Arms and influence

The big game

This morning on CNN, Senator Joseph Lieberman asserted that, if the US were to withdraw from Iraq, "Iran and Al Qaeda win." Finally someone willing to stop hinting about dire consequences, and instead give voice to the real problem for the United States in Iraq: the willingness to admit defeat.

Lieberman, of course, expected that to be the final word on America's Iraq policy. It's not.

Losing here, winning there
For sake of argument, let's agree with Lieberman. We leave, and Iran and Al Qaeda "win." (That's not necessarily true, especially for Al Qaeda, but let's not get off track.) By implication, the United States loses. But what did we lose?

One of the reasons I started this blog is point out, whenever necessary, the importance of separating the different levels of strategy. Grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical levels are very different.  Success at one level does not necessarily bring success at all the others.

Just as importantly for the iraq question, failure at one does not trigger failure at the others. If the United States were to lose one part of its theater strategy for the Middle East, it does not portend a cataclysm for the United States in that region, or for the most recently added priority in American grand strategy, counterterrorism.

The United states may have to contain the consequences of occupation and withdrawal, but there are several outcomes that may be eminently tolerable for the United States. The Iraqi factions are likely to remain focused on each other, not the United States. Iran may gain power and influence within Iraq, but exactly how does this automatically translate into a catastrophic loss for the United States? Freed from the Iraq trap, the United States might be able to do more in the Middle East overall, instead of pouring more blood and treasure into a single country. Americans might live in less danger of terrorist attack, if the American occupation no longer inspires outrage against the United states.

Don't look for a scoreboard
It's hard for Americans to avoid conflating Iraq with the Middle East, and with US national security overall, in part because Americans hate to lose. It's the reason, for example, why military recruitment rates are lower than desired, but reenlistment rates are higher than many expected. American soldiers who have served in Iraq have faced a tough challenge. They feel responsible for the Iraqis who live in mortal danger. Therefore, they don't want to leave a job undone.

While America's allergy to losing might be a good thing for the teams playing the Super Bowl, it's a bad thing for US foreign policy. For the United States to remain a superpower, Americans have to be mature enough to accept defeat at one level of strategy, if it does not endanger American successes at the other levels of strategy. There are no military equivalents of Hail Mary passes or on-side kicks. War and diplomacy are not games with simple ways to measure winning and losing--something for which we should all be grateful.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (5)

Previous posts in this series: grand strategy (1, 2); theater strategy (3, 4).

IN THE NEWS
Iraq has re-educated Americans about the hard realities of revolutionary warfare for the first time since the Vietnam War. Even the guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua that occupied American attention in the 1980s did not involve Americans in these conflicts to the depth that they are now focused on Iraq. Stories from the Iraq war dominate the daily news. Friends, relatives, and co-workers have been deployed to Iraq. Worries about the cost of the Iraq war creep into the average person’s thinking about personal and national wealth.

With this amount of attention on Iraq, Americans by now should realize that counterinsurgency is not merely a numbers game. The 21,500 troops are no better trained and equipped to fight the Iraqi insurgents than the American forces already there. President Bush is not proposing to send 21,500 Arabic language-speaking soldiers, all of whom have some expertise in Iraqi culture and politics. These troops are not even specialists in counterinsurgency strategy. (For a detailed picture of the critical differences between conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, read the “Counterinsurgency is hard” and “Counterinsurgency is doable” posts, under the “Core topic” heading in the left-hand column of this blog.)

Using more troops to expand operations in Baghdad might easily make matters worse, not better. Clear and secure operations require cordoning off more neighborhoods, searching more homes, and interrogating more suspects. That may inspire more resentment, not less, of American forces and their Iraqi allies.

Worse, the Iraqi troops are not operating in the same chain of command as American forces. Even if American troops perform their task perfectly, it doesn’t necessarily help inspire respect for Iraqi security forces. If insurgents put up any serious resistance, the Iraqi commander might have a much different opinion of risking casualties than his American counterpart.

During this “battle for Baghdad,” some Iraqi forces may use the excuse of fighting Iraqi insurgents to take a few shots in the larger Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. American forces, particularly if they don’t understand what’s really happening, may have little chance to intervene.

To make matters worse, there are other players in this deadly game. Although many of the contractors included in the “surge” are not mercenaries, some of them will be performing security duties. Even the ones that perform support duties represent a larger contingent of Americans at risk of being killed or kidnapped while in Baghdad. On the Iraqi side, there are also police forces and paramilitary units to consider. Even if they are not directly involved in clear and secure operations, they won’t exactly be sitting on the sidelines, either.

In other words, the phrase “clear and secure” is completely inadequate to describe the goal of counterinsurgency operations focused on Baghdad. The goal should not be merely to kick down more doors, but to permanently kick out the Army of the Mahdi, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and other insurgent groups. Even if American and Iraqi forces temporarily clear some neighborhoods, these troops and tactics have had little success keeping these areas “insurgent-free.”

The “surge” does nothing to put the right kinds of troops in the line of fire, nor does it ensure that they are pursuing the right strategy. All it does is increase the number of troops in Baghdad. 

What's wrong with the "surge"? (4)

Previous posts in this series: grand strategy (1, 2); theater strategy (3).

IN THE NEWS
At the theater level, the Bush Administration’s proposed escalation dos not change the regional balance of power. If you sweep away every other attempt to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq—the unconventional weapons that weren’t there, the non-existent Al Qaeda/Ba’athist connection, the attempt to implant democratic institutions—the strongest argument left for fighting in Iraq is any effect it might have on Middle Eastern politics. Maybe the war might give regional trouble-makers like Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria pause. Perhaps the war might moderate the Sunni-Shi’ite rift, if for no other reason than Iraq shows the horrible turn sectarian disagreements can take. Maybe the investment of blood and treasure might demonstrate the West’s willingness to invest more in resolving the Middle East’s problems.

