Jeffrey Record, author of Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq (2004), writes on Why the Strong Lose Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 2005-06; accessed 12/03/05. Record is a professor of strategy at the Air War College in Alabama. In this article, he poses an historical puzzle:
What is not in dispute is that all major failed US uses of force since 1945 - in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia - have been against materially weaker enemies. In wars both hot and cold, the United States has fared consistently well against such powerful enemies as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, but the record against lesser foes is decidedly mixed. Though it easily polished off Milosevic’s Serbia and Saddam’s Iraq, the United States failed to defeat Vietnamese infantry in Indochina, terrorists in Lebanon, and warlords in Somalia. In each case the American Goliath was militarily stalemated or politically defeated by the local David. Most recently, the United States was surprised by the tenacious insurgency that exploded in post-Baathist Iraq, an insurgency now in its third year with no end in sight.
The phenomenon of the weak defeating the strong, though exceptional, is as old as war itself. Sparta finally beat Athens; Frederick the Great always punched well above his weight; American rebels overturned British rule in the Thirteen Colonies; the Spanish guerrilla bled Napoleon white; Jewish terrorists forced the British out of Palestine; Vietnamese communists drove France and then the United States out of Indochina; and mujahideen handed the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. Relative military power is hardly a reliable predictor of war outcomes.
It's nice to see that in this particular Army War College journal, it is not taboo to say that the United States can fail. Our elected officials don't seem to be able to use the word except to say how the other side's ideas would cause us to do so.
One of the reasons the weak can beat the strong in international contests is a disparity in the stakes involved. For the weaker side, the stakes may appear total, whilethe stronger side may simply not perceive their interests as being so strongly involved. This was the case with the United States in Vietnam. Record observes that it was also the case in the American Revolution:
The signers of the Declaration of Independence risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in what became a contest with an imperial giant for which North America was (after 1778) a secondary theater of operations in a much larger war. For the American rebel leadership, defeat meant the hangman’s noose. For British commanders in North America, it meant a return to the comforts and pleasures of London society and perhaps eventual reassignment.
But a disparity of commitment, or Will as it's elevated to mystical levels in the current discussion over the Iraq War, quite obviously isn't enough to win a war:
Indeed, superior political will - a greater commitment to the fight - would not, alone, seem sufficient to defeat a stronger enemy. Having even a significant edge in resolve cannot overcome a strategy that pits insurgent military weakness against the bigger enemy’s military strengths. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster from which the Viet Cong never recovered because communist forces came out in the open and tried to take and hold fixed positions, thereby exposing themselves to crushing US firepower. (The Taliban made the same mistake in Afghanistan 33 years later.) Tough is one thing. Tough and stupid is quite another.
It's worth noting here that Record has written extensively about the Vietnam War. When he references the Viet Cong (NLF) never having recovered from the Tet Offensive of 1968, he is referring to the fact that the NLF committed to a nationwide uprising that was suppressed and the guerrilla infrastructure that had developed over the years never fully recovered from that defeat. But the NLF was fighting in conjunction with the conventional forces of North Vietnam, which eventually engaged with the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and defeated them. The NLF infrastructure was not wholly destroyed in 1968, however, and they played an active role until the end of the war.
As Record puts it:
Tet shocked the American electorate, forced Lyndon Johnson from theWhite House, and compelled a reassessment of US war aims. During the Tet Offensive, however, the Viet Cong suffered horrendous manpower losses. By 1971 the insurgency had been substantially reduced and effectively contained by a combination of military action, ruthless counterterrorism, land reform, and major improvements in economic infrastructure and agricultural productivity. But this success counted for little, because by then the original insurgency had been replaced by a large and superbly armed conventional North Vietnamese army as the primary threat to South Vietnam’s survival. It was this army, not the Viet Cong, which brought South Vietnam down in 1975. South Vietnam was conquered by an external military force that had, especially after 1968, access to massive logistical support from China and huge quantities of sophisticated weaponry from the Soviet Union. (my emphasis)
The sentence I highlighted is important. The conventional argument about the Tet offensive, often accepted by opponents of the Vietnam War who perhaps should pay closer attention to the argument, is that the Tet uprising was a military success for the US. But civilian Will collapsed as a result, ultimately resulting in the American defeat. The argument that the US won "militarily" in Vietnam is based on this line of thinking.
There's a lot to be said about that aspect of things. But as a matter of the historical narrative, the nature of the war was shifting at that point more toward a conventional war.
