More than two years after the September 11 attacks, the American military finds itself entrenched in a host of open-ended, low-level counterinsurgency campaigns across the Muslim world. These guerrilla conflicts have become, to no small extent, the operational reality that defines the global war on terror. But our current experience in Iraq--the central front of that broader conflict--suggests that the Pentagon still has a long way to go before it can prosecute these "small wars" with the same primacy it displayed during the "big war" this spring. Thus, if the United States is to succeed in creating a different kind of Middle East, it must create a different kind of military, redefining defense transformation to meet the strategic challenge now before us.
American political discourse today is replete with plans and prescriptions for "winning" Iraq. Every presidential candidate, congressional staffer, and op-ed columnist has, by now, formulated his own fiercely held notion about precisely what is needed to achieve victory there. Yet lost in this hail of talking points about troop strength and internationalization has been any serious public discussion about how our present experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq should reshape the Pentagon's long-term assumptions about defense procurement, training, and doctrine.
Such a discussion is warranted not only because of the challenges facing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but also because counterinsurgency has proven to be a perennial blind spot for the American military. Although the United States has been repeatedly pulled into small wars against bands of guerrillas-from the Philippines a century ago to Somalia a decade ago-the military has tended to deemphasize these conflicts in its institutional memory; too often, it has fallen to soldiers in the field to relearn, the hard way, the lessons of small wars. Even in the wake of the Civil War, when the preeminent mission of the U.S. Army was to combat Native American insurgencies, "the generals always viewed the Indian Wars as a temporary diversion from their 'real job'--preparing to fight a conventional army."[1]
Over the past century, the military's "big war" mindset has been bolstered by its experiences in World Wars I and II, Korea, and the Cold War. Even Vietnam--in which this "big war" mentality was applied to a "small war" reality with disastrous consequences--failed to shake the entrenched orthodoxies. Instead, defeat in Southeast Asia had the perverse consequence of actually reinforcing the conviction of many in the Pentagon that, rather than learning how to fight small wars better, the U.S. military should simply avoid fighting them at all. This ideology reached its apex in the form of the Powell Doctrine, which put such an emphasis on "overwhelming force," "exit strategies," and "clearly defined political and military objectives" that it all but precluded military intervention everywhere and anywhere.
The Powell Doctrine was widely reported to be the first casualty of the global war on terror, but the idea that nurtured it-an institutional unwillingness to confront the problem of low-level combat-persists to this day. In fact, the Powell Doctrine was less discarded than circumvented, as the technological advances of the past decade allowed the military to redefine its desire for "overwhelming force" in terms of speed, precision, and coordination, rather than the brute strength of sheer numbers. This was the promise of defense transformation: a "new American way of war," as realized this spring in the battlefield victory of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Yet for all the self-styled iconoclasm of transformation, its central insight--that the military can do more for less, waging overwhelming campaigns quickly and with fewer forces--is squarely in keeping with the longstanding American faith that technology and firepower can substitute for human capital; that, in the words of an old army credo, "it is better to send a bullet than a man."
Thus, too much of the Pentagon's interpretation of transformation remains fixated on winning decisive battles rather than fighting small wars. As a consequence, the military has failed to devote sufficient resources to thinking about protracted, low-level insurgencies, much less develop a robust capability--in the form of doctrine, training, and equipment--to combat them effectively.
Toward an Imperial Army
The efficiencies wrung from an emphasis on speed, precision, and coordination have produced extraordinary strategic dividends that cannot be ignored. No nation has enjoyed any power like that of the modern American military in its capability to destroy armies, capture capitals, and topple tyrants, rapidly and with an economy of force.
Unfortunately, it is precisely the U.S. military's unassailable strength that removes almost any incentive to engage it on a conventional battlefield. The more attractive options for America's adversaries are to adopt a balance of terror that combines deterrence--through the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction--and the kind of twenty-first century guerrilla tactics deployed against us on September 11, 2001, and that continue today to target our soldiers and allies around the world, most visibly and palpably in Iraq. Shock-and-awe campaigns, it seems, are only the price of admission to the war on terror; the counterinsurgencies that follow are the main show.
