Arms and influence

Proportionate to what?

IN THE NEWS
The violence in Lebanon has sparked a moral debate in the blogosphere. What is the correct amount of violence to apply, against which targets, in conflicts like the one between Israel and Hezbollah?

While I'm all for clear moral reasoning in military affairs, I think a lot of this debate is fundamentally misconceived. Moral reasoning depends on a clear understanding of the situation where morality is supposed to apply. In other words, the devil is truly in the details. To use the Philosophy 101 example of this principle, it is generally wrong to lie, but most rational beings would agree that it's not wrong to lie to Nazis about the Jews hiding in your attic.

Moral questions about Israel's recent conduct, therefore, have to start with some understanding of the nature of the war itself. Unfortunately, these operational details seem to be lost on most of the people involved in this debate. The differences between conventional warfare and counterinsurgency, between conventional warfare and counterterrorism, and between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are significant. These are three different types of warfare, each posing different strategic and moral challenges. Israeli civilian and military leaders are certainly aware of these differences, after fighting a few conventional wars against Arab armies, countless counterterrorist operations against Palestinian enemies, and a counterinsurgency war (of a distinctly urban character) in Lebanon.

However, the arguments over whether Israel's attempt to "break the back" of Hezbollah seem to miss these distinctions altogether. Here's an example from Captain's Quarters:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn't mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars. Part of the reasons nations build strong militaries is to deter people from committing aggressive acts against them. The United States did not build the military it has just to provide "proportionate" reponse. Such a limitation would invite any tinpot dictator or kleptocrat to attack us, knowing that we would only respond in proportion to their ability to attack. It makes every fight even-up from the beginning, odds that would encourage a lot more fighting, not less.

Of course, Israel isn't fighting a tinpot dictator or kleptocrat. It's not even fighting a state. Instead, its enemy is an armed political movement, fired by religious enthusiasms. Although Hezbollah's leaders are not lunatics, deterrence doesn't work quite the same as it once did between Israel and Egypt.

The Captain's Table also makes the outlandish accusation that "the world" (whoever that is) expects Israel to "fight with one hand tied behind its back." That statement bears no resemblance to the criticisms of the Olmert government's strategy I've read. Instead, "the world" (if by that we mean critics of what Israel is doing in Lebanon) expect Israel to fight Hezbollah as if it were not a conventional army. Blowing up bridges and power stations might injure a conventional military force, dependent on the economic and physical infrastructure in the theater of operations. The tragedies that befalls civilians living in the combat zone might be unavoidable, as they certainly were when the Allies invaded France in 1944. (The author of Sicilian Notes makes much the same point: "Nobody today complains about the thousands of dead French civilians from the liberation of Normandy and it would be self-evidently ludicrous to do so.") However, the death of innocent bystanders, and the loss of their property, has almost no bearing on the conflict itself.

However, in southern Lebanon, these same operational methods--blowing up bridges and power plants--will have far less effect on Hezbollah than it did on the Wehrmacht. These attacks also risk driving many Lebanese into the arms of Hezbollah, and creating the kind of political chaos in which Hezbollah has traditionally thrived.

In a similar vein to Captain's Table, TigerHawk argues the following:

The left claims that the powerful states of the world, especially the United States and Israel, need not fear for their security because they can use their military power to deter aggression. To a post-Cold War lefty, the magic of deterrance supposedly obviates the need to intervene preemptively, or to remove regimes that commit "petty" acts of war against us or even declare themselves to be our enemy. See, e.g., the most frequently offered reasons why we should not have removed Saddam, or should not consider military options to deal with Iran. We can, after all, obliterate any power that actually attacks us, so why worry?

What your basic anti-defense lefty does not admit, however, is that effective deterrance requires not only the capability to retaliate, but that the threat to retaliate be credible. The former without the latter is worthless.

Stripping the snide rhetoric about "anti-defense lefties" out of these statements, you're left with another argument for Israel's practical and moral need to deter potential enemies. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning violates the basic Clausewitzian dictum about warfare: it's supposed to engineer a particular political outcome. TigerHawk races from the action (retaliation for kidnappings and rocket attacks) to a presumed result (deterrence), without checking the political roadmap to see if that's where Israel has actually arrived.

Undoubtedly, people commenting on guerrilla warfare and terrorism often make the mistake of sounding as though any retaliation is bad: Military responses just set off a cycle of violence. You're just playing into the hands of the enemy. And so forth. If you listened to some of the worst offenders (who may be the "lefties" with whom TigerHawk takes issue), events like the routing of the Taliban in 2001 may be a bit of a surprise. (The problem in Afghanistan wasn't the US/NATO invasion, but the incomplete effort that let the Taliban survive, regroup, and counterattack.)

On some occasions, these warnings about retaliation are appropriate. Unless Israel plans on occupying Lebanon again, the current conflict will not wipe Hezbollah from the map. (Even if Israel did occupy Lebanon, that outcome would be doubtful.) Instead, it has created greater uncertainty about security along its northern border, particularly now that a lot more Lebanese truly hate Israel with a passion they didn't have before a few days ago. Israel has granted Hezbollah a de facto legitimacy, to the point where Hezbollah leaders can seize the headlines by agreeing to a multi-national force deployed in southern Lebanon to keep the two combatants apart. To the extent that Hezbollah acts as a proxy for Syrian or Iranian ambitions, Israel has also shown how it can be baited into an overreaction, something that both Syrian and Iranian leaders can certainly use to their own advantage.

For these, and a few other reasons I'd mention if I had more time to write this post, the action (retaliation) is not producing the political result desired. Hezbollah may have lost a significant number of its fighters, but it stands to gain politically in ways that counterbalance any manpower or material losses.

However, it's not merely the defenders of Israel who can't put the moral discussion on a firm, factual basis. A similar discussion in Kenneth Anderson's blog talks as if just war doctrine should be applied the same way to all forms of conflict. Anderson makes some excellent points, such as these:

That said, much of the comment on proportionality in Israel's war aims in the Lebanon conflict has been based around the assumption that it must be proportional to the immediate incidents which sparked retaliation - the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as hostages and the most immediate rocket attacks upon civilians. As noted above as a matter of moral theory, the response to aggression is not predicated upon the triggering incident, but instead upon the threat presented - the evaluation of which lies in the hands of a state and its leadership.

