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

[Madhu]

Ken -

In my opinion, you veer toward the latter.

And no one has a problem with Pakistan, we are talking about the leadership of the Army and the intelligence agencies, certain of which are able to help us because it just so happens that they trained huge numbers of so-called non-state actors (some of whom just happen to live in training camps and safe houses inside the country), some of which killed Americans on American soil and abroad. Also, they get paid a lot. Add that to the drug money and misdirected aid money and it adds up. Over the years, how much does the missing money add up to (I'm talking total world aid from the 1950s onward). A nuke or two?

Call it a different kind of Marshall Plan.

It's only natural that civilians such as Carl and I are leery of militaries that have a history of coups, interfere internally in governance and buy journalists and air time, and threaten their own populations physically. When American military--retired or otherwise--express admiration or a kind of benign understanding indulgence toward such a military, then, well, you can bet civilians start to become a bit testy.

'Cause it makes us worry about some of you (kidding but you know what I mean).

I understand that there are brave individuals who don't like the situation and may be trying to help us, but we are talking the realm of dissidents here and not "rogue actors". I sometimes think the term rogue actor was developed to distance ourselves from the fact that we are to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia what Russia and China are to Iran. It's a way to misdirect and lie.

PS: Training scores of state/non-state actors is a bad strategy, so, no, I don't see how these agencies are acting in their nation's interest. It has hurt them badly and hurt their people badly. It's one thing to say, "this is the situation and we are not going to change it," it's another to say, "gee, they are just following their interests," in a mirroring fashion as if their Army is just like the American Army. Providing intellectual cover probably isn't a good idea because it means that you can't think about a situation properly. Poor rhetoric sometimes leads to poor decision making.


I didn't think you lot represented the same sort of institution, but if you do think that, can you point me to the American coups that I've missed?

PPS: Getting this right matters because we are about to embark as a society on a discussion about how we are to work with the currently changing Mid East. I have a sinking feeling we will do the same thing we've done over the years with Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Pakistan and now Afghanistan. It matters to understand how our aid, military or otherwise, how our building up of armies, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or otherwise, may have long term negative implications for our nation. We inadvertently hurt people, including our own.

[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.

[Ken White]

It's only natural that civilians such as Carl and I are leery of militaries that have a history of coups, interfere internally in governance and buy journalists and air time, and threaten their own populations physically. When American military--retired or otherwise--express admiration or a kind of benign understanding indulgence toward such a military, then, well, you can bet civilians start to become a bit testy.

Testy is okay, misperceptions less so. You and Carl have misperceptions about the US Armed Forces and you tend to accord the hundreds (thousands when you include those retired) of US Flag Officers far more power than they actually possess. As I told Carl and as you objected to, they do what they're told. In many ways, they're more constrained than are Majors and Lieutenant Colonels.

Not just militaries buy journalists and air time -- in fact, when it comes to that, the militaries, here, there or elsewhere are generally way down the power curve...

American military people, retired or otherwise do not set the policy of the US toward any given nation. None. You may judge people on what they say if you wish, but I'd suggest that being aware of what they're directed to say and appear to do is not the same as watching what they actually do and to whom they respond.

I sometimes think the term rogue actor was developed to distance ourselves from the fact that we are to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia what Russia and China are to Iran. It's a way to misdirect and lie.

Yep. Agreed but who directs that? What level of government?

PS: Training scores of state/non-state actors is a bad strategy, so, no, I don't see how these agencies are acting in their nation's interest. It has hurt them badly and hurt their people badly.

I agree, so does Bob's World. Shame that many don't agree with us, isn't it?

It's one thing to say, "this is the situation and we are not going to change it," it's another to say, "gee, they are just following their interests," in a mirroring fashion as if their Army is just like the American Army. Providing intellectual cover probably isn't a good idea because it means that you can't think about a situation properly. Poor rhetoric sometimes leads to poor decision making.

Usually does lead to poor decision making -- doesn't change the reality that both we and Pakistan are pursuing our interest as seen by some in each Nation.

I can assure you that I do not see their interests and ours in the same light nor do I see their -- or any other Army -- as a mirror image of the US Army. We're kind of unique -- not special, not great (usually just barely adequate, in fact) but we are different. I've worked with enough others to know that, to appreciate the good points of that difference (and there are some) and dislike the bad issues (and there are some of those as well).

I didn't think you lot represented the same sort of institution, but if you do think that, can you point me to the American coups that I've missed?

Nope, I can't. That's due to a strongly entrenched civilian control ethic. As I said, the Generals do what they're told...

You have assumed, as Carl often does, that I have attitudes that I do not possess and did not state. Y'all tend to make standing broad jumps at wrong conclusions and infer things that tickle your sensibilities, things that were not written or meant.

PPS: Getting this right matters because we are about to embark as a society on a discussion about how we are to work with the currently changing Mid East. I have a sinking feeling we will do the same thing we've done over the years with Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Pakistan and now Afghanistan. It matters to understand how our aid, military or otherwise, how our building up of armies, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or otherwise, may have long term negative implications for our nation. We inadvertently hurt people, including our own.

I could not agree more. However, you're talking to the wrong guy. I'm with you on all this -- you need to address this to the Council on Foreign Relations and the rest of the US governing and foreign policy elite. They're the idiots that sway our government of the day in certain directions with their misguided vision of what's needed.

ADDED: I agree with the thrust of your later post. Many in the US Armed Forces who had experience in the area (and many more like me who had that but were retired) let the powers that be know we were getting taken for a ride and that we were not going to outsmart people playing a game they've played for centuries -- especially not on their own turf. You see how much good that did,

[ganulv]

It's only natural that civilians such as Carl and I are leery of militaries that have a history of coups, interfere internally in governance and buy journalists and air time, and threaten their own populations physically. When American military--retired or otherwise--express admiration or a kind of benign understanding indulgence toward such a military, then, well, you can bet civilians start to become a bit testy.

Having spent time in Central America in the mid-90s as a very impressionable 20-year-old I came to pretty much the same conclusion about the State Department. My view of the world is much more nuanced now but I think my knee is going to jerk for the rest of my life when I see a blue blazer. The DOD does not have the job of spreading truth, justice, and the American way. State, on the other hand, says its mission statement is to “[a]dvance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and act responsibly within the international system.”