Strategy in Afghanistan: could the US have done better?

[TheCurmudgeon]

This article reinforces my belief that the US military is about to make a mistake by returning to a total emphasis on high intensity conflict (HIC) with the misguided belief that a military trained for HIC can easily be retrained for COIN.

Beyond the somewhat obvious fact that there is no near peer competitor that the US military needs to be prepared to fight, the reality is that small, intrastate wars with a decidedly political slant are more likely to be the type of fight the American civilian leadership will get us in - largely because internal fights that are believed to be (or can be packaged as) wars of democratic liberation and expansion of liberties are the kind of wars the American public will support. We hate dictators and we feel drawn to these fights - it is our duty as the world’s first modern democracy to support others who want to be free.

So the problem is that at least some portion of our military is not organized, equipped, or trained to do this kind of work. We depend on civilians to do too much, particularly since civilians are not willing to join the fight. A military trained and equipped for HIC is not organized or trained to do COIN. Add to this that neither the military nor the civilians are trained to see the world through the eyes of the locals. They will consistently attempt to force American solutions to local problems. What is needed is an expeditionary force that is designed and resourced to conduct these operations. But that is a pipe dream. So I guess I will just wait till the next time we screw things up and attempt to argue that that future war was different from Afghanistan or Vietnam.

[Madhu]

This article reinforces my belief that the US military is about to make a mistake by returning to a total emphasis on high intensity conflict (HIC) with the misguided belief that a military trained for HIC can easily be retrained for COIN.

Beyond the somewhat obvious fact that there is no near peer competitor that the US military needs to be prepared to fight, the reality is that small, intrastate wars with a decidedly political slant are more likely to be the type of fight the American civilian leadership will get us in - largely because internal fights that are believed to be (or can be packaged as) wars of democratic liberation and expansion of liberties are the kind of wars the American public will support. We hate dictators and we feel drawn to these fights - it is our duty as the world’s first modern democracy to support others who want to be free.

So the problem is that at least some portion of our military is not organized, equipped, or trained to do this kind of work. We depend on civilians to do too much, particularly since civilians are not willing to join the fight. A military trained and equipped for HIC is not organized or trained to do COIN. Add to this that neither the military nor the civilians are trained to see the world through the eyes of the locals. They will consistently attempt to force American solutions to local problems. What is needed is an expeditionary force that is designed and resourced to conduct these operations. But that is a pipe dream. So I guess I will just wait till the next time we screw things up and attempt to argue that that future war was different from Afghanistan or Vietnam.

I am flabbergasted at this statement. I am sure that armies trained to fight insurgencies need different skills than HIC but who says there is only one way to fight an insurgency and COIN as envisioned on paper by the American military in FM 3-24 is the only way to do it?

So, instead of thinking of something new you want people to double down on what didn't work in Vietnam and Afghanistan?

We misread the strategic environment in Afghanistan, thought FM 3-24 based on Vietnam and Iraq and colonial small wars and modernization theory would work when there are a million ways to go about countering an insurgency, had overly ambitious goals, got sent off to Iraq in the middle, had a weird relationship with NATO (who was really in charge?) and so on.

What evidence is this based on?

PS: The Army always has to be ready to fight a near peer competitor because that's part of your job too and if you don't think it is, we should just disband you. And, to be honest, I'm not sure even fighting a near peer competitor would out well for us at this point.

Insurgency fighting via expeditionary COIN with the US in the lead has a dismal track record and last time around, the President asked for something else besides pop COIN to work in Afghanistan. He got three pop COIN solutions from the military. That is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The military was asked for a variety of solutions to a policy and got only one way to do things instead of options.

PPS: Er, am I misunderstanding your point? Why isn't the lesson that we should have tried to train up a security force more quickly and in a better way?

[TheCurmudgeon]

I am flabbergasted at this statement. I am sure that armies trained to fight insurgencies need different skills than HIC but who says there is only one way to fight an insurgency and COIN as envisioned on paper by the American military in FM 3-24 is the only way to do it?

So, instead of thinking of something new you want people to double down on what didn't work in Vietnam and Afghanistan?

We misread the strategic environment in Afghanistan, thought FM 3-24 based on Vietnam and Iraq and colonial small wars and modernization theory would work when there are a million ways to go about countering an insurgency, had overly ambitious goals, got sent off to Iraq in the middle, had a weird relationship with NATO (who was really in charge?) and so on.

What evidence is this based on?

PS: The Army always has to be ready to fight a near peer competitor because that's part of your job too and if you don't think it is, we should just disband you. And, to be honest, I'm not sure even fighting a near peer competitor would out well for us at this point.

Insurgency fighting via third party COIN via the US has a dismal track record and last time around, the President asked for something else besides pop COIN to work in Afghanistan. He got three pop COIN solutions from the military. That is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The military was asked for a variety of solutions to a policy and got only one way to do things instead of options.

PPS: Er, am I misunderstanding your point?

The short answer is, yes you misunderstand my point. First, let me be clear that the military MUST be capable of conducting HIC. The fact that we are so good at it is part of the reason that there are no near peer competitors. No one sees any possible way to take us on head-to-head so we effectively deter aggression. I am not advancing the idea that we give that up and return to a world where any number of nations feel that using their military to get what they want is a viable option.

No, I am not endorsing COIN as outlined in the FM 5-34. I believe it has some very serious flaws.

What I am saying is that the world has changed. The change is the result of numerous factors from our superiority at HIC, which means that political confrontation now moves from direct conflict to proxy wars; to democracy becoming a more prevalent, if not dominant political system; to the fact that international trade has limited the need for wars of economic gain; to the ubiquity of free flowing commutations. The conflicts of the future will look more like the conflicts of the recent past (40 years) than like the conflicts of the more distant past (41+ years). The military has not cracked the code on this type of conflict with its significantly political nature. The problem is that we do not really want to try. The mistakes we have made in the past will be repeated in the future until we rethink how to organize for a completely different type of fight.

