Iraq-style counterinsurgency is fast becoming the U.S. Army’s organizing principle. Is our military preparing to fight the next war, or the last one?
By Andrew J. Bacevich
The Atlantic, October 2008
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| Image credit: Benjamin Lowy/VII Network |
For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the U.S. Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.
Anyone who cares about the Army’s health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future U.S. national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.
What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.
The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today’s Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.
Like any bureaucracy, today’s military prefers to project a united front when dealing with the outside world, keeping internal dissent under wraps. Nonetheless, the Great Debate is unfolding in plain view in publications outside the Pentagon’s purview, among them print magazines such as Armed Forces Journal, the Web-based Small Wars Journal, and the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.
The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam.
The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives.
The Crusaders consist of officers who see the Army’s problems in Iraq as self-inflicted. According to members of this camp, things went awry because rigidly conventional senior commanders, determined “never again” to see the Army sucked into a Vietnam-like quagmire, had largely ignored unconventional warfare and were therefore prepared poorly for it. Typical of this generation is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, once the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, who in late 2003 was still describing the brewing insurgency as “strategically and operationally insignificant,” when the lowliest buck sergeant knew otherwise.
Younger officers critical of Sanchez are also committed to the slogan “Never again,” but with a different twist: never again should the officer corps fall prey to the willful amnesia to which the Army succumbed after Vietnam, when it turned its back on that war.
Among the Crusaders’ most influential members is Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a West Pointer and Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University. In 2002, he published a book, impeccably timed, titled Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. After serving in Iraq as a battalion operations officer, Nagl helped rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual and commanded the unit that prepares U.S. soldiers to train Iraqi security forces. (Earlier this year, he left the Army to accept a position with a Washington think tank.)
To Nagl, the lessons of the recent past are self-evident. The events of 9/11, he writes, “conclusively demonstrated that instability anywhere can be a real threat to the American people here at home.” For the foreseeable future, political conditions abroad rather than specific military threats will pose the greatest danger to the United States.
Instability creates ungoverned spaces in which violent anti-American radicals thrive. Yet if instability anywhere poses a threat, then ensuring the existence of stability everywhere—denying terrorists sanctuary in rogue or failed states—becomes a national-security imperative. Define the problem in these terms, and winning battles becomes less urgent than pacifying populations and establishing effective governance.
War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”
Of course, back in the 1960s an earlier experiment in changing entire societies yielded unmitigated disaster—at least that’s how the Army of the 1980s and 1990s chose to remember its Vietnam experience. Crusaders take another view, however. They insist that Vietnam could have been won—indeed was being won, after General Creighton Abrams succeeded General William Westmoreland in 1968 and jettisoned Westmoreland’s heavy-handed search-and-destroy strategy, to concentrate instead on winning Vietnamese hearts and minds. Defeat did not result from military failure; rather, defeat came because the American people lacked patience, while American politicians lacked guts.
The Crusaders’ perspective on Iraq tracks neatly with this revisionist take on Vietnam, with the hapless Sanchez (among others) standing in for Westmoreland, and General David Petraeus—whose Princeton doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam”—as successor to General Abrams. Abrams’s successful if tragically aborted campaign in Vietnam serves as a precursor to Petraeus’s skillfully orchestrated “surge” in Iraq: each demonstrates that the United States can prevail in “stability operations” as long as commanders grasp the true nature of the problem and respond appropriately.
For Nagl, the imperative of the moment is to institutionalize the relevant lessons of Vietnam and Iraq, thereby enabling the Army, he writes, “to get better at building societies that can stand on their own.” That means buying fewer tanks while spending more on language proficiency; curtailing the hours spent on marksmanship ranges while increasing those devoted to studying foreign cultures. It also implies changing the culture of the officer corps. An Army that since Vietnam has self-consciously cultivated a battle-oriented warrior ethos will instead emphasize, in Nagl’s words, “the intellectual tools necessary to foster host-nation political and economic development.”
Although the issue is by no means fully resolved, the evidence suggests that Nagl seems likely to get his way. Simply put, an officer corps that a decade ago took its intellectual cues from General Colin Powell now increasingly identifies itself with the views of General Petraeus. In the 1990s, the Powell Doctrine, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent. According to the emerging Petraeus Doctrine, the Army (like it or not) is entering an era in which armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous—with the application of force becoming a lesser part of the soldier’s repertoire.
Nagl’s line of argument has not gone unchallenged. Its opponents, the Conservatives, reject the revisionist interpretation of Vietnam and dispute the freshly enshrined conventional narrative on Iraq. Above all, they question whether Iraq represents a harbinger of things to come.
