predictable adaptations by technologically dispossessed forces willing to challenge Western militaries having superior precision firepower. Like their Asian fellow travelers, the Serbs sought victory by avoiding defeat. In a similar fashion, they conceded the vertical dimension of the battle space to NATO. They were content to shoot down a few aircraft using ground-mounted guns and missiles. This hope was underscored by an expectation that a few dead or captured alliance airmen would gradually degrade NATO resolve. Even if a shoot-down was impossible, the Serbs would seek to keep their antiaircraft assets robust, knowing that ground targets would be difficult to spot from high altitudes.
The surest way to avoid defeat was keeping the army in the field viable—both as a defiant symbol of national resolve and as a legitimate Serbian guarantor of sovereignty over occupied territory. To maintain an effective army in being, the Serbs likewise depended on historical precedents. Units quickly went to ground and dispersed widely. They rapidly computed the pace at which the allies could find, target, and strike uncovered assets and then devised ways to relocate mobile targets inside the alliance’s sensor-to-shooter envelope. They replicated camouflage, decoys, and spoofing techniques proven effective by Asian armies. As the allies became proficient at spotting troops, Serbs sought greater dispersal and went deeper into the ground.
Toward the end, the coalition gained a significant airpower advantage with the emergence of a rudimentary ground presence in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This force was not very effective in open combat against the better-armed Serbs, but the very presence of large-scale KLA units among them forced the Serbs to come out of protective cover and to mass. The results were remarkably consistent with past experiences against China and North Vietnam. Troops moving, massed, and in the open present the most lucrative targets from the air. Yet the Serb forces were never severely damaged, because they were too large and well protected to be erased by aircraft. Since total destruction was not feasible, the contest in Kosovo, like all battles of attrition, soon devolved into a test of time and will. Victory went to the side that could endure the longest without a collapse of will. Once it became evident to President Slobodan Milosevic that NATO resolve would not be broken before a threatened ground assault could materialize, he ceded Kosovo to ensure his own political survival.
THE SECOND IRAQ WAR
Fourteen years of American adventures in the Middle East have provided the surest evidence yet of the vacuity of our fighting doctrine that minimalizes the ability of the enemy to endure our killing power as they adapted to find new and creative ways of killing us. We all remember the euphoria that accompanied the “March to Baghdad” in March 2003. Again, Saddam Hussein was too stupid and fixated on his mechanized forces to realize that two U.S. divisions supported by overwhelming airpower would destroy his military in less than three weeks.
Unfortunately, the victory dance was premature. With Saddam out of the way, the Iraqis, particularly the Iraqi Sunnis, were quick to apply the lessons they had learned in the past when fighting against Western militaries. U.S. leadership failed to heed the signs of a shift from conventional to irregular warfare. By the end of the summer of 2003, as the George W. Bush administration tried to find a means to withdraw from the fight, a combination of mostly Sunni ex-Baathist officers and a newly formed Shia militia army started to fight back by killing Americans and each other. In time, during the “surge” of 2006–7, the U.S. command in Iraq adapted to the enemy’s adaptation and transformed the military in Iraq into an effective counterinsurgency force. But none of this happened until the chaos induced by an adaptive enemy had resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. Soldiers, principally from a tactical system that relied on roadside bombs and carefully orchestrated small-unit engagements in places like Fallujah and Ramadi.
Tragically, the chaos of Iraq created the strategic vacuum that allowed Osama bin Laden’s small terrorist organization to morph into larger and more deadly terrorist surrogates and franchises, to include Al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, as well as many others spawned from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Hindu Kush.
THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR
The first year of successful combat by special operating forces in concert with the Afghan Northern Alliance showcased what U.S. Soldiers can do if they give up on big-machine warfare and practice the art of war among the people. Speed, shock, and surprise combined to break the back of the Taliban. I recall a particularly poignant moment in the early months when my television showed images of Special Forces Soldiers wrapped in native Talib shawls and leggings, mounted on horseback, calling in precision fires from B-52 bombers making “lazy eights” in the skies high above. It was a moment when those of us who had been calling for exactly such an imaginative melding of unconventional and high-tech warfare felt vindicated.
Sadly, the moment passed. A defeated Taliban retreated into Pakistan to fight another day. The Taliban, like all of our successful enemies in the past, knew that American patience in war was lacking. It was just a momentary failure for Afghan insurgents whose ancestors had been evicting enemies for 2,300 years. In time, patience and cunning replaced active resistance. Within a year of victory, the Bush administration had decided to fight two wars, with priority given to the one in Iraq, creating another strategic vacuum, which would be filled by a resurgent Taliban . . . and yet another war fought against an adaptive enemy, a war that is with us still.
ISRAEL AND LEBANON THE SECOND TIME: 2006
Contemporary history teaches about the firepower addiction of a Western-style military, unused to fighting against adaptive enemies. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the first air force officer to be appointed head of the Israeli Defense Forces, said upon assuming his duties in 2005 that he believed the American experience in Kosovo demonstrated that a carefully planned, orchestrated, and technologically precise air campaign could collapse Hezbollah’s ability to threaten Israel.
Halutz fell prey to the same demons that were at that very moment confounding his American friends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hezbollah’s demons appeared most decisively in the small village of Bint Jbiel, just over the Israeli-Lebanon border and nearby in the defile of Wadi Saluki. There Hezbollah fighters ambushed and destroyed a battalion’s worth of Israel’s blitzkrieg-era heavy tanks. The parallel disasters of Bint Jbiel and Wadi Saluki became laboratories for teaching how a well-trained insurgent force—exhaustively drilled, carefully dug in, camouflaged, and armed with the first-rate, Soviet-era precision antitank weaponry—could utterly devastate a modern, technologically superior Cold War force, even if that force commanded the air absolutely. These battles strongly suggest that older-generation portable antitank and antiaircraft weapons in the hands of diabolically skilled infantry fighting what theorists now term “hybrid warfare” can win against heavy, mechanized forces if they meld just enough technology with an irregular force whose members are willing to fight to the death.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Non-Western militaries are increasingly internalizing the lessons of wars against technologically superior enemies. Recent works on the operational and tactical problems of fighting Western-style militaries suggest clear warnings. First, non-Western enemies understand Western military vulnerabilities: aversion to casualties and collateral damage, sensitivity to domestic and world opinion, and lack of commitment to conflicts of durations measured in years rather than months. They also perceive that Americans in particular retain a style of war focused on the single offensive dimension of a firepower battle. Moreover, they are already considering how to target Western vulnerabilities while capitalizing on their intrinsic advantages: time, will, and the inherent power of the defensive. Borrowing from Mao and Giap, future enemies have learned the value of time and patience. From their perspective, swift success is not essential to victory.
Future enemies have also realized the advantage of interfering with an intruder’s intention to end a conflict quickly and at minimum cost. Moreover, non-Western armies have learned to limit the effect and duration of air campaigns by dispersing not only their forces but their telecommunications, logistics, and transportation infrastructures. They also understand
