Failures of counter-insurgency - part 2

Continued from this post.

Why has American military power--so overwhelmingly superior by almost any metric--been so unsuccessful in achieving basic war aims in the last generation?

It is an important question, maybe the most important of our time. The world is changing rapidly. The developing world has accelerating growth, and the gap between rich and poor nations is closing. Today, Iran or Egypt or Nigeria may be regional problems that require containment. In twenty or thirty years, they may have advanced nuclear capabilities or other weapons that are much more dangerous. The era of terrorism is the era of asymmetric warfare, when cyber weapons or IED’s can change battlefields or strike at a great power’s homeland. Hitler thought he could break Great Britain through a bombing campaign and, later, with rockets. Today, Hezbollah has rockets, the Taliban has IED’s, and North Korea has the atom bomb. In each case, for the time being, their capabilities are insufficient to overcome the technological advantage of the United States and its allies. The Iron Dome missile defense system has cut the heart out of the Hamas and Hezbollah strategy to use rockets, for example. But IED’s remained an essentially unsolved problem for the coalition in Afghanistan, despite huge resources expended on various solutions. In the future, directed energy weapons or biological terrorism or cyber threats may upend American military hegemony in an instant. I, for one, don’t welcome such a dangerous world. In any case, it is not in America’s interest to roll the dice on that future, especially when the problems with its military strategies are so clear.
Americans are prone to whining about their fate and their nation’s capabilities. We have heard a great deal about “imperial overstretch” and the threat of China in recent years. But these fears are falsehoods. America is the predominant political and military power of the current age by an immense margin. First and foremost, America possesses a military which is exquisitely well-designed to project power and suppress its enemies. The bin Laden raid is a wonderful example of that. The two wars against Iraq are great examples, too. And these wars did not stress the country in the least, taking a tiny percentage of GNP to prosecute.  If the United States wished, its military could vie with that of the entire rest of the world, including its allies in Europe and Asia, and prevail in a conventional conflict very quickly. Stealth bombers, Predator drones, and Aegis cruisers are excellent tools of war. The electronic and sensor systems behind those tools are even more impressive. But the military is awful at prolonged counter-insurgency conflicts or nation-building. And the United States is terrible at staying the course on that kind of project. As Patton said—in the movie at least—Americans love a winner and won’t tolerate a loser. They also won’t tolerate having to wait for victory. If it takes longer than a few months, then they don’t want any part of it.
I was against the Iraq war when it started, not because I questioned the possibility that Saddam Hussein may have had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, as a scientist in chemical-biological warfare defense, I was very familiar with his history. Today’s pundits conveniently forget that he used nerve agents against the Iranians and Kurds throughout the 1980’s and had been developing anthrax and other biological weapons right up to the time of the first Gulf War. His military had even experimented with novel ideas, such as the use of aflatoxin.  As it turns out, in 2003, he probably did not have weapons of mass destruction. I am sure he would have had such weapons if he could have obtained them. Those considerations aside, I opposed the war because I just didn’t believe Americans would tolerate a long, drawn-out conflict in Iraq, where three distinct groups—Shia, Sunni, and Kurd—have been fighting for centuries. (For those with an academic interest, I recommend Anabasis, which was written in the generation before Alexander the Great and which detailed the adventure of some Greek mercenaries coming home from war in Persia through current Kurdistan. It should be required reading for anyone in the military or foreign policy professions.) It was inevitable that Iraq would be a difficult quagmire barely amenable to external control or influence. Given the constraints, it is a small miracle that the military was able to achieve what it did, i.e., to create a peace that was sufficient to get out of the country with American dignity intact and leave the Iraqis to quarrel among themselves. And, in the north, the Kurds have established something akin to a modern state. Interestingly, it may be the no-fly zone of the 1990’s which played the major role: it protected the Kurds from Baathist domination but forced them to abandon internecine animosities and develop self-government. I did not believe that Iraq would be a quagmire because of anything I knew about American military capabilities, but because of the lessons of history. Even Julius Caesar spent ten years suppressing rebellions in ancient Gaul—modern-day France.  Eventually, those provinces “civilized” and wound up protecting the heritage of learning of the Roman Empire, but it took generations to establish that foundation. Julius Caesar was hailed as a hero by his people at the time; maybe the Romans had a more realistic view of what’s possible than modern-day Americans who are convinced that push-button wars can be won like a video game on their Xbox.
The American military produced a result better than anyone had a right to expect, all the more so because it is so hobbled by bureaucracy and Cold War thinking. The Army is America’s oldest bureaucracy, 237 years old, even predating the formation of the country itself. It shows. The Army is divided among its various specialties—intelligence, operations, communications, and so on—and personnel decisions are often ridiculously unrelated to operational needs or a soldier’s expertise. Procurement is run by the Program Executive Offices, PEO’s, who spend by the billions on well-defined programs within their bureaucratic empires. They are the Cardinals of the Pentagon. If something falls between PEO responsibilities, two things can happen, either a fight between PEO’s for the right to do the work or a “not my problem” mentality. Either way, the soldier doesn’t get what he needs. A good example of this is force protection equipment, things like camera systems or radars or barriers to protect remote bases from attack. After more than a decade of counterinsurgency warfare, the Pentagon still hadn’t figured out who was responsible for giving small units force protection equipment.

Still, the military is more flexible and dynamic than any other part of the federal government. That’s why they are more effective at hurricane relief than FEMA and better at foreign aid than the State Department. That’s important, because today’s conflicts require the engagement of people outside the military to manage. Military leaders talk about a “whole of government” approach, but for the most part civilian leaders are AWOL on the front lines, as you might expect. As often as not, when the military is talking about The Interagency, they mean working with the CIA, not the Peace Corps. In Afghanistan, aid focused on big projects like the Kabul “ring road” and other things the central government could control. In other places, like Africa or the Philippines, aid has caused as many security problems as it has solved, because money corrupts those who get it and makes everyone else jealous. The military does what it can, mostly by working with their indigenous military counterparts. So, the Afghan Army is the most advanced and professional organization in the country. But, then, so was the military in Egypt, while the police and courts and services were corrupt and untrusted by the people. So, when the crap hit the fan, the government didn’t have any civil institutions to rely on, even after 30 years of American aid.

Next: what's missing from conventional military doctrine and forces...

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