Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 190

Toby Dodge rides again: The best summary of Iraqi politics I've read lately

Toby
Dodge is one of the few people I always make sure to read about Iraq. He
has been right more than most I can think of. Here
is his latest piece. He concludes that "the trajectory of Iraqi politics
clearly is heading towards a new authoritarianism with the concentration of
power in the hands of one man, Nuri al-Maliki." Good luck, Amb. McGurk.

 

Haig: The ubiquitous man

The last four books I've read have been on very different
subjects -- a terrific
novel about Watergate, a startling unpublished book on foreign policy in
the Middle East, the final years of the Vietnam War, and the manuscript of my
own history of American generals since 1939.

Despite their differences, I was surprised to see one person
appear in them all: Alexander Haig. He may be the real Zelig.

Question time: What is the best book to read on him? Is it
time for someone to write a new bio that uses the disclosures of the last 30
years?    

Mattis to Daddis: Strategy should come from civilians, not generals who execute

By Peter Mattis

Best Defense guest respondent

Colonel
Gregory Daddis' argument
is that strategy is overrated: "Talented American generals can develop and
implement a comprehensive political-military strategy and still lose a war." As
sympathetic as watching a poorly executed strategy fail is likely to make
someone to this argument, the argument itself rests on fallacious assumption.
In the United States, a general cannot develop and implement a comprehensive
political-military strategy. That's what civilian control of the military
means. We are not the Prussians under Frederick the Great or the French under
Napoleon, where civilian and military command was unified. A talented American
general only may advise on creating such a strategy, because he/she -- like almost
everyone else in the room -- lacks the standing and the comprehensive professional
competence to establish the political ends. Something civilian commentators
should remember when the national introspection and reflection begin, hopefully
with more honesty.

Does
a good strategy guarantee success? No. A good political-military strategy
however does mean that individual operational and tactical successes (or
failures) are far less important. 

The
Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 provides a useful antidote to the focus on
operational successes at the expense of thoughtful strategic planning. The
Chinese suffered enormous losses for the number of troops engaged. Apart from
the crossing the border with some level of operational surprise, it is hard
identify what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) did right. Beijing did however
achieve its political objectives. As Vietnamese documents later showed, Hanoi learned that Moscow could not
be depended upon to protect Vietnam from China. Vietnam's potential expansion
was stifled, because it had to maintain more forces closer to the northern
border. Beijing earned the gratitude of Bangkok and Washington, while getting
Moscow to back off in Asia. If there is a Chinese way of war, then focus on
political outcomes of campaigns is a key element to how the use of force is
measured. 

General
Ulysses S. Grant's peninsula campaign
in 1864 also shows the value of operations within a sound strategic
framework.  From the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and the
failed amphibious move on Petersburg, Grant continued to have
opportunities -- irrespective of stalemate or defeat on the battlefield -- to hurt
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and separate it from the Confederate political
leadership. Because Grant understood this, he did not react the same way to
defeat as the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Lee may have been
able to parry Grant's individual and successive thrusts; however, he could not
force Grant out. 

Although
Andrew Bacevich's charge that the
U.S. military has failed in almost every conflict since becoming an
all-volunteer force may be hyperbole, there is enough truth to warrant some
critical introspection. The lack of a draft meant a U.S. administration did not
have to think as critically about power, passion, and politics -- even if the
draft was not always a sufficient guard against supercilious "strategizing."
Similarly, we should compare the record of the PLA's operational competence against
the record of it accomplishing Beijing's objectives. That the former was poor
while the latter superb should raise important questions for would-be U.S.
strategists to consider about why and how to employ the U.S. military. 

On
one score at least Clausewitz was unequivocal: "War is not merely an act of
policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political
intercourse, carried on with other means." Although the military's professional
prerogative and special competence, victory on the battlefield and operational
competence are only relevant if they advance political objectives. The focus on
the war-fighting excellence of the U.S. military seems to distract those in the
civilian world from understanding that that excellence means little without
walking through the political steps of strategy long before the military
becomes involved. 

