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November 14, 2006

Warfare Changes Gears

Over the next few days or weeks, I am going to take a look at how warfare is changing, what that means for the United States and the Army, and throw out some thoughts on how we can adapt to 21st Century warfare. Today I'm going to address where we are today, and how we got here.

As even the casual student of history knows, warfare is a means to an end, not a means to itself. Nations go to war when they determine that they want to acquire something that they do not believe they can acquire through other means, and that they believe is worth a war to acquire. In many cases, war differs from simple armed robbery only in scale: a nation decides it wants a resource and invades another nation to get it. But in every case I can think of, nations go to war for a reason, not simply to make war.

In the 20th Century, the United States established itself as the master of classical warfare. In a purely military encounter, American forces became something very close to unstoppable, accomplishing military feats that would be considered impossible prior to their occurence. Facing the United States in a conventional military conflict was demonstrably little less than committing suicide. This development caused the U.S. to develop a degree of overconfidence: no one would dare face up to us, because we had a demonstrated ability to defeat them militarily.

But the world is not a static place. When situations change, people adapt to them. In the case of warfare, the world has taken a look at what the United States does well and does poorly, and has found methods of attacking us where we are weak. This is the infamous asymmetrical warfare that we've heard for years. But people tend to assume that because it's asymmetrical, it is somehow inferior. We often hear that this war isn't a big deal, because it's not an existential war. That is true as far as it goes, in that losing on either of our two current major battlefields will not lead directly to our destruction. But if our enemies can develop forms of warfare that render them capable of consistently defeating us, we may find ourselves in some bigger problems that we currently face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

War, Clauswitz observed, is politics via other means. Winning a battle doesn't mean a thing if you can't exploit that victory. And the U.S. has demonstrated that while we are very good at winning conventional military battles, we're lousy at exploiting those victories politically. Our enemies have observed this problem and have developed strategies that allow them to defeat us politically, which is the only place victory really counts.

The Army, in particular, has been slow to adapt to this new form of warfare. We like high-intensity conflict (HIC). It's fun to practice for, we have a lot of experience at it, compared to counterinsurgency, it's pretty easy, and it involves lots of complicated gadgets like tanks and helicopters and artillery. In HIC, new gadgets act as massive force multipliers, and the Army bet heavily on those force multipliers in the 1990s. Heavy battalions trimmed from four to three maneuver companies each. Artillery platoons went from six guns to four guns. Better systems would allow us to accomplish similar effects on the battlefield with fewer personnel. There were those who questioned the new paradigm, but the question came down to one critical issue: money. Sure, the Army would have been better off to maintain full-strength battalions and batteries, but we couldn't afford to do that and purchase the new, better equipment that would allow us to maintain the technological edge against our adversaries. Men are expensive, as odd as that sounds. But beyond the costs of training a soldier to a level where he can be of value on a battlefield, the United States has developed a degree of casualty aversion that makes every loss far more painful than what we have historically accepted, although part of this comes from the problems we've had in achieving measurable results. Yes, we took more casualties on D-Day than we have thus far in Iraq, but at least at the end of June 6, 1944, we could point to Utah and Omaha beaches and show that we had bought something with our losses. We have been far less able to do that in Iraq. The bottom line is the same, however: in both real dollars and emotional costs, soldiers are more pricey than equipment.

Now the Army is involved in a forced transformation due to the fighting in Iraq. But while we have developed a generation of company grade officers who don't think about HIC, because their experiences have been formed in the crucible of COIN in Iraq, senior soldiers like yours truly are still highly familiar with HIC, but are struggling to learn the vagaries of COIN. At the highest levels, this has resulted in senior leadership that hasn't begun the process of changing the Army's systems to fight 21st century war. There has been no call for increasing the size of the Army, despite the fact COIN is a manpower-intensive form of war. Senior officers are not speaking out about the decline in quality of new enlistees. We're not looking at how to rebuild units to make them more effective in the COIN fight. In part, this is because senior leaders don't generally like the idea of ending their careers by making politically inconvenient comments. It takes an inordinate amount of work to become a General officer, and I have a great deal of respect for anyone who earns the right to wear stars on their shoulders. But when you've put that kind of effort into reaching that position, it's not hard to justify actions that keep you in position so you can help protect your soldiers. Let me say right now that every General I've known has cared very deeply about soldiers, and they have worked exceedingly hard to do what they can to make sure that their soldiers have the best available training and equipment. But the Army is also a culture where we learn early on that mission accomplishment is the sine qua non of our existence. If you're given a mission, you find a way to accomplish it (with the law and moral constraints). While that's a highly valuable trait for military personnel, since in combat you will rarely have the optimum tools available to you, it often causes us to swallow our protests when we're told to accomplish a mission and instead find a way to succeed despite the shortfalls we're given. This is where I think a lot of senior officers find themselves now: they know they have a mission to accomplish, and they're going to find a way to do it regardless of the constraints placed on them by their superiors.

But soldiering on against all obstacles can only get you so far. America's enemies have found our military weaknesses (I would argue that culturally they are strengths, such as our concern over civilian casualties) and have developed a form of warfare that allows them to take full advantage of those weaknesses. If we are to succeed against these tactics, we are going to have to make some serious changes to how we do business, or we're going to lose. While losing Iraq or even Afghanistan may not be fatal in and of themselves, sooner or later we are going to find ourselves fighting on a battlefield where we cannot afford to lose. When that day comes, we need to have an Army that can win there.