Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Adding to the overall sloppiness of the postwar effort was the Bush administration’s insistence that, as author Rajiv Chandrasekaran put it, “whatever could be outsourced was.” This reflected the neocon view that America’s participation in the NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans had dragged on for far too long and resulted in a dangerous tie-down of U.S. ground forces there, thus the desire to shift the postwar reconstruction dynamics as quickly as possible to private-sector entities. Ironically, the rush to draw down the uniformed presence only ended up extending the stay of the troops, as the deteriorating security situation kept private-sector investors and companies away for the most part, eventually growing so dangerous as to drive off many nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations itself. Over the longer haul, even our military allies began deserting us. Some of these wounds the U.S. military inflicted upon itself by engaging in a series of practices known to constitute poor counterinsurgency operations, such as overemphasizing killing and capturing of the enemy, concentrating forces in large bases, using regular troops in large-scale operations and focusing special operations forces on raids, and allowing relatively open borders. In sum, the more frantically the Bush administration worked to diminish the need for troops, the more it ended up foisting additional aspects of the postwar reconstruction on those very same troops.

  The turning point in U.S. military operations in Iraq occurred after the “lost year” was allowed to unfold, in the summer of 2004. By this point, anger within the junior officer ranks was just beginning to appear in Internet chat rooms, but more important, a number of crucial milestones had been reached. First, Saddam Hussein had been captured in December 2003, and most of the remaining “deck of cards” had been accounted for. Second, the United States essentially gave up looking for evidence of WMD in Iraq in the spring of 2004. These two events recast the U.S. military’s efforts somewhat, allowing for a stronger focus on training the new Iraqi army and police. Third, in a rush to declare “victory”—again prematurely—the Bush administration pressured Bremer’s CPA into engineering the handover of political control to the interim Iraqi government in June, following the first national elections there and—more important—five months before the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. This transfer of power left the U.S. military the responsible U.S. government party in country, in tandem with the U.S. ambassador. That’s when it really stopped being Bremer’s show and started becoming the U.S. military’s “war” to own. Fourth, a new wave of officers were beginning their second tours in Iraq, and this time they came armed with a far different set of expectations. Instead of arriving to wage war, they knew full well they’d be knee-deep in postwar stability-and-reconstruction operations, and prepared themselves and their troops better for this inevitability. Finally, some of the most experienced postwar American commanders and junior officers were starting to rotate back to the States, where their presence and new thinking were immediately felt at the major schoolhouses and training centers of the Army and Marine Corps. The students started teaching the instructors about counterinsurgency, and the instructors were listening.

  While learning within the Bush administration proceeded at a glacial pace throughout the Iraq occupation, the same could not be said of the U.S. military. The problem, of course, was how long it took a new generation of experienced military commanders, tempered by the crucible of Iraq and Afghanistan, to convince the Bush administration that (1) a full-blown and self-sustaining insurgency had been allowed to erupt, and (2) a dramatically different and purposeful counterinsurgency strategy was needed to combat it. Why did this take so long? As soon as the Bush administration admitted there was a self-sustaining insurgency (something it did only after the 2004 elections), it effectively had to admit that it had bungled the postwar reconstruction and that Iraq’s tentative steps toward democracy would not sap the insurgency’s strength. But once it admitted that a long-term counterinsurgency strategy was required, it would also have to admit—in a decision that began with an ultra-secret White House “Iraq strategy review” in the summer of 2006—that there was no chance America could achieve anything close to a perceived “victory” in Iraq before the Bush administration came to a close. In the end, that admission of ground truth wouldn’t be possible for the White House, as Bob Woodward noted in The War Within, until after the November 2006 elections eliminated the political costs associated with coming clean.

  THE NEW RULES: FROM THE “MONKS OF WAR,” A NEW COIN OF THE REALM

  Presidents and secretaries of defense call the big shots, but it is the generals who turn the cranks—and suffer the consequences in terms of personnel lost. If the Bush White House had been slow to learn lessons, reluctant to admit mistakes, and incompetent at adapting to changing realities, those prosecuting the war, those living and dying it, had no such luxury. By the summer of 2004, the overwhelming consensus within the U.S. military was that Afghanistan and Iraq would not be ending anytime soon and that these conflicts would be the first of many in a long struggle that Central Command boss General John Abizaid, who took over from the Baghdad-conquering Tommy Franks in July 2003, had quietly taken to calling the “long war.” The grim message was simple: The boys were never coming home.

  This shift in grand strategic vision had huge implications for the U.S. military as a whole, but especially for the Army, which had long viewed war as an episodic, high-intensity event followed by a long period of peace, during which the force can recover and regenerate its strength for the next fight—the reset. The long war features no such downtime, nor opponents who array themselves as our Army has for the past century: frontline troops at the ready and reserve units at significantly lower states of readiness—especially in terms of equipment. In the long war, then, the Army faces a dramatically new requirement not unlike that long managed by the U.S. Navy: the ability to keep a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously, as opposed to simply garrisoned in places like South Korea or Germany (places to which families could accompany the troops). So when Army chief of staff General Pete Schoomaker took over in the summer of 2003 for Eric Shinseki (who was summarily pushed out by Rumsfeld for his comments on Iraq troop levels), he took Abizaid’s concept of the long war to heart and soon set his service on the path of rapidly bringing the entire Army up to frontline status, a move that forced him to reconceive the Army completely as a fighting force.

