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Why Can’t America Win a War Anymore?
I recently read an interesting column by James Fallows in The Atlantic on “Why the Best Soldiers in the World Can’t Win.” (Yes, I know all the caveats that have to be attached to any members of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy team.) His thesis is that they can’t win because the US is a chickenhawk nation that supposedly supports its troops but can’t do the hard work of actually understanding what they do and how–“reverent but disengaged”– is how he terms it). His bases this thesis on three arguments:
1. The American public greatly admires the military, but very few serve in uniform anymore, causing complacency. This leads to underestimating the difficulty of foreign engagements. Likewise, this insulates the military leadership from public accountability.
2. Procurement is no longer about delivering a military capability most efficiently, but about consistently spending more on greater technology, regardless of battlefield need. The result is spending that is at once inflated and sacrosanct.
3. This creates politicians who view the Department of Defence as a source of pork for their congressional districts and a means of burnishing credibility on National Security for electoral purposes. There was a lot that I found provocative in Fallows’ piece.
Those are strong points, but he is still skirting the real problem. He never follows through from cause to effect, even as he provides ample evidence of the concerns that he highlights. He gets closest to the mark on #3, but can’t quite close the deal. To borrow a description of the British Army of the Great War, America isn’t winning its wars anymore because its soldier are “Lions led by Donkeys.”
The US hasn’t really suffered any tactical defeats since the start of the Korean War. At the same time, it is constantly being beaten by strategically by inferior rivals. This is why we must look to the deficiencies of the political classes. Their failure truly to understand the nature of our foreign conflicts and to make strategic decisions consistent with their nature undermines the ability of the armed forces to win.
In Iraq, the greatest problem was not that the Army had the wrong tactics, though there was undoubtedly a lot of learning that went on in the first few years. Instead, the greatest problem was to see the Iraqi security situation as an Iraqi problem, rather than as the focal point in a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Just as the Viet Cong hid from a more capable foe by crossing into Cambodia, the antagonists in Iraq hid in a strategic depth where they were safe from American offensive action.
The loss of Iraq into Iran’s sphere of influence, while made complete by the withdrawal of forces on an artificial timetable, was well underway through the early problems during Sadr’s insurgency, and even through the successes of the Surge. Afghanistan was another of these regional conflicts in which the West decided to play in only one corner, though this time the conflict was between Iranian and Pakistani proxies.
When I was at staff college a couple of years ago, there were a number of new theories that we reviewed (Effects Based Operations, 4th Generational warfare, Systemic Operational Design … the list goes on and on). My impression across all of these is that these were thoughts generated by military leaders to mitigate the impacts of failures by the rest of government to approach military problems with any depth of understanding.
The problem with each is that they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. The political class should be shouldering this burden. Fallows cannot close the loop because it sits too close to home–the unimaginative and blinkered thinking of the political classes, of which he himself is a part.
Published in Military
A valid point, but there is something illuminating that you made me conscious of. American public opinion is more likely to be swayed by American casualties. International public opinion is more likely to be swayed by enemy casualties.
This is why a British journal like Lancet was playing up Iraqi casualties, while American lefties were counting down until the number of Americans who died in Iraq exceeded the number killed on 9/11.
Attrition warfare and manoeuvre warfare must go hand in hand. Over-reliance on either yields a suboptimal result. The classic battles of annihilation, Cannae, France 1940, etc. are almost invariably the result of manoeuvres which made the losers’ positions untenable.
Sherman’s March to the Sea could not have been accomplished without deft manoeuvre. He simply didn’t have the supply train to fight repeated stand up battles. What he did have was an army that could move so quickly that it could threaten multiple objectives simultaneously and hit whichever ones the Confederate Army couldn’t cover. Sherman had absolutely no interest in engaging and destroying large formations of Confederate troops. He was interested in destroying Confederate infrastructure and forcing the Confederacy to divert troops to oppose him. And yet, Sherman’s manoeuvre warfare supported Grant’s attrition warfare. Every troop train that couldn’t get through to Virginia because Sherman trashed the tracks made Grant’s job easier.
I think our lack of victories stems from our lack of strategic imagination. There were a few lone voices (Robert Spencer among them) who opposed the Iraq War not because of pacifism, but out of real concern that upsetting the Sunni-Shia balance between Iraq and Iran would tilt it too far in Iran’s direction. It was plainly obvious when the state department insisted on a Sharia-lite Islamic Republic of Iraq that this would guarantee a religious civil war as effectively is happening with ISIS vs the Shia militias.
