The Art Of War Sun Tsu

Courtesy Of: The History Channel

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise that is attributed to Sun Tzu (also referred to as "Sunzi" and "Sun Wu"), a high ranking military general and strategist during the late Spring and Autumn period (some scholars believe that the Art of War was not completed until the subsequent Warring States period. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it is said to be the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time, and is still read for its military insights.

The Art of War is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy in the world. It has been the most famous and influential of China's Seven Military Classics: "for the last two thousand years it remained the most important military treatise in Asia, where even the common people knew it by name.It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business 
tactics, and beyond.

Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of positioning in military strategy, and that the decision to position an army must be based on both objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective beliefs of other, 
competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_...

Audacious Raid On NATO Base Shows Taliban’s Reach

An audacious Taliban attack on a heavily fortified base in southern Afghanistan did far more damage than initially reported, destroying or severely damaging eight attack jets in the most destructive single strike on Western matériel in the 11-year war, military officials said Sunday.

While other attacks have caused greater loss of life, the assault late Friday at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, one of the largest and best-defended posts in Afghanistan, was troubling to NATO because the attackers were able to penetrate the base, killing two Marines and causing more than $200 million in damage. “We’re saying it’s a very sophisticated attack,” said a military official here. “We’ve lost aircraft in battle, but nothing like this.”

The complex attack, which NATO officials said was conducted by three tightly choreographed teams of militants wearing American Army uniforms, was a reminder that the Taliban remain capable of serious assaults despite the “surge” offensive against them. Now the offensive is over, and nearly 10,000 American Marines have left Helmand Province, a critical stronghold for the Taliban, over the past several months.

Together with a rash of attacks by Afghan security forces against NATO troops — including two over the weekend that left at least six coalition service members dead — the Taliban have put new pressure on the American withdrawal plan, which calls for accelerated troop pullouts through 2014 while training Afghan forces to take over.

military officials and Afghan analysts said that the insurgents may well have prepared for their mission in significant measure by studying easily available satellite images on the Internet. “We don’t underestimate the enemy,” the military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. “We know the enemy has limited capability to do these, but they are not a whole bunch of yokels running around the country.”

The 15 insurgents conducting the attack lost no time from the moment they blew a hole in the perimeter at one of the closest points to the airfield, military officials said. They then raced toward their targets, shooting and setting fire to parked Navy AV-8B Harrier jets and destroying three refueling stations, even as a quick reaction force was mustering to fight them off, a military official said. “It was a running gun battle for a while, two and a half hours, nonetheless they were able to get to the aircraft before we could intercept them,” a military official said, noting that because it happened at night it was difficult until daylight to be sure that all the insurgents had been killed or captured. All but one was killed; the remaining insurgent is in custody, the military said.

Two American Marines were killed in the attack, and nine coalition personnel, including a civilian contractor, were wounded, the military said in a statement. Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, is doing a tour of duty as a helicopter pilot and was stationed at Camp Bastion at the time of the attack, but was not hurt. Camp Bastion is home mostly to British soldiers, while the neighboring camp, known as Leatherneck, has American Marines and other service members.

Six of the jets, which each cost between $23 million and $30 million when they were first acquired by the United States Navy, according to a General Accounting Office report, were completely destroyed and two more were so severely damaged it was unlikely they could be repaired. Also badly damaged were three refueling stations and three soft-skinned aircraft hangars, the military said in a news release.

Determining how it was possible for the insurgents to penetrate and severely damage such a well-defended base, particularly one with clear lines of sight across miles of mostly flat plain, will be important in determining whether this was a unique attack or one that could be replicated either in targeting Western bases or Afghan ones, military experts said.

“The Taliban retain the command and military planning infrastructure to put together complex and sophisticated attacks,” said Stephen Biddle, a professor at George Washington University with expertise in defense studies.

“If this is a clever surprise, it can’t work twice; it tells you the people are clever and can do elaborate planning, using subterfuge and possibly captured uniforms,” Mr. Biddle said. “It would be a different matter if they managed to blow a hole in a heavily defended perimeter — then the Afghan National Security Forces are looking at a big, big problem.”

Wahid Mujda, an Afghan analyst who tracks the Taliban, said that despite the Taliban’s statement that the attack was retaliation for an anti-Muslim video, the video almost certainly had nothing to do with it.

“I do not think that the Camp Bastion attack had anything to do with the anti-Prophet movie,” Mr. Mujda said. “Given the sophistication of the attack one can say with a lot of confidence that the Taliban had been training, rehearsing and preparing for weeks and even months. Everything was not planned and decided overnight.”

He predicted that the Afghan government and the international military forces here would see similar attacks in the future.

“They have experts, strategists, planners and designers, they have a great knowledge of the modern technology,” Mr. Mujda said.

Via: "The New York Times"

The Poor Man's Artillery

What IEDs Can Do

By CLANCY SIGAL
September 16, 2010
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

The IRA tried to kill me on three separate occasions. Nothing personal, just that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Provos' deadly "mainland campaign" against Brits took the form of planting IEDs, improvised homemade bombs, in central London where I lived. In Picadilly, shrapnel from a device inside a letter box grazed my head; the same month, a McDonald's I walked past on Oxford Street blew up; and still later, outside a Sloane Square pub, glass shattered at my feet after an explosion. Such an intense level of exposure and vulnerability left me shaken.

The Provos had resorted to the "poor man's artillery" of IEDs because they were outnumbered and outgunned by the British army and Ulster constabulary. How else were they to achieve their political agenda other than by indiscriminately killing British civilians?

