The Pentagon's Debate Over What Iraq Means
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Pentagon is primarily in the business of preparing for war, not waging it. War is waged by commanders in the field. What the Pentagon does is think long and hard about what the future of war should be like. It then directs vast R&D and acquisition programs to generate a force capable of waging war successfully in that domain. Its demands for intelligence tend to be future-oriented.
Right now, there is a debate raging within the Pentagon and the military as a whole about what the war in Iraq and the subsequent (and ongoing) occupation tell us about the future of war. This debate pits two fundamental, dominant visions of future war against one another. I consider this juxtaposition to be a false dichotomy, meaning a choice that does not need to be made and, frankly, should not be made.
The two sides in this debate are functionally derived: the “air community” versus the “ground community.” The air community tends to be known as the Network-Centric Operations (NCO) crowd, whereas the ground-pounders fall under the rubric of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW).
Net-centric operations are a long-term effort by the military to understand how the rise of the information age alters the fundamental nature of war. In the vernacular of NCO advocates, the past force was platform-centric, meaning we organized ourselves around the major "platforms", the machines we created to wage war (aircraft, ships, tanks, etc.). The future, by contrast, is network - centric: platforms are nothing more than nodes in a larger network whose main power isn’t its massed fire, but its ability to wield that force with pinpoint accuracy.
NCO defines the 20th Century's long march toward "winning from above," the notion that you can effectively bomb your way to victory. Going into Iraq, it seemed as though NCO was not only the dominant mode of future-war thinking, it had reached such an apogee that serious thought was given to radically slimming down the ground forces into a future, "transformed" force.
The trajectory of combat across the 1990s hadn't served the Army and Marines well in Pentagon debates. While the Air Force was winning wars "all by itself" in Iraq, the Balkans, and later-Afghanistan, the Army and Marines were left holding the bag in such crappy situations as Somalia and Haiti. Within the Pentagon, Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) was strongly perceived—and is still perceived in many quarters today—as a form of war that the American public can't stomach in terms of losses incurred (“body-bag syndrome”), longevity (America's SADD: strategic attention deficit disorder), immoral acts (e.g., atrocities like Abu Ghraib and beheadings of hostages), and demand for resources (Senator So-and-So: "We spend more money in Iraq by breakfast than we've spent all year on [name his or her favorite cause]").
Right through "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq (May 2003), the NCO crowd seemed ascendant. Rumsfeld was right in both Afghanistan and Iraq: the small "footprint" force, armed with high-technology, could network its way to relatively bloodless (for our side) victories. In only a few weeks of major combat operations, neither war cost the U.S. more than 200 dead. That isn't just impressive, that's absolutely amazing.
But in that hubris lie the seeds of NCO's current problems, plus a growing backlash among the Fourth Generation Warfare crowd. The extremely spotty planning by the Pentagon for the occupation and postwar stabilization of Iraq enabled the rise of the disastrously efficient insurgency we face today. Arrogance about what could be achieved by NCO contributed to that bad planning, but frankly, far more of it was a result of the Pentagon's defensive response to the Army’s charges that Secretary Rumsfeld and his lieutenants were willfully disregarding its warnings about necessary troops levels on the ground.
You remember the debate: Rumsfeld versus then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki. Rummy said we could "win the war" with a small, highly transformed force, whereas Shinseki argued for massive ground forces (roughly 200,000). In the press and in our own wording of this debate, the argument became known as, "How many troops are required to win the war?" Later accusations revolved around whether or not "Rumsfeld sought to fight this war with too few troops!"
My problem with this description, as I've noted many times in my blog, is that it conflates two concepts: regime takedown and the post-conflict stabilization / nation-building effort. I call the former, the "war," and the latter, the "peace." So, in my more careful lexicon, I say that Rumsfeld was arguing—and arguing correctly—about how to "win the war," while Shinseki was arguing—and arguing correctly—about how to "win the peace."
The current fight between NCO and 4GW, over who "lost" the war in Iraq, is basically a repeat of the Rumsfeld-Shinseki argument. The 4GWers accuse NCOers of blindly stumbling from a 3GW victory over Saddam into a 4GW stalemate with the insurgency. But again, this accusation tends to conflate two very different situations: one the war, the other the subsequently botched peace. But the 4GW crowd’s answer can’t be simply, "Let's get ready for counter-insurgencies because NCO is powerless to deal with them."
4GW is essentially guerrilla war that seeks to defeat an enemy not militarily, but politically, and not on any one battlefield, but over years and even decades of low-intensity conflict. Mao is considered the father of modern 4GW, though it’s obviously been around as long as weak forces have met far superior forces. In his recent book, The Sling and the Stone, Thomas Hammes runs through the history of this modern variant of guerrilla war, from Mao to the Viet Cong to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua to the Intifadas of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Naturally, al Qaeda is considered very 4GW, coming as it did out of the great victory that was the Islamic insurgency's defeat of the superpower Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The answer on Iraq (and future situations) needs to be: "Let's get so good at the follow-on System Administration model that when our NCO force defeats a regime, we effectively shut down the possibility of 4GW by flooding the country with peace-maker troops capable of 4GW combat, staffed up big time with support personnel, lots of foreign coalition forces, and plenty of civilians experts all brought together in a larger force that's optimized for stabilization and reconstruction efforts." In other words, the best 4GW strategy is to prevent insurgencies before they start.
In short, our choice isn’t between Network-Centric Operations or Fourth Generation Warfare, it's how we focus each effectively on the logically-defined tasks of effective regime change, a list that covers both war and peace. A Pentagon debate that pits these two visions of war against one another is self-defeating and a waste of time. We must take advantage of the force-structure savings allowed by NCO (e.g., the smaller footprint) to build up our 4GW capabilities and marry those with the larger force requirements entailed in successful SysAdmin work.
In Asia today, there is a huge ongoing battle for "hearts and minds" that has nothing to do with a 4GW enemy. Yet, if this battle is waged well, it will do much to prevent such an enemy's rise in the future and diminish the appeal of enemies who already exist within the region. It is the battle to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake-driven tsunamis, the largest humanitarian assistance / disaster relief operation the world has ever seen. A truly transformed U.S. military, one that covers both the Leviathan and System Administrator functions effectively, will be a military that not only efficiently processes a politically-bankrupt regime like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It will also be a force ready to deal with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to preemptively secure "peace victories," in situations like the one we face today in southern and southeast Asia.
For me, that is the force worth building for the future worth creating. |
