"Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife," Organizational Culture, and "National Power"
I finally got around to reading "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife," (took me attending a foreign university to get a library that carried it) and after reading it, I wondered a lot about organizational culture and the inherent proclivity an institution may have for specific tasks, as opposed to institutional difficulties with others.
First, a quick aside - I know a lot of changing for the better is going on in the services, but when the guys who clearly articulate the changes (some radical, some not so much) that need to occur, like Hammes and Nagl, have joined the Cranes and Krepineviches of recent years in adding "(ret.)" to their surnames, it makes you wonder just how much effective change is going on. Anyway, back to my point.
The first post I made on SWC concerned the Army's reverting to the big war focus after Vietnam in all phases, from procurement (Abrams, Apache, Blackhawk, Bradley, MLRS) to doctrine (AirLand Battle) and scoffed at the idea that the services would do it again when commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced - whenever that is. I was alarmed when Tom and others said they're worried by some of what they've seen and heard. I didn't really understand how this could be. After all, the Soviet threat doesn't exist, and a land war with the Chinese is unthinkable in the near future.
In "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," Lt. Col. Nagl effectively described why the Army was not a proper learning institution and how it failed to conceptualize and execute an effective COIN strategy. Hammes in The Sling and the Stone recommended several ways in which the services need to change to be better suited to the pressures of adaptability and innovativeness that COIN and IW entail. Both touched on the point that the services, the Army in particular (given the Marine Corps' 19th and pre-WWII 20th century history) have an organizational self-image as the citizen army that fights wars of survival. Such wars, then, have typically been monstrous clashes of attrition won by "liberal use of firepower, even more liberally applied." Obviously we all understand that and how it applies to military thinking in the Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, etc.
But the more subtle result of that self-image is that the services expect the full weight of the nation behind them. Economic, political, social commitment. And while we talk about how political COIN is, or the need to use the oft-repeated "all aspects of national power," repeatedly clamoring for more commitment from the home front on numerous levels I believe to be an excellent indicator of why, as an institution, the services remain in ways ill-suited to COIN.
Nagl emphasized that a large part of the British success in Malaya was because the British Army and political apparatus recognized both the political nature of the struggle (and thus the associated requirements of limited and discriminate force, employment of troops in policing roles, etc.) which I think we have understood properly, at least now, in Iraq; and also the tradition of imperial soldiering and policing - that the troops on the ground would have to make do with limited resources and support from the home country. This "forced privation," I think it could be argued, help spur creative solutions and innovation that enabled success.
I understand that comparing Malaya to Iraq (or making the oft-repeated analogy to Vietnam) is fraught with discrepancies - controlling a country the size of California with its infrastructure and government destroyed is different from the work required in Malaya - but the point is this: How much time to we spend observing the failures of the American citizenry to be committed to the effort, or even know a thing about it? I am completely and totally guilty in this respect, often bemoaning my generation's failures to contribute to, or even be aware of, the conflicts today. Captain Hsia's articles on the SWJ blog are only the most recent examples of this attitude.
But I wonder, do we (again including myself as a hopeful future stakeholder) need to get this malady of "why isn't the rest of the country involved in this?" behind us to truly be institutionally prepared for what successful COIN entails? Does anyone else see how this cherished self-image of being the nation's savior during the darkest times, of American foreign policy being so messianic, can hurt our COIN abilities?
Or am I just way off base? Thoughts?
Regards,
Matt
Thoughts appropos of little...
TT Said:
Quote:
"You also note that the Army’s ‘organizational self-image as ‘the citizen army that fights wars of survival.’, but the hard question is whether the Army is truly a ‘citizen’ army now that that is an all volunteer force?"
I suggest that an Army that is recruited from a society, effectively lives and plays among that society, has numerous friends and relatives in that society and whose members return to that society will always be a citizen army -- just not in the 'national' army, Napoleonic sense (which IMO is a good thing). I'd also suggest that both the British and US Armies have been filled with volunteers for a far greater time than they haves used conscripts, that similar worries have been expressed for centuries and that such worries are misplaced. I'm more concerned with a society of citizens that denigrate things military because they do not understand them than I am about the Armed forces eschewing the values of the society from which they come.