Unfortunately, to achieve ambitious goals, the United States will need more than an additional 21,500 troops. Iran continues to benefit from the Iraq war, a painful truth that no short-term battle for Baghdad can change. The US has little leverage over Syria. Nothing has changed the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Most painfully, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets little American attention, and certainly does not change as a result of the “surge.” The Bush Administration’s “new” strategy does not commit Americans and Europeans to greater efforts in the Middle East. In fact, the meager scale of the "surge" implies that the US may not be able to sustain its war effort for much longer.

The “surge” is not the dramatic mobilization that might have a chance of changing some elements of the Middle Eastern balance of power. This short-term, small-scale escalation is not the pebble that begins the avalanche of change. It is, obviously, a last-ditch effort to salvage a failed strategy. The “surge”does not change US goals at the theater level  to something attainable. (He might, for example, have spoken of containing the violence in Iraq, while shifting attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.) The “surge” also does not provide adequate means to achieve whatever the goals are at the moment.

Bush has made a fetish of staying in Iraq, just as Lyndon Johnson became fixated on staying in Vietnam. However, by the time Johnson left office, the US government had already started the slow disengagement from the Vietnam War. In other words, Johnson was already willing to admit that, at the theater level, there were matters more important in Asia than just Vietnam.

In contrast, Bush has proposed to divert more resources into Iraq, which means they will not be available in Afghanistan and other places. The “surge” reduces American freedom of action in the Middle East (not to mention other theaters), based on the remote possibility that a short-term troop escalation will somehow unravel the Gordian knot of the Iraq war. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, this proposal has little chance of working at the operational and tactical levels.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (3)

Previous posts in this series: grand strategy (1, 2).

IN THE NEWS
Having pointed out problems with President Bush’s “surge’ strategy at the level of grand strategy, the next step is to examine it at the level of theater strategy. How much of a difference will it make in Iraq and the region?

Unfortunately, not very much. The limited escalation does not alter one of the biggest problems at the theater level, the lack of leverage over the Iraqi government and important Iraqi factions. An increase of 20,000 troops neither signals greater long-term commitment to Iraq, or a firm willingness to withdraw American support if the situation does not improve. This escalation undoubtedly looks to Iraqis much the same as it does to Americans: just enough to claim some sort of minor, temporary change to American strategy, but not enough to significantly alter its formulation or execution.

In fact, the fine print of the Bush Administration’s announced “surge” contained something that shows exactly how little leverage the US government has. There will be no unified command in the campaign to secure Baghdad. Iraqi and American forces working side-by-side will report up through different chains of command. While, at some point, Iraqi forces will need to operate independently of American commanders, the task at hand is a joint operation to clear and secure Baghdad neighborhoods. In other words, if this operation is the last, best hope for winning the Iraqi counterinsurgency war, Americans and Iraqis will be fighting two separate battles.

Secondly, “the battle for Baghdad” may be the wrong place to start. An enclave strategy, in which Iraqi and American forces focus on securing control in one area before moving on to the next one, needs to start where there’s a high probability of success. Baghdad is important symbolically, especially for the Sunnis whom the Americans are trying desperately to keep within the government coalition.

However, Baghdad is one of the most difficult places to sweep and clear. The high population density of Baghdad provides more hiding places for insurgents, including the small groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq that grab headlines with terrorist attacks. Making Baghdad appear secure will be difficult, with car bombs exploding next to police stations and crowded markets.

Given the high profile of everything that happens in Baghdad, local leaders, whose cooperation will be necessary in any “clear and secure’ operation, will be harder to get. These leaders know that they have more bargaining chips, given the attention that any “battle for Baghdad” would receive. The government is also fighting the skepticism, among Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere, that the new regime is more interested in protecting their interests than settling old scores. Therefore, other parts of Iraq, such as the Kurdish areas in the north, may be better starting points for a long-overdue enclave strategy than Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the insurgents whom the US and Iraqi governments are fighting are watching the news. The obvious response to the Bush escalation plan is a short-term escalation of their own—stepped-up attacks that send the message that a half-hearted “surge” can’t decisively end this conflict. That escalation, a Tet Offensive in miniature, may already be happening.

I’ll have more to say about how the “surge” doesn’t change the situation at the theater level, when dealing with Iran, Syria, and other regional powers, in the next post on this subject.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (2)

IN THE NEWS

[For the first post in this series, click here.

Grand strategy: Alone again, naturally
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration has insisted on, whenever possible, going it alone. The “coalition of the willing” was, short of acting without any allies at all, the furthest the Bush Administration could have gone from the traditional American approach to coalition warfare. In domestic politics, the Administration, once it got a poorly-worded approval from Congress to attack Iraq, shoved the other two branches of the federal government aside. In fact, the Administration deliberately excluded or neutralized important parts of the executive branch, most notably the State Department and CIA. To a startling degree, a narrow part of the US government, the White House and the Department of Defense, prosecuted a war with a far weaker alliance than the United States used in previous conflicts of this scale.

The “new” strategy for Iraq, the so-called “surge” of 20,000 troops, primarily in Baghdad, does nothing to  break the Administration out of its imperious solitude. Foreign governments are not providing additional troops, money, or even rhetorical support. The Administration has not revised its Iraq alliance, a brittle arrangement in which there is no formal obstacle to the British leaving at any time, and severe doubt that the Iraqi government is even fighting the same war as the United States. There was no sweeping re-formulation, in which regional powers, NATO, or the United Nations made new commitments to ending, reducing, or containing the violence in Iraq.

