Arms and influence

The technical level

THEORY
The last--and lowest--level of strategy is the technical level. As its name implies, this level is all about technology--weapons, communications, transportation, and the like.

Needless to say, technology has been important in every period of warfare. Greek fire gave the Byzantines a key naval advantage. In the American Civil War, the railroads, telegraph communications, and ironclad warships helped tip the balance in favor of the Union. In World War II, cryptography gave the Allies the power to eavesdrop on German and Japanese communications.

You can come up with dozens of examples of how technology re-shaped warfare, and at the same time, how military concerns drove innovation. A generation of physicists--Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi, Oppenheimer, etc.--not only re-wrote the rules of modern warfare, but also transformed the international system, and even US presidential politics. The first A-bombs begat H-bombs, bombers begat intercontinental missiles, ICBMS begat submarine-launched missiles, missile-armed submarines inspired new ways to detect and kill submarines...The list of innovations goes on.

The technical level is so easy to explain, and the examples so handy, that it seems like belaboring the point to describe it at all. The first step into military affairs you took probably had some connection to the technical level. Some WWII history buffs become experts in the relative merits of German, Soviet, British, Italian, Japanese, and American tanks. Some of us, as children and adolescents, built models of military aircraft, warships, or tanks. Many of us got drawn into the interesting discussions during the first Gulf War about Patriot missiles, M1A1 tanks, satellite imagery, and other pieces of equipment in the impressive US arsenal.

All good reasons why I made this level the last one to discuss. By working our way down the hierarchy of strategy--grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, technical--we can see how easily we can overvalue the technical level. Every soldier wants the best weapon available. Unfortunately, not even the best rifle, tank, fighter, or submarine can save the day if the other levels of strategy aren't working.

PRACTICE
Going back to my last post, I'll belabor another point. Yes, the United States has superbly-trained troops, armed with some of the best military hardware in the world. (The same compliment should be extended to our coalition partners, too.) However, we're in the thick of a crisis where the best troops with the best equipment can't deliver victory.

On the electronic battlefield, GPS and other technologies give a commander the exact position of every soldier in his unit. That's an extraordinary achievement, something every commander from Themistocles to Zhukov would have wanted, if it had been available. But are these soldiers in the right places, doing the right things? As I've argued in earlier posts, there are serious defects in every level of strategy above the technical and the tactical, in both the war in Iraq and the war against al Qaeda. (Again, these are two separate wars. Even if Iraq had been the wellspring of international terrorism, you don't fight Iraqi insurgents the same way you stop the terrorist threat.) If the strategies at these levels aren't working, it doesn't matter how well trained a soldier is, or how impressive is the equipment he carries.

We've also been maneuvered--or more tragically, maneuvered ourselves--into a position where our tactical and technical edge is severely blunted. In the first Gulf War, US tanks outranged their Iraqi counterparts. In an average armored combat, the Iraqis didn't even get a chance to fire a shot before their tedchnically superior enemies knocked them out. In the current war, not only is the battlefield empty of enemy tanks, but armor is worse than useless in counterinsurgency warfare. An M1A1 tank can give "force protection" to infantry under fire, but it can't win "hearts and minds" by blowing up apartment buildings.

Anyone could have made the previous observation without understanding the levels of strategy. Therefore, I hope this discussion made two contributions, above and beyond what common sense could have supplied: (1) you can now see the technological side of warfare in a new (and slightly dimmer) light; and (2) this discussion has illuminated more clearly what else needs to be fixed before our technical and tactical strengths can be put to good use.

The tactical level

THEORY
The tactical level is fairly straightforward: the art of fighting with a particular kind of military unit. In the hierarchy of strategic levels, success at the tactical level has to contribute to the success of the next level up, the operational level. I alluded to this connection in my last post, showing that the fighting skill of the Roman legionnaire made the stunning victories of the Roman campaigns possible. Of course, an inexperienced Roman politician could always command the army straight into disaster, but you couldn't blame the legions for the mistakes of someone like Varus.

People who follow military affairs are often fascinated by the tactical level. Tank aficianados, for example, like to read and talk about armored tactics. It's a pretty interesting topic. But as we've seen, it's only one small part of a much larger story.

Armored tactics are now a very well understood discipline with time-honored principles. If at all possible, fight on the move. Maneuver to a "hull down" position, like a brick wall or a hillock, so the rest of the tank gets extra protection while the turret can still fire at the enemy. "Shoot and scoot" is a pretty effective technique, so that the enemy won't find you in the spot from which you just fired. Hitting the enemy from the flank or rear is key, if you're worried that you can't penetrate the thicker armor in the front. Never drive tanks into city streets unless the infantry has first cleared the surrounding buildings of hidden enemy soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons. And so on.

Tactical discussions like these fill official military manuals, thrilling first-person accounts, and computer games (with varying degrees of realism). Fighter tactics, submarine tactics, special operations tactics...The list is long just looking at contemporary warfare, and would be even longer if you looked backwards into history. The heavy cavalry tactics of medieval knights, the harassment tactics of Muslim horse archers, age of sail tactics...

Mastering the profession of arms at this level may or may not contribute to victory, however. The 1983 invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) looked more like several separate invasions. Marines, Rangers, paratroopers, Delta Force commandos, naval aviation--each force seemed to be operating separately from the others. (It's worth asking, as many did after the invasion, why all the services needed to be involved in this operation, when perhaps this was a simple amphibious assault and hostage rescue.) The Grenada invasion succeeded in spite of itself; if the Cuban and Grenadan forces had offered stiffer resistance, a somewhat comically uncoordinated operation could have been a major disaster.

Tactics are critical, and the human face of warfare is most visible at this level: the tank platoon commander, the infantry seargent, the fighter pilot, the commando, the captain of a submarine, the helicopter gunship pilot. Other levels may seem more abstract, but they're just as important.

PRACTICE
There's a lot I could say about the tactical level, particularly when it comes to the types of troops needed for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. I'll save that discussion for later, since I'll be digging into the specifics of those two types of warfare in future posts. For now, I want to talk about two important misunderstandings about the tactical level of the war in Iraq.

