Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods

Rating:
Summary: The Tools to Prepare the Next Generation for the New Wars
Review: "Pentagon officials insist the anti-Western fighters have not won a single battle against U.S. forces. But those in the field say the measure of winning and losing is more psychological than physical, and here the insurgency has gained the upper hand. Pentagon leaders have maintained insurgents number no more than 5,000, but privately some military officials say the resistance can draw upon more than 20,000 fighters. With superior numbers and technology, U.S. troops could prevail in almost any conventional battle, officers say. But they run the risk of losing against the insurgency in the long run because the war ultimately is not about killing targets. History shows it's about winning the popular support, many officers say."

Sounds familar? Unfortunately the citation above, from Elaine Grossman's article "Officers In Iraq: War Tactics Offer Little Prospect Of Success" is from the war in Iraq, published in September 2004.

Why Is this happening again? Before I answer, this, I also ask, "where are the real leaders today? Where are the leaders that in the past would have had the moral courage to make corrections, stand up to the powers to be, and save soldiers lives"

If we do ever adapt the books of John Poole, such as the Tactics of the Crescent Moon, which is one of the most innovative and practical books on military tactics, it is because we found leaders at all levels of our Army and Marine Corps willing to adapt and use them. They would do this against the antiquated programs of instruction that we teach at most ROTC programs, and Army and Marine Corps schools.

Most of the services today are educated and train in a culture that is immersed in the 2nd Generation of War (refer to www.-d-n-i.net for more details). With the exception of U.S. Special Forces, the leaders are developed, accessed, and promoted in a culture that is out of touch with the growing evolution of war. This is an evolution that to the U.S. is a Revolution of Ideas--thus all the buzz words you hear today by talking heads on evening news programs--but we have not reacted with substance to the changes this so-called Revolution brought to the battlefield and the global community.

John Poole is one of the few with the moral courage, experience and intelligence to try to make the change through writing. "The pen is mightier than the sword," if only those who need this book would read it, believe in it, and then implement its recommendations, despite it going against what their superiors are telling them to do.

I love John's books so much that the first, The Last Hundred Yards, was the best small unit tactics manual published; so I made it my text book for my MS III (junior) cadets at Duke and Georgetown University Army ROTC programs. Fortunately for my cadets and I, John keeps turning out more books that continue the cadets' evolution toward true professionalism, and hopefully, the ability to impact change generations from now on the U.S. Army.

Now, just in time for preparing my cadets to lead in Iraq and Afganistan, John is offering his take on how Islamic non-state forces fight. Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods is going to be my text book for the MS II (sophomore) year. I was so impressed with it, that I am rewriting my entire syllabus to revolve around this book and William S. Lind's Maneuver Warfare Handbook.

My actions, and those of my department, while bold and necessary, unfortunately run counter to the U.S. Army Cadet Command prescribed curriculum that centers on process, task-condition and standard (2nd Generation Warfare) and developing junior officers who are supposed to react, play safe, and not in how to think in order to be decisive.

If we had officer accession programs that was evolutionary with the pace of war, they could create adaptive officers with intuition as the foundation to the future. These officers would innovate and execute "better tactics," which these leaders would understand,

"U.S. forces could take fewer casualties at close range without alienating the local population and without sacrificing their long-range capabilities. More powerful than firepower in this new kind of war will be the preservation of infrastructure. For it is the lack of social services that gives the foe his recruiting base. In the 21st century - as it was at the end of World War II - food, water, clinics and jobs will do infinitely more to secure the ultimate victory than bombs. Better small-unit technique costs nothing. It requires only a slower operational pace and the authority to experiment at the company or school level."

Instead of using the U.S. method for analysis of war, which is the quanatative method that relies on the tangibles due to a lack of trust in classical thinking about war, John Poole uses a thorough examination of history. He uses lessons from the Iran-Iraq war and Israel's expulsion from southern Lebanon. John combines this with another important factor, know thy enemy. He studies each of the main Islamic Fourth Generation forces the U.S. may find itself facing. He discusses the Afghan resistance to the U.S., as well as that to the Soviet Army

John Poole then examines the Iraqi opposition, and in Part Three of Tactics of the Crescent Moon, he offers how U.S. forces should change their tactics. As in his other books, Poole stresses small-unit tactics and techniques, but the foundation is solid leadership.

Now, many reading this, especially defenders of the faith, will say the U.S. has good tactics and techniques. But John Poole bases his recommendations on trust and professionalism. He empowers sergeants: individuals, squad and team leaders, with the ability to do things that today's officers would not do-trust their subordinates with autonomy.

Because we do not do this, we limit our courses of action to fire power and strong arm tactics. Sadly, we do have the people that would welcome this trust and would deliver results. But instead, we continue to fight as we have for a century based on assumptions that drive a culture that is out of date.

John talks about moral disadvantages of the massive use of American firepower. With John Poole's methods, the U.S. could create good small units - true light infantry. These units could win without the vast collateral damage and civilian casualties that work against us. They would win by constant adaptation, by evolving faster than the enemy. They would win by using their mental power.