Within the US government, the proposed escalation—surge, augmentation, spike, spurt, whatever—hasn’t changed the Bush Adminisration’s relationship with other parts of the US government. Quite the opposite: the Administration is already digging in its heels during the first round of hearings, such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ recent testimony. If there are private talks between the Administration and the new House and Senate leadership, so what? Politically and constitutionally, the important next moves will occur in the open. Negotiating with the legislative branch of government is not like negotiating with Iran or Syria.

The "surge" changes nothing about the Bush Administration's radically different version of American grand strategy. If you have any doubts, look at how little has changed outside of Iraq. Iran continues its march towards nuclear weapons. North Korea has not budged, either on its nuclear weapons program, or anything else. China continues to assert its independence, most recently by trying to blind US spy satellites. Russian continues its effort to cement a sphere of influence and a separate direction from the West. Relations with the European Community have not changed. Whatever the merits or faults of the "surge" as a policy toward Iraq, it is certainly not a new direction for US foreign policy.

In announcing the strategy, the White House clearly tried to signal that something had changed. Unfortunately, moving the camera from one Presidential set to another did not alter one of the iconic images of the Iraq war: George W. Bush, speaking alone to the camera.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (1)

IN THE NEWS
The Bush Administration’s “new” strategy for Iraq—which, as we’ll see, isn’t a genuine change in approach, is wrong on many levels. In fact, it’s wrong on nearly every level of strategy, from the grand strategic to the technical. That framework for understanding warfare is a good guide to why the United States should not prosecute President Bush’s “surge,” and what better alternatives might look like.

Rather than create one big mega-post, I’m going to make this one the first in a series. We’ll start by looking at the US grand strategy.

GRAND STRATEGY: HOW IMPORTANT IS IRAQ?
At the highest plane of strategy, the US government has to put Iraq, one theater among many where American interests are at stake, in its proper perspective. Iraq is not the only concern for US national security; in fact, it’s probably not the most important locus of problems. To date, supporters of the Iraq war—from Wolfowitz to Ledeen, from Leiberman to McCain—have had free rein to refer to horrible consequences if the United States fails in Iraq, without ever having to describe what those consequences would be.

By now, the connection between US grand strategy and the Iraq theater of operations should be clear. If not, the prima facie justification for continuing to fight in Iraq fails. Anyone who won’t make the connection in an explicit, convincing way should be laughed out of the room.

It doesn’t help matters that Americans, voters and leaders alike, don’t have a clear idea of what US grand strategy should be. The 9/11 attacks may have raised important questions about how well Americans were monitoring threats from enemies who were not states, operating out of countries like Afghanistan that did not seem important. Raising a question is not the same as answering it, however. Americans should not be congratulating themselves on their collective wisdom for having ignored a real threat until planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Nor should we be pleased with the visceral and brainless reaction that followed.

The greatest sin in warfare is fighting without a clear point. Despite (or because of) the kaleidoscope of Iraq war justifications (eliminating Iraq’s alleged nuclear program, changing the balance of power in the Middle East, etc. etc.), there is still no clear justification for continuing the war. Here is the best case I can make for the importance of Iraq.

Iraq in 2007 is what Afghanistan was in 2001, a base of operations for terrorist groups that might be a threat to US interests in the future.

Of course, you have to qualify the hell out of that statement: the American occupation inflames anti-Americanism; almost none of the anti-government factions in Iraq have the global organization and resources that Al Qaeda had in 2001; more importantly, almost none of these groups have any interest in attacking enemies outside of Iraq, including the United States.

Therefore, you might just as easily build a strategy for containing these threats as eliminating them. From a purely selfish perspective, American foreign policy aims at deflecting attacks against American targets. The fact that terrorists or guerrillas exist somewhere in the world has not, to date, been the problem. The threat that some of them present to American interests, such as the physical safety of American citizens, is the real concern.

Instability in Iraq is a threat to American interests in the Middle East. This is one of those places where distinguished foreign policy experts get to waggle their bushy eyebrows and frown, but not say anything meaningful. Political instability in one country is usually a problem for its neighbors, but it’s not an infectious disease that automatically is transmitted to everyone in the vicinity. Iraq may be where factions opposed to the current regimes in other Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, get experience, recruits, weapons, and prestige. The risk to allied regimes may increase as a result, but perhaps not beyond containable levels.

Of course, the biggest defect of this argument is its narrowness. Iraq is a threat to American interests in the Middle East—not necessarily to American global interests. Because American attention is disproportionately focused on that region does not mean that other parts of the world are getting the attention they deserve. Just as Iraq should not be conflated with the Middle East, the Middle East should not be conflated with US grand strategy.

American credibility is now at risk. According to some pundits, having declared Iraq to be the central battlefield in the “global war on terror” (I still chuckle at the acronym, GWOT), the US government risks looking foolish if it abruptly withdraws from Iraq. Breaking American promises to the new Iraqi government and its neighbors would make other allies question American commitments to them. American enemies would gain confidence, seeing the United States retreat from Iraq.

Fortunately, every one of these concerns is unfounded. Average citizens and heads of state around the world do not believe that Iraq is the central battlefield of counterterrorism, except to the extent that Islamic extremists in their own countries are using the Iraq war as an opportunity to sharpen their swords. Shifting 20,000 American troops to Iraq will have no effect on what happens in Morocco, Yemen, Uzbekistan, or Pakistan. Given how strongly world opinion is set against the US strategy in Iraq, perpetuation of that strategy is the greatest risk to American credibility.

Anyone following the Iraqi conflict knows that American promises to the Iraqi government may be moot. If Shi’ite leaders use government security forces to wage their side of the civil war, instead of building a confessionally neutral Iraqi state, the current American strategy effectively stops. American diplomacy will have to shift to new targets, such as mediating an end to the civil war, and trying to salvage something from the collapse of the Iraqi constitutional and political arrangements.