As you can guess from reading this blog, I'm very sympathetic with a comment that General Anthony Zinni made during his 60 Minutes interview broadcast last weekend. Zinni argued that nothing justifies shutting down critical discussion of the Iraq war. The slogan "support the troops" is an argument for open discussion, not the stifling of criticism. If the US Army give soldiers faulty rifles, Zinni said, no one would complain if you point out their defects. Given the danger these faulty weapons pose to the soldiers carrying them, it'd be the responsibility of any citizen, not just someone in uniform, to point out the risk. If you arm the same soldiers with a faulty strategy, the risks are exactly the same--and so is our common responsibility to point out defects when we see them.

Unfortunately, critical discussions of our counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and our counterinsurgency operations in Iraq make a lot of people uncomfortable. There's a chain of reasoning that breaks in a fairly obvious place, but one apparently that a lot of people pretend not to see. We have a superbly equipped and trained military, particularly at the tactical level. We are justifiably proud of these men and women in uniform. They are trained and equipped to perform amazing feats in service to the nation, and they pledge their lives in our common defense. However, pride in their accomplishments as tactical virtuosos doesn't mean that their virtuosity is being put to good use. The operational and theater strategies that determine when, where, and who they fight may be fatally flawed. Therefore, we're not supporting our troops through our silence; we can only support them, as Zinni correctly says, if we identify strategic defects that makes "harm's way" more harmful than it should be.

My second point about the US military's efficiency is that it often leads to unrealistic expectations. You should be applauded for your extraordinary achievements; the price of success shouldn't be wildly escalated expectations than you can do the impossible. The rollercoaster of emotion about the Patriot missile batteries used in the 1991 Gulf War showed this psychology in action. At first, people expected the Patriots to be able to intercept and destroy close to 100% of the SCUD missiles the Iraqis fired at Israel. This expectation was wholly unrealistic, and unfortunately, some US military and civilian officials encouraged this misperception. When the actual rates of successful Patriot intercepts were released to the public after the war, many cried foul, charging that they had been hoodwinked into trusting a technological marvel that was far less than marvelous. Whatever you think of the Patriot missile system, you can't fault it for failing to knock down every SCUD missile. As advanced as the Patriot technology was, no system could deliver complete success.

The same phenomenon is at work in Iraq, only the focus this time is on flesh and blood soldiers, not steel and silicon weapons systems. Because "the troops" are seen as the best in the world, we've set them up for unfair accusations of failure when we discover that total efficiency is impossible. The crew of an Apache gunship can't fire on a building with absolute certainty that the missile won't hit a neighboring apartment block by accident. The gunner can't know for sure that there aren't innocents in the building when the rocket explodes. The pilot and gunner may have performed their mission with unmatched efficiency, while unwittingly killing bystanders in the process. Who's fault is that?

A recent NPR story about US snipers in Iraq epitomized this risk. For all the embedded reporters, thousands of air time reporting on the war, countless articles discussing the day-to-day fighting in Iraq, there has been very little explanation of how the modern "profession of arms" actually works. Snipers have a tough tactical challenge--stalking and killing a specific target from long range--that requires special skills and some innate talent.

The reporter, Anne Garrels, first interviewed a recently-trained sniper, one of many recently put through "sniper school." Just as there aren't enough Arabic language speakers in Iraq, there's also a shortage of snipers. The soldier interviewed readily admitted that he was not the most proficient in his craft, but he tried to do his best. In the highly populated areas where he was deployed, he had to be careful not to hit innocent bystanders. His "score," therefore, wasn't as high as it might be, had he more experience and a less complicated battleground in which to hunt.

OK so far. However, Garrels then interviewed another, more experienced sniper. Suddenly, the whole tone of the piece changed. Sgt. Daniel Osborne, the seasoned sniper, talked about his higher kill rate, and then spoke in measured tones about how if he ever killed an innocent bystander by accident, he'd be no better than the people he was fighting. As Garrels says near the end of the piece, "Sgt. Osborne says he...has...made...no...mistakes."

I'm not being cute with the punctuation. That's exactly the kind of inflection that Garrels used in that sentence. That's also the kind of outlandish expectation that sets up soldiers like Osborne for later accusations of being babykillers and psychopaths. Mistakes will happen, with tragic results. Soldiers are trained to avoid civilian casualties, which offend their moral sensibilities in any case. But as other accounts like this one and this one show, it's unrealistic to expect US snipers to operate in difficult, confusing, and dangerous places like Fallujah, Najaf, and Karballah and not make mistakes.

The higher the pedestal, the longer the fall--and news stories like Garrels' piece put the troops on a very high pedestal indeed.

Operational strategy: another example

THEORY
Since the operational level sometimes requires a bit of further explanation for it to "click" in the minds of someone unfamiliar with it, I realized another example might be useful. If you look at ancient and medieval warfare, the dividing line between the operational level and other levels is far more clear.

Take the operations of the Roman legions. Before modern communications, the commander of the legion couldn't afford to split up his force and fight across hundreds of miles of terrain, the way modern armies do. The Roman army on the march might temporarily break down into smaller formations, but recombined as a single force once battle was joined. In fact, every ancient and medieval army fought this way--which is why you can drive around the battlefield of Agincourt in a few minutes, while driving around the D-Day beaches takes at least half a day (if you decide not to stop anywhere for long).

The Roman army--republican, early imperial, or late imperial--fought at the operational level in essentially the same way.For example, when waging an offensive campaign against the Celtic barbarians, the army would stay on the move until it came into contact with the enemy. The legions would then try to force the Celts to fight on the ground of the Roman's choosing. Although the barbarians normally outnumbered the legionnaries by as much as ten to one, Roman training, tactics, and technology would normally win the day. After the decisive battle, the Romans would pursue the remnants of the Celtic army until the region was safely subjugated.

Obviously, not every campaign followed this model. However, the ones that do fit this picture--such as Julius Caesar's operations in Gaul--show clearly the contours of operational strategy. In pursuit of a theater objective (conquering or re-conquering a province), the Roman army--including the main legionary force, auxiliaries, scouts, and spies--found, fixed, and finished the enemy in a highly efficient way. The battles--Zama, Pharsalus, Alesia, Teutoburg Forest--normally were the decisive moment in the campaign.

