Arms and influence

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.