Only the most insecure person believes that never admitting a mistake is the road to credibility. In fact, there are few things more comforting than to hear a powerful individual admit that he or she made a mistake, but is rectifying it. Sure, the normal rules of American politics mandate the rigid, Kabuki-like drama around blunders and scandals, in which admitting error is the very last step in a long, predictable process of denying, stonewalling, distracting, and finally, confessing.

To summarize, at a grand strategic level, there are plenty of reasons to question the importance of Iraq. American leaders who supported the war are now trying to depict an American withdrawal as the ultimate boogeyman. By American leaders, I mean anyone who makes the unchallenged assertion that an American withdrawal would be the worst possible calamity. This category includes politicians and pundits who say that, while they admit they were wrong to support President Bush’s policy earlier, the United States has to clean up the mess it made. (I still marvel that a major part of US foreign policy has been based on a Pottery Barn slogan.) No proposal for continued prosecution of the war should be given one second of attention unless it starts with a convincing explanation of how Iraq substantially threatens the truly important things at the plane of US grand strategy.

Taliban wants anti-armor weapons

IN THE NEWS
According to this CTV report, the Taliban is looking for anti-armor weapons. But why?

Certainly, the Taliban guerrillas in question may be shopping around for anti-tank mines and rockets for all the wrong reasons. Insurgents aren't supermen, immune from error. For example, the ELAS guerrillas in Greece's civil war tried to use conventional methods at the operational level of strategy, and the Greek government thanked them for this chivalric gesture by cutting them to pieces. The current Taliban leadership, or some faction within the Taliban, may just be making the same mistake, looking for ways to fight battles that don't need to be fought.

Not too long ago, the Taliban defeated the mujahideen government (later, the Northern Alliance, and now the coalition behind the current government in Kabul) without a healthy arsenal of anti-armor weapons. The mujahideen had a healthy arsenal of tanks and armored personnel carriers, many appropriated from the former Najibullah government. While the Taliban wasn't exactly powerless against these weapons, Kabul didn't fall because of some Kursk-like clash of armor, or waves of anti-tank rockets fired against government vehicles.

You could make the argument that the mujahideen used their tanks and APCs poorly, while the NATO allies are not making the same mistakes. Mujahideen armored units often did act more like mobile artillery, driving from one fixed position to another, blasting any enemies they found at each point. NATO APCs are highly mobile and well-armored, and the tactical doctrine that guides their use is much better than what the Taliban faced in the past.

However, what happens at the technical and tactical levels of the current war in Afghanistan won't decide the conflict. The Taliban's essential strategy remains the same: maintain a military and political presence until the NATO allies withdraw and the Kabul government collapses (in whatever order those two events occur). Meanwhile, the Taliban has to avoid being shut out of whatever enclaves the Kabul government and its foreign patrons can establish, in an ever-widening swath of the Afghan countryside.

Anti-tank weapons may help the Taliban keep any potential enclave from being totally secure. They may also be an important political tool: destroying NATO vehicles--and killing a lot of enemy soldiers in the process--is good PR for the Taliban. If, as the CTV article suggests, the Taliban is planning on raiding NATO and Afghan National Army (ANA) bases, the goal is the same: demonstrate that nowhere, no one, is safe.

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.

Hot time, summer in the city

IN THE NEWS
Sometimes, people notice important shifts, but read them the wrong way. This article in Army Magazine by Lt. Col. Robert Leonhard is a good example. Leonhard puts his finger on one such shift: the battles of the 21st century, he argues, look less and less like the D-Day invasion 60 years ago this month. Instead, US forces--particularly the "point of the spear," the Army and the Marines--are engaged in complex politico-military operations, primarily in heavily-populated areas. Napoleon's Grand Armée fought on empty fields, across which it faced easily-recognized opponents, neatly lined up, awaiting battle. Today's wars are fought house-to-house, in places where civilians are caught in the crossfire and the enemy isn't so easily identifiable.

Before Iraq, many parts of the US military, including the Air Force, were keenly interested in "urban warfare." They noticed this shift in battlefields, and they decided to make as much a virtue out of this necessity as possible. In typical fashion, the Department of Defense didn't just develop one urban warfare strategy; if you looked closely enough, you'd see a different strategy in every branch and service. If you take a look through some of the military and think tank periodicals of the last decade, you'll see what I mean.

However, Leonhard's otherwise excellent article falls victim to a common fallacy: because something is new to me, it must be new to everyone. If you look at the history of many US conflicts in the 19th and 20th centuries--the various deployments to the Philippines, China, and Central America, for example--you'll see many of the features of "the new battlefield" that Leonhard describes. If you expand your focus a bit more to other countries (for example, "Queen Victoria's little wars") or across time (the Roman occupation of Palestine or Britain, for instance), you'll recognize the contours of this "modern" military mold.

You won't be surprised to hear, then, that I don't agree with Leonhard's conclusion that you might as well chuck your copies of Clausewitz, Liddell-Hart, and Sun Tzu in the trash. The vision we have of neatly compartmentalized Napoleonic battles distorts the real history of warfare, which includes messier kinds of warfare, and does a great disservice to the classic strategists. Clausewitz wrote about the connection between politics and war; he didn't write a manual on how Napoleonic armies should march in column, fire in line, and form into a square when enemy cavalry charged. Nothing about friction, the initiative, the dialectic of measure and countermeasure, the indirect approach, or other classic strategic principles has changed because the battlefield now features more buildings and civilians. Nor, as Leonhard contends, does the operational level of strategy disappear. It might be less tidy than the Grand Armée on the march, but it is definitely still there, as I discussed at length in earlier posts. You ignore the operational level at your peril. You can't, for example, respond to guerrillas and terrorists in necessarily different ways just by finessing the lines of authority among military and civilian bureaucracies.

Still, it's a good article, and I recommend it despite my misgivings about its conclusion.

