An interesting discussion on Afghanistan, insurgency and “what now” has been breaking out lately.
Note that here, again, the semipro commentariat are doing Obama’s work for him as they collectively try and come up with a strategic framework for the related series of conflicts we seem to be caught up in.
I’ll refer you to three pieces, and focus my own commentary on one of them, the triggering post by Zenpundit (Mark Safranski): ‘The Post-COIN Era is Here.’ In addition, you should read Thomas PM Barnett’s response, as well as T Greer’s supportive post.
So, COIN still reigns supreme, albeit with trimmed sails?
No.
We are forgetting something important about the ascendancy of COIN. It was not accepted by a reluctant Pentagon and the Bush administration because COIN is a very effective operational tool in the right strategic context – although that is certainly true. Nor was it because the advocates of COIN were brilliant policy architects and advocates – though most of them are. COIN became the order of the day for three reasons:
1) The “Big Army, fire the artillery, fly B-52’s and Search & Destroy=counterinsurgency” approach proved to be tactically and strategically bankrupt in Iraq. It failed in Mesopotamia as it failed in the Mekong Delta under Westmoreland – except worse and faster. Period.
2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans.
3) The 2006 election results were a political earthquake that forced the Bush administration to change policy in Iraq for its’ own sheer political survival. COIN was accepted only because it represented a life preserver for the Bush administration.
We have just had another such political earthquake. The administration is now but one more electoral debacle away from having the president be chased in Benny Hill fashion all over the White House lawn by enraged Democratic officeholders scared out of their wits of losing their seats next November.
Republican Scott Brown, the winner in a stunning upset in Massachusetts’ special election for Senator, certainly had no intention of undermining President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan. To the contrary, he is for it in a far more muscular manner than was his hapless Democratic opponent. But that’s irrelevant. What matters is that in all the recent elections, Democrats have been clobbered by a “Revolt of the Moderates” – socially liberal, fiscally conservative, independent voters who came out in 2008 for Obama and are now shifting radically away from him. For the next year, politicians of both parties will be competing hard for this bloc which means “deficit hawks” will soar higher than defense hawks.
America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over.
He’s making the (very real) point that our strategies have to match our means, and that those means are going to look pretty sketchy for the next few years (sadly for me, who is supposed to be bankrolling my retirement during that term…).
The problem of course can be summed up in three quotes:
“The enemy gets a vote.“
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.“
and my personal (and most generally applicable) favorite:
“You can’t win.
You can’t break even.
You can’t quit.“
So what do we do if we’re unwilling – or unable – to afford massively time consuming and expensive COIN wars?
Do we hunker down?
Do we follow Hamas rules?
Now – again – I’m not disagreeing with his assessment of the domestic political situation. I think he’s dead on that being fiscally prudent is the Golden Ticket to electoral success in the next round – being fiscally prudent plus (depends on your political affiliation) is going to be the stump speech we’ll all have to hear for the next two years.
But…we can be as cheap as we want to; the problem is that we still have to figure out how to deal with the ongoing expansion of Islamism while doing so.
(Or not…one of the disconnects among people with varying approaches here will be the question of whether the conflict with Islamists would be a significant one if we simply refused to play. Shockingly, I’m on the side that says that things would just get worse.)
Because creating an internal police state to deal with domestic security won’t be a lot cheaper than dealing with the problems outside our borders.
And to me, that’s one of the five real alternatives:
1. Hama rules (B-52’s all the way, “rubble don’t make trouble”).
2. Come home and lay down arms, while defending civil rights for everyone.
3. COIN
4. The security state. (“Homeland Security is watching you, buddy, so watch your a**!”)
5. Magic underpants gnomes.
I’ve got to say that ranking these in reverse preference order (for me), it’s #4, #2, #1, #3, and maybe, depending on what it is, #5.
So maybe we’d all better get cracking on figuring it out.
–
_But…we can be as cheap as we want to; the problem is that we still have to figure out how to deal with the ongoing expansion of Islamism while doing so_
A.L. we’ll get cracking on figuring it out once we stop conflating “islamism” with resistance to foreign occupation and/or resource exploitation facilitated via affiliated local tyrants.
_2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans_
This quote is priceless. It perfectly encapsulates the bipartisan nature of the support our ongoing war crimes in Mesopotamia enjoy.
