Policy Disconnect
AEI’s Thomas Donnelly at Small Wars Journal with yet another reason why Bacevich doesn’t make any sense. His Atlantic article positing a policy disconnect, advocating we stop fighting the current war and start massing large tank formations, suffers from a policy disconnect. It neglects to mention that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, under domestic political pressure, belatedly pushed the counterinsurgency policy change after the brass and the commander-in-chief had dropped that ball, and however unsatisfying any of that may be, it is in fact a legitimate policy path. SWJ excerpt:
Bacevich concludes with what he rightly describes as “the biggest question of all.” That is, in the American democracy, do the essential choices about war rest with soldiers or civilians? The presumption he makes, however, that the decision to prosecute the Long War has been delegated to the military, isn’t correct: rather, it’s been the military (with top-cover from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) that’s been trying to dodge the decision. One may well argue that the Bush Administration has made unwise choices, but they are undeniably choices that have been validated by the American political process. Bacevich has elsewhere argued that the course of events since the 2006 election has disregarded the democratic process, but that’s not right, either. The Democrats victories in the 2006 elections gave them a congressional majority, but not a large enough majority to override the Constitution’s presumptions in favor of the commander-in-chief.
Bacevich similarly disparages at the quality of the war-policy debate, and it’s hard to disagree. But quality is no more the measure of democratic legitimacy than is any particular outcome. As a matter of the historical record, America’s domestic debates about war have generated more heat than light. And, when it came to Iraq, what is remarkable in retrospect is how long it took to translate civilian guidance – President’s Bush’s oft-stated goals of a stable and representative government in Baghdad – into military policy. The Decider decided; alas, the commander-in-chief did not sufficiently command, and the uniforms, too frequently, shirked.
So it is the new civilian leadership – in the form of a chastened, post-2006 President Bush and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates – that finally is dragging a still-reluctant military into embracing the irregular warfare mission. Just this Monday, Gates continued his jeremiad against “Next-War-It is” and “the defense bureaucracy’s priorities and lack of urgency opposed to a wartime footing and a wartime mentality.” This may be a strategic error, but it’s his civilian job to make the call. If anyone’s outside our norms of civil-military relations, it’s those in the Gentile-Bacevich camp.
If you are new to this debate, previously: Re Not Fighting the Current War.
Topics: military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:12 am on Monday, October 6, 2008
One Response to “Policy Disconnect”
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October 6th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I may be a cynic, but I wonder if Bacevich’s concern with allegedly losing conventional forces focus and wanting to switch back to it is isn’t a backdoor way to hamstring us from being able to accomplish Iraqi and Afghanistan type missions, and thus prevent us from ever being able to engage a regime-change-and-subsequent-counter-insurgency-campaign ever again. I am sorry his son was killed, but however painful, it is not a reason to throw away a winning strategy.
After the Vietnam war, I heard and read plenty of times in my military career that we needed to focus on “war-fighting” (i.e. conventional forces) and not Vietnam type scenarios, that the military was for fighting big wars. I never really understood how the “small” stuff was to be fought — the Peace Corps?
We should not jettison tanks and big force capability — there are still plenty of foes we may have to opportunity to use them against. The use of heavy armor and air attack in the initial Iraqi campaign worked brilliantly at taking down Saddam’s regime. But we clearly shouldn’t jettison counter-insurgency/small war capability either. And yes, we need to ramp up the ground forces to do this.