How well the Roman infantryman fought, or the deficiencies of Roman cavalry, are important tactical questions. Here's another one: as one contemporary observer noted, the Romans trained with the ferocity and seriousness of actual combat, so that combat seemed as easy as training. This tactical superiority certainly made spectacular Roman victories possible, even when their opponents vastly outnumbered them. But the tactical and operational levels are obviously two different (if interdependent) things.

PRACTICE
I had another reason for bringing up the Roman example. I used a modern phrase--find, fix, and finish--to describe a classic operational approach. Cornering the enemy, fighting at the time and place of your choosing, and ruthlessly pursuing the remains of the enemy army--these steps seem like simple common sense, an energetic and rigorous approach to fighing a war.

Finding, fixing, and finishing Iraqi insurgents, as I said in my last post on operational strategy, appears to be the primary concern of US troops in Iraq today. American forces, like the Roman legions, are extremely efficient at the tactical level. Unfortunately, the situation is a bit more complicated than the find, fix, finish formula:

• The Romans had to apply this formula once when fighting the Gauls. US troops have to find, fix, and finish the enemy every single day in Iraq.


• Unleashing the full efficiency of the US military will increase casualties among innocent bystanders, level homes, and damage not only mosques, but sacred sites like the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf.


• We're not always sure we're shooting at the right people. Sometimes, barbarians would engage in hit and run attacks on the Roman legions, then melt back into the population. Normally, however, the Roman army had few problems identifying the enemies, or anticipating when they would attack.


• Find, fix, and finish is only one "vertical" dimension of counterinsurgency strategy. "Horizontally," the United States needs to be doing a lot more than military sweeps to ensure a stable, friendly Iraqi regime will someday govern from Baghdad. Once the warriors of a Gallic tribe were defated on the battlefield, the Romans had the region under control for the time being. In Iraq, the situation is not nearly as easy as that.

Things not to do in Iraq, part I

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday's post took me longer than usual to write because I wanted the dividing line between conventional war and whatever it is we're fighting since 9/11 was clear. I also wanted to show that terrorists and guerrillas aren't interchangeable; the operational approaches for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are very different.

I hope the list of things to do and not do is fairly obvious. However, I'll point out the occasional news items that illustrate the right and wrong ways to (1) defeat al Qaeda, and (2) win the war in Iraq. So, here we go...

A partial list of things not to do when fighting guerrillas:

• Use torture. Not only is it ineffective, but it undermines the legitimacy of any Iraqi leader who is willing to work with us.


• Block the investigation of the torture. The world is watching what we do now--including the Iraqis. Our own legitimacy and leverage depend on demonstrating faith in our own laws and Constitution.


• Kidnap the family members of "suspected insurgents" to put pressure on their relatives to surrender. Even if this tactic were to "work" (i.e., coerce people into surrendering to US troops), it'd be another sure-fire way to undercut any Iraqi regime allied with us.


• Turn minor enemies into major heroes of the resistance. It was the right call to step back from the brink of demolishing Fallujah and Najaf. However, the nasty boomerang effect of declaring Muqtada al-Sadr public enemy number one, then bungling his arrest, is obvious. Fallujah's new, Taliban-like government was exactly what we were supposed to prevent.


• Resist adjustments to the strategy. You can't plan a counterinsurgency operation the way we planned the D-Day invasion. We have to keep our ear to the ground, find out what's happening in the everyday politics of Iraq, and adjust accordingly.


• Act as though we can ignore politics. The theme that weaves in and out of these news items is, the United States is acting as though politics and war have no connection--which, of course, was the great mistake we made when we invaded a country without a plan for the occupation. Anyone involved in this kind of war--in Iraq, Vietnam, El Salvador, the Philippines, Afghanistan--has to live and breath the politics of the country where we're fighting. Political and military action must work, every day, in concert with one another. The only measure of success is the politics of the country itself, not Macnamara-esque body counts, or chest-thumping declarations of toughness.

The operational level

THEORY
As Luttwak says in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, the operational level is, perhaps, the trickiest to explain. Something clearly exists between decisions made at the theater level, such as the entire western front in World War II, and the those made by an infantry captain leading an assault on the Normandy beaches. But what is this middle level?

The battle is perhaps the easiest starting point for understanding the operational. The battles of the Bulge, Stalingrad, Midway, El Alamein, and Guadalcanal share some important features. One or both combatants were looking for a decisive engagement that will change the situation in a particular theater. The battle for Normandy gave the Allies a beachhead on the European continent. The Japanese were trying to cripple the American fleet at Midway, but failed. Battles don’t always result in one side gaining some significant advantage—a point well illustrated by the WWI meatgrinder battles of the Somme and Ypres. What matters, however, is that one or both sides are looking for a decisive change.

What’s interesting to note, by the way, is the decreasing frequency of significant battles in the history of modern warfare. John Keegan, in his classic book, The Face of Battle, makes this point at some length. Battles may be less frequent, but violence in wars like the civil war in Peru, the Serb-Croat conflict, and the Iran-Iraq war is no less intense, or in cases like Rwanda and Bosnia, far more vicious. Either the combatants aren’t seeking some dramatic clash, or they’re failing to engineer them. What, then, defines strategy at this level somewhere between the theater and the tactical levels.

To properly depict the operational level, then, you have to recognize its  “combined arms” character. Conventional militaries have infantry, armor, air power, and naval power. Guerrilla armies have both fighters and political cadres. Operational strategy, therefore, is the realm where combined resources (not all strictly military) jointly contribute to the advancement of theater goals. Eisenhower’s strategy for D-Day—employing every type of unit available, from OSS units working with French partisans to battleships pounding the beaches—required skills far different from those that even the most capable Navy commander or Army major had. Similarly, an NLF commander for a South Vietnamese district needed to employ guerrillas. political cadres, spies, and the occasional support of conventional NVA units to slowly erode the Saigon government’s control and legitimacy.

We may not be as accustomed to thinking in operational terms, but this level often is the fulcrum on which larger victories and defeats turn. The stunning German successes in the first years of WWII were due largely to a great operational innovation, the blitzkrieg. In WWI, the first tanks were mobile artillery supporting the infantry; in WWII, the infantry now supported the tanks.

