An Army Trying To Shake Itself From Intellectual Slumber, Part 2: From 9/11 To Great Power Competition
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An Army Trying To Shake Itself From Intellectual Slumber, Part 2: From 9/11 To Great Power Competition
- US military was dominant in military operations after 9/11
- However, decisive initial successes proved to be illusory
- Campaign plans woefully underspecified what would happen after the end of hostilities
- As a result Iraq, especially, goes off the rails and ground troops find themselves in the middle of an insurgency
- Insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan create political crisis and a demand for military solutions
The Failures of Fighting Insurgents as Peers
- In 2006 (20 years after the publication of AirLand Battle FM 100-5) Army and Marine Corps publish FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency
- Manual to deal with insurgency problem that they were not prepared to deal with in 2003
- Institutionalized and formalized many of the ad-hoc adaptations already taking place
- Conceptual shift from closing with and destroying the enemy to protecting the population
- Surge in Iraq, combined with surge, restored security to Baghdad and Anbar province, stabilizing Iraq
- FM 3-24 regularized what had previously been considered "irregular warfare"
- FM 3-24 worked... until it didn't
- Rise of Islamic State showed illusoriness of gains carved out during surge
- Counterinsurgency tactics never really worked in Afghanistan
- Insufficient capacity
- Different terrain
- Afghan population was not concentrated in a few relatively large cities
- Scattered across a broad swath of difficult terrain, with relatively poor infrastructure
- Taliban had sanctuary in across the border in Pakistan, Sunni insurgents in Iraq couldn't access cross border resources as easily
- Militias in Afghanistan couldn't be bought off like militias in Iraq
- Afghan police and civil government were far behind Iraq in competence and experience
The Present Costs America The Future
- US military adapts at all levels, not just doctrinally, to the demands of Afghanistan and Iraq
- Cuts procurement of advanced vehicles for high-intensity combat in favor of replacing rear-area vehicles with more ambush/IED resistant versions
- Comanche attack helicopter, Future Combat System, Crusader howitzer, and a number of other major programs were cut
- Extant systems like the Abrams, Bradley and Stryker were modified to make them more survivable against insurgent weapons
- These modifications increase weight and reduce maneuverability
- US military develops a mindset that insurgencies are the new normal
- Erodes AirLand Battle skills
- US Army becomes expeditionary
- Larger formations are dismantled to create more brigade combat teams, since the largest usable unit in counterinsurgency operations is a brigade
- Soldiers train for individual tasks, flew by commercial aircraft to Iraq or Afghanistan, served a tour of duty and rotated home
- This process caused the Army to lose much of its understanding of the rule of larger formations, like divisions and corps
- Headquarters become glorified think-tanks, as their functional units are stripped to form more brigade combat teams
- This leads to the same situation that Gen. DePuy saw after Vietnam - army has lost a decade of equipment modernization, and is doctrinally and experientially ill-prepared for high-intensity conflict
- The US military does not know how to fight in a situation where air, maritime, space and cyber domains are contested
- There were signs that near-peer adversaries had modernized their forces
- Chechen Wars
- Second Lebanon War of 2006
- Russo-Georgian War
- Russian and Chinese military exercises
- However these signs were not sufficient to broaden the US focus beyond the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan
- The wake-up call occurred when Russia returned to the scene
- Invasion and annexation of Crimea
- Stymieing of US attempts to depose Bashar Assad in Syria
- The US faces a situation today that it has not faced since 1940 - competent, well-equipped potential adversaries in both the Pacific and the Atlantic
- China and Russia both have home-field advantages
- Have studied and planned specifically against US doctrine with their Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) weapons and tactics
- Meanwhile the US has to simultaneously deal with the increasing capabilities of Russia and China, while also continuing to fight the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan
- Similar to the situation the US found itself in during the Vietnam war
- US forces in Europe became a hollow shell as resources were diverted to Vietnam
- However, US forces in the Cold War had the "equalizer" of tactical nuclear arms
- As forces were diverted to Vietnam, the remaining forces in Europe were increasingly equipped with tactical nuclear weapons to maintain their ability to blunt a rapid Soviet advance
- Today, however, the US Army no longer has tactical nuclear weapons (what happened to them?)
- Apparently the US lost its tactical nuclear weapons to arms control treaties
- There is a huge jump from conventional strikes to strategic nuclear weapons
- Russia's military modernization appears to specifically target this gap
- New tactical nuclear weapons
- Doctrine to force the US to choose between conventional war on unfavorable terms and strategic nuclear strikes with no options in between
Waking Up Again
- US leaders now face the same dilemma they did in the 1970s - do you continue to prepare against counterinsurgency? Or do you prepare against peer adversaries?
- First needs to recognize that there is a problem that needs solving
- Needs to recognize that analysis should take precedence over experience, since the last relevant experience the US had against near-peer adversaries was 1941-1945
- New National Security Strategy begins this process of assessment and prioritization
- In addition, the US needs to limit its commitments on the periphery
- Fight to not-lose rather than win
- Example: Afghanistan
- Effort to build a nation-state in Afghanistan has failed
- The US should be asking itself: Why are we in Afghanistan and what is the least bad outcome there?
