"Tactics of the Crescent Moon" is timely because of the wars raging in the Middle East. These wars include and are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has been targeted by Middle Eastern terrorist since the late 1960's. As long as any of these exist, the United States will face Islamic warriors on jihad: the existance of corrupt governments in the Middle East, the existance of the state of Israel, failure to convert wholesale to the "right flavor" of Islam, providing a market for Middle Eastern oil, and lack of a global Islamic empire. The United States first fought Islamic warriors at the beginning of the 19th Century, when a handful of Marines, Sailors, and mercenaries fought and routed the Barbary Pirates. Following the Spanish-American War, Filippino Moros (Muslim tribes on Mindinao) proved so fierce that the .38 caliber Colt revolver was replaced by the .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol. Thus, the Muslim irregular is an old enemy for the United States. Surviving this foe requires a comprehensive and multi-pronged strategy. Basic to a viable startegy is understanding who the enemy is, why he fights, and lastly, how. Poole concentrates on the tactical defeat of the Islamic militant.
American military units are poor at the short-range fight. Hand-to-hand combat has been neglected for reasons ranging from "why waste efforts on something of marginal effectiveness" to creating a female-friendly military environment. These lame excuses favored two groups--military careerists, and the enemy. Close combat training is difficult and dangerous. A zero-defect mentality coupled with the desire to empower women--without giving women the tools that empower--is being overtaken by current events. Units going to Iraq or Afghanistan are getting crash courses in city fighting, room-to-room combat, firing from moving vehicles, and reacting to ambush. Combat units are learning to detect and defuse ambushes before they occur. The US bases in the Middle East are hard targets, with defense in depth. Poole alludes to the timidity about sustaining casualties--it does hamper operations. Also hampering operations is the fear of inflicting collateral damage. Poole points out that skilled infantry can defeat the enemy with a minimum of casualties. This has been happening in Iraq, and the new Iraqi forces are taking over the burden of fighting the Iraqi insurgency. Unlike South Vietnam in 1968, there are not neighbors ready to pounce on Iraq with a large conventional army equipped with lots of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. And if there were, tanks and artillery and aircraft battles are the United States' strong suite. The war for Iraq will be won or lost in street battles. Poole advocates bottom-up squad-focused training and doctrine to defeat the Islamic irregular fighter threat. Because the United States is fighting a war, many of the careerists now recognize that small arms training, squad tactics, and yes, plain old brawling have to be part of the bag of tricks. Marines paid at least lip service to this new old doctrine--now the Army, the Navy, and even the Air Force are conducting realistic and rigorous squad-level training to better-prepare American service members for duty in the Middle East. Trouble is, old habits die hard. Poole recommends that the US goes further, adopting a bottoms-up tactical doctrine that is "circumstantially unique, surprise oriented, and threat compensating." This will shift a larger burden to junior leaders. The biggest shift will be to the individual soldier or Marine on patrol--currently, the capability to run each fire-team size patrol (four or five soliders) from the White House exists. There is a great temptation to do so, even though President Bush was a fighter pilot, not an infantry team leader. Poole argues that the man on the spot is better able to decide what action to take. He's correct as long as the man on the spot has both situational awareness (something that is hard or impossible to do by remote control) and has the other information needed to make the dicision. Plus one more thing--a doctrine that puts decision-making at the lowest possible level. America's most effieicnt industries do this already--the same high-quality people are in business and in our all-volunteer military. It takes time and effort to make a well-rounded knowledgable soldier.
It will be a difficult task. Saddam's minions were specifically trained in deception techniques. The laundry list Poole provides in "Tactics of the Crescent Moon" read like a James Bond movie: advanced psychological training, mind control techniques, and a ruthlessness not possible if we are to meet American societal norms and what Poole terms "moral behavior." One section of Chapter 11 is titled, "Tactics and Morality Are Not Mutually Exclusive."
The Islamic warrior can be beaten. Poole examines the tactical shortcomings of several Islamic jihad groups. A major problem with the Islamic imperial movement is that the jihadists must play first to the Islamic world. It isn't that the jihadists are ineffective playing to a Western audience--they are many times more effective at the media game against the West than the West is against the Islamic world. The guerrilla theater bombing of Madrid did cause the withdrawal of Spanish soldiers. Kidnapping foreigners and holding them hostage until a Western government complies isn't working out very well now, but held great promise while it was still novel. More effective is that the kidnappings have slowed down the flood of foreign workers into Iraq--there's more to winning a guerrilla campaign than killing American soldiers. Guerrilla war is a war of ideas and images.
