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TWO DIFFICULT WARS OFFER COMPELLING LESSONS
[ Part 2.2: "Attached Text" ]
Military power
The uses of force
Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition
We're the US Army and we're here to help
"AMATEURS TALK STRATEGY, professionals talk capacity." Jeremy
Shapiro, who recently left the State Department to join the Brookings
Institution in Washington, has put his finger on a central question
for foreign policy. For the liberal, open-market system to endure is
in America's interest-and in the general interest, too. America does
not yet face a direct challenge from China and Russia. But as the
dominant power it must be able and willing to maintain the system,
or norms will fray and tensions grow. Does it have the capacity?
The question forces itself on policymakers just now because the demands
placed on American primacy have changed. In the cold war, explains John
Ikenberry, an academic, America provided security and other services to
many countries. But the threat is no longer so great and security is
therefore no longer so valuable. For many countries in large parts of
the world, the past decade has been not about war and financial crisis
but about peace and prosperity. Those countries want more of a say.
At the same time, according to Moises Naím of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, the old centres of power, including
governments, have less room for manoeuvre. Their authority to
dictate values and behaviour has been undermined by a profusion of
new political actors and interest groups who are mobile and connected.
Some conclude that in such a world dominance is impossible: there are
too many actors with the power to block anything they dislike. The
rest of this special report will examine how far that is true by
looking at the components of American primacy-sharp military power,
sticky economic power and the sweet power of American values-before
drawing some conclusions about how America should act. In each case,
as Mr Shapiro has observed, the starting point is capacity.
Seen from Washington, the main threat to America's armed forces is to
be found not in Helmand or Hainan but in the automatic budget cuts
of the sequester. This roughly doubles the savings that will have
to come from the Pentagon's budget in the next nine years, to about
$1 trillion.
During the summer Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary, mapped out a
possible first round of cuts: shrinking the army by up to 110,000
troops from its current target of 490,000; and losing possibly two of
ten aircraft-carriers, as well as bombers and transport aircraft. The
alternative, Mr Hagel said, was to cut spending on modernisation.
Cut, but not to the quick
Inevitably, the proposed cuts have stirred up a hornets' nest. But
just how bad are they? In the ten years to 2011, when America was at
war, pay and benefits for the army increased by 57% in real terms.
The number of support staff, too, grew rapidly. Because Congress will
not touch this large and politically sensitive part of the budget,
the cuts must be borne elsewhere.
That is a foolish way to run an army. However, even without the
sequester, much of the enormous build-up in spending after the attacks
of September 11th 2001 should be going into reverse.
Moreover, America's military might will remain unchallenged, even after
the cuts. Just after Mr Hagel set out his ideas, the vice-chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress about the Pentagon's revised
plans for potential wars around the world. Large invasions may be
out, but it can draw on quick-reaction forces and stealth air power
and ships. And not only does it outspend most of the rest of the
world combined on conventional defence (see chart 3), it also has a
formidable nuclear arsenal and the wherewithal for cyber-warfare.
The real question is not whether the country can go to war if it has
to, but whether it fights the right sort of war when it chooses to.
Modern America has shown an unrivalled appetite for battle. During
more than half the years since the end of the cold war it has been in
combat. That is not just because of the war in Iraq, which lasted from
2003 to 2011, and that in Afghanistan, which began two years earlier
and is still unfinished. Even before that, between 1989 and 2001 the
United States intervened abroad on average once every 16 months-more
frequently than in any period in its history.
Few are happy about this, especially America's senior officers.
"It's too easy to use force," says Admiral Mike Mullen, a former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It's almost the first
choice." General Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser to Gerald
Ford and the elder George Bush, agrees. One reason why politicians
have turned to the armed forces, he argues, is that war looks like
a shortcut to success. Trying to change people's minds and influence
them in other ways is long and slow. "The fallacy is that often the
use of force changes the circumstances of the question. By the time
you have finished, the question is different and we frequently find
ourselves in an unanticipated situation."
