Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods | H. John Poole

Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods | H. John Poole | Extraordinary--Breaks the Code and Outs China and Iran

books:

Tactics of the Cre...

	Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods H. John Poole Posterity Press, 2004 - 360 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Timely and time-sensitive; read to understand Iraq

"Tactics of the Crescent Moon" is timely because of the wars raging in the Middle East. These wars include and are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has been targeted by Middle Eastern terrorist since the late 1960's. As long as any of these exist, the United States will face Islamic warriors on jihad: the existance of corrupt governments in the Middle East, the existance of the state of Israel, failure to convert wholesale to the "right flavor" of Islam, providing a market for Middle Eastern oil, and lack of a global Islamic empire. The United States first fought Islamic warriors at the beginning of the 19th Century, when a handful of Marines, Sailors, and mercenaries fought and routed the Barbary Pirates. Following the Spanish-American War, Filippino Moros (Muslim tribes on Mindinao) proved so fierce that the .38 caliber Colt revolver was replaced by the .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol. Thus, the Muslim irregular is an old enemy for the United States. Surviving this foe requires a comprehensive and multi-pronged strategy. Basic to a viable startegy is understanding who the enemy is, why he fights, and lastly, how. Poole concentrates on the tactical defeat of the Islamic militant.

American military units are poor at the short-range fight. Hand-to-hand combat has been neglected for reasons ranging from "why waste efforts on something of marginal effectiveness" to creating a female-friendly military environment. These lame excuses favored two groups--military careerists, and the enemy. Close combat training is difficult and dangerous. A zero-defect mentality coupled with the desire to empower women--without giving women the tools that empower--is being overtaken by current events. Units going to Iraq or Afghanistan are getting crash courses in city fighting, room-to-room combat, firing from moving vehicles, and reacting to ambush. Combat units are learning to detect and defuse ambushes before they occur. The US bases in the Middle East are hard targets, with defense in depth. Poole alludes to the timidity about sustaining casualties--it does hamper operations. Also hampering operations is the fear of inflicting collateral damage. Poole points out that skilled infantry can defeat the enemy with a minimum of casualties. This has been happening in Iraq, and the new Iraqi forces are taking over the burden of fighting the Iraqi insurgency. Unlike South Vietnam in 1968, there are not neighbors ready to pounce on Iraq with a large conventional army equipped with lots of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. And if there were, tanks and artillery and aircraft battles are the United States' strong suite. The war for Iraq will be won or lost in street battles. Poole advocates bottom-up squad-focused training and doctrine to defeat the Islamic irregular fighter threat. Because the United States is fighting a war, many of the careerists now recognize that small arms training, squad tactics, and yes, plain old brawling have to be part of the bag of tricks. Marines paid at least lip service to this new old doctrine--now the Army, the Navy, and even the Air Force are conducting realistic and rigorous squad-level training to better-prepare American service members for duty in the Middle East. Trouble is, old habits die hard. Poole recommends that the US goes further, adopting a bottoms-up tactical doctrine that is "circumstantially unique, surprise oriented, and threat compensating." This will shift a larger burden to junior leaders. The biggest shift will be to the individual soldier or Marine on patrol--currently, the capability to run each fire-team size patrol (four or five soliders) from the White House exists. There is a great temptation to do so, even though President Bush was a fighter pilot, not an infantry team leader. Poole argues that the man on the spot is better able to decide what action to take. He's correct as long as the man on the spot has both situational awareness (something that is hard or impossible to do by remote control) and has the other information needed to make the dicision. Plus one more thing--a doctrine that puts decision-making at the lowest possible level. America's most effieicnt industries do this already--the same high-quality people are in business and in our all-volunteer military. It takes time and effort to make a well-rounded knowledgable soldier.

It will be a difficult task. Saddam's minions were specifically trained in deception techniques. The laundry list Poole provides in "Tactics of the Crescent Moon" read like a James Bond movie: advanced psychological training, mind control techniques, and a ruthlessness not possible if we are to meet American societal norms and what Poole terms "moral behavior." One section of Chapter 11 is titled, "Tactics and Morality Are Not Mutually Exclusive."

The Islamic warrior can be beaten. Poole examines the tactical shortcomings of several Islamic jihad groups. A major problem with the Islamic imperial movement is that the jihadists must play first to the Islamic world. It isn't that the jihadists are ineffective playing to a Western audience--they are many times more effective at the media game against the West than the West is against the Islamic world. The guerrilla theater bombing of Madrid did cause the withdrawal of Spanish soldiers. Kidnapping foreigners and holding them hostage until a Western government complies isn't working out very well now, but held great promise while it was still novel. More effective is that the kidnappings have slowed down the flood of foreign workers into Iraq--there's more to winning a guerrilla campaign than killing American soldiers. Guerrilla war is a war of ideas and images.