But not alone. Infantry screened the tanks from attack, pinned down the enemy, and blasted holes in the enemy line. Artillery pounded tough defenses. Aircraft bombed enemy units and headquarters, strafed enemy reinforcements moving to the front, and relayed the birds eye view of the battlefield. The tanks slashed through the enemy line, spreading confusion and panic, encircling masses of troops then unable to escape. Blitzkrieg therefore relied as much n the chaos it created as the actual number of casualties it inflicted. None of this would have been possible without radio communications, efficient supply lines, and troops trained to improvise in a quickly-changing situation.

Like any level of strategy, the operational level needs to work in concert with the levels above and below it. Military history often is a discussion of how well this synchronization worked.

Theater strategy for the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 set the overall goals (preserving an independent South Vietnam) and the broad means (attrition strategy). Opinions about what went wrong for the US vary from blaming the theater strategy itself (as discussed in an earlier post) to identifying points at which the operational strategy was working at odds with the theater strategy. Both arguments have their merit.

Whichever argument you find convincing, they both share one important point: the efficiency of US search and destroy operations in Vietnam, to large extent, didn’t matter. Operationally, a search and destroy operation—which might combine mechanized and airmobile infantry, armor, artillery, close air support from fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, and even the occasional naval bombardment—succeeded by their own measures. To indicate success, US commanders pointed to statistics like the number of enemy soldiers killed, the number of villages temporarily secured during a sweep, and the number of US casualties kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, these proved to be the wrong measures.

NVA and NLF military strength could undermine political stability in the South, but killing enemy soldiers wouldn’t necessarily give the South Vietnamese regime the strength and legitimacy it needed to survive. At its worst moments, search and destroy operations worked against the theater goal of keeping the Saigon regime alive.  Free fire zones, the destruction of villages suspected of VC sympathies, refugees fleeing for their lives—the attrition strategy created these problems, and more, that deepened the political crisis in the South, and actually gave the Viet Cong more recruits. The real “center of gravity” in the conflict wasn’t the enemy soldier, but the US military was certainly trained and equipped to focus on that tangible and familiar target. Winning battles didn’t necessarily give the population a sense of security; killing guerrillas didn’t win support for the government. The Soviets learned the same hard lesson in Afghanistan.

It’s still possible in this analysis to pin blame on American theater strategy for creating other problems. The United States threw away much of its leverage with the South Vietnamese regime. Without leverage, the US could not budge successive governments in Saigon to make painful but necessary. Commitment itself became too much of a fetish, cornering the United States into arguing that its credibility in containing the USSR and China was, somewhat ridiculously, being tested in a country peripheral to the interests of all three superpowers. However, even if the theater strategy for fighting the Vietnam War had been a work of supreme brilliance, the operational strategy often worked against it.

PRACTICE
The big question about the current war in Iraq is, Are we winning? If our theater goal is to create a stable Iraq, friendly to the United States, capable of shifting the Middle Eastern balance of power, the answer is clearly no. Obviously, the US and its allies have insufficient troops to maintain control over Iraq; moving it into the column of reliable US allies seems like a dim hope. So far, Iraqi police and army units have proven ineffective; in the siege of Fallujah, they actually joined the forces fighting US troops. The Iraq war has made it harder for the United States to deal with the North Koreans, the Iranians, and perhaps also al Qaeda. (At least in one example, the Iraq invasion has helped a terrorist group allied with al Qaeda.)

But the problem isn’t merely one of strength. We could double, triple, or quadruple the number of troops, and still find the political ground in Iraq crumbling beneath us. In fact, I would argue, the current US operational strategy ensures our failure.

It goes without saying that the impressive plans for the invasion weren’t matched by equally impressive plans for the occupation. After a swift victory over Iraq conventional forces, US troops were caught by surprise by escalating guerrilla attacks. The Bush Administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the US Central Command have all blamed these attacks on terrorists and insurgents (alias guerrillas). The fact that US authorities use these terms interchangeably is an unfortunate sign of exactly how unprepared the United States is for the war it’s now fighting. Not only do you use different operational techniques to defeat guerrillas and terrorists, but what the United States is doing today is doomed to fail against either kind of opponent.

As in Vietnam, American forces are now focusing at the operational level on the enemy’s military strength. Whether the enemy is Ansar al-Islam or the Sadrist “Army of the Mahdi,” US forces are primarily concerned about killing or capturing as many of these enemy troops as possible. Tanks, helicopters, and jet aircraft pound enemy positions, often in heavily populated areas. American commanders believe that captured guerrillas—or, sadly, the relatives of suspected guerrillas—are “intelligence assets” that might help track down and eliminate even more enemy fighters. The pressures to wring information out of these “assets” have led to the dehumanizing, counterproductive, and shocking events at Abu Ghraib, Baghdad airport, and other jails. Meanwhile, efforts to win public support through rebuilding the country—the Vietnam-era term was civic action—continue on a completely separate track from military operations. Civic action is often impossible, since the people responsible for it—contractors, US troops, or humanitarian organizations—can’t safely reach the people they’re trying to help, or guerrillas demolish the work they’ve already done.

The operational strategy is clearly not working, in large part because we have a limited understanding of the enemy. The “insurgency” isn’t a monolithic organization, but a combination of different guerrilla, terrorist, and criminal groups. This mélange is hardly new in the history of warfare. Recent conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Peru, El Salvador, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere have featured similar mixes of these three groups—often within the same organization (such as the FARC in Colombia).

However, the anti-occupation guerrilla groups are the real “center of gravity.” Not only are the guerrillas more numerous than the terrorists (including al Qaeda allies) and criminal gangs, but the they pose the most serious threat to the US occupation. Tragically, the guerrillas are far more akin to partisan forces fighting a foreign occupier—heroic figures to people inside and outside Iraq—than the universally condemned terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It’s easy to think that, because the guerrillas threaten us, killing as many guerrillas as possible is the road to victory. We'd be wrong yet again to believe that myth.