Clausewitz
was clear about war being simple, but he decried devotion to any simplistic
notion of how to design and execute strategy. One of the analogies used was a
comparison to chopping down trees with an axe. At first glance, the object is
simple. Chop the tree down. However, it rapidly gets more complicated. Which
direction does it need to fall? What about the knots in the trunk? Is it a
hard- or soft-wood tree? Where to start making the cuts and at what height?
Each tree grows in a different context -- even if in the same forest -- with
different features. Thus, what is simple in concept rapidly becomes more
difficult in execution. 

In
his book The Logic of Failure, psychological
researcher Dietrich Dorner highlighted how complex problems needed variable
levels of planning for good strategic decision-making to occur. Many
individuals had a marked tendency to plan too much or too little, based on how
insecure they were facing uncertainty. Dorner's experiments were not simplistic
"games" of strategic choice, but rather continuing tests of people to manage
the complex relationships -- such as the interrelationships between healthcare,
population, food supply, and more -- over time where they had near dictatorial
powers. Even people should know better by dint of training and experience still
fail to set clear objectives, to treat strategies like testable propositions,
and gather information related to the first two. Instead, most "muddle through"
and a repair approach, which, although often better than nothing, is the result
of a lack of clear objectives. In the face of such uncertainty, humans fall
back on what they know and can deal with -- no matter how trivial -- to preserve their
sense of competence. [[BREAK]]

Given
these complexities and the difficulty of strategy, it is a wonder that people
still think the Vietnam War was predestined to be lost and that Saigon was
destined to fall. South Vietnam only capitulated after the North had launched
one failed campaign when Saigon still had U.S. material support and succeeded
only once that support was withdrawn. Although I am distant in both time and
place, the Vietnam War is still personal. My father-in-law spent three years in
reeducation camps for being a doctor and being mustered during the Tet
Offensive in 1968. The morality or immorality of U.S. involvement does not
change the fact that the North's conquest of the South was conquest and the
resulting feelings are still alive today. And not just in U.S. émigré enclaves
where the three red stripes still fly. Hanoi itself has a large number of
failures and had to revisit its strategy a number of times. Perhaps that was
the biggest difference between Washington and Hanoi: The willingness to revisit
and evaluate strategy as new information and events changed the circumstances.
Accepting Eliot Cohen's arguments about great wartime leadership, which
country's leadership most resembles the kind of learning behavior exhibited by
Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben Gurion among others? 

To
even accept the argument that Vietnamese nationalism made the war unwinnable
requires a kind of historical amnesia and replacing the timeline of Vietnam's
struggle for independence with the timeline of direct U.S. military involvement
in support of Saigon. The two timelines are not the same. It was not the
Soviets or the Chinese who stood with Ho Chi Minh when he declared independence
on September 2, 1945, but rather the United States, and Truman later rejected
(or did not read) Ho's personal appeals. We also called for national self-determination in 1919, but accepted locking Ho and other nationalists out
of the Versailles Conference.

Maybe
Ho was a communist first and a nationalist second; however, critics of the
Vietnam War cannot have it both ways. If nationalism drove North Vietnam and
made the war unwinnable, then it highlights the tragedy of that war -- and
arguably of the Cold War writ large. The United States allowed national
self-determination to become a communist cause, allowing what should have been
a democratizing and developing process to be hijacked by
authoritarianism. 

It
is true General Westmoreland and the civilian "best and brightest," like
McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, were not as foolish as they often look in
hindsight. To go back to the tree chopping analogy, they identified that they
needed to chop down a tree and maybe even which direction it needed to fall,
but did not go further or continue to adapt to the knots in the wood or the wind
over time. In unclear situations, as both Dorner and the late James Q. Wilson demonstrated, humans fall back on what
they know and bureaucracies use metrics that end up defining the mission. 