That was particularly true of Afghanistan and Iraq. The consensus now
is that the first war has been unhappy and the second was a mistake.
The Iraqi campaign (which The Economist also supported, to the
irritation of many of its readers) especially provokes the experts. A
"fiasco" and a "catastrophe", they say; "a 15-year detour" that
"sullied America's moral leadership". America needs to look squarely
at why it found these two wars so hard to help it decide which wars
to take on in future.
The end of the beginning in Iraq
The basic armoured set-piece on a defined battlefield in which one
side wins and the other loses now rarely happens in real life. The
past few decades have seen no absolute defeat in the style of Berlin
in 1945. Even the most successful recent campaign, the first Gulf
war of 1990, left Saddam Hussein in power and at liberty to go on
murdering his own people. America went to war for a second time in
Iraq in 2003 thinking that the fight was a big armoured assault, only
to discover that it had stumbled into a seemingly endless insurgency
like the one already under way in Afghanistan. Both were a bit like
the Vietnam war, but the army had been so keen to forget Indochina
that it had to learn the art of counter-insurgency all over again.
What did it discover?
First, that war is even more political than it used to be. Emile
Simpson, who was an infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles
and served three tours in Afghanistan, argues that modern war is not
defined against the enemy alone. Far beyond the battlefields of Uruzgan
province in southern Afghanistan are other audiences, including the
Afghan people, the Muslim world, NATO, China and voters back home. The
idea of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan has become ever less
relevant. To the politicians in charge and to the overall national
interest, the other audiences have counted just as much, if not more.
When groups far from the fighting matter, the foundations of warfare
shift all the time. Military strategy needs to evolve to take account
of all those other audiences. A drone strike like the recent one
that killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban might help defeat
the insurgents but undermine the coalition among other groups. Just
as you do not win an election by destroying the other party, so you
do not win such a war by destroying the enemy. You have to destroy
the enemy's legitimacy.
When the battlefield is diffuse, you get cross-cutting franchises
rather than two opposing sides. In Afghanistan the foreign forces
were co-opted into tribal and ethnic conflicts that had existed long
before they arrived. The allocation of resources was designed to keep
the base of supporters as well as win over new ones. It was not about
conquering territory and moving forward. America and its allies were
dragged into battles that had no clean military solution. Winning
the trial of strength could not win over the people: the idea was
not destruction but persuasion. If they had sought to destroy the
insurgents with raw power, audiences away from the battle would
have objected.
The second lesson America's armed forces learned is that
counter-insurgency, or COIN, is drawn out and hard to pull off. One
study looking at the past few decades found that only a quarter
of COIN campaigns have succeeded-though this may be partly because
fights against insurgencies often start as if they were traditional
wars. The campaigns tend to last at least 14 years, which means they
have to be sustained during at least four American presidential terms.
Richard Betts, of New York's Columbia University, notes that this is
all the more demanding because COIN requires a lot of manpower.
Insurgents are prepared to bear heavy casualties. Ho Chi Minh told
the French in 1946 that "you will kill ten of our men and we will
kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it."
That was more or less what happened.
The force ratio that is often suggested is 20 soldiers for every
1,000 citizens, which works out at about 650,000 troops for Iraq and
600,000 for Afghanistan. The implication is that an insurgency has to
be either in a small country or be restricted to a region in a large
one. The danger, says Mr Betts, is that the force you send in is too
weak to pacify the territory or too big and clumsy to win over the
local population.
Humanitarian operations pose an extra problem. Military interventions
in small countries, as in Sierra Leone in 2000, have often been
successful; in larger ones, such as Sudan, less so. Humanitarian
forces seek to be impartial and tend to be small, because the war
is voluntary and domestic political support may not last. Mr Betts
points out that this combination often only prolongs the fighting.
When you are imposing peace, you need either to take sides and send
in a small force that can tip the balance and bring the fighting to
an end; or remain neutral and send in a large force which can keep
the warring sides apart but will probably be stuck in the country
for years.