More technical stuff

IN THE NEWS
Less than a day after I posted this piece on the technical level of strategy, I ran across this case study of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War from Parameters, the journal of the US Army War College. It makes the same basic point: the technical dimension is important, but it's usually vastly overrated.

The Army War College has been home to a lot of good discussions about counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. There are some thoughtful people in uniform doing serious work on the subject. See this article, also from Parameters, for a good example.

The technical level

THEORY
The last--and lowest--level of strategy is the technical level. As its name implies, this level is all about technology--weapons, communications, transportation, and the like.

Needless to say, technology has been important in every period of warfare. Greek fire gave the Byzantines a key naval advantage. In the American Civil War, the railroads, telegraph communications, and ironclad warships helped tip the balance in favor of the Union. In World War II, cryptography gave the Allies the power to eavesdrop on German and Japanese communications.

You can come up with dozens of examples of how technology re-shaped warfare, and at the same time, how military concerns drove innovation. A generation of physicists--Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi, Oppenheimer, etc.--not only re-wrote the rules of modern warfare, but also transformed the international system, and even US presidential politics. The first A-bombs begat H-bombs, bombers begat intercontinental missiles, ICBMS begat submarine-launched missiles, missile-armed submarines inspired new ways to detect and kill submarines...The list of innovations goes on.

The technical level is so easy to explain, and the examples so handy, that it seems like belaboring the point to describe it at all. The first step into military affairs you took probably had some connection to the technical level. Some WWII history buffs become experts in the relative merits of German, Soviet, British, Italian, Japanese, and American tanks. Some of us, as children and adolescents, built models of military aircraft, warships, or tanks. Many of us got drawn into the interesting discussions during the first Gulf War about Patriot missiles, M1A1 tanks, satellite imagery, and other pieces of equipment in the impressive US arsenal.

All good reasons why I made this level the last one to discuss. By working our way down the hierarchy of strategy--grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, technical--we can see how easily we can overvalue the technical level. Every soldier wants the best weapon available. Unfortunately, not even the best rifle, tank, fighter, or submarine can save the day if the other levels of strategy aren't working.

PRACTICE
Going back to my last post, I'll belabor another point. Yes, the United States has superbly-trained troops, armed with some of the best military hardware in the world. (The same compliment should be extended to our coalition partners, too.) However, we're in the thick of a crisis where the best troops with the best equipment can't deliver victory.

On the electronic battlefield, GPS and other technologies give a commander the exact position of every soldier in his unit. That's an extraordinary achievement, something every commander from Themistocles to Zhukov would have wanted, if it had been available. But are these soldiers in the right places, doing the right things? As I've argued in earlier posts, there are serious defects in every level of strategy above the technical and the tactical, in both the war in Iraq and the war against al Qaeda. (Again, these are two separate wars. Even if Iraq had been the wellspring of international terrorism, you don't fight Iraqi insurgents the same way you stop the terrorist threat.) If the strategies at these levels aren't working, it doesn't matter how well trained a soldier is, or how impressive is the equipment he carries.

We've also been maneuvered--or more tragically, maneuvered ourselves--into a position where our tactical and technical edge is severely blunted. In the first Gulf War, US tanks outranged their Iraqi counterparts. In an average armored combat, the Iraqis didn't even get a chance to fire a shot before their tedchnically superior enemies knocked them out. In the current war, not only is the battlefield empty of enemy tanks, but armor is worse than useless in counterinsurgency warfare. An M1A1 tank can give "force protection" to infantry under fire, but it can't win "hearts and minds" by blowing up apartment buildings.

Anyone could have made the previous observation without understanding the levels of strategy. Therefore, I hope this discussion made two contributions, above and beyond what common sense could have supplied: (1) you can now see the technological side of warfare in a new (and slightly dimmer) light; and (2) this discussion has illuminated more clearly what else needs to be fixed before our technical and tactical strengths can be put to good use.

The tactical level

THEORY
The tactical level is fairly straightforward: the art of fighting with a particular kind of military unit. In the hierarchy of strategic levels, success at the tactical level has to contribute to the success of the next level up, the operational level. I alluded to this connection in my last post, showing that the fighting skill of the Roman legionnaire made the stunning victories of the Roman campaigns possible. Of course, an inexperienced Roman politician could always command the army straight into disaster, but you couldn't blame the legions for the mistakes of someone like Varus.

People who follow military affairs are often fascinated by the tactical level. Tank aficianados, for example, like to read and talk about armored tactics. It's a pretty interesting topic. But as we've seen, it's only one small part of a much larger story.

Armored tactics are now a very well understood discipline with time-honored principles. If at all possible, fight on the move. Maneuver to a "hull down" position, like a brick wall or a hillock, so the rest of the tank gets extra protection while the turret can still fire at the enemy. "Shoot and scoot" is a pretty effective technique, so that the enemy won't find you in the spot from which you just fired. Hitting the enemy from the flank or rear is key, if you're worried that you can't penetrate the thicker armor in the front. Never drive tanks into city streets unless the infantry has first cleared the surrounding buildings of hidden enemy soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons. And so on.

Tactical discussions like these fill official military manuals, thrilling first-person accounts, and computer games (with varying degrees of realism). Fighter tactics, submarine tactics, special operations tactics...The list is long just looking at contemporary warfare, and would be even longer if you looked backwards into history. The heavy cavalry tactics of medieval knights, the harassment tactics of Muslim horse archers, age of sail tactics...

Mastering the profession of arms at this level may or may not contribute to victory, however. The 1983 invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) looked more like several separate invasions. Marines, Rangers, paratroopers, Delta Force commandos, naval aviation--each force seemed to be operating separately from the others. (It's worth asking, as many did after the invasion, why all the services needed to be involved in this operation, when perhaps this was a simple amphibious assault and hostage rescue.) The Grenada invasion succeeded in spite of itself; if the Cuban and Grenadan forces had offered stiffer resistance, a somewhat comically uncoordinated operation could have been a major disaster.

