Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made it clear that our military was reorienting to deter, fight, and win wars. I only hope that he and President Trump are successful at this task in time to make a difference.
The distraction from a war-orientation took several Presidential administrations to creep in. I suspect that the Woke rot and peacetime complacency will take time to truly root out.
Hegseth declared that our military will be unshackled from politicized rules of engagement. A more free set of rules-of-engagement will improve the US military’s performance in battle. The Cold War era principle of limited war and proportional response may have made sense in light of the USSR’s nuclear deterrent. However, these notions cost in excess of 100,000 American dead to achieve a tie in Korea and a loss in Viet-Nam.
We are not the British Empire. Our society is not geared to garrisoning and guarding a vast world empire of allies and colonies. Because of the nature of our liberty-oriented society, we are a distracted hegemon; an imperfect global policeman.
Instead of this Department of Defense model, the American approach to war should be to fight it rarely, but with an unfettered intensity. We should abandon any treaty governing some abstract international standard of the “rules of war”. War cannot be made humane.
The US should always employ 1945-era rules of engagement; the rules that gave us victory in World War II. No one should ever wish to experience battle with an unleashed American military.
Under those WWII rules of engagement, we did not restrain our fighting forces from doing whatever was necessary to achieve victory. In the First Gulf War in 1991, we fought without undue restraint. In both World Wars, we did the same.
Consequently, among other things, in 1945 we waged unrestricted submarine warfare to starve Japan’s home islands. We flattened neighborhoods with tanks and artillery to soften up enemy defenses before advancing our troops into them. We fire-bombed cities like Dresden and Tokyo. We employed Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, by being effectively brutal, along with the British Empire and the Soviet Union, we earned ultimate victory.
Because of Cold War fears of a Soviet nuclear response, we restrained our forces while fighting in Korea, Viet-Nam, and (I hate to recognize this truth) the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our lack of urgency in these struggles was also inspired by a sense that all of these wars were ultimately discretionary. The ongoing survival of freedom in the United States did not seem to be at stake in these brushfire conflicts.
By refocusing the leadership of our armed forces on sharpening our military’s war-fighting capabilities, we should both deter most wars and have a fighting chance of winning those that we do not deter.
One essential benefit of this reorientation is for the US military to definitively reject the GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, Obama, and Biden doctrines of fighting to reconstruct a foreign culture in our own image (“nation building”). The only occasions where this has seemed to work, in Germany and Japan, involved the US in rebuilding their destroyed countries, perpetually protecting them, and stationing permanent garrisons in these nations.
These policies were certainly good investments. For seventy years, they helped to prevent a general war from erupting in both Europe and Asia.
Now, with the increasing bellicosity of Russia and China, both the Prussian and State Shinto/Samurai traditions that still exist under the surface in Germany and Japan will necessarily resurface. As each US ally is menaced, their instinct to defend themselves will brook nothing less than them reclaiming their most effective military traditions.
If Hegseth’s reforms are fully implemented, if we truly reorient our military to kill our enemies and break their things,… and nothing else,… we might do what is necessary to prepare for the Chinese Communists attacking Taiwan and the Russians attacking Poland, the Baltic States, Moldova, and Romania. Our forces might meet these existential challenges with a competence that is essential for our and our allies’ ongoing liberty and survival.
One small example of Hegseth’s prioritizing battlefield effectiveness over any other consideration involves restoring the best male physical standards as a requirement to serve in ground combat roles. Effectiveness in personal combat requires one singular standard for specialization; one that not likely to include many females. This is one part of military service, and there are many roles for good women in them beyond that of being part of the Infantry, the Marine, or the Special Forces.
Combat effectiveness, and not social engineering, needs to be our new watchword. This is because the world is closer to a general war erupting in both Europe and Asia than at any time since the late 1930s.
Communist China has been assiduously preparing itself to avenge its so-called Century of Shame, from the 1842 Anglo-Chinese Opium War through the Red takeover in 1949. They are eager for a contest that will eclipse the West and restore China to the role of humanity’s central society around which all others orbit.
Everything that the Islamist Terrorists, Iranians, Pakistanis, Taliban, Venezuelans, Cubans, North Koreans, and Russians do to disrupt world peace is done with China’s active support. They are planning not only to start a new global conflict, but to decisively win it.
Restoring the war-orientation of the US military is only one of many things that we Americans will need to do if we wish to deter such a nightmare war, or if we can’t deter it then to prevail against evil and preserve human life and freedom.