So too in Afghanistan, where punitive expedition turned into wishful nation-building and a Sharia- enforcing central government punishes rape victims and apostates in ways not so discernible from the Taliban.
I remember the idealism of late 2001 where we were going to Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden and free their oppressed women from the chattel slavery of the burqa. The surest sign of our failure there and elsewhere is that we have never insisted on secular governance. The women are still in burqas.
If you could get them to recall me to fly the B-52s I’d be all over that.
I agree strongly with half of what you say.
Even if the Republican Party is full of crooks, the crooks wouldn’t stop us from winning a war.
I think that the major reason that we’ve had so much trouble “winning” a war since Korea (and even Korea was something of a draw, though we did keep the south free) is as you say, that “the Democratic Party is full of traitors,” although I would tone down the hyperbole a bit. The fundamental problem is the anti-Americanism of the Democratic Party. This makes them incapable of successfully waging a war while in power, and incapable of supporting a war being waged by Republicans.
We can win the war, we just can’t win the peace. Destroying nations is easy, it’s building them that’s hard.
Got a peace treaty and eveything war was over and when the peace treaty was violated Congress refused to step up.
Got an armistice treaty out of that one – which, when violated didn’t result in immediate consequenses
Meh – who cares already…LOL
Should have just left right after too.
Then handed over governance to a bunch of Harvard MBA’s who gave power away to the corruptocrats – Biden was actually right about this one (can’t believe I am saying this.)
Amen.
I think you are trying to make the term ‘war’ do too much.
I saw this discussion this morning and concluded it was so far off the mark that I had to consider whether to comment, start a new post to redirect the conversation, or ignore it and hope somebody would come to the right conclusion. I opted for the latter, but we don’t seem any closer to getting on track now than we were this morning. I don’t have time to give this topic the attention it deserves, so I’ll try a comment to nudge things in the right direction.
This thread and most of the comments focus on problems with our military and its civilian leadership. These are offered as reasons why we lose wars. Seawriter and Guruforhire correctly point out that we win wars militarily, but, still, commenters make the case for how to fix the military. That doesn’t make any sense. This is not to say that the problems observed in this thread are not real and significant. (Though I thinks Fallows’ article has more to offer scatology than political or military science.) It indicates that we have much bigger problems to solve.
We need to start by examining why we wage war to begin with. What is its purpose and what is the expected outcome? The answer to this question varies from war to war, and, I believe, has much more to do with whether we “win” or “lose” than all problems you could list with our military, its procurement policies, the nature of civil support, and moronic rules of engagement, combined.
Military force is but one tool available in international relations, and like any tool, there are things for which it is well suited and things for which it is not. To extend the tool metaphor, you wouldn’t set out to work on your car with a single tool. You’re more likely to use an entire tool kit. International relations is no different. If you attempt to accomplish militarily those things which cannot be accomplished militarily, you’re almost certain to fail. (You could always luck into a win.) Western political elites and much of society has lost site of how to use the military, and we’ll continue to pay for that ignorance in blood and treasure until that lesson is learned.
Lions led by donkeys indeed.
My armchair observation is by 2009 we had won in Iraq (after a whole lot of wasted effort, false starts, SNAFUs and FUBARs generally). Then we walked away from it without securing the victory. A war isn’t over when we say it’s over, it’s over when the enemy is beaten conclusively.
We don’t win because the American people as a whole are unwilling to, in Lincoln’s words “face the bloody arithmetic.” For whatever reason we are unwilling to abide going in, killing whoever needs to be killed, breaking whatever needs to be broken, and doing whatever else needs to be done to pacify the enemy and keep and hold the territory until there is no question that the war is over in fact (not just because saying so is a nifty campaign slogan).
Will it mean we have to be in Iraq and Afghanistan for 50 to 100 years? Maybe, we don’t know yet because clearly it isn’t over yet. Obama is going to hand over to his successor a region on fire (a “flaming cluster-up” to be precise) from Algeria to Pakistan. He’s standing on the shoulders of midgets (G. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and G. H. W. Bush) so it’s bipartisan, although Obama’s malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance has been egregious.