The strategy of guerrilla warfare makes sense for a adversary that is distinctly weaker in conventional military terms to use against a much stronger opponent. As Record writes, distinguishing here between "direct" (conventional) and "indirect" (guerrilla/counterinsurgecy) strategies:
The British in North America also pursued a direct strategy against American forces, which were waging what amounted to a protracted guerrilla war. The [American] Minutemen fought as irregulars, and General George Washington was careful not to risk the survival of the regular Continental Army. He was always prepared to run away from superior British force. Both the Vietnamese communist and American rebel leaderships understoodacritical reality that their stronger opponents failed to grasp: the guerrilla can win simply by not losing, whereas the counterinsurgent power can lose by not winning.
Record also addresses the question of whether democracies have a particular dilemma in the situation of being the stronger adversary facing an opponent that is using guerrilla warfare effectively. He cites a 2003 study by Gil Merom in which Merom examined France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon and the US in Vietnam, and concluded that "democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory.”
This superficially sounds like an argument that would support the current position of Iraq War supporters, arguing that only the Will of the American people - and of more immediate effect, the US Congress - can lose the Iraq War by failing to persevere. Record believes that there is much to be said for this argument, citing also Robert Pape's findings on suicide bombers. He also suggests that conscription (the draft) is a major factor:
The conclusion that democracies are softer targets of coercive insurgent violence than dictatorships would seem validated by Merom’s case studies of the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and the Israelis in Lebanon. In all three cases the stronger side relied on conscripted armies that incurred substantial casualties, and in a democracy there is nothing so toxic in weakening domestic political support for limited war as dead and maimed conscripts. But hasn’t the United States shown that a democracy can reduce its vulnerability to weaker-side coercive violence via reliance on professional troops and on advanced military technologies that have lowered casualty rates to unprecedented levels? Democratic vulnerability to insurgent coercion is hardly a given in low-casualty fights waged by volunteer professionals.
He doesn't develop the point, but the unpopularity of the Iraq War has grown more rapidly than opposition to the Vietnam War, despite the war's being waged by "volunteer professionals". The question of whether the Iraq War is "low-casualty" compared to the Vietnam War is amore complicated one, although superficially it could be argued that it is obvious a lower-casualty conflict.
Records also argues that significant external assistance has been a criticial success factor in successfuly insurgencies, citing in this regard the American Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
But in addition to these general factors, he also contends that there are two signficant factors distinctive to the American approach to war that make counterinsurgency warfare situations especially problematic:
The first is the American tendency to separate war and politics - to view military victory as an end in itself, ignoring war’s function as an instrument of policy. The second is the US military’s profound aversion to counterinsurgency. Both combine to form a recipe for politically sterile uses of force, especially in limited wars involving protracted hostilities against weaker irregular opponents.
I've long thought that the unusual and specific conditions of the Second World War that allowed "unconditional surrender" to be a feasible war goal for the United Nations coalition (yes, it was called that at the time, though "Allies" was the more common description) contributed decisively to the widespread notion that "victory" in war meant the complete capitualtion of the enemy and the end of the enemy government. Record gets directly to why this way of looking at war is foolish and unhistorical:
This ... view underpins the conventional wisdom in the United States regarding the failed prosecution of the Vietnam War. Meddling politicians and Defense Department civilians, it is said, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory; if they had just gotten out of the way and let the military professionals do their job, the United States would have won the war. One need look no farther than the Gulf War of 1991 to see what happens when the civilians stand aside, so this reasoning goes, or no farther than Bosnia and Kosovo to see what happens when they resume their interference.
Conventional wisdom conveniently overlooks the reality that limited warnecessarily entails restrictions on the use of force (and the 1991 Gulf War was no exception); otherwise, it would not be limited war. Military means are proportional to the political objective sought; thermonuclear weapons are not used against insurgency. Letting [Douglas] MacArthur attack mainland China [in the Korean War] would have involved a use of force excessive to the limited objective of restoring South Korea’s territorial integrity. Even in Operation Iraqi Freedom, whose object was the overthrow of a hostile regime via invasion of its homeland, extensive restrictions were placed on ground force size and aerial targeting. (my emphasis)
It's still worth saying that even though Record is certainly correct in saying that the military goal of the Iraq War was regime change, which was also the general official policy of the US toward Saddam's regime, the specific goals of war authorized by Congress in October 2002 had to do with weapons of mass destruction and the fight against jihadist groups, neither of which condition was met by the Bush administration.
