America is NOT at War

Should We Be?

With about 0.4% of Americans serving in the military and the other 99.6% mostly ignoring the progress of two wars, this nation is not at war. As Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli (senior military assistant to SecDef) put it in the Sep/Oct Military Review, “Learning From Our Modern Wars,”

“The U.S. as a Nation—and indeed most of the U.S. Govern­ment—has not gone to war since 9/11. Instead, the departments of Defense and State (as much as their modern capabilities allow) and the Central Intelli­gence Agency are at war while the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their normal business.”

Robert Kaplan in WSJ Opinion had something stronger to say (see also IntelDumps commentary on the article, “Robert Kaplan on heroes and service”):

"An army at war and a nation at the mall do not encounter each other except through the refractive medium of news and entertainment."

This post will explore the issues of supporting small wars of COIN (counterinsurgency) or nation building.

Why Do We Hate This War?

In one of my very early posts (say, June 07), I mentioned that I did not fully understand the public’s intense dislike of the Iraq War. Some blame it on casualty aversion (that’s PC-speak for deaths), but I don’t buy it. Americans ignore casualties, or any suffering, the further they are away from home and family. We certainly don’t get nationally upset at genocide in Darfur and we’ve even forgotten about the deaths in our own back yard with Katrina. I’ve mentioned before that our troops and their families endure further hardships, short of death, that are unimaginable to most civilians. I think that most civilians are vaguely aware of that truth but still don’t quite comprehend it.

Robert Kaplan explained the disconnect as:

Put simply, military service used to be viewed as a duty for all. Now, it is viewed as a choice for some. The act of joining the military has morphed into a heroic act, if only because so few Americans do it, and so few understand or appreciate the nature of this act, let alone the acts of extraordinary heroism which define the word for those in uniform.

This partially explains the problem but it also leads to some other problems with how civilians view the troops, as Kaplan also explains:

“The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq's complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it…

“As one battalion commander complained to me, in words repeated by other soldiers and marines: "Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer Army? I'm a warrior. It's my job to fight." Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged.

"An army at war and a nation at the mall do not encounter each other except through the refractive medium of news and entertainment."

But to those service men or women reading this, I think the battalion commander who complained is asking for something unobtainable. I would ask him to pick any other profession, for which he has not been trained, and tell me if he respects those in that other profession because of a technical proficiency that he does not understand and probably has no interest. Do you respect us engineers because of our mathematical ingenuity:? Do I respect lawyers because of their knowledge of obscure law? If not, do you really expect civilians to understand your technical proficiency and respect you for it? It is possible that the service members’ expectations of civilians are as unreal as is the public’s expectations of our military.

Regardless of other conclusions in this post, we need to better educate the public in the risks and requirements (in time, money, and lives). One of the reasons the public remains against the Iraq War is that neither our civilian leaders or the media have attempted to inform the public. Lt. Gen. Chiarelli said,

“Perhaps the most important thing we need to do to prepare for a dangerous future is change the cultures of our national security organizations and increase our efforts to educate the U.S. public.”

Casualty aversion, lack understanding of small wars, and poor media coverage when taken together still did not explain America’s dislike for this war. Perhaps the explanation is simply that America does not like to be embarrassed or does like to lose faith in itself. Stephen Holmes in a The Nation Article, “Apocalypse Now?,” confirmed my guess when he said,

“But before we lay all the blame on newspapers and networks that may have deceived the American public, we need to consider the possibility that many Americans did not and do not want to be informed about the misdeeds of their own government abroad. A majority of the electorate supported Bush for some time after the pretexts for the Iraq War were exposed as mendacious and the appalling behavior of some American personnel at Abu Ghraib became well-known. Support waned only after the war turned into an undeniable and embarrassing fiasco, not because a large majority was appalled that the war had been launched on false pretenses or conducted by immoral and illegal means.”

There is a lot of meaning in that blunt statement. If true, it is critical to our national psyche. We can’t lay the blame on Congress or the media without also blaming ourselves. It should be painfully obvious to anyone, liberal or conservative, that too many in Congress are adjusting their positions to what they think their voters want to hear. Of itself, that’s not a bad approach, but when the public is wrong, Congress is also wrong, and the country is in trouble.

If 31% of America still supports Bush (depending on the latest polling), then I suppose that 31% who would disagree “that the war had been launched on false pretenses or conducted by immoral and illegal means.” If Holmes is correct, it doesn’t matter.