Tactics are critical, and the human face of warfare is most visible at this level: the tank platoon commander, the infantry seargent, the fighter pilot, the commando, the captain of a submarine, the helicopter gunship pilot. Other levels may seem more abstract, but they're just as important.

PRACTICE
There's a lot I could say about the tactical level, particularly when it comes to the types of troops needed for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. I'll save that discussion for later, since I'll be digging into the specifics of those two types of warfare in future posts. For now, I want to talk about two important misunderstandings about the tactical level of the war in Iraq.

As you can guess from reading this blog, I'm very sympathetic with a comment that General Anthony Zinni made during his 60 Minutes interview broadcast last weekend. Zinni argued that nothing justifies shutting down critical discussion of the Iraq war. The slogan "support the troops" is an argument for open discussion, not the stifling of criticism. If the US Army give soldiers faulty rifles, Zinni said, no one would complain if you point out their defects. Given the danger these faulty weapons pose to the soldiers carrying them, it'd be the responsibility of any citizen, not just someone in uniform, to point out the risk. If you arm the same soldiers with a faulty strategy, the risks are exactly the same--and so is our common responsibility to point out defects when we see them.

Unfortunately, critical discussions of our counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and our counterinsurgency operations in Iraq make a lot of people uncomfortable. There's a chain of reasoning that breaks in a fairly obvious place, but one apparently that a lot of people pretend not to see. We have a superbly equipped and trained military, particularly at the tactical level. We are justifiably proud of these men and women in uniform. They are trained and equipped to perform amazing feats in service to the nation, and they pledge their lives in our common defense. However, pride in their accomplishments as tactical virtuosos doesn't mean that their virtuosity is being put to good use. The operational and theater strategies that determine when, where, and who they fight may be fatally flawed. Therefore, we're not supporting our troops through our silence; we can only support them, as Zinni correctly says, if we identify strategic defects that makes "harm's way" more harmful than it should be.

My second point about the US military's efficiency is that it often leads to unrealistic expectations. You should be applauded for your extraordinary achievements; the price of success shouldn't be wildly escalated expectations than you can do the impossible. The rollercoaster of emotion about the Patriot missile batteries used in the 1991 Gulf War showed this psychology in action. At first, people expected the Patriots to be able to intercept and destroy close to 100% of the SCUD missiles the Iraqis fired at Israel. This expectation was wholly unrealistic, and unfortunately, some US military and civilian officials encouraged this misperception. When the actual rates of successful Patriot intercepts were released to the public after the war, many cried foul, charging that they had been hoodwinked into trusting a technological marvel that was far less than marvelous. Whatever you think of the Patriot missile system, you can't fault it for failing to knock down every SCUD missile. As advanced as the Patriot technology was, no system could deliver complete success.

The same phenomenon is at work in Iraq, only the focus this time is on flesh and blood soldiers, not steel and silicon weapons systems. Because "the troops" are seen as the best in the world, we've set them up for unfair accusations of failure when we discover that total efficiency is impossible. The crew of an Apache gunship can't fire on a building with absolute certainty that the missile won't hit a neighboring apartment block by accident. The gunner can't know for sure that there aren't innocents in the building when the rocket explodes. The pilot and gunner may have performed their mission with unmatched efficiency, while unwittingly killing bystanders in the process. Who's fault is that?

A recent NPR story about US snipers in Iraq epitomized this risk. For all the embedded reporters, thousands of air time reporting on the war, countless articles discussing the day-to-day fighting in Iraq, there has been very little explanation of how the modern "profession of arms" actually works. Snipers have a tough tactical challenge--stalking and killing a specific target from long range--that requires special skills and some innate talent.

The reporter, Anne Garrels, first interviewed a recently-trained sniper, one of many recently put through "sniper school." Just as there aren't enough Arabic language speakers in Iraq, there's also a shortage of snipers. The soldier interviewed readily admitted that he was not the most proficient in his craft, but he tried to do his best. In the highly populated areas where he was deployed, he had to be careful not to hit innocent bystanders. His "score," therefore, wasn't as high as it might be, had he more experience and a less complicated battleground in which to hunt.

OK so far. However, Garrels then interviewed another, more experienced sniper. Suddenly, the whole tone of the piece changed. Sgt. Daniel Osborne, the seasoned sniper, talked about his higher kill rate, and then spoke in measured tones about how if he ever killed an innocent bystander by accident, he'd be no better than the people he was fighting. As Garrels says near the end of the piece, "Sgt. Osborne says he...has...made...no...mistakes."

I'm not being cute with the punctuation. That's exactly the kind of inflection that Garrels used in that sentence. That's also the kind of outlandish expectation that sets up soldiers like Osborne for later accusations of being babykillers and psychopaths. Mistakes will happen, with tragic results. Soldiers are trained to avoid civilian casualties, which offend their moral sensibilities in any case. But as other accounts like this one and this one show, it's unrealistic to expect US snipers to operate in difficult, confusing, and dangerous places like Fallujah, Najaf, and Karballah and not make mistakes.

The higher the pedestal, the longer the fall--and news stories like Garrels' piece put the troops on a very high pedestal indeed.

Operational strategy: another example

THEORY
Since the operational level sometimes requires a bit of further explanation for it to "click" in the minds of someone unfamiliar with it, I realized another example might be useful. If you look at ancient and medieval warfare, the dividing line between the operational level and other levels is far more clear.

