The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[Madhu]

....in my first post on this thread. I was referring to the following:

Document 2 – State 109130
U.S. Department of State, Cable, "The Secretary’s Lunch With Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar," June 22, 2001, Confidential, 8 pp. [Excised]

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has lunch on June 19, 2001 with Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to discuss Afghanistan, U.S. sanctions and Pakistan-China relations. Secretary Powell encourages the Foreign Minister to explain Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan as “the United States and Pakistan have different perspectives about the Taliban.” Minister Sattar describes the Pakistan-Taliban "relationship as ‘reasonable, but not problem free,’ and listed points of contention such as: smuggling of goods through Afghanistan to Pakistan, Afghan refugee/migrant flows into Pakistan, and Pakistani fugitives in Afghanistan.”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc02.pdf

I've got more (you all know by now I like to use references for my comments. Plain ole' opinion kinda bores me right now....you guys got good reads for me, I'll read them).

We strung things out during the Afghan campaign a lot longer than we needed to because we believed our own fairy tales about that region and our ability to outsmart locals when they did the outsmarting. Given the location of prominent Al Q leaders within that country, they did a lot of outsmarting of us (even if the leadership didn't know about OBL, it means they weren't looking very hard and so that is kind of outstmarting us too). I can understand why people want to sweep this stuff under the rug. I sometimes think there is a touch of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" about our dealings in that part of the world.

PS: I mean, read that document. We keep doing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and expect different results. At this point, though, I am waiting for the history books and more interviews and declassified material. I need more intellectually. And to go all school marm on you, young people lurking, you demand more too.

[Steve Blair]

PS: I mean, read that document. We keep doing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and expect different results. At this point, though, I am waiting for the history books and more interviews and declassified material. I need more intellectually. And to go all school marm on you, young people lurking, you demand more too.

You don't need to wait that long. Many of the patterns you're talking about in US policy go back to our own Indian Wars (the constant struggle between the Army and the Department of the Interior). There's plenty out there about the US in the Philippines (anything by Brian Linn is well worth the read), and the interaction between State and the Marine Corps in Central America is also pretty well covered.

This, incidentally, is why I contend that the US military is often reluctant to learn from its own past...or in some ways may actually be incapable of learning.

[Fuchs]

Sometimes I sense that the usual suspects at SWC (not that many are active here...) think of the U.S. heavily armed bureaucracies as something more special than they are.

I suppose you don't need to look at individuals, individual laws or events to explain the state of affairs at all. The global socio-economic and psychological theories apply to U.S. humans just as to almost all if not all others.


This fits well to he persistence of certain problems.
You might close with the solution an inch or two more if you look at the problems as fundamental, human ones - and strive to search for some policy lever that could trick the bureaucracies into being better (illusionary) agents of the people.


Or you simply destroy the beast and replace it with a newborn version, one without all the accumulated scars, poisoning and decrepitude. The newborn will need some time until it can acquire all those bad old habits.

[Ken White]

Sometimes I sense that the usual suspects at SWC (not that many are active here...) think of the U.S. heavily armed bureaucracies as something more special than they are.

Not special but breeders of ineffectiveness in the name of efficiency...

Or you simply destroy the beast and replace it with a newborn version, one without all the accumulated scars, poisoning and decrepitude. The newborn will need some time until it can acquire all those bad old habits.

Exactly -- which is why I'm a fan of our ad-hocery. And why the bureaucracies hate and stomp on ad-hocery; thery like all those old habits. Job security, y'know...

Ideally we'd have a big training base from which we select individuals, form and deploy units for specific conflicts and durations and then disestablish them to be replaced by another newly formed bunch when needed. That's not about to happen, costs would be too great and even if we did that, the training base would still become an old bureaucracy...

[Dayuhan]

This conversation has wandered a bit, nothing unusual.

