Irregular-Conventional Warfare Debate Continues

The Washington Post belatedly recognizes that there is a fierce debate going on about the future of the Army's doctrine and training. It's the Gentile-Nagl debate on whether our military needs to be ready for all forms of warfare or if it should just focus on irregular warfare, given the ongoing struggles in the Middle East.

"The Lebanon war has become a bellwether," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has advised Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command. "If you are opposed to transforming the military to fight low-intensity wars, it is your bloody sheet. It's discussed in almost coded communication to indicate which side of the argument you are on."

U.S. military experts were stunned by the destruction that Hezbollah forces, using sophisticated antitank guided missiles, were able to wreak on Israeli armor columns. Unlike the guerrilla forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, who employed mostly hit-and-run tactics, the Hezbollah fighters held their ground against Israeli forces in battles that stretched as long as 12 hours. They were able to eavesdrop on Israeli communications and even struck an Israeli ship with a cruise missile.
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Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army's top officer in the Pentagon, has said it is essential that the military be able to do both simultaneously. New Army doctrine, meanwhile, calls for a "full spectrum" service that is as good at rebuilding countries as it is at destroying opposing armies.

But other experts remain skeptical. "The idea that you can do it all is just wrong," said Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations. Soldiers, who are home for as little as 12 months between deployments, do not have enough time to prepare adequately for both types of wars, he said.

Biddle and other counterinsurgency advocates argue that the military should focus on winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and only then worry about what the next war will look like.

I haven't stayed abreast of the exact pros and cons of the debate, other than to be aware of it. I think I tend to go towards Gentile's side of the argument, that we need to be prepared for conventional as well as irregular warfare. We ought to have the ability to face any adversary on any terms, but the Army has the bad habit of trying to genericize everything into a bland, one-size-fits-all doctrine and organization. I think that's the real debate - can we actually have two sides of the Army, both of which are professionally trained and equipped without one side being favored over the other? The past isn't suggestive of that ideal.

Comments

[FDChief]

If Biddle's thinking is that South Lebanon 2006 should be grounds for forcing doctrinal change on the U.S. Army then Mr. Biddle is a fathead.

Lebanon was a one-off, probably the extreme endmember of the sort of thing that happens when a conventional military gets its head rammed up its backside.

The IDF has been living on its reputation since 1973. Its performance in Lebanon in the 1980s was underwhelming and since then it has devolved even further, into a kind of British colonial constabulary whose warfighting capabilities have been savaged by one-sided wog-bashing on the pathetic Palestinian gunsels. So the circumstances of the Lebanese fight - a badly undertrained conventional army sticking its dick into a decades-long prepared defensive meatgrinder manned by some death-loving Shiites - is almost unrepeatable anywhere the U.S. is (hopefully) likely to fight. And how this is supposed to support the notion that the U.S. Army is supposed to become some sort of IDF-like wog-bashing constabulary (i.e. a COIN-centric force) I have no idea.

This was and is my issue with the COINdinistas. It's not that they want the Army to train on these guerilla war/nation building/civil action missions. It's that they seem to want to focus EXCLUSIVELY, or nearly exclusively, on these missions. As you point out, the overall geopolitical mission of the U.S. Army is to execute national policy when it includes military force, as well as the generic national defense mission.

COIN basically starts with the assumption that the U.S. benefits and should take sides in foreign internal political disputes. The COINdinistas generalize further from that that the ONLY significant missions for the Army in the near future will be these sorts of FID/COIN missions.

When you put it that way, it seems pretty nuts, doesn't it?

[Sven Ortmann]

The Hezbollah wasn't as much relevant as an "irregular" opposition as it was an infantry force with very limited budget, good motivation and common sense.
The Israelis blundered (I agree with FDChief, they're overrated, overhyped and in decline since their post-1973 army expansion).
They learned their lessons, though.

The West haven't been good against infantry-centric forces, ever. The deprived and overage, infantry-heavy German forces on the Western front were a tough nut for the Allies in 1944.
The infantry army of the PRC was a huge challenge in the Korean War.
The infantry forces of the North Vietnamese NVA were a huge challenge as well.

The usual approach is to throw more resources into the fight when enemy infantry shows skill and determination - but that doesn't work if the ratio of resources to enemy infantry strength isn't extreme.

We need to find ways to have more and better infantry battalions on our own to win necessary wars and we need to accept that unnecessary wars will be costly because we have weaknesses that most people simply ignore.