A leading voice in the Conservative camp is Colonel Gian Gentile, a Berkeley graduate with a doctorate in history from Stanford, who currently teaches at West Point. Gentile has two tours in Iraq under his belt. During the second, just before the Petraeus era, he commanded a battalion in Baghdad.
Writing in the journal World Affairs, Gentile dismisses as “a self-serving fiction” the notion that Abrams in 1968 put the United States on the road to victory in Vietnam; the war, he says, was unwinnable, given the “perseverance, cohesion, indigenous support, and sheer determination of the other side, coupled with the absence of any of those things on the American side.” Furthermore, according to Gentile, the post-Vietnam officer corps did not turn its back on that war in a fit of pique; it correctly assessed that the mechanized formations of the Warsaw Pact deserved greater attention than pajama-clad guerrillas in Southeast Asia.
Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the Petraeus era, attributing security improvements achieved during Petraeus’s tenure less to new techniques than to a “cash-for-cooperation” policy that put “nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, … on the U.S. government payroll.” According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events.
All of this forms a backdrop to Gentile’s core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.
The concern is not idle. A recent article in Army magazine notes that the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, long “renowned for its force-on-force conventional warfare maneuver training,” has now “switched gears,” focusing exclusively on counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than practicing how to attack the hill, its trainees now learn about “spending money instead of blood, and negotiating the cultural labyrinth through rapport and rapprochement.”
The officer corps itself recognizes that conventional-warfare capabilities are already eroding. In a widely circulated white paper, three former brigade commanders declare that the Army’s field-artillery branch—which plays a limited role in stability operations, but is crucial when there is serious fighting to be done—may soon be all but incapable of providing accurate and timely fire support. Field artillery, the authors write, has become a “dead branch walking.”
Gentile does not doubt that counterinsurgencies will figure in the Army’s future. Yet he questions Nagl’s certainty that situations resembling Iraq should become an all-but-exclusive preoccupation. Historically, expectations that the next war will resemble the last one have seldom served the military well.
Embedded within this argument over military matters is a more fundamental and ideologically charged argument about basic policy. By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, Nagl is effectively affirming the Long War as the organizing principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish. Observers differ on whether the Long War’s underlying purpose is democratic transformation or imperial domination: Did the Bush administration invade Iraq to liberate that country or to control it? Yet there is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades. In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate—and perpetuate—the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.
Gentile understands this. Implicit in his critique of Nagl is a critique of the Bush administration, for which John Nagl serves as a proxy. Gentile’s objection to what he calls Nagl’s “breathtaking” assumption about “the efficacy of American military power to shape events” expresses a larger dissatisfaction with similar assumptions held by the senior officials who concocted the Iraq War in the first place. When Gentile charges Nagl with believing that there are “no limits to what American military power … can accomplish,” his real gripe is with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
For officers like Nagl, the die appears to have been cast. The Long War gives the Army its marching orders. Nagl’s aim is simply to prepare for the inescapable eventuality of one, two, many Iraqs to come.
Gentile resists the notion that the Army’s (and by extension, the nation’s) fate is unalterably predetermined. Strategic choice—to include the choice of abandoning the Long War in favor of a different course—should remain a possibility. The effect of Nagl’s military reforms, Gentile believes, will be to reduce or preclude that possibility, allowing questions of the second order (How should we organize our Army?) to crowd out those of the first (What should be our Army’s purpose?).
The biggest question of all, Gentile writes, is “Who gets to decide this?” Absent a comparably searching Great Debate among the civilians vying to direct U.S. policy—and the prospects that either Senator McCain or Senator Obama will advocate alternatives to the Long War appear slight—the power of decision may well devolve by default upon soldiers. Gentile insists—rightly—that the choice should not be the Army’s to make.
Abizaid of Arabia
General John Abizaid has driven big changes in the American military. Now, as he commands U.S. forces in the Middle East, his ideas are being put to the test
By Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.
The Atlantic, December 2003
This past July, a week after taking charge—as the chief of what the military calls Central Command—of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, the four-star Army general John Abizaid stepped over the line. He deliberately used the loaded word "guerrilla" to describe the escalating Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation—something his civilian superiors had gone out of their way to avoid. Reporters pounced, even as soldiers quietly applauded Abizaid's candor. The Administration let it go—testimony to Abizaid's standing in the Pentagon, where he is said to be one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's favorite officers.
And not only Rumsfeld's. To a remarkable degree Abizaid is admired by his fellow officers, many of whom have said outright that he is uniquely suited to oversee the increasingly complex and bloody occupation of Iraq. Indeed, Abizaid's entire life seems to have prepared him to be the military proconsul of an Arab country in chaos. But now the question is whether he can step up from a career of triumphs in smaller arenas to take on the nation-building challenge of the decade.
