Err War?

This article from Slate is a severe indictment of the Army's ability to adapt to the realities of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Kaplan's evidence is much too thin to support his sweeping conclusions. Further, his preferred course of action has risks that he does not seem to recognize.

First, Kaplan references an Army report that is critical of our intelligence performance in Iraq. He claims that it has been "suppressed" because the Army took it off its website. This, he concludes, is evidence that the brass is obstinate and unwilling to learn the lessons of our current war.

Another way to look at it is that the brass does not want to provide fodder to a bunch of journalists cherry-picking facts for their "quagmire" stories. Kaplan does not show that the report on lessons learned has been suppressed internally.

As noted below and here and here and here, the military's record of learning the right lessons are quite good. Better, i'd argue, that the typical reporter's. It's not just that journalists opt for the lazy Vietnam analogy. Remember as well that reporters were quick to trumpet the claims of the "military reformers" in the 1980s. They couldn't get enough of the claims that we didn't need the M-1 Abrams tank, the Bradley IFV, big nuclear carriers, the B-1, the B-2,.......

In short, most journalists got the procurement battles of the 1980s almost 100% wrong. What evidence do we have that they are more astute now?

Kaplan writes:

Careers tend to be advanced on the battlefield or in the chain of big-ticket weapons procurement—not in the shadows of conflict or under the green eyeshade of "support analysis."

The Army has long been dominated by armor and artillery, and decisions about its budgets, missions, and priorities tend to be made by officers who rose through the ranks during the Cold War as commanders of armored divisions. A shift has begun to take place, as high-tech munitions and surveillance systems come into the arsenal, and as "rogue regimes" and terrorists replace the Soviet Union and China as the leading threats—but, at least as it affects military institutions, this shift is still in its early phase.

It would be a big mistake for the army to reorient as dramatically as Kaplan thinks necessary. Terrorism can cause civilian casualties, but China or North Korea could trigger a nuclear face-off. We need a strong conventional capability to lessen our reliance on nuclear deterrence. It is better to stumble sometimes in our small wars than to risk losing a big battle.

In the nineteenth century Britain and France gained immense experience fighting small wars. Their officers were trained for them; their armies were good at fighting them. But this expertise had little applicability to the war with Germany in 1914. The British, in particular, lacked the staff expertise to command large formations and manage the logistics of trench warfare.

The same thing happened in the US in both the Civil War and WWI. Our regular army officers were trained and experienced in frontier warfare and counter-insurgency. They were overwhelmed by the demands of large-scale conventional operations at the beginning of both wars.

Kaplan would have us repeat these mistakes in order to pacify Iraq a few weeks or months faster. For the fact is the guerrilla was will be won soon. The Ba'athists and jihadis cannot win: they have neither sanctuaries nor reliable sources of supply. This is not South Vietnam or Lebanon where the guerrillas can dictate the combat tempo; they can be squeezed slowly but inevitably.

That does not mean all of Iraq will become 100% safe and peaceful. By that standard, South Central LA, Compton, and the Bronx are not pacified. Nor are Spain, France, or Sweden.

But we can win this little war in Iraq without completely reorienting our military.