TRYING TO DISAGREE. I'm also not sure that Matt and I disagree all that much about counter-insurgency, but I'm going to press foward as if we do. Matt's argument, I think, is that a focus on operational questions such as counter-insurgency doctrine ignores the basic political question of what could have been achieved in Iraq or Vietnam. Matt is arguing that, because even a competent counter-insurgency doctrine would have failed in those situations, focusing on doctrine rather than on the critical political question of the intervention itself is misplaced. Setting aside the question of whether Matt is right about Iraq and Vietnam (which is open to reasonable dispute, although I agree with Matt), I still think that he's missing the point. Whether or not Iraq was winnable, the military ought to proceed in terms of its doctrinal organization as if the conflict could have been won through military means. This is the Army's job, as it was between 1950 and 1985, when most within the Army believed that the defense of Western Europe from the Warsaw Pact through conventional military means was a lost cause. Even a military organization with a healthy understanding of the relationship between military and political affairs needs to conduct military operational planning. While it is not within the means of the military to determine where the next conflict will occur or what it's nature will be, it is part of the responsibility of the military establishment to provide military means for dealing with the most likely form of security crisis. On a related point, I'm also not sure how much I concur with Jeff Record's argument (PDF) that the U.S. is culturally inept at dealing with the linkages between political and military affairs. I think difficulty with this divide may be an element of U.S. strategic culture, especially in the last sixty years, but that it hasn't always been so; and changes over the past fifteen to twenty years have made the distinction untenable. Well before the Iraq war, the combatant commands around the world had begun to take on tasks and missions that were explicitly political in nature. Much of this work is detailed in Dana Priest's The Mission, which concentrates on the day-to-day work of U.S. troops around the world doing essentially political tasks. The combatant commands have financial and diplomatic resources that vastly exceed those of the State Department, a situation that irritates diplomats to no end but results nevertheless in a military increasingly accustomed to dealing with political problems through political means. I guess it's here that the disagreement comes to a head, because while Matt seems to see the development of a counter-insurgency doctrine as another in a failed set of experiments in keeping the political and the military at bay from one another, I think of the recent push on counter-insurgency as part of the political reawakening of the U.S. military establishment, and perhaps further as evidence of a move away from the Prussian model of warfare that has dominated U.S. military thinking since the nineteenth century. As such, I'm a little bit more optimistic that the doctrine might be headed in the right direction.
--Robert Farley
