The army rewrites its operations manual: reinventing the wheel
First we had the new counterinsurgency manual. Now the army has a new operations manual with an emphasis on postwar stabilization. This is referred to as a “newly minted doctrine” and “a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
But we should go back even further; it’s actually a case of “everything old is new again.” For anyone who has studied Creighton Abrams’s approach in the latter years of the Vietnam War, it’s clear that this new approach is based in large measure on his old approach (I’ve written several posts about Abrams and his policies as described in Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, here, here, and here.)
In Vietnam, we went through several years of fighting and a change in administrations before the change in tactics was made under the direction of General Abrams. In Iraq, a similar time lag occurred, but it was under a single President. The executive change was in the Secretary of Defense and in the military leadership in Iraq.
Why did it take so very long to learn a lesson we should have learned in the 70s in Vietnam? An article written by Greg Jaffe that originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal almost two years ago contains some hints as to why this failure to learn from experience may have occurred:
In the past, it was commonly held in military circles that the Army failed in Vietnam because civilian leaders forced it to fight a limited war instead of the all-out assault it longed to wage. That belief helped shape the doctrine espoused in the 1980s by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell. They argued that the military should fight only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy the enemy.
In his article, Jaffe alludes to a new manual being written that reverses that thought and instead emphasizes the Abrams approach. This manual, of course, turned out to be the counterinsurgency manual that has already been adopted as part of the surge. John Nagl and Conrad Crane were among its major contributors, and in his forward to that manual Nagl writes that the army began the Iraq War unprepared to deal with insurgencies. He quotes former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane’s explanation:
We put an Army on the battlefield that I had been a part of for 37 years. It doesn’t have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained, to deal with an insurgency . . . After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight, that was a bad decision.
So part of the failure to learn the lessons was a desire to not look at lessons to be gained from a war that ended in a shameful abandonment of the South Vietnamese. That was emotionally understandable but strategically and intellectually unfortunate, with negative consequences for the prosecution of the Iraq War.
In connection with this question of “what took so long?” I found a wonderfully informative video that features three of the figures I’ve mentioned here—Nagl, Crane, and Sorley—being interviewed by Atlantic journalist James Fallows back in March of 2006. Please listen to these highly articulate West Point graduates, historians, and authors to get some insight into how the current counterinsurgency policy was developed and instituted.
Nagl states that, in fighting against counterinsurgencies, “there really isn’t much new under the sun.” If so, then, why then did the counterinsurgency wheel have to be reinvented, and why was there such a delay in doing so?
Conrad acknowledges there was “a reluctance to embrace counterinsurgency institutionally after Vietnam.” He says that it took recent realities on the ground for the army to finally do that. Sorley attempts to explain this reluctance. After saying that most of the books on the history of the Vietnam War focused on the Westmoreland years rather than the Abrams years (unlike his), he claims that afterwards we had to:
…unpeel layer after layer of misinformation or disinformation or lack of information to get people to take a look at what really happened [in the Abrams years in Vietnam]…Newer generations are more open to the evidence and more able to assimilate useful insights..
Apparently the military needed several new generations, plus a wakeup call in Iraq, to cast off its reluctance to look at the lessons of Vietnam with open eyes capable of seeing clearly. In this, I suppose, it’s typical of most large institutions, although even slower than some.
The bitterness of the Vietnam years seems to have made the task of understanding how to make the best use of our experience there more difficult rather than easier. But, finally, this operations manual is here to dovetail with the earlier one on counterinsurgencies, and to point the military in a new and extremely productive direction.
It’s a shame it had to take so long. Let’s hope we’ll be quicker to learn the next time.
At the risk of missing the main thrust of your post, Neo… Dammit! I start OCS this week, and now I have ANOTHER manual to study??
😉
Remember that for the military nothing went right in Vietnam in the long run. I remember as a midshipman in the Navy of the Carter Era there were race riots on aircraft carriers and terrible morale everywhere. The forces felt abandoned and misused. The predominant lesson was not to fight without overwelming PUBLIC support not just firepower.
