In Praise of Attrition
RALPH PETERS
© 2004 Ralph Peters
“Who dares to call the child by its true name?”
— Goethe, Faust
I
n our military, the danger of accepting the traditional wisdom has become
part of the traditional wisdom. Despite our lip service to creativity and in-
novation, we rarely pause to question fundamentals. Partly, of course, this is
because officers in today’s Army or Marine Corps operate at a wartime
tempo, with little leisure for reflection. Yet, even more fundamentally, deep
prejudices have crept into our military—as well as into the civilian world—
that obscure elementary truths.
There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error
than our rejection of the term “war of attrition.” The belief that attrition, as
an objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. Asoldier’s job
is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the moment,
is secondary. And to kill the enemy is to attrit the enemy. All wars in which
bullets—or arrows—fly are wars of attrition.
Of course, the term “war of attrition” conjures the unimaginative
slaughter of the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last
year, when journalists wanted to denigrate our military’s occupation efforts
in Iraq, the term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the
enemy is a bad thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industry’s
claims, seconded by glib military careerists, that precision weapons and tech-
nology in general had irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the na-
ture of warfare never changes—only its superficial manifestations.
The US Army also did great harm to its own intellectual and practi-
cal grasp of war by trolling for theories, especially in the 1980s. Theories
don’t win wars. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do.
And they do so by killing effectively. Yet we heard a great deal of nonsense
about “maneuver warfare” as the solution to all our woes, from our numerical
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