Armies as a Mirror of Civilization, Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Armies as a Mirror of Civilization

Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal

Arab News, 9/28/03

I continue from my article two weeks ago. I said in my column published Sept. 14 that US military doctrine has reached the point of bankruptcy. This point requires further elaboration.

Over the last five centuries Western ideology has been developing along lines of more and more emphasis on methods and procedures over objectives and goals. This is necessarily reflected in military doctrine as well. So generals and other military planners are overly concerned with methods of warfare over achieving decisive victory in the field. This is by no means exclusive to the US Army but rather a feature common to all armed forces organized along Western lines or trained extensively at staff level by them.

In the 19th century this obsession with method became highly entrenched in military thinking with the development of the German Imperial General Staff. This accelerated the change in the role of staff officers from pure warriors to bureaucrats in uniform.

The idea of finding one simple principle or theory to explain the essence of existence is a particularly Western fascination. An example of this is the search for a general unified theory of physics, which is the Holy Grail for Western scientists. It is a simple idea and like all simple ideas is very powerful. So the idea of discovering fundamental rules of management that can be applied across the board to all human activities is one that is particularly seductive to a Westerner.

This led to another highly dangerous development that occurred during World War II in the US, when methods widely used in industry and commerce began to be applied wholesale to military matters, culminating with the war in Vietnam. Managing an armed force was and (unfortunately) still is regarded as fundamentally no different from managing a public utility or a corporation.

This has resulted in armed conflicts of unbelievable brutality and cost in human and material terms.

It is not due exclusively to the increase in the lethalness of modern arms, rather it is the way they are used and the way armies are organized and the way military operations are conducted, as well as the confusion as to what the objectives behind military conflict are and what constitutes real and decisive victory.

Therefore I believe it is necessary to stand back and re-evaluate in a clear-eyed manner the current obsession with method and procedure in military matters and the overreliance on quantitative methods and statistical analysis. We must go back to basics and train our soldiers, officers and enlisted men how to behave as warriors who win rather than what they are now, which is employees who kill.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).