I read Afghanistan casualty lists almost every night, and my rough calculation seems to agree with the Pentagon's: that IEDs – jerry-built, cleverly-disguised roadside bombs – cost way more American (and Afghan) lives than snipers, mortars or RPGs. According to NATO and the Department of Defense, despite General Petraeus's soothing assertion that the incidents are "flattening out", since 2007, the number of Taliban IEDs has increased nearly 400 per cent, and IED kills by that same 400 per cent and IED-crippled troops by 700 per cent. At least 30 per cent of combat soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are at risk of potentially disabling neurological disorders from IED blast waves – without suffering a scratch.

But percentages don't bleed. For yourself, look up the casualty lists from your own state or district, add up the IED "kinetic events", and study, really look at, the names and photographs of the dead soldiers who suddenly seem part of our own families. The harsh lesson is that no foreign invading army like ours can beat a "backward" native people who, for a few dollars and in five minutes, can build a dish pan, copper wire, a left-over 155mm Soviet shell and a bit of Semtex or C-4 and fertilizer into a killer IED hidden in potholes, among garbage and even inside animals.

It's terrifyingly easy for a soldier to get blasted apart by these devices. You don't even have to step on a pressure plate any more, just walk by an innocent-looking rock and – bang! – you're shredded by remote control. Increasingly, these things are set off by text messages from afar. Jihadists may be typecast as primitive "ragheads" on TV news, but they have learned to be thoughtful and high-tech assassins.

In his latest Oval Office speech, President Obama, in paying anodyne tribute to the troops, glancingly referred to "the signature wounds of today's wars, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury (TBI)". Let's pause a moment on TBI, where a visible wound may not show but the person's brain has been shaken as in a Mixmaster by the faster-than-speed-of-sound blast of an IED explosion. No helmet or body armor yet invented can protect from its peculiar one-two punch that causes, on the battlefield or much later, microscopic cellular and metabolic damage, leading to blindness, deafness, memory loss, premature ageing and destruction of neurons that cannot be replaced.

As the pediatric surgeon and Vietnam veteran Ronald Glasser says, "the symbol (of the new IED-dominated battles) is not the cemetery but the orthopedic ward" and neurological unit. Strangely, army commanders are extremely reluctant to award Purple Hearts for IED wounds, which can be hard for combat medics to diagnose in the heat of battle. Even skilled field-hospital emergency doctors may miss the insidious danger signs. If a soldier looks unscratched, just a little dazed, military culture demands he or she be shipped back to fight again. Troopers themselves may be reluctant to report symptoms, fearing career damage or being seen as a goof-off.

Once back home, soldiers very often have to struggle for treatment. Congress is eager to vote the Pentagon $20bn for JIEDDO, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Organization – who thinks up these names? – whose own boss, general Michael Oates, confesses is only marginally useful. But when it comes to money for medical research into the little-known effects of TBI, the government drags its feet.

At the moment, despite evidence that 30 per cent of our battlefield casualties are bomb-concussion cases, the military and the Veterans Administration make it as hard as possible to get help. President Obama boasts that "because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to go on the offence" in a deteriorating Afghanistan, which translates into more visible and invisible wounded. Soldiers lose their lives, arms, legs, eyes, even faces. We can see those terrible wounds. But concussed, TBI-suffering soldiers also lose parts of their minds sometimes without even knowing it. Until they get home and can't remember their daughter's name.

Clancy Sigal is a novelist (Going Away) and screenwriter (Frieda) in Los Angeles. He can be reached at clancy@jsasoc.com

Guerrilla Of Arabia

How One Of Britain's Most Brilliant Military Tacticians Created The Taliban's Battle Strategy

By Neil Faulkner
Friday, 17 September 2010
Courtesy Of "The Independent"

