The Army You Need
Max Bergmann reads Defense Secretary Robert Gates and proclaims the end of the "Bush military."
There is a lot to praise in Gates' speech, but there's a lot to quibble with in Bergmann's gloss of it. Specifically, placing the blame for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld and the doctrine of military transformation.
It's true that the Rumsfeld/Franks war plan led to much unnecessary carnage, but it remains the case that American political objectives inside Iraq and Afghanistan are fundamentally misaligned with our resources.
Re-read Gates' speech and ask yourself if any of his recommendations can ultimately change the underlying dynamic we face in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. That dynamic is simple: we are a foreign power attempting to implement political change.
Past empires handled this through a mixture of ruthless force and the cultivation of local (undemocratic) elites. We are doing this as well, but with much less brute force and with far more solicitation of the locals. That does indeed make us morally superior to past empires. It does not make us more effective.
The one time in recent history where the U.S. was unambiguously successful at this kind of gambit was in the after-math of World War II, where we occupied and transformed Germany and Japan into democratic allies. Considering what it took to produce quiescent populations in Japan and Germany, is it any wonder that every subsequent war the U.S. has fought has ended so ambiguously?
We have rightly recoiled from total war, while simultaneously insisting that we enjoy the societal malleability that waging such a campaign affords. Our inability to bring our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a politically satisfying end has, I think, much less to do with the composition, training, weapons systems and doctrine of our military than the objectives we have set before it.
This leads, I think, to two basic lessons. First, don't start so many wars. Not for nothing did the Founders invest Congress with the authority to declare war. Maybe they were onto something! Second, if you are forced to fight, keep the objectives simple.
As a stateless enemy, al-Qaeda does provide a unique and genuinely thorny challenge to the formula above. But I don't see how providing population security for Afghanistan, and dumping billions of dollars of development aid into that country, advances the fight. If we manage to suddenly turn Afghanistan into a functional state, al-Qaeda can simply move on--to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or cyber-space. I find it hard to see how a democratic, stable Afghanistan even begins to addresses the very urgent threat of jihadism in Europe.
