Are Preplanned Exit Strategies a Good Idea in Military Conflicts
Contents
David Kampf: No, Having A Pre-planned Exit Strategy Is Not A Good Idea
Originally published as When Are Exit Strategies Viable, War on the Rocks October 2019
Outline of article
- Ending an intervention is always more difficult than starting one
- A common truism is that you need an exit strategy before you commit troops
- Pre-planned exit strategies, however, are unviable for anything longer than a rapid strike
- The start of an intervention is too early to plan an exit
- Ignores intractable uncertainties
- Does not decrease the duration of intervention
- Having a prior exit strategy will not prevent a quagmire
Premature and Problematic Planning
- An exit strategy is the strategy for disengagement, transition and ultimate withdrawal
- Exit strategies are essential for maximizing preservation of gains and minimizing risk of future threats
- Exit strategies should only be formulated when withdrawal is looming
- The idea that exit strategies should be planned out ahead of time gained currency at the end of the Cold War
- Avoid committing troops to open-ended campaigns with in places with little or no national security impact, like Somalia
- Powell Doctrine: get in, win, get out ASAP
- Today's extended wars illustrate the difficulty of ending interventions
- Persistent insecurity
- Inadequate nation-building
- Successful interventions are about winning the initial confrontation and then having a plan for the aftermath
- For example, what was our "exit strategy" for World War 2?
- The reason our interventions in Europe and Asia from 1941-45 were successful is because we had a clearly defined goal: unconditional surrender of the German and Japanese governments
- We followed that up with plans for what we were going to do after the conflict
- Yalta conference to decide territorial divisions after the end of World War 2
- Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after the war
- It was only after that that we looked at our withdrawal and drawdown plans
- Exit strategies should not be confused with the objectives for the intervention itself
- Rather, an exit strategy defines with you do after either
- The objective has been achieved
- The ongoing costs of the intervention have been judged to be greater than the prospective gains
- Articulating an exit strategy before operations begin often does more harm than good
- The presence of an exit strategy can become a political tool for selling a war
- Exit strategies can create unrealistic expectations
- Missed deadlines can rapidly erode popular support and create perverse incentives for adversaries
- South Korea is an example of a conflict where articulating an exit strategy early would have been extremely counterproductive
- The Bosnia and Kosovo interventions would have been much less effective had they been carried out with an eye to withdrawing US forces as fast as possible
- Any pre-baked exit strategy becomes obsolete once the war starts
- Conditions change and goals shift
- Need to properly assess ground-level realities before planning for departure
The Time Is Now
- Before an intervention begins, planners should be focusing on battle plans, post-combat stabilization and political objectives
- The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan was a lack of support for new political systems, not a lack of exit strategy
- Misguided belief in decisive victories
- Failure to consider the full repercussions of toppling governments
- The ongoing quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have nothing to do with lack of exit strategy -- they have more to do with the US lacking clearly defined, achievable goals
- A clean exit cannot redeem a botched intervention
- The Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan is literally a textbook example of a well-planned and well-executed military withdrawal
- Yet the success of the withdrawal cannot hide the fact that the intervention itself was a failure
- Exits should be planned only after either objectives have been achieved or costs are judged to be greater than the benefit from ongoing intervention
- Once developed, exit strategies should be clearly communicated to local partners
Focus on the intervention strategy, not the exit strategy
- The US "endless wars" in the Middle East and South Asia are the result of grandiose and unclear objectives
- Exit strategies don't matter if the intervention strategy is flawed
- No exit strategy will save you from having to pick and choose where you intervene
- Instead of focusing on having exit strategies, reduce the reliance of military interventions
My Thoughts
- Kampf seems to agree that having an exit strategy is a good idea, but he disagrees as to when that exit strategy should be formulated
- To me, it's the process of thinking about an exit strategy that drives the necessary thinking about political objectives
- An interesting example of this is the Gulf War
- Colin Powell insisted that the US military commitment not be open-ended
- This forced the H.W. Bush administration to think about the necessary preconditions for a successful departure
- Revised political goals downwards -- instead of seeking the complete overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the US chose to pursue the much more limited and well defined goal of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait
- Without an exit strategy in place, it would have been more tempting for the administration to push the military to march on Baghdad in 1993
Adam Wunische: Yes, having an exit strategy is absolutely necessary at the start of hostilities
Originally published as The Lost Art of Exiting A War
Outline of Article
- The best way to ensure a speedy exit from a war is to not start the war in the first place