The view from the ground
Many think that in future America can simply avoid such
entanglements. Instead, they say, it can restrict itself to big
state-on-state "wars of necessity". American forces are world leaders
in this kind of fighting. Any other business can be mopped up by the
redoubtable special-operations forces, such as the Navy SEALs who
killed Osama bin Laden.
But this is an oversimplification. At the margin, "of necessity" tends
to mean nothing more than "justifiable". Whether the country needs to
go to war is always unclear before the fighting starts. Many Americans
thought that even Hitler's Germany should not be attacked-until Japan
bombed the American fleet in Hawaii.
Besides, wars of choice might sometimes be worth fighting. Imagine, for
instance, engaging a band of jihadists who were repeatedly attacking
American interests in a lawless land; or perhaps dealing with a country
bent on nuclear proliferation. And what should America do about a
nation devastated by genocide, as the Armenians were a century ago?
Even in a war of necessity America often cannot force an enemy to fight
on its terms. Conrad Crane, a military historian and author of the COIN
manual for Iraq, has observed that "there are two types of warfare,
asymmetric and stupid." The enemy might refuse to fight a stupid war.
Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official, thinks that the army
should therefore continue to train its soldiers for COIN among
other missions even though, after more than a decade spent fighting
insurgents, it has had enough. As today's troops retire, she says,
COIN techniques risk being forgotten. Her fear is well-founded. The
Pentagon is preoccupied not by doctrine or the enemy abroad but by
budgets and the enemy in Washington.
Limited wars tend to be long and hard, so America needs a clear sense
of what it is trying to achieve before the first shot is fired. As
Admiral Mullen puts it, "I am tired of interventionists picking up a
stick without a strategy, without knowing the political and diplomatic
outcome." Although such wars cannot be avoided altogether, in future
America should aim to fight them less often and more wisely.
>From the print edition: Special report
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590103-two-difficult-wars-off
er-compelling-lessons-uses-force
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
[ Part 2.2: "Attached Text" ]
Military power
The uses of force
Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition
We're the US Army and we're here to help
"AMATEURS TALK STRATEGY, professionals talk capacity." Jeremy
Shapiro, who recently left the State Department to join the Brookings
Institution in Washington, has put his finger on a central question
for foreign policy. For the liberal, open-market system to endure is
in America's interest-and in the general interest, too. America does
not yet face a direct challenge from China and Russia. But as the
dominant power it must be able and willing to maintain the system,
or norms will fray and tensions grow. Does it have the capacity?
The question forces itself on policymakers just now because the demands
placed on American primacy have changed. In the cold war, explains John
Ikenberry, an academic, America provided security and other services to
many countries. But the threat is no longer so great and security is
therefore no longer so valuable. For many countries in large parts of
the world, the past decade has been not about war and financial crisis
but about peace and prosperity. Those countries want more of a say.
At the same time, according to Moises Naím of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, the old centres of power, including
governments, have less room for manoeuvre. Their authority to
dictate values and behaviour has been undermined by a profusion of
new political actors and interest groups who are mobile and connected.
Some conclude that in such a world dominance is impossible: there are
too many actors with the power to block anything they dislike. The
rest of this special report will examine how far that is true by
looking at the components of American primacy-sharp military power,
sticky economic power and the sweet power of American values-before
drawing some conclusions about how America should act. In each case,
as Mr Shapiro has observed, the starting point is capacity.
Seen from Washington, the main threat to America's armed forces is to
be found not in Helmand or Hainan but in the automatic budget cuts
of the sequester. This roughly doubles the savings that will have
to come from the Pentagon's budget in the next nine years, to about
$1 trillion.
During the summer Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary, mapped out a
possible first round of cuts: shrinking the army by up to 110,000
troops from its current target of 490,000; and losing possibly two of
ten aircraft-carriers, as well as bombers and transport aircraft. The
alternative, Mr Hagel said, was to cut spending on modernisation.