On a related note while I’ve often taken issue with some of Elaine Supkis’ _cultural_ positions, on the geo-political and economic scales she’s often cooking with gas as in her “latest essay”:http://emsnews.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/beware-of-starting-global-war-with-china-and-russia/
_”It perfectly encapsulates the bipartisan nature of the support our ongoing war crimes in Mesopotamia enjoy. “_
Of course we’d be equally responsible for the inevitable blood bath if we leave prematurely, which would cost far more lives and leave Iraq a shattered Lebanon for generations to come. But THATS morally correct. Until we do it, at which point it immediately becomes yet another crime to add to the tally of western imperial greed and destruction on Coldtypes list.
Which pretty well sums up the moral bankruptcy of the far left- anything you do is wrong, anything you dont do is wrong. And by you, we mean you, not us. We’re the good people on the sidelines condemning our side and excusing the nihilistic, woman enslaving, gay murdering, civilian targeting uber-reactionaries.
There’s a middle way, but it doesn’t stand a chance because it f’s with too many powerful interests.
We stay the course in Afghanistan and radically overhaul the entire defense budget around the 21st century needs. I don’t think we can ignore the fact any longer that our defense budget dwarfs the rest of the world (just about put together), and more importantly, much of it is geared to fight wars that don’t exist.
Fleets of nuclear armed B52s and B2s are pointless in an era of cruise missiles and submarines. We never needed 10,000 warheads any more than we need 2500. 200 nestled in subs beneath the ice-caps is every bit as useful a deterrent. Neither do we need to send B2s to lob cruise missiles at enemys with no living radar stations just to pretend they are useful.
We should rethink our defense industry from the ground up. Beef up our COIN capability, keep our air and naval superiority, keep a minimal nuclear deterrent, and ruthlessly chop any spending that doesn’t equate to that. If anybody wants to get into a Fulda Gap WW2 style conventional slug fest with us, we will simply destroy every industrial and infrastructure asset they have overnight and let them spend the next decade turning their power back on. Stop trying to fight the last war or imagining anybody else wants to play it with us knowing they would be doomed.
The problem (or rather one problem) with what you present is that Islamist attacks take place outside the context of hypothetical Western oppression – in places like Thailand and the Phillipines.
Even in countries with relatively benign governments – Jordan, for example – we have strong Islamist movements which are often violent.
So even if I bought your vision of a world under the boot of the West, that doesn’t explain the Islamist dynamic.
And it’s charming to see that the problem with China-Western relationships isn’t China’s totalitarian belligerence (almost all totalitarian states need an external enemy and need to expand – Albania is the only counterexample I can think of); it’s the evil CIA. I’d actually be interested in hearing you expand on your views on this, because they are pretty alien to me and I might actually learn something.
Marc
Mark, I’ll be on a call to hear the QDR explained later this week and may have more to say on this, but I don’t see your defense buget as making a ton of sense.
Let me break it into two parts; the craziness of defense contracting which consistently results in less-flexible and useful $10 million solutions to $200K problems, and the overall posture of building a defense against – what, exactly?
The reality is that one thing that modern technology does is to make subsequent generations – of anything – orders of magnitude cheaper than earlier generations.
So while we might have the budget to spend 10x what our near-peer competitors spend, they can piggyback on the declining tech cost curve and deliver 80% of the functionality for 20% of the price.
Which means that our near-peers present a much more robust defense problem than budgets would suggest.
And the reality is that we face a complicated and potentially hostile relationship with Russia, and adversarial relationship with China, and our relations with Brazil and India are positive, but uncertain.
Coldtype and Andrew Bacevitch would suggest that we pull back to our borders and hunker down; the problem is that we’d also be looking back toward an early 20th century economy since much of our current economy is driven by the global markets.
And that once our economy was that weak, we’d face genuine threats from more-powerful states.
So – as the title of the post suggests – we’re stuck.
As a sidenote, I’ll suggest that the 2010 defense budget is $634B out of a total budget of $3.8T…so to suggest that defense is the only problem, or that cutting the defense budget to zero would solve our fiscal problems doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Marc
_”less-flexible and useful $10 million solutions to $200K problems, and the overall posture of building a defense against – what, exactly?”_
Right- but cart before the horse, we should have our ‘focus’ of what we expect our defense forces to be doing _before_ we talk about what we will be buying (obvious I know, but not to be overlooked as its a perennial and expensive sin in our procurement system).
_”The reality is that one thing that modern technology does is to make subsequent generations – of anything – orders of magnitude cheaper than earlier generations.”_
True- but again, no matter how cheap the widget is, if you don’t need the widget its a giant waste. Even if you’re already heavily invested in it, you mustn’t succumb to that kind of logic as it is expensive. Good money after bad should be the watch word.