To make better sense of the situation, here are some points of comparison that reveal how different operational strategy looks for fighting terrorists, guerrillas, and conventional armies:

                                                                               

	Counterterrorism	Counterinsurgency	Conventional war
Required amount of force	Very small.	Moderate.	Overwhelming.
Type of units involved in combat	Small military units, such as Delta Force   (US) or the SAS (Britain). Agents within the terrorist organization are also   required. Other military assets are usually irrelevant; using them in their   normal role to bring maximum firepower to bear on a foe is counterproductive   when civilians die in the crossfire.	Troops who can stay in a region, work with   the local population, and earn their trust are a must. Primarily infantry,   with perhaps some armor or air support on infrequent occasions. Again, using   overwhelming firepower can be counterproductive.	Combination of all types of military units   (infantry, armor, artillery, air, naval) needed for a particular operation.
Type of operation	Raids on terrorist cells, hostage rescues,   police sweeps for supporters or informants. Intelligence operations critical,   from eavesdropping on communications to infiltrating terrorist cells.	Sweeps to eliminate guerrilla presence from   a region. Following that, defense against guerrilla raids, plus constant   patrolling to prevent the re-infiltration of guerrilla forces. Some   similarity to the intelligence operations used against terrorists.	“Traditional” military attacks to seize   territory, wear down enemy forces, disrupt command and communications,   eliminate supply depots, etc.
Coordination with grassroots political or   “civic action” efforts	Akin to police efforts to gain information   about criminals from the local population.	Critical on all fronts—everything from   building bridges to helping ensure fair elections.	Little or none required.
Time to plan and execute	Given the challenge of penetrating the veil   of secrecy around terrorist cells, operations can take months or years.   Occasionally, you have the opportunity to strike a training camp or other   facility, but these are normally not fatal blows to the terrorist organization.	The overall operation—securing an area,   ensuring the growth of security and legitimacy—normally takes months or even   years.	Operations can be planned and executed in   days or weeks.
Number of opponents	Terrorist cells are usually very small—sometimes   less than 10 or 20 people. Their supporters can also be a very small group.	Smaller than a conventional army, but larger   than terrorist cells. The number of supporters can be small or large,   depending on the phase of the guerrilla conflict and other factors.	Large, if they present any threat to US   forces.
Ease of identifying the enemy	Very hard. Terrorists are highly secretive,   adept at hiding within the population, and surface very briefly for swift,   dramatic strikes.	Hard. Usually disguised, and guerrilla   operations are normally hit-and-run affairs. You can find guerrillas in   particular regions (“liberated zones”), and you can catch guerrillas in the   act out their own military operations. Political operatives will be harder to   spot than fighters, however.	Easy. (They wear uniforms.)
Importance of territory	None.	Low to moderate, depending on the phase of   the conflict. Guerrillas need to establish an increasingly larger presence in   broad areas of the country to achieve victory through a final military push   or the political collapse of the regime.	High. Territory determines how safe are   lines of supply and communications, how much of the country is under your   control, where you’re vulnerable to enemy attack, and where you can make   attacks.
Measures of success	For terrorist operations, the political   paralysis of the enemy and their willingness to comply with your demands. For   counterterrorist operations, the number of terrorist cells eliminated, and   the prevention of any “regeneration” of the terrorist organization.	For both sides, the tilting of the political   balance of power. Both military and non-military means are critical, but the   goal is to engineer the political collapse of the enemy’s base of support.	For both sides, territory seized, plus   reduction or elimination of enemy forces.

There are a lot of points of comparison you might cite, but the ones used here are enough to support the basic argument: these three types of warfare demand three different operational strategies. 

Do US operations in Iraq look like classic counterinsurgency or counterterrorist operational-level strategy? Not at all. The US military is still an organization trained, equipped, and rewarded for its ability to fight conventional wars—a familiar problem with a long legacy. As Andrew Krepinevich argued in a great but often overlooked book, the US Army, thrown into an unfamiliar situation in Vietnam, first tried to apply familiar operational principles. The result (until key changes in 1968 and 1969) was the ubiquitous search and destroy operation—a failure however you look at it. This problem wasn't as simple as the “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” principle. Changing the operational approach would have required wrenching organizational and doctrinal changes that the Army wasn’t convinced it needed to make—particularly when these military reforms may have threatened the Army’s “core mission” and undercut its ability to operate independently of other services and civilian agencies.

Obviously, this part of the Vietnam story is of more than historical interest. The US military is, once again, wrongly focused on the enemy soldier. Operations to find, fix, and finish the enemy—in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad, and elsewhere—may result in an impressive body count. They won’t help win the war.

The theater level

THEORY
The next level down in the strategic hierarchy is the theater level. What defines this level is the overall choice of targets: a particular geographical region, or a particular opponent who, in some cases, might not be bound by geography.

Anyone familiar with the history of World War II instantly recognizes theater level strategy for what it is. The United States had a grand strategy--defeat the Axis powers--and to achieve this goal, it fought in the European and Pacific theaters. Nazi Germany had its own theaters: the Western Front, the Eastern Front, and the Mediterranean. Britain fought in Western Europe, North Africa, and Asia. The USSR's main theater was in Eastern Europe, but it also fought smaller skirmishes with the Japanese in the Far East.

Normally, theater level strategy isn't too hard to craft--at least, in figuring out who your friends and enemies are. Military history is often marked by rare occasions, though, when theater level strategy seems dangerously out of whack with grand strategy. One of the great controversies among aficianados of Napoleonic history, for example, is whether France ever needed to invade Russia. Was Napoleon knocking out a powerful opponent before the Russians could cement an alliance with Britain, or was he disastrously jumping the gun?

Just as Napoleon may have overestimated the Russian threat, creating a need for a theater level strategy that didn't serve French grand strategy, other combatants have at times underestimated threats. The classic example is Chamberlain's appeasement policy--at least, in the traditional view that he was hoodwinked by Hitler's promise of peace. Recently, some historians have been arguing that Chamberlain was simply buying time, since Britain in 1938 wasn't ready yet for an unavoidable conflict with the aggressive Nazi regime.

Theater level strategy demands more than just the identification of an opponent and an area of operations. Combatants also need to determine, in broad brushstrokes, how to defeat their opponents. The debate over the Vietnam War often focuses on this aspect of theater strategy. Should the United States have just pursued the Westmoreland attrition strategy more aggressively? Would an invasion of the North brought victory? Would a focus on a different approach to counterinsurgency given the South Vietnamese government enough breathing room to stand on its own, even in the face of its hostile Communist neighbor? How, in any case, would the United States have been able to use its power and leverage to put an end to South Vietnam's political troubles, which threatened to make any military strategy moot?

