Military Myopia

Via the comments section of a recent Abu M post, I find this interesting commentary from "View From The Right," a conservative blog that seems to articulate the need for more severe courses of action in our "War on Terror." In this post, he suggests that our military company and field-grade officers have a bad habit of focusing on the process and on achieving intermediate steps instead of recognizing that the overall situation was going to shit.

This is ATM (American Technocratic Madness), which is most fully developed in the middle and upper officer ranks of the U.S. armed services. The military is given some mission to accomplish. So it applies its formidable brains to the task and comes up with an incredibly involved and expensive multi-step plan (e.g., training commissioned and non-commissioned officers how to socialize with and win the trust of Afghan village elders), all laid out in PowerPoint, in order to carry out that mission. The more complex and absorbing this intermediate plan toward the accomplishment of the mission becomes, the less the plan has to do with the actual mission. The Army becomes fascinated by the intermediate steps. When the intermediate steps seem to be going well, Army officers get all excited about the great progress they are making, and tell newspapers and their friends and family back home about the great faith they have in their mission and about how fulfilling they find their job, and the "conservative" U.S. media pick up on these encouraging reports and say, "See, things are going great!" Meanwhile the Army officers and their conservative cheerleaders have lost sight of the overall picture, in which no progress is being made at all.

Thus, during all those years in Iraq, almost every time you opened a newspaper, you saw a story profiling an intelligent, competent, and devoted U.S. Army captain or lieutenant colonel talking about his great faith in the ultimate success of our mission, based on his personal success in establishing rapport with a local Iraqi chieftan with whose aid he was building a school or a fixing a sewage plant. Meanwhile the overall situation in Iraq was steadily deteriorating, which the gung-ho captain or lieutenant colonel didn't realize at all, because his gaze was fixed on his immediate assignment and his personal experiences. This delusionary process, with the conservative journalists participating in it and cheering it every inch of the way (at least well into 2006 when some of them started to voice anguished doubts and to back away from President Bush), went on from March 2003 to January 2007, when, facing the prospect of the imminent collapse of Iraq into sectarian mass murder, the U.S. finally adopted a radically different policy aimed at suppressing, not just managing, the insurgency. And now every mainstream conservative pundit blocks out that 1,408-day period of self-delusion, drift, and disaster, 62 days longer than America's engagement in the greatest war in history, and calls our Iraq involvement a marvelous success, and urges us to repeat the experience in Afghanistan, where our forces have already been engaged for a period more than twice the length of our involvement in World War II.

And I absolutely agree. Whenever I pick up any book written by a military person in the "I was there on the ground" point of view, the myopic focus on day-to-day tactics and on personal interactions with the Iraqi/Afghani locals really doesn't satisfy. All the "good news" stories about building schools or fixing wells or patrolling the streets really are nice, but they can't substitute for developing an effective government, reducing corruption in the civil service, and building a safe environment within an unstable region. So I stopped reading the "first person" combat vet stories and started looking for the "how to fix a broke national security strategy" articles.

For the record, I certainly don't endorse the general point of view in "View From the Right" (which seems to be "take off the gloves already"), but I find it encouraging that we can both identify with the problems of a military organization that can't seem to break away from its tactical/operational focus and that has lost sight of the need to develop and monitor metrics for strategic success (and then change one's approach if the outcome is not hopeful).

Comments

[FDChief]

But...Jason...

If we HAD a strategy, what would it be?

We can't make Afghans into Californians with bullets.

We can't make Iraqis into free-marketeers with bullets.

We can't make Pakistanis into liberal, Western, nonsectarian Enlightenment-loving secularists with bullets.

We can't solve lack of education with bullets, or corruption, or tribal rivalries, or ethnic hatreds, or anger at our own policies like unquestioning support of whatever Israel has done this week or wet sloppy kisses for the House of Saud or Predator strikes on somebody's mom's house.

Bullets are good for killing people who want to kill you. Once enough of those people are dead - provided you can and want to spend the time, money, and lives, you may get the chance to realign the survivors' heads. It might work. It might not. (the British ran most of the Indian subcontinent for 200 years and you'll note that when they gave it up as a bad job not many of their former subject invited them to stay on)

But the real bottom line on these wars and rumors of wars in central Asia and the Middle East is that our military policies are running head on into our diplomatic policies.

So once we became Israel's sugar daddy, once we got in bed with the Maronites in Lebanon, with Mubarak in Egypt, with the Sauds, with the Shah in Iran we were always going to have people and groups in the ME who wanted to take a poke at us. When we kill them we make the survivors smarter and madder. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Mind you, your right-wing fella has a point. There is one way to do it. The Romans knew how; ubi solitudenem facient et pacem appelant.

If he is willing to do that, then Ave! I have no wish to be Roman or for my country to become another Rome. The pleasure is transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

[John Farnham]

FD Chief certainly knows how to pick out the FUD. Rather I suggest that one of the multi-pronged advantages of Afghanistan is that it's a rathole of damnable climate and aridity with mountains separating diverse tribes who fight over the proceeds of the poppy, neither speaking the same language, sharing the same culture, nor having other common ground. The place is for nomads....not a European-style state.
The mission of the military - is to spend prodigious amounts of money in a futile exercise far away from people we care about and provide lovely graft for Washington.
In other words, the same scenario that faced George Armstrong Custer a while back. He, however, was stupid enough to make a stink about the President's brother screwing the state on procurement contracts.
Cheney was much slicker with Haliburton.
The Brits have been at the noise of Empire for quite a while. Here's an old field report
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/30/call_in_the_calvary?new

[Ray]

John; Empire is old hat by now.It lingers in British public minds very fleetingly these days- if at all-it's the worn-out theme for writers and journalists and for some Americans who think that their presence in Afghanistan has a similar position. The Empire is now a free-wheelimg Commonwealth: 71 countries represented and competing at Sport, and trading and associating among themselves. Any one of these countries could leave that association; they choose not to -so far, but the British can't make them do anything they don't want to. The British do not want them to either.

[J.]

Hey FDChief, all I'm saying is that both sides of the spectrum acknowledge (I think) that the Army's been tactically good but strategically stupid. And the first step to getting better is admitting there is a problem. Now let's work on getting out.

[YT]

FD,

I think Carl Meyer @ g2mil.com/crumbles.htm has somethin' on his blog entry: Aug 7, 2010 - Flood Afghanistan with Television

Maybe you could flood these damn backwaters with flatscreens & get away with it all eventually by makin' 'em ragheads all dumb & fat with TV dinners & pizza in addition to whatever crap it is they drink for pleasure.

Fill their d**k brains with a steady flow of soft porn images on a daily basis & they'll probably forget all 'bout their centuries-ol' crackpot ideals & philosophies.

The only problem though is havin' to work out the infrastructure for power & cable.

P.S.: Love the stuff you guys have at the Pub.