Poole identifies a major weakness of American forces: movement skills. How can American infantry move through a foreign urban area unseen? The jihadists do so routinely. Some elements, such as Al Queda, have recently began losing their "invisibility cloak" because they're outsiders and don't blend in as well as the insiders. Al Queda's operations have been increasingly directed at Iraqi civilians--the US forces are bottled up in their fortified bastions and there are fewer foreign workersl By necessity of having to act, and having driven off most of the targets, Al Queda has to conduct ethnic cleansing, and is alienating Iraq as a result. The US is not only increasing its mobility when it does patrol, but increasingly the new Iraqi police and Iraqi army are becoming more effective at confronting and destroying Al Queda and other insurgency movements. The number one problem in Iraq is still criminal gangs. This fragmented opposition to the new Iraqi government is compartmented by accident and has trouble coordinating large-scale operations, but is resistant to disruption because the many elements are seperated from each other. In many cases the seperate elements are actualy bitter hereditary enemies--temporarily united to fight the "Crusader" invaders. The fragility of this alliance is off-set by the fact that all these insurgency movements are self-contained. If Al Queda was smashed today, it would be a body blow to the insurgency, but not a knock-out punch. The insurgents use the Iraqi population as a shield and data bank. US artillery crews are being used as infantry because the cannon shells are not very useful in this war, but infantry patrols are indespensible.

Will the US military establishment finally follow the model of Heinlein's 1956 novel, "Starship Trooper?" Heinlein's elite force was the Mobile Infantry, a handful of high-tech troops that applied force surgically in surprise raids that combined speed, stealth, firepower, and intelligence. When one of these four was missing, the raid came to grief. In that novel, the most dangerous enemies, the "bugs," moved underground unseen (much like the Oriental warriors in Poole's books) and defeated Earth's soldiers in close combat where the humans were at a disadvantage. The hero of that novel, a sergeant named Zim, used initiative and on-the-spot situational awareness to capture a "bug brain," winning a hard-fought campaign. Heinlein's novels showcased the strengths and weaknesses that Poole's book discusses--both American and Oriental warrior. The Islamic warrior is not as readily identifiable as Heinlein's bug warriors. The Islamic terrorist is no hive creature--and the hive in that science fiction novel proved to be crafty and innovative.

One last note--suicide warriors are nothing new for American GI's. The Japanese kamakazi was the most-organized and may be the most famous example, but he wasn't the first. Many American Indian tribes ritually purified their warrior's souls before battle--the warrior didn't enter battle to die, but was already dead. This freed him from worrying about death and made him more effective. The US cavalry was more worried about catching fleeing Indian bands than encountering "suicidal" Indian braves. In the Philippines, the Moro ritually prepared himself to enter Paradise prior to running amok with a barong among US troops. About the same time, the Boxers in China underwent pre-battle preparation that made them "immune" to bullets and was more or less funeral rites. Despite being "godless communists," the Chinese and North Korean soldiers sometimes used the suicide option, complete with body bomb. The Viet Cong and NVA were credited with doing this frequently. My question is why American soldiers are not better-prepared to face this common threat. Suicide bombers proved to be cost-effective in lives for the PLO--one truck bomb took out the Marine barracks in Beruit and killed over 240 Americans. One PLO suicide driver died. The American response was to bomb a refugee camp--two aircraft shot down, two naval aviators killed, and one captured--and zero PLO fighters were in the camp. Given the disparity in firepower, the suicide bomber seems to be a lifesaver for the insurgency movement. Non-suicide ambushes between American forces and insurgents in Iraq typically end one of two ways--the insurgents escape inflicting few casualties, or the insurgents get wiped out while inflicting multiple American casualties. One successful Iraqi tactic is to drive a car bomb into an American convoy. Because many of the drivers are now contractor personnel, the suicide bomber may only kill some poor kid from Pakistan or another Islamic country--but suicide bombers die so that the insurgency can strike blows with minimal losses. Sometimes a car bomb will kill four or five American servicemen and make headlines.

Poole mentions how the human wave attack seems to disregard human life, but actually is a smart, life-sparing tactic for America's Oriental enemies. Rather than wasting the lives of the Iraqi insurgency, suicide bombers seem to be a cost-effective way of killing the intended target, and have the bonus of psychological impact on the Western media, and the American soldier. So why is America still surprised by ruthless, violent, often suicidal close-range attack?

for more information click here

Extraordinary--Breaks the Code and Outs China and Iran

This book is quite extraordinary, and all of the reviews are helpful in appreciating its content. The author has done a brilliant meticulous job of culling through open source references to create a thoughtful, well-structured, and superbly foot-noted document that is nothing less than "Ref A" for what must become the new "American Way of War."

Big ideas:

1) One third of the world is Muslim, and if we do not restore morality to our form of democratic capitalism, and they adopt asymmetric warfare techniques, we are toast.

2) Iran certainly, and China probably, are fostering global terror as part of their grand strategy--each with different objectives--to end Anerica's status as a super-power.

3) Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia continue to train and support terrorists, with North Korea, Yemen, Sudan and various other countries (e.g. Bangladesh) having diverse roles to play.

4) Hezbollah out of Iran, rather than Al Qaeda out of Saudi Arabia, is the major player in the Iraqi insurgency, and its methods (hostages, suicide bombings, disguised IEDs) are clearly visible across the Iraqi theater of operations and now beginning to appear elsewhere in the world.

