THE MANY MINEFIELDS OF GLOBAL ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

Bob Newman

It may be a common misconception that Marines spend most of their careers at war with bullets flying over the heads at any given moment. In reality, most of a Marine’s career is spent training for war, being forward deployed aboard ships offshore of potential trouble spots, attending schools designed to make the Marine a more proficient purveyor of discontent, death and destruction, and performing other duties.

Ten of my 20 years in the Corps were spent teaching at formal military schools at Camp Lejeune and in Maine and California. I always learned more as an instructor than a student, because as an instructor you must truly be the expert in what you are teaching. As a student, you must simply master and demonstrate proficiency in the subjects being taught. But I loved being a student, and because I was trained in counterterrorism, special operations and unconventional warfare, I was fortunate to learn all about the spectrum of warfare and what we might expect in the future.

One school I attended taught the unique skills required to be a guerrilla, form a guerrilla army, and overthrow a foreign government by instigating a revolution (this school, and operating in guerrilla- and terrorist-infested regions of the world, helped lay the foundation for a guerrilla warfare book I wrote, "Guerrillas in the Mist: A Battlefield Guide to Clandestine Warfare"). Another school taught me the intricacies of terrorism. Combined, these courses and operating against guerrillas and terrorists taught me one undeniable lesson: effectively fighting guerrillas and terrorists in global asymmetric warfare is damn difficult and costly, but it can be done. It’s just that some very hard lessons are going to be learned along the way. The trick is to not make the same mistake twice.

Back during the grim days of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), when we thought World War III would take the shape of global thermonuclear war (the uppermost form of war in the spectrum of conflict), only a comparative few of us were equally focused on guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Those of us who were knew that the winner of such a conflict would be the side that adapted most rapidly to the situation, was the most aggressive, brought the war to the enemy’s neighborhood, and stayed the proverbial course, even in the face of political treachery and even when an easily manipulated (by the media and certain politicians), short-sighted, quick-to-quit-because-they-saw-some-blood populace made the going tougher for the troops.

At this point, the two biggest threats to our winning the war on terror are (1) ethically corrupt, morally bankrupt, leftist politicians (Kerry, Kennedy, Pelosi, Daschle, et al) who will do and say anything for personal and political gain, and (2) a large number of naïve Americans who demand instant gratification in the form a quick, painless, largely bloodless wars. The enemy, who lies in many dozens of countries including our own, is counting on such people to help them achieve their nefarious goal of the destruction of America and deaths of every American man, woman and child.

So the question becomes: Which side are you on?

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Bob Newman, a retired, decorated US Marine, is co-host of "Redmond & Newman" on 630 KHOW in Denver, and is the military science and terrorism columnist for The Denver Daily News.
bobnewmana@clearchannel.com