Strategy: Occupation or Invasion

Just saw in a survey this morning that 80% of Canadians are receiving less phone solicitation due to the national do-not-call list. That made me feel so good (because of my earlier rant) that I have decided to branch out into another new specialty: Military Analyst!

It seems military thinkers are always have a problem planning for the next war. There has been a huge change in the last twenty years, that everybody except the Israelis seem to be missing. First lets go back ten thousand years, and follow the situation up to say WW2. It has always been difficult to invade, but easy to hold once the invasion was successful. In fact the very reason for the invasion was all about the fun of the occupation, where the invaders put their enemies to death, raped and pillaged to their heart's content. The invasion itself was a buzz-kill, consisted of getting mowed down by machine gun fire or having boiling oil poured on your head while climbing rickety ladders.

What seems to have happened? The invasion of Iraq has apparently shown that invasion is now the easy part, if you have the military hardware of course. Air power, sea power, high speed land travel. Logistics are aided by GPS and computerized plans.

But the technology of carrying out an occupation seems to have actually tipped towards the insurgents. Remote controlled roadside bombs being the prime example. And then it does seem that the need for occupation has pretty much evaporated. No more raping and pillaging allowed. No more grabbing the land of the occupied for your own people, in fact none of your own people even want to move there. The age of colonization seems to have ended. And with the end of the cold war, it's not like you are even denying the occupied area to the Soviets. These days, any occupied territory is nothing but a drain on resources.

Only the Israelis seem to have figured out the new model. In Gaza, they pulled out all their people and ostensibly ended the occupation. Instead they have a system where they blockade the area, and occasionally invade - they lose fewer people that way than they would in an occupation, and they spend less money on the invasion than the long term occupation. After the invasion, they just retreat and leave the Palestinians to recover. That way, other countries, such as Canada, Britain etc. pay for the rebuilding while Israel is free rearm and re-equip itself for the next invasion of Gaza.

Iraq was an unexpectedly easy invasion according to most Americans, but an unexpectedly difficult occupation. It's time to face the new reality, it would have been better, cheaper, less loss of life, more effective for US foreign policy and security, to invade Iraq 5 times in the last 6 years, than to maintain an occupation. We are not in the old days any more. Time for a rethink of general military strategy, and Canada needs to figure this out before we lose a lot more people in Afghanistan - I think Prime Minister Harper is almost there.