My first response to President Bush’s call to increase the size of the Army and the Marines Corps is: What took you so long? The answer may be that it had to wait until Don Rumsfeld left. Secretary Rumsfeld was a proponent of a small, light, fast military. While that can work for offensives against regular armies (see the invasion of Iraq), it does not work for the follow-up against counterinsurgents and nontraditional forces (see Iraq after the invasion). Rumsfeld was right to force the Army to learn to fight the next war, but he was wrong if he thought it would never have to also fight the last war. We need to be able to do both, and for the latter, we need a bigger military.
The Army says that 10,000 additional soldiers would cost $1.2 billion a year. I have no problem with that. I would have no problem if it cost more than that. I object to bridges to nowhere and tax breaks for corporations and all of the other pork that Congress doles out, but I do not object to paying and equipping our soldiers. There is nothing I would rather spend my tax dollars on than the men and women in our military.
However, supporting an increase in the size of our military is not the same as supporting a short-term increase in the number of troops in Iraq. While President Bush has not said what he is going to propose for Iraq, there is a lot of speculation he will increase the number of troops in Iraq, perhaps as a temporary surge to support a big offensive against the insurgency.
The problem with this is that I do not think it will work. I doubt the insurgency (or civil war or whatever you want to call it) can be defeated with the kinds of strategies and tactics we are using now. If attacked, the insurgents will just fade away and come back to fight again on another day in another place. The insurgents cannot be defeated in one big battle or one big operation. The key has to be providing security for the people of Iraq, and this is a long-term project that needs different tactics.
For example, William Westmoreland‘s search and destroy tactics did not work in Vietnam, but Creighton Abram’s "one war concept" was working. As General Abrams explained to Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander in Chief, Pacific:
"[T]he one war concept puts equal emphasis on military operations, improvement of RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces] and pacification – all of which are interrelated so that the better we do in one, the more our chance of progress in the others." *
One journalist said, referring to Abrams emphasis on disrupting the enemy’s supplies, "Where Westmoreland was a search-and-destroy and count-the-bodies man, Abrams proved to be an interdict-and-weigh-the-rice man." According to Abrams, the appropriate measure of success was not body count but population security:
"‘The body count does not have much to do with the outcome of the war. Some of the things I do think important are that we preempt or defeat the enemy’s major military operations and eliminate or render ineffective the major portion of his guerrillas and his infrastructure – the political, administrative and para-military structure on which his whole movement depends.’"
What Abrams was talking about was disrupting the enemy’s supplies and cutting the enemy off from the sources of support (usually involuntary support) in the local population by providing safety and security for the local people.
It seems to me we may need some variation of General Abram’s concepts in Iraq today. In the Wall Street Journal article also noted here, a major who served as a company commander in Baghdad said that "[j]unior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure," but "[a] lot of senior officers just don't get it."
The new draft counterinsurgency doctrine mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article sounds a lot like what Creighton Abrams did in Vietnam. But is it being followed? The report in the Wall Street Journal is not encouraging, just as the idea of sending more troops for a short term surge is not encouraging. A short term surge indicates a mindset looking more at big battles and body counts than what we need to be doing, which is "providing security, finding friends, and fixing infrastructure."
I agree with those who say we must not lose in Iraq. I also agree with those who say we should not surge without a purpose. The key to both of these is making sure that we get our strategies and tactics right – and realizing that, even once we get our strategies and tactics right, it is going to take time to complete the job. Short terms surges and big operations are not going to get the job done. It is going to take slow, hard work.
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* For these quotations and more on Abrams’ tactics in Vietnam, see A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, by Lewis Sorley, especially chapters 2 and 3.
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