[Greetings, Winds Readers. This is Chester of The Adventures of Chester. I'm going to crosspost something from my own blog here, then offer a second part that is exclusive to Winds. Here goes.]
The Irrational Tenth
Belmont Club notes a sort of ongoing conversation taking place in many circles about the war and the size of the force necessary to best prosecute it.At that time [2003] there was very little appreciation of what was really required to defeat the enemy. The Democrats were arguing for police action through multilateral alliances. Or for large half-million man troop deployments in Iraq. And the Conservatives thought that major combat operations were over in Iraq. But in truth, no one was asking the right questions. As one Marine Colonel (the reference to which I can't find at the moment) argued, more men of the wrong kind would have converted Iraq into a mud-trodden disaster. John Kerry understands this, and calls for more Special Forces to be used. But where to get them?Where to get them indeed. This is the type of conversation in which someone quickly chimes in, "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics."
In the short run you have to raid tactical units for more recruiters, for drill sergeants, for instructors, etc. This means less capable deploying units. We've divested ourselves of a lot of training facilities. It will take lots of time and money to get back to the capacity we had in 1990 with a much smaller number of installations because an expanded Army has to be quartered somewhere and it has to train when not deployed. So without some degree of political guarantee that we won't find another "Peace Dividend" there is really little to no constituency within the institutional Army to expand in anything but the most gradual way.In short, institutional fear of a lack of national will hampers the ability to make a full-throated cry for increases in size. And this is truly the problem. New forces might be raised, new kinds of fighters might be created, but in the end without the will to use them, they come to naught. Critics can carp to no end about the lack of postwar planning in Iraq, and certainly have a point in many cases. But our national will seems too endeared with the search for a perfect plan for warfare, without acknowledging that such quests are as fruitless as perpetual motion machines. This sentiment is one of the bases of Tony Corn's wide-ranging critique of an over-reliance on Clausewitz in Policy Review:
Last but not least, the third major flaw is “strategism.” At its “best,” strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate.
In making the case that there is a distinct Western military tradition dating back to the Greeks, Victor Hanson argued in The Wars of the Ancient Greeks
Fair enough. But Corn seems to think that we have gone too far, that our conversations are "strategy for strategy's sake." Indeed, I know a different aphorism, often mentioned by field-grade logisticians with whom I served: "amateurs talk logistics, professionals talk pornography."
What this is meant to express, however earthily, is the idea that it is a sort of raw, fighting spirit which is the essence of war, and given that, all else will fall into place with merely mediocre planning. Leadership, persistence, manipulation, sheer force of will -- these are the missing elements.
T.E. Lawrence knew this. "Nine-tenths of tactics are certain and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex."
Belmont Club finishes,In the end, the single best . . . response to the attack on September 11 was simply to do something, a policy which seems to me infinitely better than doing nothing, if only because action led to learning and that was superior to sitting back and imagining that we had the answers.Yes, the irrational tenth is probably only to be discovered in combat.
Doesnt take special forces to seal the Syrian border, or dig berms around towns in Anbar, or protect pipelines and power lines. Those were the failures that hurt.
Mark, the piece tries to make a larger point about a certain factor of warfare largely ignored in popular discourse, rather than to argue for a certain kind of force or certain particular actions.
The only way to find out which military leaders have that "irrational tenth" is to keep firing the losers until you get someone who's a winner...
Too bad America doesn't work like that any more.
It never did Monkeyboy, one wonders where you learned history.
FDR did not have the guts to fire MacArthur and LBJ did not have the guts to fire Westmoreland.
Really, Robin?
Lincoln fired 3 generals before he found Grant.
FDR fired the admirals responsible for Pearl Harbor.
Truman dumped MacArthur after he draged China into the Korean War.
Bush promoted Hayden, the guy who was running the NSA on 9/11.
Bush let Tommy Franks screw up Iraq after he bungled Afghnaistan.
And here we are...5 years later.
Let me try out a heretical speculation. Belmont Club is quoted as saying:
Let me try out the claim that we would have been better off doing nothing at all, at least in comparison with what was actually done. Here's the argument.
