I just came acroos this report issued by the Congressional Research Service (CSR) of the Library of Congress: Peacekeeping and Related Stability Operations: Issues of U.S. Military Involvement 09/15/05 by Nina M. Serafino.
Serafino takes a look at the issues involved in adjusting the Army force structures to more successfully carry out peacekeeping missions. Her paper also provides an informative guide to current official terminiology on the subject.
The use of the term “peacekeeping” gained currency in the late 1950s, when United Nations peacekeeping efforts mostly fit a narrower definition: providing an “interpositional” force to supervise the keeping of a cease-fire or peace accord that parties in conflict had signed. In 1992, the United Nations began to use a broader terminology to describe the different types of peacekeeping activities. In particular, it created the term “peace enforcement” to describe operations in unstable situations where peacekeepers are allowed to use force because of a greater possibility of conflict or a threat to their safety. (For some military analysts, there is virtually no difference between peace enforcement operations and low-intensity conflict, save the existence of a peace plan or agreement that has some degree of local consent.) Subsequently, U.S. executive branch agencies substituted the term “peace operations” for “peacekeeping.” Since the early 2000s, the Department of Defense more often uses the term “stability” operations to refer to peace operations (although the term also encompasses other non-combat operations, such as counterdrug operations), and undertakes some peace tasks in the context of reconstruction assistance. Congress has tended to use the term “peacekeeping,” as does this issue brief.
Peacekeeping tasks are also erferred to as "nation-building". for several years up until the mission in Iraq bogged down, the Republicans treated "nation-building" as a pariah concept. Now, they still don't like it. But they find themselves having to attempt it in Iraq and defend the resultsto the public.
After the Vietnam War, the officers corps reoriented the services even more toward conventional war. They prepared to fight the Soviet Army in Central Europe. The plan for future counterinsurgency wars was simple: avoid them.
Another lesson the officer corps learned from the Vietnam War was that they needed to insure widespread public support for any war they undertook. One of the conclusions they drew from this had to do with the reserves.
During the Vietnam War, the Joint Chiefs repeatedly urged Lyndon Johnson to mobilize the reserves. LBJ refused because he though it would encourage a kind of war fever among the public that he did not want.
The Chiefs wanted the mobilization because they believed it would give them better trained and more highly motivated soldiers than they were getting through the draft. They also thought it would rally public opinion more strongly behinid the war, because mobilizing the reserves would be a statement of how serious the US was about the military effort.
So in their subsequent planning, the military structured their mix of forces in such a way that in any Vietnam War-scale conflict in the future, the president would have to mobilize the reserves toprovide adequate personnel. During the Gulf War of 1991, this seemed to achieve the desired effect on public opinion.
While I haven't seen any polling data exploring this particular question, it certainly seems that in the present Iraq War, the mobilization of the reserves backfired as far as public relations.
But this background is necessary as a framework for understanding some of the insights in Serafino's paper. For instance, she writes about "a 'rebalancing' of positions between the Army active and reserve forces that officials said eventually would involve some 100,000 positions," initiated by Rummy's Pentagon in 2003.
The primary reason stated for these changes was to improve the Army's warfighting capacity. Nevertheless, the changes were also viewed as enhancing the Army's ability to carry out a broader range of missions - including peacekeeping and related stability operations, as well as homeland defense - with less stress on the active and reserve forces.
Translated from Pentagonese, the plan is to move positions from the reserve to the active force so that it would not be necessary in a future conflict like the Iraq War torely so heavily on mobilizing the reserves.
Serafino doesn't frame the issue explicitly in the way I'm doing here. But what she is describing is how Rumsfeld and the current officer corps are trying to make adaptations to better organize the Army to fight counterinsurgency wars by tinkering with existing elements of the conventional-war model. But reading between the lines, it's not hard to see that what see is describing is a Pentagon that remains committed to conventional-war preparedness and reliance on whiz-bang high-tech projects while avoiding the assumption that it will be expected in the future to wage counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be clear on the PentagonSpeak, counterinsurgency is considered to be "low-intensity conflict," which is distinct from peacekeeping/stabilization/stability operations. However, as Serafino notes, "counterinsurgency techniques include humanitarian and political activities which are also carried out in peace operations."
But the real dilemma is that the Pentagon's focus is on conventional warfare, or "medium-intensity conflict". (A "high-intensity" conflict is nuclear war.)
But before I get more into that, the most striking item in her paper to me this:
Where military and civilians are delivering assistance in the same areas, some civilians geel that the military presenceconfuses the civilian role, and makes them targets of armed opponents. In Afghanistan, humanitarian groups have charged that U.S. soldiers were endangering their workers by wearing civilian dress while undertaking humanitarian activities...
This reminded me once again of the breath-taking arrogance and hubris of the Bush/Cheney/Rummy clique. The official justification for declaring that Geneva Convention protections did not apply to Taliban soldiers captured in Afghanistan was that they did not wear uniforms while in combat. The parts of the body of international law referred to by the shorthand "Geneva Conventions" which the US has ratified specify that a distinguishing uniform or insignia is one of the definitions of combatants. On this ground, Bush and Rummy sent hundreds of capturedmen, by no means all of them captured in combat, to be tortured and held in a legal limbo in Guantanamo for years.
