Learning the Wrong Lessons from Iraq

Thomas Ricks touts the brilliance of this article by Col. McMaster (the "brain behind Petraeus") in World Affairs Journal. It is essentially an extended attack on the technological hubris of American defense planners and well worth a read.

However, McMasters offers up this as a conclusion:

In the last paragraphs of his book, A Better War, Lewis Sorley relates a story from December 1975, about seven months after the fall of Saigon. New Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was away from the Pentagon. Workmen took advantage of the opportunity to refurbish the secretary’s office. In doing so, they removed a large relief map of Southeast Asia that had hung on the wall during much of the Vietnam War. Perhaps if the map were still hanging there when Secretary Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon more than thirty years later, it might have inspired a healthy dose of skepticism about the latest orthodoxy predicting how U.S. technological advantages would make war fast, efficient, and decisive. That skepticism, in turn, might have generated a deeper understanding of the nature of the conflicts in which the United States and its partners remain engaged today.

I think McMaster's point about the dangerously seductive quality of defense technology, while valid, is being taken altogether too far. If we collectively decide that the problem with the Iraq war was that Donald Rumsfeld and company were insufficiently mindful of population security and overly optimistic about high-tech warfare, then we haven't actually learned anything. It never ceases to amaze me that critics of the invasion - such as the New York Times editorial board - nevertheless insist that we build an Army to wage future Iraq-style wars.

But why? If the war was a strategic mistake, as people such as Brent Scowcroft argued at the time, then the flaws that it exposed in our defense establishment are actually not flaws of force structure or doctrine, etc. but flaws in the strategic decision making of our civilian policy makers. The lesson we should learn from Iraq is not that we need to do a better job "next time" but that there should be no next time. I mean, what's easier: replacing strategically inept bureaucrats with astute ones, or reorienting the entire defense establishment on the theory that future blunders are simply inevitable?

Moreover there is nothing about the "nature of the threat that we face" that necessitates building a constabulary Army capable of pacifying unruly natives. Indeed, the nature of the threat of Islamic terrorism warns specifically against such a move, on the grounds that it would vindicate bin Laden's propaganda, tie down a disproportionate amount of U.S. combat power, and drain the economy of needed resources. The surest way to keep the threat of Islamic terrorism alive deep into the 21st century is to garrison ever larger contingents of U.S. troops on Muslim soil.

Yet the very people one would expect to acknowledge that fact are the same people insisting that we build an Army to do just that. It's very frustrating.

One further quibble. McMasters writes that "the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other."

The problem with "how we went to war" wasn't the undue focus on technological superiority, it was the legitimacy of the enterprise. A war without an obvious and compelling casus belli - a war viewed globally as grossly illegitimate - was going to have a much higher hurdle associated with the end state than one (like Afghanistan) where U.S. action was widely viewed as urgent and compelling. We simply couldn't leave behind an Iraq that was demonstrably worse than we found it.

That, again, suggests that the answer isn't to pay more attention to the human aspects of waging war, but to the legitimacy of initiating military conflict. I would argue that the more legitimacy the U.S. has in taking military action against a state, the less will be expected of us by way of nation building.