_”And the reality is that we face a complicated and potentially hostile relationship with Russia, and adversarial relationship with China, and our relations with Brazil and India are positive, but uncertain.”_
True- but those relationships are different than the Cold War mentality that continues to pervade the ‘upper-reaches’ of the defense department. Technology has outpaced the boilerplate strategy once again. If Russia invades Poland, or China attacks Taiwan, sending Abrams tanks to meet them is a mistake. Destroying their oil pipelines will get their attention faster.
_”So – as the title of the post suggests – we’re stuck.”_
I dont think so. I think we can provide an equally robust deterrent and footprint globally, meet our current obligations, keep order in the world at least as well, and cut our defense budget by at least 1/3rd. We just don’t need expensive Cold War toys to do it. The toys we do need are cheaper and will become cheaper still- and by focusing carefully on the few big-budget items we DO consider very useful, we can maintain the edge over our near-peers to such an extent that engaging us remains suicidal economically especially.
And of course the defense budget is only one part of what needs desperately to be done to our government, but its still a big, big part that can’t be ignored. If we do it now we can do it on our terms, which is far better than under the gun in 5 or 10 years when we have no choice.
I figured we’d have about ten years to finance the neoconservative project before we’d be faced with a dilemma. If we wish to continue the project after that period, the option are: either seek partners with whom we can share the cost, or finance the project by creating an empire. In this scenario delay = defeat. The left may not have been able to stop the project, but they don’t have to. All they have to do is slow it down enough that we can’t fulfill the first option within the allotted time. Since the US doesn’t have the stomach to become a *real empire* we’ll have to find some other way to fulfill the first option, and what comes to mind for me is the creation of an alternative to the UN composed of countries that are “free” according the Freedom House scales or some analogous metric. This would not only diffuse the costs, but would create a socio-economic “rabbit” that the partly free and non-free countries will be compelled to chase. And yes, we’d better get cracking, because the sand is running out of the glass.
Many years ago, I tried to ask what victory in Iraq was worth. How do we define victory? How much are we willing to spend to achieve it?
The same questions could be asked about Afghanistan. Let’s pretend that we kill all taliban 1 year from today. Is Afghanistan a stable country? Is it ripe for democracy? Could we remove enough corruption for the government to flourish? Are there stable political bodies that can negotiate their way through these difficulties?
Unfortunately, it seems like the answer to these questions has changed to no.
I’m willing to admit I was wrong on Iraq, but Afghanistan is now worse (by every measure) than Iraq was in 2005.
Yes, leaving will be a nightmare. But unless something is changed quickly, the nightmare will become inevitable.
_”I’m willing to admit I was wrong on Iraq, but Afghanistan is now worse (by every measure) than Iraq was in 2005. “_
But is it worse than Iraq was in 2007? You were wrong about the surge in Iraq, and we may (may I say) be as close to a victory condition in Iraq as anybody could have hoped. Doesn’t it follow that the same military brains can pull a rabit out of Afghanistan as well? And isn’t there value, even if we can’t achieve stunning results, in keeping our footprint so close to the heart of the enemy? Our Afghanistan problem is Pakistan. If we can manage to protect the population and interdict the border crossings, we can plausibly reverse the momentum. This isn’t a hopeless situation in which every hand is turned against us as the Soviets dealt with.
_”Interesting. Want to take some time and expand that?”_
Absolutely- lets start the state of warfare today from our point of view.
Smart weapons have radically changed almost everything (the exception being infantry warfare, as always boots on the ground is a world unto itself). The services know this, and they have scrambled to turn everything that can fly, float, or roll into a ‘guided missile delivery system’, no matter how vastly overpriced the platform is for that service. The truth is you can load a 747, a coal barge, or a flatbed truck with guided missiles and they are every bit as effective as a B1, a guided missile cruiser, or a HIMARS. And the reason for that is that every one of those platforms is too expensive to risk in close combat, and with stand off weapons you don’t really need or want them in combat anyway. Now if you need that kind of firepower on station- you slap a hellfire onto a UAV or a helicopter for a fraction of the cost or you use your organic artillery with their fancy guided shells.
Look at the navy and how much money we are sinking into new generations of ships with all kinds of stealth nonsense and ‘littoral’ capability that are NEVER going near a hostile coastline- because again they are too expensive and their weapons systems just don’t require it. Are we really going to send billion dollar ships to chase around thousand dollar pirate dingies? How many Cutters can you buy for that price tag (which can fire Tomahawk missiles just as well if you just gotta have it)?
That being the case- we need to start from the point of view that very soon we will have ubiquitous platforms to deliver smart munitions tactically and strategically 24/7 all weather, at all strategic depths, and _cheaply_ if we are smart about it.
to be continued..
