Great Powers
Page 32
Iraq is ours. Get used to hearing that, because that’s the strategic outlook of the generation of Army and Marine Corps officers already forged by the first seven years of this long war against violent extremists. It is not your father’s military, because Iraq is not Vietnam.
THE UNDENIABLE TRAJECTORY: THE MISEDUCATION OF COLIN POWELL
George Kennan, father of America’s Cold War grand strategy of containment, spent a year as academic administrator at the National War College in Washington, D.C., following World War II, and the experience unnerved him. The mindset of the officers struck him as wholly incongruous with the challenges of the Cold War that lay ahead—a decades-long war of discipline. As he put it:
The precedents of our Civil War, of the war with Spain, and of our participation in the two world wars of this century, had created not only in the minds of our soldiers and sailors but in the minds of many of our people an unspoken assumption that the normal objective of warfare was the total destruction of the enemy’s ability and will to resist and his unconditional capitulation. The rest, it was always assumed, was easy. This sort of victory placed you in the position to command total obedience on the part of the defeated adversary; it thus opened the way to the unhindered realization of your political objectives, whatever they might be.
The American military has struggled mightily with this mindset ever since, believing that if enough firepower can be employed and sufficient troops put in the field, “real” victory is always at hand. It is the purest expression of an outlook that I’ve spent my entire career combating: war viewed solely within the context of war.
American military history can be divided into three basic periods since the end of World War II. First there was a three-decade period (1946-75) in which we struggled with the reality of limited war, starting in Korea, and then ultimately came to reject its premise following our failures in Vietnam, despite promising evolutions in the direction of real answers to real problems (the so-called CORDS [Civil Operations, Revolutionary Development Support] program there served as precursor to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in both Afghanistan and Iraq). Then we spent another three-decade period (1976-2005) retreating—as far as possible—from the Vietnam experience. We professionalized the force (ending the draft) and reembraced an “overwhelming-force” mindset now tailored to smaller wars and interventions, thus accepting the concept of limited war but addressing it through the familiar annihilation-style approach described by Kennan. The third and current transitional period began years into the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In this time frame the Army and Marines are once again moving toward understanding how best to address the challenges of limited war (i.e., effectively placing war within the context of everything else), while the Air Force and Navy continue to straddle these new challenges and their need to justify force-structure requirements with big-war scenarios. If we set aside the larger focus on global war with the Soviets during the Cold War, the more practical question in each historical period remains the same: Are small wars truly different or are they merely a shrunken version of big wars, and do they thus require the same annihilation mentality?
The American military’s fix after Vietnam was to say, “A war is a war is a war,” and let it go at that. Our military would be used to win wars and nothing else. A critical part of what would become the Reagan Doctrine was that truly limited wars would be effectively outsourced to local “freedom fighters.” In assuming this mindset, our military grew distant from its frontier roots and the people and economic activity it once protected on those frontiers. War became detached from society, as did warriors who, in their professional standing, eventually concentrated themselves and their kin in geographic enclaves along America’s southern coastlines. Children followed parents into service, just as in many other professions. A soldier was a soldier until the day he died, a life spent defending the American System but likewise spent apart, because this force was used “over there” to keep bad things “over there.” As soon as threats were vanquished, this fearsome beast returned home as quickly as possible and became invisible once again, distributed across its network of military reservations. Done right, our military could remain totally apolitical and robotlike in its efficiency, admired in the abstract but—for the vast majority of Americans—never encountered face-to-face, much like the distant interventions these forces undertook and the rest of us watched on TV.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 destroyed this artificial wall between the military and society. Suddenly, the military was back in frontier mode—back in “Injun country.” The scale was different, but the sense of immediate threat and the need for immediate response were very familiar—almost instinctive. We had been here before and we knew what needed to be done. Wild West imagery resurfaced, along with a dead-or-alive demand for frontier justice. Laws would be put aside for a while, and vengeance would be ours.
The American military that stepped into this maelstrom was not a military prepared for a return to frontier-integrating wars—anything but. It was a military of overwhelming force applied to achieve overwhelming victories. There was no “everything else,” and if there was, then somebody else would have to do it, because that was not what this soldier had signed up for and it was certainly not the scenario for which this military had long been buying equipment and training. The military needed for post-victory nation-building was not the force a generation of senior officers had spent their entire careers reconstructing after the disaster of Vietnam. As far as they were concerned, this was not going to be another Lebanon where Marines would be truck-bombed, or another Somalia where U.S. forces would be lured into unwinnable urban shoot-outs, or even another Balkans babysitting job where NATO troops wasted their time DABing (“driving around Bosnia”) and doing nothing warriorlike. This war would be fought much like the first Iraq war, where this generation of senior officers felt its first true vindication as professional warriors following Vietnam.
As for what came next, well, that would be easy.
