it, arrest its leaders, and replace both the form of government and its leadership with one acceptable to America.

For the sake of simplicity, let us call this approach to war “Dynamic Warfare.” Its attributes include an overwhelming determination on the part of America to bring the enemy not just to its knees, but to totally destroy that enemy and its ability to rule. In Dynamic Warfare the war is not over until the seat of power is dismantled, the political system that supports it is torn asunder, and the leaders who foster the war are arrested, brought to trial and either imprisoned or released back into society, depending on the severity of their crimes. When these elements are accomplished such a war can be declared over, the troops sent home, and an effort got underway to rebuild the country involved with a new form of government and a new set of leaders acceptable to the U.S. and the world at large.

Dynamic Warfare… a concept invented long ago that, because of how it was waged and the objectives it held, forced the creation of what we in this article will call a “traditional tour of duty.” Without a traditional tour of duty, the capacity to wage Dynamic Warfare simply would not exist. One begets the other, and vice versa. Or, in other words, if one looks at a war by first studying the kind of tour of duty employed in that war, one can sense and determine the level of resolve a country, America in this case, has in winning that war. If the form of the tour of duty is traditional, then one can expect that America will have entered into Dynamic Warfare, and therein intends to win the war at all costs by decimating the enemy, its power base, its political system, and its leaders.

What then does it say if one looks at American soldiers and sees them experiencing something other than a traditional tour of duty? Is there such a thing? If so, what does it look like? And most importantly, if a traditional tour of duty says America is out to win at all costs, what does it say about America’s resolve when its military falls back on non-traditional tours of duty as a means to accomplish its wartime objectives?

To answer these questions one need only look at America’s modern day wars… beginning with Vietnam and continuing through to Afghanistan.

With little doubt the tours of duty soldiers experienced in Vietnam were not traditional. Then again, the war itself was certainly not an example of Dynamic Warfare either.  

In Vietnam soldiers were shuttled between units like rental bicycles at a beach. Got a hole somewhere that needs to be filled? Then send a man from one unit to another. Better still, shorten the tour of duty from “the duration” to only 1 year, and then rotate people endlessly from the States to Vietnam, back to the States, then on to Europe or Korea, and then back to the States, and maybe even back again to Vietnam one more time if a man’s time in service lasted long enough to allow for two tours. With such an approach to staffing, it was only natural that in Vietnam there was no such thing as unit cohesion. Instead, the people that made up a unit became bifurcated, broken into new guys, middle timers and short timers. Few of one type mixed with the other, as there was no value in building relationships that would only be torn apart by the vagaries or war, death, reassignment, or the end of a man’s tour of duty. Knowing that anyone you became close to would be gone in, on average, 4 months, suggested that it was a waste of time to make friends among the new guys coming in, or the short timers about to rotate out. In Vietnam a tour of duty was most definitely not traditional. In Vietnam a man’s tour of duty was his own tour of duty. No one else had one like his. No one else lived the same experience.

In Vietnam a man moved through the system by himself, bereft of unit integrity, value or purpose. The only thing that mattered was coming out the other end… “rotating home.”

Don’t misunderstand us. We are not criticizing what a Vietnam tour of duty was, we are only defining how it was different from the traditional kind that existed in WWII, when people spent their entire time in the service together, fighting the same war in the same way… usually for 3 straight years or more… within one unit, their unit, soldiering with men they had been with for that entire 3 year period. It’s not that Vietnam’s tour of duty was worse, it’s that it was different, and in that difference a person can see something of how determined America was to prosecute and win the Vietnam war.

With a non-traditional tour of duty structure like that of Vietnam, it was only natural that the objective of obliterating the enemy would fall by the wayside, to be replaced with something more akin to working towards a negotiated settlement of the conflict. The reason for this is that a disjointed, incoherent approach to warfare simply is not up to the task of defeating the enemy at his doorstep. So true is this that one could even laugh at the idea that Uncle Sam ever had the slightest intention of marching to the doorstep of power in Hanoi.

What then does the non-traditional tour of duty of Vietnam say about America’s intention to win that war? It says that America never had any such intention. The objective was never to “Take the most direct route possible to the center of power and influence in [Hanoi], dismantle that power base, imprison its leaders, and replace it all with a functioning government that would, from that point forward, serve society and the world.” The intention with North Vietnam was never the same as that with Germany or Japan.

Instead, the intent was to clear and hold a piece of amorphous territory not even contained within the national boundaries of North Vietnam. The idea was not to stop North Vietnam from being able to wage war, it was to go out into the South Vietnamese country side, secure a series of population centers, hold those centers, and from them then project power into the surrounding countryside. That may be a way to bring security to those who live in the countryside, but it sure is no way to win a war.