Lieutenant Colonel Hank Keirsey (now retired) got a firsthand look at Abizaid's approach when the general commanded an airborne brigade in a war-games exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, back in 1995. "He was probably at his best in the chaos of the 'low-intensity' fight," Keirsey recalls, "the one that most usually confuses the modern American commander." In the phase of the exercise simulating a "high-intensity" war, against a conventional, tank-heavy force, Abizaid's performance was unspectacular, marred by gaps in the performance of his staff. But in the phase simulating a "low-intensity" war, against Third World insurgents, Abizaid's unit killed more guerrillas than any other Keirsey had ever seen. Discarding standard procedure ("He operated that brigade almost by ignoring his staff," Keirsey recalls), Abizaid improvised quick counterstrikes and repeatedly turned the tables on his would-be ambushers. This unconventional approach to warfare was not how the Army had taught Abizaid to fight. It was something he had largely taught himself.
John Abizaid graduated from West Point in 1973, ranked forty-second out of 944 in the class that just missed Vietnam. Above his yearbook photo is the cryptic caption "The 'Mad Arab' came from the deserts of the West to become a star-man"—a reference to Abizaid's Lebanese roots, to his California home town of Coleville, and to the star insignia he was entitled to wear for being in the top five percent of his class. It was at West Point that he first developed a reputation for fierce intelligence that persists today. "When people talk among themselves," says Michael Pasquarett, a retired colonel who teaches at the Army War College, "they'll say, 'Abizaid has a forty-pound brain.'" After graduation Abizaid spent three years in elite airborne and Ranger units, as a platoon and then a company commander; next he won an Olmsted scholarship—a military award for study abroad, given to only three to six young Army officers each year. Most officers would have chosen to study somewhere in Western Europe, where Army careers were then usually made. Abizaid decided to go to the University of Jordan, in Amman.
Olmsted scholars are supposed to study on their own, taking courses in a foreign language at a civilian institution, their uniforms in mothballs, their only Army contact the military attaché at the U.S. embassy. Abizaid headed into a situation that was exceptionally unsettled; after a year of intensive Arabic in the United States, he arrived in Amman in September of 1978, just ahead of the first explosion of modern extremist Islam—the Iranian revolution of 1979. Jordan, with its pro-American monarchy and its Palestinian majority, was thrown into turmoil by events in Iran; unrest and riots repeatedly shut down the university.
So Abizaid struck out on his own. He trained with the Jordanian army, visited neighboring Iraq (where Saddam Hussein was consolidating power), and camped out in the desert with Bedouins. "He wasn't just talking to well-to-do English-speaking people in Amman," one officer who knew Abizaid in Jordan says. "He was getting out to tribal areas and having dinner with sheikhs."
When Abizaid returned to the United States, in 1980, he completed an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard, and then went back to his combat-infantry career. This was unusual. Officers who are labeled specialists in a given region usually end up at headquarters and embassies, pigeonholed as area experts. But except for a short tour as a UN observer in Lebanon, Abizaid spent the 1980s in one career-enhancing post after another: leading a Ranger company air-dropped into Grenada; serving in the Army Chief of Staff's research group; commanding the 3/325 Infantry, widely considered to be the best battalion in Europe.
Abizaid led that battalion into Iraq in 1991, in the chaos of Operation Provide Comfort. The mission was to protect and feed thousands of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's reprisals, but without restarting the Gulf War in their behalf. Prohibited from unleashing his superior firepower, Abizaid used everything from laborious negotiations to painfully loud rock music to keep the Iraqi forces back.
In a conventional career the next stop would have been the Army War College, where future generals are groomed. Instead Abizaid spent a year at Stanford's Hoover Institution, on a National Security Affairs fellowship, studying how to train troops for peacekeeping. In an article about the challenges of peacekeeping that he co-authored at the time (published in Special Warfare, the magazine of the Special Forces, and based on his meetings with military officials in Somalia and elsewhere), Abizaid wrote that "doctrinal voids exist at every level," and argued repeatedly that peacekeeping required a new kind of initiative that would have to rise up from the lowest ranks. In northern Iraq and in Bosnia peacekeepers were scattered in small units, isolated from one another and surrounded by feuding locals. "In each instance," Abizaid wrote, "superiors were far away, and quite junior leaders were required to defuse numerous potentially dangerous situations." He underlined his point by quoting Brigadier Michael Harbottle, an Englishman and a former chief of staff for UN forces deployed to Cyprus: "There is no doubt in my mind that the success of a peacekeeping operation depends more than anything else on the vigilance and mental alertness of the most junior soldier and his non-commissioned leader, for it is on their reaction and immediate response that the success of the operations rests."
