The Jump Blog

H/T: Blackfive

Kharmah Awakens

I’ve never been to Iraq, and barring some miracle cure for emphysema I won’t be going. My ignorance of conditions on the ground does not make me hesitant to state the following: we are losing the war on terrorism in every theater in which we are currently engaged.

Now, hang on a second before you call for my scalp.

The operational reality on the ground seems to be that we are winning and making gains. Progress is happening and the terrorists are being defeated in nearly every engagement. Local populations are starting to come around in certain areas, but not in others, and overall things are not as bleak on the ground as they appear to us at home.

But none of this matters.

We are losing the war not due to operational failures but due to popular perception. If the perception of the support base for the war is that we are losing it then we will lose it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And all of the human interest stories about this school and that project and this village and that unit and these men simply do not have the collective weight enough to shift that perception.

It didn’t work in Vietnam and it won’t work now.

I happen to have a predilection for old magazines. I can’t throw ‘em away. Among my collection are military professional journals and publications extending back to the mid fifties. I also have more than a few of the nationals (Time/Life/Newsweek/National Geographic) going back that far. An observable pattern emerges when one looks at the reporting during the Vietnam War. During the early days of the war the reporting was upbeat and positive, chock full of the same type of positive “we are making a difference stories” that JD Johannes has written in his blog. As the war progressed the professional journals and military publications stuck to these types of stories while the national media began to attempt to shape public perception to fit their world view.

The national media won. Public perception shifted radically after the Tet Offensive (even though we won that battle) and Americans came to believe that the we were losing the war –and that perception stuck. The reality was irrelevant after Tet. It didn’t matter that the Vietcong were largely a broken force after that. It didn’t matter that the NVA were unable to mount anything like a major offensive again. It didn’t matter that, as long as we stayed in South Vietnam, North Vietnam just did not have the military muscle to complete their objective. It didn’t even matter that for a war spanning over a decade the U.S. casualties were stunningly low. We lost that war because the perception was that we lost it, even though the reality is that we didn’t.

As late as 1970 Armor magazine was running stories about how the tide was turning and how we had the population on our side. And we might have, but it didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

To use a sports metaphor it’s like paying to see a two card boxing match. The first card is a featherweight bought, the two fighters are skilful and technical, working the ring, choosing their shots, and racking up high scores. One fighter decisively beats the other in a masterful display of technical boxing and the crowd yawns, “what a shitty fight” they say. The second card is a heavyweight bought and for three rounds the boxers abandon all technical aspects of the sport and slug it out, toe-to-toe. At the end of the third round a fluke uppercut flattens one of the boxers. Knock out. The crowd is on its feet, “What a great fight!”

The perception is the reality.

If we want to win this war (and I’m not so sure that America does, or even knows how any more) then we need a knock out to change the public perception of how things are going on the ground.

And that’s the only reality that matters.

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