However, Anderson gets so bogged down in just war theory that you emerge from his discussion with little sense of how you'd apply it to this particular conflict. Sure, the sporadic rocket attacks themselves don't rise to the level of a severe cassus belli, but do the attacks in toto (along with kidnappings and cross-border raids) amount to a severe threat to Israel? And, just as importantly, is Israel's strategy actually going to make it safer? If you read first-hand accounts of the war in Lebanon, such as this heart-breaking piece from Salon, you'd be a cold soul if you did not ask the obvious question: What justifies this level of bloodshed and destruction, suffered as much by civilians as Hezbollah fighters?

Crooked Timber hits closer to the mark, but this post isn't exactly a bullseye. While the "war of the flea" doesn't give guerrillas and terrorists a carte blanche, it'd be silly to take the counterargument--kidnapping and hiding among civilians--is always wrong. How different is the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers from the normal taking of prisoners in wartime? The distinction may be there, but it's not as clear-cut as some might think. How could guerrillas operate at all, if they did not, to use Mao's famous phrase, swim like revolutionary fish amidst the sea of the population? As this post from Obsidian Wings said, "I'm not certain how to best approach the problem of fighting an asymmetric opponent, but I'm certain that strengthening his strengths and shoring up his weaknesses isn't the ideal way to go about it."

Certainly, making it difficult for the "revolutionary fish" to hide is a lot different than boiling the sea until everything in it dies. Ultimately, we come back to the basic problem with Israel's strategy: it's not justified, morally or practically, for the result it's achieving. Hezbollah's "back" won't be "broken." Israel has made its case that Hezbollah is still a state-within-a-state, but it hasn't helped the Lebanese state to deal with this problem. Instead, it has done the reverse, plunged a country that had recovered from one of the nastiest civil wars back into something resembling those dark days. Lebanon has not regressed all the way back to where it was in 1983, with Druze, Shi'ite, and Christian militias warrning unchecked with one another. However, having failed to descend to the ninth level of hell doesn't make the first level of hell any less pleasant for the people living there.

Recruitment

IN THE NEWS

So why hasn't the Bush Administration acknowledged the dangerous military overstretch that the Iraq war has created, and step up recruitment efforts? Short of reviving the draft, there are other measures that would ease the strain on the US Army and Marines. Even after giving recruiters aggressive quotas, activating the stop-loss option, and exercising other, less above-board options, the more public efforts to sustain US war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have not even been tried.

During World War II, when the Draft Board enrolled young Americans into mandatory military service, the US government still pushed hard to increase voluntary enlistment. The emotional, often lurid appeals to civic duty in enlistment posters are now famous icons of American history.

In contrast, public appeals for enlistment in the current "Global War on Terror," "The Long War," or whatever we're calling this week, look the same as they did before the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon's TV and magazine ads for recruitment have not changed. The recruitment page from the US Marine Corps web site contains nary a picture of 9/11 or Iraq. (Instead, the Marines have a Flash-based gallery of their most famous campaigns and leaders.)

Clearly, leaders in the White House and Congress are uncomfortable making a public appeal for enlistment. Appealing to the American conscience would highlight the paucity of sacrifices that the wealthy and powerful seem to be making themselves. Worse, it would call into question the political basis of the Iraq war itself. As George III once did, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy, and inexpensive war, and is now unwilling to own up to the harsher realities.

Instead of stirring recruitment posters, the only icon of the post-9/11 war effort is the shopping bag icon that appeared in many store windows in the Christmas 2001 season. If a single picture ever were truly worth a thousand words, that image certainly qualifies.

Fear God, dread naught.

IN THE NEWS
Lawyers, Guns, and Money has been on a roll lately, and their recent posts posts about the battle of Jutland are no exception. (Click here, here, and here for the first three in this series.)

Aside from being just plain good reading, it's also worth remembering Jutland in light of current events. Two decades after Jutland, this kind of battle was already largely obsolete. By World War II, the submarine and the airplane both made clashes between surface fleets the exception, not the rule. The Kriegsmarine's menacing battleships, such as the Bismarck (pictured here) turned out to be effective raiders on Allied shipping, not instruments of sea control. Even if the Nazis had built a larger surface fleet, the Allies likely would have used submarines and aircraft to hunt them down and kill them long before the German navy could force a Jutland-like decisive battle. That sort of asymmetric escalation would have proved far cheaper, more effective, and more obvious than a tit-for-tat construction of more British and American navy's battleships.

I'm sure you can see where I'm headed with this. It took only 26 years, between the battles of Jutland and Coral Sea (the first naval clash in which the ships never saw each other), to make the dreadnought, the battleship, and their kin obsolete. (Well, not exactly. They still played an important role in supporting amphibious landings at Normandy, Tarawa, and elsewhere.) If US conventional forces were rendered obsolete in most conflicts, such as the counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how long would it take? And would we even recognize the moment of obsolescence when it arrived?

The Bismarck spent a great deal of time in port, including safe havens in the Norwegian fjords, from which it would occasionally sortie for a raid. How different is that picture from conventional American and Iraqi forces, sheltered in their bases, venturing forth only for the occasional raid or patrol?

Denial

IN THE NEWS
Robert at Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted this excellent analysis of the likely Iranian strategy, were there a war between the United States and Iran. Certainly, the Iranian government is likely to fall back on the strategy that was effective in the 1980s: sea denial.

The Iranians seem to be gaming a guerilla at sea approach, focusing on small boat attacks against US warships and neutral shipping. It's pretty unlikely that these could do much damage to a US Navy warship, but they could make life uncomfortable for some of the big tankers. It's unlikely that Iranian attacks could sink one of the supertankers, but they might threaten enough damage to close off, at least temporarily, oil transit by sea in the Gulf.

This is exactly what the Iranians did during the Reagan Administration: keep a credible threat to the supertankers moving through the Persian Gulf. The US Navy might wipe the Iranian navy from the map, and as long as a few light craft survive, the fragile flow of oil through the Gulf would still be at risk.

There's more to high oil prices than this threat, but it weighs heavily on the commodities market. Oil prices stay high, as long as uncertainty is the defining feature of Middle Eastern politics. The Iranian government's demonstrated ability to seize the political and military initiative from the West is generating a great deal of discomfort and uncertainty about Persian Gulf oil supplies. (Of course, the Iraqi insurgency plays its part, too.) Last time, the Iranians were foolish enough to force a confrontation with the US Navy. This time, they might have learned their lesson, keeping a "fleet in being" as yet another trump card to play in their confrontational diplomacy with the West.

