Philadelphia Inquirer
December 12, 2006
Winning Battles, Losing Wars
Once again, the United States has failed to grasp that war is more than just weapons.
By Gabriel Marcella and Fred Woerner
On April 25, 1975, U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers, author of On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, said to a North Vietnamese colonel in Hanoi: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." To which the North Vietnamese replied: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
Both men were right. In Vietnam, the United States scored all kinds of tactical victories but lost the war. Today there is no military peer that can compete with the global reach, speed, precision, and lethality of our armed forces. And few nations can be as proud of their soldiers and officers; they represent the finest values of American democracy.
Yet Iraq demonstrates that, despite all the power, resources and technology, we are strategically impaired. We continue to win most of the battles, but not the wars.
War is a transformative political process intended to lead to a better peace, not a mere sequence of battles. In Iraq, our soldiers fight splendidly, performing Herculean feats to make the investment in blood, treasure, and honor work. But strategic success, a better peace than what preceded, may be beyond their grasp because of flaws in strategic design made by superiors.
Why are we strategically impaired? Rather than seeing continuity, Americans tend to separate peace from the aberration called war, whereas the opponents we face do the opposite. Our strategic planning tends to reflect that bifurcation and causes untold distempers and recriminations among civilians and military in government.
In foreign affairs, we rely too much on military might, allowing the velvet glove of diplomacy and information to wither in comparison, thereby weakening the world's understanding of what we stand for, and breeding misperceptions that lead to hostility.
We have unbounded confidence in technology to solve the complex social, economic, and political problems of millennial civilizations.
We go to war without mobilizing the support of the American people, knowing full well their impatience for quick results and intolerance for ambiguity. We have a quasimissionary zeal to "democratize" societies that we barely understand, and we fathom the intellectual requirements for such ambitious tasks even less.
Moreover, we give the military missions that are best performed by civilian agencies like the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, and then we don't empower the military.
Finally, going it alone internationally loses friends who want to help and burns bridges that must be rebuilt.
What can be done? First, our political leaders must respect the complexities, limits, paradoxes, and unintended consequences of war. They must understand the utility of the military, neither expecting it to perform the impossible nor underestimating its enormous capabilities for doing good.
Second, we must develop a new class of statesmen, civilian and military, to be holistic thinkers, capable of managing the integration of the many implements in the toolbox of American power - diplomacy, economics, law-enforcement, intelligence, information, as well as the military. They should have a deep understanding of modern conflict in all its manifestations, from narcotics and international crime, to terrorism, insurgency, ethnic and civil wars, conventional war, as well as the ecological basis of national security.
Third, they should be thoroughly schooled in the language, culture, history, economics, and politics of foreign cultures.
Fourth, we should strengthen our diplomatic and informational capabilities. The United States is likely to need these tools for a long time in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, where we have deployed power since America inherited global responsibilities in 1945, but still the areas we understand the least.
Democracy is a process of mutual learning. Our founding fathers understood this and the seriousness of war very well. Thus they wrote into the Constitution that the responsibility for taking the nation's armed forces to war be shared by the people and the government. If we are wise, we will learn from the Iraq experience, make corrections, and approach future war better prepared to build the better peace.
Gabriel Marcella teaches strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. Fred Woerner is a retired general and professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.
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