a year of the Chinese Civil War, America severely tested Mao’s methods in the mountains of Korea. Initially, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) badly misjudged the effects of U.S. artillery and tactical airpower. Pushed quickly into maneuver warfare, the Chinese massed in the open, often in daylight, to expand their control over the northern Korean Peninsula. They extended their narrow lines of communications farther down the mountainous spine of Korea as they advanced. However, they soon found their logistic support exposed to U.S. airpower and paid a horrid price for their haste. The spring 1951 offensive mounted by the Chinese sputtered to a halt as U.S. artillery and aerial firepower slaughtered PLA Soldiers in masses and air interdiction cut their lines of supply and forced a retreat back across the Han River.
Brutal experiences led to the relearning of sober lessons from the civil war. The Chinese quickly adjusted to a new situation. Over the following two years their attacks were limited and controlled. The high command learned to keep most key logistic facilities north of the Yalu River, out of reach of U.S. air strikes. South of the river they dispersed and hid, massing only to launch attacks. Soldiers moved at night and chiseled their front lines of resistance into “granite mountains.” U.S. casualties mounted while the Chinese stabilized their own losses at a rate acceptable to Beijing. Many more Americans died during the stability phase than in earlier days of fluid warfare. What was an acceptable human toll to China was unacceptable to the United States. The result was operational and strategic stalemate. To the Chinese, stalemate equaled victory.
THE VIETNAM EXPERIENCE
Over the next two decades, the Vietnamese borrowed from the Chinese experience and found creative ways to lessen the killing effect of firepower, against first France and then the United States. They also proved skilled in adapting to the new challenges posed by their Western enemies. The Viet Minh based its tactical and operational approach on Mao’s unconventional methods. Its conduct of the battle was remarkably reminiscent of siege operations conducted by the PLA during the Chinese Civil War. In both cases, the secrets of success were dispersion and preparation of the battlefield. The Viet Minh remained scattered in small units to offer less detectable and lucrative targets and to allow its troops to live off the land. Fewer supply lines and logistic sites offered even fewer opportunities for interdiction fires.
To win, the Chinese—and eventually the Viet Minh—needed to attack. That demanded the ability to mass temporarily. The Viet Minh had to exercise great care in massing under the enemy umbrella of protective firepower. Superior intelligence indicated the right time and place. The ability to collect and move tens of thousands of Soldiers at the right moment allowed attacking forces to collapse French defenses before firepower could regain the advantage. This capacity to “maneuver under fire,” perfected against the Nationalists and now the French, reached new levels of refinement during the second Indochina War, against the United States.
The North Vietnamese architect of victory, General Vo Nguyen Giap, quickly accommodated his strategic plans to the new realities of U.S. firepower. The North Vietnamese relearned the importance of dispersion and patience. They redistributed their forces to keep their most vulnerable units outside the range of U.S. artillery while moving their logistic system away from battle areas into sanctuaries relatively safe from aerial detection and strikes. Thus, they dusted off and applied many of the same methods that had proven useful in previous Asian wars against Western-style armies.
THE RUSSIANS IN AFGHANISTAN
Half a decade later and half a continent away, in Afghanistan, the Soviets learned the same harsh firsthand lessons of overconfidence, when a first-world military once again confronted third-world forces that had the will, tenacity, and skill to remain effective despite firepower inferiority. Year after year, the Soviets arrayed themselves for conventional combat and pushed methodically up the Panjir Valley, only to be expelled a few months later by a seemingly endless and psychologically debilitating series of methodical and well-placed ambuscades and skirmishes. Borrowing a page from the American textbook in Vietnam, the Soviets tried to exploit the firepower, speed, and intimidation of armed helicopters. They employed them principally as convoy escorts and to provide fire support. At times, Hind helicopters proved enormously lethal, particularly early on, when the mujahideen were psychologically unprepared. The guerrillas eventually turned back to the Vietnam experience, employing heavy antiaircraft machine guns and then Stinger shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down the gunships, and in increasing numbers. Military frustration and defeat in Afghanistan presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.
ISRAEL AND LEBANON THE FIRST TIME: 1982
Beginning in 1982, after nearly three decades of failure in open warfare, an alliance of Arab state and nonstate actors pushed Israeli mechanized forces out of Beirut. Back streets, tall buildings, and other urban clutter provided the Arabs just enough respite from intensive firepower to wear away Israeli morale in the field and at home. Unable to bring superior maneuverability and shock effect fully to bear, the Israelis paused just short of their operational objectives. Excessive casualties and the public images of bloody excesses on both sides eventually resulted in Israeli withdrawal. This success provided Israel’s enemies with a promising new method to offset its superiority in open, mechanized combat. Today a spectrum of low-tech threats, running the gamut from weapons of mass destruction delivered by crude ballistic missiles to acts of terrorism, to children throwing rocks at Soldiers, confront an increasingly frustrated Israeli military and public. An irony of the recent wars in the Middle East is that Western-style militaries have had great success against non-Western enemies who mimic their own firepower doctrines. The Gulf War is the most recent example of such failed efforts by Arab states, stretching back to 1948. In 1973, Arab armies enjoyed some measure of success applying Western methods, but that was in large part a result of Israeli overconfidence and limited Arab objectives.
THE GULF WAR
Despite extraordinary incompetence on the part of its leadership, the enemy displayed considerable capacity to adapt on the battlefield during Operation Desert Storm. As the U.S. air campaign began to focus on destroying Iraqi ground forces in the Kuwait theater during early February 1991, the Iraqi army quickly adapted. By scattering their tanks across the desert and then constructing berms around them, they ensured that aircraft dropping precision-guided bombs could at best destroy only a single vehicle per pass. Burning tires next to operational vehicles spoofed attackers into missing real targets. Moreover, effective antiaircraft fire kept numerous coalition planes too high to do substantial damage. The best-trained Iraqi units endured weeks of coalition air bombardment with unbroken will and combat capability intact. The most impressive indication of the Iraqi ability to adapt came in the operational movement of a substantial portion of the Republican Guard during the first hours of Desert Storm. Elements of two divisions shifted from a southeastern defensive orientation to defensive positions that faced southwest along Wadi al-Batin. There, the Tawakalna Division and the 50th and 37th Armored Brigades would be destroyed by VII Corps.5 Nevertheless, these units’ sacrifices allowed the rest of the Republican Guard to withdraw. Significantly, the Iraqi Republican Guard ultimately escaped to save Saddam despite overwhelming coalition airpower.
NATO AND KOSOVO
Despite its video-game public image, the NATO campaign against Serbia was no exception to the Clausewitzian construct. Belgrade sought to overcome a tremendous matériel and technological disadvantage by capitalizing on its strengths: the ability to gain operational objectives quickly and then disperse to avoid the inevitable aerial assault. The Serbs thought that patience, tenacity, guile, and ground forces sequestered throughout the countryside would provide an interval long enough to outwait the resolve of NATO. The political will of the alliance proved stronger. But skill and perseverance on the part of the Serbian army in the face of a thousand aircraft with precision-guided weapons is a compelling example of how an adaptive enemy can foil the best-laid plans of a superior force, by capitalizing on its own inherent strengths while minimizing those of the enemy.
Placed in historical context, the Serbian response to the NATO onslaught is simply another