EBO in the USA

IN THE NEWS

FX-Based seems to be a blog devoted to the defense of "effects-based operations," or EBOs. To quote from one recent post:

First of all, EBO is a methodology, an approach and a way of thinking used for planning, executing and assessing operations and not a new "theory" of war or a particular strategy. It is not an "easy-win concept", but rather a cross-dimensional, cross-discipline way of thinking that seeks to integrate all the instruments of power to the maximum extent possible.

EBOs, the author argues, are not "miracle strategies," the way some critics have argued. World War II provides some fuel for this debate: was strategic bombing supposed to win the war single-handedly, or was it merely an adjunct to Allied theater strategy?

It would have probably been more costly, in terms of lives and aircraft, to send C-47's full or paratroopers and drop them directly on top of the engine factories and Romanian oil fields. The best way to attack those targets, at the time, was using long-range bombers. Today, we would use stealth bombers with precision weapons and cruise missiles, technologies not available during WWII.

I think it's a mistake to be too humble about what EBO theorists—Duohet and Doolittle before World War II; Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, and their brethren during the Cold War; the "military transformationists" behind the American "shock and awe" strategy in 2003—have thought or said. If effects-based operations are nothing more than an adjunct to traditional military strategy, why does they need their own term (and inevitable acronym)?

There's no doubt that strategic bombing played an important role in defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, as did other forms of strategic warfare. Submarines, an old instrument of strategic warfare, had crippled Japan's war economy long before the Enola Gay dropped the next generation's strategic weapon on Hiroshima.

But that's not what Duohet, Wolfowitz, and other members of the EBO school have been arguing. Instead, they've claimed that attacks on the strategic foundation of an enemy's warmaking ability can single-handedly win a war. Conventional and unconventional munitions dropped on population centers can terrorize civilians. Attacks on the engines of the war economy—factories, railroads, ports, etc.—can bleed the enemy dry.  Destroying communications equipment and killing enemy leaders can erase the enemy's C3I. This ambitious vision of modern warfare fired EBO theorists, not some pedestrian acknowledgement the Allied bombing of Schweinfurt and Ploesti made the German economy less functional.

I'm not sure how comfortable some EBO enthusiasts might be in admitting it, but the most successful practitioner of EBO methods in recent history was President Bill Clinton. Air attacks, not a ground invasion, forced the Serbs to end the wars with their neighbors, eventually leading to the Nuremburg-like trial of Slobodan Milošević.

While you might give Clinton and EBO methods some credit for ending the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, there's a lot more to that particular story. Still, it's a case study with a more successful, less ambiguous ending than strategic bombing in World War II, "shock and awe" in Iraq, the terror bombing of populated areas in the Spanish Civil War, or Operation ROLLING THUNDER. In fact, a lot of the hard-nosed people who might be attracted to EBO often make an argument about the Vietnam War that runs contrary to EBO thinking. According to the Harry Summers-esque view, unless the United States had been willing to escalate ROLLING THUNDER to nuclear levels, the United States could not have defeated North Vietnam without a ground invasion. In other words, even some of the most die-hard defenders of a conventional military strategy in the Vietnam War would not embrace EBO as a surrogate.

The end of battle?

IN THE NEWS
An article in last month's Armed Forces Journal made an argument that I haven't heard for a while: the irrelevance of battle in modern strategy. While that sounds like the sort of musty subject that only military academics at the Army War College or Sandhurst might care about, it's actually a thesis that, if correct, should change everyone's expectations and measures of the utility of war.

The early forms of this thesis have been around for quite a while. Clausewitz, for example, made it clear that the standard concept of battle—two armies locked in a death struggle, waiting for the moment to deliver the decisive blow that would subdue the enemy militarily—could easily be irrelevant. Having lived through the Napoleonic Wars, he had plenty of examples where the victors of battles still lost the war. In 1812, the Grande Armée smashed the Russian Army in a series of dramatic battles (including Borodino, a major part of Tolstoy's War and Peace), occupied Moscow, and later evacuated Russia with a fraction of its original strength. In Spain, French generals came to grief chasing mobile British columns and elusive guerrillas. Napoleon, for all his self-publicity about being the master of the battlefield (a claim certainly supported by victories like Austerlitz), could not transform tactical and operational success into theater and grand strategic victories. Years later, Clausewitz would be writing On War with Napoleon clearly in mind. Battlefield victory, Clausewitz pointed out, doesn't necessarily translate into the political outcome you desire.

However, Clausewitz still believed that battles could manufacture political results, even though he was careful to warn his audience that one does not always flow from the other. John Keegan, a modern military historian and theorist, argued in The Face of Battle that battle itself might have become obsolete. After surveying famous battles like Agincourt and the Somme, Keegan concludes that various technological, strategic, and historical changes have made the notion of a decisive battle an illusion. Writing in the later years of the Cold War, Keegan pointed out that traditional "battle" depends on avoiding military scenarios that risk nuclear escalation. Assuming you overcome that hurdle, the enemy has to agree to meet you on the field of battle, an increasingly rare situation in an age when people have mastered "the war of the flea." The increased cost of war, and its disruptive effects on an increasingly interdependent international system, makes a sustained military effort that much harder.

Keegan was not arguing that war was futile. Instead, what the Armed Forces Journal article described as "the Austerlitz moment"—the dramatic battle that decides a conflict—is increasingly rare. Although Keegan didn't phrase it in quite this way, he in effect argued that the operational level of strategy, the critical middle layer between the tactical and theater levels, has fundamentally changed, changing its focus from battle to smaller, steadier clashes.

Saddam Hussein learned this lesson in the hardest possible fashion. The 1990 invasion of Kuwait was supposed to be the decisive stroke that, by putting Iraqi teeth on the Persian Gulf oil artery, elevated Iraq's position in the Middle East and the world. Instead, his invasion locked Iraqi forces into static defenses, waiting for the US-led coalition to evict him from Kuwait, cripple his army, and force Iraq into a humiliating regimen of international inspections, economic sanctions, and effective loss of control over major portions of its territory (particularly in the north).

Before you conclude that Operation DESERT STORM, a successful battle, disproves Keegan's point, think again. DESERT STORM occurred in a golden moment between the end of the Cold War and the emergence of whatever new international order there was to come. The USSR had collapsed, and its Russian core was economically and politically crippled. No nuclear-armed rival was in a position to oppose a Western military build-up in Saudi Arabia. In fact, most countries had good reason to side with the United States: by threatening the Persian Gulf oil supply, Hussein antagonized the world, not just Iraq's immediate neighbors.

