The Field of Fight by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn

Author:Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250106230
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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How to Win

What does “winning” mean and how do we accomplish this against Radical Islamists and their allies? It means several things:

• Destroying the jihadi armies, and killing or capturing their leaders;

• Discrediting their ideology, which will be greatly helped by our military victories, but which requires a serious program all its own;

• Creating a new set of twenty-first-century global alliances. This, too, will emerge naturally from the military and political campaign;

• Bringing a direct challenge to the regimes that support our enemies, weakening them at a minimum, bringing them down whenever possible.

It won’t be easy—they’re a formidable enemy—and it certainly won’t be fast. Indeed, it is impossible with our current leaders, who clearly lack the will and the desire to win.

On the other hand, we know how to win this war. We’ve done it before, notably in the Second World War and then the Cold War against the messianic mass movements of the twentieth century, Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Even in the Middle East since 9/11, we’ve won many battles. In fact, no matter what you’ve been told about the “lost wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve defeated the Radical Islamists every time we’ve fought them seriously. Their current positions of strength were not won against us on the battlefield, but were instead the result of our bad, politically motivated decisions to withdraw before victory was consolidated.

The primary requirement for winning any war is the willingness, determination, and resolve to win and to do the necessary things required for victory. At the moment we have a president who said—incredibly, in my opinion—on November 16, 2015: “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning.’”

That says to the American people and to our enemies that America will not lead, does not want to win, and is therefore doomed to lose. Our enemies are certainly determined to lead and to win, whether they are radical Muslims or ambitious secular tyrants.

There is no escape from this war. Our enemies will not permit that. We will either win or lose, and at present we look like losers. Knowing that the current administration will not challenge them, our enemies will press hard to gain every possible advantage before a new president, potentially with the will to win, takes office.

You can see this in Afghanistan. U.S. forces led raids against two huge training facilities in the country’s south in October 2015. One of these camps was approximately thirty square miles in size! General John F. Campbell, who oversaw the war effort in Afghanistan between 2014 and 2015, explained that the camp was run by al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and is “probably the largest training camp–type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.” Unbelievable! But sadly, this is not surprising to those of us who have been intimately following this enemy and take them deadly seriously.

AQIS is an important component of al Qaeda; it answers to Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), bin Laden’s successor.

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