Poole identifies a major weakness of American forces: movement skills. How can American infantry move through a foreign urban area unseen? The jihadists do so routinely. Some elements, such as Al Queda, have recently began losing their "invisibility cloak" because they're outsiders and don't blend in as well as the insiders. Al Queda's operations have been increasingly directed at Iraqi civilians--the US forces are bottled up in their fortified bastions and there are fewer foreign workersl By necessity of having to act, and having driven off most of the targets, Al Queda has to conduct ethnic cleansing, and is alienating Iraq as a result. The US is not only increasing its mobility when it does patrol, but increasingly the new Iraqi police and Iraqi army are becoming more effective at confronting and destroying Al Queda and other insurgency movements. The number one problem in Iraq is still criminal gangs. This fragmented opposition to the new Iraqi government is compartmented by accident and has trouble coordinating large-scale operations, but is resistant to disruption because the many elements are seperated from each other. In many cases the seperate elements are actualy bitter hereditary enemies--temporarily united to fight the "Crusader" invaders. The fragility of this alliance is off-set by the fact that all these insurgency movements are self-contained. If Al Queda was smashed today, it would be a body blow to the insurgency, but not a knock-out punch. The insurgents use the Iraqi population as a shield and data bank. US artillery crews are being used as infantry because the cannon shells are not very useful in this war, but infantry patrols are indespensible.
Will the US military establishment finally follow the model of Heinlein's 1956 novel, "Starship Trooper?" Heinlein's elite force was the Mobile Infantry, a handful of high-tech troops that applied force surgically in surprise raids that combined speed, stealth, firepower, and intelligence. When one of these four was missing, the raid came to grief. In that novel, the most dangerous enemies, the "bugs," moved underground unseen (much like the Oriental warriors in Poole's books) and defeated Earth's soldiers in close combat where the humans were at a disadvantage. The hero of that novel, a sergeant named Zim, used initiative and on-the-spot situational awareness to capture a "bug brain," winning a hard-fought campaign. Heinlein's novels showcased the strengths and weaknesses that Poole's book discusses--both American and Oriental warrior. The Islamic warrior is not as readily identifiable as Heinlein's bug warriors. The Islamic terrorist is no hive creature--and the hive in that science fiction novel proved to be crafty and innovative.
One last note--suicide warriors are nothing new for American GI's. The Japanese kamakazi was the most-organized and may be the most famous example, but he wasn't the first. Many American Indian tribes ritually purified their warrior's souls before battle--the warrior didn't enter battle to die, but was already dead. This freed him from worrying about death and made him more effective. The US cavalry was more worried about catching fleeing Indian bands than encountering "suicidal" Indian braves. In the Philippines, the Moro ritually prepared himself to enter Paradise prior to running amok with a barong among US troops. About the same time, the Boxers in China underwent pre-battle preparation that made them "immune" to bullets and was more or less funeral rites. Despite being "godless communists," the Chinese and North Korean soldiers sometimes used the suicide option, complete with body bomb. The Viet Cong and NVA were credited with doing this frequently. My question is why American soldiers are not better-prepared to face this common threat. Suicide bombers proved to be cost-effective in lives for the PLO--one truck bomb took out the Marine barracks in Beruit and killed over 240 Americans. One PLO suicide driver died. The American response was to bomb a refugee camp--two aircraft shot down, two naval aviators killed, and one captured--and zero PLO fighters were in the camp. Given the disparity in firepower, the suicide bomber seems to be a lifesaver for the insurgency movement. Non-suicide ambushes between American forces and insurgents in Iraq typically end one of two ways--the insurgents escape inflicting few casualties, or the insurgents get wiped out while inflicting multiple American casualties. One successful Iraqi tactic is to drive a car bomb into an American convoy. Because many of the drivers are now contractor personnel, the suicide bomber may only kill some poor kid from Pakistan or another Islamic country--but suicide bombers die so that the insurgency can strike blows with minimal losses. Sometimes a car bomb will kill four or five American servicemen and make headlines.
Poole mentions how the human wave attack seems to disregard human life, but actually is a smart, life-sparing tactic for America's Oriental enemies. Rather than wasting the lives of the Iraqi insurgency, suicide bombers seem to be a cost-effective way of killing the intended target, and have the bonus of psychological impact on the Western media, and the American soldier. So why is America still surprised by ruthless, violent, often suicidal close-range attack?
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- Rafal GruszczynskiReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2007
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