Hussein learned the value of avoiding a direct confrontation. When the invasion of Kuwait inspired anger, not acquiescence, in the United States, Hussein began planning for future conflicts. The inspections, no-fly zones, sanctions, and intelligence operations against the Ba'athist regime gave Hussein a better picture of how the US government operates than he had before DESERT STORM. These experiences gave Hussein an appreciation of the value of bluff, delay, and obfuscation, the cornerstones of his new strategy. If the Americans attacked again, some Iraqi forces would put up a fight, but the rest—particularly the fedayeen units—would go into hiding. Thus was one major part of the current Iraqi insurgency born. While Hussein may be in prison, his fate is by no means decided. Who knows what might happen to him, were the new Iraqi regime to collapse?

Meanwhile, the Iranian theocracy has continued its decades-long campaign of indirect conflict with the United States. The latest crisis, in which Iran is testing its ability to play nuclear brinksmanship, is merely the latest in a series of attacks on the American political, economic, and military flanks. While the seizure of American hostages shortly after the Iranian Revolution might have been as much improvisation as deliberate strategy, other stratagems—Iranian support for the Hezbollah, the Iranian attacks on Persian Gulf shipping in the 1980s, and Iran's nuclear program—have been far more deliberate. Iran is not looking for an "Austerlitz moment," even in a confrontation over its nuclear ambitions. Instead, it continues to antagonize the United States, waiting for American leaders to make a crucial mistake, or simply give up some of its position in the Middle East out of sheer exhaustion. Nuclear weapons don't change the game Iran has been playing for nearly thirty years; they simply increase the odds of success.

For American military planners looking for an "Austerlitz moment," the People's Republic of China may be the last opponent that might reasonably grant that opportunity. However, China is just as experienced with this kind of indirect strategy, and far more skilled at it than the Iranians. Even the recent Chinese naval build-up, a development not widely reported in the Western press beyond a few military journals, is not aiming towards a decisive battle with American forces. To use classic Mahanesque naval terminology, China is more likely to seek "sea denial" than "sea control." If the United States and the PRC got into a shooting war over Taiwan or some other objective, the Chinese navy is practically doomed to lose any naval battle. The important question, however, is how many losses Chinese ships, submarines, and aircraft can inflict on the US Navy before they are defeated—particularly if Chinese forces avoid any major engagements. The Chinese naval expansion raises the possibility of unacceptable American losses in any such war: how many aircraft carriers would have to be sunk before US officials felt the political costs of rescuing Taiwan were too high? How many ships and aircraft could the United States lose in the western Pacific before it felt its overall ability to project naval and air power worldwide strained to unacceptable levels?

In short, wherever Americans look, they see a military landscape that is poor ground for future D-Days, Yorktowns, or Gettysburgs. While military power is hardly obsolete, it is now used to engineer different results than decisive battles. When intimidation fails to produce results, armed conflict is the next logical step in dealing with problems like Al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan, or Iran's threat to build and use nuclear weapons. However, contemporary military action at the crucial operational level of strategy is not about the preparation, conduct, and aftermath of a decisive battle. Operational strategy is, instead, the plane of sustained, smaller-scale actions that cascade towards a political outcome.

Perhaps, then, we should do away altogether with the phrase, "the Battle of," when describing recent history. For example, there was no "Battle of Baghdad" in 2003, or "Battle of Fallujah" in 2004. Major mobilizations of US military power do not necessarily lead to decisive results. In fact, the Iraqi invasion led to the exact opposite of what the Bush Administration intended: rather than resolving the problems of the Middle East in a daring masterstroke, the modern equivalent of Napoleon's march on Austria in 1805, the invasion made the Middle East even more problematic. Worse, the United States is now more deeply entangled in the barbed wire of Middle Eastern politics than it was before. In the 1990s, the important American foreign policy question was how best to use the United States' newfound position as the world's remaining superpower. A decade later, the important question is how a local election in Najaf or Karballah might determine the future exercise of US military power. There may be no better illustration of how the traditional concept of "battle" has become a mirage, luring the likes of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush into dangerous military expeditions.

The power of wishful thinking

IN THE NEWS
While we continue to fight guerrillas and terrorists across the world, the testing of anti-ballistic missile systems continues. The hurdles yet to be crossed sound like the ones that the Pentagon and defense contractors keep promising they will cross any time now. Unfortunately, many of these stubborn problems have been dogging the ABM program for years, even decades.

Don't get me wrong--I'd rather that we figure out how to knock down missiles fired against us by some future adversary. I also fully understand just how long it's likely to take to develop these systems. However, every day that we spend in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other hotspots deepens the impending defense budget crisis that will force Americans to ask themselves, How much can we really afford to spend on ABM programs?

Clausewitzian humor

IN THE NEWS
I'm still trying to parse the phrase Clausewitzian humor, let alone digest that there's a web page about it.

The knives come out

IN THE NEWS
Now that JCS Chair General Richard Myers is headed toward retirement, his part in implementing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's ruinous policies is finally getting the press it deserves. Although The Los Angeles Times quotes many civilians, inside and outside the Pentagon, both active and retired, I'd be very, very surprised if the sources for this article didn't include a substantial number of military officers. They've seen the key lessons of the Vietnam War, once codified in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, smashed to pieces during the Bush Administration. (With, of course, the bizarre acquiescence of Colin Powell himself.) The hollow, disrespected military of the 1970s is returning, like Frankenstein's monster climbing out of the rubble, as the hollow, overstretched military of this decade.

Here what I think that people will, a decade from now, call "the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq":

• The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine was a pretty good idea.
• A war in the Middle East is the worst time to pilot risky experiments about deploying barely enough forces to accomplish the mission.
• It's better to fight under the flag of official alliances than ad hoc coalitions.
• Top military leaders whose job it is to give you their frank advice are not the enemy. The enemy is the enemy. If you can't expect their loyalty, it's time to look for a job outside the Pentagon.
• Be honest with the American public and allies about the nature of the wars we are fighting, the exact composition of the enemy forces, and the measure of victory.
• If you ignore the previous lessons, you risk an international and domestic backlash that will make the Vietnam syndrome feel like a summer cold in comparison to the deep, deep sickness that will impair the armed forces and the society that supports them.