Certainly most here can find something to complain about in US foreign policy, though different people will have different complaints. I don't see how that can be laid at the door of the military: foreign policy is an executive function. The military may have some debatable degree of influence, but responsibility lies with the executive branch. I can't see any instance in which one could state with any certainty that policy would be different if the military had taken a more aggressive role, nor do I think the military taking an aggressive role in the formulation of foreign policy would necessarily be a good thing. Like Fuchs, I believe the only thing worse than a military under civilian control is a military not under civilian control, and thus under no control at all.

The citation in the original post seemed to complain that the claim that the US military is the strongest that has ever existed is inconsistent with that military's performance in recent COIN campaigns. I don't see any inconsistency there. The US military is by any objective standard the most powerful military force that has ever existed. Not all goals are achievable through the application of military force, though, and recent campaigns are evidence of that.

Certainly the US military has its share of weaknesses, defects, and inefficiencies. Some of these are common to almost any large bureaucratic organization. It is perhaps some saving grace that the potential peer competitors have similar problems: the overt corruption in the Chinese and Russian military is as severe an obstacle to performance as anything afflicting the US.

I still think the equivocal results in COIN campaigns are attributable less to military deficiencies (though they certainly exist) than to policy errors. I see no reason why American forces should be taking a primary role in any fight against another country's insurgents. If we need to assist a government in a fight against insurgents, fine: that's why we have Special Forces. It's not something to be undertaken lightly, but it something we've some capacity to do. Sending our own forces to fight another country's insurgencies is something to be avoided in almost any case. Fighting insurgents is a fundamental governance function, and it is not our place to be taking on fundamental governance functions in other countries. That's a recipe for a mess, for reasons RC Jones has explained many times.

Our government has a hammer. It's not a perfect hammer in any way, but it's better than anyone else's hammer. If the government chooses to employ the hammer as a screwdriver, we shouldn't blame the resulting mess entirely on the hammer.

[Bill Moore]

Posted by Bob's World

Pop-centric thinks one can bribe the populace to success, and that manufacturing better effectiveness of host nation services is the long-tern answer. There is no evidence of that ever working for long, if at all.

Of course there is, 3-24 say it works, so it must be law . I agree, and that is what happens when you have a bunch of GPF folks who have been focused on fighting tank battles get tasked to write a COIN manual. They turn to a couple of guys who had no experience at all, but did a thesis on COIN in college and subsequently were crowned the COIN home coming queen.

Threat-centric thinks one can simply defeat the various aspects of the threat: his fighters, his sanctuary, his ideology, his funding, etc, and that that is the long-tern answer. Equally, while this has indeed suppressed the fighting in many places over time, and has eradicated more than a few specific insurgent groups, I am not aware if it ever producing an enduring peace, and it typically drives the conditions of insurgency deeper into the fabric of the society.

I guess it depends by what you mean by enduring, but it does achieve effects if you're willing to go to the extremes needed to make this approach work. Fortunately our national values don't permit this, but based on that we should realize it isn't an option. It is like the paper Davidbpo posted on the USSR's experience in Afghanistan. In it the Soviets pointed out we finally realized we were waging war on the peasantry, and it was a no win situation.

No, sometimes I feel a little lonely on these thoughts, so perhaps they are "Bob-centric"; but in simplest terms they recognize that the roots of these conflicts reside in the nature of the relationship between various aspects of some populace and the systems of governance that affect their lives. Actual sins of governance and grievances of populaces vary widely, but the core human emotions that seem to pop up again and again in the many histories of these types of conflict around the globe and over time are the ones I try to focus on here.

I think you're close, but the Afghan people aren't ready to accept a national government yet, or so it seems. Karzai is strongly criticized, but he knows what he needs to do to retain the loyality of the tribe/ethnic group that will be with him after we leave. The Soviets realized Afghanistan was ungovernable and their task was easier than ours, because you can impose a communist system upon the people by the very dictatorial nature of communism.

Those chasing threats or populaces either one with a package of tactical programs that do not keep an eye to the the larger strategic criteria I attempt to discover, define and describe, tend to fail. They may put up great numbers, get a great report card and big promotion for their efforts on their tour, but they fail at their mission. Truth.