• • ary was to capture the city of Marjah in Afghanistan's war-torn Helmand province. Fifteen thousand troops, mainly American, British and Afghan, were to take on between 400 and 1,000 Taliban insurgents holed up in a city of 80,000 people.
    Commanders talked of a "new model war". An Afghan administration and police force would move into Marjah behind the soldiers. Engineers would maintain power and water supplies. "We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," said the then-US General Stanley McChrystal.
    But as the offensive unfolded, reported Taliban casualties were few, and Marjah turned out not to exist. Faithfully reported by global news media, it was in fact invented by US military officials. "This is all a war of perceptions," McChrystal said. As The Washington Post reported, the decision to launch the offensive was intended to influence US public opinion on the effectiveness of military action in Afghanistan by showing it could win a "large and loud victory". In reality, Marjah is a vaguely-defined area of villages, markets and family compounds. If there are tens of thousands of people, they are spread across 125 sq miles. Marjah was invented because a military operation has to have a clear-cut goal to be deemed a victory. President Obama had doubled the total US troop deployment, but public support was waning. The generals needed a victory, so they created Marjah and planned Operation Moshtarak to capture it.
    A phantom city was needed because the enemy is a phantom. A task force is assembled and motors into bandit country. If it is too small, it risks annihilation. If it is too big, it finds itself punching the air. A golden rule of guerrilla warfare is that you fight only if you are certain to win. So the invaders of Afghanistan are waging a war against an enemy who is never there.
    "Suppose we were (as we might be)," wrote T E Lawrence, "an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed... Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert ..."
    Lawrence was a young officer who had spent the first two years of the First World War in the intelligence department in Cairo. On a diplomatic mission to the Hijaz region of western-central Arabia in 1916, he had formed a personal relationship with Prince Faisal, a commander now ranged in revolt against Ottoman rule. Faisal asked that Lawrence be attached to his service as a British liaison officer. Lawrence's superiors agreed. The Ottoman Empire, though much reduced, still controlled a vast territory from south-eastern Europe to the Caucasus, the Tigris, the Yemen, and the Suez Canal. Plunging into the world war, this ramshackle traditional empire, though fighting a war on four fronts, against the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in Gallipoli, Sinai, and Mesopotamia, proved a tougher opponent than its enemies predicted.
    The Arab Revolt, led by the Emir of Mecca, had been encouraged by secret British diplomacy as a source of military and ideological support for the Allied cause. But after momentary success – principally the capture of Mecca itself, along with the Red Sea ports of Jidda and Rabegh – the Revolt stalled. Medina remained in Ottoman hands, and the city's 10,000-strong garrison was receiving reinforcement. When the Turks went on to the offensive, the Arabs fell back, and the tribal irregulars forming the army began to melt away. In late 1916, the Revolt hung by a thread.
    Lawrence, newly arrived in the Hijaz, was witness to this looming disaster. His response appears to have been a radical re-conceptualisation of the war. He turned conventional military thinking on its head and created a new theory of modern guerrilla warfare. What if the Arabs ignored the Turks? What if they simply marched away from them into the desert? What if they constituted themselves as a "silent threat" and waged a "war of detachment"?
    This they did. In fact, even before Lawrence had worked it out, they had made a start by marching 200 miles north – away from the Turks threatening them around Medina – and establishing a new base at Wejh. Supplied here from the Red Sea by the Royal Navy, they then staged a series of raids on the Hijaz Railway. Running through 1,000km of desert, a lifeline on which the Ottoman grip on Arabia depended, the Turks had to defend it. But against an enemy who could appear suddenly out of the desert haze at any point to defend the line at all was to defend all of it. So instead of a concentration of force at the decisive point – at Medina, from which a thrust towards Mecca might have snuffed out the rebellion – the Turks were forced to plant 100, 200 or 300 men every few kilometres.
    Then, in June 1917, Faisal's Northern Army, inspired by its brilliant British military adviser, leapt forwards again, some 250 miles to Aqaba. But they did not go direct: following a 500-mile route through the desert, a small commando group appeared north-east of Aqaba, raised the local tribes in revolt, and rolled up the Ottoman positions all the way to the coast.
    With a new forward base, the insurgency could be supplied as it spread into Syria. British intelligence reports from 1918 reveal its success. The Arab armies comprised about 5,000 regulars and a fluctuating force of up to 20,000 tribal irregulars. Yet more Turks were deployed against them than there were fighting General Allenby's army of 340,000 men west of the Jordan in Palestine.
    In fact, given that most of the serious fighting was done by Faisal's Northern Army, which was never more than 8,000-strong, often as low as 3,000, the imbalance was extreme. The raw statistics imply that one of Faisal's guerrillas was 35 times more effective in tying down Turkish troops than one of Allenby's Tommies.
    Lawrence's ideas on guerrilla warfare were touched upon in his "Twenty-seven Articles", which appeared in an internal British intelligence bulletin in 1917. They were then developed in three post-war treatises. Reading closely, one can identify 15 distinct principles of guerrilla warfare (see box). They are extraordinary. They invert many principles of conventional military theory, such as concentration of force, and the centrality of pitched battle to destroy the enemy's main forces and will to fight. In this sense, they are the work of a brilliant maverick – an unconventional intellectual who had not even undergone the military training given to volunteer wartime officers (though he probably learnt something as a member of the Oxford University Officers' Training Corps).
    They draw on the traditional tactics of the "eastern way of war" – as embodied in Bedouin tribal raiding – yet elevate this into a strategy for what would later be called a "national liberation struggle". The Arab leaders' emphasis was on creating a regular army, not on guerrilla warfare. Again, just as Lawrence was not hidebound by British military tradition, nor was he constrained by Arab political ambition.
    The third striking thing about the 15 principles is how seminal they are. Guerrilla warfare is as old as human conflict, but Lawrence's treatises represent the first systematic conceptualisation of its strategy. And this conceptualisation is remarkably comprehensive. Later theorists of guerrilla warfare – notably Mao, Nguyen Giap and Che Guevara – have added little of substance. Lawrence is the real teacher of the guerrilla fighter.
    The fourth remarkable thing is lack of recognition for the intellectual achievement. Despite the central significance of guerrilla warfare in the last century of world history, Lawrence has rarely been acknowledged. Robert Taber's 1965 book, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare, Theory and Practice, has no mention of Lawrence nor the Arab Revolt. Only recently has awareness grown – notably among US Army officers – of Lawrence's significance as a military theorist.
    The exigencies of imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the study of guerrilla warfare a necessity, and officers have been encouraged to read Lawrence's 1922 treatise Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Leading counterinsurgency specialist Lieutenant-Colonel John Nagl echoed Lawrence in the title of a recent book Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2002). His point – "to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife" – encapsulates the challenge of foreign invaders fighting guerrillas.
    But Seven Pillars of Wisdom, however carefully read by US officers, is likely to be the book of their defeat in Afghanistan. The counterinsurgent regular cannot replicate the tactics of the insurgent guerrilla. The former is an invader. The guerrilla is embedded in local society. This basic dichotomy manifests itself in a dozen practical, and potentially deadly, ways. The regular is imposed on the military landscape and is dependent on heavy equipment, modern communications, and external supply. Intelligence depends on observation posts, patrols, and interrogation, and security entails the full panoply of fortified posts, armoured vehicles, and firepower. The invaders are therefore highly visible, relatively immobile, and poorly informed.
    Compare the guerrilla. He is largely self-sufficient, highly mobile, with superb intelligence from his social network, and indistinguishable from the civilian population of which he is part. He is almost invisible, yet has the capacity to strike anywhere, anytime. The regular strives to dominate landscape by visible threat and heavy firepower. But wherever he is, the guerrilla is not.
    The guerrilla dominates the landscape, for his embeddedness makes him an invisible, secure, and ineradicable presence. He is powerful because he is a phantom. Let the last word go to Lawrence. He could be describing Operation Moshtarak – 15,000 men chasing phantoms out of a non-existent city in Afghanistan. But, of course, it is the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918. "It [the rebellion] had a sophisticated alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts... The active rebels had the virtues of secrecy and self-control, and the qualities of speed, endurance, and independence of arteries of supply... The presence of the enemy was secondary. Final victory seemed certain, if the war lasted long enough for us to work it out."
    Dr Neil Faulkner is editor of the new 'Military Times' magazine (out now), and co-director of the Great Arab Revolt Project. For details, visit Military-times.co.uk
    Military mastermind: Lawrence of Arabia's 15 principles of modern guerrilla warfare
    1. Strive above all to win hearts and minds
    2. Establish an unassailable base
    3. Remain strategically dispersed
    4. Make maximum use of mobility
    5. Operate mainly in small, local groups
    6. Remain largely detached from the enemy
    7. Do not attempt to hold ground
    8. Operate in depth rather than en face (i.e. not in lines)
    9. Aim for perfect intelligence about the enemy
    10. Concentrate only for momentary tactical superiority
    11. Strike only when the enemy can be taken by surprise
    12. Never engage in sustained combat
    13. Always have lines of retreat open
    14. Make war on matériel rather than on men
    15. Make a virtue of the individuality, irregularity, and unpredictability of guerrillasORMAL
  • LARGE
  • EXTRA LARGE

