In any military strategy session, from the Pentagon's E-Ring to a game of capture the flag, the practicing intellectuals (eggheads) are given a polite hearing and then with some subtle eye-rolling, shown the door, so the brass tacks of real warriors can be displayed.
Cautionary lessons learned from military intellectuals are often rightly suspect, as their over-application can cause what should be forward-looking, innovative problem solving to be mired in the inapplicable past. The elegant historical stylist Barbara Tuchman once quipped: "nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general." True enough. But in the current military morass in Iraq that continues to consume American blood and treasure in a zero-sum game, we might do well to consider a classical focus. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian intellectual godfather of all matters military, coined the phrase "centers of gravity" to describe people, places, and capabilities of your opponent that, when threatened, attacked, damaged, or displaced, compel your enemy to bend to your will (war as an extension of national policy).
The lack of these centers of gravity in Iraq, and indeed throughout the emergent anti-American cultural cells around the globe, is what will bring about our ultimate and unsatisfying exit from Iraq. The efficacy of "troop surges" and "staying the course" are the military equivalent of continuing to shock a flatline patient in the ER.
Once the last thing resembling a center of gravity (Hussein's regime) was eliminated (the genesis of the unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" banner), there remained nothing for the brilliant, destructive, and superbly led professionals of our armed forces to direct their energies against to achieve national ends. There remains nothing in Iraq today to bomb, strafe, occupy, subjugate, destroy, or threaten that can produce a result coherent and consistent with what we are trying to achieve geopolitically. Centers of gravity now consist of whatever door our patrol is kicking down in search of the AK-47 stashed under the bed. Our troops control only the street they stand on, ceding it back to myriad enemies when they depart.
The two 20th-century success stories in which the American military oversaw the repair and resurrection of a country (Germany and Japan) featured concrete centers of gravity that had been destroyed, a more or less monolithic society exhausted by total war, and legions of enlightened military administrators assisting in the re-build. That these conditions do not and will not exist in Iraq can and will be debated ad infinitum.
It is this lack of identifiable centers of gravity to direct our military prowess against that lies at the core of our failure in Iraq. Since our earliest days as a nation, the American public has taken a proprietary view of how and why its sons and daughters are employed in military operations from Brandywine to Beirut. They are quick to recognize a losing situation and although slow to question the efficacy of military operations post 9/11, an aroused population's good sense will ultimately close down operations in Iraq. The projection of this good sense loud enough for an administration's hearing has historically included the breaking of a few of the afore-mentioned intellectual's heads (and careers) before a change in course was recognized and implemented.
Our Islamic opponents du jour present our planners with an amorphous and stateless force often willing to trade their lives in exchange for military and political gain. These enemies, by definition, lack the centers of gravity that our military forces can be directed against preemptively or after the fact. Our strategists are at work 24/7 to redraw the strategic applications of U.S. power in the 21st century to respond to this phenomenon. None of this planning appears to be altering the day-to-day operations in Iraq, as each blow the insurgents strike seems more audacious than the last. Whether a sensible, mutually beneficial end game can be mapped out and executed by the best and brightest of current and future administrations in concert with our allies, other players in the region, and a respectful congressional opposition remains very much in question.
The haunting image of Vietnamese hanging off the skids of the last chopper out being replaced with Iraqi faces is too terrible to contemplate.