Fighting wars, past and future

With the release today of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of 2006, it's worth reflecting a bit on the high-tech, "light footprint" model that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld prefers for military conflicts.  (The report is dated 02/06/06, but it was released on 02/03/06.)

Stephen Biddle reflected on The New Way of War? in the May/June 2002 Foreign Affairs, reviewing three books on the Kosovo War.  That conflict was taken by air power advocates as a validation of the idea that wars could be won almost exclusively through the use of air power, with minimal commitment of ground troops.

The Afghan War was also initiated using the model of heavy air power with few American

In Afghanistan, as in Kosovo, the war began with a high-tech air campaign doing the heavy lifting with minimal U.S. ground presence. Among the Afghan campaign's most salient features has been the effort to limit U.S. casualties - even at the cost of effectiveness. The central war aims in Afghanistan were to deny the country to al Qaeda and to destroy the al Qaeda elements based there. Ousting the Taliban was a means, not an end. Yet once the Taliban fell and it came time to realize the payoff by rounding up bin Laden and his operatives, the U.S. military drew back from the dirty work of cave-to-cave fighting in Tora Bora and elsewhere, relying on local proxies instead - much as it delegated the ground fighting against Serbia in 1999 to the Kosovo Liberation Army. With their own interests at heart, not America's, these Afghan and Pakistani proxies allowed the quarry to escape. Washington now hopes that Hamid Karzai's interim government, backed by a handful of international peacekeepers, can stabilize Afghanistan and prevent al Qaeda's return, but so far it has insisted that this be done without any major U.S. ground forces to help. So U.S. policymakers have implemented the new way of war even more completely than in Kosovo; the Clinton administration at least agreed to a major U.S. postwar peacekeeping contingent.

Whether the new way of war will persist in the face of experience remains to be seen. As this review goes to press, the ground fighting in Operation Anaconda suggests that Tora Bora may have triggered a debate within the administration over the importance of casualty minimization at the cost of mission effectiveness. To date, however, the similarity between U.S. casualty aversion in Afghanistan and Kosovo - and the contrast between either one and, say, World War II on this score - has been striking. (my emphasis)

Biddle is not alone in questioning whether this model makes sense as a permanent assumption.  Part of the reason for the optimistic estimates I mentioned in my last past about drawdowns of troops in Iraq is that Rumsfeld and his neoconservative planners had staked their gradiose schemes for wars of liberation in the Middle East on the notion that governments could be outsted and societies transformed with relatively small numbers of American troops.  Biddle wrote:

So far at least, the new American way of war is alive and well, but in a world where its premises are no longer valid. When legitimate but remote interests limited the public's willingness to sustain costs, a strategy of warfare on the cheap arguably made sense. After 19 hijackers killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil, however, the public has become willing to shoulder real costs - including real casualties - to defeat a clear and present danger. Yet in important respects, Washington has continued to behave as though the strategic context were March 1999 rather than October 2001. The twin specters of Vietnam and the Soviets' defeat by Afghan mujahideen still clearly loom large, making the administration wary of ensnarement in a guerrilla quagmire. Yet there may be times when only major commitments can counter major threats, and occasions where real costs are worth bearing. Rooting fanatical Japanese from caves on Iwo Jima and Okinawa cost thousands of American lives, but the country shouldered the sacrifice for the sake of a transcendent cause. (my emphasis)

The Republicans, though, have not wanted to ask affluent voters to make any extra sacrifices, even for the war in Iraq that they claim to consider so vital.  The Republican Party exists to comfort the comfortable here at home. And higher taxes to pay for wars, or - God forbid! - a military draft that would require affluent Republican young people to serve in the military, tend to discomfort people.