Exit, stage left: Max Boot, who has the perfect name for writing about infantrymen, has an engaging piece at Commentary on how the four most celebrated talented generals in the GWOT recently have followed some of the earlier ones he does not mention (Franks, for example) into the sunset. The last of his four, Marine General Jim Mattis, isn’t quite gone, but he’s standing in the door. Geronimo!

Some of these guys were undone by personal scandals of a trivial sort. Petraeus couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, and McChrystal unwisely gave a reporter access to his staff; the reporter, predictably, betrayed him for a juicier headline. (You can’t blame the reporter for that, really. Item 1: A snake will always bite; that’s the nature of a snake. Item 2: If you’re self-confident enough to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Juggling Snakes, see Item 1). Allen and Mattis? Well, the administration, which doesn’t like the military much, really doesn’t like successful military men, and undermined them at every turn. (It did to the other pair as well, but they gave the administration ammunition). Mattis in particular was resented for leading the Marines as if he had Marine values — as if there was something wrong with that. Boot:

Petraeus, McChrystal, Allen, and Mattis would be the first to deny that they are irreplaceable—the graveyards, they would no doubt remind us, are said to be full of irreplaceable men. And clearly there are a number of capable officers who will strive to fill their combat boots. Some heroes of the last decade of war—including General Ray Odierno, General Martin Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral William McRaven (McChrystal’s successor at JSOC and the man who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid), and Major General H.R. McMaster (a noted military intellectual and counterinsurgency commander)—remain in uniform.

But the experience and savvy of the four will be hard to replace. Certainly they deserve more public appreciation than they have gotten so far and, at the very least, an honored role in helping to teach a new generation of soldiers and Marines how to operate at the pinnacle of command. We do not have such a surplus of brilliant commanders that we can afford to wave away those like Petraeus and McChrystal and Allen and Mattis, who have demonstrated a mastery of the modern battlefield. We can only hope that President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the loss of their institutional knowledge, their leadership abilities, and their complex understanding of a dangerous world does not prove to be a tragedy for the nation.

Need we advise you to  «Read The Whole Thing™? Or had you already decided to do that? We’ll be here when you come back.

We don’t share Boot’s (or McMaster’s own, for that matter) degree of being impressed with McMaster. Mattis and McChrystal have probably forgotten more about COIN than that publicity hound has ever learnt. But he is talented, even though a bit of a self-promoter. And every corporal and up knows how to handle a “Spotlight Ranger”: keep the spotlight on him, but spread the kudos around enough to ensure his peers don’t get resentful; you’ll get credit for the great things he does, while his personality deficiencies will be his alone. Of course, no one in the NCA, except Chuck Hagel knows this. He’s the only one who’s actually been a corporal, the rest of them lack that character-forging resumé line.

The other guys he mentions vary in quality. Dempsey, for example, is a politician in uniform; while his bosses may curl their toes happily at his sucking-up, his troops wouldn’t cross the street to urinate on him if he were on fire. Odierno has politician tendencies, but in person we found him impressive on several levels. McRaven is the real deal, a good leader for a moral country in a hard world. They are all probably famous enough that the White House resents and will, in time, undermine them, unless they can hang on until the next guy, who will not be so vain and vindictive, whoever he is and whatever party he comes from (or “she” for that matter).

There are many other generals further downlist who bring similar courage, fidelity, and dedication to their tasks. We hesitate to name names, lest we plant targets on their backs. We, as a nation, have always found talented officers, in bad years and under bad Presidents as well as good ones. Some of the best ones “bubble under” at the O-6 (Colonel/Navy Captain) level, but there’s an incredible amount of talent there.

Indeed, the “up-or-out” rule embedded in DOPMA and ROPMA, sucked into the military from 1920s corporate practice — think Durant’s GM — ensures that the path to high rank is an elimination tournament and the Army and other services shed incredible talent at every level.

For years, everyone speculated about what would happen if something like the Bombay Attacks happened here. All kinds of carnage were suggested.

Well, we’ve just had two roughly analogous attacks in 2013. How did Creepy Chris Dorner and the Jihad Brothers do, relative to Bombay?

Dorner was a lone wolf, but he was a well-armed lone wolf, better trained in marksmanship than most of his former LE peers, and armed with a suite of weapons. His shooting spree killed not hundreds, not dozens, but four people. (Three more civilians would have died but were saved by cops’ terrible marksmanship, despite being targeted by an average 80 rounds each at point-blank range).

