Two new and important books are now available.

Two new and important books are now available.

One is Col. Douglas Macgregor's (USA ret.) "Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights." It is available from Naval Institute Press at Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Transformation-Under-Fire-Revolutionizing-America/dp/0275981924/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239371194&sr=8-1. (Ignore the very un-transformational F-22 on the cover; it's amazing the junk publishers take license to put on their covers.)

The other is Maj. Donald Vandergriff's (USA ret.) "Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow's Leaders." This is available from Praeger Security Internationals and available at Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Manning-Future-Legions-United-States/dp/0313345627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239371555&sr=1-1.

Material below summarizes these two important books.

Find a review of Don Vandergriff's important book on manpower and leadership at http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/2009/04/06/another-vandergriff-book/. The review is written by William S. Lind; the text follows this introduction.

This month's "Armed Forces Journal" features as its cover article a new piece by Doug Macgregor. Find "Refusing Battle" at http://www.afji.com/. The text of this important article on American national strategy is also below, after Lind's review.

Both make excellent reading. All three authors mentioned here are contributors to "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress." This new anthology, now released by Stanford University Press, is also available at http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Defense-Meltdown-Pentagon-President/dp/0804769311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239372055&sr=8-1

Reading any of these will help you sort through how to address the decay in America's armed forces and to distinguish between real and phony military reform, the latter now slithering its way through Congress and elsewhere.

On War #299: Another Vandergriff Book

by William S. Lind
April 6, 2009

Don Vandergriff has published another book, which is good news for all who care about the future of the U.S. Army. Titled Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders, Don’s new book brings together many strands of Army reform to create a comprehensive and intelligent reform program.

The book begins by describing the Four Generations of Modern War, which together establish the context in which we can see both where the Army is (in the Second Generation) and what it needs to prepare to fight (Fourth Generation war). Unlike many other descriptions of the Four Generations, Vandergriff’s is generally correct, although I would quibble here and there. Most importantly, he does not fall into the common error of saying the U.S. Army is now a Third Generation military. On the contrary, much of what the book prescribes is intended to move the Army from the Second Generation into the Third, as a necessary step forward facing the Fourth. Cultural change is central to that transformation, and quite properly it is the purpose of much of what Vandergriff proposes.

After a look at the history of manning the U.S. Army, which explains how and why it adopted the Taylorist “industrial age” model, the book makes an important call for “parallel evolution.” Parallel evolution, in which many things change at the same time, is essential for bringing the Army’s culture from the inward-focused, process-driven Second Generation to the outward-focused, result-driven Third Generation. In its absence, all you get is specific, unrelated alterations such as the recent move to brigades (while keeping the fifth-wheel division headquarters) that leave the culture untouched. Instead of reforming, the Army merely reorganizes. Vandergriff rightly points to the reforms of the Prussian Army under Scharnhorst as a model of parallel evolution the U.S. Army might profitably follow (see Charles Edward White’s superb book, The Enlightened Soldier).

When he discusses the key subject of developing leaders, Vandergriff draws on his earlier work at Georgetown (described in his book Raising the Bar), which the Army now calls Adaptive Leader Methodology (ALM). ALM is of central importance to cultural change, because it teaches outward focus. Thanks largely to Don’s missionary work, ALM is spreading in the Army, including to important places such as West Point and the Basic Officer Leader Courses at Ft. Benning and Ft. Sill.

Manning the Future Legions is optimistic about the future of the U.S. Army, but it also raises the question of how optimistic dare we realistically be? As Vandergriff writes, “Proposed reforms to Army culture still avoid changing the system’s legacies, which also serve as the four pillars holding up the (current) cultural structure.” He rightly identifies the “four legacy pillars” as:

1. The up-or-out promotion system
2. Quantity-based vs. quality-based officer accessions
3. Centralized control of the evaluation and promotion system, and
4. A top-heavy officers corps and too many headquarters.”

As Vandergriff states, “As long as these legacies of today’s Army culture remain invulnerable, the service will evolve only slowly, or not at all, and therefore will have trouble in recruiting, developing, and retaining adaptive leaders and soldiers.”