It can be argued that we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan at all. And that argument has a lot of merit considering the half-a$$ed way we’ve gone about it, and are likely to go about it in the future because the American people, as a whole, simply don’t have the stomach for it. Better we should just stay home until the day an Iranian or North Korean, or whatever nuke goes off over or in Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles (or just as likely Washington, and New York, and Los Angeles). Then we can sit on the ground and throw ashes on our heads which makes about as much sense as what we have been doing.
[FWIW, for context four of my children enlisted in the military on graduating high school. One is still in, and a son-in-law is active reserve working on becoming an officer. I mention this only to establish my “skin-in-the-game” bona fides].
The crooks can’t focus on anything but lining their pockets. That’s what gets us unusable crap like the F-35. The crooks don’t care enough about winning to win. They only care about the next election and their own political influence. So yeah, the crooks can lose a war.
More fundamentally, our failure since Bush has been on insisting on the “see no evil” approach to jihad. We couldn’t bring ourselves to say that we were at war with political Islam, so we conjured up a laughably named “war on terror,” which further devolved into “war on global extremism.” As if we were as threatened by fanatically religious Jains and Amish as we were by jihadists.
Boyd Boyd Boyd Boyd Boyd.
@Instugator- “I argue that the greatest mistake was the Coalition Provisional Authority and a too early transfer of sovereignty to Iraq.”
In terms of Iraq, the war had broad public support in the US until the violence that occurred in its aftermath. AFAIK, in large part that was because General Abizaid, who had a Mideastern background, gave Bush bad advice. I gather he argued that since Iraq had been an occupied country before, sensitivity to its colonial history required America to limit the military to a light footprint, which Al-Zarqawi and the Shite militias saw as provocative weakness. The subsequent constant news of explosions and resulting carnage turned public opinion against the war. The CPA’s dismantling of the Iraqi army created embittered, unemployed Sunni veterans, offering a fertile field for recruiting insurgents.
This is exactly my point, but much better exposited. Thank you.
As an aside, an old Sergeant Major of mine described what should have been the strategic objective of war in Iraq in the simplest, but perceptive terms: “you invade Iraq for one of two reasons: to turn right (Iran) or left (Syria).” They certainly have a way with words, don’t they?
Thanks for taking the time to address this point. You’re right, of course, that the military aspect is only a single element of the larger problem of lack of strategic thinking in foreign policy, and that fixing that military aspect will not resolve the rest of the shortfall. It’s also the core problem with the Fallow’s piece, for what it’s worth.
This point actually fits cleanly into Clausewitz’ first principle of war: Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. We all too often do not carefully enough select the correct aim, and similarly do not retain that ongoing focus of our operations on meeting that aim, but instead become far too reactive to events. That’s true both directly in terms of the military involvement, but also on the broader question that you raise. Until that gets fixed, no amount of internal efficiency within the military will resolve the broader gap in strategic thinking.
It isn’t that we can’t win wars. It’s that no one fights set battles any more. No one in their right mind would fight a set war against the United States. Other than the 1991 Gulf War – and you could argue Saddam Hussein was not in his right mind – wars are fought asymetrically. Any advantage a major power has is offset by the punch and hide approach of the insugence, and to overcome that one needs massive amounts of troops for long periods of time to stabilize a region. No one unfortunately has the will to do that today.
The three reason given by the Atlantic author do not even come close to explaining why the US cannot win wars anymore. The reason is, as the post had it, “Lions led by Donkeys.” The political elites are ruled by one of two guiding principles about state power depending on which Party is wielding said power. If it is the Democrat Party, then the power is restrained due to the perception that the US is not a legitimate force for good in the world. If it is the Republican Party, it is restrained after an initial burst of bravado due to fear of losing elections because they are bullying weaker states and thus proving the Democrat perception of the US correct. In short self-loathing and fear are the two things that have prevented the West in general from winning wars going back to the Korean War.
I laughed out loud when I read this. You have got to love Sergeants Major, don’t you?
Exactly my first thought. If anyone is interested and hasn’t read it, it is a riveting biography
OK, I’ll take on the challenge.
The Cold War was a confrontation not a war though episodes within it were wars like Vietnam (which we lost) and Korea (with an ambiguous ending; a victory if our objective was to preserve South Korea, a loss if it was to free the rest of Korea).
The Gulf War was a victory. We achieved our goal, kicking Saddam out of Kuwait. Thus, the Iraq War was a victory also. We eliminated the threat of Saddam forever.