Indeed, Iraq is not a strategic anomaly in the present geopolitical order. From southern Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa and east to the Philippine archipelago, American troops are engaged in similarly open-ended, low-level counterinsurgency operations against Islamist guerrillas. In each of these places, there is no clash of armies on barren plains; no clearly definable enemy force that can be decisively or swiftly annihilated; and few statues of dictators left to tear down. Instead, U.S. forces are scattered in relatively small and fluid formations, with an operational emphasis on protracted "hunt-and-peck" patrolling: a half-dozen infantrymen walking the beat in Mosul, a Special Forces officer trudging across the jungle on Basilan with a Filipino platoon, an unmanned aerial vehicle scouring the Yemeni desert for al Qaeda operatives.
In keeping with classic counterinsurgency theory, progress in these conflicts is predicated not simply on lobbing precision-guided munitions at terrorists or overthrowing rogue regimes; rather, the defense of the liberal international order ultimately requires that the United States aggressively expand its security perimeter into these terrorist redoubts, providing a measure of safety for the local populations and cementing their support.
On the one hand, this entails a world's worth of humanitarian outreach aimed at winning hearts and minds: just as servicemen are repairing sewer systems and organizing soccer games in Iraq, so, too, are they digging wells in Kyrgyzstan, delivering polio vaccine in Ethiopia, and building elementary schools in Afghanistan.
More fundamentally, however, it requires that U.S. soldiers recruit, mobilize, and aggressively support locals willing to join the fight alongside us. In essence, just as al Qaeda has been said to "franchise" jihad--outsourcing the grunt work of suicide bombings to angry young locals from Turkey to Indonesia--the Pentagon is trying to build a rival franchise in counterterrorism. Thus, while new corps of native soldiers and police officers are embraced as the strategic sine qua non of reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops are also to be found reorienting the militaries in a slew of other frontline states toward the business of counterinsurgency. In East Africa, for instance, American soldiers from a combined joint task force help Kenyans secure their border against terrorist-infested Somalia, and in Southeast Asia, Marines train Filipino light infantry in their campaign against Abu Sayyaf.
All of these operations make a compelling case for another kind of defense transformation-one geared not only toward swiftly winning decisive wars but also toward building a high-tech constabulary force for the open-ended, low-level warfare in which the United States is increasingly engaged. This is not to say necessarily that the navy should scrap its next generation aircraft carrier or the air force its Joint Strike Fighter, or that missile defense is not a good thing. But counterinsurgency does demand an additional set of priorities.
It is, after all, not difficult to intuit that these missions require different equipment and skills than conventional combat. There is, for instance, a clear need for surveillance devices that can track insurgent movements and guard borders against foreign infiltrators. More simply, in the case of Iraq, the U.S. Army has been rushing to address a shortage of flak jackets, having purchased enough ceramic armor for its combat forces but not enough for civilians and support troops there. Nor is its fleet of high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles entirely equipped with Kevlar plates to protect them against mines and the increasingly ingenious "improvised" explosive devices that the Iraqi insurgents favor.
Counterinsurgency also requires that the U.S. military be logistically prepared to provide its new allies--be they soldiers in the Afghan national army or the Baghdad police force--with the equipment and logistical support to do their job properly. Until the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, a benchmark for military readiness was the capability to defeat two foreign militaries simultaneously; a new metric for the war on terrorism, it seems, is the ability to build two foreign militaries (plus police and civil defense forces) simultaneously.
But even more than new equipment, counterinsurgency necessitates a renewed investment in human capital. Despite the Pentagon's dogged insistence that a counterinsurgency force cannot possibly grow any larger than the force deployed in the preceding "big war," numerous studies on stability operations--from the Clinton administration's 1997 "Dynamic Commitment" to the more recent effort by RAND--suggest that this is precisely what is needed. Furthermore, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the proposition that the Pentagon should deploy more troops to fight the counterinsurgency in Iraq, it is disturbing to realize that not many more troops are available.
Still, to be fair to the Pentagon, it's not just that we need more boots on the ground. Rather, the strategic challenge of the war on terrorism requires empowering soldiers with skills that allow them to better operate in protracted, low-level war. In this regard, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is correct in his emphasis on making the regular military operate more like the Special Forces. In particular, an emphasis on sustainability, self-sufficiency, and adaptability-including language skills and region-specific knowledge-is far more important than speed in a protracted counterinsurgency.