Robert
McNamara in his book, In Retrospect, said Washington lacked the
expertise to understand what was taking place in Vietnam. But as CIA analysts
Harold "Hal" Ford, in his scathing review
of In Retrospect, and George Allen's memoir, None So Blind, make
clear, the leadership's combination of objectives that were at minimum
undeveloped and metrics that did allow for this expertise to move up the chain
ensured Washington could not revisit and reevaluate strategy on the basis of
new information. The order of battle controversy that pitted CIA versus MACV
and DIA is but one example of this dissonance. General Cushman's reflections
are another. The U.S. leadership
lacked the means for understanding the data, even if they had a useful or even
apparently sound strategy.  

The
other problem was that the ability to execute the strategy based on the
limitations-such as trying to avoid a Chinese intervention, which was a
possibility up to the late 1960s, based on Beijing's material and military
support for North Vietnam -- was not necessarily reevaluated after the restraints
were imposed. Nor is it clear that strategy was reevaluated after it became
apparent that the Viet Cong were getting wiped out and being replaced by
regular NVA forces. It was one thing to contain an insurgency that was mostly
local with some foreign support and another to contain a foreign-based
insurgency that was mustered, trained, and supplied outside where the campaign
is being fought. 

The
most interesting finding in Dorner's study of decision-making was that
performance had no correlation with intelligence as measured by IQ. The only
distinction that made a real difference was practical decision-making
experience. As Robert Komer said, "good judgment is usually the result of
experience and experience is usually the result bad judgment." People can get
experience vicariously through study; however, studying is requires a
discipline most often confused with acquiring academic credentials. As one
commenter on Col. Daddis' post asked, did Westmoreland read Clausewitz, ask
questions in the margins, and, then, go back research possible answers to those
questions? It is a big job and a serious one, requiring a time that is rarely
available and respected. 

Careerism -- pursuing
the "be" part of John Boyd's famous "to be or to do"-- is the enemy of such practical
intellectual pursuits, but unfortunately is becoming more common. Rather than
critiquing the military, the intelligence community, or any other part of the
national security establishment, I simply point to my own experience on the job
hunt. Despite still being in graduate school, the most common question (even in
this economy) was why are you out of work, never what have you been doing with
your time. Outside the military, it is even more difficult for civilian
officials to have the experience of studying, teaching, and practicing. This is
arguably the trinity of developing insightful strategists.  

Dismissing
the value of strategy on the basis of poor execution is throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. The presumption that "the general" should develop and
implement the political-military suggests the kind of omni-competence that raised the question of whether
an American military coup was
possible. Recent survey results have shown younger military officers now
increasingly (and possibly alarmingly) think it is a military officer's job to
make civilian policymakers listen -- how to do so is a completely different
question. This is beyond their professional competence as managers of organized
violence and standing as military advisors. Bernard Brodie's solution (and seemingly General Cushman's as
well) to the tough dilemma was for
military officers to resign in the face of civilian unwillingness to do the
thinking necessary for strategy -- not disagreements or a refusal to respect
military judgment. Intellectual laziness about national interests and the
employment of force to achieve specific political objectives was Brodie's
concern. This "unequal dialogue" requires civilians to be literate in military and strategic affairs-a situation
made more difficult by fewer opportunities for vicarious experience and a
smaller percentage of the American population having been engaged in the
military during wartime. If the United States wants to get strategy and the use
of force right, then studying and teaching need to become more fundamental
parts of civilian advancement in government.

Peter Mattis is editor
of China Brief at The Jamestown
Foundation. The views here are his own and do not reflect those of the
Foundation.

Blogging Thucydides (V and last): Who won the Peloponnesian War, Athens or Sparta? The correct answer is C: Neither

The conventional wisdom is that Sparta won, because Athens
ultimately surrendered and faced total destruction.

But as Robert Strassler points out in his epilogue to the
Landmark edition, which I read this time, the big winner was not a belligerent.
Rather, victory belonged to an observer, Persia, which stood on the sidelines
and encouraged the fight, and then moved in to collect its winnings. I think
too often we don't consider that as an outcome in wars.    

Interesting -- Athens going broke, Iran/Persia
ascendant . . .