We have about 69% of the public that is against the war. Going to war on al Qaeda had public support in the months after 9/11, but a common cause of this level is not common. We typically elect our Presidents with 51 or 52% and that seems to be common across most Western democracies. We usually elect our leaders without clear mandates (although Bush claimed a mandate with 51%). Yet we continually face wars, and now must add small wars to the equation. We need leadership supported by more than 51% of the nation. But there is a danger in that. It could lead to a President who might go to war under false pretenses and conduct the war by immoral and illegal means. Our Constitution provides the solution and it is called a separate and distinct Congress, with the help of a separate and distinct Supreme Court.

Congress did not exercise its advise and consent role from 2000 to 2006; it was essentially a cheering section for a popular but wrong war. Since early 2006 Congress has begun to exercise that role but, sadly, it is mostly a byproduct of party warfare. That won’t change until the public changes. Congress’ approval rating is even lower than Bush’s, yet each of us must perceive our own Senators or Representative as good since we re-elect them time after time. If we want our leaders to be more statesman-like, then we voters must also start acting and voting more statesman-like. There must come a time when we really believe that our nation and way of life is worth saving. I leave this soap box with a quote from “Newsworthy Reconsidered,” by Victor Hanson at the National Review:

“… a society that does not fathom who keeps them safe in order that it might stare at Oprah and fixate on Brad and Angelina, eventually will be a society not kept safe either to so stare or fixate.”

Failure is a Choice

Virtually every text on COIN, small wars, or long wars state three requirements:

1. Military must organize and train for COIN operations.
2. Supported by civilian leaders (White House and Congress)
3. Supported the American public

I will add the media to this list since the media is the primary conduit of communications between the military, our leaders, and the public.

The first requirement is being met, the second is in doubt, and the third seems unlikely to ever happen.

I want to talk about the second and third elements, but first a brief summary of the first element.

The Military

The Marines have a long history of small wars experience so adding COIN operations has been relatively easy for them. The Army has made remarkable progress toward an effective COIN force over the past two or more years. In fact, for a very large organization, the U.S. Army’s change is stunning.

The Public

We, the U.S. and the West, have not had much success in winning at small wars, counterinsurgency operations, or nation building. Here are some favorite reasons for why insurgent win (from “The American Way of War,” CATO Institute):

· Insurgents have a greater interest in the outcome of the war and therefore bring to it a superior political will, a greater determination to fight and die; the insurgents wage total war, whereas the government or foreign occupying power fights what, for it, is necessarily a limited war.

· Others contend that superior strategy best explains insurgent victories—that is, protracted guerrilla warfare against a politically impatient and tactically inflexible conventional enemy.

· Still others …argue that democracies, as opposed to dictatorships, lack the political and moral stomach to prevail in long and bloody wars against irregular adversaries…

There is some truth to each of these points but the following may apply specifically to the U.S. (extracted from the above list):

· fights a necessarily a limited war.

· politically impatient.

· as a democracy, lack s the political and moral stomach to prevail in long and bloody wars.

There’s not much we can do about small wars being limited wars fnor can we avoid long wars. But politically impatient and lack of political and moral stomach may describe us and may be our downfall. Lt. Gen. Chiarelli says,

“Our current problems raise the legitimate ques­tion of whether the U.S., or any democracy, can successfully prosecute an extended war without a true national commitment. “

“The American Way of War” has a similar analysis and reaches the following conclusion:

“If this analysis is correct, the policy choice is obvious: avoidance of direct military involvement in foreign internal wars unless vital national security interests are at stake. Such wars are primarily political struggles and only secondarily military contests, and the very presence of foreign combat forces can provoke insurgent attack and undermine the legitimacy of the host government. Avoidance of such conflicts means abandonment of regime-change wars that saddle the United States with responsibility for establishing political stability and state building, tasks that have rarely commanded public or congressional enthusiasm.”

And

Barring profound change in America’s political and military culture, the United States runs a significant risk of failure when it enters small wars of choice, and great power intervention in small wars is almost always a matter of choice. Most such wars, moreover, do not engage core U.S. security interests other than placing the limits of American military power on embarrassing display. Indeed, the very act of intervention in small wars risks gratuitous damage to America’s military reputation. The United States should abstain from intervention in such wars, except in those rare cases when military intervention is essential to protecting or advancing U.S. national security.

There is the choice. I agree that we should avoid intervention in small wars, but I don’t think we can avoid them as much as the CATO Institute seems to imply. I disagree that most such wars do not engage core U.S. interests since the threat of WMD use by al Qaeda, or its brother crazies or its replacements, are a valid and continuing threat. I would even project that there will be many small wars in our future that we cannot avoid. So I think failure is a choice but not one we should be willing to make.

What Stirs the Hearts of Americans?

As far as war goes, not much stirs the hearts of Americans. We look for that singular event, such as a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 that demands revenge and victory. But most events that lead to wars, especially small wars, are small and they build to some level that leads to action.