This leads us to the third aspect of theater level strategy: a definition of victory. Was victory in the Vietnam War the preservation of South Vietnam, mirroring the defense of an independent South Korea? Was it the preservation of US credibility, regardless of the consequences? Was it simple containment? The eradication of any threat from the North? Often, people with opposing views on what went wrong in Vietnam are talking past each other, since they're assuming different definitions of victory in the Asian theater of containment.

One more point is worth making before leaving this summary of theater strategy: what defines the theater for one combatant may not fit anyone else's involved in the conflict. Asia was, for the United States, one of several theaters in the Cold War. What happened in Vietnam may or may not have been important in the Asian theater, but it was small compared to the global objectives of the United States. The Vietnam War was certainly unrelated to the goal of nuclear deterrence. However traumatic the American defeat may have been, in reality, all the United States did was to redraw the perimeter of containment after Saigon fell.

In contrast, there was only one theater for the North Vietnamese regime: South Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia were part of this theater to the extent that they factored into North Vietnamese operations against the South (the course of the Ho Chi Minh trail being one such consideration). Victory or defeat in that single theater was absolute for the North Vietnamese.

Not surprisingly, therefore, many interpretations of the Vietnam War cite the mismatch of wills between North Vietnam and the United States as a critical element. From the perspective of theater level strategy, this insight makes perfect sense. It's an observation worth noting in other situations, such as the history of colonial wars in the 19th and 20th centuries, and even our own War of Independence. For the "locals," there always is just one theater--and, to go back to our discussion of power and leverage, that fact gives the locals considerable leverage over their more powereful enemies.

The essence of theater strategy, therefore, often boils down to choices about this war, at this time, against this foe, with these forces, fought in this general way.

PRACTICE
It may seem odd to describe counterterrorism as a theater level strategy, but that's effectively what it is. If the United States is now in mortal combat with al Qaeda, that group becomes one of our theaters of operations. Al Qaeda fighters may move from Afghanistan to the Philippines to New York, but wherever they are, they've become an important theater-level concern. Put in the simplest terms, American grand strategy demands the protection of defines life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Al Qaeda threatens broadly threatens all three sacred elements of the American way of life.

What makes much less sense, of course, is how Iraq became an important part of our theater level strategy. The most generous argument someone can make includes one or both of the following points:

• 9/11 was bad enough, but an al Qaeda attack with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons would have been far worse. Therefore, we have to work on two tracks simultaneously: (1) defeat al Qaeda and any other groups like it; (2) shut down secret weapons labs, restrict access to WMD technology, and do everything else necessary to eliminate anyplace terrorist might acquire WMDs. If the terrorist and WMD tracks ever do intersect, we'll have failed in our post-9/11 counterterrorist effort.


• Virulent anti-Western Islamist movements in the Middle East attract new adherents every day. So far, we've only affected Middle Eastern politics at the fringes. If we really want to shut down terrorist groups, we may need to take a bold stroke that re-defines the political equation in not jus a single country, but the entire region. In fact, we can't stop at one country, since such a masterstroke could turn into a terrible blunder if the backlash radicalizes more Muslims to join groups like al Qaeda.

Even in this generous interpretation of the Bush Administration's theater strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia, it has turned out to be a catastrophic failure so far. The invasion of Afghanistan made perfect sense. "Going downtown" (to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam War) meant invading to crush both the Taliban and al Qaeda so that Afghanistan could never become a terrorist base again. Many (myself included) have been critical of American follow-through in the Afghan operation. It's understandable that it will take time to stabilize the situation, given the ethnic, sectarian, and tribal conflicts in the country. No one expects an end to warlordism overnight--as President Kharzai readily admits. Victory in Afghanistan will take patience, resources, political skill, relentless pursuit of the Taliban and al Qaeda remnants, and time. However, the United States has done far less than it needed (and promised) to do in Afghanistan--in no small part because the Bush Administration was in a hurry to invade Iraq.

The Administration made an excessively risky bet in Iraq and lost. The WMDs weren't there. (By now, the looping strands of the "not finding WMDs isn't evidence that they don't exist" argument have completely unravelled.) There wasn't even an active WMD program, despite Bush's revisionist claim of "weapons of mass destruction-related programs."

There was no connection between the Baath Party and al Qaeda. The group to which Secretary of State Powell pointed as "proof" of the al Qaeda connection, Ansar al-Islam, was in fact a mortal enemy of Saddam Hussein. Since the post-war plans proved to be threadbare or non-existent, we've created many more enemies in Iraq than we should have.

The regional backlash many feared has in fact happened. The invasion gave anti-Western demagogues the chance to depict US soldiers as crusaders in new uniforms. The Abu Ghraib photos, the siege of Fallujah, American running battles with Sadrist forces, and related events have, needless to say, made a bad situation worse. (Bush's loose tongue about his fundamentalist Christian beliefs haven't helped either.)

Every day, American soldiers who had been safely based in Europe, the United States, or elsewhere in the Middle East are now dying in Iraq. American grand strategy, to the extent that it will eventually require shifting of resources out of Iraq to meet other threats, has also been crippled by the botched occupation. Facing down the North Koreans, who actually do have nuclear weapons, is now much harder, given the self-inflicted wound in Iraq. And we've helped make one terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, more powerful than it once was--including the power to kill Americans.

Unless there's a dramatic change in fortune, the Iraq War will become the defining example of failed theater strategy for generations to come. The Baath regime was effectively contained, according to experts like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and General Anthony Zinni, the former CENTCOM commander. Theater strategy in the Middle East was working, to the extent that Iraq posed little or no threat. Saddam Hussein had no WMDs to hand over to terrorists or launch against Tel Aviv. We may have been frustrated with Hussein's continued survival, and he certainly was the nastiest of tyrants. He wasn't, however, a factor in our war with al Qaeda--the part of American grand strategy that shot to the top of our post-9/11 priorities.

Not only didn't the Iraq War contribute to our grand strategy, but US plans (such as they were) didn't even bring real victory in the Middle East or other theaters. As billions of US dollars flow into Iraq to keep the situation from disintegrating further, real priorities--such as the surviving threat of the Taliban, or the frightening revelation that the Libyans received nuclear technology from North Korea--suffer.

The wrong war, against the wrong opponent, fought the wrong way, at the wrong time for our war against al Qaeda. The more you view current events through the clarifying lens of grand and theater strategy, the more obvious and profound the failure appears.