Cut, but not to the quick
Inevitably, the proposed cuts have stirred up a hornets' nest. But
just how bad are they? In the ten years to 2011, when America was at
war, pay and benefits for the army increased by 57% in real terms.
The number of support staff, too, grew rapidly. Because Congress will
not touch this large and politically sensitive part of the budget,
the cuts must be borne elsewhere.
That is a foolish way to run an army. However, even without the
sequester, much of the enormous build-up in spending after the attacks
of September 11th 2001 should be going into reverse.
Moreover, America's military might will remain unchallenged, even after
the cuts. Just after Mr Hagel set out his ideas, the vice-chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress about the Pentagon's revised
plans for potential wars around the world. Large invasions may be
out, but it can draw on quick-reaction forces and stealth air power
and ships. And not only does it outspend most of the rest of the
world combined on conventional defence (see chart 3), it also has a
formidable nuclear arsenal and the wherewithal for cyber-warfare.
The real question is not whether the country can go to war if it has
to, but whether it fights the right sort of war when it chooses to.
Modern America has shown an unrivalled appetite for battle. During
more than half the years since the end of the cold war it has been in
combat. That is not just because of the war in Iraq, which lasted from
2003 to 2011, and that in Afghanistan, which began two years earlier
and is still unfinished. Even before that, between 1989 and 2001 the
United States intervened abroad on average once every 16 months-more
frequently than in any period in its history.
Few are happy about this, especially America's senior officers.
"It's too easy to use force," says Admiral Mike Mullen, a former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It's almost the first
choice." General Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser to Gerald
Ford and the elder George Bush, agrees. One reason why politicians
have turned to the armed forces, he argues, is that war looks like
a shortcut to success. Trying to change people's minds and influence
them in other ways is long and slow. "The fallacy is that often the
use of force changes the circumstances of the question. By the time
you have finished, the question is different and we frequently find
ourselves in an unanticipated situation."
That was particularly true of Afghanistan and Iraq. The consensus now
is that the first war has been unhappy and the second was a mistake.
The Iraqi campaign (which The Economist also supported, to the
irritation of many of its readers) especially provokes the experts. A
"fiasco" and a "catastrophe", they say; "a 15-year detour" that
"sullied America's moral leadership". America needs to look squarely
at why it found these two wars so hard to help it decide which wars
to take on in future.
The end of the beginning in Iraq
The basic armoured set-piece on a defined battlefield in which one
side wins and the other loses now rarely happens in real life. The
past few decades have seen no absolute defeat in the style of Berlin
in 1945. Even the most successful recent campaign, the first Gulf
war of 1990, left Saddam Hussein in power and at liberty to go on
murdering his own people. America went to war for a second time in
Iraq in 2003 thinking that the fight was a big armoured assault, only
to discover that it had stumbled into a seemingly endless insurgency
like the one already under way in Afghanistan. Both were a bit like
the Vietnam war, but the army had been so keen to forget Indochina
that it had to learn the art of counter-insurgency all over again.
What did it discover?
First, that war is even more political than it used to be. Emile
Simpson, who was an infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles
and served three tours in Afghanistan, argues that modern war is not
defined against the enemy alone. Far beyond the battlefields of Uruzgan
province in southern Afghanistan are other audiences, including the
Afghan people, the Muslim world, NATO, China and voters back home. The
idea of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan has become ever less
relevant. To the politicians in charge and to the overall national
interest, the other audiences have counted just as much, if not more.
When groups far from the fighting matter, the foundations of warfare
shift all the time. Military strategy needs to evolve to take account
of all those other audiences. A drone strike like the recent one
that killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban might help defeat
the insurgents but undermine the coalition among other groups. Just
as you do not win an election by destroying the other party, so you
do not win such a war by destroying the enemy. You have to destroy
the enemy's legitimacy.