  The Army’s active-duty divisions had for a century been structured like mini-armies unto themselves, full of all sorts of combat brigades and specialized support units. The only way to send over competently arrayed troops was to deploy entire divisions at a time, and that simply won’t work in a long war. So Schoomaker made a decision—just as the invasion of Iraq was completed—to reformat the entire U.S. Army and its reserve components over the next several years, turning divisions into mere command units and “modularizing” the entire force so that each “brigade combat team” would soon be largely interchangeable with all others, allowing divisions to deploy overseas with mix-and-match brigades, all of which would be self-sustaining combat teams containing all the same supporting units that previously were aggregated only at the division level.

  It’s hard to overestimate the daring involved in restructuring the Army during significant overseas combat operations, and likewise the revolutionary impact of this historic change. Prior to World War I, the U.S. Army had been organized according to regiments of upward of 5,000 troops each. This was the essential format of the “Army of the West” during America’s settling of its trans-Mississippi West, although most operations occurred at the level of far smaller companies (100 to 200 soldiers). In the buildup for World War I, those regiments had been rolled up into large 20,000-man divisions so as to be symmetrically arranged for the type of big-war combat that lay ahead. The U.S. Army kept that division structure through WWII and the Cold War but now was virtualizing it after roughly a century of use, returning to the smaller 4,000-to-5,000-man brigade combat teams that recalled the
regiment-size U.S. cavalry of the nineteenth century—Injun Country-sized forces for a return to frontier-integrating wars.

  As the war became the occupation, Schoomaker realized something else: The military processed lessons learned from combat experience at an excessively leisurely pace, given the new global security environment. “Lessons-learned” commands would become a top priority, and three generals, one Marine and two Army, would be brought back from Iraq to teach soldiers what they needed to know to fight wars of the future. In the past, such lessons would prove valuable only to soldiers of the next war; this time, in this long war, casualties would not be marginal, so it would be the goal of these generals to learn these lessons and have them reflected in the training almost on a daily basis. Each of these three generals had already learned his own hard lessons in Iraq. Army general William Wallace conquered Baghdad but likewise oversaw its disastrous looting. David Petraeus worked the sheikhs well enough during his first tour but let a horrifically efficient insurgency build on his watch. Marine general James Mattis didn’t lose a sailor or marine during his nation-building stint in the south, only to send a host of marines to their deaths in Fallujah. So all these lessons would be born of failure and all cost blood. As General Mattis likes to say, “Success is a poor teacher.”

  William “Scotty” Wallace returned from Iraq in the summer of 2003 and took over command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he systematized the process of feeding the Army’s lessons learned from ongoing combat operations into its worldwide collection of training centers. The Army’s decision to reform its lessons-learned analysis meant that the combat-training centers would immediately switch from war-gaming against a Soviet-style, tank-heavy “world-class opposition force” to something far more complex, or what the officers now call the Contemporary Operating Environment. Wallace wanted his training simulations to account for the local populations soldiers would encounter; thus role players were added to the training centers by the hundreds to approximate life in Iraqi villages, right down to the call for prayers five times a day.

  When Lieutenant General James Mattis returned from Iraq in August 2004 to take over the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia, he initiated a very similar overhaul of how the Marines were collecting and processing lessons learned, pushing his analysts to the point of interviewing wounded Marines right in their beds at Bethesda Naval Hospital, on occasion leading to changes in training that would show up at the Marines’ Twentynine Palms combat training center within twenty-four hours. Quantico did have a center for lessons learned before Mattis arrived, but all the data flowed in and not much flowed out. Mattis wanted it flowing out like a river during flood season. If the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned learned it, the general wanted it on the unclassified, password-accessed website within hours. Soon after his arrival, close to 90 percent of what the MCCLL reported would appear on the unclassified Marine Corps web. Following his command at Quantico and a brief tour as commander of a Marine Expeditionary Force, Mattis earned his fourth star in late 2007, when President Bush appointed him to lead U.S. Joint Forces Command, the military’s preeminent post for guiding the evolution of the future force.