This was the miseducation of an entire generation of military officers, exemplified by everyone’s favorite unerring hero, Colin Powell, who, like so many of his contemporaries, deserves our nation’s gratitude for rebuilding the U.S. military after Vietnam even if the price was a leadership largely unprepared for what came next—the rough-and-tumble politics of wars fought within the context of everything else. The truth is, most of that generation, like Powell, had retired and were out of the uniform come 9/11. Running the military at that moment was a cohort of their protégés, most of whom thought much the way they did, but some of whom had come to realize that the world had changed and that the future was going to look a whole lot more like Bosnia than the battle for Beijing. Just below that senior leadership was an entirely different generation of officers who came of rank completely in the post-Vietnam military and who had cut their teeth—senior command-wise—in the limited wars and interventions of the 1990s. Instead of viewing the first Iraq war as sheer validation, they saw it as an aberration—a glorious blast from the past that future, smarter opponents wouldn’t allow us to repeat in full.
What happened after 9/11 was almost a perfect generational storm: Highly partisan Republican conservatives raised on Reagan’s reconstruction of the presidency combined with apolitical senior officers raised on the Powell generation’s reconstruction of the military, with only those “soft-on-defense,” minority Democrats standing in their way. The choice of instruments was preordained: a “shock and awe” military strike that would trigger—almost magically on its own—a complete political transformation of the Middle East. Little thought would be given to the postwar, because little thought was needed—or so the neocons assumed in their hubris. Dissenting voices were quelled or cowed, and if the military presumed that their icon of “overwhelming force,” Colin Powell, would look out for their interests from his new perch as secretary of state, they were sorely disappointed, because, as biographer Karen DeYoung noted, “Powell had not arrived at
high office with plans to remake the world; as he himself often pointed out, he was not a grand strategist.”
Too bad, because absent a George Marshall-like grand strategist in that seat, the Pentagon’s neocons, consistently shielded from reality by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, ran wild in their exceedingly narrow dreams of transformational warfare. In an age in which globalization’s economic forces are reshaping the planet, triggering security threats and political movements galore, these grand tacticians planned to remake—overnight—the world’s most rigidly traditional civilization through the use of military force and, as it turned out, military force alone. As much as Powell knew the limits of that force, he was unable to dissuade the Bush administration from recklessly employing it, in large part because he—just like the neocons—had neither real-world experience nor practical vision of global change beyond military force. It wasn’t the lack of local knowledge that doomed this daring enterprise, but the complete lack of any real understanding of the larger economic forces at work in globalization’s creeping embrace of the region, as well as of the social blowback that penetration was creating. Instead, the entire equation was reduced to terrorists + dictators = WMD, three entities seemingly subject to the application of military force.
Colin Powell, good soldier that he was, registered his concerns and made his arguments within the administration, and ultimately served as its unwitting point man to win over a reluctant UN Security Council, armed with deeply flawed intelligence about Iraq’s alleged attempts to generate weapons of mass destruction and possibly transfer them to transnational terrorists.
Of Vietnam, Colin Powell had once said that “American soldiers answered the call in a war so poorly conceived, conducted and explained by their country’s leaders.” They would do so again in Iraq in the spring of 2003, but this time the lessons learned inside the military would be different primarily because the senior officers who arose in this long war had previously undergone a very different education from the one Powell and his generation had received in Vietnam.
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM PERTURBED: THE LOST YEAR IN IRAQ
The “lost year” in Iraq is defined by most observers as the period running from early May 2003, following President Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished,” through the explosion of insurgency violence in Fallujah the following April, following the ambush and gruesome killing of four armed Blackwater contractors operating there. As many experts have argued, none of this was inevitable. The U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), run by Ambassador Paul Bremer (a former assistant to Henry Kissinger), made numerous significant mistakes, including: the immediate disbanding of the Iraqi army and police, thus denying the occupation force a significant source of social control; the expansive de-Baathification of top government and industry leaders (ditto); and the zeroing out of all Iraqi state-run enterprises’ savings and debts, which essentially rewarded the most incompetent firms while punishing the most promising—not a great way to jump-start entrepreneurship. The CPA was also guilty of operating in relative isolation from the Iraqi people and their natural leaders (its marginalization of Shia religious leader Ayatollah Sistani and his concerns was stupendously dumb), the U.S. military in country, and even its own political overseers back in Washington, earning the telling sobriquet of “Versailles on the Tigris.” Some military officers who interacted with the CPA believed it was so dysfunctional that the U.S. effort would have been more successful without it having been set up.
