Abu Ghraib and the reserves

IN THE NEWS
Another dark aspect of the Abu Ghraib scandal is how it illustrates further (as if we needed it) the extent to which the reserves are broken. (See Seymour Hersh's piece for details.) That's very bad news, since we depend on the reserves to fight our wars.

Part of the post-Vietnam compact between civilian and military leaders was what later became known as the Weinberger Doctrine: in any future conflicts, the US military would not only have the backing of the US public and government, but it would be fighting a fully-resourced war, with clear objectives, for a limited duration. The first Gulf War was a classic illustration of the Weinberger Doctrine in action.

The reserves played a crucial war in this policy. To win a swift victory, overwhelming force (not tit for tat escalation, LBJ-style) is necessary. To provide this overwhelming force, at a time when a globally-committed US military can't necessarily muster all the troops is needs, the reserves need to be mobilized. Because the US government is disrupting the lives of these reserve troops, their families, and their employers, the reserves impose a time limit on military operations. So, the reserves both enable and require a swift victory.

The unspoken part of this equation, of course, is that you can only win a swift victory in a conventional war. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are, by nature, protracted conflicts. Rooting out a well-hidden, well-entrenched adversary like the IRA or the NLF takes years, not weeks. Whether we could have avoided an Iraqi insurgency altogether by "securing" the country with more troops is a good question, but beyond the scope of what we're discussing here: the fate of the reserves.

The troops in charge of Abu Ghraib are a mix of mercenaries and reservists. The recently-dismissed brigadier general in charge, Janis Karpinski, is herself a reservist. The 372nd Military Police Company, responsible for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, wasn't trained for holding and interrogating Arabic-speaking, Muslim detainees--another regular or reserve unit thrown hastily into duty it wasn't adequately prepared or equipped to handle.

Not only is the Bush Administration breaking the reserves by putting them into the wrong places, it's also making sure that being a reservist looks less and less attractive to anyone who might think of enlisting. Although the US press is not printing much about the topic, certainly the impressionistic evidence from the few stories that have emerged, plus the accounts we've all heard from friends, co-workers, and family members, add up to a gloomy recruitment picture.

As I said in my last post, brutalization in warfare is always a risk, but it's much higher in "unconventional" wars like the one we're now fighting in Iraq. The temptation to fall back on torture to get critical information about the insurgents' organization and plans rises as frustrations in beating the enemy increase. However, torture doesn't give you anything but what the victim thinks you want to hear. In short, torture generally doesn't work, but it's hard for a desperate person to avoid thinking that it might.

Which means, not only are we in the process of breaking the reserves, but in the case of the MPs running Abu Ghraib, we are truly breaking the reserves for nothing.

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