Jules Crittenden

Re Not Fighting the Current War

Never mind the last one. Boston University Prof. Andrew Bacevich says he’s worried about the next one, but his big problem is with the current one. Bacevich decries the U.S. Army’s new counterinsurgency focus, suggesting that it reduces conventional capabilities, and that Bush War-driven practical needs are pre-empting a traditional chain-of-command policy process. Like much of what he has written lately, while it may in fact touch on some serious concerns, it veers quickly into the ridiculous. The Atlantic:

Embedded within this argument over military matters is a more fundamental and ideologically charged argument about basic policy. By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, Nagl is effectively affirming the Long War as the organizing principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish. Observers differ on whether the Long War’s underlying purpose is democratic transformation or imperial domination: Did the Bush administration invade Iraq to liberate that country or to control it? Yet there is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades. In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate—and perpetuate—the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.

It’s not so much that we are faced with two significant counterinsurgencies … and the prospect that others will demand our attention … and that we are compelled to fight them. It’s that training our forces to do so will perpetuate a Bush doctrine of imperial domination.

Authorship re post-modern U.S. “imperialism” has become the cornerstone of Bacevich’s career, and it is a little disingenuous of him to pass it off to “observers.” Bacevich and The Atlantic also fail to disclose that Bacevich is a former armor colonel, which is about as conventional as it gets, a Vietnam and Cold War vet, and that his son, a United States Army lieutenant, was killed in Iraq last year while conducting counterinsurgency operations, all of which might be helpful to understanding his perspective in this and other essays.*

At Small Wars Journal, Bacevich is very deftly answered on the merits of his argument, or lack thereof, by a lieutenant and a think-tank policy wonk.

The point is that Army, in the midst of waging two counterinsurgency campaigns, is still very much a force concerned with its conventional combat role. The balancing act is hard, but unavoidable. It has to prepare its soldiers to be effective in an irregular operating environment, while – at the same time - attempting to maintain a high level of proficiency in conventional military missions and tasks. Given this situation, it is unclear what Gentile would propose as a solution. Would he prefer that the Army ignore the wars it is currently involved in to prepare for conventional wars that may or may not happen in the future?

Bacevich’s second argument and his deeper fear is that, now that the Army is capable of conducting

counterinsurgency and stability operations, the United States will continue to be bogged down in a costly and unnecessary path of interventionism with the pipe-dream purpose of saving the world. It is, Bacevich charges, an “affirmation” of the Long War launched recklessly in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by President Bush and the “Vulcans” in his war cabinet.

In the course of this critique, Bacevich (like Gentile) seeks to tear down the importance of counterinsurgency, as well as those who have advocated its development within the Army. He uncritically repeats Gentile’s dubious assertion that General David Petraeus’s successes in Iraq had more to do with buying off the enemy than a change in approach, as if cooptation of foes were not a well-established component of any counterinsurgency. He further conflates Petraeus’s and John Nagl’s advocacy for adapting the force for irregular warfare with an unquestioning acceptance of the Bush Administration’s post 9/11 foreign policy goals. He tars them as “Crusaders” who are wedded to counterinsurgency as the solution to all foreign policy problems, rather than simply as part of a community of innovators who have helped devise more effective ways to prosecute the wars of today. When did striving to fight America’s current wars better become the wrong thing to do?

They go on to note that for all his criticism, Bacevich offers no solution.

… what of Iraq and Afghanistan today? Is America supposed to simply turn its back on those countries and act like the past seven years never happened? Is the Army supposed to go back to preparing only for the conventional wars it wants to fight rather than the irregular ones it actually is fighting?

To Bacevich’s point, here’s my suggestion. Make the Army bigger. It’s long overdue. Probably the most significant criticism of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is that he remained stubbornly stuck on faster, cheaper, lighter, more high-tech as we went into time of war, with full knowledge that we faced multiple and varied threats and he intended to address them. Make the Army bigger, so you can have your big, heavy conventional force to counter emerging, or re-emerging threats in Russia, China, and possibly places like Iran, while retaining the ability to deal with the very real, unavoidable counterinsurgency challenges the world presents. As for whether or not the United States is an imperialist power, that’s a semantic game. Should the United States be exercising robust authority in the world and pushing the values of democracy and free enterprise? Absolutely. The counterinsurgency focus shows that seven years in, we are adapting in a positive way, while pursuing the multilateral efforts at diplomacy with Iran and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though thus far ineffective, that the anti-war camp has been clamoring for. I’d add that power hates a vacuum, and of all the current options, U.S. geopolitical supremacy is far and away the best. A Eurofied American foreign policy would be as laughable as … Europe. The people laughing hardest would be the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and al Qaeda.

* Bacevich has generally tried to be meticulous about keeping his personal life apart from his academic one, but the device at this stage has become intellectually dishonest. When he did address his personal background and the loss of his son directly in a geo-political context, the result was tragically but perhaps understandably bordering on incoherent (see “Loss and Bitterness” link below). While he paints counter-insurgency advocate Col. Nagl as a Bush administration proxy in this article, he fails to note that he himself is effectively a Code Pink proxy.

I interviewed Bacevich repeatedly on a variety of military and foreign policy issues over the years, and we were on friendly terms. I don’t like to take a hard line on a man who I have respected if I’ve disagreed with him, and who lost his only son in combat, but an inescapably personal matter is repeatedly being allowed the guise of dispassionate academic views in prominent national publications.

In the personal disclosure department, I was embedded with U.S. forces and saw combat in the invasion of Iraq. I know men who have been killed and maimed in these wars. I am not related to any, though I am related to by blood and marriage to several military men who have served in these and past conflicts. I attended Lt. Andrew Bacevich’s funeral in May 2007 as a matter of personal respect with several friends who are combat veterans, and volunteered to write about it for the Boston Herald.

Prior re Bacevich:

Loss and Bitterness

Beloved Son

Requiem

Topics: academia, military