5) We cannot win 4th generation asymmetric wars with firepower alone. The heart of the book is a dissection of the Muslim insurgent's inspired excellence at close and asymmetric combat, and a carefully articulated case for getting back into the business of field light infantry that has the skill to infiltrate, surprise, and defeat enemies "mano a mano"--as some of us have been saying for some time (my own phrase has been "one man, one bullet"), but this author does a fantastic job of nailing it in war-fighting terms, modern way must be won by bottom up squad-level observation and skill, not top down command and control wielding firepower that kills 10-100 non-combatants for every US life that it might save (and ultimately--the author is compelling on this point--the deaths of those non-combatants inspire more suicidal terrorists who kill more US fighting men and women than might have died if we had done it right in the first place.

6) The author outlines in detail, with absolutely first-class documentation of his many sources (this is the first book I can remember reading where a single short sentence might contain as many as six different footnotes) the tactical techniques that Muslim radicals have learned to use, to including tunnels and disguises for both themselves and their Improvised Explosive Devices (IED). I agree with General Zinni--this book is required reading for every member of our Armed Forces, from Private to General. If you have a loved one in the Armed Forces, buy them this book and send it to them immediately.

7) Light infantry, acting as a gendarme with superior human intelligence, can nail the terrorists, but unless we want to occupy the world--something impossible to do (see point one)--then we must mobilize all of the instruments of national power and dedicate ourselves to nurturing legitimate effective *indigenous* governments everywhere. That means we must stop supporting 44 dictators, and we must stop imposing immoral capitalism (carpetbagging) on South America, Asia, and Africa.

This book is nothing short of ispirational. Sadly, it will probably be ignored by the Pentagon because, as the author himself points out, the old outdated and ineffective American Way of War is based predominantly on massive firepower and a heavy contractor presence that is most profitable for our arms merchants (see General Smedley Butler, "War is a Raquet") and our beltway bandits. Consequently, I pray that this book will be bought, read, and acted upon by anyone who has every served in the U.S. military, is serving now, or knows someone now serving or likely to serve (I have three boys, the oldest will be of draft age in two years). What we are paying for now is not working and time is running out. We need a fundamental change in direction, and that will not happen absent a national uprising, or at Tom Atlee would say, "from group magic to a wise democracy."

The author gets special high marks from me for relating morality and our acknowledgement of God to being able to win at war. He is absolutely right to castigate the Supreme Court for removing God from our national fabric, and points out that the same Supreme Court once declared slaves to be non-humans. He understands, as Clausewitz did, that the moral is to the material by at least one order of magnitude--in today's information-rich era, I would double it. Morality matters, and we have lost that high ground by allowing special interests to dictate America's profiteering foreign policy, rather than letting the common sense of the American people enrich America's foreign policy for the common good of all--as the Golden Rule suggests: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If the public demands that its politicians attend to this author's views, and if our military leaders--both suited and uniformed--attend to this book, it will save hundreds of thousands of lives, tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps the American way of life.

See the links at Phantom Soldier: The Enemy's Answer to U.S. Firepower

for more information click here

Warriors perspective

As a Career Marine I understand tactics. Poole breaks it down so that the small unit leader can better understand and interpret intelligence. His ability to walk you through each scenario and give you a concise look into the enemy's thoughts and reasoning allows small unit leaders to train their personnel on the proper techniques to defeat the enemy. Because he has over 30 years of experience, conducts intense research and has the ability to be put it into words, he is the perfect author of a book on tactics. This book should be required reading for every member of the US Armed Forces.

for more information click here

A Truly Topical Book

As with Poole's previous books, especially The Tiger's Way, Tactics of the Crescent Moon is truly topical. It shows us clearly why we are having trouble combatting the Iraqui insurgents (that's what these terrorists are). We are repeating the same mistakes we made during the Vietnam War, thus losing many brave soldiers and expending outrageous amounts of treasure, while at the same time alienating our allies and the people.
Our opponents will not be defeated by huge amounts of firepower, our first tactic. This only works in set piece battles like those of WWII. It didn't work in Vietnam and it's not working now. In his book, Poole shows clearly that small-unit tactics can produce favorable reesults. This would involve a sea change in the training of both soldiers and Marines to give our brave young people a chance at both surviving and defeating our enemy. I would hope that the training for the new Iraqui armed force would be along the lines of small-scale operations, to include the tactics of infiltration, ambush, and subversion, already practiced by the enemy. We must have better intelligence, gained at the lowest level, then taking offensive combat to the enemy, instead of reacting to the latest suicide bombing. We can no longer afford to think that by adding a bit of armor to a Humvee we are saveguarding our soldiers. In short, we need to give them a fighting chance.
Anyone reading Tactics of the Crescent Moon and applying its lessons cannot fail to benefit from the experience. This is a must read for Infantry leaders.

for more information click here

Excellent Insight on Militant Tactics

As a student of Middle Eastern Culture and the Arabic language as well as a someone who intends on entering the military upon graduating, I find this book very enlightening as to the tactics of muslim militants. While some explainations are very brief the book covers many different aspects of terrorist methodology. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in terrorism or 4th generation warfare.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

products you might be interested in