The same experience was expressed in different ways by the French. The book “The Last Valley” about Dien Ben Phiu does an excellent job of showing the experience of soldiers who were asked to fight on while peace talks were going on. These soldiers went on to Algeria to have the public support suddenly with drawn again. This led to the OAS and attempted coup.
The Iraq war has shown the military again how fickle the public support is no matter how the battle goes in the field. They may have known that Abrams was winning the war in the field, but they were in an untenable political situation.
An absolutely intriguing discussion for anyone interested in political-military history. Neo, you do a great service for your readers to bring such to their attention.
q2600: congrats on starting OCS!
Dave Moelling: good point.
I think the military did not believe America would again support “building a democracy” in a foreign nation, in opposition to Russian/Chinese/Cuban assistance to that nation. Our military simply believed the task would take too long, and the American public would never see it through. Therefore, our military should be geared to repel an invasion of Soviet style forces, then to get out quickly, i.e. a military should kill people and break things, as opposed to doing police work. Our military beaurocracy did not move itself to prepare to face the coming Jihadi threat.
I wonder, also, how much the civilian/Congressional oversight of our military affected these matters. If the military had begun prepping for jihadi/insurgency warfare, would Congressional leaders have accused the military of racism or some other PC incorrect ism? Would the NYT have broken a politically damaging expose about a military readying to kill “brown people”, or somesuch? Would the public have supported maintaining the readiness of such a military?
I think you may have inadvertently mischaracterized the Weinberger-era mindset. Their decision to avoid counterinsurgencies wasn’t born from an aversion to analysis and self-critique (“reluctance to learn the lesson of Vietnam”). Instead, it was a deliberate decision to emphasize the lesson they did learn from Vietnam:
Never Fight a Counterinsurgency, Only Fight a Conventional War. (Or, more stridently: “Guerilla Wars Cannot Be Won.”)
“Don’t Fight Guerilla Wars, They Can’t Be Won” was very nearly the Holy Writ of “realist” foreign policy from 1973 to 2007.
This mindset was born during the Vietnam era, became entrenched in the aftermath of 1975’s flight from Saigon, and reinforced by the Soviet loss in Afghanistan.
This mindset wasn’t unique to the Pentagon. It was the predominant political/military paradigm up until Petraeus.
Politicians, journalists, foreign policy experts, commentators- all subscribed to this tactical doctrine. It was taught in colleges, and formed the basal point for debate over invading Afghanistan and Iraq. (Remember: “We can’t invade Afghanistan and expect to win. Look what their guerilla’s did to the Soviets and Britain.”)
I concede that this was the wrong lesson to draw from Vietnam, but it emerged from sincere, dedicated, and long running analysis and debate within the Pentagon, not from an aversion to analysis and debate.
Great post, Neo.
It’s called institutional memory. The military is an organization that promulgates doctrine much like Congress passes laws. Once the doctrine is on paper and everyone is trained up the tendency is to believe that the problem is solved. Until………. another doggone problem comes up or the old doctrine isn’t working. Then they have to, often reluctantly, go back to the drawing board and come up with new doctrine. Then everyone has to get trained in the new doctrine. All that takes a lot of time and effort.
The Powell Doctrine that came as a result of not wanting to get bogged down in another long war of attrition, like Vietnam, worked pretty well in Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq. The military performed magnificently and as planned. When guerilla warfare broke out we were unprepared. The COIN doctrine that was written for Vetnam had been lost from the institutional memory. The doctrine has now been rewritten and the training is taking place. Remarkably quickly by the way.
One man who has a great grasp of all this is Thomas P.M. Barnett, the author of “The Pentagon’s New Map” and “Blueprint For Action.”
His blog is at: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/
should anyone be interested.
