Blundering in "terror war," blundering in Iraq

Military analyst William Arkin is coming to the end of his run as an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times.  For his last installment, he looks at Five Big American Blunders in Terror War Los Angeles Times 09/05/04. 

The five are, in his words: (1) Beware the Next Big Thing; (2) What you don't know can be bad, but what you think you know can be worse; (3) Be a little skeptical about people with "inside" information; (4) Changing a long-standing policy on the basis of immediate circumstances is not a good idea. It's hard to think long-term in the midst of a crisis; and, (5) Never mistake a mirror for a window.

In point one, he has particular reference to an excessive expectation of the current "military transformation" approach of trying to rely much more heavily on special forces:

... [T]he special operations strategy is essentially a SWAT team approach: Highly trained operators swoop down on the enemy and clean house. It works well for the police, because the bad guys are usually holed up somewhere. You can't surround a whole city or country, though. By the time we kick in the doors, the bad guys have often scattered. Or they were never at that particular address to begin with; witness the still-futile search for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Point two refers to the famous intelligence claims about Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction," the basis of going to war in Iraq.  A basis that didn't exist.  "A president or a military leader who operates on the basis of what he thinks must be true, instead of the specific details of what is known and not known, is headed for trouble," he says.

The third point is a self-criticism.  Arkin says that prior to the Iraq War, he missed out on something important: "Rumsfeld and his team were impervious to any views other than their own."

Point four could refer to the preventive war strategy.  But Arkin actually discusses something else:

In March 2002, I was able to describe classified details of the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review that revealed its decision to increase the role of nuclear weapons in military planning. I said then, and believe now, that the administration's decision to redefine nuclear weapons requirements — a redefinition that makes their future use more likely — was a panicky overreaction to Sept. 11.

We have continued to move down the path of developing more usable nuclear weapons. And we are shortchanging far too many efforts that would reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the first place.

With point five, he refers to our present-day military's attempt to make every war into a conventional, Second World War-type conflict:

Senior officials talk about Iraq as part of something fundamentally different from past military challenges. But they fight it like a conventional war: From the beginning, our strategy was to engage the enemy in battle, win a crushing victory and reap the fruits of unconditional success. Thus, field commanders have talked of "victories" in Najaf and "strategic progress" in Fallouja. Meantime, soldiers continue to die by the ones and twos on conventional infantry patrols.

I've referred in earlier posts to similar analyses.  For instance, from Lt. Col. Robert Cassidy in Parameters Summer 2004:

The US military has had a host of successful experiences in counter-guerrilla war, including some distinct successes with certain aspects of the Vietnam War. However, the paradox stemming from America’s unsuccessful crusade in the jungles of Vietnam is this - because the experience was perceived as anathema to the mainstream American military, hard lessons learned there about fighting guerrillas were neither embedded nor preserved in the US Army’s institutional memory. The American military culture’s efforts to expunge the specter of Vietnam, embodied in the mantra “No More Vietnams,” also prevented the US Army as an institution from really learning from those lessons. In fact, even the term “counterinsurgency” seemed to become a reviled and unwelcome word, one that the doctrinal cognoscenti of the 1980s conveniently transmogrified into “foreign internal defense.” Even though many lessons exist in the US military’s historical experience with small wars,the lessons from the Vietnam War were the most voluminous. Yet these lessons were most likely the least read, because the Army’s intellectual rebirth after Vietnam focused almost exclusively on a big conventional war in Europe—the scenario preferred by the US military culture. (my emphasis)

I've also quoted Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., author of The Army and Vietnam (1986) on the same issue.  He's also quoted in Newsweek (It's Worse Than You Think published online 09/14/04), where he comments on the development of the insurgency in Iraq:

"What we see is a classic progression," says Andrew Krepinevich, author of the highly respected study "The Army and Vietnam." "What we also see is that the U.S. military is not trained or organized to fight insurgencies. That was the deliberate choice after Vietnam. Now we look to be paying the price."

William Arkin has a book forthcoming: Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World.