You Have to Be There
By James R. Holmes
July 2022 Proceedings Vol. 148/7/1,433
Director and actor Woody Allen famously joked, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Admiral J. C. Wylie, the author of Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, opined that to control something, an armed force must stage firepower on the scene sufficient to control that thing.1 Implicit in Wylie’s analysis is that if you want to control something forever, you may need to remain there forever. Combine the insights from this odd couple, and it seems that 80 percent of martial affairs is showing up and the remaining 20 percent is staying in force.
This oversimplifies matters, but it is sage counsel, nonetheless. Contenders must bestride the field of competition—and stay on the field as long as the contest lasts—to entertain any hope of success. Yet militaries have flouted this simple but profound axiom throughout history. Beguiled by offense, they take territory only to move on—and relinquish control back to the foe, who promptly reoccupies the ground and resumes his own agenda. Intermittent control is no control at all in strategic terms.
Come-and-go offensive operations have a mixed record at best, yet they seem graven on U.S. military culture. American warriors regard garrison duty as static and inglorious, whereas closing with and engaging the foe’s main forces appears rewarding by contrast. During the Vietnam War, for example, top commanders quashed the U.S. Marine Corps’ Combined Action Platoons, a defensive initiative that stationed small bodies of troops in South Vietnamese villages to deny Vietcong insurgents what they desperately needed—control of civilian populations and their key resources. Instead, U.S. ground forces pursued offensive—but often fruitless—search-and-destroy operations in the backcountry.2
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/july/you-have-be-there