- Maybe it's sufficient to do the minimum necessary to prop up an Afghan government capable of preventing the country from turning into a terrorist safe haven
- Take the pragmatic view that not every contingency is an existential crisis
- It's easy to argue that when your "contingency" hasn't resulted in the destruction of two highly symbolic buildings and the deaths of thousands of American civilians
- People did argue this very point when the US was going into Afghanistan after 9/11. Those people were roundly ignored.
- Near-term existential problem is a nuclear armed Russia, but this time the problem is in Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe
- China poses a long-term existential threat
- Not a threat now, but will be a threat soon
- So far the US response has been empty rhetoric - "pivot to Asia"
- Important to note that recognition of interstate competition does not presage war
- In fact, the presence of a clear and flexible deterrent that allows for a range of response options can help prevent war by preventing miscalculations
- As in the 1970s, the Army is central to the US response to Russia
- However, unlike the 1970s, the Army's force structure and logistics are no longer suited to fighting a protracted conventional conflict
- US Army is an expeditionary force, with limited forward presence in Europe
- This leaves Russia with all the advantages when it comes to a conventional conflict in Eastern Europe
- Numerical superiority
- Materiel overmatch
- Tactical nuclear weapons
- Much shorter supply lines
- A RAND corporation analysis found that it was possible for Russian troops to advance from the Russia-Estonia border to Talinn in as little as 60 hours
- This would present NATO with nothing but bad options
- Launch a bloody and risky amphibious invasion against dug-in Russian troops, leading to the threat of Russian nuclear escalation
- Nuclear escalation on the part of NATO itself
- Concede defeat (and thus show that the North Atlantic Treaty is no longer worth the bits used to store it)
- While the US can take some steps to slow the conflict down, the US Army does not currently have the ability to deny the Baltics to Russia
- Did the US Army ever have the ability to deny the Baltics to Russia?
- I think that slowing down the conflict is the best you can do - if you don't allow Russia to present the world with a fait accompli, then you can open space for diplomatic maneuvering and drum up support from allies for a decisive counterpush
- If the Baltics fall, it's not at all clear that NATO will be able to retake them
- Polling in the most militarily capable European NATO countries shows that they're not willing to fight for Eastern European allies
- Wars have a funny way of changing public opinion very quickly
- Also, if the threat is grave enough, I do trust European leaders to go to war over the objections of their publics - they're not all Chamberlains over there
- NATO capabilities (those that remain after post-Cold War budget cuts) are all geared around the defense of Western Europe, not power-projection into a battlespace controlled by an adversary with potent A2AD capabilities
- And again, this has always been the case - NATO has never been geared towards projecting power into Russia's backyard
- The real problem was the expansion of NATO in the first place. NATO never had the ability to defend the states that joined it after 1990; but with seemingly permanent Russian weakness, no one thought it would matter
- Now Russia is no longer weak, and NATO is realizing it wrote a check it can't cash
Back To The Future
- Deterrence against Russia must be bolstered by credible military options
- The reform of the Army after the Vietnam War relied on a thorough understanding of the military problem posed by the Soviet Union
- Fight would take place in Europe, as part of the NATO alliance
- Materiel capabilities were outmatched by the Soviets
- NATO would have to fight outnumbered an win, possibly in a nuclear/biological/chemical environment
- Deterring and defeating the Soviet Union without relying on strategic nuclear arms required detailed integration between the Army and Air Force
- This is contrast to post-Cold War concept-based doctrines which have been all about things that the Army wanted to do, rather than adversaries the Army would have to fight
- Overemphasis on technology over doctrine
- Historically the most successful military strategies have not relied on new technology, but rather have combined existing technologies in innovative ways
- Blitzkrieg, for example, combined pre-existing technologies (tanks, airplanes, radios, infantry) into a combined arms concept
- If Multi-Domain Battle is mature into a 21st century operational doctrine, it must address the problems faced by the Army as it faces two near-peer competitors that pose dramatically different problems from one another
- If the US is to win its next first battle, it needs to focus on specific adversaries (Russia and China) their capabilites and the specific locales in which conflict may occur
- This is an approach that worked very well in the post-Vietnam era, and it will serve the Army again today
My Thoughts
- I kind of question the very premise of this article (and of the article preceding it as well)
- The premise is that counterinsurgency is an aberration, and that the Army needs to "refocus" on its "core competency" of deterring and (when deterrence fails) winning against near-peer adversaries
- The problem is that I don't see counterinsurgencies fading
- One of the things that Nagl points out in Learning To Eat Soup With A Knife is a persistent pattern of thinking among Vietnam-era generals that the Vietnam war was temporary, and that very soon they could all go back to staring down Russian forces across the Fulda Gap
- This led these generals to prosecute the Vietnam War as if it was a strictly conventional inter-state conflict (rather than a civil war), with predictably disatrous results
- And while these generals eventually did get back to staring down Russian tanks across the Fulda Gap, they did so after losing the Vietnam war, which put them at a grand-strategic disadvantage vis-a-vis the Soviet Union
- Likewise, my concern is that this article gets it backwards, just as the Vietnam-era generals got it backwards
- The truly important things are the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan - if the US military/diplomatic complex can clean those up, we go into a potential great-power struggle with our noses unbloodied
- Meanwhile, if we let the insurgencies rage out of control, then that signals weakness to China and Russia (just as the US defeat in Vietnam did), and the US faces a much harder climb in deterring these two near-peer adversaries