Barnett’s strategy is that the developed nations (His Core) need to use diplomacy, aid, trade and, if necessary, military force to help the undeveloped and rogue nations (His Gap) integrate into the modern, globalized world. Nearly all of the military operations that he sees in the future are like Iraq and Afghanistan. He believes we need a kinetic miltary force that can defeat a country’s army (as in Iraq), then a COIN force to combat guerilla warfare, and finally a Sys Admin Force to get the government, police, infrastructure, and new military up and running. The biggest problem with this is that it is manpower and money intensive.
The military is just getting the COIN force up and running now. The COIN forces are doing some Sys Admin work, but Sys Admin requires, construction people (like Navy Seabees), lawyers, tech people, politicians, etc. It would really be more like a Peace Corps operation, protected by the military.
The big question is: Should we be doing this? Barnett and Nagl both believe that we cannot not do it if we want to have a more secure, peaceful future. Getting Congress and the American people on board is, as apparent, the major obstacle.
After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, in the Military Intelligence Officer’s Basic Course at FT Huachuca AZ, we fought the godless commies endlessly across the Fulda gap.
–With 1 day devoted to Counter Insurgency Warfare.
You are right on the money. Nobody today remembers Gen. Abrams, perhaps because he died before he could publish a multi-volume memoir.
I have argued in my blog from the beginning that the Vietnam analogy is oversimplified when we discuss Iraq. I was downright offended when someone tried to compare Petraeus to Westmoreland.
http://burketokirk.blogspot.com/search?q=creighton+abrams
Leadership is everything, and it includes having the right plan for the battle.
neoneo
Let’s hope we’ll be quicker to learn the next time.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?MId=16&Id=351
It’s not “the business we’ve chosen.” It’s the reality of human nature expressed in the current international system. Being a nation in the community of nations is like living in a bad neighborhood where the police don’t go. You have to take care of yourself and there are different strategies for doing so. Some work for small guys, some work for big guys.
Like it or not, we’re a big guy and we have plenty of stuff that people want to steal. We have to use a big guy strategy, and everybody benefits in the long run from things like keeping the sea lanes open and paying most of the WHO bill. But as people get used to having us around, they take us for granted and criticize us for not being their ideal paladin.
It’s not some ideal world, but it’s the real one and we just have to do the best we can in it.
Generals always tend to fight not the present war, but the previous one. This is universal. That is why WWI turned to be so long and bloody: nobody fully understood that machine-guns radically shifted the balance between offensive and defensive forces. Only in the middle of a war new concepts emerge, and they decide the outcome.
where the police don’t go.
The police were there in house, thus this one not right one
we have plenty of stuff that people want to steal
But other people had also plenty of stuff to keep you life and keep your stuff become more and more advanced, thus as you said Being a nation in the community of nations we should learn to use each other to help not to fight, there is more room to live together
everybody benefits in the long run from things like keeping the sea lanes open and paying most of the WHO bill.
Its not benefits everybody, the big guy who his history of Cowboy telling he never give his wealth to everybody. Who threatening the sea lane? Did Iraq do that? Or the 2nd Evil who never stopped threatens you for 20 years with his hatred slogans wishing your death or wiping from the map and now come with new one threaten to close Strait of Hormuz?
we just have to do the best we can in it.
Is the war the best thing to do?
Truth: Um…What????
Why did it take so very long to learn a lesson we should have learned in the 70s in Vietnam?
Because people don’t tend to emulate the losing side’s tactics and strategies. That’s just one of the many advantages to losing, if you ask the Socialists.
They argued that the military should fight only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy the enemy.
That’s called the Bigger Hammer approach, in which everything becomes a nail when you are only using hammers.
After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war.
Well, that was kind of obvious. Most Americans, especially young ones, think the United States is invulnerable to invasion. Why did I bring that up in relation to the quote? Because the United States is only safe from invasion so long as the military Keeps Winning Wars. You lose too many wars and you end up like Carthage. Your military will break itself because in their minds, they have already lost. Then where will your precious invulnerability be then.
Nagl states that, in fighting against counterinsurgencies, “there really isn’t much new under the sun.” If so, then, why then did the counterinsurgency wheel have to be reinvented, and why was there such a delay in doing so?