In the not so distant past the US military created Special Forces to help conduct the type of fight I am talking about. What I am advocating is expanding on that concept and create an expanded capability with a specific mission of fighting wars amongst the people. I am not sure that exactly that would look like, but I am fairly certain it does not look like an heavy BCT.

[Madhu]

Half way through my comment I realized I probably misunderstood your point but stupidly posted anyway.

I honestly don't know how some of you do it, keep trying to come up with something useful within a large bureaucracy. I'd go nuts.

Our policy makers, misunderstanding everything, probably will think some time in the future that fighting one of these small will make us safer and you all will be stuck with another thankless task.

It is time for FM 3–24 to be deconstructed and put back together in a similar way as the Army’s Active Defense Doctrine was between 1976 and 1982. That previous operational doctrine was thoroughly debated and discussed in open (not closed bureaucratic) forums, and the result of that debate was a better operational doctrine for the time commonly referred to as Airland Battle. In short, FM 3–24 today is the Active Defense Doctrine of 1976; it is incomplete, and the dysfunction of its underlying theory becomes clearer every day. The Army needs a better and more complete operational doctrine for counterinsurgency, one that is less ideological, less driven by think tanks and experts, less influenced by a few clever books and doctoral dissertations on COIN, and less shaped by an artificial history of counterinsurgency. When will the Army undertake a serious revision of this incomplete and misleading doctrine for counterinsurgency?

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/deconstruction-3-24.html

In general terms I would deconstruct the manual as it is now and break the singular link that it has with a certain theory of state building (known as population centric COIN). Once broken up I would then rewrite the doctrine from the ground up with three general parts: 1) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered on post-conflict reconstruction; 2) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered around military action to attack insurgent sources of military power (sometimes referred to as counter-terror or CT), but not linked to an endstate of a rebuilt or newly built nation state; 3) would be a counterinsurgency approach -- perhaps call it COIN light -- that would focus largely on Special Forces with some limited conventional army support conducting Foreign Internal Defense (FID).

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts...urgency_manual

I get frustrated because so much of the conversation is about how to build things and there is so little understanding of strategic environments, to the point that the hoariest cliches are believed about regions so no matter what the military does, if it is based on an improper reading of the strategic environment, it will likely fail. This is different than understanding the local cultural customs.

So, it seems that you and I are actually concerned about the same things. I too want more of the kind of discussion in the last link I provided.

PS: The article David posted seemed of that variety of paper that says, "if we just try harder at these same things in the future, we will have a different result." Our system doesn't do certain things very well and it is designed that way. Understanding this and coming up with an operational strategy that recognizes this is important. Instead of focusing on perfection, we should try and focus on something doable.

[Madhu]

I don't think they are close and a lot of the hype and scare mongering is just that, hype and scare mongering, but they are clearly trying to copy the US military in some conventional sense.

[TheCurmudgeon]

I don't think they are close and a lot of the hype and scare mongering is just that, hype and scare mongering, but they are clearly trying to copy the US military in some conventional sense.

Perhaps, but as you point out, geopolitical culture and history matter. What does China want? They want to be respected in their own back yard. They do not want to colonize the eastern Pacific. They are an economic powerhouse with a proud history. They just want to be respected and they see westerners as respecting military power. I don't see them using it unless forced to. The barrier islands and arguments with their regional nemesis Japan is probably the biggest threat to China, largely because it is an attack on their pride to have to give in to the same country that invaded them.

We probably will cause more harm with our Pacific Shift than good. We keep analyzing problem by putting ourselves in the place of our potential enemy. We need to think like they think.

[Bill Moore]

Perhaps, but as you point out, geopolitical culture and history matter. What does China want? They want to be respected in their own back yard. They do not want to colonize the eastern Pacific. They are an economic powerhouse with a proud history. They just want to be respected and they see westerners as respecting military power. I don't see them using it unless forced to. The barrier islands and arguments with their regional nemesis Japan is probably the biggest threat to China, largely because it is an attack on their pride to have to give in to the same country that invaded them.

We probably will cause more harm with our Pacific Shift than good. We keep analyzing problem by putting ourselves in the place of our potential enemy. We need to think like they think.

This seems in line with popular liberal rhetoric, but it doesn't nest with current reality. Today's China was born in 1947, so it isn't that old. It hard to make a claim they're a proud nation based upon their history from their internal conflicts, to the opium war, to the Japanese occupation, to Mao's mass slaughter of his people. One can even make an argument that they're a state that survives through criminal activity, much of their economic success is based upon intellectual property theft, and now they're using the threat of force in an attempt to secure territory in the South and East China seas using some illegitimate 9 line concept as justification. China's internal security/stability problems are well known, and drumming up a little nationalism as a means to hold the state together is not an unknown tactic throughout history. Unfortunately China's aggression is resulting in other states in the region becoming more nationalized, and nationalization can result in much more radical behavior than Islamist beliefs. Not unlike the past the U.S. continues to live in an era of uncertainty and our critical interests are probably best addressed by having a credible combat force (low end to high end). Stability operations and FID will continue to be military missions, but success in these endeavors which are not war will rarely be determined by the U.S. military but by the politicians. The military can only buy space.

I to worry about concepts like the air-sea battle, not that isn't worth exploring, but that is a narrow comfort zone with limited utility. On the other hand I think our greatest effort must be maintaining our combat skills. No one else will fight the nation's battles other than the military. A lot of other organizations can provide aid, intelligence, conduct CT, etc.