The Army is-among itself. Andrew Bacevich chronicles it.
The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam.
The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives.
As Bacevich points out this is probably a really good thing. Especially when you contrast that with the Navy, which is doing nothing but getting smaller- and worrying about how many women it can promote ahead of when they should be. There are no arguments going on publicly within the Navy. Just in bars and blogs by people such as myself who are astounded at the rat hole our once great Navy has gone down. Vern Clark and his six years of oligarchy cured that.
Besides confirming the deification of Petreaus-at the expense of Colin Powell I might add, the argument is about the proper role of the Army, and thus what kind of war it should train for:
Instability creates ungoverned spaces in which violent anti-American radicals thrive. Yet if instability anywhere poses a threat, then ensuring the existence of stability everywhere—denying terrorists sanctuary in rogue or failed states—becomes a national-security imperative. Define the problem in these terms, and winning battles becomes less urgent than pacifying populations and establishing effective governance.
War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”
A very tall order. And not every one is buying it:
Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the Petraeus era, attributing security improvements achieved during Petraeus’s tenure less to new techniques than to a “cash-for-cooperation” policy that put “nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, … on the U.S. government payroll.” According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events.
All of this forms a backdrop to Gentile’s core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.
The concern is not idle. A recent article in Army magazine notes that the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, long “renowned for its force-on-force conventional warfare maneuver training,” has now “switched gears,” focusing exclusively on counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than practicing how to attack the hill, its trainees now learn about “spending money instead of blood, and negotiating the cultural labyrinth through rapport and rapprochement.”
And this is change is not free-it comes at a high cost:
The officer corps itself recognizes that conventional-warfare capabilities are already eroding. In a widely circulated white paper, three former brigade commanders declare that the Army’s field-artillery branch—which plays a limited role in stability operations, but is crucial when there is serious fighting to be done—may soon be all but incapable of providing accurate and timely fire support. Field artillery, the authors write, has become a “dead branch walking.”
This is an important question, the answer to which will drive the Army’s spending priorities for years to come. I tend to side with the conservatives-simply styling the Army for Iraq style counter insurgencies ignores the issues with the Army’s role in the rest of the world and as a part of the overall US national security strategy. “Strategic choice—to include the choice of abandoning the Long War in favor of a different course—should remain a possibility.”
Especially if you think Al Queada has already been beaten. Where does one go from there?
The Army deserves credit for having this discussion. Meanwhile over in the Navy……the fleet just gets smaller and older. They are talking about who is a Shipmate though.
I think it is a valuable dialog. I saw it start a long time ago when I attended the EXWAR NDIA conference a few years back. TRADOC’s rep, a BGEN made a huge impact on me and left me in no doubt that the Army reflects, ponders, thinks deep thoughts and, most importantly, listens to the roil at the surface. The navy, on the other hand, simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass what they hear from deckplate level and they are keen to suppress the midlevel officer/senior NCO views that run counter to the adopted policies of the bureaucracy. You’re a commander and you announce that a policy or process is naked and you’ll never ever be promoted again.
I listened the other day to an 06 charged with responsibilities involving force protection say that he would never give the order to fire on an asymmetric enemy force. He didn’t see what purpose would be served and instead would have surrendered. Truly sickening behavior.
The Army is going to tear itself apart here for a little while as it tries to work out, once again, what is the #1 priority. What is the #2 priority, etc. I’m sure they’ll figure it out and in the meantime, the US is left with the most professional, most experienced, most deadly army in the world. I’m not all that worried. We’re not going to see a repeat of what happened after WWII when 95% of the military dissolved and disappeared within 12 months of the end of hostilities.
I don’t follow the latest trends but I haven’t seen any of the usual nonsense viz doctrine and STOM and all the rest of the usual nonsense from the USMC. For them, I’m a little worried. They’re the small wars bubbas and they are getting used to fighting in the big war. What kind of focus do they retain on the essential nature of the force from the sea? Are they losing it as they start to turn into army V2.0? They’re not thinking of maybe contracting out the FSSG to KBR or Haliburton are they? Not thinking of descoping artillery in order to maximize boots on ground with rifles….. The last time I had them in support I was pretty impressed. The time before that, not so much.
The old man was FA and commanded a battery in Vietnam. I recall going through his 201 file (don’t tell him, he doesn’t know) and seeing that he was one of perhaps 2% of FA officers in Germany, before Vietnam, who could pass the test for getting fires on targets accurately and TOT if that became necessary. Most skills atrophy if left unpracticed. In my service we’ve only suffered atrophy in shipbuilding, MCM, ASW, ASUW and AAW so, were doing pretty good. We can still handle BSFs, UNREPS, air ops and ………..drat, it was on the tip of my tongue. I’m sure there’s something else we’re good at.
Sea and anchor detail. With only 279 ships-the navy gets to do that a lot.
It is nice to see this Bacevich article highlighted. However the importance of Bacevich’s piece goes beyond highlighting an interest debate taking place within the military. A critical point he notes is that aspects of the debate described should actually be taking place outside the military. Regrettably the political and academic types that should be engaged in this debate are apparently more interested in other matters leaving it in the hands of the army.
One point that Bacevich does not emphasize, but which is never-the-less pervasive is that the essence of Nagl’s argument is a move to nothing less than full-blown hard imperialism. The view that all non-US societies and polities must be reshaped so that they cannot threaten the US is seductive and understandable but the scale of the job is daunting, to put it mildly. And it needs to be recognized that such an effort would imply massive changes in the politics and society of the US as well. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is one of the things that should be getting debated. At a minimum though, some consideration should be given to the cost-benefit exchange of accepting a limited potential for harm from foreign nationals in exchange for preserving the values that made the US such an inspiring society in the first place. But unfortunately the military is being left to address these questions on its own while the public is told, by its political leadership, that with the right application of effort everyone can be safe all of the time from everything that might come from outside. Which is of course simply not true and never will be.
My own thinking is that the Army should focus on maintaining that force on force capability that they worked so hard to gain in the post Vietnam era.
Many folks will (correctly) point out that the likelihood of having to fight that scenario is less than the likelihood of having to conduct stability operations. But the problem is, when you need a force on force capability, you cannot adapt a constabulary force to it. You need that capability right there, right then. See Desert Storm or OIF in 2003. It is far easier to have the “worst case” force adapt to a lower level of intensity than trying to scale up.
Oh, and did you see that pig go flying by? I can’t believe I am in agreement with Skippy. What’s next, dogs and cats living together?
Feel the power of the dark side! 🙂