My cadets, and returning alumni as officers, cherish the thought that they would one day be allowed high levels of small unit autonomy. They have learned that better peacetime training, training would permit experimentation and adaptation, is the recipe to success. Instead they are telling me that everyone is forced into cookie-cutter sameness.

My cadets want to learn, and this makes the Tactics of the Crescent Moon an invaluable resource. The question is whether the U.S. Army can truly Transform, not by buying new technology, or filling thick doctrine manuals with the right buzz words but no substance. If the Army would focus at the beginning at the way it educates its cadets on how to think, to learn and adapt. Then the Army would well be on its way to Transforming itself into a 3rd Generation force that could deal with 4th Generation foes.

We have to do everything we can to prepare our young officers. New officers will have to bear the burden of a vast, centralized, bureaucratic command structure that has little interest in adaptation. It will be up to them that tries to change it, despite threats to their careers. They will up against layers of officers who know all too well how to grab more bucks for irrelevant high-tech weapons, and sit in huge headquarters. These headquarters resemble huge circuses that constantly demand information to justify their existance, but in turn distract units from their purpose, stay abreat and preparing for the evolutions in war.

Hopefully, enough young people get hold of and read John Poole's books in order to start changing the Army and the nation so we have a chance to survive the combative future of the globe.




Rating:
Summary: Learning to empathize with your opponent
Review: Empathy with the enemy (getting in his skin) is often a key factor to success. Until we attempt to understand our enemy's cause and his worldview, we can hope for little success. Once again John Poole cuts to the essentials of doing just that-understanding. Like all of Poole's books, this one provides a depth of background along with details required to survive and win. Would that every soldier that might face "militant Muslim combat methods" had this book in his hands for preparation.

Mr. Poole goes back in history to give us a feel for the culture that produced a fierce warrior class. He then proceeds to demonstrate how that culture affects the way they fight now and the way they will likely fight in the future. He describes further how an insurgency develops and becomes more sophisticated in its methods and in so doing lets us see what might come next.

Buy it for your loved ones in the military. There could be no more practical book for the combat soldier's kit.

Rating:
Summary: Reversing the Tide
Review: I rate this book five stars for the audience it was intended: warriors. This book is one of the MUST read selections in the wide array of books about the Global War on Terror. John Poole pitches this book at the level of understanding of the meanest private and he doesn't pull any punches. He calls a spade a spade.

While we are the best trained heavy infantry and armor force in the world, we are not a match for the 10 meter 4th Generation elusive enemy. John Poole clearly illustrates this thesis with many examples. Poole is perhaps the most experienced infantry trainer in America with combat experience in Vietnam. He is a student of history, and he has written 4 books on the subject of tactics at close range. He knows war, including 4th generation war, backwards and forwards, top to bottom.

If we can accept that because of our top-down directed training schedules, cram packed with road marches, mechanized gunnery tables, National Training Center/Joint National Training Center routines, are ill-spent time adhering to strict conventional doctrines and policies, it is easy to see how we become predictable to a 4th generation warrior. John Poole suggests a bottoms-up approach to training in order to begin to be able to evolve training techniques to fight this type of war. This is the only way we can adapt and evolve. It is the way that our own light infantry can get ahead of the jihaadist OODA Loop cycles with our own and drive a wedge between the jihaadists and the mass of the Islamic population.

The generals have yet to learn that this is a company, platoon, squad war and that they are cast in a supporting role. There are no Pattons on this battlefield.

The Administration has yet to learn that our high technology is in a supporting role to aid the troopers on the ground, and that there is no technical panecea.

Part of this bottoms-up training for our soldiers is an understanding of the enemy and how he trains. Poole provides Cultural Intelligence 101 in this book. The enemy has training, but not nearly as much as we do, we should have a decided advantage if we trained on the right things. We can beat him at his own game, but it will take an entirely different approach, a totally different type of training.

The jihaadist training is practical and directed, and the training center for the jihaadists has moved from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Lebanon to the battlefields in Iraq. U.S. soldiers patrolling inside vehicles are only providing the jihaadists with easy targets. Living behind Green Zones is only providing the jihaadist easy targets. And killing civilians by using our less-than-precision weapons is what they want us to do. We have to learn to fight the three block war all over with a different mind-set.

There are many many pearls of wisdom in this book, but you may not like reading some of them. If it causes you to think, however, then the effort is more than worthwhile. Read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Infantry and Foreign Aid Specialists: This Book is for You.
Review: Poole shows clearly and concisely with many citations that militant Muslim combat methods are similar to urban and rural guerrilla warfare methods used in many other wars. Although Poole explains the influences of Muslim leaders in history on current militant Muslim leaders, Islam does not by itself make the militants' methods much different from those used by other rebel guerrilla fighters, especially in Asia.

No matter how good one's firepower and technology, most wars, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are won on the ground by well-trained individual infantry in small units. These infantry must know the terrain (urban or rural), get along with the local people, and be quick to adapt to changes in enemy tactics. Muslim militants in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan have certainly demonstrated their abilities to change their combat methods to confront successfully overwhelming U.S. or Soviet force, firepower, and/or technology.