I'm not the only person who has reached these conclusions. If you read contemporary articles in Parameters, the Joint Forces Quarterly, the Army Times, and other publications, you may be surprised how openly their authors talk about these dangers. In the 1980s, these same publications featured heated debates over the Pentagon's hostility towards all things related to special operations and low-intensity conflict. Now, we're hearing critiques that span all of US military affairs--and those are the ones in the official journals. Since the Vietnam War, which inspired the scorn of capable officers ranging from David Hackworth to Harry Summers to John Kerry, I can't remember another time when retired military officers like Anthony Zinni have spoken as consistently, cogently, and angrily about the people in charge of military affairs as they do now.

No wonder, therefore, that Myers is facing a barrage of personal criticism as soon as he pokes his head outside his office in the Pentagon. Some of his former colleagues, I imagine, are helping pass the ammunition.

Military intelligence

IN THE NEWS
I've been a regular reader of Parameters, the official research publication of the US Army War College, for years.There are always at least a couple of gems in each issue--a good sign that the people who are most directly involved in counterinsurgency and counterterrorist operations today are, left to their own devices, pretty bright, open-minded, capable, and dedicated people.

The home page from the Army War College site features a few interesting articles outside Parameters and other research venues. Check out this piece about using the Koran, the Hadith Reports, and Islamic scholarship as weapons against Al Qaeda. Also, read this excellent summary article by Max Manwaring about the lessons we can learn from past conflicts. The underlying message, of course, is that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are not new, so we should not be groping around in the dark while a mysterious, deadly enemy waits to pounce again. If I read these articles correctly, they're intended to be primers for military and civilian professionals new to this topic. Therefore, it's enormously encouraging to see the war against Al Qaeda framed this way. (But I beg the scholars at the War College to drop the acronym GWOT. Please.)

Support the troops. No, really.

IN THE NEWS
David Hackworth and Roger Charles are banging the drum over at Soldiers for the Truth to call attention to the Pentagon's infuriating policies about combat pay. Here's a choice quote from Hackworth's editorial:

So I made a few phone calls. And sure enough, the guys living the good life in places like Kuwait and Qatar – for example that bronzed, handsome lifeguard saving lives at the base pool – get the same $7.50 a day as our heroes facing the bear on the mean streets of Iraq and in the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan.

While I'm glad to hear that the White House has finally increased the outlay for death benefits, I'd still prefer we reward people we've put in harm's way while they're still alive.

Just enough is never enough

IN THE NEWS
You might infer from some of my postings that I don't think Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a very smart person. For example, how could someone with a higher-than-average intelligence say something as boneheaded as, "And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up."

I don't have the means to test Donald Rumsfeld's IQ. I can make two definitive statements:

• Even smart people make mistakes.
• In fact, smart people often fall victim to their own intelligence.

Case in point: the emperor Augustus, the man who transformed the Roman state from a republic to an empire. Sure, the Roman state was already in shambles, so he had a unique opportunity to rebuild and refashion it. However, lesser men might have made a mess of things, but Augustus did not.

Augustus was a brilliant man, and he knew it. Among other problems that taxed his considerable skills, he needed to trim down the Roman army. Sixty or seventy legions, its size during the civil wars, was clearly far too large for the tasks of defending Rome's borders against enemies like the Parthians and Gauls, and policing its interior against slave rebellions, pirates, and other internal threats. A large army was also a threat to whomever ruled Rome, since a popular general could get enough disgruntled troops on his side to re-ignite the civil wars.

Augustus, therefore, became enmeshed in the calculations needed to determine the minimum number of legions needed. He finally arrived, after a few adjustments, at the figure of 28, deployed around the provinces and on the frontiers. Through careful management of crises, Augustus was sure that he could always deploy enough troops to stop an invasion, crush an uprising, or make a punitive attack against an enemy. Equally important, Rome had enough legions to continue military conquest, a vital source of the slaves, land, and trade that kept the Roman economy successful.

He was therefore supremely confident that he could walk a very thin line between having enough legions to protect Rome from without, and having too many legions to keep Rome from collapsing from within (the way it did during the civil wars). The system worked—for a while.

Augustus' plans fell apart with Publius Quinctilius Varus's disastrous campaign against the Germans, who ambushed and destroyed his three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Suddenly, Augustus' delicately balanced system collapsed, forcing major changes to Rome's grand and theater strategies. Augustus abandoned any further plans for conquest and ordered the evacuation of Roman colonies between the Rhine and Elbe rivers. 

The margin of error was far too thin to sustain Augustus' plans. He had outwitted himself--a hard admission for anyone to make. For years to come, people often overheard Augustus mutter, "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" Augustus was more than angry at a single general who led  Rome to an embarrassing defeat. He was thunderstruck by the failure of his own grand design.

Other extremely bright people have built equally delicate strategies, which failed for different reasons. Bismarck's foreign policy for the new German empire depended on maintaining a complex web of alliances and antipathies among the other European powers. While Wilhem I was the German emperor, Bismarck had the latitude he needed to pursue this strategy on his own. Wilhelm II, however, proved far less likely to defer to Bismarck. Even worse, the new Kaiser displayed a combination of personal pugnacity and fixation on expanding the German navy, qualities that doomed Germany's delicate relationship with Great Britain. Bismarck's foreign policy ran just fine as long as Bismarck was running it—a situation that ended just as swiftly as the Roman disaster in the Teutoburg Forest.

History, therefore, provides more than one kind of lesson. Sometimes, we learn about how our weaknesses can lead to failure. At other times, we have to be on guard about our strengths. Augustus and Bismarck both demonstrated how strategies that depend on razor-thin margins of error cannot survive. Rumsfeld may be a genius, or he may be a fool. Either way, he should know better than to pursue a military doctrine based on having just enough troops to defeat the enemy.

Half a league half a league

IN THE NEWS

Today is the anniversary of the publication of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade. It struck me that this anniversary has more resonance than it did in previous years.

The Crimean War was Great Britain's great imperial sideshow. The issues were obscure, confused, and in short, peripheral to British interests. Of course, it started with the same patriotism and optimism that swell before every war, followed by clamor and alarm that can obscure how well the war effort is proceeding. Like our own current war, the Crimean campaign had its dramatic but unproductive siege, Sevastapol. More importantly for drawing contemporary parallels, the war started as a dispute between a Christian power, Russia, and a Muslim one, the Ottoman Empire. Religion and Realpolitik were entangled, and the conflict drew in outside powers, Britain in France, to defend the gates of Christian Europe.