GETTY IMAGES

Action man: TE Lawrence, the archaeologist, author and military leader, wrote a series of seminal treatises on guerrilla warfare

•  MORE PICTURES

The aim of Operation Moshtarak in February was to capture the city of Marjah in Afghanistan's war-torn Helmand province. Fifteen thousand troops, mainly American, British and Afghan, were to take on between 400 and 1,000 Taliban insurgents holed up in a city of 80,000 people.

Commanders talked of a "new model war". An Afghan administration and police force would move into Marjah behind the soldiers. Engineers would maintain power and water supplies. "We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," said the then-US General Stanley McChrystal.

But as the offensive unfolded, reported Taliban casualties were few, and Marjah turned out not to exist. Faithfully reported by global news media, it was in fact invented by US military officials. "This is all a war of perceptions," McChrystal said. As The Washington Post reported, the decision to launch the offensive was intended to influence US public opinion on the effectiveness of military action in Afghanistan by showing it could win a "large and loud victory". In reality, Marjah is a vaguely-defined area of villages, markets and family compounds. If there are tens of thousands of people, they are spread across 125 sq miles. Marjah was invented because a military operation has to have a clear-cut goal to be deemed a victory. President Obama had doubled the total US troop deployment, but public support was waning. The generals needed a victory, so they created Marjah and planned Operation Moshtarak to capture it.

A phantom city was needed because the enemy is a phantom. A task force is assembled and motors into bandit country. If it is too small, it risks annihilation. If it is too big, it finds itself punching the air. A golden rule of guerrilla warfare is that you fight only if you are certain to win. So the invaders of Afghanistan are waging a war against an enemy who is never there.

"Suppose we were (as we might be)," wrote T E Lawrence, "an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed... Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert ..."

Lawrence was a young officer who had spent the first two years of the First World War in the intelligence department in Cairo. On a diplomatic mission to the Hijaz region of western-central Arabia in 1916, he had formed a personal relationship with Prince Faisal, a commander now ranged in revolt against Ottoman rule. Faisal asked that Lawrence be attached to his service as a British liaison officer. Lawrence's superiors agreed. The Ottoman Empire, though much reduced, still controlled a vast territory from south-eastern Europe to the Caucasus, the Tigris, the Yemen, and the Suez Canal. Plunging into the world war, this ramshackle traditional empire, though fighting a war on four fronts, against the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in Gallipoli, Sinai, and Mesopotamia, proved a tougher opponent than its enemies predicted.

The Arab Revolt, led by the Emir of Mecca, had been encouraged by secret British diplomacy as a source of military and ideological support for the Allied cause. But after momentary success – principally the capture of Mecca itself, along with the Red Sea ports of Jidda and Rabegh – the Revolt stalled. Medina remained in Ottoman hands, and the city's 10,000-strong garrison was receiving reinforcement. When the Turks went on to the offensive, the Arabs fell back, and the tribal irregulars forming the army began to melt away. In late 1916, the Revolt hung by a thread.

Lawrence, newly arrived in the Hijaz, was witness to this looming disaster. His response appears to have been a radical re-conceptualisation of the war. He turned conventional military thinking on its head and created a new theory of modern guerrilla warfare. What if the Arabs ignored the Turks? What if they simply marched away from them into the desert? What if they constituted themselves as a "silent threat" and waged a "war of detachment"?

This they did. In fact, even before Lawrence had worked it out, they had made a start by marching 200 miles north – away from the Turks threatening them around Medina – and establishing a new base at Wejh. Supplied here from the Red Sea by the Royal Navy, they then staged a series of raids on the Hijaz Railway. Running through 1,000km of desert, a lifeline on which the Ottoman grip on Arabia depended, the Turks had to defend it. But against an enemy who could appear suddenly out of the desert haze at any point to defend the line at all was to defend all of it. So instead of a concentration of force at the decisive point – at Medina, from which a thrust towards Mecca might have snuffed out the rebellion – the Turks were forced to plant 100, 200 or 300 men every few kilometres.

Then, in June 1917, Faisal's Northern Army, inspired by its brilliant British military adviser, leapt forwards again, some 250 miles to Aqaba. But they did not go direct: following a 500-mile route through the desert, a small commando group appeared north-east of Aqaba, raised the local tribes in revolt, and rolled up the Ottoman positions all the way to the coast.

