It's amazing to me that the professional military journals routinely discuss American problems and failures in the Iraq War more frankly than most members of Congress are ready to. I'm not surprised that the military journals discuss these things. I'm surprised that Congress, especially our alleged opposition party, the Democrats, are so far behind.
A British Brigadier General, Nigel Aylwin-Foster, discussed some of the dilemmas arising in Iraq from the fact that the US Army is structured and trained to fight a conventional war, e.g., the Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, but finds itself in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. His article appears in the Nov/Dec 2005 issue of the Army's Military Review: Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations. Don't let the Army jargon, like "COIN" for "counterinsurgency" deter you. It's readable. (Also available from the Council of Foreign Relations.)
He writes of the Iraq War:
In short, despite political and military leaders’ justifiable claims of achievement against tough odds, others claim, justifiably on the face of it, that the Coalition has failed to capitalise on initial success.
Aylwin-Foster says the Iraq War is "just as critical a watershed in U.S. Army development" as the Vietnam War. Reflecting on the transition from the conventional war, which lasted only a few weeks, to counterinsurgency, he writes:
[A] senior British officer, in theatre for 6 months in 2004 ... judged that the U.S. Army acted like ‘fuel on a smouldering fire’, but that this was ‘as much owing to their presence as their actions’. Others have been less sanguine. One senior Washington Administration official considered that the Army was unquestionably successful during the combat phase, but much less so subsequently. He noted that General Tommy Franks had assured the Administration that the Army would restore law and order, but in the event it had failed to do so, and thus to some extent Lt Gen (Retired) Jay M. Garner had been replaced because of a failure by the Army, since the absence of law and order hadrendered the country ungovernable by the thinly staffed ORHA [Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance]. Like many others, he believed that a window of opportunity had been missed in the period immediately after the fall of Saddam, to some extent owing to a failure by the Army to adjust in time to the changing requirement. He thought the Administration had already recognised the need to be better prepared for Irregular Warfare (IW) and post conflict stabilisation and reconstruction (S&R) operations, but the Army had not yet done so.
One of the problems he identifies is, ironically, the initial moral fervor of the operation in Iraq:
U.S. Army personnel, like their colleagues in the other U.S. Services, had a strong sense of moral authority. They fervently believed in the mission’s underlying purpose, the delivery of democracy to Iraq, whereas other nations’ forces tended to be more ambivalent about why they were there. This was at once a strength and hindrance to progress. It bolstered U.S. will to continue in the face of setbacks. But it also encouraged the erroneous assumption that given the justness of the cause, actions that occurred in its name would be understood and accepted by the population, even if mistakes and civilian fatalities occurred in the implementation.
It's getting pitifully little attention in the mainstream press. But the decisions made over the type of war preparedness the Army and Marines especially plan for the coming years will be one of the most important military decisions to be made. And it's barely on the radar of public and Congressional discussion yet. This is a very good description of the Army's conventional-war focus:
The most straightforward reason why the Army struggled in OIF Phase 4 to achieve the effectiveness demonstrated in the preceding combat phase was that it was, by design, relatively ill prepared for it. In spite of COIN and S&R operations having occupied the majority of the Army’s operational time since the Cold War, and their being an inevitable consequence of the GWOT [Global War on Terror], these roles have not been considered core Army activities. The Army’s focus has been conventional warfighting, and its branches into COIN and S&R have been regarded as a diversion, to be undertaken reluctantly, and preferably by Special Operations Forces and other specialists, many of whom are in the Army reserves. So deeply ingrained is the Army’s focus on conventional warfighting that even when HQ 3 Corps was preparing to deploy to Iraq in early 2004 and must have known it would be conducting COIN and S&R operations, with all that that should entail in terms of targeted preparation, its pre-deployment training still focused on conventional operations.
Surprising though HQ 3 Corps’ omission may seem, it is symptomatic of a trend rooted in U.S. Army historical development: the Army has consistently seen itself more or less exclusively as a conventional warfighting organisation, and prepared for operations accordingly.
I look forward to the day that the Democrats get to the point that they can voice straightforward statements of the military's problems like this and, instead of trembling in fear of the Republicans' inevitable attempts to spin it as "insulting our troops", will be prepared to shove that nonsense back down their throats. The officer corps knows very well that these are real issues that have to be dealt with. Congress should step up to the plate and make some decisions about them.
This is also a very important point with far-reaching implications:
The U.S. Army has not merely been uncompromising in its focus on conventional warfighting. It has also developed an uncompromising approach to conventional warfare that is particularly ill-suited to the nuances of COIN and thus compounds the problem. Nagl again: ‘When the United States finally did develop a national approach to the use of force in international politics, the strategy of annihilation became characteristically the American way of war’. Eliot Cohen cites the two dominant characteristics of American strategic culture as: ‘The preference for massing a large number of men and machines and the predilection for direct and violent assault’. Although a doctrine intended for conventional warfare rather than COIN, it has permeated the American military and renders the transition to the more graduated and subtle responses required for effective COIN all the more difficult.
In other words, this approach of massive application of force has clear advantages in large conventional army clashes. But when it's applied to trying to target one or two snipers in an urban environment, it can mean blasting several houses into smithereens and killing a bunch of civilian noncombatants in the process. This is the problemthat Andrew Bacevich addresses in the American Conservative article I discussed in an earlier post.
Aylwin-Foster addresses this problem from a different angle, as well:
Armies reflect the culture of the civil society from which they are drawn. According to Snider the Army is characterised, like U.S. domestic society, by an aspiration to achieve quick results. This in turn creates a presumption of quick results, and engenders a command and planning climate that promotes those solutions that appear to favour quick results. In conventional warfighting situations this is likely to be advantageous, but in other operations it often tends to prolong the situation, ironically, as the quick solution turns out to be the wrong one. In COIN terms the most obvious example is the predilection for wide ranging kinetic options (sweep, search and destroy) in preference to the longer term hearts and minds work and intelligence led operations: even though the former may often be the least effective strategy, it always seems the most appealing, since it purports to offer a quicker and more tangible result.
He doesn't spend much space on it. But he does not that this logic, dysfunctional in the COIN environment:
... is further encouraged when the deployed force is supported by a massive industrial base, with vested business interests in the wider employment of technological solutions, and a powerful Congressional lobby culture. However, the lure of technology can be misleading. In an environment where, above all else, it is imperative that the occupying force be seen as a force for the good, it is counter-productive when technological solutions are employed that promote separation from the population. Furthermore, a predilection with technology arguably encourages the search for the quick, convenient solution, often at the expense of the less obvious, but ultimately more enduring one. (my emphasis)
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