My own view of the Army is that, to borrow from an old European bon mot, while the United States Marine Corps’s situation is serious but not hopeless, the U.S. Army’s condition is hopeless but not serious. I participated as an “outside expert” in one of the Army’s “transformation” exercises, and all I saw were the usual games, despite explicit guidance to the contrary from the Army Chief of Staff.

One thing could change that. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Army units from battalion downward have had to develop an outward-focused, Third Generation culture in order to succeed in their missions. Officers and soldiers who experienced an outward-focused culture are coming home, where they find still an inward-focused, Second Generation Army. Many are responding by getting out. But some will stay, and they will work for reform. They know there is a better way.

Don Vandergriff’s pioneering intellectual work, readily available in his books, will give Army combat veterans the ammunition they need to make reform real. Here’s hoping they read the books, including this one.

To interview Mr. Lind, please contact (no e-mail available):

Mr. William S. Lind
Free Congress Foundation
1423 Powhatan Street, # 2
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Direct line: 703 837-0483


___________________________________________________________________
http://www.afji.com/

April 2009

Armed Forces Journal

Refusing Battle
The alternative to persistent warfare

BY COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET.)

“Sir, I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is
becoming really impossible ... if they (Sunni and Shiite) are not prepared
to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear
out. ... At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of
living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to
get anything worth having.”

Winston Churchill to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Sept. 1,
1922

Despite the seriousness of the present economic crisis, the greatest danger
to the future security of the U.S. is Washington’s inclination to impose
political solutions with the use of American military power in many parts of
the world where Washington’s solutions are unneeded and unsustainable.
President Barack Obama must arrest this tendency by making pragmatic and
methodical changes to the goals of American military strategy. The Bush
legacy in foreign and defense policy presents Obama with a stark choice:
Will we continue to pursue global hegemony with the use of military power to
control and shape development inside other societies? Or will we use our
military power to maintain our market-oriented English-speaking republic, a
republic that upholds the rule of law, respects the cultures and traditions
of people different from ourselves, and trades freely with all nations, but
protects its sovereignty, its commerce, its vital strategic interests and
its citizens? This essay argues for the latter approach; a strategy of
conflict avoidance designed to make the U.S. more secure without making the
rest of the world less so.

For Americans who’ve lived in a world with only one true military, political
and economic center of gravity — the U.S. — changing how America behaves
inside the international system is not an easy task. Since 1991, Americans
have become so accustomed to the frequent use of American military power
against very weak opponents they seem to have lost their fear of even the
smallest conflict’s unintended consequences.

But the 21st century is no time for the leaders of the U.S. to make
uninformed decisions regarding the use of force or to engage in desperate,
end-game, roll-of-the-dice gambles. Recent events in the Caucasus involving
Russia and Georgia may simply be a foretaste of what is likely to happen
during the 21st century in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the
ancient practice of encouraging one ethnic group to dominate others as a
means of securing foreign imperial power is breeding new conflicts. These
conflicts are likely to resemble the Balkan Wars of the early 20th century,
except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with the
competition for energy, water, food, mineral resources and the wealth they
create. In nations such as Iran and Turkey, states with proud histories,
huge populations under the age of 30 and appetites for more prominence in
world affairs, the influx of wealth from the energy sector will also support
much more potent militaries and, potentially, more aggressive foreign
policies, too.

In this volatile setting, direct American military involvement in conflicts
where the U.S. itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at
risk should be avoided. Otherwise, American military involvement could cause
21st century conflicts to spin out of control and confront Americans with
regional alliances designed to contain American military power; alliances
that but for American military intervention would not exist. It is vital the
U.S. not repeat the mistakes of the British Empire in 1914: overestimate its
national power by involving itself in a self-defeating regional war it does
not need to fight and precipitate its own economic and military decline.

Avoiding this outcome demands new goals for American military power and a
strategic framework that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method
and end-state; a strategy in which American military action is short, sharp,
decisive and rare. Such a strategy involves knowing when to fight and when
to refuse battle.

LEE’S CHOICE

On June 24, 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia — 74,000 strong
— completed its crossing of the Potomac River and pushed northward into
Pennsylvania toward Gettysburg. Six days later, when Robert E. Lee, the
Confederate commander, arrived in front of Gettysburg, he discovered to his
dismay that a much larger and better equipped Union Army — 115,000 strong —
confronted him in strong defenses on the high ground above the town. As an
officer of engineers, Lee knew what this development meant for his army; his
troops would have to attack uphill while the Union troops poured rifle and
artillery fire into them.

