MUST READ: STARTEGY, TACTICS, & WINNING WARS (PARTS 1 & 2)

Strategy, Tactics, and Winning Wars
(Part One of Two)
By Col. Thomas Snodgrass (USAF, ret.)

Amid the partisan imbroglio over the way in which the U.S. is waging war against Islamofascism, a fog of misunderstanding, ignorance and lack of historical hindsight has been created.

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The obvious place to begin is to correctly identify the enemy and its nature. In order to codify this identification in short form, I refer to a previous article by SANE’s David Yerushalmi, War Manifesto: The War Against Islam, which clearly and correctly focuses on the true nature of our enemy: “The actual or physical enemy is any Muslim who adopts or accepts historical and traditional Shari’a as authoritative. This includes individuals, terrorist networks, clans, tribes, regimes, or states. One law and one Rule of Engagement: If you adopt Shari’a as your ideology, you constitute our enemy and you are in our cross hairs. We of course will pick the most opportune time and place but you will be targeted.”

Once we are clear who the enemy is – that they are not deviants from a proud and peaceful religion, but rather faithful followers of a Shari’a-based Islam taking their military-political “religion” of domination, subjugation, and murder quite seriously – we can begin meaningfully to defend ourselves. Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Khomeini, Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, and al-Sadr are putting Muhammad’s concept of religion into action exactly as he intended, President Bush’s interpretation notwithstanding.

What’s next?

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Strategy, Tactics and Winning Wars
(Part Two of Two)
By Col. Thomas Snodgrass (USAF, ret.)

In our current conflict with the Islamic Jihadists in Iraq, we are not attacking their center of gravity – Iran.

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We could afford to go into a Strategical Defensive posture in the Cold War against the Soviet Union because that conflict was essentially politico-economic, with shooting warfare interludes in Korea and Vietnam. Both sides understood this was a long term “cold war” at its essence. In the end, notwithstanding the threat of mutual destruction always just under the surface, time was on our side. At the end of the day, it was the productivity of capitalism and a free people over the inefficiency of Marxism and totalitarianism.

When, however, we attempted to apply the same Strategical Defensive & Tactical Offensive approach in the shooting warfare interludes in Korea and Vietnam, we failed to understand that the Strategical Defensive approach we undertook required that time work in our favor. We did not prevail in those conflicts precisely because the American people refused to continue to support inconclusive warfare that was sending countless U.S. soldiers home in body bags or maimed without a goal of clear strategic victory.

Can we afford to assume the same Cold War Strategical Defensive & Tactical Offensive posture in our war with Islam? The short answer, and really the only answer, is “NO!” If the U.S. Government continues to send US forces into combat zones where the hostilities are bound to drag on interminably - precisely because the US Government refuses to attack Islamic Jihadist centers of gravity - it is only a matter of time until the U.S. public’s will (MOTIVATION) to continue to resist Jihad will be eroded to zero.

If, however, the US Government (be it Republican- or Democrat-controlled) would adopt the Strategical Offensive & Tactical Offensive posture using air control as the method for defeating Jihadist nation-states, we could destroy the Jihadist military CAPABILITY and erode their MOTIVATION for doing battle with the West. When Christian Europe finally pushed back and began its own Strategical Offensive against Islam, Islam began its long retreat culminating in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Appropriating, a priori, the judgment that the West cannot win a war against a Shari’a-motivated Islamic Ummah is to doom the West and the U.S. in particular to endless terror, murder, and mayhem. No society can suffer that and survive. Witness Israel’s paralysis and degeneration. There is no escape from the responsibility of national existence. War is a necessary part of that responsibility. It will either be a war fought to win or a war fought on the way to defeat