Eden said:
Quote:
"This is what happened after Vietnam, when an enlightened set of generals and a new set of institutions - the combat training centers and their unfriendly evaluation regime - shook us out of the doldrums and focused the Army on major conventional combat operations. Which was the right thing to do! The threat from 1972 to 1991 - a generation - was existential and arose in the form of Soviet conventional armies and their clones. Thank God we forgot about unconventional warfare."
I can agree up to the last line. We emphatically should not have forgotten about it. Place it well down the priority list, absolutely, however forgetting about it entirely was really dumb. As we found out when a generation of senior leaders with nil exposure to COIN were confronted with an incipient insurgency and proceeded through ignorance to cultivate that into a full blown, if minor, insurgency...
The larger problem is that even if one agrees that it should have been forgotten about until, say 1994 or 95, there is no excuse for forgetting about it after that time.
Eden also says:
Quote:
"So, my point is that while the armed forces have structural flaws, the uniquely American nature of those institutions do have certain strengths that we abandon at our peril."
Truer words were rarely spake...
Steve Blair is right on the mark...
Tom Odom defends Nagl's book and that's fine -- but Wilf was correct in saying the British in Malaya did some really dicey things in Malaya and (even more so) in Kenya and Nagl is remiss in not pointing out all the advantages the Brits had there -- not least that they were the government. We did use Brit Malaya-like techniques in Viet Nam -- or tried to -- and they failed miserably, partly because we were not the government, partly because we did not want to do some of those dicey things and partly because we do not have the patience the British have. Malaya was NOT a good example for anyone to adopt in COIN.
I also have anecdotal evidence that Nagl's book is indeed discounted in the British Army.
Probably should repeat and amplify something;Malaya was NOT a good example for anyone to adopt in COIN. That is because the conditions were very unusual, will almost never pertain to other nations (particularly the US) and the most effective techniques cannot be used today on 'humanitarian' grounds.
Okay, I've picked on everyone except Matt who asked a very pertinent and important question (Good job, Matt!); and Rob who had cogent comments and has to grapple with the answers as part of his job now. Time for me to go to lunch. :D
TT, I need words put in my mouth...
Generally I say what I mean and mean what I say but frequently get garbled in transmission... :(
That and my innate laziness lead to shorthand and even on occasion to Runes...
Agree that my 'definition' of citizen army is beyond loose and not in accordance with the norm. The US Army of WW II and to a lesser extent of WW I and of the Civil War was a real citizen army. The far more normal (in the greater historical sense) relatively small volunteer Army is not in that model and never has been.
My broad point was, of course, that the non-model is the norm (as the real citizen Army is ordinaily not) and that it is a representative of the society from which it springs. Due to that, I for one, recalling days of yore when it was smaller than it is now by a considerable margin, am not concerned that it will pull away from the society it represents to a deleterious extent.
Quote:
"...This fits with your concern, one I can only agree with, about the implications should the public denigrate things military (which I can see breaking the connection/bond). But I wonder whether we should not be concerned if the military increasing holds a set of values that are at variance to the values held by the general public?"
I think that depends on what the concern is. In one sense it has always been and is now a problem in that most with more than four or five years service have always and do now see themselves as possessed of stronger and better values than the society to which they belong. My limited experience with other national forces lead me to believe that is not a US-peculiar phenomonena. Thus I suspect that the variance in values differences are more concerns of strength of attachment than to strength of value per se and I personally do not see much chance of a broader breach than does now or has historically existed. The 1930s were an interesting corollary...
The encouraging counterpoint is that about 30 to 60 % (time and circumstances dependent) leave the force each year with less then five years service to rejoin the society from which they came. They are replaced annually by a roughly equal number of new people and that turnover in Officers and Enlisted folks keeps the ties far stronger than is the case where longer service is the norm as is true in most Commonwealth forces.
Quote:
"Much more problematic is the first order characteristic, that is that the Army sees itself as being an org that fights ‘big wars’, or wars of national survival (the ‘who are we’ component being ‘conventional war fighters’). This to me is very likely an important, if not a core, personality/identity trait.'
Given the "Death or Glory" factor, the unfortunate psychological hangup on WWII as a defining moment and the fact that IW / COIN / Nation building / Occupation are tedious, dirty, messy, time and resource consuming and tend to show little progress or benefit to many, that defining trait is going to be very difficult to change...