Killebrew on US Defense Thinking
From Armed Forces Journal - SecDef has signaled a turning point in U.S. defense thinking by Colonel Robert Killebrew (USA Ret.).
Quote:
Gates’ speeches to AUSA and his subsequent “soft power” speech at Kansas State University indicate a turning point in U.S. defense thinking since the neo-isolationism of the “pre-emptive warfare” strategies of the early Bush administration. In many ways, the secretary’s call to empower our allies to defend themselves returns to a consistent theme of U.S. foreign policy first employed in the early days of the Cold War, with the Marshall Plan, the Van Fleet advisory mission to Greece and the beginnings of foreign military assistance to U.S. allies.
For the military services, this should be nothing new. Since 1947, U.S. military assistance and advisers have been deployed to wars in Greece, Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Central America and now Southwest Asia, and in hundreds of almost-wars around the globe. American uniforms have been seen, and still are seen, in mud-hut villages and on river deltas worldwide, where individual soldiers or small teams of sweating GIs work alongside local forces to reinforce shaky new nations. But in fact, for the mainstream military generation raised since the end of the Cold War, this is new, since advising foreign armies, providing military assistance and working in harness with the State Department have been out of style for the top leadership of the services for decades.
The defining events, of course, have been the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the failure of the U.S. to plan adequately for the rebuilding of Iraqi and Afghan security forces put us at a grievous disadvantage for the first several years of warfare in those two countries, a disadvantage that is only now being made up by the hard work and sacrifices of dedicated men and women in recently created advisory jobs. Much more remains to be done, but the reconstruction of Iraqi and Afghan security forces is finally on firmer ground.
Iraq and Afghanistan are worst-case examples of “enabling and empowering” allies. The secretary’s real thrust — and the topic of debate in Washington, D.C., today — is how to merge military power with other government agencies to support allies in emerging states before events reach crisis proportions, and to help our friends manage their own affairs without U.S. conventional forces. This is a challenge the U.S. has successfully faced before, yet the Washington policy establishment appears singularly ill-informed about how to go about it. Here are some fundamentals...
Good and perceptive comments.
When our staff system was devised, the intent was to develop a general staff without having a General Staff. Couldn't copy the Germans, after all. That and our xenophobic 'not invented here' syndrome insured that we succeeded and effectively created a staff system that sort of works but suffers from not having specially trained and dedicated people. Trying to do long term staff work with short term people insures minor chaos and a learning curve that one staff section or another is always going through -- and generally with similar sections at different levels being on different parts of the curve... :wry:
Of course, our political system with major shifts in policy every four or eight years -- many shifts just so the new guys can say they shifted -- sort of negates any real coherence in civilian direction of the military. That is particularly true with the large increase, post 1980, in numbers of political appointees versus civil servants in high places. The increasing number of SES 'Deputies' isn't as helpful as it could be for various reasons (nor, even tho I was one, do I think it a good idea). All that has several adverse impacts. :(
You are of course correct on the "we're apolitical" aspect in the mindset of the US Armed Forces and that too has an effect. That is in part engendered by the absolute disdain of most in uniform for most politicians. The Commonwealth Forces had the advantage (or disadvantage, viewpoint dependent) of the senior civilians in government and the forces being members of the same class, and in each Commonwealth nation in the past, a far smaller and less diverse population aided in some mutuality of effort. We've always been too big, fractious and diverse to develop that much coherence. I suspect those factors will not change. ;)