With a new forward base, the insurgency could be supplied as it spread into Syria. British intelligence reports from 1918 reveal its success. The Arab armies comprised about 5,000 regulars and a fluctuating force of up to 20,000 tribal irregulars. Yet more Turks were deployed against them than there were fighting General Allenby's army of 340,000 men west of the Jordan in Palestine.

In fact, given that most of the serious fighting was done by Faisal's Northern Army, which was never more than 8,000-strong, often as low as 3,000, the imbalance was extreme. The raw statistics imply that one of Faisal's guerrillas was 35 times more effective in tying down Turkish troops than one of Allenby's Tommies.

Lawrence's ideas on guerrilla warfare were touched upon in his "Twenty-seven Articles", which appeared in an internal British intelligence bulletin in 1917. They were then developed in three post-war treatises. Reading closely, one can identify 15 distinct principles of guerrilla warfare (see box). They are extraordinary. They invert many principles of conventional military theory, such as concentration of force, and the centrality of pitched battle to destroy the enemy's main forces and will to fight. In this sense, they are the work of a brilliant maverick – an unconventional intellectual who had not even undergone the military training given to volunteer wartime officers (though he probably learnt something as a member of the Oxford University Officers' Training Corps).

They draw on the traditional tactics of the "eastern way of war" – as embodied in Bedouin tribal raiding – yet elevate this into a strategy for what would later be called a "national liberation struggle". The Arab leaders' emphasis was on creating a regular army, not on guerrilla warfare. Again, just as Lawrence was not hidebound by British military tradition, nor was he constrained by Arab political ambition.

The third striking thing about the 15 principles is how seminal they are. Guerrilla warfare is as old as human conflict, but Lawrence's treatises represent the first systematic conceptualisation of its strategy. And this conceptualisation is remarkably comprehensive. Later theorists of guerrilla warfare – notably Mao, Nguyen Giap and Che Guevara – have added little of substance. Lawrence is the real teacher of the guerrilla fighter.

The fourth remarkable thing is lack of recognition for the intellectual achievement. Despite the central significance of guerrilla warfare in the last century of world history, Lawrence has rarely been acknowledged. Robert Taber's 1965 book, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare, Theory and Practice, has no mention of Lawrence nor the Arab Revolt. Only recently has awareness grown – notably among US Army officers – of Lawrence's significance as a military theorist.

The exigencies of imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the study of guerrilla warfare a necessity, and officers have been encouraged to read Lawrence's 1922 treatise Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Leading counterinsurgency specialist Lieutenant-Colonel John Nagl echoed Lawrence in the title of a recent book Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2002). His point – "to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife" – encapsulates the challenge of foreign invaders fighting guerrillas.

But Seven Pillars of Wisdom, however carefully read by US officers, is likely to be the book of their defeat in Afghanistan. The counterinsurgent regular cannot replicate the tactics of the insurgent guerrilla. The former is an invader. The guerrilla is embedded in local society. This basic dichotomy manifests itself in a dozen practical, and potentially deadly, ways. The regular is imposed on the military landscape and is dependent on heavy equipment, modern communications, and external supply. Intelligence depends on observation posts, patrols, and interrogation, and security entails the full panoply of fortified posts, armoured vehicles, and firepower. The invaders are therefore highly visible, relatively immobile, and poorly informed.

Compare the guerrilla. He is largely self-sufficient, highly mobile, with superb intelligence from his social network, and indistinguishable from the civilian population of which he is part. He is almost invisible, yet has the capacity to strike anywhere, anytime. The regular strives to dominate landscape by visible threat and heavy firepower. But wherever he is, the guerrilla is not.

The guerrilla dominates the landscape, for his embeddedness makes him an invisible, secure, and ineradicable presence. He is powerful because he is a phantom. Let the last word go to Lawrence. He could be describing Operation Moshtarak – 15,000 men chasing phantoms out of a non-existent city in Afghanistan. But, of course, it is the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918. "It [the rebellion] had a sophisticated alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts... The active rebels had the virtues of secrecy and self-control, and the qualities of speed, endurance, and independence of arteries of supply... The presence of the enemy was secondary. Final victory seemed certain, if the war lasted long enough for us to work it out."

Dr Neil Faulkner is editor of the new 'Military Times' magazine (out now), and co-director of the Great Arab Revolt Project. For details, visit Military-times.co.uk

Military Mastermind: Lawrence Of Arabia's 15 Principles Of Modern Guerrilla Warfare

1. Strive above all to win hearts and minds

2. Establish an unassailable base

3. Remain strategically dispersed

4. Make maximum use of mobility

5. Operate mainly in small, local groups

6. Remain largely detached from the enemy

7. Do not attempt to hold ground

8. Operate in depth rather than en face (i.e. not in lines)

9. Aim for perfect intelligence about the enemy

10. Concentrate only for momentary tactical superiority

11. Strike only when the enemy can be taken by surprise

12. Never engage in sustained combat

13. Always have lines of retreat open

14. Make war on matériel rather than on men

15. Make a virtue of the individuality, irregularity, and unpredictability of guerrillas

Drones Revolutionized The Face Of Warfare

Story Highlights

Expert: Robots have biggest impact in 5,000 years on how man fights war

UAVs credited with killing more than half al Qaeda's top 20 leaders

U.S. military commanders are now trying to keep pace with battlefield demand

U.S. government admits that civilians, as well as targets, are dying in some strikes

From Nic Robertson
CNN Senior International Correspondent
July 24, 2009 -- Updated 0258 GMT (1058 HKT)
Courtesy Of CNN International

(CNN) -- Barely an hour's drive from the casinos of Las Vegas, a group of unassuming buildings have become as important as the trenches were to WWI. The big difference? Today's warriors are fighting without getting in harm's way, using drones to attack targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Remote-controlled drones, such as the Predator, are proving increasingly popular with the U.S. military.