Power Projection, that is what it was all about. Where in WWI and WWII one could see a tour of duty formed around Dynamic Warfare, in Vietnam the tour of duty was structured to support Power Projection across dozens of small, irrelevant population centers. Across 43 provinces and 4 military regions, soldiers were sent on 1 year tours of duty to try to project America’s power into places like I Corps: Quang Tri, Thua Thien, Quang Nam, Quang Tin, Quang Ngai, Hue, Da Nang; II Corps: Kontum, Binh Dinh, Pleiku, Phu Bon, Phu Yen, Dar Lac, Khanh Hoa, Ninh Thuan, Tuyon Duc, Quang Duc, Lan Dong, Binh Thuan, Can Raah; III Corps: Binh Tuy, Long Khanh, Phou Long, Binh Long, Dinh Duong, Tay Ninh, Hay Hghia, Bien Hao, Phuoc Tuy, Long An, Gia Dinh, Vung Tau, Saigon; and IV Corps: Go Cong, Kien Tuong, Kien Phong, Dinh Tuong, Kien Hoa, Vinh Binh, Vinh Long, An Giang, Kion Giang, Chunong Thion, Phong Dinh, Ba Xuyen, An Xuyen, Duc Liou.

Along the way firefights and search and destroy missions made even smaller, more irrelevant places famous. Places like  Tuy Hua, An Khe, Khe San, An Loc, Dong Ha, the Ia Drang Valley, Dak To, Qui Nhon, Phu Kat, Song Tre, and on, and on. Yet never in all of this was a serious effort mounted to take the battle to the front door of the power center and people who ruled North Vietnam... Hanoi, to end their capacity to wage war in the south. Never were the generals at the top of the NVA under threat of arrest and imprisonment. Never did the political leadership face an American force intent on tearing down the political structure they had built and replacing it with one less warring and aggressive. Never was the intent to have America’s soldiers march across the world to the power center of North Vietnam, to “dismantle that center of power… to decimate it, grind it into the ground, and forever put an end to its ability to rule its people and therein do the world harm.”

Why?

Why was there no tour of duty where soldiers served for the duration... until a march could be completed up the Ho Chi Minh trail to Hanoi, where the enemy would then be engaged on its doorstep? Or an amphibious landing at Haiphong followed by a quick sprint to Hanoi? Of a simple crossing of the DMZ with an overwhelmingly powerful push to Hanoi, to tear the government asunder and imprison its leaders, in the manner of what the NVA did on its way to Saigon in 1975?

The answer is that defeating the North by winning the war was never in the cards. It was never the objective. One can see that by looking at what a tour of duty was in the Vietnam War… it was an exercise in Power Projection, not Dynamic Warfare. And we venture to say the same is true of Afghanistan today. America never had an intention to win that war either. At most it intended to fight to a stalemate, and in the process do its best to weaken to the point of failure the Taliban’s ability to mount a serious offensive against America again… for, oh, say, another 5 - 7 years from now, by which time the world will have moved on and hopefully the Taliban will be just one more inconsequential group of extremists playing at power games.

The fact is, America’s intentions in the wars it fights have changed from WWI and WWII until today. To understand why, we need to know exactly when that change come about, and what caused it.

In terms of when the change came, we would posit that it came about on 11 April 1951. Yes, on that day the way America fights its wars changed, and in the process the composition of a tour of duty changed too. From that point forward it was no longer necessary to structure a soldier’s tour of duty around winning a war by defeating the enemy. From that point forward the intention was no longer to follow a path to the enemy’s door, there to decimate him and imprison his leaders. From that point forward the objective was merely to project power into his country and make his ability to govern it difficult, until a settlement could be negotiated and agreed to.

On one side, this is all well and good. However, it would have been nice if someone had told the American people of this change in policy. More importantly, it would have been even better if someone had told America’s fighting men, the ones living through their individual tours of duty. It would have been nice if someone had said that the goal is no longer to defeat the enemy, it is to weaken him to the point where he cries uncle, at which point you can then let him up off of the floor, to return again to ruling his own country, hopefully with an improved mindset.

Nonsense.

As to when this change came about, it came about in the middle of the Korean War when one of America’s most influential Dynamic Warfare generals took it upon himself to disagree with the President as to how to win the Korean War, and what should be done about it. That's what caused the change, and the impact of this change has been rippling down through history ever since.

From that commanding general's standpoint, the only way to win the war was to push his soldiers up a path that ended at the gates of the power center fighting the war: Beijing. There he would overthrow the government, as was done in the case of Berlin and Tokyo, imprison its leaders, and then set about rebuilding the government of China as had been done in Germany and Japan.

