why didnt busch use the military strategy outlined in the book called the art of war?

Question

i dont want answers from bush haters or people who thinks hes god just unbiased answers only please most historians agree that the book the art of war is something everyone should read yet it is obvious bushes war strategy took absolutely nothing from this book if bush read the book do you think the war would have been handled differently and how

Answer 1

I have never read the book but Bush has been dismissing the advice of the experts from the beginning and I suspect it is because he wants a never ending war where war profiteering can go on and on.

Answer 2

Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

Maybe we followed Sun Tzu a little to closely. Maybe U.S. Grant's philosophy would have been better.

Also, this was not Bush's strategy. Has GEN Franks said the white house made me do it? Some retired officers have crticized the plan after the fact. Many people said we would not get to Baghdad with as little trouble as we did. Also, many retired officers said we would lose over 10,000 people taking Baghdad.

Have you read the book? Where did we miss the mark?

"Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign. " Since you do not know what if any interference the military was given why speculate.What I do know is that a non-binding resolutions against additional troops violates the above mentioned essentials.

Answer 3

There is no textbook on war. The US has over 700 men and women with the rank of brigadier general or above. Most of these people have attended war college, and many were involved in helping to develop America's strategy, good or bad, used in the Iraq war.

For the US to use a strategy from a book that sets in every Barnes and Noble book store shelf, seems somewhat bizarre, given that every dime store participant opposing the US could quickly know our next step, once they know our game plan.

War strategy is like a football game. Offensive coordinators rarely go back to the last play because it was successful, chances are the 2nd time, it just might fail. The same applies to war strategy, you've got to keep em guessin!

Answer 4

"Let them think that your strengths are your weaknesses." THE ART OF WAR is a Chinese book and George W. Bush has probably never read it. The Chinese have, however, and now they are the true World super power. They have over a million troops, a satellite system to rival ours, nuclear submarines circling our oceans, the bomb, and an anti-ballistic system that is much more powerful than ours. Not many people are aware of this. If Bush had read the book, he would never have gone into Iraq, but would have quietly been preparing our military the same way the Chinese have.

Answer 5

The first part of the war is the same strategy, siege warfare. This portion was indeed over quickly, remember the victory banner? This was immediately followed by urban warfare which was unprecedented in history.

Edit:
added link

Answer 6

The planning of the Iraq War was done by civilian amateurs.

Answer 7

Well, the folks in the administration figured someone - in many many ways that the rules don't apply to them.

With that failing entrenched , you do some critical things wrong.
Failure points include
1. Disbanding the Iraqi army - Iraq HAD a standing Army that was battle tested against it's enemies. This could have been de-Baathed in the same way, as was the Wehrmacht after WW II was de-Nazified. No significant re-training necessary. Just bringing up a (hopefully) small, loyal nationalists into the existing Iraqi armed forces.

Sun Tzu, Alexander, Sparta and Athens, Rome, the Mongols, the Swedish, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires all did this to expand their holdings without expanding their overhead(s) and directly leaving an open door for chaos in the newly conquered territories.

2. Sun Tzu stressed planning and knowing your enemy's strengths and weaknesses - We however did not plan effectively in this regard, or rather we played to OUR strengths, not our enemies weaknesses. The administration's failure to acknowledge what was actually occuring on the ground - The civilian commanders and administrators failed to take into account the concept of insurgent war until they found themselves in one.

The administration was particularly keen to believe that technology would save them and they couldn't or wouldn't have "another" Viet-Nam on their hands. Their enemy however, has relentlessly studied that conflict and that's presciesely what we have - minus the jungle warfare and Chairman Mao's Army, we now have urban combat and desert warfare, and Mohammed's word of mouth Army.

2a. Unfortunately, a factor that Sun-Tzu did not have to extensively contend with was fast infantry and mobility on a scale which makes hit and run and other insurgent/resistance tactics inheirently effective.

3. There was a near total lack of intelligence, on the part of the US. Specifically crafted as such by the administration for political purposes, the pre-war intelligence and information can rightly be classified as sketchy at best. It's one of Sun Tzu's major themes to know thy enemy as thy knows oneself. Clearly had we done this we'd never be there. For as twisted and despotic as he was Saddam was a stabilizing agent in Iraq.

4. Preparations for war, and for the aftermath of war, clearly here again, nothing so much as dusting off 10 year old runways and getting things ready to "rumble", there was no thought that the war might last more than a few weeks. Clearly after this timeframe, the administrations' talking heads can be seen to have been making it up as they went along.

5. For as much as technology has helped it has hurt, smart bombs are awesome for taking out the room on the left , on the 5th floor but not the rest of the buildings. That's AWESOME for killing exactly some guy we might want out of the way , they are assassination weapons at this point.

HOWEVER, one of the reasons the Japanese and Germans were willing to surrender was that they had been utterly devastated. In this case, the immediate horror and destrution of war that massive carpetbombing and the utter reduction of cities to so much smoldering rubble and the death of hundreds of thousands or millions of their citizens.

Both peoples knew they were beaten , not for some higher moral reason, but because they got their AS*es kicked and it was undeniable to anyone by the time the infantry had gotten there, the Japanese and Germans were mostly already spent and willing to at least consider surrender.

Today with the smart-bombs and precision assault teams etc, the average Iraqi insurgent suffers (and dooms his neighbors by suffering) the creeping normalcy of their situation, they weren't bombed back to oblivion immediately, they got a live-fire light show that messed up downtown Baghdad, oblivion is slowly creeping up on them now.....so .... nobody will notice and the fighting will continue until the cities are rubble and there are hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. This is not strictly Sun Tzu but in a way it is, never engage a city , but be prepared to siege one. Sun Tzu viewed this as a bad tactic and one of last resort, but a seiged city knows the same thing as a bombed city, they're defeated.

Another point - which in a way reminds me of the Drill of the Concubines, is that this administration has at multiple points and times, failed to listen and allow the professional military commanders ask for and received all that is needed from their civilian leadership. This was most keenly make clear when years of obvious overstretch we coupled with the obligatory "We're fine and don't seen a single extra troop or speck of resources" line from almost every active-duty rank commanding officer within speaking range of a microphone.

This is either the first war in human history where the military commanders never actually needed for anything and wanted for nothing, and still have had such a miserable time and suffer from gross incompetence through and through (this is clearly not the case) OR there was a treasonous level of interference in the military order by civilian interlopers, contractors and armchair quarterbacking adminstrative hacks.

I'm reminded that when the "troops" were prepared and ready to command in demonstration of their martial skills (in the anecdote about the "Drill of the Concubines")......Emperor did not attend.

That's basically about all I have to constructively say about this topic at the moment.

Answer 8

You spelled "Bush" like the beer! ALL YOUR CREDIBILITY IS GONE MY FRIEND! HA HA HA! RFLMAO!!!