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November 28, 2006

What the U.S. Needs from its Armed Forces

Second in a series. Part one here.

The purpose of the Army, as is laid out in FM 1.0 The Army, is to fight and win the nation's wars. As far as mission statements go, that isn't bad, as it lays out what needs to be done clearly and succinctly. However, it also doesn't get into the level of detail necessary to determine how the Army needs to be constructed in order to accomplish that task, and it is therefore no more than a starting point for our discussion.

The Army views war along a spectrum ranging from peace to war. Along that spectrum are the Army's primary missions: high-intensity conflict, low-intensity conflict, stability operations, and support operations. Counterinsurgency (COIN) falls somewhere between low-intensity conflict and stability operations. Traditionally, the Army has trained primarily for high-intensity conflict, because it was assumed that was the critical task. If the Army failed in a stability or support operation, the nation would survive. Losing a high-intensity conflict, however, would mean a far more dire problem. (Conversely, the U.S. was only involved in one threat that could be considered existential in the 20th century: World War II.) So the Army focused on high-intensity conflict and adapted to other operations as necessary. When it came to stability operations, that worked well; Army forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia have been pretty successful in keeping the peace in those locations. Unfortunately, the Army had set counterinsurgency aside after Vietnam, and it paid the price for that in Somalia in 1993 and in Iraq over the past three years.

Success at each level of war requires different tools. High-intensity conflict requires some manpower and a lot of expensive equipment: tanks, armored fighting vehicles, jet aircraft, naval forces, and so. Low-intensity conflict requires more manpower and less equipment, much of which is also used for high-intensity conflict. Stability and support operations tend to require manpower and equipment. For these levels of warfare, the same Army can handle all of these tasks, as long as the manpower base is large enough.

Counterinsurgency is often called the graduate level of warfare. As we're seeing in Iraq now, there is good reason for that. While high-intensity conflict requires a great deal of training and coordination, high-intensity conflict also gives the Army far more latitude in imposing its will on the enemy. In a high-intensity conflict, we seek out and destroy the enemy. Sure, the enemy gets a vote, but with our advantages in training and equipment, we're able to impose our will on the enemy and win high-intensity conflict with impressive frequency. Counterinsurgency, however, doesn't give combat forces that ability. You can't win a counterinsurgency fight by killing people. Indeed, killing the wrong people is a great way to lose a counterinsurgency campaign, since the entire purpose of counterinsurgency is to gain popular support for your side. Winning counterinsurgency involves knowing the ground and people intimately in order to seek out and destroy the enemy while drawing popular support to your cause. That means it depends in great measure on things that are very difficult for the Army to control. If you shoot an enemy tank with a 120mm Sabot round, you'll probably destroy it and therefore make good progress towards defeating the enemy. If you build a water purification plant for the local population, they may appreciate it, but there is no way of knowing how any particular individual will react to that action. Counterinsurgency also requires incredibly disciplined soldiers. Soldiers are, as a rule, well-disciplined to begin with, but there is a significant difference between disciplining troops to enter a situation where they may die in combat and requiring them to move about a populace where the enemy looks just like your friends. At least in combat, once you're engaged you can shoot back. In counterinsurgency, shooting back when engaged may do more harm than good, and many insurgent tactics don't even give soldiers an opportunity to shoot back. Dealing with that kind of situation requires a degree of discipline beyond anything most of us will ever require.

At the moment, the odds of the United States becoming involved in a high-intensity conflict are very low. We have demonstrated several times over the past few years that an enemy force foolish enough to stand toe-to-toe with the U.S. military will quickly be destroyed. But that position has only come about due to the expenditure of a great deal of money and even more hard work on the part of the services to develop personnel capable of fighting extremely well in high-intensity conflict. Our future military must still be capable of fighting such battles, or in time we will risk fighting in high-intensity conflict when we no longer possess such superiority. On the other hand, if we can be defeated by an insurgency, then our ability to prevail in high-intensity conflict is of limited utility; yes, it will ensure nobody can successfully invade the United States, but they may not need to do so if they are successful overseas. American interests, at least according to our actions of the past century, stretch well beyond the borders of the United States. As long as we determine our national interests in that fashion, the ability to defend ourselves alone will be insufficient. That means we need armed forces capable of fighting and winning against insurgencies as well as in high-intensity conflict. That means we need to make some significant changes in how we construct our armed forces. I will address what changes I think need to be made in my next installment in this series.