Making Sense of "Long Wars" — Advice to the US Army

Abstract

Most military institutions that experience success or failure in war will seek to understand their recent history so they can make sense of it, and learn intelligently from it. The process is never easy or straightforward; indeed, it is often fraught. Those inside the institution have positions and reputations to defend; those outside it--often anxious to level critiques--may not have enough knowledge to offer sophisticated and informed analyses, or may be so determined to build a good story around goats and heroes they miscast the events and offer far more heat than light. Analyses of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have come in every possible form: journalists' accounts were first on the scene, but they were followed quickly by those of think-tank analysts, academics, defense intellectuals, official historians, and memoir writers. Each of these has its own weaknesses and strengths. Many have echoed the frustration felt by the American people--frustration driven by a belief that while the US seemed to invest extraordinary amounts of time, blood, and treasure in these campaigns, we have little to show for them. The US Army had the biggest investment--and thus the biggest stake--in the long wars. It is unsurprising, then, that the Army should be the service most buffeted by the experience and the institutional effort to make sense of it. After all, the senior leaders of the US Army must continue to hold the trust and confidence of the American people, and justify the resources invested in the organization. They must learn from and adapt to past experience even as they look forward to a future that arrives with unforgiving speed. They must fight ongoing budget battles, maintain force readiness, keep up with new technologies, plan for new weapons systems, and educate personnel even as they try to process and absorb the recent past. Adding to the difficulty of this task is the fact that, of all the services, the Army may have the greatest challenge when it comes to predicting the future and getting ready for it. In many ways, the Army is the utility infielder of the US military: because it can never be sure exactly what the nation will ask of it, it must be prepared to perform a wide range of tasks well. It must be able to transform itself from Retriever to Rottweiler, and back again, quickly and seamlessly. As an institution, the Army is not averse to introspection and self-analysis. But like all institutions, it is susceptible to the pathologies that stem from cognitive bias and sensitivity to criticism. At one moment senior leaders may ignore that which is painful; the next moment they may over-react to it. Similarly, they may miss moments of success that deserve capture and amplification. At present, the Army seems to be in a phase not dissimilar to the one it entered after Vietnam: it does not study the hard problems and failures deeply enough, and it overlooks and forgets the things that deserve positive acknowledgment and reinforcement. As the Army works through its own analyses of the long wars, and responds to external critiques, it must discern which problems were internal, which were external, and which emerged due to frictions and pathologies along the ever-challenging civil-military fault line. While the Army must understand and take responsibility for the ways it contributed to unsatisfactory outcomes, its leaders must recognize these failings were located inside a broader national security framework that must be addressed comprehensively. Simply put, the Army operates within a civil-military system in which both parties are responsible for failure and success. One can hardly argue, for instance, the flawed assumptions embedded in the Bush 43 decision for regime change in Iraq in 2003 stemmed principally from a failure of strategic thinking inside the Army. One can and should argue senior Army officers might have found more effective ways to ask probing questions about the direction of events, and about the theory of victory operative in the minds of those who were driving the decision for war. …