Thus, defense transformation must bring about a change in the military mindset from what Eliot Cohen calls a "mass army" to that of an "imperial army":
The mentality of an imperial army is, of necessity, utterly different from that of a mass army. . . . The former accepts ambiguous objectives, interminable commitments and chronic skirmishes as a fact of life; the latter wants a definable mission, a plan for victory and decisive battles. In the imperial army the trooper finds fulfillment in the soldier's life; in the mass army in the belief that he exists to fight and win America's wars.[2]
A military's mentality is developed in large measure through training and doctrine, and counterinsurgency has been neglected on both fronts. Consequently, it should come as no surprise when a squadron commander stationed on the Syrian border tells the New York Times: "We are not trained to fight a war like this."[3] These doctrinal and educational voids are especially worrisome because, in sharp contrast to conventional warfare--in which decision-making authority is concentrated among a select group of high-ranking civilian officials and generals--counterinsurgencies tend to devolve power and responsibility, ad hoc, to the lower ranks.
Thankfully, there are signs of progress. American military experience during the 1990s in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo prompted many military officers and defense analysts to challenge some of the orthodoxies about small wars. Although these missions tended to be humanitarian rather than strategic, blunting the imperative for internal reform, they provided a conceptual basis for thinking about counterinsurgency and stability operations.
Furthermore, the choice of General Peter Schoomaker as U.S. Army Chief of Staff is likely to push that institution, which bears a disproportionate burden of counterinsurgency operations, toward finally grappling with these issues. General Schoomaker, whose background is in special operations, has already concluded that the service's "Force XXI" modernization is all but irrelevant to its future mission and has expressed his support for more of the light infantry that provides the backbone to counterinsurgency.
Likewise in this vein, Secretary Rumsfeld has consistently and rightly stressed that transformation is less about a particular set of tactics or technologies than a constant willingness to interrogate and reevaluate the strategic demands placed on the military. As he argued in Foreign Affairs in the aftermath of the Afghan war, "a revolution in military affairs is about more than building new high-tech weapons. . . . It is also about new ways of thinking and new ways of fighting."[4]
Retiring the Ghosts of Vietnam
Speaking at graduation exercises at West Point in June 1962, President John F. Kennedy eloquently foresaw the danger posed by low-level, Communist insurgencies in the developing world:
This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins-war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted . . . to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.[5]
Kennedy advocated the expansion of the Special Forces (indeed, the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg is now named after him) and reiterated, again and again, that he wanted the Pentagon to develop a more robust counterinsurgency capability. In one particularly brusque memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Kennedy stated he was "not satisfied that the Department of Defense, and in particular the army, is according the necessary degree of attention and effort to the threat of insurgency and guerrilla war."[6]
Despite his efforts, Kennedy failed in his attempt to budge a military institution firmly committed to fighting big wars in the European theater, and the country suffered the consequences in Vietnam. As Andrew Krepinevich argues persuasively in The Army and Vietnam, the fundamental reason for defeat in that war was, "simply stated, the United States Army was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment."[7]
For all that the September 11 attacks mark a sharp break in the life of our nation, this episode from the past provides a valuable reminder that the war on terror and the struggle in Iraq must be placed within a broader institutional history for the U.S. military. Rather than repeating the mistakes of the past, the Pentagon now has the opportunity to put to rest the ghosts of Vietnam-not merely by winning in Iraq, but by confronting, and defeating, its longstanding reluctance to reorient itself toward the counterinsurgency operations that are likely to define much of its future mission.
Notes
1. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 283.
2. Eliot Cohen, "Why the Gap Matters," The National Interest, Fall 2000.
3. Raymond Bonner, "For G.I.'s in Isolated Town, Unknown Enemy is Elusive," New York Times, October 21, 2003.
4. Donald H. Rumsfeld, "Transforming the Military," Foreign Affairs, May-June 2002.
5. President John F. Kennedy, Address at Graduation Exercises at the U.S. Military Academy, June 6, 1962. Accessed at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/ps24.htm on November 21, 2003.
6. Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1986, p. 31.
7. Krepinevich, 4.
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI. Vance Serchuk is a research assistant at AEI.
