Word: mogadishu
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That education is overdue. The heroic narrative of American warfare stresses great, set-piece, conventional battles: Antietam and Gettysburg, Normandy and Okinawa. When a military operation departed from those norms--as in Vietnam and at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993--it was dismissed as a mistake, the consequence of political meddling rather than a cool decision by the military to use force. In fact, the ambush in Somalia by armed men indistinguishable from peaceable civilians is more relevant to our future than a full shelf of books on the World War II heroics of the "greatest generation." Given...
...political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war--which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. But that was before the invention of the video camera...
...officials believe the Iraqi command circulated copies of the movie Black Hawk Down before the war, as a manual for defeating the Americans. The film tells the story of the 18 U.S. Army Rangers who were killed by Somalis while attempting to rescue comrades from two helicopters downed in Mogadishu in 1993. The casualties prompted the U.S. to wind up its military operation in Somalia. The Iraqis may hope that similar scenes of Americans being bloodied in the streets of Baghdad would bring the same result...
...That education is overdue. The heroic narrative of American warfare stresses great, set-piece, conventional battles: Antietam and Gettysburg, Normandy and Okinawa. When a military operation departed from those norms - as in Vietnam and at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993--it was dismissed as a mistake, the consequence of political meddling rather than a cool decision by the military to use force. In fact, the ambush in Somalia by armed men indistinguishable from peaceable civilians is more relevant to our future than a full shelf of books on the World War II heroics of the "greatest generation." Given...
...political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war - which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. But that was before the invention of the video camera...