Willbanks' 'Abandoning Vietnam': A study of how South Vietnam died

Basically, South Vietnam committed suicide, but we handed
Thieu the loaded gun, James Willbanks
more or less concludes in this
fascinating book. 

I think it is the best book I've read on the last part of
the Vietnam War. Essentially, he argues that "Vietnamization" was a misnomer.
Rather, it was the "Americanization" of the Vietnamese military. "Nixon's
Vietnamization policy had worked very well to the extent that it taught the
South Vietnamese to fight 'American-style,' using air mobility, tactical air
support, and lavish expenditure of ammunition and other materiel."  But in 1974, the Americans cut off all that
support.

It makes me wonder whether the war would have been different
if from the outset, the Americans had tried to help Vietnamese fight in their
own way. Would that even have been possible? I think so. (There is a good but
PhD dissertation to be done comparing the U.S. efforts to build security forces
in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.)

One of the things that struck me in the book is how
different the American experience of the war was from Vietnam. For us, the
worst year was 1968, with nearly 15,000 KIAs. For the South Vietnamese
military, the worst year was 1971, with nearly 40,000 dead. Their second worst
year was 1974, when they lost 31,000 soldiers. In that year, American combat
deaths in Vietnam numbered 207.

Look for yourself:

The Final Years, Jeffrey Clarke

Blogging Thucydides (IV): I think this may be the most brutal line I've ever read

In the dialogue with the
people of the small, weak island of Melos,
the Athenians explained why the island must submit to the wishes of the city of
Athens: "the strong do what they can and
the weak suffer what they must." (P. 352, Landmark edition) Yow. That is
(as the headline suggested) perhaps the nastiest line I ever have read. 

The Melians asked to be allowed to remain neutral in the
war. Tough luck, said Athens, which then invaded and "put to death all the
grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves," and then
re-settled the island with their own colonists.

Such wholesale violence seemed to be about par for the
course in the ancient Greek world. Samos is not that big an island, but when
one party in a civil war on the island prevailed, it executed 200 of most
powerful men from the other party and banished another 400. (P. 493, Landmark
edition) Sounds to me like they extirpated the opposition.

Maj. Robert Stanton on having the courage to let your soldiers figure it out

Maj.
Robert Stanton discusses learning how to do counterinsurgency in eastern
Afghanistan in 2006-07:

If you have the intellectual humility
to realize that you don't have all the answers, and you are willing to
underwrite enough risk to let your junior leaders and soldiers do what needs to
be done. You can take a group of American soldiers, give them a vague mission,
and as long as you resource them, they're going to do things you never could
have imagined them being able to do. They're going to solve your problems for
you, half the time when you don't even know you have a problem. For me, the
biggest lesson that I think I learned -- and I learned a lot of lessons from
that deployment -- was that. As I continue in the military and as I see other
leaders, you've got to have that intellectual humility, because you don't have
all the answers, and you don't need to have them all. You've got some brilliant
21-year-old kid who loves what he's doing and is going to solve your problems
for you if you just give him the freedom to do it, and you resource him enough
to do it. You make him feel empowered to do it. If you can do that, then the
things we can do as an Army are unbelievable. That's what I would say.

Blogging Thucydides (III): A great line about how revolution deforms language

Describing the evil effects of revolution, Thucydides
writes, "Words had to change their
ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." (P. 199 of the
Landmark edition)

That's an insight that strikes me as true, and that I don't
remember seeing before.  Though Orwell's
wonderful essay on the
language of politics makes a similar point. (If you haven't read that, you should.
You have my permission to take off the rest of the day to study it.)

Cassidy's study of AfPak COIN: A review

By LTC Kevin D. Stringer, Ph.D., USAR

Best Defense guest book reviewer

Robert Cassidy's War,
Will and Warlords, (PDF will soon be made available for free), a study of
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is a must read for all scholars,
policymakers, diplomats, and military practitioners seeking to understand the
Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus. Cassidy provides a number of salient points
concerning uneven U.S. involvement in the region, the contradictions of Pakistan, and the
counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches implemented on both sides of the porous
region between the two states.