Record just has little use for the stab-in-the-back theory of the US defeat in Vietnam. He himself was already writing on military issues during that war, and he was highly critical of it. Perhaps the Nixon administration's attempt to bully critics into silence by smearing them as unpatriotic contributed to his particularly dim view of that argument:
Perhaps worse still, conventional wisdom is dangerously narcissistic. It completely ignores the enemy, assuming that what we do alone determines success or failure. It assumes that only the United States can defeat the United States, an outlook that set the United States up for failure in Vietnam and for surprise in Iraq. Custer may have been a fool, but the Sioux did, after all, have something to do with his defeat along the Little Big Horn. (my emphasis)
Reminding his reader's that the legitimate object of war "is, after all, a better peace", he gives an excellent definition of the posture of the US military toward the whole problems of counterinsurgency warfare:
The US military’s historical aversion to counterinsurgency is a function of 60 years of preoccupation with high-technology conventional warfare against other states and accelerated substitution of machines for combat manpower, most notably aerial standoff precision firepower for large ground forces. Indeed, past evidence suggests a distance between the kind of war the United States prepared to fight and the kinds of war it has actually fought in recent decades. Hostile great powers, once the predominant threats to American security, have been supplanted by rogue states, failed states, and non-state actors - all of them pursuing asymmetrical strategies to offset US military strengths. This new threat environment places a premium on stability and support operations - i.e., operations other than the powerful conventional force-on-force missions for which the US military is optimized. Such operations include peace enforcement, counterinsurgency, stability, and state-building. (my emphasis)
I hope this aspect of the experience of the Iraq War will get the level of discussion and consideration they deserve. If we are going to have an army prepared only for conventional warfare, the US - under both Republican and Democratic administrations - needs to take into full account the limitation that puts on US military options. It effectively means that unilateral (or effectively unilateral) US military operations aimed at occupation and reconstruction of countries larger than Micronesia or Grenada are effectively off the table as policy options.
But if we do choose to have a foreign policy of unilaterally fighting wars of liberation around the globe to install regimes that meet the approval of our neoconservative ideologues, then we need to understand all of what that requires and prepare appropriately:
Operation Iraqi Freedom followed not only three decades of determined US Army concentration on conventional operations but also over a decade of steady cuts in active-duty US ground forces, especially Army infantry. Most stability and support operations, however, including counterinsurgency, are inherently manpower-intensive and rely heavily on special skills - e.g., human intelligence, civil affairs, police, public health, foreign language, foreign force training, psychological warfare - that are secondary to the prosecutionof conventional warfare. Forces postured to achieve swift conventional military victory thus may be quantitatively and qualitatively unsuited for post-victory tasks of the kind that the United States has encountered in Iraq.
Record describes some of what the policy choices would mean:
The policy question is not whether the United States should continue to maintain its conventional primacy, but whether, given the evolving strategic environment, it should create ground (and supporting air) forces dedicated to performing stability and support operations, including counterinsurgency. Forces and doctrine optimized for conventional warfare and the rapid application of intense violence are hardly optimized for the counterinsurgent mission, which demands the utmost restraint and discrimination in the application of force. Firepower is the instrument of last rather than first resort. There is no big enemy to close with and destroy, but rather the presence of threatened civilian populations that must be protected in ways that minimize collateral damage. Conventional ground force preparation for counterinsurgency requires major doctrinal and training deprogramming of conventional military habits and reprogramming with the alien tactics, doctrines, and heavy political oversight inherent in stability and support operations. Needless to say, forces so reprogrammed - commonly manpower-intensive and relatively low in firepower - will not be optimized for big, high-tech conventional conflicts. (my emphasis)
It should be obvious on the face of it that maintaining current US military budgets - which are already half of the military spending of the entire world - plus adding new counterinsurgency/stability operations capabilities on top of those at a level that would allow a much greater chance of success in a situation like Iraq today, would mean a huge new investment of resources. And almost certainly could not be achieved without drafting a significant number of consripts.
Does that level of commitment really make sense? Do Americans really want to spend money on military investments that much out of proportion to what any potential adversary is spending? Are wars of choice like the Iraq War really something the public believes in as a goal of US policy? Because a majority of the public has lost faith in the real existing Iraq War.
The bureacratic inertia and perceived self-interests of the officer corps and the anything-but-inert interests of war contractors building high-dollar projects like the Star Wars boondoggle will create a strong tendency to substitute bigger and bigger military budgets for a real "military transformation" that would "right-size" the military to protect the US from conventional military threats and to support whatever political for counterterrorism and "wars of liberation" the country adopts.
Record sees some reason for optimism in the Army's recent push to recreate itself as a "modular force", designed to give the Army greater flexibility to quickly resize units based on the particular situation in which they find themselves at a particular time. But "modularity" is hardly the same as a counterinsurgency capability. And it's painfully easy to slap a nice justification like "increasing the capacity for stability operations" on a reform that doesn't necessarily address the problem in any meaningful way. Especially with elected officials not inclined to look too closely at military budgets. (Usually the reason for the neglect is something other than the kind of overt corruption that we're seeing in the case of Congressman "Duke" Cunningham.)
These are decisions that are far too important to be left to generals and war profiteers. And far too important to be suppressed with sentimental slogans about "honoring the soldiers" being misused to protect the military and those private business that profit from military business from the public scrutiny that they deserve. And that is long overdue.
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