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.