First, thanks to Marc for this topic. I’d read Zen’s post when it came out, had the feeling it would be seminal, but hadn’t the time to follow the discussion. Thanks for doing so.
On topic, I’d like to question the sometimes nebulous definition of COIN, particularly when it’s conflated with ‘nation-building’. Alchemist apparently does this above:
bq. Let’s pretend that we kill all taliban 1 year from today. Is Afghanistan a stable country? Is it ripe for democracy? Could we remove enough corruption for the government to flourish? Are there stable political bodies that can negotiate their way through these difficulties?
Barnett, whom I once admired greatly for his PNM work, also does it in the linked article, where he brackets COIN in Afghanistan and Iraq with relief work in Haiti. Huh? It seems that his notion of the US as global SysAdmin has become an _idee fixe_. If we haven’t the will and means to support two moderate scale COIN efforts, it would instead seem to be a dead letter.
Perhaps such a conflation is inevitable, given that an insurgency posits a rebellion against _something_, but is it useful? We won in Iraq when we stopped fixating on the central government, and began a bottoms up strategy (partially ‘tribal’) that left the locals to decide what the center might look like.
Hopefully the same shift is now underway in Afghanistan. There are certainly enough “it’s the tribes, stupid” posts and essays floating around. As to why it’s the only way, consider the following: If we had _suceeded_ with a centralized strategy in Afghanistan, we would have saddled it with an Army and Police establishment that could not be supported by its economy in any foreseeable future.
What Barnett usefully calls out, and fits right with Marc’s unease, is that we have surrendered the strategic initiative by tying down deployable resources. Gearing up in Afghanistan as we phase out of Iraq might be inevitable to rescue a broken strategy, but it’s left little liberty to consider other options. And while our expenditures of blood are low on a historical scale, the amount of treasure going up in smoke is also unprecedented, operating at the far end of an expensive logistics tether.
Meanwhile, Somalia is already at and Yemen is fast reaching the level of disorder that allowed Al Qaeda to base itself in Afghanistan, and Iran is reaching for weapons that would make the terror threat more acute, with political cover from China. Just as much as domestic political limits, the actions of adversaries say that we don’t have a great deal of time in Afghanistan.
As to what may happen as a result, let me propose a further addition to Marc’s alternative list, a sort of hybrid of his number 1 and 3 – maybe call it “muscular COIN”. To the ‘make nice’ carrot of current COIN – e.g. funding infrastructure and providing aid to friendly tribes – we add a ‘bring the hurt’ stick against hostiles – delivered aggressively rather than waiting for ambushes and IED blasts.
This may well be starting already. If you haven’t noticed, there’s war in North Yemen, with the weak central government and the Saudis battling against Al Qaeda-affiliated tribes. Buildings and compounds belonging to the insurgent Houthi tribe has been blowing up, and there’s evidence that some of the explosives may be falling off US bomb racks.
Mind you- this all comes from the pov that air power can only get you so far and that ultimately wars are decided either before they start (because you convince the other guy it just aint worth is, which dominant air power can do) or by guys taking and holding ground (which air power is helpful, but can never replace).
So our efforts with infantry and armor need special attention. Is the ‘digital warrior’ future combat systems misguided? I suspect so but could be convinced otherwise. Does every soldier need to know every detail of the battlefield? Or is that just asking for information overload when instinctual decision making keeps you alive? We better figure it out- because this system is hugely expensive and it could be a massive dog.
Secondly, we got caught with our pants down in Iraq by IEDs and predictably procurement turned lemons into lemonaid by basically replacing or upgrading everything in the inventory on wheels. Damned necessary, but I promise you the ad hoc way its been done is a huge expensive mess. “Here’s”:http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/BillLanguage/Summary_Tables1007091.pdf a breakdown of the defense budget for 2010. Notice how many different programs are devoted to vehicles- we are going to end up entirely over stocked with vehicles, many too heavy to complete their roles efficiently. I haven’t studied it but my gut says somebody needs to look at the enchilada and figure out what’s what. Otherwise- give the army and marines whatever they need, especially UAVs for firepower.
Whats that do for the Air Force? They should concentrate entirely on control of the air space and delivering smart weapons on strategic targets, full stop. Develop towards UAVs controlled by the ground pounders handling tactical strikes entirely, its so much safer and more efficient.
That also means ending the AF nuclear deterrent. Its pointless. Retire the B1 and start winding down the B2, end the missile silos. A half dozen submarines on station under the ice cap can end the world. Thats plenty. Quit pretending otherwise. B52s have been great for delivering ordnance for 50 years, why mess with a good thing. Their replacement should be more B52s. They can handle our airborne cruise missiles.
