"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Fortunately, Bush and Cheney and Rummy haven't completely suppressed all dissenting scholarship in the war colleges and other military research organizations. This paper by Col. Brian Watson argues for a greater institutional emphasis in the Army on "stablization operations": Reshaping the Expeditionary Army to Win Decisively: The Case for Greater Stabilization Capacity in the Modular Force August 2005 (US Army Strategic Studies Institute; *.pdf file)
Watson's paper makes heavy use of management terminology current in the Army. It's not written for popular newsmagazines. For instance (my emphsis):
First, the ability to initiate progressive stabilization from the outset as an inherent part of combat operations demands a ready force pool of stabilization capabilities in the active force... The Army must have a robust force pool comprised of modular and scalable combat support and service support units that can be tailored rapidly under multifunctional battalion and brigade headquarters and integrated into operations as coherent force packages. Modularity ensures the correct combinations can be achieved; scalability ensures the force can be right-sized for the specific mission. (p. 11)
But there are important concepts interwound with all this jargon. The paper is based on a recognition that in the Iraq War, the failure to establish a basic level of civil order and security after the rapid defeat of the Iraqi army had devastating consequences for the American mission there. It's not being pessimistic at this point to say that it turned a conventional military victory into a lost war, though Wilson doesn't go that far.
His main idea has to do with a fairly specific organization arrangement to make sure that Army forces used in an invasion (expeditionary force) will have sufficient numbers of trained soldiers available to immediately begin undertaking quasi-police functions (stabilization operations) and to protect and restore basic services like electricity and water. It's standard language these days to cast any such organizational ideas in terms of "military transformation," which broadly speaking is the adjustment of the US forces to post-Cold War missions.
He defines the "transformation" context in this passage, in which I've emphasized the jargon phrases:
In direct response to recent and current operations, the Army has embarked on a period of unprecedented evolution marked by radical changes in employment doctrine, infusion of information technologies to enhance precision engagement and maneuver, and a comprehensive reorganization of its fundamental warfighting structures. In part, this transformation acknowledges that land forces must be able to confront the complex challenges of the 21st century in which armed conflict is on the rise and includes the requirement to conduct combat, stability, and humanitarian operations at the same time. The Army’s near-term effort - the Modular Force - aims at disassembling the Army’s corps, division, and brigade structures to create a more flexible and responsive brigade-based land force with flexible command and control structures. (p. 12)
What this means is that the Army is organizing itself around a concept that would allow quick expansion of certain specialized batallions that could be quickly moved from one division or brigade to another. The idea is that training and operations would be standardized in such a way as to make such transitions rapidly, so that when certain specialties are needed in one area, they can be redeployed there quickly. This is a simplified summary; those who want to wade through thejargon can get much more information from Watson's paper.
But, despite the thick cover of jargon, Watson is addressing in a critical manner the current inadequacy of the Army's war-fighting approach in a situation like Iraq. In The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), Andrew Bacevich describes how the officer corps went about recovering the blow to their prestige and influence inflicted by the Vietnam War. They did so by concentrating on achieving a vastly higher level of preparedness to defending Europe against the Soviet Army in a conventional (non-nuclear) war. "Thus disposed, American officers returned to what they viewed as real soldiering," i.e., not the kind of counterinsurgency warfare at which they had lost in Vietnam.
They adopted the doctrine dubbed the "LandAir Battle" doctrine:
AirLand Battle offered the formula according to which U.S. forces would trun back a full-scale nonnuclear Warsaw Pact attack, relying on superior technology, superior tactics, and superior training to compensate for the enemy's superior numbers. Quality would render the adversary's enormous quantitative advantages moot.
The senior military leadership presented this, writes Bacevich, "as a sharp departure from the past." However, the innovative elements that were supposed to add much greater battlefield flexibility in "nonlinear" maneuver warfare for the most part "never made it off the printed page." He explains:
Both in exercises and in subsequent combat, U.S. forces operated in ways consistent with traditional military precepts: hierarchy maintained, orders coming from the top down, forces arrayed in linear fashion. In truth, despite all the claims made on its behalf, AirLand Battle as implemented contained little that qualified as genuinely original. At its core, the new U.S. doctrine was a throwback. It was blitzkrieg, invented decades earlier by the Germans, more recently refurbished by the Israelis, now dressed up with somewhat longer range, somewhat more accurate, and somewhat more lethal weapons.