- The second best way is to have an exit strategy
- Kampf argues that exit strategies are problematic because they distract from the prosecution of the conflict itself
- By his logic, a successful intervention is one that achieves its initial objectives, without regard given to maintaining those objectives
- Similar to Gideon Rose's argument in 1998
- Wunische disagrees
- Agrees with Kampf about the importance of defining military and political objectives
- However Kampf misunderstands the strategic process
- Uncertainty makes strategy more necessary, not less
- After arguing that leaders need to wait for the "right conditions" to emerge, Kampf never defines what those conditions are
- Here I think Wunische is being unfair to Kampf
- Kampf says that an exit strategy should be formulated only after political goals have been achieved or after it's been judged that the costs of ongoing intervention are going to be higher than the benefits from achieving those political goals
- Kampf mischaracterizes the value of strategy
- Says that because the future is unknowable, there is no value in formulating a strategy
- Here, I think Wunische is once again being unfair to Kampf
- Kampf doesn't say that the future has to be known in order for strategy to be formulated
- He says that it's opportune to wait for objectives to be achieved before figuring out how to secure those objectives and go home
- Strategy isn't valuable because it gives you a plan that you can apply without regard for changing circumstances
- Strategy is valuable because it
- Forces planners to prioritize
- Forces planners to anticipate counter-strategies
- Forces planners to make tough choices about resource allocation
- Kampf's arguments re: strategy make "forever wars" like the US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan more likely, not less
- Says that because the future is unknowable, there is no value in formulating a strategy
- With great power competition coming to the fore, having exit strategies is more important than ever -- we can't afford to get bogged down in peripheral conflicts
Strategy Is Hard, But Worth It
- Part of this disagreement is definitional
- Kampf seems to view "exit strategy" is the specific movements required to get troops and equipment out of the theater of operations
- That's not strategy, it's logistics
- Strategy, including exit strategy, must be linked to objectives, and thus must be planned for prior to the start of hostilities
- The impossibility of certainty in strategy does not negate its necessity
- Without strategy, war is just violence for its own sake
- Developing an exit strategy is a key part of the overall strategic planning for the conflict, not a distraction
- How do you plan for the start of a war with no consideration for when and how you'll leave?
Without An Exit Strategy The Right Conditions For A Withdrawal Are Never Apparent
- Kampf argues that we should only formulate an exit strategy when withdrawal is looming
- When was withdrawal "looming" for Iraq or Afghanistan?
- The entire reason we're talking about the importance of exit strategies is because of the US's inability to leave peripheral wars
- There will never be an ideal time to leave a counterinsurgency
- Suggesting that the initial planning should just cover the opening of hostilities and the immediate aftermath is the sort of thinking that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place
- Garrisons invite further missions
- They become commitments in search of a rationale
- Leaving troops in place after objectives have been achieved overshoots the culminating point of victory -- the point at which additional presence results in increasingly marginal (or even negative) gains
- For example, the purpose of US troops going into Syria was to fight and defeat Islamic State, not act as a counterbalance to Russian, Turkish and Iranian forces
- The fact that we're talking about failing those objectives means that significant mission creep has occurred, even in the Syrian commitment
The True Value of Strategy
- Why do we have strategy at all? After all, circumstance will always change and strategy will always have to be adjusted
- Strategy allows us to assess the likely costs and benefits of engaging in an armed conflict
- Allows us to estimate whether it's even possible to achieve our objectives with armed conflict
- If you can't come up with an exit strategy before the chaos of war, then it's not likely that you'll be able to come up with an exits strategy during the chaos
- You don't need to make your exit strategy public
Exit Strategies Are Necessary
- Exit strategies should be developed prior to hostilities
- Having a plan is always preferable to not having a plan
- We need to be clear-eyed about the risks of staying in a conflict that we don't need to be in
- If we're serious about facing up to great-power competition, we need to ensure that we're not overextended in parts of the world with little strategic significance
My Thoughts
- I mostly agree with Wunische, but I think he's strawmanning Kampf a bit
- I agree that they seem to have definitional differences about what exit strategies are
- However, Kampf's definition is too narrow
- Neither of these two authors talk about exit strategy in the context of armed conflicts between great powers, and that's concerning
- The consequences of uncontrolled escalation in a great power conflict are as great today as they've ever been, and increasing multipolarity means that the probability of the US being drawn into a an armed conflict between great powers is higher than it has been in the past
- Having an exit strategy for getting out of Syria is far less important than having an exit strategy to prevent a (limited) armed conflict with China from escalating into all-out nuclear war
