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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
Got it in four, Simon! Where do we go from here? I don’t know about others, but I (at long last) am ready for some part (however small) in an Action Plan. OohRah! and !Si puedo!
We don’t win because we aren’t allowed to field and turn loose those with the leadership style of Patton, the tactical plan of Sherman, and the strategy of the Carthage campaign.
I wrote and posted (here on Ricochet) an Action Plan. There were about 7 or 8 threads called Winning the Peace. Take a gander, if you dare.
On my way, OTD, sir…Even if I’ve read them, I’ll approach them with new eyes…Major-Fr. K. is visiting as pastor and friend tomorrow a.m. So it may not be tonight…But a seminar during the day – after morning workout. Is “Winning the Peace” the tag? Thanks for the reply…S/F!
Good one except as pointed out by ctlaw that #2 probably does not apply though #1 and #3 do. The other aspect of this was temporal. The war was completed within a limited timeframe and by completed we mean completed, over, terminated. There were no Falkland Islanders supporting covert Argentinian efforts to inflict casualties on the British troops on the island.
I stand corrected. We liberated Grenada from the Cubans and their Grenadian collaborationist lackys. Limited US goals; military means adequate to achieving those goals and no residual long-term combat needs.
What, “Iran Delenda Est?” Are we going to kill all the men, take the women and children into slavery, and salt the earth so thoroughly that in 300 years no one will even know where Teheran is? That’s just not how things are done nowadays and you know it.
The United States routinely wins wars and then promptly looses it at the peace table. Its as simple as that.
First – We used to “kick some …. take names”, in that order. Today we take all the names and then the soldiers are only allowed to place a few of the enemy in a “time-out”.
Second – To quote a phrase – “War is Hell”. There are civilian casualties in war. If the enemy chooses to fight their war within cities or to hide behind civilians, there will be more casualties. This is sad, and a tragedy, but, isn’t war a tragedy in and of itself?
Third – If the civilians choose to hide the soldiers, or combatants, then the civilians have become combatants. They should be treated as such.
Fourth – The politicians want to be in control of everything. Let me rephrase that — The politicians want to mess with everything. The soldiers are fighting the war, let them fight the war. Politicians should let them and go back to their wine and cheese (I use wine and cheese because today the politicians act more like the French than U.S. politicians from earlier generations who would have preferred bourbon and a stogie).
Lastly – Stop with the “exit strategy” stuff. The exit strategy is easy. Win the war then come home. If winning the war entails “Kill them All”, I’m sorry about that, but so be it.
“That’s just not how things are done nowadays”. I think that’s pretty much his point!
For the record, I’m pretty much in the “Nuke the Bastards and be done with it” camp of warfighting.
More’s the pity.
I don’t know about you, but I’m rather firmly in the “razing entire societies is a bad thing” camp. Maybe that just makes me a squish – it certainly makes me rather abnormal when compared to the average person in the grand sweep of human history – but I like to think it makes me somewhat more civilized.
I am for killing bad people and breaking their stuff up until the point they say “we give up” and “please stop” or even, “we surrender”.
What isn’t civilized is to have to keep going back to do it again.
The problem is that just killing bad people and breaking stuff isn’t always enough to keep the bad people’s friends, family, neighbors, or kids from getting mad and deciding that the bad people were either actually good or just killed unjustly. So do we kill the friends, family, and neighbors too, just to make sure? Do we bribe them to turn the other way? Do we have to convince them that what we did was, contrary to their own judgment, just and necessary?
Maybe you’re right – maybe some level of savagery is really necessary. I just can’t gin up the intestinal fortitude to confront it myself.
Well, the last time we “razed entire societies” was Germany and Japan in WWII. Haven’t had much trouble with either of them since. Pretty much every conflict since then, we didn’t raze the entire society, and look where it’s gotten us. (I’ll also point out that in WWI we did not raze Germany, and that pretty much led directly to WWII).
What MWM said.
Note that the North Vietnamese decided the peace table was of appropriate dimensions once Linebacker 2 had been underway for a while. – If only the Johnson administration had thought of it.
This is true, though I’d point out that Germany and Japan in 1945 were still very much modernized and industrial societies highly integrated with the rest of world culture in ways that Iran or Syria just aren’t (to say nothing of Afghanistan). Rebuilding them was less a matter of re-educating the entire populace than it was just de-fanging them. Still, I will concede that Prussia (the historically most militarist portion of Germany) no longer exists, and the eastern regions of Germany were subject to prolonged and scarring terror under the tender mercies of the NKVD, KGB, and Stasi. But does this mean that we would be justified in employing those methods against our enemies? If so, should we re-evaluate our assessments of the Soviet Union? This is a moral road I’m not so sure we want to walk.
I do want to slightly contest the point about WWI – the blockade the British wrapped around Germany was so tight that by the end of the war the death toll from starvation was somewhere between half and three-quarters of a million people. German infrastructure wasn’t razed, true. But the German people sure suffered quite a lot. Perhaps this means that suffering divorced from visual reminders that the status quo is crumbling in the form of bombed-out buildings doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything. I don’t know for sure. I do prefer the interpretation which notes the prevalence of outright Communist revolutions in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s in Germany, and also notes that the only people who were willing to resist the reds were rabid nationalists who followed the cracked nostrums of General Erich von Ludendorff (the originator of the “stab in the back” theory).
I don’t know much about the Vietnam War – I’ll defer to you there.
There is a critical difference between today and the Japan/Germany analogies people are drawing. In the case of Japan and Germany there were no internal insurgencies, largely because there was no external help. Japan and Germany were alone; in 1945 there were no sympathetic peoples, nations, cultures to assist them. What were their alternatives – seek support from the Russians? No, they wanted us to protect them from the Russians.
One other point, we did not win WWII by ourselves or even with the help of just the British. It took the Soviets, one of the worst regimes in human history, to bring that war to a decisive end. And ask those in Eastern Europe who won the war when they were left enslaved for more than four decades.
And yet, we’re not fighting wars with Germany every 20-30 years. That’s gotta be worth something.