Dr. John Nagl: Let's Win the Wars We're In
[Dr. John Nagl is the President of the Center for a New American Security. He is also a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department at Kings College of London, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.]
Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars.
-General Douglas MacArthur[1]
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred long-overdue changes in the way the U.S. military prepares for and prioritizes irregular warfare. These changes are hard won: they have been achieved only after years of wartime trials and tribulations that have cost the United States dearly in lives of its courageous Service men and women, money and materiel. However, these changes are not universally applauded. Yet I believe they should continue, particularly regarding the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Today, the United States is not winning a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, it just managed to turn around another that was on the verge of catastrophic collapse only two years ago. A continued U.S. commitment to both campaigns is likely necessary for some years to come. America's enemies in the Long War-the al Qaeda terrorist organization and its associated movements infesting other states around the world-remain determined to strike. A host of trends from globalization, to population growth, to weapons proliferation suggests that the "era of persistent conflict" against lethal nonstate irregular foes will not end any time soon.[2] For these reasons, the security of the United States and its interests demand that the nation continue to learn and adapt to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare and that it institutionalize these adaptations so that they are not forgotten again.
Forgetting Yesterday's Lessons-On Purpose
Our military capability to succeed in today's wars can only be explained in light of our experience in Vietnam. In the wake of that war, the Army chose to focus on large-scale conventional combat and "forget" counterinsurgency. Studies criticizing the Army's approach to the Vietnam War were largely ignored. The solution was to rebuild an Army focused exclusively on achieving decisive operational victories on the battlefield.
The dark side of this rebirth was rejecting irregular warfare as a significant component of future conflict. Rather than rethinking and improving its counterinsurgency doctrine after Vietnam, the Army sought to bury it, largely banishing it from its key field manuals and the curriculum of its schoolhouses. Doctrine for "low-intensity" operations did make a comeback in the 1980s, but the Army regarded such missions as the exclusive province of special operations forces. Worse, these revamped doctrinal publications prescribed the same enemy-centric conventional operations and tactics that had been developed in the early 1960s, again giving short shrift to the importance of securing the population and countering political subversion.[3] It was as if the Vietnam War had never happened.
The military's superlative performance in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 further entrenched the mindset that conventional state-on-state warfare was the future, while counterinsurgency and irregular warfare were but lesser included contingencies. The United States did not adjust to the fact that its peer competitor had collapsed, spending the decade after the Cold War's end continuing to prepare for war against a Soviet Union that no longer existed.
Deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s brought us face to face with diverse missions that did not adhere to the Desert Storm model. Despite the relatively high demand for its forces in unconventional environments, the U.S. military continued to emphasize "rapid, decisive battlefield operations by large combat forces" in its doctrine and professional education. The overriding emphasis on conventional operations left the military unable to deal effectively with the wars it ultimately had to fight…
Read entire article at Foreign Policy Research Institute
Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars.
-General Douglas MacArthur[1]
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred long-overdue changes in the way the U.S. military prepares for and prioritizes irregular warfare. These changes are hard won: they have been achieved only after years of wartime trials and tribulations that have cost the United States dearly in lives of its courageous Service men and women, money and materiel. However, these changes are not universally applauded. Yet I believe they should continue, particularly regarding the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Today, the United States is not winning a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, it just managed to turn around another that was on the verge of catastrophic collapse only two years ago. A continued U.S. commitment to both campaigns is likely necessary for some years to come. America's enemies in the Long War-the al Qaeda terrorist organization and its associated movements infesting other states around the world-remain determined to strike. A host of trends from globalization, to population growth, to weapons proliferation suggests that the "era of persistent conflict" against lethal nonstate irregular foes will not end any time soon.[2] For these reasons, the security of the United States and its interests demand that the nation continue to learn and adapt to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare and that it institutionalize these adaptations so that they are not forgotten again.
Forgetting Yesterday's Lessons-On Purpose
Our military capability to succeed in today's wars can only be explained in light of our experience in Vietnam. In the wake of that war, the Army chose to focus on large-scale conventional combat and "forget" counterinsurgency. Studies criticizing the Army's approach to the Vietnam War were largely ignored. The solution was to rebuild an Army focused exclusively on achieving decisive operational victories on the battlefield.
The dark side of this rebirth was rejecting irregular warfare as a significant component of future conflict. Rather than rethinking and improving its counterinsurgency doctrine after Vietnam, the Army sought to bury it, largely banishing it from its key field manuals and the curriculum of its schoolhouses. Doctrine for "low-intensity" operations did make a comeback in the 1980s, but the Army regarded such missions as the exclusive province of special operations forces. Worse, these revamped doctrinal publications prescribed the same enemy-centric conventional operations and tactics that had been developed in the early 1960s, again giving short shrift to the importance of securing the population and countering political subversion.[3] It was as if the Vietnam War had never happened.
The military's superlative performance in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 further entrenched the mindset that conventional state-on-state warfare was the future, while counterinsurgency and irregular warfare were but lesser included contingencies. The United States did not adjust to the fact that its peer competitor had collapsed, spending the decade after the Cold War's end continuing to prepare for war against a Soviet Union that no longer existed.
Deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s brought us face to face with diverse missions that did not adhere to the Desert Storm model. Despite the relatively high demand for its forces in unconventional environments, the U.S. military continued to emphasize "rapid, decisive battlefield operations by large combat forces" in its doctrine and professional education. The overriding emphasis on conventional operations left the military unable to deal effectively with the wars it ultimately had to fight…