Re-Thinking "Boots On The Ground" In An Era Of Asymmetrical Warfare

1. 
2. Anyone fighting outside his "weight class" will not obey the rules.
3. Duh.
4. Asymmetric Warfare is warfare in which opposing groups or nations have unequal military resources, and the weaker opponent uses unconventional weapons and tactics, as terrorism, to exploit the vulnerabilities of the enemy.

Alan:  An overlooked characteristic of asymmetrical warfare is that most of our designated enemies "live" where war is taking place. 

To win an asymmetrical war, natives must do one thing. 

Only one thing.

They must outlast America's tolerance for spilled blood and spent treasure. (The outer limit of such toleration is around ten years; in future, probably less.)

Americans are utilitarian people and thus cursed by the erroneous belief that "failure is not an option." 

Failure is always an option. 

It would be more accurate if Uncle Sam said: "In asymmetrical warfare, final victory is not possible." 

Consider. 

If the United States were invaded by an immeasurably more powerful army using a justification as dubious as Smirk and Snarl's in Iraq, the American people would immediately use every terrorist trick in the book, employing Yankee ingenuity to invent myriad new ones. 

And, in the end, the Yanks would win.

Marshall McLuhan said this about modern warfare: "To the spoils belongs the victor."

Asymmetrical Warfare

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare

Since the U.S. Military Lost the Last Two Wars It Fought, Is There Reason to Think “Boots on the Ground” Anywhere Is a Good Idea?

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Lambert Strether

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Fallows, who seems to have called his shot on Iraq correctly, back in 2002, even while bending over backward to give “the war party” fair treatment (“Iraq: The Fifty-First State“), helps explain why.

First, the U.S. military lost both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Fallows writes:

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.

Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes.

...it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much.

Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.

And now we’re going back to “train” the Iraqis again!  “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results”? How many wars do the ruling factions of our political and national security classes plan on losing...,there’s a genre of analysis that claims we really won Iraq and Afghanistan...if the political class believed we won those wars, there would be victory parades, and one of the parades would be politicians taking credit.)

Second, there’s been (almost) no accountabilty for losing the wars whatever. There’s been (almost) no accountabilty in the political class.Fallows again:

...public figures, from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell on down, have put Iraq behind them. In part this is because of the Obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But such willed amnesia would have been harder if more Americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure.

Nor has there been accountabitility in the national security class:

our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. 

Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please.

...“hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness”... “an important factor in the failure” of our recent wars.

Nor ...has there been any accountability for our famously free press. I pointed out an especially shocking, or not, example of airbrushing on Iraq from Times Editor Baquet the other day; Thomas Freidman, speaking on the rationale for the Iraq war:  "Because we could!"

and note that Freidman still has a platform at The World’s Greatest Newspaper, and is treated as a Serious Person at Davos.

So, to recap, we’ve got a military that lit a trilllion dollars or so on fire and threw it into the air in the process of losing two wars, while firing no generals; and we’ve got a national security and a political class that looks on blankly, twiddling their fingers, whistling a little or occasionally humming, for what, thirteen years? while the smoking, bloody ball of severed limbs and torn metal rolls...downhill. This is imperial decadence of a Caligulan scale. 

As it turns out, we’re optimizing the Federal civil service for Veterans:...It is the government’s most visible effort to reward military service since the draft ended in the 1970s.

...managers are graded on how many they bring on board, officials said...,veterans made up 46 percent of full-time hires, the Office of Personnel Management said...a third of the federal workforce....

I imagine a sociologist or anthropologist would find much of interest:

Most cultures esteem the scholar-warrior, and these programs expose usually skeptical American elites to people like the young Colin Powell, who as a lieutenant colonel in his mid-30s was a White House fellow after serving in Vietnam, and David Petraeus, who got his Ph.D. at Princeton as a major 13 years after graduating from West Point.

At this point, let me note that Colin Powell was responsible for selling Bush’s manufactured WMD evidence to the UN while making the case for the Iraq War; and that “scholar-warrior” Petraeus got taken down in a weird scandal involving sex with his biographer (!). 

If these two examples are the best and brightest (the “people like”) of the officer corp, I have to say I don’t think much of them; gullible at the very best in the one case; narcissistic in the other.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were setting ourselves up for a lot more self-licking ice-cream cones.

* * *

So, on the narrow question of policy, yeah, we’d be nuts to send our military into either Ukraine or Syria. They’re losers. 

Worse, because they’re never held accountable for failure, we’d just be setting ourselves up for more losing, down the line.

I have no idea what the implications are of optimizing Federal hiring for the enlistees in a military that lost two major wars, or of populating the political and national security classes with officers who led those enlistees to failure, while nobody held them accountable. I can’t imagine anything good. Imperial decadence, as I said. Iceberg? What iceberg?

NOTES
[1] Heaven forfend that the employment prospects of all citizens improve!

NOTE
A joking dialog:

QUESTIONER: How will we know when the aircraft carrier is obsolete?

ADMIRAL: When it fails in war.

I don’t think the process of decadence visible here is at anywhere near an end, and I think we have barely seen the consequences of it, so far.