An Outsider's Perspective
An Outsider's Perspective by Frank Hoffman at SWJ Blog.
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I think the
SWJ community will benefit from the
attached essay by Dr. David Ucko, who recently completed his doctoral work at King’s College London. This well-crafted essay has just been published by Orbis, the policy journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. It’s an objective assessment of where the United States stands in our adaptation to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, from an outsider’s perspective.
Dr. Ucko’s research is focused on how well the U.S. is absorbing the right lessons from today’s ongoing conflicts, and how well DOD is institutionalizing the necessary changes across the doctrine, structure, training and education and equipment pillars of combat development. A student of American military culture, he notes our history of adapting to counterinsurgency campaigns, but then quickly discarding the lessons learned at the close of the war to return to our preferred conventional mode.
Ucko challenges whether or not DOD has truly embraced irregular warfare. “With the eventual close of the Iraq campaign,” he asks “will counterinsurgency again be pushed off the table, leaving the military just as unprepared for these contingencies as it was when it invaded Iraq in 2003?” Thus, this essay fits into the context of the debate we have seen on these pages and in the Armed Forces Journal (Shawn Brimley and Vikram Singh’s “System Reboot”) about whether or not the American Way of War will adapt or revert to form...
Monty Hall raised the larger question
The bigger question is, are we willing to substitute U.S. Government in most of the areas where Ucko filled in the question with “DoD” or “U.S. Military”. Ucko makes the case up front that our strategic culture produced a military which lived up to how it saw its role as a military, but that only apportions part of the responsibility – the part LTC Paul Yingling brought up in a “Failure in Generalship” – the part that requires military leaders to look out beyond our biases and sometimes parochial interests to the security threats that face the United States and challenge the civilian leaders who determine the political objectives.
I don’t think you can put the full responsibility on the U.S. military though, I think a significant part of the responsibility should and must rest upon past, current and future political leadership to determine what role it’s military will play in meeting security challenges as an instrument of policy. It is our elected leadership which determines what tools it will use to achieve its policy objectives, and how it addresses reason and passion – it was the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that said “You go to war with the military you have”. That is not a dig at the former secretary, his statement is accurate – when the decision is made to go to war, and the tools you have resourced and cultivated are the means by which you can determine ways to the end. That blame goes back further then Sec Rumsfeld's watch.
Colin Gray has an interesting chapter in War, Peace and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History. In Ch. 16 Gray explores the “Inter-War period” between the collapse of the Soviet Union (Cold War) and 9/11(GWOT/Long War). Gray spends the chapter thinking about lost strategic opportunities and failures to consider what would fill the vacuum during that decade, and the types of security challenges that would emerge. I think it is an important observation by Gray, because it cuts to the chase on Civ-Mil relations, and also raises the role of politics, parochialism and lobbyists in providing the most basic function to which government is charged, and held in legitimacy – the provision of security.
Given that we spent the second half of the century preparing for a war which never came, but one which if it would have could have been existential in the extreme, how did that affect our strategic outlook? How strategically important was Vietnam in comparison to our commitment to NATO (when it was really an alliance meant to preserve territorial integrity of Western Europe)? How did the combinations of politics and experiences that not only formed many of our pre 9/11 flag officers, but also many of those serving as senior political appointees then and today create and facilitate a failure to understand what changed and lead the adaptation of our government to meet those challenges?
Ucko examines the role of DoD in adapting to the current challenges, but as I said up front, I think you have to look beyond DoD, because we already know that given the nature of this threat, our competing FP objectives elsewhere and our U.S. strategic culture in terms of the ways which are acceptable to us, that the use military force has limitations. Military force has a role to play in providing security, but ultimately (and I’ll steal from Dave Kilcullen here) counter-insurgency might usefully be thought of as “counter-war” because sooner or later to make good on the gains improved security has bought, the effort must transition to establish the political and/or economic conditions which made the insurgency viable in the first place.
To do that I think the government and the people who elected it must be convinced of the nature of the threat, and must understand how it affects them – this does not mean it must be blown out of proportion, just that Americans must understand that its political leaders believe that the most pressing and legitimate threat we face is not the same thing it was prior to 9/11 and the consequences for ignoring that threat are such that the expenditure of U.S. blood and treasure are worth the price. This is a tall order because there are years of bias built up as to what a threat is and what role we should play unilaterally or multilaterally. Elected officials must either articulate or facilitate the articulation of causality in such a manner that it is credible, e.g. “we are investing in Columbia’s (or Iraq’s, or Africa’s, or Lebanon’s, etc.) security because….”.