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U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Major Morgan Andrews is one such combatant. He kisses his wife goodbye, drives to Creech, a tiny desert air force base in Nevada, and within minutes could be killing insurgents on the other side of the world.

Andrews fights not from the seat of the F16 he joined the air force to fly but from a darkened ground control station. He pilots a remote-controlled Predator, a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) which can spy on and attack positions and personnel without risk to its controller, shooting deadly Hellfire missiles at enemy fighters in support of fellow soldiers.

"You're talking to them on the radios as if we were in a normal airplane flying overhead," says Andrews. "You see the imagery, you know what's going on, you see what you're looking at. It's very easy when something like that is happening to project yourself there and feel a part of the battle. Like I said, your heart starts racing a little bit." Is remote-controlled warfare a good or a bad idea? Tell us what you think.

Meanwhile, intelligence analysts get to see images in real time and can identify personnel on the ground.

There are now more than 7,000 UAVs ranging from the workhorse, the Predator, and its beefier, deadlier kin the Reaper, to army drones like the tiny hand-launched Raven and the larger Shadow.

The drones are dramatically tilting the war in favor of the United States. Predators, for example, played a key role in killing al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2006. UAVs are credited with killing more than half al Qaeda's top 20 leaders.

World's Untold Stories: Warfare by Remote

For this month's World's Untold Stories Nic Robertson takes us inside the revolutionary world of robotic warfare and UAVs, better known as drones.
Thurs July 23: 0430 ET, 1300 ET/Sat July 25: 0430 ET,

see full schedule »

Now U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants more UAVs. Already he has said that the next generation of fighter planes -- the F-35 that took decades to develop at a cost of more than half-a-billion dollars each -- will be the last manned fighter aircraft.

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF, explains that the next phase will enable a single drone to provide as many as 60 simultaneous live video feeds directly to combat troops. Some new drones will be as small as flies, others walk -- all appear destined to work with decreasing human input.

"The future of how you use these un-manned systems or remotely piloted systems is really unlimited," says Deptula, based at the Pentagon and racing to keep pace with battlefield needs as well as Gates's demands. "We need to open our minds and think more about capability and impact we are going to achieve as opposed to how we've done business in the past." Watch how UAVs are changing the face of warfare »

At Creech, frontline requests surged when weapons were first put on the Predator. In Iraq and Afghanistan drones have become so indispensable that missions are cancelled if they are not available

Don't Miss

• 'They circled above and watched U.S. soldiers die in front of them'
• U.S. envoy told: Pakistan drone strikes not working
• Sources: U.S. resumes Pakistan drone flights
• U.N. envoy calls for probe into U.S. drone attacks

Robotic warfare expert Peter Singer, who advised President Barack Obama's campaign team and has authored "Wired for War," says that remote warfare is changing mankind's monopoly on how conflict is fought for the first time in 5,000 years. All that limits its advance is its application, not the technology.

"The barriers of war in our society are already lowering," he says. "This tech may allow them to lower to the ground. And we might already be seeing this in the strikes being carried out on Pakistan."

He points out that raw numbers over the last year show the same number of strikes as the opening of the Kosovo war. "But we didn't debate about it in Congress, we don't talk about it daily in our media."

Pakistani officials say drones are killing al Qaeda leaders who thought they were beyond U.S. reach. But even the U.S. government admits civilians are dying in those attacks too.

Singer fears the use of drones is misunderstood as cowardice, undermining the effectiveness of attacks and ultimately losing the war UAVs are fighting.

He explains that last year one of the most popular songs in the Pakistani charts talked about America fighting without honor, adding that the U.S. is "getting better and better at targeting leaders but perhaps creating a context that gets more recruits."

The spokesman for Taliban leader Mullah Omar recently told me that it is not afraid of drones, that it doesn't fear death. Deptula disagrees and quotes recently declassified comments between two Taliban leaders: "Tanks and armor are not a big deal, the planes are the killers."

He says that of more than 600 Hellfires fired by Predators, over 95 percent hit their targets. Those that failed did so generally through mechanical fault, loss of guidance or a target moving at the last instant, Deptula says.

Singer cites other instances when a computer fault has turned robotic warfare into a mass casualty event. "Last year in South Africa an anti-aircraft had a 'software glitch' during a training exercise," he says. "It was supposed to fire upwards into the sky, instead it lowered and it fired in a circle and killed nine soldiers, all because of a software glitch."

For the U.S. military the gains more obviously outweigh the glitches. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of service men and women have had limbs and lives saved by bomb-detecting bots. Conservative estimates say that fighting from home and putting robots in to war has saved hundreds of millions of dollars.

At Creech the demand for Predator pilots is so intense that it is mobilizing Air National Guard and reservists. It has also introduced an experimental training program for air force cadets from the videogame generation.

Colonel Chris Chambliss, based at Creech, explains: "If you look at younger people right now, they multitask much better than I do. They can do a lot of things with a lot of different information, gather all that in. That's certainly a skill set we need."

Cadet Greg Groves, who is in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, has never flown a plane before -- but is well aware of his responsibilities.

He says: "It's pretty clear that it's not a video game, and it is real life and that what I do directly affects someone else halfway around the world. So I don't think that's going to be a big problem for me."

Groves' father and grandfather were both in the military: when he leaves for Creech he'll be the first in his family to go to war without fear of dying.

Some commanders, such as Colonel Baxter Swift, based at USAF Balad in Iraq, says the future has only just begun.

