A Strategic Question and Three Insights

[TheCurmudgeon]

Certainly Vietnam would have become a unified state with a communist government if we would have allowed events to follow the course created by the people who actually lived there. We feared that outcome (domino theory) so acted to prevent it. To obstruct self-determination for others in order to prevent a larger regional outcome that we saw as detrimental to our interests. But we now know that Vietnam feared an expansion of Chinese influence into SEA even more than we did. We over-emphasized the ideology employed to throw off French colonialism and did not recognize that a self-determined, communist Vietnam ally would serve us far better than an externally contrived solution forced upon the people of the region by US military power. Ditto in Afghanistan. We failed to learn the strategic lesson of Vietnam, but wrote reams and reams on the tactical lessons. Good tactics cannot overcome bad strategy.

I agree. In fact I could not agree more. For whatever institutional reason, American military leaders like to pretend that conflict takes place in isolation of other events. Why the people are at war is not relevant to how to conduct the war. Tactics are independent of policy objectives. What comes before and even what comes after is almost as irrelevant.

At what point do military leaders tell politicians that their policy objectives are unrealistic? It seems that the military have created a clear line between war and policy. We like them over there and us over here. Perhaps that is the scariest thing about COIN - it takes the military way out of their comfort zone.

As to apples, oranges, etc; all of four of these situations are more alike than different at a fundamental level. Clearly each is very unique in the details of culture, history, politics, geography that should contribute to our decision to intervene or not, how to intervene if we do, to what ends and what approaches to employ to achieve those ends.

I don't think they are the same. Iraq and Afghanistan were Democratization/Nation Building; Philippines is an separatist insurgency; Columbia is a criminal/ideological insurgency. Therefore how to address them, from the beginning, should be different. They are different wars all together.

My point is that because we do not have a good, accepted body of work on how to think about these situations at a fundamental level we tend to make poor decisions up front, before the first troop is ever deployed.

Again, I could not agree more. But without a change in corporate culture, even if you write it, no one will read it.