Speedbump and Flashbang, the Jihad Twins, likewise managed to kill four people, despite using three bombs, an unknown quantity of guns, and calling on mighty Allah for aid. Like Dorner, they used a certain limited amount of stealth and animal cunning, and like him, they were quickly run to ground (in Speedbump’s case, literally) by a coordinated police response and an alert public. They also were the beneficiaries of awful cop marksmanship, with relatively few hits for hundreds and hundreds of rounds hastily addressed “to whom it may concern.” (At least they were hit. Dorner never was; his sole wound was his self-inflicted head shot). In Boston, too, two non-terrorists were saved only by police marksmanship when a number of confused cops mag-dumped a marked State Police SUV, and there was at least one single-shot negligent discharge among the assembled throngs of lawmen.

Terrorist Ajmal Kasab, in the former Victoria Station. Hung November, 2012.

But compare this to Bombay in November, 2008, where 166 people were killed, including 15 policemen and 2 elite NSG commandos, and almost 300 wounded. There, of course, there were more shooters — ten, in five teams — and the attack was well organized, with the cooperation of an organized terror group, Lashkar-e Taiba, and LET’s national sponsor, Pakistan’s national intelligence agency, ISI. (Pakistan still has brought no one to justice, and won’t; their “Anti-terrorism Court No. 1” is running out the clock still. Conversely, India has rededicated itself to the death penalty and has been merrily condemning and hanging Islamic terrorists and mass murderers recently, including the sole survivor of the Bombay shooters, Mohammed Ajmal “Kasab”). An organizer of the attack was extradited from Saudi Arabia (!) to India last summer; it will take several years for his case to make its way through India’s courts.

Taking into account the shock effect of the multiple attacks, the superior small arms, and the probably superior training of the Pakistani terrorists, the Indian results are about four to eight times worse than the American ones — roughly 17 victims per shooter compared to two or four.

Despite the fact that India was under steady attack from foreign terrorists, the Indian security services were ill-prepared for an attack of this nature. As bad as American police marksmanship training is, at least American police are armed with adequate weapons (once mobilized, superior weapons to the terrorists) and provided with ammunition. Some Indian police carry bolt-action rifles or even single-shot shotguns, with ammunition counts in the single digits. Cops like that died on November 26, 2008 when they came up against determined AK-armed shooters. The NSG was a single unit for the vast country, and had to be mobilized and brought in (once they were on scene, they quickly reduced the remaining concentrations of terrorists and freed hundreds of hostages).

The Indians were not lacking in valor — both NSG commandos and ordinary cops ran towards the gunfire, as soon as they could — but were deficient in equipment, training, numbers, and coordination.

Indians are as smart as any people on Earth, and they took these lessons to heart: the state government of Maharastha bought the police boats and copters to patrol the coastline, and established a state-wide CT element, Force One; all police agencies upgraded their guns and their training, which benefits day-to-day crimefighting as well as CT potential; NSG established four regional bases, putting its operators closer to possible missions; and a nationwide investigative agency with both crime and terrorism beats, much like the FBI, was stood up.

All those were already in place in the USA, so the butcher’s bill of our jihadis was much lower. So that’s the lost lesson of the Dorner and Flashbang/Speedbump attacks: the USA is a pretty hard target, even deep inside the Boston Victim Disarmament Zone.

So another lesson learned, for terrorists: you get one shot at a novel attack like this. Next time, we’re ready for you.

One last comment on India: the government didn’t want the nine deceased shooters’ graves to become points of pilgrimage for other radicals, and Indian moslem imams didn’t want them in their cemeteries, either. The Toronto Star retells the story in an article on the Boston bombers (albeit with numbers a little off):

After the Mumbai attacks in 2008, which killed 164 people, including nine gunmen, the Indian government considered burying the bodies of the attackers in a Muslim graveyard in the city. However, religious leaders vehemently opposed the use of their cemetery. The government was forced to hold on to the bodies. When they began to rot, officials launched a secret operation to bury the bodies in the outskirts of the city, away from the media glare. The government informed the public of the burial two days later.

The executed jihadi, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, was interred inside the jail where in which he was hanged.

There is an exception to the general futility of US terror attacks: Nidal Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood, Texas. Jihad solo practitioner Hasan knew he had a disarmed target set, because of the gun-control practiced by military provost marshals; he practiced with weapons for his planned attack; and applying these Bombay-like factors, he achieved near-Bombay levels of per-terrorist killing (13 dead, 32 wounded) before far-off police arrived to stop him. Hasan’s error in choice of weapon saved a lot of those wounded from death: he used an FN Five-seveN pistol, which makes small wounds.

Likewise, some criminal shooters’ have had successes more like the Bombay terrorists, by applying similar factors, particularly on target selection: contained, disarmed, undefended targets. So the lesson learned there seems to be: harden and arm such targets.