Incompetence, thy name is Simone

IN THE NEWS
[I keep trying to get back to the big picture posts on strategy. I really do. However, the daily news, as Michael Corleone might say, "Just keeps pulling me back in...]

Today's Washington Post has a strange and frightening article about the Young Republican types who now help staff the Coalition Provisional Authority. People as inexperienced but ideologically orthodox as Simone Ledeen hold posts responsible for Iraq's economy, physical infrastructure, laws, police, and other functions. (Click here for Ledeen's personal account of her time in Iraq, including her weak-in-the-knees moment shaking Bush's hand and her desire to spit on Hilary Clinton.) The tone of the Post article is extremely disturbing, since the assignment of inexperienced and incompetent people to positions of responsibility, whatever their youthful exuberance, isn't something that merits the Post's creepy Ferris Bueller's Day Off in Iraq treatment.

There are plenty of seasoned people who might take these jobs, particularly in the ranks of retirees. Foreign service professionals, accountants, military officers, contractors (the kind who build houses and bridges, not the kind like Blackwater Security), electricians--you name it, many of them might actually volunteer for government service in Iraq. Heck, there are many people in their 30s or 40s whose sense of patriotic duty might compel them to quit their jobs and, at some risk to life, limb, and smaller paycheck, put their skills, experience, and passion into the job. These are the competent people--including those who both opposed the war in Iraq as well as supported it--who now share a common interest in seeing us and the Iraqis through this mess.

Unfortunately, this is the same group of competent people whom the Bush Administration never called into service after 9/11. Meanwhile, it plugs manpower holes with reservists, contractors, and newly minted MBAs, all hurriedly thrown into jobs for which they're not prepared, in the place that's supposed to be, according to the Bush Administration itself, the main battlefield in the war against terrorists.

I've posted on this subject before, since it hits close to home before. I know I'm not the only one who was shocked and disappointed when my government told me that my greatest patriotic duty in late 2001 was to shop.

No doubt there's a role in the CPA for the Simone Ledeens, just graduating from college. The offense to reason and national security, of course, is (1) there are too many Simone Ledeens, according to the Post article, in too many positions of responsibility, and (2) the Simone Ledeens are getting these jobs through patronage. By her own account, Ledeen had no interview, just instant acceptance to her new job in the CPA. No surprise, maybe, that her father is Michael Ledeen, a famous conservative opinion-maker.

Unsurprising, perhaps, but certainly unconscionable.

A hard day

IN THE NEWS
[I'm writing this post in case anyone has a friend, relative, co-worker, or acquaintance who can't understand how the events of the last couple of weeks have inspired shame and disgust in many of their fellow Americans. Feel free to point them to this post.]

Yesterday was a hard day. Work was unfriendly and unforgiving; the day's news was infuriating and depressing. In the course of just five minutes, I hit three new outrages browsing the regular online newspapers and weblogs. Ahmed Chalabi is accused of passing secrets to the Iranian government. Worse, Chalabi may have been Iran's catspaw as far back as when he was passing flawed intelligence to a Bush Administration eager for reasons to attack Iraq (a sentiment it shared with the Iranians). Senator John McCain was justifiably outraged that the version of the Taguba Report that Congress reviewed was redacted--a polite word, as you already know, for incomplete or censored. Truck drivers for Kelllog Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Haliburton, accuse the company of ordering them to drive empty trucks up and down dangerous Iraqi highways--at no small charge to the US taxpayer. (The jokesters at KBR listed the cargo as "sailboat fuel.")

Five minutes, three outrages. It was already a hard day; those five minutes made it vastly harder still.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one feeling that way. Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly said that his spirit was sagging under the weight of the news, too. A lot of people sent him words of encouragement, I was glad to see. For my own sake, I looked for some inspirational reading in The Mammoth Book of Heroes, short tales of courage from Spartacus' defiance of Rome to the Tienanmen protestors.

Sadly, I didn't find the book as inspirational as I hoped it would be. One of the first stories I read was about Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, the escape wizard who broke out of Nazi prisoner of war camps several times, including the "great escape" from Stalag Luft III. German patience with Allied escapees ran out with this major embarasssment, so Hitler had 50 of the re-captured Allied soldiers executed, including Bushell. (Previously, the Nazis had respected the Geneva Conventions when re-capturing Allied POWs, out of concern for what might happen after the war.) Hitler originally ordered all 76 prisoners to be executed, but Goering talked him down to the smaller figure. The Third Reich, as it turned out, was worried that it wouldn't be able to maintain the pretense of respecting the Geneva Conventions if all 76 prisoners were killed.

Hitler and Goering were concerned about the Geneva Conventions, at least to the extent that they wanted to appear to respect it. Douglas Feith openly mocks the Geneva Conventions in cases where suspected terrorists are captured--or suspected Iraqi insurgents, or people who might have useful information of some unspecified sort.

Then I read the firsthand account of John McCarthy, a prisoner of Islamic Jihad during the infamous hostage-taking period of the Lebanese Civil War. The story, of course, is shocking in its cruelty. The terrorists held McCarthy for a year--blindfolded, and chained to the wall--before they started any negotiations about his release. At this point, his kidnappers let McCarthy write a letter to his family, and then hey held him for another four years of captivity. The Islamic Jihad guards kept McCarthy and his fellow prisoner, Brian Keenan, in a state of constant fear and disorientation by physically threatening them, keeping them from communicating except in the quietest possible whisper, and disrupting their sleep by playing the radio or praying loudly. Blindfolded, chained, McCarthy and his fellow prisoners never knew if they would see their loved ones again. In the end, they had to wait years for their release.

No human being deserves this type of treatment. That's a statement, of course, which could just as easily apply to prisoners held for years at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and countless other jails, overt and covert, that the United States now keeps around the world.

Does it make better sense why was yesterday a hard day for me? Why, for many people, every day since 9/11 has been a little bit harder? So hard, in fact, that the daily news tears at your vitals, or makes you feel like a phantom dagger is plunging into your heart over and over again.

Events like the Abu Ghraib horrors pollute the sacred. We should be appalled by what happened at Abu Ghraib because we know that no American should is justified in terrorizing those prisoners in the same fashion as terrorists brutalized John McCarthy.