For the United States, Cassidy offers insights into how
short-term and ill-advised American policies -- the support of the mujahedeen and Pakistani President Zia
to name just two -- created the conditions that spawned Al-Qaeda and provided
the Taliban on both sides of the Pashtun frontier a popular support base.
Cassidy further demonstrates how U.S. financial aid underwrites Pakistan's
military expenditures against India, which destabilizes the entire region.

Concerning Pakistan, the author explores its security policies, and
how they contradict American strategy. Pakistan is Janus -- one "face" grudgingly
supporting the United States with the Pakistani Army conducting operations
against the Taliban on its side of the border, while the Pakistani intelligence
service "face" promotes and supports the Afghan Taliban as a proxy against the
Karzai government and India on the other side.

In
his discussion of counterinsurgency, Cassidy illustrates that both the American
and Pakistani militaries struggle in these operations because of embedded
institutional and structural propensities for conventional war. For legitimacy,
the insurgents challenge the Afghan and Pakistani administrations in the
outlying tribal regions given low governmental presence and high levels of
endemic corruption. For this theme, I would have liked to see the author engage
in a more detailed critique of the quality of Afghan forces being trained by
the United States for pacification efforts -- are they "shake and bake" or
competent troops? Similarly, Cassidy's sober assessment of the capacity
building projects executed to date would have added greater insight to campaign
progress. These omissions left me with an uneasy feeling that Coalition and
Afghan government efforts may not be as positive as described in the text.

The book is well-researched, and the author's
soldier-scholar credentials are impeccable. Colonel Cassidy is a military
professor at the U.S. Naval War College with both scholarship and experience in
irregular warfare and stability operations. With a PhD from the Fletcher School
at Tufts University, he has served as a special assistant to two general officers,
a special operations strategist, and published two previous books, one on
peacekeeping and the other on counterinsurgency.

My one major concern with the book is the chosen publisher, the Marine
Corps University Press, whose marketing capacities may limit its wider
dissemination. This book definitely deserves a broad readership given its
relevance to U.S. policy-making in the region and future military campaigns.

Kevin
D. Stringer, PhD,
is an associate professor at Webster University, Geneva campus, and a lieutenant
colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Are you one of those hard-core types who can't get enough of Robert S. McNamara?

C'mon, you know who you are. The National Archives has just
the session for you, on Tuesday April 10:

The Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense and the
National Archives invite you to a panel program discussing Robert S. McNamara's
most controversial years as Secretary of Defense (1965-68), and Clark
Clifford's brief but significant successor tour as Secretary (1968-69). The
event will take place at noon on 10 April 2012 at the McGowan Theater, National
Archives, located at 7th and Constitution, NW, Washington, DC. 

Discussion will be based on the Historical Office's recent publication,
McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 1965-1969, by Edward J. Drea.
Panel speakers will focus on the work of Secretaries of Defense McNamara and
Clifford and the Vietnam War, but they will also address the impact of Vietnam
on American defense interests in other parts of the world.

David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, will convene the
panel and introduce Dr. Erin Mahan, Chief Historian, Historical Office of the
Secretary of Defense. Dr. Mahan will introduce the panelists and lead the
panel. Harold Brown, Air Force Secretary under McNamara and later Secretary of
Defense under President James E. Carter, will talk about working with McNamara.
Professor Emeritus George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky, one of the
nation's foremost experts on the history of the Vietnam War, will review the
book. The author, Dr. Edward J. Drea, currently a contract historian in the
Office of Joint History, Joint Chiefs of Staff, will respond to Secretary
Brown's and Professor Herring's comments. The speakers' presentations will be
followed by a question and answer session and then a reception.

The
event is free; reservations are not required. Seating is on a
first-come, first-served basis. For this McGowan Theater event, doors to the
building will open 30 minutes prior to the start of the program. Use the
Special Events entrance on Constitution Avenue.