Fortunately for Lee, his opponent opted to immobilize itself in defensive
positions. The Army of Northern Virginia was not yet decisively engaged. Lee
still had options.

Lee could move his army away from Gettysburg, placing it between the Union
Army and Washington, D.C., an action likely to draw the Union Army out of
its strong defensive positions to attack and eliminate the danger Lee
presented to Washington. Such a fight would occur on terms more favorable to
Lee, increasing the likelihood of yet another Southern victory. A major
Confederate victory on Northern territory would almost certainly have
resulted in Lee’s occupation of Washington, D.C., and maybe even Southern
independence.

Flush with their victory at Chancellorsville seven weeks earlier, Lee and
his troops were spoiling for a fight, and they got the one they did not want
or expect. After repeated charges and the loss of thousands of men, Lee
retreated southward over the Potomac River without interference from the
Union Army, but Lee lost a battle that cost the Confederacy the war.

Lee should have refused battle. Had he done so, he would have kept his army
and its capabilities intact until he could achieve a position of advantage
and with it more favorable conditions for the employment of his force.

LOSING AN EMPIRE

When word reached Britain on Aug. 1, 1914, of Germany’s mobilization for
war, Winston Churchill recorded that of the Cabinet “at least three-quarters
of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel
unless Great Britain was herself attacked, which was unlikely.” The members
knew the English Channel and the massive Royal Navy made a German offensive
against Britain not only unlikely, but impossible.

However, Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, a man who spoke only
English, seldom left England and was contemptuous of foreigners, reached a
different conclusion. He believed moral obligations dictated British
intervention to save its historic enemy, France, from defeat. While
England’s drinking classes sang the jingoistic ballad made popular during
the Boer War, “We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money
too,” Grey warned the House of Commons, “If France is beaten ... and if
Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland and then
Demark ... the most awful responsibility is resting on the government in
deciding what to do.”

The argument was specious. Germany’s war aims had nothing to do with Britain
or the states mentioned. It did not matter. Grey’s emotional appeal to
patriotism, and fear, worked.

When Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, the newly appointed British minister
of war, told the Cabinet its decision to go to war with Germany and
Austria-Hungary meant the British Empire would have to maintain an army of
millions, the war would last for at least three years and that it would be
decided on the continent — not at sea — the Cabinet ministers were
astonished. For reasons that seem baffling now, Britain’s political leaders,
including Churchill, who was first lord of the Admiralty, believed a war
with Germany would be short, and that the Royal Navy — not the British and
French armies — would decide its outcome in a great sea battle with the
German surface fleet. The possibility that Britain’s very small,
professional army could not sustain a war with Germany and Austria for more
than a few months, that Germany would decline to fight on Britain’s terms
(at sea) and that the war on land would consume Britain’s national wealth,
did not seem to occur to most of the Cabinet members until Kitchener made
his presentation.

How could the British leaders have been so misguided in their assumptions?
The British interpreted the world that existed beyond Britain’s global
imperial power structure in ways that flattered their self-image of
limitless money and sea-based power.

Britain should have refused battle and sought strategic conditions more
favorable to the effective use of Britain’s considerable, but still limited,
military and economic resources. Instead, Britain joined a regional
conflict, turning it into a world war; a war Britain, along with France and
Russia would lose until the manpower and industrial might of the U.S.
rescued them from defeat in 1918.

Britain’s human losses were staggering; one in 16 British men aged 15 to 50,
or nearly 800,000, died. Paying for Britain’s victory in World War I led to
a tenfold increase in Britain’s national debt. Paying the interest alone
consumed half of British government spending by the mid-1920s.

Britain fought a war that cost the British people their national power,
their standard of living, and, in less than 20 years, their empire. Had
anyone in London’s leadership stopped to seriously examine what outcome
(end-state) it was they wanted to achieve with military power (purpose) and
what military capabilities (method) were at their disposal to do so, it is
doubtful they would have reached the decisions they did.