Tennyson's poem had a privileged place in Victorian culture. It took a profoundly stupid military action, the charge at the battle of Balaclava, in a extremely questionable war, and turned it into a moment of romantic heroism. (Once again, as today, you have to always have to acknowledge the difference between the valor and skill of individual soldiers and the questionable judgment of those who command them.) Great Britain faced all the attendant surprises, setbacks, and mistakes that any world power suffers, plus an depeening responsibility for the administration of a growing number of colonies. The Charge of the Light Brigade, therefore, was the palliative for treating many of the anxieties and doubts Britons had about their imperial mission. However confused, bloody, or pointless today's struggle seemed, the 600 at Balaclava showed that there was a point to it all, even if was honorable slaughter in the face of impossible odds. Later generations would adopt a far more jaundiced view of Balaclava and the whole Crimean venture (as brilliantly lampooned in George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman At the Charge). At the time, however, few wanted to admit to themselves that, maybe, Crimea and other ventures were a bad idea, badly executed by buffoons and blowhards like Lord Cardigan.

Today, you might want to raise a glass in remembrance for the 600, the brutal fate they suffered, the orders they carried out in spite of the odds, and the good fortune we have of learning from the mistakes of others.

Legionaries, auxiliaries, and mercenaries

IN THE NEWS
The Roman army consisted of three types of troops: legionaries, strictly "Roman" units, the core of the legion; the auxiliaries, drawn from conquered or allied people, often performing the duties as cavalry or archers at which the Romans were less adroit; and mercenaries, occasionally hired to fill a temporary manpower shortage on campaign, or to handle a highly specialized task. This system worked very well, as centuries of Roman conquests can attest.

Why am I talking about the Roman army under the banner, "IN THE NEWS"? Because the United States now has a military that is moving toward the Roman model.

I don't think many Americans see or understand this transformation. Daily evidence—"contractors" killed in Fallujah, the use of hastily-trained Afghan troops to encircle the Tora Bora stronghold in Afghanistan—don't fit into any larger picture. Not every service is moving in this direction, but the Army certainly is. Meanwhile, the average American is convinced that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by American soldiers, when in reality many traditional military functions are now in the hands of the modern equivalents of auxiliaries and mercenaries.

The Bush Administration did not start these trends. Many functions in the Pentagon had already shifted to private enterprise in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, when civilian parts of the government, such as the CIA's Directory of Operations or the State Department, have needed "security services" or just a few hired guns, they've often hired private parties for these jobs.

However, the Bush Administration has accelerated this trend, and pushed it far beyond what other Administrations might have found acceptable. Some stories are not well known. Most Americans would be surprised to hear that the people who guided remotely-piloted vehicles in Afghanistan, or who flew a helicopter that rescued American troops from a rooftop firefight in Iraq, were private contractors—in other words, mercenaries. Since this part of the Bush Administration's aggressive military transformation is new, kept quiet, and a bit hard to justify, even when direct evidence of it stares us in the face, it's often hard to bring it into focus.

But the evidence is there. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted on making both the Afghanistan and Iraq operations a laboratory for his updated version of the Roman model of warfare. Rejecting the advice of the uniformed members of the Defense Department, he insisted on a smaller force in both cases. Where the heads of the services saw a need for strategic depth and reserve forces, Rumsfeld saw bureaucratic inertia and outmoded thinking. He accused the military of being "the belt and suspenders crowd," over-preparing for every contingency. A small, mobile, technologically superior core, the modern legionaries, would form only part of the fighting force in both invasions.

Rumsfeld's minimalist approach to theater and operational strategy depended on recruiting private firms and local forces to fulfill many critical military tasks. The private industry part of the story remained largely invisible until two events hit the headlines: (1) the deaths of the "contractors" in Fallujah; and (2) the revelation that the employees of CACI and Titan were working as translators and interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Lost in the hubbub about both events was an obvious question: why are private firms patrolling Fallujah, or handling critical parts of counterterrorism? To sharpen the focus a bit, you might ask the following: If the Navy has a world-class language school in Monterey, California, to train people how to speak Arabic, Farsi, and other languages, why are we hiring private companies to handle translation duties?

Privatization is not without its benefits, since it can improve efficiency and lower costs in some areas, in some types of public organizations. However, as the Abu Ghraib scandal and the recent conviction of three American mercenaries in Afghanistan show, privatization also blurs the lines of accountability and authority. The cost savings may also be a lot less than you might expect. When the government underfunds the people who monitor private firms, or the procurement and accounting rules are poorly crafted, the taxpayer may wind up paying more for their services than government employees might have cost. The most famous example of cost inflation, of course, is the ongoing controversy about Halliburton's "cost plus" contracts in Iraq. There are other stories to be told, however, including the real costs paid for the mercenaries hired as bodyguards, quasi-police (for example, the employees of DynCorp who assisted in the raid on Ahmed Chalabi's home), and other "security service" personnel.

The pressure to privatize, of course, increases if you wage wars without having a draft. Once you've committed the Guard and the Reserves, and you still need warm bodies for some jobs, what do you do? Find someone else to do the job. In other words, the Rumsfeldian approach ensures that, if the United States is going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal government will either (1) maintain, and perhaps expand, its dependence on mercenaries, or (2) revive the draft. Legionaries or mercenaries? The government--and by extension, the American public--has to decide.

Since the Bush Administration has failed to convince many allies to stay in Iraq, let alone expand their support, the only other source of help are the local forces whom we can help fund, equip, and train--the auxiliaries. So far, these efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have met with little success. The repeated suicide bombings of police recruits is certainly going to discourage other Iraqis from enlisting in the police and army. (Here's a question for the presidential debates: Why do these attacks keep succeeding?) The Fallujah Brigade failed to hold together. In many cases, American-trained Iraqi military units have retreated, or worse, joined the insurgents.

The worst failures, however, are the least visible ones, foremost of which is the Afghan national army—or, more to the point, the lack thereof. When the Taliban retreated, traditional Afghan warlordism swiftly filled the vacuum. President Karzai is eloquent on defeating the central problem of warlordism in Afghanistan, but so far, he has made little progress. Tragically, Warlordism is responsible for replacing the Taliban problem with new ones: skyrocketing opium production; the continued survival of the Taliban, who has been able to win the temporary tolerance or assistance of some warlord factions; the siphoning of wealth and political legitimacy away from the central government to the warlords; the re-imposition of Islamist laws and taboos in some provinces, including many restrictions on women; the continued opportunity for the pro-Taliban elements in the Pakistani Army and intelligence services to meddle in Afghanistan; the deepening sense of despair throughout country.