Back in Washington, the Pentagon’s senior civilian leadership went out of its way to freeze out the State Department’s postwar planning elements, a great number of which had spent the months leading up to the war generating a thirteen-volume, 2,500-page “Future of Iraq” study that recalled, in its assemblage of relevant facts and policy comprehensiveness (including consideration of the second- and third-order consequences of possible actions), the efforts of Woodrow Wilson’s “Inquiry” group during World War I. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon likewise ignored numerous preinvasion war-gaming efforts—including those by the military itself—that predicted the vast majority of subsequent problems. None of what came next was a surprise, not even to Secretary Rumsfeld, who routinely wrote his own memos predicting a wide variety of problems, and whose staffers created reams of PowerPoint slides they believed to be far more detailed in their planning. But they weren’t. As Thomas Ricks states in Fiasco, the resulting disaster “was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously ‘worst-casing’ the threat presented by Iraq while ‘best-casing’ the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.” The classic expression of this mistaken reasoning came in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s stunning dismissal of his own military’s estimate that it would actually take more troops to secure the country following the conflict than would be required to topple the regime during the war. Not only did this judgment contradict the very real nature of our military’s transformation across the 1990s (i.e., underestimating its overmatch against a very weakened Iraqi military), it likewise ignored the extensive experience of U.S. peacekeeping force in the Balkans.
In retrospect, history was a good guide in both the war and the postwar. While Rumsfeld’s “transformed” force toppled the regime with roughly half the troops that the Pentagon had used in Desert Storm to eject the Iraqi military from Kuwait and destroy it (240,000 to 250,000 compared with over half a million), it suffered similarly low casualties (139 dead compared with 148 in 1991, and 542 wounded compared with 467) across a similar length of time (a matter of weeks). Part of the invasion force’s success came as a result of the Iraqi military’s refusal to fight, as Saddam’s war plans included the subsequent shift to insurgency tactics against a superior force, meaning one expert’s famous prediction that the war would be a “cakewalk” was both accurate and irrelevant. Still, the transformed force performed as advertised, which only made the subsequent long summer pause of U.S. activities in Iraq all the more consequential. As Thomas Ricks argues, the speed of Rumsfeld’s transformed force “didn’t kill the enemy—it bypassed him.” Because the U.S. military focused excessively on the capture of Baghdad, where, presumably, most of the regime’s top leaders could be located and captured (the infamous “most wanted” deck of 52 cards), once that objective was taken it “seemed to fall asleep at the wheel.”
It was during this summer lull that the tremendous internal political momentum created by Saddam’s fall essentially disappeared in a flurry of uncontrolled looting, the disbanding of the government and military, and no clear sense among ordinary Iraqis about what would come next. Meanwhile, as our troops drew down somewhat over the summer of 2003, top commanders were swapped out, and the CPA replaced the original American-led reconstruction entity known as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which never really got off the ground during its brief and troubled existence. As a result, U.S. reconstruction efforts, which were supremely hampered by the summer’s looting, didn’t really get serious until the fall of 2003, meaning the first half-year of the postwar was basically wasted in our slow transition from liberating force to occupying force. It was almost as if the entire U.S. military on the ground had found itself stunned to realize that it was going to be left holding the bag for the long run. As one soldier who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom explained to American military historian and strategist Eliot Cohen:
Well, you know, we went in, and we expected a fight; we got a fight. And then I always expected that I’d look over my shoulder, and there would be battalions of nation-builders from ORHA or someone from the CPA. I kept on looking around, and they didn’t show up. Then I realized I’d have to be doing some of that.
As for the postwar, where over 95 percent of American casualties have since come, the Balkans again proved a useful guide. In the Bosnian peacekeeping operation, then Secretary of Defense William Perry used a simple formula to calculate American troop levels relative to the local population. A si
milar calculation, applied to Iraq, generated the estimate provided to Congress in the spring of 2003 by then Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had himself commanded troops in Bosnia. Shinseki’s calculations indicated the United States should field a force in the range of 300,000 to 400,000 personnel, whereas the Pentagon under Rumsfeld had dreams of reducing the invasion force of roughly 240,000 troops to something as small as a 30,000-man occupying force within four months of “victory”! Such plans constituted a complete rejection of the Bosnia and Kosovo peacekeeping models, in which NATO collectively fielded between 20 and 25 troops per 1,000 local population and subsequently suffered virtually no casualties. In Haiti and Somalia we averaged closer to 3 or 4 soldiers per 1,000, with even fewer than that in Afghanistan. For most of the Iraq occupation, U.S. troops registered in the range of 6 or 7 troops per 1,000 local population. Adding in the Iraqi army gets the number up to about 14 per 1,000 by the end of 2006.
Ironically, when U.S. forces surged their numbers in early 2007 and began achieving some success in pacifying the environment, the total number of American-sponsored personnel in Iraq by the fall of that year had roughly achieved Shinseki’s preferred target of boots on the ground, with approximately half the total coming in U.S. military troops (168,000) and the other half coming in the form of private-sector contractors (182,000). That’s not to pretend that you can simply backfill civilians to achieve the same security effect. My point is this: We naturally ended up paying for the same footprint, given the population-size differential. So when you try to go cheap on government personnel, you simply end up paying high for similar bodies from the private sector. But either way, you’re going to pay that piper.