PRICE OF VICTORY

The lesson is a straightforward one: When national military strategy fails
to answer the questions of purpose, method and end-state, military power
becomes an engine of destruction not just for its intended enemies, but for
its supporting society and economy, too. Regardless of how great or how
small the military commitment, if the price of victory is potentially
excessive, then the use of force should be avoided. After all, the object in
conflict and crisis is the same as in wrestling: to throw the opponent by
weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance without risking
self-exhaustion.

This strategy served President Franklin Roosevelt well during the years
leading up to and including World War II. Roosevelt concluded it made no
sense to challenge the German war machine on its own terms. That was a job
Roosevelt left to Stalin. Instead, Roosevelt avoided German strength and
moved his forces through North Africa and Italy waiting for the combined
effect of massive Soviet offensives and Anglo-American bombing campaigns to
weaken the Nazi grip on Europe to the point where France could be invaded.
When American and allied forces stormed ashore at Normandy, the strategic
outcome in Europe was effectively decided.

But even when conflict is forced upon the U.S., as it was in World War II or
Korea in 1950, there are still opportunities to halt ongoing, inconclusive
military operations before they consume America’s military, economic and
political reserves of strength. This was Eisenhower’s rationale for ending
the Korean conflict in 1953. Unfortunately, chief executives such as
Eisenhower are rarer than hens’ teeth.

Before committing to military action, political and military leaders must
always measure what they might gain by what they might lose. Even when wars
are won and the victorious military achieves total military domination of
its opponent — the case in Iraq and Afghanistan — the population of the
“defeated” country may not submit to the victor’s demands, particularly if
the victor insists on garrisoning his troops in the defeated population’s
territory. If the foreign military presence provokes local hostility — and
it usually does — the result will be more fighting, not stability. These are
all good reasons for the U.S. to end conflicts on terms the defeated party
can accept and disengage U.S. forces; even when the terms may not meet all
of America’s security needs. What militates against this line of reasoning
is the delusion of limitless national power and the unhealthy condition of
national narcissism that thrives on it.

The Johnson administration’s decision to intervene with large-scale
conventional forces in Vietnam rested on this delusion. Even worse,
President Lyndon Johnson subscribed to the idea that whatever military
action the American government initiated, it was inherently justified on
moral grounds, even if, as in the case of Vietnam, the military action
turned out badly for the U.S. Tragically, Johnson’s wish-based ideology made
retreat from inflexible and irrational policy pronouncements impossible when
they no longer made sense.

Wish-based ideology is dangerous because it imagines a world that does not
really exist; the kind of world described in 1992 by the late Defense
Secretary Les Aspin, where the U.S. armed forces are employed to “punish
evil-doers,” or Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s idea that armed forces not
engaged in fighting should export democracy-at-gunpoint. Not only has this
ideological thinking and behavior since 1991 failed to create stability
around the world, it has made the U.S. and its allies less secure.
Understanding why means leaving the 20th century’s wars of ideology behind.

The U.S. and Europe spent most of the 20th century coping with the forces of
nationalism and social change unleashed by the French Revolution and Karl
Marx's mock scientific theory of history as the systematic unfolding of a
predictable, dialectical process.

The Bolsheviks, later called communists, tried to unite the two in an
attempt to perfect human society through force of arms at home and abroad.
Fascists were ideological opportunists who borrowed from the right and the
left seeking to fuse society’s classes inside mass movements of radical
nationalism.

The failed utopian projects resulting from both European ideologies turned
the 20th century world into a battlefield littered with the ruins of great
civilizations. Communism and fascism exalted territorial conquest and
occupation; a form of total warfare that pushes violence to its utmost
limits and rejects the deliberate employment of military means to achieve
anything less than the opponent’s complete annihilation — what Stalin and
Hitler called “victory.”

Such war aims are not limited to changing the opponent’s policy stance to
create the basis for a new status quo all sides can support. The aim of
total war is to replace the defeated government and its supporting society
with ones subservient to the victor’s. It is the mentality that created the
Warsaw Pact. This mind-set is dangerous and incongruous with the strategic
interests of the American people and the realities of the 21st century.
Political and military leaders who talk and think in these terms should be
rejected. The disproportionate use of military force and the unlimited
political aims it supports will not protect or safeguard American interests
or the interests of our allies.