Seen from a different angle, from his perspective the real power behind the Korean War was not the North Koreans, it was the Chinese Communist soldiers, their material, and the orders that sent them into the Korean peninsula to drive America into the sea. And the power behind the Chi-Com soldiers lay in Beijing, in a compound known as Zhongnanhai (中南海).

Zhongnanhai was China’s Reichstag. In it lived the men that ruled Communist China, including a fat old man that loved to dally with frightfully young girls, a man named Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东).  In order to defeat this foe, more had to be done than just fighting the men he sent to the battle fields of North Korea. What had to be done was what was done in Germany and Japan. A path had to be cleared to the steps of Zhongnanhai, where the power base, political system, and people who ruled these two could be done away with. Winning all the battles you could on the fields of North Korea would not stop more Chinese from coming south to contest again and again the useless hilltops that American men were losing their lives defending. To win this war, Dynamic Warfare had to be undertaken.

There was only one problem with this: the President of the United States was not interested in winning this war if it meant taking on the Chinese. At this time his interest was in finding a way to de-escalate the fighting, sue for peace, and let the peninsula be sliced into two, with the top half becoming puppets of the Chinese, and the bottom half becoming puppets of America, until such time as they might show a propensity to rule themselves on their own.

And so it was, Truman and MacArthur clashed. MacArthur saw the folly of fighting a war that could not be won with the tactics being employed. Truman saw the folly of dragging America into yet another war in the world, so soon on the heels of the end of WWII, for a purpose most American’s could barely fathom and a country most Americans barely knew existed. Surely there could be no good reason for turning a police action into an overt war with China? Surely. Surely there was no nuclear threat coming from this bedraggled little area of the world? Surely.

By the end of the day on April 11, 1945, MacArthur was on his way home, relieved of duty. Matthew Ridgeway stepped into his shoes, and dutifully wound the war down, while others negotiated a stalemate truce with the grandfather of the child who currently rules North Korea today, and rattles his nuclear weapon pacifier above his head whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Back then, from that point forward, Dynamic Warfare as a means to an end, of a type designed to depose those sitting in the seat of power so that they pulled their men from the battlefield and sued for peace in order to save their own lives, would no longer be part of the Korean War. From that point forward Power Projection, in the form of continued stubborn episodes of defense for the numerous but essentially useless hills and choke points of the Korean peninsula that were constantly in contention, was to replace it.

Reflecting on this change in America’s objectives in going to war, and especially on her abandoning the intention to win the wars she engages in, we can see today that an entire philosophy started to be built up at that time. A philosophy centered around justifying America's change from Dynamic Warfare to Power Projection Warfare. From then until today, the objective has been to improve on and embellish the justification for this change, until the reasoning behind the concept of Power Projection Warfare ended up sounding like unassailable scientific logic. Among the most recognized and widely accepted of these forms of justification is a concept Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld liked to toss around when he was in office: the idea of asymmetric versus symmetric warfare.

To hear Rumsfeld speak of it, the concept of symmetric warfare where one country pits itself against another is long dead and likely not to be seen again. Proper nation states do not fight each other anymore, instead, non-nation state extremists do. These stateless groups of “dead enders” are the real threat to the world, not countries like Russia, Syria, China, Iran or North Korea. Asymmetric warfare is the byproduct of this change in the world's approach to political governance... it is the result, and with that result comes a new form of warfare: short scrappy wars where Power Projection rules... and a new type of tour of duty... one based on a short stint of duty in a dangerous country, for, oh, say, 10 - 14 months, after which the soldier will return home to his loved ones. And if the war hasn’t been won by then, well, we’ll just send another contingent of men to pick up where the others left off. All well and good.

Hogwash. All well and good, except that the new arrivals will have about as much experience in the situation on the ground in Afghanistan as the FNGs had when they arrived in Vietnam.

If you ask this author, it’s a lousy and a losing way to fight a war. Asymmetric warfare: baloney. It’s nothing more than the redefinition of clear and hold or guerilla warfare with a phrase that some military officer with an MBA in strategic thinking presumes will make the concept sound more important and believable.

Clear and hold does not win wars. Fighting a guerilla war believing that the guerillas are truly on their own and there is no government behind them is idiocy. There is always a government behind guerillas, you just have to look for it. So absurd has the concept of asymmetric warfare being a legitimate concept become that there are now dozens of scholarly articles that have been published claiming that Vietnam was an asymmetric war. It wasn't. In case someone out there missed the memo, the Viet Cong were fully backed by the government of North Vietnam. They were not guerillas, they were a separate military group that recruited fighters from South Vietnam, but answered to and were supported by the government of North Vietnam. If anyone wanted to defeat the Viet Cong all they had to do was take Hanoi and the Viet Cong would have dried up as a fighting force within 4 months.[1]

In this regard, the VC were much like the U.S. National Guard, a group of organizations that recruit their fighters from the regions within the states they represent. They are separate and distinct from the Marines, Army or Navy, much as the VC were separate and distinct from the NVA... but in the VC's case they were still backed by the government of North Vietnam, just as the National Guard is backed by the DOD and Federal Government. Without North Vietnam's backing the VC would have had no weapons, no ammunition, no medical supplies, and little food. In fact, if it weren't for the backing of the VC by North Vietnam there would have been no need for the Ho Chi Minh trail.