Bin Laden's strategic goal was to foment large-scale war between Islam and the West, primarily because that would rally the Islamic street, especially the youth, to his cause. He could identify his violent cause with the religious mandate for jihad.
To do this, he needed to hit the West hard enough to get a massive response against some portion of Islam, which is what it would take to wake up the masses and get them to pay attention to him.
He and al Qaeda had tried a number of bombings, including the WTC in 93, the embassies, and the Cole, but they just got treated like a dangerous but small-time bunch of violent thugs. Nothing like the attention they needed to hit the big time.
But then on 9/11, they hit the jackpot.
3000 lives lost is a terrible personal tragedy for a lot of people, and billions of dollars in damage is an economic blow. But the actual damage done by the 9/11 attack was very far from a body blow to the USA. It was nowhere close to Pearl Harbor and the destruction of our Pacific fleet in terms of actual damage to our national interests.
But al Qaeda got some serious attention from it. At first, it didn't look like even that attack would work out as well as Bin Laden wanted. Bush's speech on 9/20/01 was not the vicious attack on Islam that Bin Laden undoubtedly hoped for. Rather, it showed firm, statesmanlike resolve to join in solidarity with the rest of the world to bring these criminals to justice. (Too bad they didn't "stay the course" on that one.)
And the conquest of Afghanistan was a measured and appropriate pursuit of a criminal gang being defended by a rogue state. Looked pretty bad for Bin Laden, stuck in a cave somewhere, and still regarded as a hunted criminal, including by most Muslims.
But then, with the invasion of Iraq, we gave him what he really wanted: an opportunity to portray the West as attacking Islam as Islam, and to mobilize Islamic youth to jihad behind him.
I claim that if we had done, literally, nothing at all but mourn our dead and sweep up New York City and the Pentagon, we would have denied Bin Laden and his ilk most of what they wanted. We would be better off than we are today.
I'm not saying that would have been the ideal course of action, but it would have been better than what we actually did.
We have followed Bin Laden's playbook. He always wanted to be an existential threat, and we've given him that. He wanted us to be widely seen as major enemies of Islam, and we've given him that. What do you think he wants us to do next? Iran?
We have followed Bin Laden's playbook. He always wanted to be an existential threat, and we've given him that. He wanted us to be widely seen as major enemies of Islam, and we've given him that. What do you think he wants us to do next? Iran?
Probably Iran. As should be plain as day, our current leaders are buffoons who have done everything about as wrong as they could have done, so doing a half-a**ed job bombing Iran would be par for the course.
George Bush has followed bin Laden's playbook to the letter. Why should he stop now?
Beard, the consequences of inaction would have been far, far worse, as the evident unwillingness/inability to react to such a provocation would be seen worldwide as weakness and taken advantage of appropriately, inflaming the world to a much greater extent.
Here's why: while cultures that develop in conditions of relative abundance have the luxury of evolving a humanistic, classical liberal approach, cultures under extreme scarcity conditions do not have that option. Scarcity dictates that your subgroup maintain tight ties, tribal or otherwise, and take command of as many resources as possible, to prepare for the next resource crunch that everybody knows is coming.
This is the default human understanding of the world, given the prevalence of scarcity conditions throughout history, and it links the social behavior of tribal societies and small children everywhere, along with the hoarding tendencies of some survivors of the great depression and the bloodiness of political infighting for status. Also, I should point out that while it is evident in America that abundancy enables strategies that lift a country well beyond the natural limits of scarcity tactics, simply creating abundancy in the middle east will not automatically drive out the entrenched scarcity culture there; new strategies for survival need nurturing and time to develop.
The United States is a rich and powerful country, but if we make no moves to defend ourselves against an obvious attack, scarcity dictates that the other vultures who are still circling on the sidelines will move in and start feeding.
Note that this is not a ringing defense of everything we HAVE done, but rather a focused rebuttal to your argument. 8-)
-Piercello
Piercello,
There are always vultures circling the tiger. There are always groups out there howling for our destruction. The question is whether they are regarded, and in truth whether they can regard themselves, as more than marginal nut-cases, living in a fantasy.
For every Timothy McVeigh, there are a hundred nut-cases, some of them holding meetings in fatigues in the woods, hoping to topple to the US government. Even Timothy McVeigh, in spite of the human tragedy he caused, was a small-time villian.