We also kicked Grenada’s butt in the 80s.
This suggests that victory can be achieved by limiting our objectives.
Something I find useful in a discussion like this is comparative analysis. What countries have won wars since the 1970s? What are the similarities and differences between their approach and that of the U.S.?
Glad you got the reference! Boyd not only foresaw the precise problems we encounter today, but offered a powerful prescription for overcoming them- from runaway costs in the weapons procurement process to non state actors fighting the US. His ideas are so revolutionary and yet now ubiquitous that it’s hard to overstate his influence. And no other action in the past 20 years can better illustrate the failure to embrace his ideas than the decision to cancel the A-10 and promote the F-35.
If you care about the US and our military, I highly recommend you pick up a copy. And since I didn’t put in money for a NCAA bracket, I’ll personally refund the $11 bucks you shelled out if the book doesn’t dramatically reframe your thinking. (Dad rule- offer not valid if the book reaffirms everything you’ve ever thought)
OK, I’ll bite. Britain won unambiguously against Argentina in the Falklands war. Key aspects differentiating:
1. clearly defined objectives that were aligned to a rational view of national interest, and to military capability
2. willingness to inflict damage on the enemy’s warfighting capability, regardless of the niceties of international law (I’m thinking particularly of the sinking of the Belgrano by HMS Conqueror)
3. ongoing rallying of national will in seeing through to the completion of those objectives.
It isn’t that we can’t win wars. It’s that no one fights set battles any more. No one in their right mind would fight a set war against the United States. Other than the 1991 Gulf War – and you could argue Saddam Hussein was not in his right mind – wars are fought asymetrically. Any advantage a major power has is offset by the punch and hide approach of the insugence, and to overcome that one needs massive amounts of troops for long periods of time to stabilize a region. No one unfortunately has the will to do that today.
And it’s not like this is new—any war the US has been involved in since the end of the Cold War (and arguably, since the end of WW2) has been “asymmetric.” How could it be otherwise?
Even given that, there are few wars in any nation’s history have the moral clarity of World War Two—or perhaps I should say “apparent clarity.” We don’t seem able to recall the deep ambivalence with which many Americans regarded the prospect of war prior to Pearl Harbor, the real questions regarding the ethics and efficacy of bombing cities both before and after, the very questionable alliance we had to make with Stalin to ensure a two-front war (an alliance which resulted in a further 70+ years of suffering for the people of eastern Europe) and, above all, the unbelievable human cost of it, which we continue to pay to this day. One might argue the Civil War wasn’t a clean and clear victory either, given that there are Ricochetti who still refer to it as the W of N.A.
“2. willingness to inflict damage on the enemy’s warfighting capability, regardless of the niceties of international law (I’m thinking particularly of the sinking of the Belgrano by HMS Conqueror”
Not even a close call legally.
They did not attack argentine bases on the mainland or the Argie aircraft carrier
Wars either started by or finished by Republican administrations must to sabotaged by Democrats. Part of the Democrat narrative is that Republicans (1) can’t fight wars properly, (2) don’t pick proper wars.
Please don’t bring up the Korean War. It was “done” before Eisenhower got into office.
The 1st Gulf War “stopped” as prescribed by Liberals, by way of the U.N., not ended by what Republicans and Conservatives considered appropriate, i.e. terminating Saddam Hussein and his government. That took Gulf War II. Obama snatched that defeat from the jaws of victory.
Vietnam war ended with a truce, weak at first. But a Democrat Congress made sure Nixon and Republicans didn’t get a ‘Win’ for this, pulled funding and collapsed the South Vietnamese government. We know how it ended.
If Republicans acted like Democrats, Dewey (who was nearly elected) would have pulled out of Germany and Italy allowing the Nazis to make a comeback, or, more likely the communists to take over completely. Ditto with Korea. Eisenhower should have just pulled all U.S. troops and watched the commies take over. Then the history books would record that Democrats suck at war. But since Republicans and Conservatives are good guys who don’t like to use dead Americans as political props, we take the high road.
I think you mean Cuba’s
I saw the other day that it took until the 1920’s before historians were willing to say the Civil war was over the institution of slavery as opposed to the protectionist tariffs that prevented the south from acquiring manufacturing capacity.
The previous analysis (pre-1920) held that slavery was prolonged as an institution because of the tariffs.
Not so new. Ever seen or read The Mouse That Roared?