The navy should concentrate on whats currently on its plate- boomers deterring, attack subs scaring everyone, carriers scaring everyone, and the current surface ships launching missiles. Scrap all the new plans and defer the Virginia subs and Ford carriers as long as possible. Forget littoral fantasies.
And end the Osprey yesterday. More helicopters.
mark, why don’t you edit that together and make it into a post and I’ll put it up for discussion. Email it to me when you’re done.
Coldtype, I’ll make the same offer to you; you’re coming from a wildly different vision of the world than I am, but it’d be an interesting jumping off place for a discussion.
Marc
I have a somewhat darker take on the last paragraphs in Zenpundit’s piece. I do agree we are moving to a different place as a global trend, but it’s something I see reaching far beyond what America decides to do or not do.
What I think is going to happen, is that the 21st century is going to be the Century of the Death Squad, much as the 20th century was defined by totalitarianism.
You’ve got successes by the Soviet Model in Chechnya, and a Chinese type model in Sri Lanka, backed by the Chinese. You’ve got Totten’s friend noting that Arab nations lose war after war, but have never lost to an insurgency. You’ve got a tech curve that keeps bending the threshold for serious destructive capabilities downward, and will continue to do so. You’ve got an international system that is visibly worse than useless at addressing threats like terrorism and piracy, to say nothing of their ongoing mutations.
In that environment, the demand for order will rise, because it’s not being fulfilled. The would-be providers of same will have choices that extend far beyond the USA. And an America diminished in its financial and global power is going to be pushed toward letting the locals handle things more and more often.
Doesn’t take a genius to see where that all goes.
Apologies for the late response A.L, I’ll get to work on something.
correction: I said surge was necessary at the time. (that hasn’t changed…)
Response to Tim:
_We won in Iraq when we stopped fixating on the central government, and began a bottoms up strategy_
Although it’s not perfectly clear from my phrasing (in the previous post), the Sunni Uprising is exactly the kind of program those questions should lead to. The basic problems need to be fixed (tribal disagreements) before you can truly strengthen the government and weaken the insurgency. I don’t think anyone expected it to happen that quickly in Iraq, but many things came together simultaneously.
In Afghanistan, we’ve been paying tribal leaders to support the government. And that’s been going so-so, as long as we don’t interfere with their business, they don’t interfere with ours.
We had a window to sway public opinion in Afghanistan, but after 8 years, we have not tipped the balance of power. We never really controlled the country the way we did in Iraq, and when these fiefdoms began aiding our enemies, we had no power to prevent it. Many of these fiefdoms prefer Taliban law to ours, and as long as that’ true, we will not succeed.
So now we’re finally starting to do what’s 6 years late… we’re putting troops down to stabilize individual areas and create a relationship with tribes. But (as those posts have noticed) our basic military strategies/dollars are not slated for COIN. Can we make it work anyway? Can we use what we have to influence the public outside of Kabul? Will the american public wait?
The general idea is sound, and I agree that the surge is necessary. However, at this point in the game, the odds are against us. If we cannot fix those basic problems, Afghanistan will not succeed, ever.
It we leave, it will definitely be a tragedy. But throwing money to prevent the inevitable solves nothing. The trick (of course) is identifying (& preventing) the point of no return. And if we can’t, defeat may be thrust upon us anyway.
Well said.
Alchemist #19: We seem to be in fervent agreement as far as that comment goes. My objection was to the passage I quoted from #10 that seemed to be stated as war goals in Afghanistan.
The goal there should be preventing the territory from once again becoming a recruiting and staging ground for Al Qaeda. If establishing a self-sufficient, democratic, central government is an effective means to that end, then so be it. But it seems increasingly clear that that is not sufficient, and may not be necessary. I have the nasty feeling that Kabul and Karzai are supported in part so that portions of our own government – State, the politicians, and parts of our military – can have some recognizable counterpart with which they can count coup. In a place (unlike Iraq) that has never had an effective central government, and may lack the will and resources to support one, that’s pushing on a string.
That leaves us with tribes as the effective units of power and control. They don’t have to love us, but they have to at least remain true neutrals with respect to jihad against the West. If they actively help us, they should expect and get aid and security assistance. If they host those who would attack us, then they should be fearing the Reaper, or worse.
There’s an “new article regarding the ‘tribal approach”:http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/blog/blogs/coin/archive/2010/02/03/the-way-ahead-in-afghanistan-does-a-silver-bullet-exist.aspx that’s well worth a read. The discussion is at least as interesting, with the noted Maj. Gant, academics, and previously deployed getting into it.
Hey A.L., let me know if you didn’t get the email i sent. Thanks!