  In late 2005, Wallace was elevated to four-star commander of the Army’s seniormost schoolhouse command, the Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia. His replacement at Leavenworth was arguably—even then—the Army general whose star was rising most rapidly on the basis of his performance in Iraq, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division in northern and central Iraq during the first difficult postwar year and then assumed leadership of the coalition effort to rebuild Iraq’s security forces. With his Princeton Ph.D. in international relations and, by that time, already two and a half years in Iraq, Petraeus was the closest thing the Army had to its own Lawrence of Arabia, a comparison that’s only grown since Malik Daoud (“King David,” as many local Arabs call him) picked up his fourth star and took over command of all U.S. forces in Iraq in early 2007, directing the now-famous “surge” deep into 2008. Petraeus was thereupon tapped by the White House to replace Admiral Fallon as the boss of Central Command, giving him command over both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Mattis served with Wallace and had multiple career overlaps with Petraeus, both in the Pentagon and in Iraq. In the early years of this long war, these generals traded best practices and new technologies like next-door neighbors who’ve known one another for years, setting in motion a level of Army-Marine cooperation that was unprecedented. I was fortunate to witness this synergy in the fall of 2005, when Petraeus returned from Iraq and took over Leavenworth. The general, who e-mailed me one afternoon to say he was a reader of my weblog (confirming his reputation, much like Mattis, for a voracious and wide-ranging intake of analysis), thereupon invited me to address the student body of the Command and General Staff College there (an honor I repeated in August 2008 to kick off the school year). Since that invitation came right on the heels of one from Mattis to address the student body of his Marine Corps University in Quantico, I took advantage of the resulting trips to interview both officers (along with Wallace) for a March 2006 Esquire article called “The Monks of War.”

  The timing of the piece couldn’t have been better, because it was at the end of 2005 that the two of them, Petraeus and Mattis, had brought together “big-brain” officers from both services to generate what would eventually become the first-ever dual-designated Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. I distinctly remember my first impressions of the preliminary material, as presented to me in a brief by the study director, Conrad Crane, in November 2005, just a month before the writing team was assembled at Leavenworth. My notes were sprinkled repeatedly with the modifiers “radical” and “stunning,” as I struggled to capture just how big a shift this new thinking represented, especially as it was emerging right on the heels of a new Pentagon directive (DoD Directive 3000.05, November 2005) that stated postwar planning for stability-and-reconstruction operations would now have to be pursued by combatant commands in equal measure to their warfighting plans.

  At this point in my career, I had spent several years arguing, like some wacked-out John the Baptist in the desert, about the inevitability of a split between the first-half Leviathan force focused on big war and the second-half SysAdmin force focused on all the small but crucial stuff. So the sum total of these changes, coming in rapid fire across 2005, was like manna from heaven to me, including my first interactions with this host of “saviors” in the personages of Schoomaker, Wallace, Mattis, Petraeus, and Colonel John Nagl, whose seminal study of past counterinsurgency campaigns, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, seemed to channel British colonel T. H. Lawrence (of “Arabia” fame) with the same vigor as many of Petraeus’s mantras about counterinsurgency done right. To no one’s surprise, Nagl ended up being one of the field manual’s primary authors, while much of Petraeus’s idiosyncratic translation of Lawrence’s “pillars of wisdom” made it into the text as the nine Zen-like “paradoxes of counterinsurgency” (for example, “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot”).

  More than three years later it’s still hard to overestimate what a paradigm shift all these changes cumulatively represent. Until the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army has been essentially a continental constabulary force that never left home, whereas the Marines were a marginal force with really no significant overseas nation-building/counterinsurgency experience. All that would change over the first half of the twentieth century, setting in motion the rise of the modern version of both services: a Leviathan-like Army and a Marine Corps used primarily for short-term power projection into regional crises. Now the long war was reformatting both services’ operational profiles: sucking the Army into a constabulary role it had not embraced in over a century and returning the Marines to nation-building and counterinsurgency operations on a s
cale recalling their decades serving as “State Department troops” in the Caribbean basin in the early twentieth century. In both cases, we’re really talking about rebranding the Army and Marine Corps back in the direction of an operational ethos neither has fully embraced for roughly a century. As such, the new counterinsurgency, or COIN, field manual, in the words of Harvard professor Sarah Sewall (writing in the book’s introduction), “challenges much of what is holy about the American way of war.” Indeed, as Sewall argues further, “those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it, or at least understand what it’s up against.”

  What the new COIN field manual is up against—despite its obvious success in Iraq—is half a century of American grand strategic thinking that says our number-one goal as a superpower is to contain or—better yet—prevent the rise of other superpowers, but not to manage the global security environment per se. Indeed, much of the military’s intransigence about embracing the strategic realities—as I define them—of the post- Cold War era stems from the belief that if America becomes too involved in such small-wars management of the global security order, it will see its forces devolve to the point of inviting the rise of a serious near-peer competitor whose military capability for big war will eventually put our own at unacceptable risk—the essence of the current reset debate, now animated by Russia’s conventional crushing of Georgia’s military. This is why, in my opinion, our Leviathan’s need for the China/Taiwan scenario is ironically self-fulfilling: our military needs China’s military to keep getting bigger on the basis of Taiwan, even though China’s true strategic risks increasingly overlap with our own as a result of globalization’s advance. But if the U.S. national security establishment were to admit that growing coincidence of strategic interests, it would risk losing its primary reason for delaying a deep embrace of the SysAdmin role of managing the global security environment, surrendering to the institutional momentum created by the new COIN field manual, DoD Directive 3000.05, and a host of other recent U.S. military adjustments to the ongoing long war. What do I mean by “deep embrace”? As always, it comes down to what we buy more than how we use it. Simplest definition? Again, starving the SysAdmin to continue overstuffing the Leviathan with high-tech weaponry and platforms, the vast majority of which will never be effectively exploited in the long war.