In closing we would say this: asymmetric warfare is not asymmetric. It's nothing more than a misapplied phrase that masks the true symmetry of any war being fought. Outside of a dictionary, there is no such thing as asymmetric warfare... there is only symmetric warfare portrayed as being asymmetric. In each case, if looked at carefully, what one will see is that behind any group of bad guys conducting asymmetric fighting is the backing of a real country, with leaders who have formed a real power base, a political system, and people whose job it is to enable the fighters to do their work. Or put another way, behind every asymmetric threat is a real country whose political system, power structure and leadership should be the target of American led Dynamic Warfare.

Take Afghanistan. The problem there is not the Taliban, it is both the Afghan government itself, as well as the Pakistani government... and all of the corrupt, self serving miscreants that work within those governments. If they chose to, either one of these two countries could roll up the Taliban in short order. The problem is that they do not chose to. In other words, the symmetry behind the asymmetric Taliban are the corrupt governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who would rather continue the status quo than risk losing their access to the riches that come with corrupt government. Whether it is al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, ETA, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or any one of the other 144 organizations that are listed as terrorist groups, behind them there is a symmetrical threat in the form of a government that either actively or passively supports them, all so that the leaders of that government can continue to enjoy the spoils of their own malfeasance, exploitation and racketeering.[2]

However, knowing this and doing something about it is another thing. If Truman was not going to take on China to win in Korea, you can bet that President Obama is not going to toss out the existing Afghan government and start over again, nor threaten to overthrow the government of Pakistan if they do not immediately invade and take control of the tribal areas that provide support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Instead he and his associates will obfuscate. As a group they will call it asymmetric warfare and claim there is little they can do about it except fly a few drones around, and otherwise try their best to harass the "stateless" bad guys who are harassing the world.

Why would they do this? In part they have no choice. As a country we no longer have a consensus that says that we should go to war over the problems that populate our planet, never mind fight to win by employing traditional forms of Dynamic Warfare to assure the enemy, his government and its leaders are deposed. Take Syria: over 70,000 people have been killed in that nasty little war. Does anyone think America wants to put boots on the ground there to save those that are left? Hardly. Things are fine in Dubuque right now, thank you, there's no need to stick our nose into someone else's dirty little war and mess up what's going on at home. Or put another way, there is no way in hell that you are going to draft my son so that he can experience a traditional tour of duty in Syria. Fuhgettaboutit.

The world has changed. People today believe it is better to live in a more risky world than step out and clean up the world we live in. You can see it happening before your eyes. Look closely at what comprises a tour of duty and you will see therein exactly how determined America is to win the wars it takes on. In our view, it no longer is. No longer is the goal to march America’s military to the doors of power of the government being fought, dismantle that government, imprison its leaders and then set about rebuilding the country. Instead, today, what we are told is that there is no government for us to fight to right the wrongs the world suffers from. America’s enemies are stateless. That being the case, we might as well develop some form of asymmetric warfare capability where we project power into the countries we find ourselves fighting in… project power to stateless enemies who could care less about our power.

 

         

Footnotes:

 

[1] For an example of a very scholarly presentation on what asymmetric warfare is, click here. Be sure to note on slide #6 the listing of the Vietnam War as an example of asymmetric warfare... and this from a prestigious think tank associated with the U.S. Marines.  - To return to your place in the text, click here:

[2] Since it is clear that America no longer has an intention to use Dynamic Warfare as a means to lay waste the seat of power of our next enemy, by decimating its capital, dismantling its political structure and arresting and imprisoning its generals and leaders, all that is left is to accept Power Projection as our sole means for fighting wars.  Employing Power Projection means fighting each war as an asymmetric war. So, if America has no intention of decisively winning the wars it fights, it will need to develop the skills it needs to fight future wars to a stalemated condition. Among the skills needed will be skills in minimizing casualties, checking and cross-checking the enemy's advance, and the other chess board moves that fall short of winning the game. Fortunately the Army is already preparing to do just that: learn how to fight wars that end in a stalemate. To see how the Army is preparing, click here and enjoy reading about the new  "let's not lose the war, but let's not win it either..." team called The United States Army Asymmetric Warfare Group. All humor aside, they mean well... but it sure would be nice if America returned to fighting its wars with an intention to decisively beat the bastards we fight against.  - To return to your place in the text, click here:

 

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