And now they are having American troops in the field performing official duties without their uniforms. Not good. Not good at all.
Returning to the Pentagon's assumptions about readiness and force size, Serafino gives good examples of how the officer corps is processing the current situation. Striving as she does throughout for a nonpartisan tone, she characterizes the military outlook of the Bush Doctrine supporters this way:
Questions also arise as to whether peacekeeping is a desirable mission for U.S. forces. Some analysts point out that as representatives of the sole world “superpower,” U.S. troops are particularly vulnerable to attempts to sabotage peacekeeping operations by those who want to convince potential followers of their power by successfully engaging U.S. forces. Others argue that other countries are reluctant to commit forces if the United States does not.
And in her description of nation-building, you can see what such activities do not fit in with military preparations to fight Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap:
As most often used when referring to the U.S. military, nation-building refers to a range of activities to assist civilians beyond providing security and humanitarian aid in emergency situations. These can include projects such as the repair, maintenance, or construction of economic infrastructure,such as roads, schools, electric grids, and heavy industrial facilities, and of health infrastructure, such as clinics and hospitals, and water and sewage facilities. They can also include the provision of a variety of services, such as medical services to refugee and impoverished populations, and training and assistance to police, the military, the judiciary, and prison officials as well as other civil administrators.
The following is yet another way that those committed to the current model say that they Army should stick to conventional warfare and avoid "low-intensity combat" and "stability" operations as much as possible:
Many senior U.S. military planners hold that successful military action requires “overwhelming” force. U.S. troops are taught to apply“decisive” force to defeat an enemy. Most peacekeeping tasks, however, require restraint, not an “overwhelming” use of force.
The same can be said for counterinsurgency ("low-intensity combat") operations. Whenever you read about US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan dropping a 550-lb. bomb on an "Al Qaeda safe house" in a village, what you're reading about in most cases is an example of applying the conventional-war principle of applying overwhelming force to a guerrilla war situation in which the action works directly counter to the political goals of the counterinsurgency.
The fact that the Pentagon's press releases invariably report all the dead as "terrorists" or "inusrgents", people in the village will have a much better idea if their dead neighbors were adults or children, or whether they were active insurgencts or not. And their allegiances will be affected accordingly. Especially if one or more of their clan members were killed in the attack, in which case they will feel obligated under the honor code to avenge them by killing an American.
In the conventional-war oriented Army, it is apparently the common assumption that use of soldiers in peacekeeping operations degrades their combat readiness. But Serafino points out that this is to some extent circular reasoning.
Peacekeeping (and all other operations other than war) is directly related to the readiness problem, if viewed strictly in terms of the readiness ratings that are calculated periodically. That is because the standards that are used to measure “readiness” only measure the military’s combat preparedness; that is, its ability to fight and win wars. These standards measure the availability of a unit’s personnel, the state of a unit’s equipment, and the performance of a unit’s members on tests of their wartime skills. When the military deploys large numbers of personnel to peacekeeping operations, scores on these measures can decline, as they did in the latter half of the 1990s.
In other words, if "readiness" is defined as the immediate ability to take part in a conventional-war, "mid-intensity" conflict, then using soldiers in any other activity by definition would reduce their readiness. But if counterinsurgency and stabilization/peacekeeping operations are seen as a critical part of preparedness, it would be hard toavoid the conclusion that the Army was seriously under-prepared forthe Iraq War in that way.
She also notes in this connection that complaints that the peacekeeping operations of the 1990s (such as Bosnia and Kosovo) were degrading combat readiness is not an compellingly obvious conclusion:
Some have argued that the readiness problem was exaggerated or non-existent, given the successful [conventional-war] combat performances of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003.
The broad policy question involved is whether the US should adopt a policy of preparing for future counterinsurgency wars like the Iraq War and require the Army to structure its forcing and orient its doctrine and training accordingly. There are a lot of implications to any answer to that question. Personally, I would rather see the US take a policy orientation that strongly seeks to avoid counterinsurgency conflicts.
But there is no policy or preparation that can totally fix problems like the one the Bush administration took on in 2003 with the invations of Iraq. They conceived of an invasion, occupation and regime change in Iraq that would require serious planning and capability for immediate stablization and counterinsurgency operations. And they managed the occupation so irresponsibly that it accelerated violent resistance.
The Pentagon had hoped in the post-Vietnam War period to avoid counterinsurgency wars and was therefore not prepared for the counterinsurgency tasks they have now in their laps in Iraq. But, as Rummy famously observed, you go to war with the Army you have. It's just that one of the many problems is that both the Executive Branch and the Congress decided to go to a war that would require serious counterinsurgency operations without taking serious account of the fact that the Army they had was not preparerd for that kind of conflict.
I'm certainly not one who thinks that the military leaders are free of blame in the irresponsibility that created the disaster known as the Iraq War. But, in the end, if the civilian policymakers decide on actions in the irresponsible way that the Bush administration and the Congress did with the Iraq War, the generals will have only the option of managing a disaster.
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