Elected officials must know the risk associated with retooling our government (to include its military) to meet one set of security challenges, while not being optimized for others. This does not absolve elected officials from continuing to reassess risk, and forecasting change – e.g. if a near peer competitor shows indications of becoming a near peer threat, then our focus must change in time to first deter that threat, then accommodate the enduring existence or defeat of that threat. That is the role and responsibility of government; it should not be complacent and stagnant because it fears something ambiguous on the horizon while ignoring the present one that has defined itself. When there are multiple threats, the leadership must distinguish between most dangerous and most likely – that is what they get elected and paid to do, there is plenty of blame to go around.
Our military should not be seen independent of the context of the government to which it serves, to do so would negate the role political leadership should play in determining what its military is capable of doing as an instrument of national power. I’m not absolving military leadership, certainly it has a strong role to play in informing our civilian leadership of risk and capabilities, advantages and disadvantages, opportunities for us and for our enemies, but the decision to accept risk by large scale transformation, and the decision when and to what proportion military force will be used must be made by the elected leadership. That I think addresses the conceptual challenges associated with how our military responds to changes in the environment, but its also worth considering the challenges of large scale change when a decision has been made. I’m not sure right now if we could do much more then what is currently being done, or if doing some things for the sake of acknowledging a need for greater change is really in our best interest. Consider just how much of the overall ground force structure is engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan? Consider how much of the Air force and Navy are engaged in other areas around the world? How important is it to make choices about doing things fast vs. doing things right? These are all hard calls and sometimes the question is “How bad do you want it?”, and the corresponding answer is “If you want it real bad, that is how you’ll get it.”
Ucko’s article is worth reading, but I think the question is too important just to make it a military one? There are both some capabilities and capacities missing in the tool bag, and it is going to take awhile to develop them. It could be argued we should have been developing them based off the anticipation of what would happen when the Soviets collapsed, and then we could have implemented the change – a holistic national strategy for the post Cold War that redefined some priorities, and built capabilities and capacities where they would be needed vs. where they were needed. Instead, when the question presented itself we made a deal, and went for the easy money and it would appear we did not even seriously consider what was behind the doors. It was both politically and culturally amenable to do so; we called it a peace dividend and thought nobody would bother us as we moved about the world. As long as a state or a nation wishes to retain its freedoms and standards it must stay smartly engaged, we should not elect leaders to take breaks and tell us we’re great, we should not allow them to abdicate those responsibilities and authorities which define the position to which they were elected; we should elect them to retain our advantages, secure our blessings and if possible extend them.
Best, Rob
A few exceptions to your excellent post...
You said:
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After 1945 came Vietnam. We were ill-prepared for this counter-insurgency...
Not so. The units of the active Army, not in Europe, were actually pretty well up on counterinsurgency as a result of Kennedy's desired emphasis on it. The problem was that the Army's senior Generals and the Army in Europe were not up on it at all.
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Moreover, most of the military's intellectual energy over the preceding decade had been spent on trying to envision what the nuclear battlefield would look like, a question that was arguably of greater import at the time.
Sort of. That nuclear battlefield envisioned small dispersed units and a lot of autonomy (as is true in counterinsurgency) -- most of the senior people did not like that concept one bit; control freaks don't do initiative or autonomy.
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Finally, Vietnam was a very different war from the ones we had fought against the Indians, the Huks, or a variety of banana republics.
Mostly because Westmoreland tried to make it into a conventional war in Europe, a construct with which he was comfortable (he had not liked the Pentomic concept at all when he was the CG of the 101st Airborne Division ;) ).
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After Vietnam, the military institution did turn away from COIN as a subject of study; or, to be more accurate, we turned the problem over to a miltary ghetto known as the SF community while the rest of us got on with preparing for high-intensity, conventional warfare. However, there were 180 good reasons to do this, in the form of Soviet divisions poised from Potsdam to Omsk.
In reverse order, true and I'd suggest that reference to SF as a military ghetto is indicative of an attitude of parochiality that does no one any good.
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Two last comments. Firstly, The reason why we are not faced with the realistic prospect of a conventional war is because we are so well-prepared to fight one - a truism so self-evident many intellectuals have trouble grasping it.
True but I'd posit that does not excuse not being prepared for the obviously highly probable lesser wars.
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Secondly, how likely is it that we will engage in another Iraq within the lifetime of our current crop of officers? How much sense does it make to remold our military institutions to fight counterinsurgencies when it may take another couple of decades to muster the political will to do so?
Hard to say; you may be correct. How much sense does it make to not prepare for the eventuality you are not correct? In any event, remolding is not necessary, better training is all that's required -- that or the vision to forecast precisely what is required. Lacking that vision, I'd opt for training for full spectrum operations. It ain't that hard...