While apparently lacking a strong worldwide command and control structure, Muslim militants in many countries have demonstrated similarities and linkages, which, according to Poole, must be recognized and confronted, if they are to be defeated. He gives several examples of these connections among fighters in different countries.

Poole lays the foundation for arguing a strong case in favor of shifting Defense Department funding towards more special operations, small unit infantry warfare training and de-emphasizing the conventional large-unit operations with overwhelming firepower. Research and technology development should likewise be directed towards the needs of individual soldiers and small infantry units.

This book is well worth reading, either cover-to-cover, or, because of its excellent organization, subtitling, and indexing, it can be used as a reference based on one's own interests.


Rating:
Summary: Another life-saver by John Poole
Review: Tactics of the Crescent Moon is a survival guide for all those people that are involved in the current conflicts.
Reading this book gives you a unique insight in the way the asymmetric or guerilla opponent thinks and acts.

This book again, as all of John Poole's writing, calls out to the reader to use his best weapon - the brain.
With all the examples and bits of information in the numerous references you can learn to identify the tell tale signs of militant Muslim action.
This will help to save lives.

This book is useful to everyone;
policy and doctrine makers, tacticians, planners, trainers, commanders and leaders and most important of all - to soldiers.

In fact I thought this book to be so current that I ordered additional copies to send to our troops that are deployed in areas where the described combat methods are used.


Rating:
Summary: This is another 5 star book that should not be ignored.
Review: This book is a wake-up call. John Poole has written a series of books prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom that are applicable today, especially now with the difficult challenge in Iraq. "Tactics of the Crescent Moon" is simply an adjunct to that effort.

Mr. Poole stresses the importance of training military forces in small unit tactics and decision making skills at the most junior levels of our services. The body-count in Iraq seldom claims the lives of senior service members- the majority of those dying are in the late teens and early 20s. Yet, the strategies to fight those battles are being directed from a myriad of headquarters that focus their training on command exercises that shy away from what some call "Small Wars", insurgencies, etc. Instead exercises focus on conventional war plans that emphasize the use of conventional forces and tactics - not guerilla, and with limited emphasis on fighting asymmetry.

Training in the use of Poole's findings should have been conducted in late 2002, vice Millennium Challenge. Operation Iraqi Freedom did not kick off until ~ March 2003, but a myriad of large scale military exercises, in addition to Millennium Challenge, did not prepare forces for what they are dealing with today- hence the reason for stressing Poole's book.

You can find more about this by reviewing the links listed below referencing Millennium Challenge 2002 when General Van Riper was restricted from utilizing asymmetric methods to train U.S. forces. Some of the return investment of that computerized hi-tech exercise can be seen in Iraq today. I also recommend reading all of John Poole's material if your training plan obstructs you from focusing on the real fight, or from gaining a modest appreciation of what our young service men and women are facing today.

Poole addresses concepts and ideas of interest to both planners and operators. Intelligence personnel can use the book to identify collection challenges and plans. Operators can develop scenarios developed from lessons learned within this book.

Concepts and ideas worth studying and EXERCISING are:

-Studying the enemy's ability to employ the use of tunnels
-Learn the insurgent's intelligence collection methods
-Learn to exercise a decentralized Command and Control and understand why
-Understand how the enemy can direct our own Artillery/hi-tech weapons against our own forces.
-Relearn lessons from the Soviet-Afghan war that we still have not learned yet in reference to the preferred used of foot patrols over the use of convoys on predictable avenues of approach.
-Learn the dynamics of radical elements of Hezbollah/Iranian influences and their efforts to gain control of power in Iraq.
-Understand that Small Wars are societal wars that do not have the same measures of effectiveness as conventional wars.
----- There is much more.


Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but I think money is better well spent on John Poole's "Tactics of the Crescent Moon" for about $15.00 than on a $250 million dollar exercise that displayed little applicability to the current fight in Iraq that focused its training on staff members, vice the 18 year old fighting and dying on the grounds in Iraq.

This is another 5 star book that should not be ignored. It addresses the human element of combat, the element left ignored behind technology and hi-tech exercises.

[...]


Rating:
Summary: This book could turn the tide in the war on terror
Review: This book is truly remarkable. In Tactics of the Crescent Moon, John Poole provides an incredibly insightful analysis of the Middle Eastern problem and our role in trying to resolve it. He explains extremely complicated issues with remarkable clarity, examining them from historical, political, cultural, military and moral perspectives. Despite the immense scope of the book, his key insights never get lost in the complexity of his subject matter. At the most fundamental level, John Poole provides detailed tactical descriptions of exactly how our Middle Eastern adversaries fight. To illuminate the big picture, he clearly shows how these tactical examples relate to the larger cultural and political issues. He goes on to propose solutions that can help American privates survive, help commanders make better decisions, help generals develop better strategies and even help politicians make better military policies. Most importantly, the book's profound morality offers insight on how to win what might be the most important battle of all, the battle for the moral high ground. We will not win this war on terrorism if we lose touch, even for a moment, with the great and noble values that make us who we are. John Poole reminds us that when Americans go to war we bring with us our honor, our compassion, our love of freedom, and our belief in the equality of all people. Our morality is our ultimate weapon.