World War II is much in the media today. Although we all know it was a time when all of America joined the fight and all suffered to some extent, we should also know that America’s entry into WWII was a inevitable long before Pearl Harbor, but both Congress and the public remained in denial until that day of attack. Here are the events over nine long and eventful years before Pearl Harbor.

• 1932 - Japan completed invasion of Manchuria
• 1935 – Italy invaded Ethiopia
• 1937 – Japan began war with China and sinks U.S. gunboat
• 1938 – Germany annexed Austria and invaded part of Czechoslovakia
• 1939 – Germany invaded all of Czechoslovakia, Italy invaded Albania, Germany invaded Poland, USSR invaded Poland and Finland
• 1940 – Germany invaded Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Italy declared war on France and invaded British Somaliland, Greece and Egypt. Japan occupied French Indochina. Hungary and Romania joined the Axis. Germany prepared for the invasion of Britain with all-out air warfare.
• 1941 – Bulgaria joined the Axis. Germany invades Yugoslavia and USSR.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Germany controlled all of continental Europe (except for Switzerland and Spain) and had invaded well into the USSR to within 50 miles from Moscow. The Mediterranean Sea had almost become an Axis lake and controlled many of America’s trade routes. Britain was alone against Germany and Italy with Japan threatening her Pacific possessions. Britain had been at war for 2 years and 2 months when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but the American public and Congress were not stirred to action until Pearl Harbor. America was not alone in its apathy. Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and others also choose to ignore the obvious until they too were attacked. Perhaps apathy, denial, or isolationism is simply a disease of democracies.

That the summation of small events might stir the American heart also seems remote. I saw a photo on one war blog that showed writing on the side of a refrigerator with a Marine in the background coming through the front door. The writing said, “America is not a war. The Marines are at war. America is at the mall.” The media is of little help. They can, at the least, be blamed for sensationalism and reporting to satisfy the corporate balance sheet. Kaplan reported the following statistic:

According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared with 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. (in reference to Medal of Honor recipient Army Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith)

A mental calculation tells me that each bad event got about 50 times the press as the one good event. Going back to Holmes’ article, we cannot just blame the press; we must consider our own attitudes that the media sells to.

Not much stirs the American heart to war. We need to change or we must face some realities about what kinds of wars we can fight and win.

America’s Way of War

America has a unique way of fighting our modern battles. Our way has been fantastically successful in the first Gulf War, the defeat of Iraq’s military, and even in Bosnia. We need this conventional capability, but it is also obvious that we also need to keep and improve our ability to conduct COIN wars. Many junior officers and some senior officers are saying that our Army is not stepping up to the plate on COIN and that there remains too many senior officers who remain entrenched in the successes of conventional warfare. That may be true but I hear a rising chorus of senior officers who are adopting COIN as a necessary component of our forces.

However, I am talking about civilian support. I believe the concepts of conventional warfare are imbedded in our national psyche, but the concepts of COIN operations are only dimly understood. Let’s look at how Americans view war.

The CATO Institute’s “The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency” observes:

“Antulio Echevarria, director of research at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, believes the United States “is geared to fight wars as if they were battles, and thus confuses the winning of campaigns . . . with the winning of wars.” He further contends that “the characteristics of the U.S. style of warfare—speed, jointness, knowledge, and precision—are better suited for strike operations than for translating such operations into strategic successes.”

…

“Frederick W. Kagan also believes that the primary culprit in delivering politically sterile victories is the Pentagon’s conception of war. The reason why “the United States [has] been so successful in recent wars [but has] encountered so much difficulty in securing its political aims after the shooting stopped,” he argues, “lies partly in a ‘vision of war’ that see[s] the enemy as a target set and believe[s] that when all or most targets have been hit, he will inevitably surrender and American goals will be achieved.” (emphasis is mine)

While the above condemns the military the perception also applies to civilians.

Compared to the complexity, frustration, and lack of sensational, set piece events in COIN operations, conventional warfare is easy to understand (but no less difficult to conduct). We look for battles that are clearly won or lost and we look for a series of battles as indicators of a successful or failed campaign. COIN operations rarely have such clearly defined events and even the status of a campaign may be unclear to member of Congress and the American public. The media’s emphasis on sensational events is not helpful.

The importance of these misperceptions should now be obvious if we remember the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The total collapse of the Iraqi military and government did not lead to a clear win for the U.S. The CATO report notes:

“…former presidential national security advisers Samuel Berger and Brent Scowcroft. “But that ‘transformation’ has had an unintended consequence. Rapid victory collapses the enemy but does not destroy it.” (emphasis is mine)

Regardless of what we eventually decide for our future war fighting capability, it seems clear to me that we need to educate the public on the COIN side of war. I think this is the responsibility of the White House, but this Administration has totally failed us in educating the public on today’s warfare. Had the Administration been honest about the Iraq War, especially when the new COIN training and operations were introduced in Iraq in 2006, I believe there would be more trust in this Administration and less opposition to the war in 2007.