When the battlefield is diffuse, you get cross-cutting franchises
rather than two opposing sides. In Afghanistan the foreign forces
were co-opted into tribal and ethnic conflicts that had existed long
before they arrived. The allocation of resources was designed to keep
the base of supporters as well as win over new ones. It was not about
conquering territory and moving forward. America and its allies were
dragged into battles that had no clean military solution. Winning
the trial of strength could not win over the people: the idea was
not destruction but persuasion. If they had sought to destroy the
insurgents with raw power, audiences away from the battle would
have objected.
The second lesson America's armed forces learned is that
counter-insurgency, or COIN, is drawn out and hard to pull off. One
study looking at the past few decades found that only a quarter
of COIN campaigns have succeeded-though this may be partly because
fights against insurgencies often start as if they were traditional
wars. The campaigns tend to last at least 14 years, which means they
have to be sustained during at least four American presidential terms.
Richard Betts, of New York's Columbia University, notes that this is
all the more demanding because COIN requires a lot of manpower.
Insurgents are prepared to bear heavy casualties. Ho Chi Minh told
the French in 1946 that "you will kill ten of our men and we will
kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it."
That was more or less what happened.
The force ratio that is often suggested is 20 soldiers for every
1,000 citizens, which works out at about 650,000 troops for Iraq and
600,000 for Afghanistan. The implication is that an insurgency has to
be either in a small country or be restricted to a region in a large
one. The danger, says Mr Betts, is that the force you send in is too
weak to pacify the territory or too big and clumsy to win over the
local population.
Humanitarian operations pose an extra problem. Military interventions
in small countries, as in Sierra Leone in 2000, have often been
successful; in larger ones, such as Sudan, less so. Humanitarian
forces seek to be impartial and tend to be small, because the war
is voluntary and domestic political support may not last. Mr Betts
points out that this combination often only prolongs the fighting.
When you are imposing peace, you need either to take sides and send
in a small force that can tip the balance and bring the fighting to
an end; or remain neutral and send in a large force which can keep
the warring sides apart but will probably be stuck in the country
for years.
The view from the ground
Many think that in future America can simply avoid such
entanglements. Instead, they say, it can restrict itself to big
state-on-state "wars of necessity". American forces are world leaders
in this kind of fighting. Any other business can be mopped up by the
redoubtable special-operations forces, such as the Navy SEALs who
killed Osama bin Laden.
But this is an oversimplification. At the margin, "of necessity" tends
to mean nothing more than "justifiable". Whether the country needs to
go to war is always unclear before the fighting starts. Many Americans
thought that even Hitler's Germany should not be attacked-until Japan
bombed the American fleet in Hawaii.
Besides, wars of choice might sometimes be worth fighting. Imagine, for
instance, engaging a band of jihadists who were repeatedly attacking
American interests in a lawless land; or perhaps dealing with a country
bent on nuclear proliferation. And what should America do about a
nation devastated by genocide, as the Armenians were a century ago?
Even in a war of necessity America often cannot force an enemy to fight
on its terms. Conrad Crane, a military historian and author of the COIN
manual for Iraq, has observed that "there are two types of warfare,
asymmetric and stupid." The enemy might refuse to fight a stupid war.
Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official, thinks that the army
should therefore continue to train its soldiers for COIN among
other missions even though, after more than a decade spent fighting
insurgents, it has had enough. As today's troops retire, she says,
COIN techniques risk being forgotten. Her fear is well-founded. The
Pentagon is preoccupied not by doctrine or the enemy abroad but by
budgets and the enemy in Washington.
Limited wars tend to be long and hard, so America needs a clear sense
of what it is trying to achieve before the first shot is fired. As
Admiral Mullen puts it, "I am tired of interventionists picking up a
stick without a strategy, without knowing the political and diplomatic
outcome." Although such wars cannot be avoided altogether, in future
America should aim to fight them less often and more wisely.
>From the print edition: Special report
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590103-two-difficult-wars-off
er-compelling-lessons-uses-force
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress