Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

Fortunately, Clausewitz’s other non-trinitarian insights into conflict still hold true. His image of a war as two wrestlers is as apt a depiction of Kennedy versus Khrushchev in 1962, and of Donald Trump versus Kim Jong-un today. This is the part of his work that we must reemphasize while deemphasizing and reframing his wondrous trinity. With an enemy who sees himself as divinely justified, the expression of war as a competition of wills is more important than ever. Clausewitz’s emphasis on will over capabilities is doubly applicable today; it is the only way we can explain how untrained and pathetically equipped irregulars can challenge the best fighting force in the world despite its seemingly overwhelming technology and real-time intelligence.

If we have the audacity to update the Prussian master’s trinity, we should perhaps renew our faith in his famous dictum while recognizing how much we have misinterpreted it of late. War may serve politics as its extension in the Westphalian way of doing business, but we should also understand that war is politics and politics is war. For too many years, the violence—the kinetic effect—has been our focus. Today, we face a foe who knows that war starts with ideas and depends on them far more than it depends on just weapons.

At the same time, the most significant threats we face today do not emanate from the world of non-state actors. They come from old nation-state adversaries who have seemingly learnt from the change wrought at the end of the twentieth century and who understand that the only way to defeat us is by using irregular and indirect means of attack. As our forty-fifth president has demonstrated, our military, when unleashed, can devastate non-state actors like ISIS. But they are not the only ones who have developed unconventional means to undermine our great nation. What have nations like Russia and China learnt about irregular warfare from our wars with al-Qaeda and ISIS? And how will they attack us when ready?

The human spirit is remarkable.

For those who have been blessed to be born in America and have never had to don a uniform and face down our nation’s enemies in foreign lands, it can be impossible to fathom just what our brave warfighters have endured in the past and will again. Not simply the danger they face when flying over, sailing through, or marching across a war zone. But what it means to live the life of a warrior in a war zone. The isolation of being thousands of miles from home and loved ones, the physical exhaustion that comes when you have to stay awake not only to stay alive, but to safeguard the lives of those you have trained with, deployed with, and bled with.

But beyond all of these trials, there is the trial that begins when everything fails, when something you didn’t or couldn’t prepare for happens. When the routine mission leads to an end no one can imagine until he has lived through it. This ultimate test of the human spirit is the test of being a prisoner of war under the control of enemy forces who see you as less than human. This is the story of one man who lived and survived that hell for six years.

The Vietnam War may never be generally seen as an honorable chapter in our nation’s history. The war came just as the counterculture captured the attention of America and challenged the traditional patriotic values of the 1940s and ’50s, and those who fought it were doomed to be rejected and vilified by a large portion of their countrymen.

But the overwhelming majority of those who went to war—those who volunteered, and the many others who simply complied when their number was called—were honorable people. They went to protect us and the world, and however ignominious our departure from Saigon might have been, the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform were not in vain.

I will never forget taking a group of young national security professionals to dine at the embassy of an Asian partner of the United States. The ambassador, in an eloquent address to an audience who had not yet been born when Saigon fell, told them with great feeling:

To many Americans today, especially young millennials like yourselves, Vietnam is considered to be the war that America lost. Not to me, my fellow countrymen, or the citizens of the free nations in Asia. By committing the blood and treasure of your country for so many years to the cause of stopping communism in Vietnam, despite the outcome for you, America guaranteed that my nation would never fall to the Marxists or Maoists. Communism died a political death in our country exactly because thousands of Americas died in Vietnam.

This is not the perspective of Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, but that doesn’t matter. Because they are wrong. That ambassador was and is right. His perspective, that of someone from the region, should lead us to reevaluate the role America played in Asia during the Cold War and to understand how beneficial it was for millions of people who were saved from the horror of communist takeover.

That said, the way we collectively treated our warriors during those years—including the government’s incompetence in securing the release of those who had been captured and brutalized—is still a national disgrace. Here I share the story of one such hero, Captain Eugene B. “Red” McDaniel, a man who fought for freedom and was held as a prisoner of war, tortured for six years in Vietnam. [1] This account is a summary of the full story found in Captain McDaniel’s autobiography (written with the assistance of James L. Johnson), Scars & Stripes: The True Story of One Man’s Courage in Facing Death as a Vietnam POW (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1975). I am honored to have met Captain McDaniel and treasure the signed and dedicated copy of his book that he gave me.

McDaniel had flown eighty combat missions. Another twelve and he would be rotated off the USS Enterprise and sent home. But there was another “Alpha strike” to fly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his A-6 twin jet engine bomber. Another sortie deep into enemy territory to hit military targets in Van Dien, south of Hanoi, part of Operation Rolling Thunder.

The son of North Carolina tobacco sharecroppers, the six-foot-three thirty-five-year-old had served twelve years with the navy and was married to the beautiful Dorothy, who was back home looking after their three young children. This morning, McDaniel went through the usual routine before the pre-flight briefing. Ablution without aftershave or deodorant, on the off-chance his bomber was downed so the local forces couldn’t smell their prey. Everything by the book. Except for the niggling feeling that today was different. Something was wrong. So much so that he couldn’t even finish his usual eggs and bacon for breakfast. Was this the day? Would this be the mission that would end in his death? If it was, he found himself asking a strange question: Will my death be worthy of Dorothy and the kids?

Then it was into the cockpit of his plane, an airframe totaling sixty thousand pounds—thirteen thousand of which were bombs—that would be catapulted to flight speed off the deck of his home carrier in less than three seconds.

The mission was like all those he had flown before. As they penetrated deeper and deeper behind enemy lines into what was called “White-Knuckle Alley,” the danger of being hit by surface-to-air missiles grew, and they “jinked” back and forth to confuse the radars scanning them for a sam lock.