He says: "It's almost like what the hot air balloon was back in the Civil War for us. 'Hey, I can rise above and look around and see what the forces are doing on the battlefield.' So now we are just in the pioneering stage."

Yet if U.S. forces can have UAVs, so can other nations. An estimated 40 or more countries also are developing drones, with an Iranian UAV already shot down over Iraq a few months ago. Even Hezbollah -- a political movement, not a state --- has used them against Israel. Watch how the demand for UAVs has increased »

For his part, Singer draws another historical parallel, comparing the U.S. and the UAV to the British invention of the tank in the early 20th century.

"There is no such thing as a permanent first maneuver advantage," Singer says.

"The British came out of WWI with the most tanks, they invented the tank and yet they didn't figure out the best way to use it in the wars they would be fighting. It was the Germans that figured that out and it was the Germans that would be fighting and would win with the tank when WWII starts."

All About U.S. Air Force Activities • The Taliban • Al Qaeda • Pakistan • Iraq • Afghanistan

The Art Of War For Dummies

By Jeff Huber,
June 16, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-war News

Military precision is to precision what Kenny G is to jazz. So it is that the art of war – known in our command and staff colleges as operational art – has a language so vague that it’s useless.

Take the term center of gravity. Everyone concurs that it is a vital concept, but nobody agrees on what it means. A Marine will tell you there can only be one center of gravity, but that’s because Marines can only think about one thing at a time (loving apologies to Staff Sgt. Joe Cleveland). An Air Force pilot will tell you a center of gravity is anything he can bomb, so you need to buy him a lot of expensive bombers so he can bomb everything. A naval aviator will tell you the center of gravity is always an aircraft carrier, even in land warfare. If you ask an intelligence officer what a center of gravity is he’ll tell you it’s classified so don’t quote him by name, and if you ask an Army general what a center of gravity is he’ll start breathing through his mouth.

No wonder the dummies running our woebegone wars can’t find their way out of Iraq or Afghanistan with a map and a flashlight.

Some desk commandos in the Pentagon think the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen says the Afghan people are “the real centers of gravity." Sen. John Kerry says the strategic center of gravity in Afghanistan is Pakistan, an observation that explains much about his track record at crafting winning strategies.

The 19th-century Prussian general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz defined "center of gravity" (Schwerpunkt) as “the point against which all our energies should be directed." Clausewitz also established that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means” and that "the political object" must determine "the military objective to be reached." It doesn’t take a cosmology major to figure out that an enemy’s center of gravity is the main obstacle between our objective and us, and that our center of gravity is the asset that will achieve our objective.

Perhaps it’s understandable that our military and political leaders are so confused about the centers of gravity in the Bananastans. Clausewitz tells us that “strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war" and that "the aim will determine the series of actions intended to achieve it." National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks unveiled our new Bananastan strategy in March, and its "realistic and achievable objectives" are unadulterated delirium.

We can’t create "an effective government in Afghanistan" or a "stable constitutional government in Pakistan." "Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan" won’t "degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks." The only thing today’s terrorists need to plan and launch international attacks is an iPhone; they don’t need to hunker down in a mountaintop cave on the far side of the Khyber Pass to use one of those things. They have freedom of action to operate from front row center at Bob Redford’s film festival in the Rockies if they choose to. "Involving the international community to actively assist in addressing these objectives" won’t be of any help. The Bananastan strategy objectives are so fantastic that the intergalactic community from the Star Trek universe couldn’t help us achieve them.

Not even the Vulcans could derive logical centers of gravity from the war aims the Jones gang has dreamed up. Spock himself would blanch at the thought of crafting measures of effectiveness to determine whether or not we’re making progress toward achieving such cockamamie goals; but Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new top Bananastan general, has taken a shot at it. "The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his June 2 confirmation hearing. "It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence."

Not a single member of that committee had sufficient intellect or spine to ask McChrystal how many shielded Afghans, in his opinion, might constitute victory.

Centers of gravity can change over time, space, and levels of war. That sounds more complex than a double-decker 3-D chess tournament at first, but it’s reasonably simple. Folks who can spell their names correctly will catch on to the time and space model quickly enough. Next week’s umpteenth reoccupation of al-Kaboom, for example, will have different centers of gravity than today’s air raid on the terrorist camp that’s camouflaged as a Muslim wedding chapel. The basic levels of war are the tactical, operational, and strategic. The tactical level is where combat takes place, and the strategic level is where military actions achieve (or fail to achieve) a war’s political aims. Tactical actions are planned and coordinated to achieve strategic goals at the operational level.

Tactical and operational centers of gravity consist of some type of armed force. To the U-boat skipper bent on sinking a supply convoy, the enemy center of gravity is the convoy’s destroyer escort. An operational center of gravity may be the armored division that blocks us from capturing a major oil field, or an air defense system that thwarts our efforts to bomb key infrastructure.

Strategic centers of gravity are always political leadership. Common military wisdom deems that popular support or national resources or the media can be strategic centers of gravity, but common military wisdom is all too common and none too wise. Population, resources, and so on may be critical factors – strengths, weaknesses, or critical vulnerabilities – but they are only important as they affect political leadership. The obsession of Mullen and McChrystal with the Afghan population is cause for grave concern. A population may influence leadership with its vote or by storming the palace, but it is your enemy’s leadership, not its angry mob, that can produce the political behavior you want. The effect of popular opinion is minimal in oppressive nations, but its influence is overrated even in so-called liberal democracies. In the last two federal elections, Americans overwhelmingly voted for the antiwar agenda. For all the good it did us, we all might as well have cast our ballots in Florida.

