winning wars in the American era. He tells our enemies that winning begins with a willingness to translate sacrifice into a national strategic advantage. He tells them that American vulnerabilities begin with American public opinion and the reluctance of American Soldiers to die. So the first principle is to kill as publicly and as horrifically as possible. Also, avoid the “hard kill” whenever possible: infantry knows how to fight back. Truck drivers and cooks traveling in open trucks are easy kills.
Yahara knew that his greatest ally was time. Americans are impatient and want to win quickly. Yahara knew that Americans would die merely from the natural attrition that attends long wars. He learned on Okinawa that the United States can be beaten only on the ground. Opposition on the sea and in the air is a senseless diversion. Thus a successful opposition strategy begins by “spotting” to the U.S. control of the air and sea (what contemporary gurus call the “global commons”).
Yahara taught that the will is superior to weaponry. Thus, like the Japanese, contemporary enemies of the United States tend to follow a strategy of repurposing older weapons and technologies to fight superior U.S. technologies. Watch any newsreel today provided by the likes of ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other successful rogues. They have left behind captured air and ground systems in favor of an assortment of portable, low-tech substitutes carried by ground Soldiers—for example, shoulder-fired and tripod-mounted antiair and antitank missiles. Newer weapons of our enemies are also derivative in nature, from cell phones to off-the-shelf drones for aerial reconnaissance. Just as in Yahara’s day, the greatest killers of Americans remain the simple mortar, mine, and small arm.
The tactics employed by Yahara remain the tactics of choice for all contemporary enemies: hide from orbiting aircraft and drones, and dig in, fortify, disperse, and hide in cities among the people, where the Americans will not strike. Fight close and make human shields of the innocent to obviate the killing effects of U.S. tactical weapons. Use social media to showcase every error that causes casualties. The Americans who fought and destroyed Yahara’s army fought a “war without mercy.” By 1945 revelations of endless Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, human banzai attacks on virtually every defended atoll, and of the thousands of Americans dead from aerial kamikaze suicide attacks had left U.S. Soldiers without empathy for their enemy. The Japanese had become so dehumanized that “any dead Jap was a good Jap.” Things are different now. If alive today Yahara would envy our enemies who exploit rules of engagement to extract themselves from losing fights. Of course, our enemies fight without such rules.
If war were a football game, Yahara’s asymmetric warfare team would yield a winning record of five-two-two over the seventy years since Okinawa. Enemies such as Saddam in 1991 and any number of other Middle Eastern conventional wannabies would suffer a zero-and-seven season when attempting to mimic Western states in the use of their conventional (and expensive) weapons and doctrine.
WHAT DOES COLONEL YAHARA TEACH US?
The first lesson is counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom tells us that we must never fight the next war like we did the last. Yahara tells us that maybe we should. Perhaps wars in the American era would end better if we considered the past as prologue, if we postulated that the pattern of progression in our wars has been essentially unchanged from Greece in 1948 to Afghanistan today. The fundamental conditions of warfare will last for many generations. While Yahara tells us that the pattern of wars will not change, he certainly would concede that it is a losing proposition to try to predict specific times, enemies, technologies, or war-fighting scenarios. It has never worked before, and it likely never will.
From a practical perspective, Yahara is telling us that war is a test of will, not technology. Of course, we need to exploit new technologies, and we must never seek to fight fair. All too often in the American era Soldiers have died needlessly, killed by enemies like the Japanese who used simple things to achieve extraordinary outcomes. Perhaps we should spend first to buy things that work best against wise and diabolical enemies.
Most importantly, Yahara knew where to strike for maximum effect. If he was right and if our most vulnerable center of gravity is dead Americans, perhaps we should place highest priority on protecting those most likely to die.
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War, however, is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass . . . but always the collision of two living forces. The ultimate aim of waging war . . . must be taken as applying to both sides. Once again, there is interaction. So long as I have not overthrown my opponent I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.1
—Carl von Clausewitz
Once the dogs of war are unleashed and the shooting starts, conflicts follow unpredictable courses. The nineteenth-century philosopher of military strategy Carl von Clausewitz warned that wars are contests between two active, willing enemies, both of whom expect to win. Once begun, war—with its precise planning and cerebral doctrine—quickly devolves into a series of stratagems and counter-stratagems as each side seeks to retain advantages long enough to achieve a decisive end, by collapsing an enemy’s will to resist.2
Over the last seventy years, Western militaries—particularly the U.S. armed forces—have been remarkably consistent in how they fight. They have an extraordinary ability to translate technological innovation, industrial-base capacity, and national treasure into battlefield advantage. But no sooner had Western powers accepted and copied the American way of war than lesser states from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East began in earnest to learn from the sinister wisdom of Colonel Yahara. The colonel and his intellectual progeny are still watching, learning, and adapting. We, on the other hand, have been slow to perceive the growing effectiveness of an asymmetric enemy, partly because of the characteristic Western arrogance that presumes that an enemy, to be a threat, must mimic the Western way of war.
Colonel Yahara was freed from U.S. custody in June 1945 and returned to his homeland, just in time to witness Japan’s former enemy, China, begin to learn from, adapt to, and eventually defeat an enemy who sought to win in the American fashion. Yahara’s old enemy continued to prosecute its way of war in subsequent conflicts and its serial failures suggest a pattern that should disturb us all.
THE CHINESE CIVIL WAR
An effort to redefine and codify an Eastern approach to defeating the Western way of war began in the mountain fastness of Manchuria, immediately after World War II. Mao Zedong and his marshals adapted doctrine from their wartime guerrilla campaigns to fit a conventional war against an enemy superior in technology and matériel. Mao perfected his new way of war against the Nationalists between 1946 and 1949. His simple concepts centered on three tenets, the most important of which was area control. To succeed, Mao’s army first needed to survive in the midst of a larger, better-equipped enemy.3 He divided his troops into small units and scattered them. Maintaining cohesion thus remained his greatest challenge.
Once his own forces were supportable and stable, Mao applied the second tenet—to isolate and compartmentalize the Nationalists. The challenge of this phase was to leverage control of the countryside until the enemy retreated into urban areas and to major lines of communications.4 The final act of the campaign called for finding the enemy’s weakest points and collecting and massing overwhelming force against each sequentially, a process similar to taking apart a strand of pearls one pearl at a time. Mao’s new style of conventional war, though effective, demanded extraordinary discipline and patience under extreme hardship. It also sought quick transition from an area-control force to one capable of fighting a war of movement.
STALEMATE IN KOREA
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