Take the operations of the Roman legions. Before modern communications, the commander of the legion couldn't afford to split up his force and fight across hundreds of miles of terrain, the way modern armies do. The Roman army on the march might temporarily break down into smaller formations, but recombined as a single force once battle was joined. In fact, every ancient and medieval army fought this way--which is why you can drive around the battlefield of Agincourt in a few minutes, while driving around the D-Day beaches takes at least half a day (if you decide not to stop anywhere for long).

The Roman army--republican, early imperial, or late imperial--fought at the operational level in essentially the same way.For example, when waging an offensive campaign against the Celtic barbarians, the army would stay on the move until it came into contact with the enemy. The legions would then try to force the Celts to fight on the ground of the Roman's choosing. Although the barbarians normally outnumbered the legionnaries by as much as ten to one, Roman training, tactics, and technology would normally win the day. After the decisive battle, the Romans would pursue the remnants of the Celtic army until the region was safely subjugated.

Obviously, not every campaign followed this model. However, the ones that do fit this picture--such as Julius Caesar's operations in Gaul--show clearly the contours of operational strategy. In pursuit of a theater objective (conquering or re-conquering a province), the Roman army--including the main legionary force, auxiliaries, scouts, and spies--found, fixed, and finished the enemy in a highly efficient way. The battles--Zama, Pharsalus, Alesia, Teutoburg Forest--normally were the decisive moment in the campaign.

How well the Roman infantryman fought, or the deficiencies of Roman cavalry, are important tactical questions. Here's another one: as one contemporary observer noted, the Romans trained with the ferocity and seriousness of actual combat, so that combat seemed as easy as training. This tactical superiority certainly made spectacular Roman victories possible, even when their opponents vastly outnumbered them. But the tactical and operational levels are obviously two different (if interdependent) things.

PRACTICE
I had another reason for bringing up the Roman example. I used a modern phrase--find, fix, and finish--to describe a classic operational approach. Cornering the enemy, fighting at the time and place of your choosing, and ruthlessly pursuing the remains of the enemy army--these steps seem like simple common sense, an energetic and rigorous approach to fighing a war.

Finding, fixing, and finishing Iraqi insurgents, as I said in my last post on operational strategy, appears to be the primary concern of US troops in Iraq today. American forces, like the Roman legions, are extremely efficient at the tactical level. Unfortunately, the situation is a bit more complicated than the find, fix, finish formula:

• The Romans had to apply this formula once when fighting the Gauls. US troops have to find, fix, and finish the enemy every single day in Iraq.


• Unleashing the full efficiency of the US military will increase casualties among innocent bystanders, level homes, and damage not only mosques, but sacred sites like the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf.


• We're not always sure we're shooting at the right people. Sometimes, barbarians would engage in hit and run attacks on the Roman legions, then melt back into the population. Normally, however, the Roman army had few problems identifying the enemies, or anticipating when they would attack.


• Find, fix, and finish is only one "vertical" dimension of counterinsurgency strategy. "Horizontally," the United States needs to be doing a lot more than military sweeps to ensure a stable, friendly Iraqi regime will someday govern from Baghdad. Once the warriors of a Gallic tribe were defated on the battlefield, the Romans had the region under control for the time being. In Iraq, the situation is not nearly as easy as that.

The operational level

THEORY
As Luttwak says in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, the operational level is, perhaps, the trickiest to explain. Something clearly exists between decisions made at the theater level, such as the entire western front in World War II, and the those made by an infantry captain leading an assault on the Normandy beaches. But what is this middle level?

The battle is perhaps the easiest starting point for understanding the operational. The battles of the Bulge, Stalingrad, Midway, El Alamein, and Guadalcanal share some important features. One or both combatants were looking for a decisive engagement that will change the situation in a particular theater. The battle for Normandy gave the Allies a beachhead on the European continent. The Japanese were trying to cripple the American fleet at Midway, but failed. Battles don’t always result in one side gaining some significant advantage—a point well illustrated by the WWI meatgrinder battles of the Somme and Ypres. What matters, however, is that one or both sides are looking for a decisive change.

What’s interesting to note, by the way, is the decreasing frequency of significant battles in the history of modern warfare. John Keegan, in his classic book, The Face of Battle, makes this point at some length. Battles may be less frequent, but violence in wars like the civil war in Peru, the Serb-Croat conflict, and the Iran-Iraq war is no less intense, or in cases like Rwanda and Bosnia, far more vicious. Either the combatants aren’t seeking some dramatic clash, or they’re failing to engineer them. What, then, defines strategy at this level somewhere between the theater and the tactical levels.

To properly depict the operational level, then, you have to recognize its  “combined arms” character. Conventional militaries have infantry, armor, air power, and naval power. Guerrilla armies have both fighters and political cadres. Operational strategy, therefore, is the realm where combined resources (not all strictly military) jointly contribute to the advancement of theater goals. Eisenhower’s strategy for D-Day—employing every type of unit available, from OSS units working with French partisans to battleships pounding the beaches—required skills far different from those that even the most capable Navy commander or Army major had. Similarly, an NLF commander for a South Vietnamese district needed to employ guerrillas. political cadres, spies, and the occasional support of conventional NVA units to slowly erode the Saigon government’s control and legitimacy.

We may not be as accustomed to thinking in operational terms, but this level often is the fulcrum on which larger victories and defeats turn. The stunning German successes in the first years of WWII were due largely to a great operational innovation, the blitzkrieg. In WWI, the first tanks were mobile artillery supporting the infantry; in WWII, the infantry now supported the tanks.

But not alone. Infantry screened the tanks from attack, pinned down the enemy, and blasted holes in the enemy line. Artillery pounded tough defenses. Aircraft bombed enemy units and headquarters, strafed enemy reinforcements moving to the front, and relayed the birds eye view of the battlefield. The tanks slashed through the enemy line, spreading confusion and panic, encircling masses of troops then unable to escape. Blitzkrieg therefore relied as much n the chaos it created as the actual number of casualties it inflicted. None of this would have been possible without radio communications, efficient supply lines, and troops trained to improvise in a quickly-changing situation.