In the 21st century, the “total victory” construct as it equates to the
establishment of Western-style governments and free-market economies
subservient to the U.S. is counterproductive. In the Middle East, as well as
in most of Africa, Latin America and Asia, “damage control,” not “total
victory,” is the most realistic goal for U.S. national military strategy.

NEW GOALS AND DIRECTIONS

America’s experience since 2001 teaches the strategic lesson that in the
21st century, the use of American military power, even against Arab and
Afghan opponents with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air
defenses, can have costly, unintended strategic consequences. Put in the
language of tennis, the use of American military power since the early 1960s
has resulted in a host of “unforced errors.” Far too often, national
decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act,
not by a rigorous application of the purpose/method/end-state strategic
framework.

Decision-making of this kind explains why Operation Iraqi Freedom never had
a coherent strategic design. The capability to remove Saddam Hussein was
enough to justify action in the minds of American leaders who assumed that
whatever happened after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, American military and
civilian contractor strength would muddle through and prevail. It’s also why
U.S. forces were kept in Iraq long past the point when it was clear that the
American military and contractor presence in Iraq was a needless drain on
American military and economic resources.

The superficial thinking informed by a fanciful view of American history and
international relations that gave birth to the occupation of Iraq is not a
prescription for American prosperity and security in the 21st century. The
recently annunciated military doctrine known as “persistent warfare” is a
case in point.

Persistent warfare advocates the use of military power to change other
peoples’ societies through American military occupation. It’s a dangerous
reformulation of Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy for the bloody excesses of the
French Revolution summed up in his slogan, “Until all men are free, no man
is free.” Fortunately for the American people, President George Washington
rejected Jefferson’s enthusiasm for an American alliance with Revolutionary
France, an alliance that would have invited the destruction of the new U.S.
“Twenty years’ peace, combined with our remote situation would enable us in
a just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth,” Washington argued in
1796.

Washington understood the importance of making prudent choices in national
military strategy at a time when the economic and political development of
the United States was extremely fragile. Today, America’s economic woes
along with the larger world’s unrelenting drive for prosperity creates the
need for new choices in national military strategy. The most important
choice Obama must make is to reject future, unnecessary, large-scale, overt
military interventions in favor of conflict avoidance; a strategy of
refusing battle that advances democratic principles through shared
prosperity — not unwanted military occupation.

ISLAMIST TERRORISM

This strategy does not change America’s policy stance on Islamist terrorism.
The exportation of Islamist terrorism against the U.S. and its allies must
remain a permanent red line in U.S. national military strategy. Governments
that knowingly harbor terrorist groups must reckon with the very high
probability that they will be subject to attack. However, long-term,
large-scale American military occupations, even to ostensibly train
indigenous forces to be mirror images of ourselves, are unwise and should be
avoided. Iranian interests gained prominence in Baghdad because Tehran’s
agents of influence wear an indigenous face while America’s agents wear
foreign uniforms and carry guns. And Iran will remain the dominant actor in
Iraq so long as it maintains even the thinnest veil of concealment behind
the façade of the Maliki government and its successors.

As a declaratory goal of U.S. military strategy, conflict avoidance is not
merely a restatement of deterrence or a new affirmation of collective
security. It is a policy stance that stems from a decent regard for the
interests of others, regardless of how strange and obtuse these interests
may seem to Americans. It is an explicit recognition by Washington that no
one in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Latin America wants American troops
to police and govern their country, even if American troops are more
capable, more honest and provide better security than their own soldiers and
police. The question for Americans is how to translate the goal of conflict
avoidance into operational strategy: What will the U.S. do if it is not
compelled to fight?

Conflict avoidance would appear to require action on several levels. First,
conflict avoidance requires that America continue to maintain the military
power to make a direct assault on U.S. and allied security interests
unthinkable and then pursue peaceful relations with the peoples of the
world, so the danger of war involving the world’s great military powers is
reduced and contained. America already has a surplus of military power for
this stated purpose. American nuclear power is overwhelming, and any state
or subnational group that contemplates the use of nuclear weapons against
the U.S. or its allies understands that nuclear weapons and weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in general have “return addresses” on them with ominous
consequences for the user. American conventional military power is no less
impressive when it is employed within an integrated, joint framework that
exploits capabilities across service lines.

What America lacks is an efficient and effective organization of military
power for the optimum use of increasingly constrained resources. More
specifically, the 1947 National Security Act reached block obsolescence
years ago.
Second, conflict avoidance balances the need to make the U.S. secure against
the danger of making the rest of the world less so. Instead of defining
events around the world as tests of American military strength and national
resolve, and rather than dissipating American military resources in remote
places to pass these alleged tests, the U.S. should define its role in the
world without feeling compelled to demonstrate its military power.
Otherwise, the U.S. runs the risk that other states, not the U.S., will
dictate America’s strategic agenda.

Though as privately pro-British as his cousin President Theodore Roosevelt,
Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of declaring war against Germany on
behalf of another state, including Britain. He would not make President
Woodrow Wilson’s mistake and commit millions of Americans to an ideological
crusade that promised no tangible strategic benefit to the American people.
Put more bluntly, Roosevelt would not commit political suicide for
Churchill.

>From 1939 to 1942, Roosevelt resisted Churchill’s considerable powers of
persuasion, providing only the assistance Britain needed to survive and
nothing more. When Hitler turned on the Soviet Union, Hitler’s closest ally
until June 1941, Roosevelt reasoned he could afford the time to build up
American strength while the Nazis and communists exhausted themselves in an
ideological war of mutual destruction.

Even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt declared war only on
Japan. Roosevelt had no intention of declaring war on Germany if it could be
avoided. It was Hitler who — in an essentially romantic gesture of
solidarity with Japan unanimously opposed by the German General Staff —
declared war on the U.S.

HANDLING RUSSIA

In the Caucasus, a region where political structures are closer in character
to the Mafia organizations of Al Capone than Jeffersonian democracy, it
makes no sense for the U.S. and its European allies to extend security
guarantees. Russia’s security interests in many of the states that border it
are legitimately paramount. American interests in these regions shrink to
insignificance next to Russia’s.

Whereas Russia’s proximity to Georgia and Ukraine ensures Russia’s ability
to effectively and efficiently apply military power, the U.S. and its allies
are no more able to guarantee Georgian or Ukrainian security than Britain
could guarantee Poland’s security against Nazi and Soviet military
intervention in 1939. In eastern Ukraine beyond the Dnieper River and the
Crimea, where the population is unambiguously Russian in language, culture
and ethnicity, it would be folly to think that a guarantee of NATO military
assistance would be interpreted as anything but a threat.

Third, when the U.S. confronts crises and conflicts, American armed forces
should be committed on terms that favor the U.S. where the use of military
power can achieve tangible strategic gains for the nation. As Churchill
argued in 1909: “It would be very foolish to lose England in safeguarding
Egypt. If we win the big battle in the decisive theater, we can put
everything else straight afterwards. If we lose it, there will not be any
afterwards.”

American military interventions have routinely violated this line of
reasoning. In Vietnam, American military assistance failed for many reasons,
chiefly because the Saigon government was thoroughly corrupt and indifferent
to the security of its own people. All the military might at America’s
disposal, whether the North Vietnamese military enjoyed sanctuaries in
neighboring states or not, was never enough to rescue the incompetent South
Vietnamese government from its eventual conquest by North Vietnamese
communists.

America’s decision to garrison Iraq after its initial goals of removing
Saddam and eliminating WMD were achieved added little, if anything, of
strategic value to American security, but the presence of so many
conventional American forces did present America’s enemies in the Muslim
world with an opportunity they would have otherwise missed: the chance to
directly attack U.S. forces, damage American military prestige and exhaust
American economic resources while strengthening their own. By the beginning
of 2008, the most serious unanticipated outcome of this exposure was a
monthly bill of $12 billion to maintain U.S. forces in support of a
Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad that was and is effectively tied to
Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has become a co-belligerent for the various
factions and peoples — Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Saudi, Sunni or Shiite Arabs
— struggling for power inside Iraq. These realities explain why the Bush
administration was reluctant to remove large numbers of troops from Iraq.
The current status quo is not merely fragile, it will not survive the
withdrawal of U.S. military power.

WHAT ABOUT AFGHANISTAN?

In consideration of what to do next about Afghanistan’s rapidly
deteriorating situation, current discussions in Washington are dominated by
people who advocate increasing force levels and plunging these forces into
Pakistan’s tribal areas. Yet a more sober analysis suggests the real problem
with Afghanistan resides in Kabul, another corrupt and ineffective
government unworthy of American military support.

The key questions missing from discussions in Washington about Iraq or
Afghanistan since 2001 include: Where is the legitimate government that
asked for help from the U.S. in defeating the internal armed challenge to
the government’s monopoly of control over the means of violence and
political power? Legitimacy is not exclusively a function of elections.
Legitimacy is also defined by a government’s competence to win and hold
power in ways that benefit American and allied interests.

Where are the organized indigenous forces defending the legitimate
government that must conduct the operations? While U.S.-provided training,
equipment and advisers can significantly improve a partner state’s
capabilities, there must already be an indigenous force to equip, indigenous
fighters to train and a senior leadership echelon to advise. And the costs
of long-term U.S. military assistance should be realistically assessed. Had
any of these questions been raised and accurately addressed within the
purpose/method/end-state framework, it is doubtful American military action
would have followed the course it did after Sept. 11.

Treating conflict avoidance as a declared strategic goal should give pause
to those in Washington who think counterinsurgency is something American
military forces should seek to conduct. For outside powers intervening in
other peoples’ countries as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called
counterinsurgency has not been the success story presented to the American
people. Making cash payments to buy cooperation from insurgent groups to
conceal a failed policy of occupation is a temporary expedient to reduce
U.S. casualties, not a permanent solution for stability.

Lord Salisbury, one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers, told his
colleagues in the House of Commons “the commonest error in politics is
sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” Salisbury’s words should resonate
strongly with Americans today. America’s scientific-industrial base and the
military power it supports give American policies and interests global
influence, but the deliberate use of American military power to bring
democracy to others in the world under conditions that never favored its
success has actually weakened, not strengthened, American influence and
economic power.

It is crucial that choices among competing resource allocations in defense
be illuminated by a much clearer perception of their likely strategic
impact. Strategy and geopolitics always trump ideology, and military action
is not merely a feature of geopolitics and statecraft, it’s the employment
of it.

The choices the new president makes among various military missions will
ultimately decide what national military strategy America’s military
executes. Of the many missions he must consider, open-ended missions to
install democracy at gunpoint inside failed or backward societies along with
unrealistic security guarantees to states and peoples of marginal strategic
interest to the U.S. are missions America’s military establishment cannot
and should not be asked to perform.

Today, America’s share of the total world gross national product is roughly
32 percent, substantially less than its 49 percent share of 40 years ago.
Yet the U.S., like the British Empire 100 years ago, continues to lead the
world in the creation of wealth, technology and military power. And, thanks
to American naval and aerospace supremacy, America retains the strategic
advantage of striking when and where its government dictates, much as
Britain did before World War I.

But like Britain’s resources in 1914, American resources today are not
unlimited. Years of easy tactical military victories over weak and incapable
nation-state opponents in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq have created the
illusion of limitless American military power. This illusion assisted the
Bush administration and its generals in frustrating demands from Congress
for accountability; allowing politicians and generals to define failure as
success and to spend money without any enduring strategic framework relating
military power to attainable strategic goals.

The result is an unnecessarily large defense budget of more than $700
billion and military thinking that seeks to reinvigorate the economically
disastrous policies of territorial imperialism. Unchecked, the combination
of these misguided policies will increase the likelihood the U.S. follows
the path of Britain’s decline in the 20th century. Though Britain was not
defeated militarily in World War I, it squandered its blood and treasure on
a self-defeating war with Germany in 1914 along with a host of imperial
experiments in the aftermath of World War I, all of which were political,
military and economic disasters for the British people. A strategy of
refusing battle that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method and
end-state in the conduct of military operations is the best way for the U.S.
to avoid following in the footsteps of the British Empire into ruin. AFJ

COL. DOUGLAS MacGREGOR (Ret.) is a retired Army colonel. The views expressed
in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Defense
Department or the U.S. government.