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

[Michael C]

One of the more popular posts on the Small War Council asks, "What can we do to keep the SWJ relevant?" Maybe the answer for the SWJ council is, "Quit insulting each other."

I stopped posting on here because people like Bill Moore and "Of the Troops" immediately descend to calling me an idiot or the author of "highly naive articles and this is just another one to add to the compost pile." As a result, I only check the council side when someone links to my article. As usual, most of the "discussion" chooses to personally attack me and avoid the argument.

You gentlemen stay classy.

[Dayuhan]

As usual, most of the "discussion" chooses to personally attack me and avoid the argument.

I don't think the argument has much substance, and I've never been in the military or involved with it in any way.

To use your own athletic metaphor, sending an army to "do state-building" is like sending an ice hockey team into a basketball game... and then of course blaming them for committing fouls.

This is not just a question of failure to prepare for irregular war or post cold war conflict. The military is perfectly correct to point out that it should not be used for "state building". That's simply not a military function from the start. If you order an engineer to perform surgery, don't blame the engineer if the patient dies.

"Pop-centric COIN" is an abortion of an idea that's based on unsustainable assumptions and programmed to fail from the start. Blaming failure to achieve the goals on inability to execute the strategy is like ordering someone to ride a unicycle up K2 and blaming the rider for the consequent failure.

I wouldn't say the military is completely devoid of responsibility (the world "blame" is really to infantile to be in the discussion at all), and I don't think anyone here would make that claim: certainly there's been an enormous amount of discussion of military shortcomings here. I don't see any point, though, in focusing on that degree of responsibility to an extent that ignores the massive shortcomings on the policy level.

Winning is achieving your objectives. The first step toward winning is selecting a clear, practical, achievable set of objectives and defending them against mission creep. This is not a military function, and if this step gets botched the job of everyone down the line, from the strategic level down to the tactical, gets infinitely more complex.

All the talk we hear of increased complexity stems to me less from any inherent complexity of the situations than from the complexity we impose by adopting vague, ephemeral, impractical goals and pursuing those goals using inappropriate tools and methods.