In the development of many societies, armies have made the nation, not the other way around. For those who serve in that army, the shared experiences, visibility into the connection between parochial and national interests, and habits of cooperation across traditional boundaries \foster a growing sense of national identity. Clearly, this process is not working in Afghanistan at all.

Looking at the Afghan local forces in the most self-serving way possible--how well do they fight alongside American troops?--the Afghan experience has been a failure so far. If you want to get angry enough to start knocking over furniture, read the section about the siege of Tora Bora in Seymour Hersh's new book. Operation ANACONDA, the encirclement of the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in their mountain stronghold, had many problems. The Marines insisted on fighting with their "organic" artillery and air support, instead of relying on other American services or the Afghan troops for these jobs. (Hersh misses the important of these organic capabilities in the Marine expeditionary units: for example, when you suddenly find yourself pinned down and in need of rescue, you'd rather depend on the helicopter gunships and transports with whom you've trained than someone from another service, or even a different Marine unit, whom you've never even met.) The Marine commanders were right to insist on this point, and perhaps as a bit of a bluff, they asked General Tommy Franks to draft a memorandum of understanding (MOU) approving the Marines' position that they should either fight as they wanted, or largely sit out the battle (which they did). Surprisingly, Franks agreed. Meanwhile, The Air Force—the service responsible for replacing the Marines' air support with their own—its own complaints, primarily about being cut out of the planning for ANACONDA. Adding further to the confusion, some special operations commanders were bypassing Franks and his subordinate, General Frank Hagenbeck, to go straight to the Pentagon and the White House with their opinions on how the battle should be fought.

In other words, the legionaries themselves were unsure how to fight. In that case, even if the Afghan auxiliaries had been fully prepared to play their designated role, the overall operational strategy wasn't working. Even if the Afghan troops had been elite fighters, like the Gurkhas, at best they could only have improvised their way through their part of the battle. They were only have been one moving part in the larger military machine, and the rest of that machine wasn't working. Unfortunately, the Afghan troops were not elite—instead, they were too green for the kind of tough fighting needed to dig out the Taliban and al Qaeda from the Tora Bora caves.

The most frustrating part of the Tora Bora story, however, comes at the end. Franks and Hagenbeck, at the direction of civilians in the Pentagon, made the Afghan forces responsible for the encirclement of the mountain. American troops might assault the cave complexes, but the Afghans would keep any fleeing enemies from escaping. Given the inexperience of the Afghan troops, the shock of the first engagements (the Taliban and al Qaeda fought much harder and more effectively than expected), and the difficulties of spotting troops moving in rough terrain (and often at night), many enemy fighters escaped. Residents of local villages later reported large Taliban units moving through their towns on the way to refuges in Pakistan.

Perhaps Rumsfeld and his supporters are right: the United States has to build a "new model army" consisting of legionaries, auxiliaries, and mercenaries. (The jury is definitely still out on that question.) However, like so many other Bush Administration decisions, this grand experiment was hastily planned, with unclear objectives, then sloppily executed, with too few resources to carry out the strategy as designed, and no contingency plan if the strategy didn't work.

And, in typical Bushesque fashion, the Administration has been anything but frank about this policy. Somewhere in an alternate universe, the man in the White House is addressing the nation: "My fellow Americans, during my Administration, the United States twice committed enough of its armed forces to swiftly, bravely, and effectively overthrow a despotic regime that was our enemy. In one case, the threat had already terribly, tragically hurt us. In the other case, the danger had not yet bitten us, but the White House and Congress decided it was not wise to wait. In both cases, we did not, however, commit enough troops to win the peace. We shattered two societies, then lacked the strength to help put them back again. Here is my plan to ensure that this never happens again…"

That plan might move us further forward into the past, making another great power army on the Roman model. However, before making any decisions, Americans have to be brutally honest about the American way of war:

• We pride ourselves on having an army of citizen soldiers. If we decide to leave that vision behind, it's necessary to have a frank discussion of that question before making the decision. What we cannot afford is to toss a pretty blanket of nostalgia over an ugly reality we don't want to look at. (By the way, the otherwise unsentimental Romans pretended they were still a nation of small farmers who took up arms when needed, when long ago power shifted to the cities, and the army depended on a lot more than its citizen soldiers.)


• Part of the sentimentality we are already displaying about our armed forces focuses on the legionaries, but ignores the auxiliaries and mercenaries, some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are not. When we talk about "our" war dead, we should include the rest of the legion. Not only will be honoring people who are now being forgotten, but we will also be far more clearheaded about how we're actually fighting our wars.


• Americans fight wars well when we prepare for them, and we generally do a poor job of muddling through them. Our outstanding successes in the 20th century—D-Day and Operation DESERT STORM—were also the most carefully planned and thoroughly tested strategies we have executed. Stephen Ambrose's book on D-Day is half about the preparations before the battle, and half about the battle itself. The preparations weren't mere prologue: they were as important for cracking Fortress Europa what happened when the ramps dropped at Omaha Beach. Today, in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are muddling through too much, with too few people, too little equipment, and too little planning and debate, for this kind of experiment, with no margin for error.

Perhaps all great powers reach this point where the army needs to depend on auxiliaries sepoys, call them what you will. If so, it's time to start discussing it. If not, and we want to remain a nation of citizen soldiers, it's time to start reversing some trends.

Principles of strategy

THEORY
I've taken a short rest from the "official" posts on the blog, the long-running discussion of time-hallowed principles of strategy and what they tell us about current events. That was the first phase in the extended discussion I had planned for this blog; the next stage is to get into the specifics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary political violence of all sorts.

It's time to make the move to this next phase. It'd be appropriate to provide some kind of summary before leaving the principles of strategy. Happily, you can summarize these principles in a pithy fashion, much like you can squeeze the core formulae you need for a physics or chemistry test onto a 3" by 5" card. That signifies the maturity of a discipline, when you can make simple, declarative, useful statements, easy to summarize, while longer discussion might be appropriate to fully digest them.