The overarching strategic importance of political leadership makes you want to think very, very hard before you charge off with a goal of regime-change, as our Mesopotamia mistake so vividly illustrates. And the puppets we propped up in the Bananastans haven’t done so well either, have they? That crazy so-and-so McChrystal told the BBC on Friday that the Bananastan bog-down “will go on until we achieve the kind of progress we want to achieve. It won’t be short.”

Of course it won’t be short. No American conflict is short in the long war era, even though the oldest warfare sage available to us, Sun Tzu, famously warned that "no nation ever profited from a long war."

And as the living sage Pete Seeger famously asks, when will we ever learn?

The Taliban To Choke US Afghanistan Mission

How The Taliban Hopes To Choke U.S. Afghanistan Mission

By By MARK THOMPSON, Washington
Source: Time Magazine
Tue Dec 9, 10:40 am ET
Courtesy Of Yahoo News

Perhaps the Taliban are observing the old military axiom that amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics. In a pair of attacks over the weekend in northwest Pakistan, militants destroyed more than 150 Humvees and other vehicles bound for U.S. troops and allies fighting in Afghanistan - the third attack on NATO supply lines inside a month. Those attacks have highlighted an ongoing vulnerability along the overland routes through mountain passes along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier that are used to transport more than 75% of the supplies sent by the U.S. to its 32,000 troops in Afghanistan. So, as President-elect Barack Obama prepares to send more troops to join the fight in Afghanistan, Pentagon planners are scrambling to figure out how to keep those already there - and the anticipated reinforcements - supplied with food, fuel, bullets and everything else a modern army needs.

"Without adequate sustainment, the operational deployment cannot maintain constant pressure on the enemy," Lieutenant Christopher Manganaro, a young U.S. officer in Afghanistan has written in the professional journal Army Logistics. And the Pentagon can't do it all with airplanes. "Few airfields in Afghanistan can support aircraft larger than a C-130," Manganaro added, "limiting the number of high-value items that U.S. Army units can transport by air." (See pictures of NATO troops in Afghanistan.)

There is no sharper contrast between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than their supply routes. In Iraq, the U.S. military basically owns the skies and roads that run from Kuwait into Iraq, through which nearly all supplies flow. But that's hardly the case in Pakistan, where most goods arrive at the Indian Ocean port of Karachi and then are shipped over land, often to Peshawar. Then they're funneled through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, 40 miles away. Pakistan is plagued with hit-and-run militancy even in some of its major cities, and everything west of Peshawar is pretty much enemy territory.

Militants hijacked a convoy of more than a dozen vehicles nearly a month ago, and last week 22 trucks were destroyed by fire at a truck stop. U.S. military officials downplay the impact of recent attacks, noting that about 350 supply vehicles a day travel the route. Still, they're nervous enough to have begun looking for alternatives.

That's because the choke-point in the Khyber Pass is an attractive target for the enemy. Marine General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was asked in September how much trouble his forces in Afghanistan would be in if Islamabad shut down supply lines through Pakistan. "It would be challenging to sustain our presence," he answered. "It is very difficult then to get to this landlocked nation in a way that would provide the quantity of resources that we need, particularly as we see ourselves growing." Bearing in mind projected future deployments, the U.S. will need to deliver up to 70,000 shipping containers (15% of them refrigerated) a year to its troops in Afghanistan. (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable northwest passage.)

The U.S. has recently tested alternate supply lines, and "we're working our way through to understand rail, pipelines, customs, what would it take, are they there in a sufficient scale to allow us to do this? And so we're working this one pretty hard," Cartwright added. The impact of a shutdown triggered by Taliban attacks would have the same result.

And the logistical needs that will accompany the doubling of the U.S. troop contingent over the next year or so makes securing supply lines even more urgent. "The larger the force, the greater the need" for security, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a congressional panel September 23. But the challenges of Afghanistan's rugged terrain has long been a key weapon for locals eager to keep foreigners at bay. The Afghans drove the British out through the Khyber Pass more than a century ago, killing more than 16,000. And they forced out the Soviet Union in 1989, following a 10-year occupation that cost the Red Army 15,000 men.

"The [latest] strike is going to embolden those who see the loss of 150 vehicles as a pretty big blow," says Anthony Zinni, a former Marine general who once headed U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan. "It's going to inspire more bad people."

Stephen Biddle, a military expert with the Council on Foreign Relations who recently returned from Afghanistan, believes the militants' goal is to slowly bleed U.S. troops. But a complete shutdown of the Pakistani routes by the insurgents would force the Pakistan military to act more forcefully than it has until now.

"[The Pakistan-based militants] don't want to do anything that would bring the government down on them like a ton of bricks," Biddle surmises. "But it's entirely plausible they could ramp the violence up slowly in an attempt to squeeze the U.S. in Afghanistan."

The alternative supply routes being investigated by the U.S. military run through the Caucasus and the former Soviet Stans of Central Asia. "The route studies exist for alternative supply lines through the Caucasus, but they're wildly expensive," says a retired military officer now serving on Obama's Pentagon transition team. The U.S. Transportation Command issued a notice to transport companies in September, saying "strikes, border delays, accidents and pilferage" in Pakistan and "attacks and armed hijackings" in Afghanistan make the current route dangerous.

The Pentagon wants to require that 90% of the goods shipped over alternate routes be delivered by deadlines ranging from 30 to 45 days. It's also demanding a "cargo loss rate" of less than 1% due to "pilferage, accident, spoilage, attacks and acts of God." No doubt the Taliban will love that last category.

See pictures of U.S. troops' 5 years in Iraq.

See pictures of art from war-torn Afghanistan.

View this article on Time.com

Related articles on Time.com:

• How the Taliban Hopes to Choke U.S. Afghanistan Mission
• The Truth About Talibanistan
• Will More US Troops Really Help in Afghanistan?
• Pakistan: Negligent on Terror?
• Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan?