Friday, September 15, 2006

Fighting today's wars

US Army Lt. Col Nate Freier in the September monthly editorial for the Strategic Studies Institute, "What If?" - A Most Impertinent Question Indeed 09/06/06, writes about the need to adjust the orentation of military planning away from large conventional war and more towards irregular (counterinsurgency) warfare.  He uses strategic-planner's terminology in doing so.  He begins:

We are in an era of persistent, purposeful, and increasingly complex resistance to American primacy.

Freier doesn't ask any "impertinent questions" about this assumption.  But it's worth thinking about what that means.  Ther certainly is resistance to the current Cheney-Bush policies.  And in a longer term view, the trade and aid policies based on the "Washington Consensus" are also being challenged by more and more countries.

But is any country or alliance attempting to supplant the "primacy" of American military power?  No.  The United States is now generally understood to be spending half or more of the military budgets of the entire world.  Andrew Bacevich has observed thatif the US had a military budget equal to the sum of the ten next-highest national military budgets, it would still mean a huge cut in US military spending.

No other country is currently driving for such a goal.  And why would would they?  Why would they want to take on some many dubuious and far-flung military commitments as the US has?  And why would they want to insert themselves into situations like the Iraq War?  Why do we even want such a thing?

Freier is somewhat tentative in the way he poses his "impertinent questions" about war planning:

The principal question?  Are recent changes in the environment’s dynamics additive - new challenges added to old or instead qualitative - new challenges replacing old?  Specifically, has there been a real revolution in the character of competition and strategic hazard in the international system?  Are endemic insecurity and under-governance, in fact, the most significant threats to American primacy over the long-term?

To translate from the "strategic planning" lingo: does it make sense to keep structuring US forces to fight a conventional war against Soviet Army Group Central in Europe since the Soviet Union dissolved a decade and a half ago?

Freier certainly seems to think current practices are far from what they need to be:

Getting the right answers to these important questions will require a more thoughtful and nuanced appreciation of the strategic environment than we have corporately demonstrated the capacity to either undertake or consume. Institutional and bureaucratic interests are now conflated with national interests.  As a result, it may be impossible to either distinguish or act on what are real but unrecognized strategic imperatives.  If our national security institutions continue to value tradition, convention, and bureaucratic self-interest over strategic utility or necessity, we are doomed to understate the importance of nontraditional challenges and certain to under-invest intellectually and materially in the strategic solutions necessary to contend with them.  As a result, our traditional instruments of power and the institutions responsible for employing them will remain optimized for the unlikeliest and most manageable of our strategic challenges; thereby, putting our strategic position and interests at substantial risk.  (my emphasis)

One danger for the future, given the post-Vietnam War experience, is that a compromise will be achieved where the conventional-war advocates still get a heavy emphasis and new funds and human resources are poured into a supposedly alternative counterinsurgency capability, with the net result being an even more bloated military budget.

We also have to remember that the Rummy-Cheney concept of "military transformation" also justifies itself as saving money compared to traditional warfighting assumptions.  Their concept is based on the assumption of air power True Believers who argue that high-tech aircraft and bombs - including nuclear bombs - are the magic key to winning wars quickly and with minimum loss of American life.  Not only has this pitch achieved considerable public appeal, particularly among Republicans, who seem to be especially fond of the idea of big ole bombs levelling villages and cities.  Many of them seem to measure "toughness" in foreign policy by the extent of one's willingness to maximize the deaths of civilian noncombatants.

So statements like the following by Freier have to be regarded as potentially very ambiguous ones:

We cannot allow intellectual narrowness or blind loyalty to convention to perpetuate the most comfortable concepts and tools of traditional “warfighting” if dedication to them is born more of nostalgia and than of necessity. Indeed, America’s future strategic success may rely less on traditional battlefield outcomes than we would like to admit. It may, in fact, rely most on skillful management of persistent conflict and resistance and the ability to push both below the threshold of strategic significance.

Another risk for the future is that a kind of consensus has emerged among criticis of the Iraq War both left and right, and even among many of those who support the war (at least the ones not totally committed to Air Power Ueber Alles), that says the experiences of both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars show inadequate preparation for fighting counterinsurgency conflicts.  I agree with that viewpoint; it's hard to avoid that conclusion.

But it's also a critical question - and one that has no exactly "right" answer, much less a permanent and static one - is, what level of preparation do we need?  And that decision should be driven by *foreign policy* not by a general assumption that American "primacy" has to be defended anywhere and everywhere in the world from opposition.

There is also a tendency for a military capability to create a temptation to use it, not just on the part of generals but also of politicians.  So there actually are real risks in having *too much* capability.  Does the US need to capability to, for instance, unilaterally fight a new counterinsurgency Phillipine War?  Do we need to be prepared to occupy and fight counterinsurgency wars in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia?  Both simultaneously?

Assuming we get a Congress in a few years that operates as the Legislative Branch of the national government and not as a rubber stamp for an authoritarian Republican President, Congress needs to set some clear policies and priorities, and the military needs to be structured to support those priorities.

At least since 1979 (Iranian Revolution, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), there has been litte real discussion and debate in Congress that didn't assume in some form that more is better when it comes to the military.  So we've wound up where we are today, spending half the military budgets of the entire world and barely able to keep an army of 140,000 or so in Iraq with another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan.  In fact, it's even to the point that military recruiters are going after felons and allowing white supremacist activists into the ranks.  (See 12-Pentagon Steps to a Misfit Military by Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com 09/14/06.)

And both Congress and the Executive in the future need to be far more realistic about the type of wars they choose to fight and what the real requirements are to fight that war.  In both Iraq and Afghanistan, a military that was structured on the assumption of avoiding guerilla wars is being required to do just that, without a draft to bring in sufficient numbers of qualified personnel.

The military budget is way too important to be left to generals, lobbyists and Halliburton.

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