In 1997, after a tour with the NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia, Abizaid moved to West Point to become its commandant. The role of the commandant does not involve overall command of the academy (which falls to the superintendent, a respected elder general) or supervision of the academic program (which falls to the dean, a long-serving professor). The commandant is an ambassador from the real Army—a one-star general who spends just two years at West Point and whose task is to ready the cadets to be real officers. He oversees the honor code, the daily drills, and the summer field training that makes West Point a fifty-weeks-a-year experience.
When Abizaid arrived at West Point, the military was still struggling with the ambiguities of the post-Cold War world. What did it mean to be an officer in a country with no clear foe? Abizaid stepped into an environment in which battles raged over whether to train warriors or peacekeepers, whether to scream in cadets' faces or correct them calmly, whether different physical standards were appropriate for female cadets, whether a sensitivity program called "Respect for Others" was politically correct pabulum, and whether some cadet "traditions" had in fact degenerated into hazing. (In one popular pre-Abizaid practice, called "shower detail," upperclassmen wrapped a freshman, or "plebe," in a hot plastic poncho and had him recite academy trivia for hours, sweating profusely, until he passed out.) Reformers argued that the old ways taught cadets to be bullies; traditionalists countered that the new ways would make them wimps. The superintendent who hired Abizaid, Lieutenant General Dan Christman (now retired), sought to strike a balance by adopting an approach that he characterized as "demanding without being demeaning." To train cadets for the realities of the modern world, Christman decided, he needed a commandant "who was both a warrior and someone who could think."
Abizaid cracked down on hazing, to the point of expelling repeat offenders. "People from MacArthur on tried to get rid of it," says David Lipsky, whose recently published Absolutely American followed a class of cadets from 1998 to 2002. But under Abizaid, he says, "that stuff stopped." At the same time, Abizaid made cadets' training more rigorous. According to Hank Keirsey, who worked for Abizaid at West Point, Abizaid's approach was "I don't just want them getting yelled at by the first classmen [seniors] and upperclassmen back in the barracks about their beds' not being made. I want the toughness to be out in the field." Abizaid added more miles of running to the training program, more weapons drills, and a multi-day "Warrior Forge" in which cadets crossed rope bridges, fought simulated battles all night, pushed a Humvee a thousand yards, and finally swam across a lake. Traditionally, the last day of summer field training ended with exhausted sophomore cadets' piling into trucks for the eight-mile trip back to West Point. Abizaid had them run back, and he ran at the head of the column.
One cadet who benefited from Abizaid's hands-on approach was Second Lieutenant Tucker Mahoney, class of 2002. Mahoney spent his first two days of fire-arms drill missing target after target, despite a crowd of other cadets and instructors who were trying to help, until, he says, Abizaid "came over, dismissed them all, got into a prone position next to me, and told me to relax and fire." Two hours later, with Abizaid still by his side, Mahoney finally mastered the drill. "He knew when to be a disciplinarian," says Captain Alan Clinard, class of 1998, "but he knew how to use other methods, [especially] leadership by example. He really emphasized the cadets' taking charge. He made the upperclass cadets a lot more involved in what was trained, how it was trained." Abizaid also instituted a controversial reform in which cadets, not faculty officers, handle most of the disciplinary system themselves, using elaborate review boards modeled on regular Army hearings. His changes to the disciplinary system have raised some eyebrows. One officer who otherwise admires Abizaid calls the process "silly," saying, "You have eighteen-year-olds being supervised by nineteen-year-olds who are being supervised by twenty-year-olds." Silly or not, the changes were motivated by Abizaid's desire to implement a new philosophy of military training that would be in step with modern realities. Army units that had spent the Cold War in garrison were suddenly being scattered across an ever messier world; new lieutenants could no longer count on commanding one small part of a large formation lined up against a single foe. "Having come from the Balkans," Lieutenant Colonel Charles Peddy says of Abizaid, with whom he worked on the new disciplinary regulations at West Point, "and having worked in Iraq after the '91 war, he had an understanding that the new graduates had to be more than just guys who could shoot rifles and maneuver. You were going to find a young lieutenant by himself as the mayor of a small town."
That is just what is now happening across Iraq. The problem, of course, is that General Abizaid cannot command a 130,000-strong army of occupation the way he led the cadets at West Point or his airborne brigade in war games at Fort Polk—by leaving his staff behind in order to be hands-on at the front. The irony of being a four-star general is that all your tremendous power must be wielded through others. Abizaid has spent three decades building the experience and the education that now underlie his plans for running Central Command, but he can be only as effective as the soldiers working for him on the ground. It is the young captains and lieutenants in their twenties—the generation brought up in the new military that Abizaid helped to create—whose day-to-day decisions will pacify, or provoke, the people of Iraq.
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