My claim is that, by elevating Bin Laden to an existential threat, instead of treating him as a small-time villian who happened to hit the jackpot, we have done exactly what he wanted, and damaged ourselves (and helped him) far more than he could ever have.
In my opinion, your argument supports modest, effective law-enforcement action against the evil-doers. If we'd tried that, it would be a different world today, and one far better for the USA.
Beard,
See Belmont's most recent post, declassified NIE excerpts about the roles of perceptions of Iraq in the West and among Muslims.
I would argue that you are correct: as far as Iraq serves merely to heighten a certain meta-narrative, then it serves Al Qaeda's interest. That meta-narrative is that the West is bent on conquest, subjugation, and oppression of Muslims and must be opposed through extremism.
But we have our own meta-narrative as well: that Al Qaeda has nothing to offer Muslims except repression, and that Iraq will serve as an example to the region that as Belmont says, "democratic Islamic progress is a superior alternative to Sharia law."
One can argue then about how well we're executing that plan, but that in a nutshell is it.
Beard, I appreciate your response! My concern is that you may be conflating two groups of scavengers, to further extend a mangled metaphor. While it is true that a vulture has to get a lucky break to score a hit on a lion, its success will embolden others when the lion fails to react sufficiently, which makes things much less pleasant for the lion, although not necessarily life-threatening.
This is not the only danger, though, because there are more players in the game than vultures and lions. Other more powerful interests (hyenas?) will note the gathering of vultures and come check it out, and some may well be moved to more direct attacks themselves if the prey looks weak enough, or consider arming the harassing vultures with nukes.
The danger of a disproportionately wide response (not strong) is that it will drag the uninvolved into an unnecessarily large conflict, but the danger of a too-weak response is that it will invite further escalating catastrophic attacks until we do something decisive about it, and waiting too long will most assuredly result in the deaths of millions. This is a tightrope we are walking, not the edge of a precipice.
I may be misunderstanding you, but doesn't your stated preference for having done nothing, as you suggested in the first comment, conflict with the invasion of Afghanistan you praised in the same post? Also, "modest, effective, law-enforcement action" seems to me to be too much like "fast, cheap, and high-quality," and I think that the world as it is will limit you to only two of those three.
-Piercello
If FDR fired the Admirals who were in charge of Pearl Harbor (actually he fired an Admiral and a General - Kimmel and Short) then McArthur deserved firing even more. He had 12 hours warning.
Beard,
You are leaving out the "strong horse - weak horse" calculations of tribal societies.
Part of what OBL was selling was that the US was a paper tiger and would colapse with a push and a shove. The fact that we took Iraq and despite a number of body blows are still there reduces the "weak horse" idea.
The demonstration of resolve is an important part of our Iraq venture. It also demonstrateds that the honor of Islam cannot be defended by OBL or any of the other Islamicfascists. It is a shot to the head of Islamic superiority.
Symbolic blows are important in tribal warfare. Not so much to the west.
Tribalists don't think the same as we do in the west. Don't be guilty of mirror imaging.
http://powerandcontrol.bl*gspot.com/2006/09/tribalism.html
Symbolic blows like Iraq sure seem important to you, M. Simon.
Piercello [#11]: As I tried to say, I don't actually think that doing nothing would have been the optimal course of action. I make the claim that doing nothing at all would have been better than what we did as a dramatic way to point out the seriousness of our errors.
In fact, I think we should have carried out a joint law-enforcement effort to track down and capture OBL and gang, which would include not allowing the Taliban to deny us free access to pursue him in Afghanistan.
(Parenthetically, a similar option was available for dealing with Saddam in Iraq. I still don't understand why we didn't use troops from an international coalition to enforce free access by UN inspectors to any site in Iraq they chose to inspect. That would have been a long way from invading and toppling a sovereign government that hadn't attacked us, and would have had most of the benefits we said we desired in Iraq, including putting Saddam on dramatic notice of his own vulnerability. Since he loved power and control above all, he would have listened.)
