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| The Petraeus Doctrine |
| 2008-09-18 |
| The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam. The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives. The Crusaders consist of officers who see the ArmyÂ’s problems in Iraq as self-inflicted. According to members of this camp, things went awry because rigidly conventional senior commanders, determined “never again” to see the Army sucked into a Vietnam-like quagmire, had largely ignored unconventional warfare and were therefore prepared poorly for it. Typical of this generation is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, once the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, who in late 2003 was still describing the brewing insurgency as “strategically and operationally insignificant,” when the lowliest buck sergeant knew otherwise. Younger officers critical of Sanchez are also committed to the slogan “Never again,” but with a different twist: never again should the officer corps fall prey to the willful amnesia to which the Army succumbed after Vietnam, when it turned its back on that war. To Nagl, the lessons of the recent past are self-evident. The events of 9/11, he writes, “conclusively demonstrated that instability anywhere can be a real threat to the American people here at home.” For the foreseeable future, political conditions abroad rather than specific military threats will pose the greatest danger to the United States. War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.” NaglÂ’s line of argument has not gone unchallenged. Its opponents, the Conservatives, reject the revisionist interpretation of Vietnam and dispute the freshly enshrined conventional narrative on Iraq. Above all, they question whether Iraq represents a harbinger of things to come. A leading voice in the Conservative camp is Colonel Gian Gentile, a Berkeley graduate with a doctorate in history from Stanford, who currently teaches at West Point. Gentile has two tours in Iraq under his belt. During the second, just before the PetraeÂus era, he commanded a battalion in Baghdad. Writing in the journal World Affairs, Gentile dismisses as “a self-serving fiction” the notion that Abrams in 1968 put the United States on the road to victory in Vietnam; the war, he says, was unwinnable, given the “perseverance, cohesion, indigenous support, and sheer determination of the other side, coupled with the absence of any of those things on the American side.” Furthermore, according to Gentile, the post-Vietnam officer corps did not turn its back on that war in a fit of pique; it correctly assessed that the mechanized formations of the Warsaw Pact deserved greater attention than pajama-clad guerrillas in Southeast Asia. Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the PetraeÂus era, attributing security improvements achieved during PetraeÂusÂ’s tenure less to new techniques than to a “cash-for-cooperation” policy that put “nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, Â… on the U.S. government payroll.” According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events. All of this forms a backdrop to GentileÂ’s core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting. The biggest question of all, Gentile writes, is “Who gets to decide this?” Absent a comparably searching Great Debate among the civilians vying to direct U.S. policy—and the prospects that either Senator McCain or Senator Obama will advocate alternatives to the Long War appear slight—the power of decision may well devolve by default upon soldiers. Gentile insists—rightly—that the choice should not be the ArmyÂ’s to make. Both sides have good arguments and neither is exclusively right. But the problem is how to divide limited resources. The big loser, it seems to me, is the USMC which could have carved out a niche much as it did with amphibious operations before WWII. There's lots more at the link. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #5 Do not look at the direct situation. Usually when these guys are rabble rousing, they are planning something else completely. When the big boys there get together, they usually want to discuss business. Not so much borders. Chess. |
| Posted by: newc 2008-09-18 19:48 |
| #4 It seems to me that this is mostly a training question. The low-tech, social engineering phase of a war can only come after a certain level of stability has been achieved. That stability can only come when the enemy has been degraded significantly. The degradation comes about through the use of traditional force application (both tools and techniques). That said, do we gear-up for a war with China or do we gear-up for a prolonged Afghan-type operation. I guess this is a "how heavy" question. But I don't see a prolonged conflict with China on the horizon. |
| Posted by: remoteman 2008-09-18 15:38 |
| #3 Being an artillery troop (Fire Direction Control) in the late '70s I can testify how quickly the skills for a competent artillery unit can vanish, with deadly consequence. The same is true for all conventional forces. Like the close air support we so appreciate requires first that air supremacy be obtained so too is the ability to control the battlefield required before the techniques of the "long war" can be applied. As in a proper diet, a little of everything is required. Don't fight the last war, including this one. Try to be flexible enough to fight the NEXT one, whatever it may be. |
| Posted by: tipover 2008-09-18 14:50 |
| #2 ...the (Viet Nam) war, he says, was unwinnable, given the "perseverance, cohesion, indigenous support, and sheer determination of the other side, coupled with the absence of any of those things on the American side. Bull feathers. When we went to the Paris Peace Talks the NV diplomats started arguing about the shape of the table, etc and wouldn't talk about anything of substance. So we fired up the USAF and commenced to turn Hanoi into a field of smoking craters. The NV diplos rushed back to the table and started talking peace loud and clear. My point? While we were not permitted to invade N. Viet Nam, We had other options to make Viet Nam winnable. |
| Posted by: DLR 2008-09-18 13:29 |
| #1 The big loser, it seems to me, is the USMC which could have carved out a niche much as it did with amphibious operations before WWII. To discuss this aspect would likely take up most of Rantburg. But some reasons for not being able to carve a niche is a) the emphasis on joint operations, 2)a serious blurring of interservice missions/interoperability (particularly SPECOPS), 3) the 'heavy-ing' of the USMC. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2008-09-18 12:26 |