Page 3 of 3 US military ripe for a fight with Obama
By Mark Perry
That viewpoint has strong advocates, including former army vice chief Richard
Cody. "We don't want to become an army that can only fight a
counter-insurgency," he told one reporter. Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, a
West Point history professor, echoes Cody, warning against "building a
counter-insurgency-only army that puts our ability to address non-COIN
contingencies at risk."
For Gentile, the success of the "surge" was not due to the adoption of a proper
counter-insurgency program, but "the decision to ally with our former enemies
(eg, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents), the pause in activities by Muqtada
al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi, and the separation of rival factions in Baghdad
stemming from sectarian cleansing in 2006-2007".
Gentile's critique represents those who fear a dilution of the military's
mandate - to protect and defend the United States and find and defeat its
enemies. As Gentile wrote in Armed Forces Journal: "The authors of the army's
1986 AirLand Battle doctrine premised their manual on fighting as the essence
of war. Fighting gave the 1986 manual a coherence that reflected the true
nature of war. The army's new COIN manual's tragic flaw is that the essence of
war fighting is missing from its pages."
Come January, the new Obama defense team will find itself in the midst of an
escalating conflict between counter-insurgency advocates who feel besieged by
the traditional proponents of the "AirLand Battle doctrine" and those who live
in the world of counter-insurgency operations.
The debate has recently devolved into name-calling. The counter-insurgency
clique, its opponents claim, live in a "matrix" of true believers, a term
derived from the movie by the same name. To escape "the matrix" you have to
"swallow the blue pill", and return to the real world, where the job of the
military is to destabilize nations and kill they enemy. The most important
voice to speak out against the new focus on COIN, Colonel Sean MacFarland, was
once in the matrix, but has now swallowed the "blue pill". MacFarland, a hero
to many in the military because of his courageous work with the insurgency in
Ramadi in 2006, wrote an internal army study in May that warned that the focus
on counter-insurgency doctrine is weakening the army's training regimen. A
similar focus on counter-insurgency operations in the Israeli Defense Forces,
MacFarland said, led to Israel's loss in their war against Hezbollah in 2006.
The MacFarland heresy stunned the counter-insurgency community.
"Counter-insurgency without MacFarland is like Christianity without St Paul," a
senior defense official notes.
The middle ground
This contentious battle between red and blue "pill swallowers" has escalated to
the point where it now involves the secretary of defense and JCS chairman. Both
have attempted to adopt a delicate middle ground, arguing that it is possible
for the nation to prepare for both a major war and train its soldiers in
counter-insurgency doctrine. "Even the biggest of wars will require so-called
'smart war' capabilities," Gates said recently at the National Defense
University. "In Iraq, we've seen how an army that was basically a smaller
version of the Cold War force can over time become an effective instrument of
counter-insurgency." Mullen, on the other hand, has emphasized the need for the
creation of a balanced force, adding, "I do worry about us losing our focus too
much in the counter-insurgency world. We need balance in the way we think, in
the way we train and in the way we resource ourselves."
In a series of public addresses, Gates has also focused the military on a new
mantra. Quoting a turn-of-the-century American general by the name of Fox
Conner, Gates says that the US should "never fight unless it has to, never
fight alone, and never fight for long". While Gates would never acknowledge it,
the mantra is a direct repudiation of the Bush Doctrine of fighting "preventive
wars" - which suggests that the best way to keep America's enemies from going
to war is to bomb them first.
Nor does he add a fourth principle, the Lincoln Doctrine, that dictates that,
in wartime, the US should deploy all the forces it has. The doctrine is derived
from Abraham Lincoln's instructions to Ulysses S Grant, just prior to the last
campaign of the Civil War. "This time," Lincoln told Grant, "put everyone in."
The Gates mantra and the Lincoln Doctrine may provide the best way to resolve
the blue pill-red pill debate, as both sides agree that whether or not the new
counter-insurgency doctrine becomes the doctrine of the future, the US should
not only stay out of unnecessary wars, but also deploy enough troops to ensure
victory; it's a view that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld - and
Franks - pointedly ignored.
While it seems unlikely that Obama will decide the military's increasingly
nasty doctrinal debate, leaving the question to senior military officers, it
seems likely that those who emphasize training soldiers to master "Phase IV"
operations will be heeded. The Obama military brains trust contains a large
number of Pentagon officials-in-waiting whose primary expertise is in "Phase
IV" operations. Included in this number are former marine officer Nate Fick (a
fellow at the Center for a New American Security - CNAS) , Roger Carstens (a
retired army special forces lieutenant colonel and CNAS fellow), Shawn Brimley
(also a fellow at CNAS), influential army colonel Peter Mansoor (a professor of
military history at Ohio State University), and retired army Lieutenant Colonel
John Nagl, who helped Petraeus and Mattis write the military's
counter-insurgency field manual.
The Obama team
Despite the contentious disagreement over military doctrine, the transition
from the Bush to the Obama presidency is expected to go more smoothly than the
still-born military hand-off to the State Department in Anbar.
While it is not yet clear whether Gates will stay on as defense Ssecretary, the
senior military's cooperation with Obama transition officials has been
unprecedented, a sign of just how disenchanted the JCS and the military's
regional commanders have been with the Bush presidency. An era that was
inaugurated with talk of how respectful the Bush White House would be towards
the military was destroyed by Rumsfeld's imperious handling of the war's senior
commanders and Bush's nonchalant reaction to military advice. The result has
been the shattering of trust between civilian policymakers and military
officers, what retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard (with over 50 years of
observing the White House-Pentagon interaction) calls "the worst breakdown in
civil-military relations that I have ever seen".
Obama himself is aware of the chasm of mistrust that exists between the
Pentagon and the White House, which is why he is not only considering keeping
Gates on, but why it is all but certain that he will appoint General James
Jones as his administration's national security advisor. It is a job that Jones
wants. The retired former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Jones was asked
to be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's deputy, but turned down the job.
"He was very careful to leave himself open for a spot in the Obama
administration," a colleague says. Jones has considerable stature among senior
military officers who, in the words of a close marine colleague, "would welcome
his appointment as reassurance that Obama will not only listen to what we have
to say, but will respect our point of view. He's perfect for the job."
While it is not clear where Jones stands on the escalating debate over
counter-insurgency doctrine, this same colleague believes Jones (like Obama)
will stay clear of the military's doctrinal debate at the same time that he
"serves as a bridge to the military's most important planners".
Among the challenges Obama faces is how to wrestle with an out-of-control
defense budget, a costly war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a military that
reflects a constituency that did not elect him. Wrestling with the cost of the
Iraq War, funded through successive "supplemental appropriations" (what JCS
chairman Mullen describes as "the military equivalent of a bad cocaine habit")
looms as a top priority, second only to the new president's plan to draw down
American forces in Iraq. That plan will undoubtedly be the subject of Obama's
first discussion with the JCS - coming right after he reassures them that the
last thing he wants to do is change the military's "don't ask, don't tell"
policy.
Mark Perry is a director ofConflicts
Forumand author of Partners in Command (Penguin Press, New York,
2007).
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