Because the Bigger Hammer approach isn’t American Total War. Instead of a way to usher in more resources, Colin Powell’s doctrine is designed to save money and munitions by hitting people harder in the beginning.
Every great general was able to usher in and allocate large portions of available resources to the battle lines. Meaning they were very good at logistics, as well as strategy and tactics. Insurgency is simply a problem with logistics. And any great military leader already knows about how to take care of logistics, friendly and enemy. Because fundamentally, war is about human beings. And when a general understands human beings and how they will behave in war, the general is able to predict problems ahead of time. A military genius already has all of your moves planned out for you. For every action the genius takes, he has already calculated your response to the third tier.
He has to have a correct understanding of not just human nature, but your nature and personality and behavior, in order for his intelligence to grasp ahold of victory in war.
So if you look back at American history, you will see that American Total War was fought by Washington via guerrila tactics, Sherman via counter-insurgency and psychological warfare, Pershing via counter-insurgency vs the Moros, WWII via pooling the total resources of a nation towards victory, and so forth. Regardless of which war you are fighting, you need to be able to win and avoid losing. Insurgency is just a poor man’s way of attempting to win a war, when they don’t know how to fight conventionally.
Historically, the same dichotomy existed between the horse archers from the Asian and Russian steppes and the Roman Empire. Rome lost several legions to the hit and raid style of warfare practiced by horse archers. Because Rome had primarily heavy infantry, they didn’t fare too well in the desert while the hardy steppe ponies could ride around all day long shooting arrows at the Romans. In the end, Rome’s soldiers got tired and mentally exhausted, while the Parthians and the other tribes just needed to bring more arrows.
However, you have to realize that hit and run tactics like that will not win the battle for you. You can have 10,000 horse archers against 5,000 heavy infantry, and while you can kill and wound plenty of the infantry, you won’t be able to rout and destroy them completely without heavy cavalry or heavy infantry of your own. It has to do with mobility, or why humvees have many disadvantages when uparmored.
The more armor a horse archer puts on, the less stamina it has and the less effective at hit and run tactics. Even if you put on more armor on a HA, he still won’t be a match for legionaires in full body armor.
Thus the only way for lightly armored horse archers with only secondary melee weapons up against Rome’s finest heavy infantry to win, is for Rome’s infantry to give up and run away. There’s no way they could do a Hannibal at Cannae. 10k horse archers can surround 5000 heavy infantry, but trying to kill that infantry without heavier support would be very hard.
This is easily applied to Iraq, given that while you need light and mobile infantry to seek and find terrorist locations, it is the main battle tank that you bring in when you finally locate a target. Or the Apache or the Spectre Gunship or the AC 130 or the GPS guided bombs. Infantry without that kind of firepower will take heavy casualties against insurgents or conventional forces. Apaches and airpower without infantry support, will never find the enemy to kill them.
The basic weapon system of melee vs range is still applicable. Meaning the farther away the enemy is, the easier you have a time of killing him in safety if you see him. The closer the enemy is, the easier a time a low tech enemy has killing a high tech longer ranged opponent. The technological advances of the US increases our weapons range, but that just means terrorists need to get up close and personal, detonate a bomb, and we suffer a defeat.
Roman legions excelled at killing up close and personal. Yet barbarian horse archers from the steppes outmaneuvered and defeated them time and time again. The US military has found out that against people who like to kill close up, it is a better idea to kill them from afar. Instead of searching house to house and looking for firefights. You get intel on the locations of enemies and just bomb them.
Let’s hope we’ll be quicker to learn the next time.
If the US can avoid another defeat, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Pingback:Mobility vs Firepower « Sake White
It occurs to me that perhaps the Pentagon thought the State Department would actually be able to do their job. Instead, the military has borne the brunt of rebuilding. If you want it done right, do it yourself seems to be the fate of our military.
Pingback:Exit Zero
I recommend to subscribe to RSS place in a conspicuous place! Readers will be more! Especially at a blog, how are you! Tested – a 30% increased the number of subscribers!
Stunning blog and good article. High 5 for u man !