Yikes! Where's LTC Gentile when you need him...
I still don't buy Ucko's premise. By my reckoning, the US Army conducted three large-scale COIN ops between 1865 and 1991. The first was the sprawling campaign against the Indians, largely concluded by the mid-1880s. There was no great institutional change in the way the regular Army was organized, trained, raised, or distributed following that campaign, though in fairness it took a few years for us to recognize that the Indian Wars were over.
After the war against Spain, we fought a prolonged campaign against insurgents in the Phillipenes which soaked up a fair proportion of our regular forces. Again, once that war petered out there was no revolution in the organization, training, etc. Though I will grant you that those years did see significant changes in the General Staff and in what we call today the reserve components, this was not in direct reaction to our COIN experience, and the regulars were just as unprepared for conventional war in 1917 as they had been in 1898.
Vietnam was the next large-scale COIN op, though it was as much a small conventional war as it was a big counterinsurgency. After it was over, we changed the way we raised troops and the balance of regular and reserve forces; we virtually eliminated 'straight-leg' infantry; we went out and bought a new generation of equipment designed for conventional war; we rewrote our doctrine and our training manuals; we created centralized training centers; we changed the syllabi at our schools. In the process, we lost our institutional memory of counterinsurgency and left the execution of LIC/OOTW/COIN to a small community of special operators, FAOs, and unappreciated training teams.
I agree with Ucko that we did this after Vietnam; I agree that we probably shouldn't do the same once we wrap up Iraq. What I reject is his characterization of this as some sort of common theme or fatal flaw in American military history, and that it must be avoided in that light. We should mold the institution in light of perceived future threats and likely resources, not because we think a certain skill set is indispensible in and of itself. And I must respectfully disagree...as I have in the past...that the Army can do all things and do all things well. The Army is less capable of conducting conventional war today than it was ten years ago; a growing percentage of our combat units are no longer trained, equipped, or organized for high-intensity combat.
I agree with Rob when he says that Ucko's paper is worth reading. I generally agree with Ucko's advice that we need to preserve much of what we have learned over the past five years. But he is using bad history to support those conclusions, and that always rings a warning bell in my head.
Where is Hoyle when you need him...
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Originally Posted by
Eden
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Vietnam was the next large-scale COIN op, though it was as much a small conventional war as it was a big counterinsurgency.
Yes and no. Chicken and egg argument over whether our predilection for 'search and destroy' as an attempt to force major combat actions was the progenitor of the conventional fighting or Clyde instigated it. My belief is that it was the former. We got beat at that indirectly -- we never struck that killer blow -- because Giap refused to play by our rules. Funny how many of our evil enemies keep doing that; dirty trick, I say... :D
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After it was over, we changed the way we raised troops and the balance of regular and reserve forces; we virtually eliminated 'straight-leg' infantry; we went out and bought a new generation of equipment designed for conventional war; we rewrote our doctrine and our training manuals; we created centralized training centers; we changed the syllabi at our schools. In the process, we lost our institutional memory of counterinsurgency and left the execution of LIC/OOTW/COIN to a small community of special operators, FAOs, and unappreciated training teams.
Yes we did. I submit that was wishful thinking on our part and yet another attempt to go to the 'big war' as the US Army's reason d'etre. It isn't.
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And I must respectfully disagree...as I have in the past...that the Army can do all things and do all things well. The Army is less capable of conducting conventional war today than it was ten years ago; a growing percentage of our combat units are no longer trained, equipped, or organized for high-intensity combat.
I would submit that an Army -- this one included -- can never universally do any one thing to perfection. Personnel turbulence, equipment replacement and literally dozens if not hundreds of factors cause that to be true. The key is that the Army be competent to do all of its jobs to an acceptable level and that it be capable of rapid train up for specific deployments and missions. We have the capability to do that. We proved in Korea and in Viet Nam that units could switch between high intensity -- far higher than anything in Iraq -- and OOTW (to use an obsolete term) and do it almost seamlessly.
The problem is that COIN operations are messy, dirty (in every sense of the word), carry little hope of dashing victory, always have significant political baggage and are just not fun. That does not change the fact that the mission exists and a healthy portion of it properly belongs to the Army. We tried to will it away during the 80s and that just did not work. It won't work in the future, either. Regardless of what we want to do, the other guy is not going to play by our rules...
Adamecics know only what they read...
Ergo there will be gaps... :D
As for his overall paper, to me, it falls in the same realm as this LINK. More precise inaccuracy, my answer is the IG staffing response and no more. Noted.