Recent events in Iraq and Lebanon lead me to wonder if the necessity to maintain at least minimal support for wars by avoiding large spikes in our casualty rates makes it impossible for modern, high-tech, highly connected democracies to successfully prosecute aggressive wars.
The US/UK war in Iraq has clearly been hampered, if not lost, through the philosophy of force protection. US forces have taken a very aggressive approach to minimising risks to their troops. The resulting atrocities – civilians shot for driving too close to US forces for instance – have fed the insurgency and destroyed any chance of winning support for the occupation forces. The military philosophy that prefers to call in “precision” air support in urban areas rather than risk troops causes civilian deaths and reduces the likelihood of actually killing or capturing the targets of the action while simultaneously recruiting for your opponents.
The Israeli Army’s need to avoid casualties is partly driven by need: Israel is a small country and can’t afford to replace large numbers of combat losses but it appears to be hampering their action in Lebanon in a similar fashion – they have hoped for air power would do the heavy killing and that troops would be relatively unopposed. As Billmon notes, Hezbollah hadn’t read that plan so didn’t know what they were meant to do. Pat Lang has more to say about the futility of relying on aerial bombardment in this sort of war.
To fight a guerilla war with conventional military forces requires massive deployment of infantry in close combat, with the concomitant losses. You need to be everywhere, all the time, using only minimum force in order to minimise civilian deaths.
Valuing the lives of your troops in tens of civilian lives guarantees that you will kill so many that you will create the army that will defeat you.
The alternatives to military action – honest negotiation for instance – are too protracted, too soft, too complicated and too stereotypically feminine for the macho men and women that are in charge at the moment. They also have the disadvantage of possibly being effective, unlike military action.