But there was more. All of the planning and preparation entailed in gearing up to defend Western Europe assumed and legitimated a specific—and, despite the trappings of novelty, inherently counterrevolutionary—conception of warfare. In the latter part of a century in which war as actually experienced had repeatedly slipped its traces, AirLand Battle presumed to impose limits and boundaries on the notional wars of the future. The clash of opposing armies, not the mobilization of entire societies, would determine the fate of the Central Region. Out of that clash would come not stalemate but decision, achieved promptly, at tolerable cost, and without widespread collateral damage or incidental slaughter. (my emphasis)
Their strategy for counterinsurgency warfare was: avoid ever having to fight another one.
This concept of warfare survivied the Cold War era. And it was the concept applied in the Iraq War, and it worked. The conventional Iraqi army was beaten quickly and decisively.
Then the looting began. And the inadequacy of the military's approach quickly became apparent, although Don Rumsfeld giggled to the pliant reporters in the Pentagon press corps, "Stuff happens, and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
In The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (2005), George Packer relates that when Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita arrived in Kuwait in early April of 2003, a official of USAID said something about the need to show immediate benefits to the Iraqi people. Di Rita replied by pounding the table and saying, "We don't owe the people of Iraq anything. We're giving them their freedom. That's enough."
And Packer relates how the Pentagon's grand concept, known as "rapid decisive operations" (RDO) translated into the mission they were given in Iraq:
General [Tommy] Franks's innovative strategy used enough troops to take the country but nowhere near enough to secure it. Even so, a concerted effort could have stopped the most egregious looters and warned off others with a show of force. It never happened. In vain, employees of the [Iraqi national] museum begged the leader of a nearby tank platoon to park one tank at the museum entrance and scare off the pillagers who were making free with the country's antiquities. Soldiers without orders to intervene stood by while men and boys hauled computers, copiers, desks, staplers, carpets, and eventually wiring and pipes out of theministries and other government buildings and took them away in trucks, cars, donkey carts, rickshaws, and on their own backs. In the war log of an infantry captain, the days leading up to the fall of Baghdad are crowded with incident. But immediately after April 9, the entries turn brief to the point of minimalism: "Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations." It was as if the sole objective had been the fall of the city. An administration official who had served in Vietnam used the phrase "commanders' intent" - the mind-set instilled down the chain to soldiers on the ground: "All of a sudden they got there - and there was no intent. There were no rules of engagement. Everything was for the battle. And commanders sat around and didn't do anything about it." Meanwhile, the destruction being visited upon the city and its leading institutions by Baghdadis themselves was far outstripping the damage from bombing and firefights. Afterward, some Iraqis insisted that they had seen soldiers not just permitting but encouraging and helping looters, as if the mayhem were joyous celebration of the fall of the regime. This was the secretary of defense's view. Only the Ministsry of Oil was protected. (my emphasis)
Watson's paper addresses this major deficiency. It's important to note that "stabilization" operations are not counterinsurgency; they are meant to establish order immediately after major conventional combat is concluded in order to minimize the chance that an insurgency can take hold. Watson describes stablization as setting the stage for reconstruction:
Stabilization sets the conditions for reconstruction where the chief aim is fostering the emergence of a new member of the global community. Reconstruction represents a shift towards rebuilding local and national institutions that provide legitimate governance, economic growth, national public welfare, and rule of law. As such, reconstruction is the primary domain of civilian agencies within government, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. (p. 7)
But he argues that the current Army leadership is not taking seriously enough the need to provide for effective stabilization operations. Indeed, they are still stuck in the model of fighting Soviet Army Central (my emphasis):
Universal recognition that future armed conflict on land will likely involve stabilization operations from the very outset of combat operations through conflict resolution must guide Army Transformation. U.S. national security strategy demands the means to win decisively always and achieve enduring results that improve the underlying conditions that promote conflict. For the military instrument, the emphasis on achieving enduring results extends military campaign objectives beyond conflict termination to include setting the conditions for conflict resolution. This fundamentally redefines the scope of an expeditionary land force and demands it broadenits core capabilities. Future victory depends on a land force equally adept in prosecuting RDO as conducting progressive stabilization to mitigate the effects of combat and bridge the gap to reconstruction. The Modular Force provides an adequate mental framework to drive organizational designs. But the current direction of the Modular Force misses the mark. Its myopic vision of an expeditionary force confines Army Transformation to new ways of fulfilling a traditional role that ends with conflict termination. As a result, the Army is expending tremendous resources reinventing its former self rather than fully responding to the challenges of future warfare. The deep fight demands more. Future success requires an Army whose view of land warfare and an expeditionary force structure includes the concept of progressive stabilization and a new balance of combat and stabilization capabilities. (p. 21)
Without saying so quite this explicitly, what Watson is saying is that the current national security strategy and practice of the United States will require Iraq-type operations in the future, in which the US occupies a country and has to take responsibility for reconstructing it with new institutions. If that is to be the case, the Army needs to adjust it's doctrine toward fighting that type of war. (Again, he doesn't discuss counterinsurgency as such.) And the immediate post-conventional-war stabilization operations will be critical to that.