Only partially true, those executing the missions at the tactical more often than not accomplish their mission. If the mission doesn't support the strategy, or strategies, then shame on us for letting them happen. In my view I think it does support the strategy and we're over reacting to enemy propaganda in many cases.

As to this:


Quote:
Of course what you don't address is how will abandoning this tactic enable the opposition? Will it increase their freedom of movement? Will they be able to conduct more operations against coalition forces if they're not disrupted (especially if the population doesn't reject the insurgents)? There are two sides to this coin, and they're both important.

I have never advocated abandoning any tactic, what I have said is one must frame their COAs and CONOPS for implementing any tactic or program, be it one to defeat, develop or shape governance, with these simple strategic questions as their framework. One must then also employ these same considerations for their measures of success. If one does this and the government one is supporting still falls to the insurgency?

At best these missions disrupt. You can't win with coercive/lethal operations if we're not prepared to conduct them in their safe havens.

Well, sometimes you just can't fix something no matter how bad you want to and it will go sooner than you want it to. You don't know what will replace what goes, and most likely things will be chaotic and messy for quite some time while the people who this directly affects sort it out on their own terms. Sometimes the insurgent is right and needs to win, more often the government is just too wrong and needs to go; better however, if one can convince said government to cure itself and avoid that uncertainty and chaos all together.

Strongly agree, and this ties into a comment I made on blog response earlier:

It is the host nation's fight (political and military) to win or lose, if they fail to take the needed actions, or lack the political legitimacy to do so, then they can't win. When they can't win is when we tend to make what in hindsight appear to be very dumb decisions about surging our forces and in fact taking the lead, that is when we own the problem and it is our fight to win or lose. That in itself seems to be form of mental illness, we realize the HN can't win for a variety of reasons, so we decide to prompt them up with our military forces and then wonder why the people we think we're trying to help are turning against us.

But we have put GIRoA in a sanctuary. We don't honor their sovereignty, but we allow them to act in all manner of self-destructive ways and protect them with our blood and treasure. History will judge us poorly for this. Public opinion already has.

Agree, time to move on. The scariest part of this is all the articles I see on the lessons the Army learnt in the past decade. Unfortunately most of them need to be unlearned.

[Bob's World]

Bill,

Only point I think I need to clarify is that what I propose in no way prevents going into safe havens after the enemy. It simply drives a shaping of HOW we best do that.

For example, we could have aggressively gone into the Pakistan tribal regions in intel-driven raids back in 2001-2002, kicking in doors, dragging out true AQ members, lined them up on their knees in the village main street and announced "These men came to our homes and murdered our friends, families, women and children. We are here to avenge those murders." Shot them in the back of the head and got back on our aircraft and moved to the next target. The local Pashtuns granting those AQ sanctuary under Pashtunwali would most likely have simply nodded in acknowledgment, understanding and respect, and gone back about their business with a very positive view of the US.

Instead we coaxed (threatened, bribed) the government of Pakistan to go up into the tribal regions to "enforce the rule of law and secure their borders", etc. Thereby violating a long standing agreement of non-interference between that government and those populaces, and accelerated Pakistan to its current instability in the process. Equally the drone strikes we do now that are so loved for their clean, easy, safe application bring death within the terms of the rules of law we have written for ourselves, but absolutely violate fundamental rules of humanity and bring the same kind of violent, unjustified death to innocent Pakistanis, Yemenis, etc as the attacks of 9/11 brought to innocent Americans. Just because a true AQ terrorist is having dinner at the home of some family who knows he is a terrorist, it does not give us the right to kill that family with a missile through their front door. We have a strategy that conflates the problem to better hammer it, when we need to segregate the problem to better get at the true evil that needs to be cut out. Our CT strategy and terrorist organization lists enable this poor behavior and shape our poor performance. Yet we cheer every tactical success as we ignore the accompanying strategic set-back. We are better than this. Morally, professionally, culturally. We are better than this.

We make logical decisions that are strategic disasters because we simply do not understand the nature of the problem and do not design, implement and assess our actions within a proper, strategic context.