At TomDispatch, Andrew Bacevich has a nice piece bemoaning the expensive yet hopeless state of the American way of war. As usual, Bacevich has a perceptive, no bullshit take on what it really means for us to fight wars that never end:
Here is Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, one of the Army’s rising stars, summarizing the latest in advanced military thinking: “Simply fighting and winning a series of interconnected battles in a well developed campaign does not automatically deliver the achievement of war aims.” Winning as such is out. Persevering is in.
So an officer corps once intent above all on avoiding protracted wars now specializes in quagmires. Campaigns don’t really end. At best, they peter out.
Formerly trained to kill people and break things, American soldiers now attend to winning hearts and minds, while moonlighting in assassination. The politically correct term for this is “counterinsurgency.”
Now, assigning combat soldiers the task of nation-building in, say, Mesopotamia is akin to hiring a crew of lumberjacks to build a house in suburbia. What astonishes is not that the result falls short of perfection, but that any part of the job gets done at all.
Call it counterinsurgency, nation building, colonial policing, whatever politically correct term is applied it still makes no sense to send our fabulously expensive military to do it. (Since they irrevocably soiled “nation building” years ago, chest thumping right wingers prefer “counterinsurgency” or the even snappier “COIN”, but the terms are essentially synonyms.) You couldn’t design a mission to which American arms are less suited. Our techno-bang wizardry is denied clear targets, our sophisticated logistical systems can be held hostage at will, and the enthusiastic “hoo-rah” culture of the military works against any goal that isn’t 100% about killing people and blowing shit up.
Worst of all, our volunteer soldiery ensures that only a tiny slice of the country actually feels the wars. Even the glibbest proponents of counterinsurgency admit it takes years or decades, but they never spell out a clear way to sustain public support for such lengthy endeavors. How to keep America fighting is either dismissed as beneath them, or ducked by hiding behind the idea that arguments like that are “political”, which our military is sworn to avoid. It is indeed creepy and wrong for uniformed officers to contemplate such things, but counterinsurgency has a lot of civilian advocates and they haven’t exactly taken to the subject with gusto.
It’s not hard to see why. Even if the powers that be go out of their way to minimize the impact of counterinsurgency at home, which two successive Administrations have now done, wars cannot be completely hidden. Sooner or later, even the perpetually distracted American electorate takes notice. Since it’s hard to make the case for these long wars based on vital American interests (note: revenge is not a vital interest), the critical support eventually peters out and the war is forced to an inglorious end. It already happened in Iraq, and the writing is on the wall for Afghanistan.
Those wars will be a big part of the legacy of Bush the Younger, easily one of the worst Presidents this country has ever endured. However painful and humiliating they were, the only way to make those tragedies worse is to repeat them. We have to let the American military, in all its expensive glory, go back to what it’s good at: scaring the living fuck out of other militaries. Anything else is a waste, of people, money and plain old life.
