"On War" = Motivation + Capabilities

COL (Ret-USAF) Tom Snodgrass writes an interesting piece today in The American Thinker. In it he writes that war is reduced to motivations and capabilities of both sides.

Correctly, he infers that motivations of Islamists cannot be influenced and therefore we are only left with affecting the Islamist's capabilities. He also correctly infers that it is impossible to maintain a regional war if we are to affect the enemy's capabilities.

His answer is two-fold:

1. Fight the war like a war and not a police action. For this he recommends changing the ROE to permit the use of overpowering and overwhelming American firepower on a hair-trigger basis to execute prolonged clear and hold operations.

2. Moving the air war to supporting neighboring countries which would have the double effect of reducing the insurgent's capabilities and establish the military-political point that if you aid our enemy, you are our enemy and we will target you and your country.

He goes on to point out that the regional war in Vietnam continued for so long and resulted in an eventual American withdraw for the very same reason.

I have argued this point repeatedly in this blog. America needs to strike at the suppliers of the insurgency. Bombing Iranian nuclear capability would have the additive effect of reducing its ability to acquire nuclear weapons which we may have to deal with in the future and limiting its influence in Iraq both politically and logistically.

The purpose of war is to break things in such a manner that you reduce the enemy's motivation and capability to wage war. While this war is taking place in Iraq, it is being supplied outside Iraq. We need to go to these outside countries and break things. In the case of Iran, nuclear installations would be a good start as this would solve not only the problem of resupplying of the insurgency in Iraq, but would also solve any future nuclear Iran issue.