Like any level of strategy, the operational level needs to work in concert with the levels above and below it. Military history often is a discussion of how well this synchronization worked.

Theater strategy for the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 set the overall goals (preserving an independent South Vietnam) and the broad means (attrition strategy). Opinions about what went wrong for the US vary from blaming the theater strategy itself (as discussed in an earlier post) to identifying points at which the operational strategy was working at odds with the theater strategy. Both arguments have their merit.

Whichever argument you find convincing, they both share one important point: the efficiency of US search and destroy operations in Vietnam, to large extent, didn’t matter. Operationally, a search and destroy operation—which might combine mechanized and airmobile infantry, armor, artillery, close air support from fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, and even the occasional naval bombardment—succeeded by their own measures. To indicate success, US commanders pointed to statistics like the number of enemy soldiers killed, the number of villages temporarily secured during a sweep, and the number of US casualties kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, these proved to be the wrong measures.

NVA and NLF military strength could undermine political stability in the South, but killing enemy soldiers wouldn’t necessarily give the South Vietnamese regime the strength and legitimacy it needed to survive. At its worst moments, search and destroy operations worked against the theater goal of keeping the Saigon regime alive.  Free fire zones, the destruction of villages suspected of VC sympathies, refugees fleeing for their lives—the attrition strategy created these problems, and more, that deepened the political crisis in the South, and actually gave the Viet Cong more recruits. The real “center of gravity” in the conflict wasn’t the enemy soldier, but the US military was certainly trained and equipped to focus on that tangible and familiar target. Winning battles didn’t necessarily give the population a sense of security; killing guerrillas didn’t win support for the government. The Soviets learned the same hard lesson in Afghanistan.

It’s still possible in this analysis to pin blame on American theater strategy for creating other problems. The United States threw away much of its leverage with the South Vietnamese regime. Without leverage, the US could not budge successive governments in Saigon to make painful but necessary. Commitment itself became too much of a fetish, cornering the United States into arguing that its credibility in containing the USSR and China was, somewhat ridiculously, being tested in a country peripheral to the interests of all three superpowers. However, even if the theater strategy for fighting the Vietnam War had been a work of supreme brilliance, the operational strategy often worked against it.

PRACTICE
The big question about the current war in Iraq is, Are we winning? If our theater goal is to create a stable Iraq, friendly to the United States, capable of shifting the Middle Eastern balance of power, the answer is clearly no. Obviously, the US and its allies have insufficient troops to maintain control over Iraq; moving it into the column of reliable US allies seems like a dim hope. So far, Iraqi police and army units have proven ineffective; in the siege of Fallujah, they actually joined the forces fighting US troops. The Iraq war has made it harder for the United States to deal with the North Koreans, the Iranians, and perhaps also al Qaeda. (At least in one example, the Iraq invasion has helped a terrorist group allied with al Qaeda.)

But the problem isn’t merely one of strength. We could double, triple, or quadruple the number of troops, and still find the political ground in Iraq crumbling beneath us. In fact, I would argue, the current US operational strategy ensures our failure.

It goes without saying that the impressive plans for the invasion weren’t matched by equally impressive plans for the occupation. After a swift victory over Iraq conventional forces, US troops were caught by surprise by escalating guerrilla attacks. The Bush Administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the US Central Command have all blamed these attacks on terrorists and insurgents (alias guerrillas). The fact that US authorities use these terms interchangeably is an unfortunate sign of exactly how unprepared the United States is for the war it’s now fighting. Not only do you use different operational techniques to defeat guerrillas and terrorists, but what the United States is doing today is doomed to fail against either kind of opponent.

As in Vietnam, American forces are now focusing at the operational level on the enemy’s military strength. Whether the enemy is Ansar al-Islam or the Sadrist “Army of the Mahdi,” US forces are primarily concerned about killing or capturing as many of these enemy troops as possible. Tanks, helicopters, and jet aircraft pound enemy positions, often in heavily populated areas. American commanders believe that captured guerrillas—or, sadly, the relatives of suspected guerrillas—are “intelligence assets” that might help track down and eliminate even more enemy fighters. The pressures to wring information out of these “assets” have led to the dehumanizing, counterproductive, and shocking events at Abu Ghraib, Baghdad airport, and other jails. Meanwhile, efforts to win public support through rebuilding the country—the Vietnam-era term was civic action—continue on a completely separate track from military operations. Civic action is often impossible, since the people responsible for it—contractors, US troops, or humanitarian organizations—can’t safely reach the people they’re trying to help, or guerrillas demolish the work they’ve already done.

The operational strategy is clearly not working, in large part because we have a limited understanding of the enemy. The “insurgency” isn’t a monolithic organization, but a combination of different guerrilla, terrorist, and criminal groups. This mélange is hardly new in the history of warfare. Recent conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Peru, El Salvador, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere have featured similar mixes of these three groups—often within the same organization (such as the FARC in Colombia).

However, the anti-occupation guerrilla groups are the real “center of gravity.” Not only are the guerrillas more numerous than the terrorists (including al Qaeda allies) and criminal gangs, but the they pose the most serious threat to the US occupation. Tragically, the guerrillas are far more akin to partisan forces fighting a foreign occupier—heroic figures to people inside and outside Iraq—than the universally condemned terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It’s easy to think that, because the guerrillas threaten us, killing as many guerrillas as possible is the road to victory. We'd be wrong yet again to believe that myth.

To make better sense of the situation, here are some points of comparison that reveal how different operational strategy looks for fighting terrorists, guerrillas, and conventional armies:

       

Counterterrorism

Counterinsurgency