So here's the list:

I. War and politics

1. War is, properly, the use of violence to achieve a political situation that didn't exist before the war.


2. War aims are often fuzzy, making it that much harder to achieve victory.


3. For this reason, and others, wars are often harder to end than they are to start.


4. War aims can shift during the war itself.


5. Declarations of war force a more precise definition of war aims.


6. Since war is a political instrument, it can and should operate within existing political institutions.


7. The US Constitution is better designed to handle the exigencies of war, including "little wars" or largely clandestine struggles, than most people give it credit.

II. War, power, and leverage

1. War is an instrument of both power and leverage, two competing interpretations of how nations (and other actors) get want they want in international affairs.


2. Since a country's ability to get what it wants depends on the context, leverage is a better guide to understanding international affairs than brute indicators of national power.


3. Power also does not explain baffling situations where nations with less power often have far greater influence than nations with greater power.


4. Doing something for its own sake--in other words, exercising national power because you think it's universally useful--isn't necessarily the right course of action.


5. Since power is a finite quantity, you should avoid exercising it too often, thereby advertising the limits of your power.


6. Alliances don't necessarily constrain power. In fact, like many contractual relationships in other spheres of human activity, they usually enable you to do more than you could have on your own.

III. Strategic levels and dynamics

1. Strategy actually has many levels: grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical.


2. Victory depends not only on succeeding at each level, but ensuring that each level contributes to the ones above and below it in the strategic strata.


3. A good strategy has to account for some degree of the unexpected.


4. Equally important is the existence of a thinking, reacting enemy. War is not an engineering problem, the exercise of resources against an inert target; it's a struggle between two adversaries trying to outwit and outfight each other.


5. You therefore need to think "a few moves ahead," by making an informed guess at how the dynamic of measure and counter-measure is likely to play out.


6. Maintaining the initiative--when, where, and in what form clashes occur--is critical to success.


7. Doing the unexpected--what is sometimes called "the indirect approach" is a technique for both maintaining the initiative and winning the measure/counter-measure battle of wits.


8. Strategies should be as simple as possible, and should include some redundancy (i.e., more resources than the minimum required, and more contingencies than just one).


9. The center of gravity defines the core features of a conflict--and, therefore, what it will take to win it.

PRACTICE
Principles of war aren't like the formulas you memorize in physics class, however. Like chess, the rules are simple, but it may take a lifetime to master the game.

That's why it's critical to keep the military from being "politicized," a neutral word for, "Telling politicians what they want to hear." The art of war requires a great deal of time and effort to master. That makes the answers to particular military puzzles not always obvious--or else, any armchair general would see them--and often, even inobvious to the vast majority of military professionals themselves. Revolutions in military strategy or organization wouldn't happen if you didn't have the occasional flashes of genius that people like Marius, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or others could provide. Of course, that means the answers you get as a political leader from your generals and admirals may not make sense at first glance, and they may make you exceedingly uncomfortable.

That's the real reason why the Bush Administration's treatment of General Shinseki was abhorrent. Shinseki was doing his duty by giving his professional judgement about the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. If Bush's supporters want to cry foul about Lyndon Johnson's micromanagement of the Vietnam War, they need to be equally outraged at the treatment of Shinseki--if not moreso, since unlike Vietnam, there was a fairly clear measure of success in Iraq. Public order collapsed after the 2003 invasion, and it hasn't recovered.

A note of apology to Shinseki is in order--not just to ask for his forgiveness, but to signal to the rest of the people in uniform that their professional judgement is valued and heeded, not simply overruled because the man in the Oval Office wants to hear a different answer.

To boldly analogize...

IN THE NEWS
In calmer times, historical analogies usually aren't very controversial things. During times like these, however, people can sometimes be a bit prickly about which parallels you choose to draw between current and past events. People can get so defensive, in fact, they attack the whole idea of drawing analogies at all.

We've all heard the analogies between the Iraq war and the Vietnam War, World War II, the Lebanese Civil War, and other conflicts. Usually, someone with their back up already will say something like, "Look, there's no way Iraq is like Vietnam. Where are the triple-canopy jungles? The safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam? The substantial support from other superpowers? You're talking crazy talk."

Obviously, no event is completely analogous to another event. Analogies can easily be misplaced. But how do you know you have a good historical analogy?

The best place to start is John Stuart Mill, one of my favorite philosophers (see On Liberty) and someone very interested in this analogy issue. Mill said that you could identify a good comparison in one of two ways:

• The method of agreement. If you are looking at examples that are completely unalike except in one way, that characteristic A always accompanies characteristic B, then there's some fundamental connection between A and B. If you look at all the wars in history, for example, and you find that (A) commanders who had simple operational plans (B) had drastically higher rates of success, then you can say that there's a connection between operational simplicity and the odds of victory.


• The method of difference. If you compare things that are completely alike, except for one set of characteristics that vary in some consistent way (as A changes, B changes), then you have a connection between A and B. You might look, for example, at all the Afghan wars involving foreign powers--the 19th century British occupation, the 20th century Soviet invasion, the 21st century US invasion--and look for some patterns. Same location, same ethnic groups, and in the last two cases, even some of the same people. However, if you find that, all other things being equal, (A) a greater focus on training and equipping local Afghan forces (B) produces better results against insurgents, then you might have a relationship between A and B.

It's tough to find cases that are completely alike, or completely unalike, but you do your best. I think that the people who pooh-pooh an anlogy because they don't like the message are in a state of historical denial. You can pick apart the analogy, you can argue over the conclusion, but you can't say that analogies don't make any sense at all.

The Vietnam analogy was something that used to really get people's dander up. It doesn't seem to have that effect now. I'm not sure if it's just the passage of time or the post-Desert Storm bolstering of our confidence in US military power, but the Vietnam specter has lost some of its frightfulness. Today, of course, you see parallels between Vietnam and Iraq all over the place (click here, here, and here for some quick examples). Sure, there are no triple-canopy jungles in Iraq, but that's a detail, as we've seen, that matters only at certain levels of strategy. Jungle and desert warfare have different rules at the operational and tactical levels, to be sure. That doesn't change US grand strategy, theater strategy, or technical considerations. Nor does the terrain necessarily change some basic principles of counterinsurgency at the operational or tactical levels.

Go ahead and be bold in making historical parallels. Use analogies, but use them wisely. Just don't let anyone tell you that you can't make analogies at all. If that's the case, every life-threatening situation in which we find ourselves will be brand new, and we'll have no past experience to help us through it. That's a far more frightening prospect than admitting, perhaps, that we've found ourselves in a quagmire again.