However, the most remarkable shift in U.S strategy is the prominence given to expanding the circle of development by building the infrastructure of democracy in place of tyrannical regimes. ...
The strategic emphasis on democratization affects all instruments of power, but the impact on military forces and the scope of future armed conflict are especially profound. Achieving long-term conflict resolution enjoys new prominence, and the new measure of effectiveness is how well-armed conflict refashions an oppressive regime into a free, open, and democratic society. Consequently, the terms of favorable conflict termination also are redefined under the new strategy. Swiftly defeating an oppressive regime’s efforts to achieve regional dominance, acquire WMD, or support terrorism is no longer sufficient. Regime change is the new standard for conflict termination because it attains the prerequisite for achieving the only acceptable outcome of war - a new democracy. (p. 2)
In a recent post, I touched on the question of how necessary or realistic it is to insist on a fully-functioning democracy as the result of such a war.
Watson makes it clear that, despite the political rhetoric from the Republicans insisting on what a brilliant success the wars in Afganistan and Iraq have been, they have revealed serious problems with existing Army doctrine (my emphasis):
The United States implemented its new security strategy with high-stakes operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The success of both operations hinges on the ability of U.S. land forces to achieve the full measure of “winning decisively” and provide the capacity for long-term stabilization commensurate with their new role in conflict resolution. Because “you go to war with the force you have,” the Army has struggled with generating the right capabilities. The Army was not built for this new role in warfare. In the years preceding September 11, 2001 (9/11), the Army had a different view of its responsibilities in future warfare and embarked on a different modernization course, one that featured different capabilities than it now requires. ... (p. 3)
On the other hand, the last 2 decades saw a sharp rise in the use of military force for a completely different type of mission - stability operations - with a need for vastly different capabilities. This trend was a source of greatangst among senior military leaders and aggravated a long-standing cultural aversion to the use of U.S. military power for nation building. These operations represented everything military commanders hope to avoid: extended and open-ended deployments, ambiguous political and military objectives, no clear signs of military victory, and indifference among Americans at home for their sacrifice. The increasing frequency of these missions around the world, however, was dismissed as an aberration rather than a forewarning of the future security environment and the role of America’s Army. ...
Cultural aversion trumped experiential learning, and the Army embarked on a modernization path defined by a new operational framework - Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO). The RDO concept aimed at enabling the military instrument to respond quickly with smaller, more lethal forces to bring regional conflict threatening U.S interests to a rapid and decisive close. ... RDO became the rallying point for the Army’s march into the future. It pervaded military thinking,equipment procurement, unit redesign, and force structure decisions regarding combat support and service support units.
The wake-up call came when the United States required its military instrument to execute the new strategy. The mission - permanently reduce the threat to the United States by defeating two errant regimes ideologically opposed to freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq and replace them with constitutional democracies. The Army, however, was not designed for the full task at hand. While the Army had perfected its ability to defeat any adversary swiftly, it also had mortgaged its ability to conduct protracted stability operations and deliver the enduring results the national strategy now insisted it achieve. (p. 4)
The problem with a near-exclusive focus on RDO is that it creates a faster and more drastic break from the old regime to the occupation than could have been achieved in similar wars decades ago (my emphasis):
... RDO are designed specifically to produce relentless pressure on an adversary’s regime and its military force to induce a simultaneous and catastrophic collapse... . Compressed timelines for crisis planning, rapid force deployments, and near-immediate initiation of combat operations allow the friendly force to dictate quickly the tempo of operations. Commitment of relatively few ground combat units, empowered with overwhelming precision joint fires, ensures rapid maneuver, and enables the force to induce the simultaneous and catastrophic collapse of both the enemy force and national leadership. Conflict termination occurs quickly - almost unpredictably - as both the opposing military force and national leadership flee for survival. The simultaneous collapse of the regime and its military forces also means an abrupt halt in internal security, emergency services, public services, and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, RDO leave a power vacuum in oppressive regimes where internal security, economic, social, and political structures are already fragile after years of neglect. (p. 5)
Conversely, though Watson doesn't specify this part of the argument, if the US military doesn't structure itself to undertake this type of warfare successfully, the civilian policymakers in the Executive Branch and Congress need to recognize that and not expect the military to undertake such missions.
And he clearly doesn't think that the Army has yet heeded the "wake-up" call of the Afghan and Iraq Wars in the way that is required.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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