RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a longstanding maxim that states that only the complete destruction of one’s enemies will suffice. Merely winning a particular battle is not enough. If they survive the defeat and can come back to fight another day, then the ultimate victory is not assured. In contrast, the contest still hangs in the balance and the outcome of any one battle may not be the overriding determinate of the final result.

This thought is summed up in the work “The 48 Laws of Power,” a best-selling 1998 book by American author Robert Greene. Law 15 states, “…. a feared enemy must be crushed completely. If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation. The enemy will recover and seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.”

Examples of this truism abound in history. There are several examples of when tactical battles were won but the bigger strategic objective was lost, with disastrous long-term consequences.

Dunkirk 1940
After Nazi Germany’s 1940 spring offensive against Western Europe, the last remaining Allied combatants — France and Great Britain — found themselves defeated and cornered in the French coastal town of Dunkirk. Over 300,000 French and British troops (along with a small number of Polish forces that had survived the campaign against Germany the previous September) were trapped after marauding German Panzer forces had crushed the inexplicably weak and uninspired French army in what was perhaps history’s most one-sided major land engagement.

With their backs to the water, the Allies waited for the final German Panzer strike, the one that would decimate their ranks and effectively win the war for Germany. But that strike never came. There are a plethora of reasons and explanations as to why German ground forces gave way to Germany’s Luftwaffe (air force) to finish off the Allies, but whatever the actual reason was, the German air force was not up to the task. The great bulk of the Allied forces escaped by sea evacuation back to England and lived to fight another day.

Germany had won a great tactical victory in France, but their inability to finish off the Allies when they had them cornered and set up for the knockout blow came back to haunt them and led to their eventual defeat five years later.

Pearl Harbor 1941
Japan had been aggressively moving against other countries in the Pacific realm for several years in the late 1930s, taking territory and raw materials to satisfy its expansionist aims. The Japanese correctly saw the US Pacific Fleet, stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as the biggest threat to their continued activities. They developed a plan to mount a surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941 against those American naval forces. Against all odds, sailing across the Pacific essentially undetected, the Japanese surprise attack was successful. The attack sank or disabled eight of the nine battleships in the U.S. Fleet (only the USS Pennsylvania, in dry dock, escaped major damage), destroyed dozens of aircraft on the ground and killed over 2,300 US military and civilian personnel, all for the loss of only 29 Japanese aircraft. It was one of the most dramatic tactical victories in modern history.

Unfortunately for the Japanese, they managed to squander their tactical success into one of the greatest strategic blunders of all time. In a stroke of immeasurable luck, America’s Pacific-based aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack. They were out at sea on maneuvers. In a stroke of immeasurable strategic shortsightedness, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto cautiously elected to withdraw his forces back to Japan instead of ordering a follow-up strike, in spite of the fact that Pearl’s air cover was gone. A follow-up attack could well have finished off the U.S. Navy completely, since the carriers returned to Pearl later that day. Instead, Yamamoto — fearful of suffering costly losses in a protracted several-day naval battle — turned for home and retreated as quickly as he could.

His strategic blunder would cost the Japanese dearly in the follow-up battles of Coral Sea and Midway, both of which took place in the first half of 1942, less than six months after Pearl Harbor. American aircraft carriers — the ones that Yamamoto let escape at Pearl Harbor — smashed the Japanese fleet, breaking its back and turning the tide of war in the Pacific. It can be argued that America, with its vastly superior industrial and manufacturing capacity, would have eventually beaten Japan regardless of whether Yamamoto had destroyed the carriers at Pearl or not. Nonetheless, his failure to follow through on Japan’s momentary tactical advantage certainly hastened Japan’s defeat and removed any doubt whatsoever as to the eventual outcome in the Pacific.

Iraq 1991
In the summer of 1990, Iraq’s displeasure with Kuwait over its continued excessive oil production in violation of OPEC quotas was reaching a critical point. Partly because of high Kuwaiti oil production, world oil prices were severely depressed, which was having a disastrous effect on Iraq’s national finances. With diplomatic efforts crumbling, Iraqi armed forces stormed into Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, quickly overwhelming the curiously unprepared Kuwaiti forces. Within 12 hours, Kuwaiti resistance had dissolved and its Royal Family had fled the country. The Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was complete.

The U.N. met several times and declared through Security Council Resolutions that Iraq’s actions were unacceptable and they authorized the use of force. A U.S.-led coalition of 34 countries moved into the area and began military operations to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait and re-install the Kuwaiti government.

In one of history’s best-conceived and best-run military campaigns, U.S.-led forces inflicted tremendous damage on the Iraqi military and virtually obliterated the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard ground forces in a series of one-sided battles in Kuwait, stretching into Iraq itself. As tactical battlefield victories go, this could be said to be history’s high-water mark. Having destroyed all the opposing Iraqi forces, nothing stood between U.S. armored divisions and the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. At this point in the war, popular folklore has it that Suddam Hussein’s “personal aircraft was on the runway, warming up its engines.”

Yet at an arbitrarily self-imposed round-number time limit of “100 hours” for the U. S. ground campaign, U.S. forces abruptly stopped their advance. Perhaps President George H. W. Bush was overly concerned that a too-total U.S. military victory would turn world opinion against America and break up the fragile U.S.-led coalition. Regardless, Hussein was not forced to flee from power. Instead, he survived and his reign of terror continued. Iraq was out of Kuwait, but Iraq remained as big a threat and as destabilizing an entity in the region as ever.

Many self-serving, after-the-fact rationalizations have since come forth to try to explain the failure of America to finish what the world so desperately needed to be finished. The undeniable fact remains that Hussein’s evil actions and destructive influence could have been permanently ended at that point by simply allowing U.S. tanks to drive on the road towards Baghdad. Further actual military action was probably not even necessary; all we had to do was motion in Hussein’s direction and he’d have been gone, saving the world from the tragedy and expense of 12 more years of his rule, and a second Gulf war that caused more than 36.000 American casualties.

These are but three examples that support Law 15 of the 48 Laws of Power. In each case, a definitive tactical victory fails to completely silence the enemy and their inevitable comeback has an all-too-predictable catastrophic aftermath for the initial victor.