Chester [#10]: Yes, of course, we had our own meta-narrative, but notice how different the narrative you describe is from the historical American good-guy meta-narrative. We have traditionally been the good guy internationally, not a nation that knocks over one nation to put the fear of God into the others. One of the tragedies of the last 3-4 years is changing the world reputation of the USA from good guy to bully.
M. Simon [#14}: You're probably right that some tribal cultures look up to you only if you show you can take a beating and keep on fighting. It's like one of those bar fights where two guys take turns slugging each other until one can't get up anymore.
I do think we need to show more toughness, but I don't think that invading Iraq was the way to do it, for all the reasons I've already said. We should have pursued OBL and aQ as a gang of small-time villains, and we would eventually have gotten them. Furthermore, we showed plenty of toughness in prevailing quickly in Afghanistan.
The places where we failed to show toughness include Reagan pulling out of Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing in 1982, and Clinton pulling out of Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1996(?). In both of those cases, if there was something there that was worth doing (and I don't know this for sure), we should have buried our dead and gone ahead to do what we were there for. Those were two episodes that cost our reputation.
Furthermore, if you want more evidence of lack of toughness, compare how we treated Iraq (which we knew did not have nuclear weapons, whatever we implied) with how we treated North Korea (which we know does have nuclear weapons, and is only a few miles from Seoul). Do you wonder why any other country might want to get their own nukes as quickly as they can?
We don't have to get into bar fights to demonstrate toughness. We don't have to invade countries that haven't attacked us first to demonstrate toughness. Toughness comes in large part from character and principle, and we as a nation have not been showing those.
I'll offer the position that we didn't actually demonstrate a whole lot of toughness in Afghanistan, precisely because we won so quickly and with so little of our own blood spilled. What we did demonstrate was power - overwhelming power that a conventional army couldn't resist. But that we had such power wasn't really in doubt; nobody was sitting there saying "we are invulnerable to the United States because they are weak."
What the "strong horse" argument is dealing with is perceptions of staying power. Yes, yes, the US army can punch through any opposition and leave bouncing smoking rubble. But if it's married to a foreign policy that equates twenty dead soldiers to a shattering defeat, then the power doesn't matter. You can inflict a few casualties, no matter how powerful the other force is, especially if you're concealing yourself among the civilian population until you explode near some of their forces. Even if your exchange rate is ruinous, if you're willing to take the punches and your opponent isn't, you're the one left with possession of the field.
It's not really a good analysis, mostly because it's heavily influenced by Somalia (a real case of "what the hell were we doing there in the first place?") What the US needed to demonstrate wasn't the power to invade, but the resilience to take repeated shots and stick around, and say what you will about Iraq, but it's working fine there... so long as we stick around.
Beard,
Your statements of what we should have done are perfect examples of "who will bell the cat" nonsense. We "should" have had a police force that would have gone into Afghanistan after bin Laden but wouldn't have allowed any interference from the Taliban? Sounds like war to me. "...troops from an international coalition to enforce free access by UN inspectors to any site in Iraq they chose to inspect"? Sounds like war to me.
This things look exactly like war to anybody who understands that enemies don't necessarily stand still and allow you to execute plans perfect plans. As for you, who knows--maybe magical thinking really will get us where we need to go, but I doubt it.
Avatar [#17]: It's hard to imagine saying "Iraq is working fine" because we're taking casualties and not leaving. We're not making any progress toward our goals either. And we've created an environment where our opponents are making progress toward theirs.
Kirk Parker [#18]: In fact, we did come a lot closer to leading a law enforcement effort to catch OBL in Afghanistan, and we didn't let the Taliban deny us access. The problem there was that we didn't follow through, and we let Iraq keep us from "staying the course".
There's a big difference between enforcing a search warrant and burning the house down. (Ask the Branch Davidians about that!) It would have been perfectly reasonable to use limited, focused force to ensure access for the UN inspectors. It's a similar issue to enforcing the "no fly" zone. That's a lot more limited than war, and avoids creating the kind of chaotic breeding/recruiting/training ground for terrorists that we have now.
You don't understand the point, Beard, there is no such thing as "limited" "focused" force when you are talking about mechanized divisions invading a nation with modern weapons. Your proposed alternatives were not and are not actual alternatives.