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

[Dayuhan]

Thought I would throw out a thought and argue that the problem is in the gap between what the Army is expected to do (the ultimate political solution, i.e. a democratic Afghanistan) and what it is capable of doing (destroy enemy military capabilities). The U.S. Army does not have the capability, nor the will, to accomplish this political objective. It does not matter if the objective is the right one. Not for us to argue. It is the objective. If we do not have the capability and we are not interested in creating that capability (we currently pay lip service to it with things like Advise and Assist Brigades), who should fill the gap between capability and requirement ... what is commonly referred to as "mission creep". It is not mission creep, it is the mission, the Army just can't do it as configured.

Not only does the US Army not have the capability to transform Afghanistan into a democracy, the US Government overall doesn't have that capacity. Neither does anyone else, which raises some questions about the wisdom of selecting goals we haven't the capacity to achieve.

If any smart people are considering the possibility of trying to reconfigure the Army to make it capable of achieving such goals, I hope they're also considering the possibility that we might at some future time need an Army that functions as an Army. It would suck to reconfigure the Army to turn them into agents of democratic transformation and suddenly run into a situation where we need them to destroy an opposing armed force.

I would personally rather let the Army be an Army... if we really desperately need some organization to turn nations into democracies we should build a new organization, let the Army handle Army functions (fighting armed antagonists and training the host country military) and have a civilian organization tasked with the rest of it. Whether we really need to be going around trying to impose democracy in other countries is another question altogether, to which I suspect "no" is a really good answer.

[TheCurmudgeon]

I would personally rather let the Army be an Army... if we really desperately need some organization to turn nations into democracies we should build a new organization, let the Army handle Army functions (fighting armed antagonists and training the host country military) and have a civilian organization tasked with the rest of it.

I agree completely.

Whether we really need to be going around trying to impose democracy in other countries is another question altogether, to which I suspect "no" is a really good answer.

I don't think it is that simple, although I agree that we cannot "impose democracy". The world is changing as those parts of the world who are not democratic experiment with the idea or fight against it altogether. It took the French nearly a hundred years from the revolution to a stable democracy and included two emperors and at least two republics. The original round of revolutions of 1848 would not see a stable Europe for over another hundred years and two world wars. I suspect that we will see the same types of gestation from the Arab Spring. Political transitions of this type are messy. They involve an internal restructuring of the society's value system. We may not be able to force countries into becoming a democracy but we certainly can limit the damage that they will inevitably do, that may end up on our doorstep, as they make the transition themselves.