If, in understanding COIN warfare, you get the idea that war and politics are being mingled, you are correct. Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) and his On War is once again popular in the Army/Marine reading list. Von Clausewitz professed that war and politics were related – “It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.”

The CATO Institute article also noted:

“the American tendency to separate war and politics—to view military victory as an end in itself, ignoring war’s function as an instrument of policy.”

I believe that attitude became prominent during WWII when we, Britain, and the USSR declared that we would accept only the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers. Politics (other than dividing Europe between the West and the USSR) was removed from that war; only unconditional surrender during war could end hostilities. WWII was also our last war that had clearly defined goals; it was the last war that we clearly won; and it was the last war declared by Congress. Small wars do not usually have these benefits.

We play Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” We let the bad guys shoot first, but return fire with devastation and demand unconditional surrender. I admit that Bush believes in shooting first on suspicion, but that is not America. Again, the White House needs to educate the public that small wars are a part of America’s international politics and that both are sometimes required to protect America and our interests. Each war is not an end in itself, but a tool. The goal is to protect America.

Conclusions

We face the probability of small wars, COIN wars, or nation building wars and we need to keep and perfect our capability to fight those wars. At the same time we must prepare for conventional war. The probability of facing a conventional war is less than for the small wars, but the risks of failure is far greater. Russia and China will not always remain militarily weak. At the least, competition for the dwindling energy resources will pit us against those two nations and the emerging strength of others such as India, Brazil, and possibly even our current friends in Europe. Expecting large, conventional wars is depressing; not preparing to them is suicidal. It appears we need both war fighting capabilities.

Yet our Army and Marines are being stressed to the point that senior officers are voicing worries about our fulfilling our commitments in Afghanistan and elsewhere and the degradation of our overall defense posture. I am more concerned about the longer term impact on the Army and Marine forces. We hear that enlistment standards have been purposefully lowered plus aggressive goals for recruitment centers have caused them to bend the rules. That alone lowers the professionalism at a time when our military needs the best personnel. Captains and majors are the key players in COIN operations and both the Army and Marines have significant shortfalls that will grow as the ground forces expand as planned through 2013. We are losing battle-experienced junior officers at an alarming rate. Incentives will cause some to remain in near constant battle, but many will leave and not return. It can only get worse as the war goes on.

The CATO Institute states the problem well:

“The policy question is not whether the United States should continue to maintain its hard-won and indispensable conventional primacy but whether, given the evolving strategic environment, it should create ground (and supporting air) forces dedicated to performing operations other than war, including counterinsurgency, or simply abandon direct military intervention in foreign internal wars altogether unless there is a compelling national security interest at stake and intervention commands broad public support.”

Although we could probably rebuild our forces to the levels we had in the relatively peaceful 1990’s, the stresses of Iraq and Afghanistan would act against more volunteers without significant and new incentives. Eventually we will have to admit the costs of a larger military and the new equipment needed, plus the equipment lost and destroyed and not now budgeted for replacement. I believe it would be difficult to build to that level and even that level appears inadequate to fight both conventional and COIN wars.

Lt. Gen. Chiarelli states the problem succinctly:

“Many proposals have been presented for maintain­ing the quality of the force, but if none of those work, we may not know until it is too late. The executive branch, Congress, the armed forces, and indeed the American population need to look now at the type of military we want for the future and the price we are willing to pay to ensure our national security.”

We need to consider the draft. I’ve been against the draft because I do not think it is compatible with our high-tech conventional war, or the complexity COIN wars. However, I see no other alternative to meeting our overall defense needs without the draft. There are probably methods and organizational structures that would effectively combine a draftee force into a more professional volunteer core force but we need a national discussion to get there.

Here’s my list of highly unpopular topics (in order of unpopular to more unpopular:

• Any kind of war, especially wars without clear targets
• Paying for wars
• Wars that last longer than a few years
• The Draft

And yet this is a list of what I believe we can expect and what we need to do. The draft would also introduce, to the citizenry, men and women who have real experience with the military. An America at the mall and an America at war would begin to understand each other and make better choices. Some might even enter politics and help put a brake on new and unnecessary small wars.

But until then, I don’t see the American public initiating any part of my unpopular list. It would have to begin with Congress and Congress won’t do anything unless the public is mostly in favor. Although retired, my military and engineering training conditioned me to seek solutions. I can’t find one here. Talk about Catch-22.