At least the Islamic Jihad guards let McCarthy write a letter to his parents. Many of the prisoners held in the "legal black hole" of Guantanamo Bay since 2001 have had no contact with the outside world. The same statement applies to the inmates of Abu Ghraib and the places we can't name, because the Bush Administration doesn't trust its own citizens to know how many people are really being held, and where, or even who these prisoners are. And when top Administration officials like Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone pooh-pooh the Geneva Conventions, we lower the bar so far that the Nazis appear to have respected international law more than we do now.

The glue that holds societies together, according to the early social scientist Emile Durkheim, is a sense of shared outrage (what he called the collective conscience). As members of the same society, we are outraged at the same things, for the same reasons. Americans, for example, are outraged by tyranny, so we depose tyrants. Like people in other societies, we feel our outrage stir when certain crimes happen--the Freeway Killer's murders, the Kennedy assassination, the Colombine massacre, the priestly pedophole cases, 9/11--and we demand that the criminal's sentence satisfy both retribution and justice. However, we also try to ensure, as Americans, that we visit retribution and justice on the right people, and retribution is held in reserve, only when it doesn't interfere with justice. It's this philosophy, we feel, that defines us as Americans. (Though we'd be pompous and self-righteous in the extreme to think we're the only nation that shares that sentiment.)

We're right to be outraged by the Nazis and Islamic Jihad. That outrage connects us to a conduit of shared strength, maintaining our spirit in difficult days like those since 9/11. We wake up, read the news, and find things that rattle our confidence. However, we can turn to our collective sense of ourselves, our history of trials that proved both our endurance and correctness, and we can find enough faith to keep us going.

When we pollute what's sacred to us and about us, that faith dissolves.

But not completely. I have a mulish confidence in this country, so I still believe that we'll survive this gauntlet of death and stupidity. My days may be hard, but not nearly as hard as it is for many of our soldiers, or the Iraqis we're supposed to be saving.

But I really don't think anyone's day should be as hard as yesterday was.

Postscript: I read one more story in The Mammoth Book of Heroes, this one about the English village of Eyam. In a brief but ferocious episode of the plague that started in 1665, Eyam lost over half of its population. What made this sad story a heroic tale was how the villagers chose to stay in Eyam, despite the mounting risk that they, too, would become infected. People who fled might have survived, but they might also have carried the plague to other towns. Apparently, the pivotal characters in this story were town's two clergymen--the official rector, and the former one, who lost his title when he refused to take the Oath of Conformity. Both men saved countless lives outside Eyam by convincing their fellow townsfolk to stay. When London suffered an outbreak of the plague, the authorities forcibly quarantined everyone in the city. The author of this piece, Paul Chadburn, was impressed by how the two rectors were able to convince the Eyamites to quarantine themselves. As Chadburn notes in an eloquent passage:

If, in the light of modern science, the alternatives put to them--likely annihilation of the few of Eyam or certain death among the many of Derbyshire--were not exhaustive and exclusive of the other possibilities, the lesson of Eyam remains, and the eternal truth--that men will sacrifice themselves, nay, their wives and their families, for a cause they believe to be good; forced, they will succumb to all the instincts of the animal.

A few words that might apply to events in today's news. I won't belabor why.

Missing the point about the wedding party massacre

IN THE NEWS
Re. the sad events in Mark al-Deeb...

Of course, the first question everyone asked was, "Who made the mistake?" A better question would be, "Why were US troops calling in air support?"

It's natural to want to know, as soon as possible, if someone made an unspeakable error in Makr al-Deeb. As usual, we can't trust the first reports, so none of us should jump to conclusions. Speculation that the wedding party was somehow an insurgent ruse--such as Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis' comment, "How many people go into the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"--seem equally unjustified, however. Blame, however, only addresses this one incident. The use of close air support might point to a larger and sadly familiar problem.

Everyone from Iraqi witnesses to the troops themselves agree on the following timeline:

• A US force of approximately 40 soldiers landed by helicopter.


• The troops believed that they had come under fire. Obviously, what remains to be determined is whether someone was actually shooting at them, or if the gunfire was part of a victory celebration that's common in Iraq (despite the Coalition Provisional Authority's efforts to ban them).


• The US commander for this operation then called in air support.


• Both airplanes and helicopters arrived to blast the buildings. Iraqis also report that the helicopter gunships strafed people in the wedding party.


• The casualties now total 42 dead and 9 wounded, including 14 children and, in an equally grisly touch, the bride and groom at the wedding.

How could this happen? The intelligence about the village being an insurgent safe house and supply base may or may not have been faulty. While US forces did find weapons at the site, it's hard to say, in such a heavily armed country as Iraq, whether that's conclusive evidence or not. (The bedouins who live in this area are often at odds with their neighbors, particularly since they smuggle livestock across the border with Syria.) Again, it's too early to say.

Two things we can say for sure:

• There are not enough troops in Iraq. Close air support is fated to kill innocent bystanders, whether or not Makr al-Deeb was an insurgent base. However, close air support is what an operational commander will use when there isn't enough manpower to do the job without it. "Better to send a bullet than a man," as the saying goes--particularly when there aren't enough men and women to seize a suspected insurgent hideout.


• Many in the chain of command still treat the average Iraqi with immediate and often unjustified suspicion. Maj. General Mattis also mused that, since the dead at Mark al-Deeb included "more than two dozen military-age males," we should be suspicious of who they really were. "Let's not be naive," Mattis concluded.

The first point directly contributes to the second. The fewer troops we have--and the more inexperienced they are in the local language and culture--the lower the chances they'll have successfully distinguishing possible friends from foes. And, of course, it doesn't help to have a general making comments like Mattis'.

Of course, whoever is to blame for Mark al-Deeb--the commander who called in air support, the Fates, the person who provided the tip about the alleged safehouse--we can also be sure about one more point: this event hurt our efforts in Iraq even further.

Site design update

I find that I keep linking the same content over and over again. Some of it is part of the "extended discussion" of military theory and contemporary practice; some of it comes from the thought du jour (usually my effort to put some news item into context).

Most of these motley postings aim to dispel common misconceptions (we've never faced anything like terrorism before, the Constitution can't possibly handle the "new reality" of terrorism, etc.). Therefore, I've added a new list of links in the "navigation bar" to the left, under the heading, Exploding myths.