An article in last week’s Economist, “Bringing out the big guns,” described the shift in direction that is taking place in the U.S. military as it “prepares for life after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Some of the changes are good and necessary. Others are more questionable. Let me quote some sections from the article and then comment on them.
“In January 2018 the Trump administration published its National Defence Strategy (NDS). Officials lamented that nearly two decades of whack-a-mole against insurgents and jihadists had eroded the country’s military edge, resulting in exhausted and under-trained units armed for the wrong enemy. So the NDS decreed that America would henceforth focus on ‘long-term, strategic competition between nations’ – namely, China and Russia.”
If the military was “exhausted and under-trained,” it was because it wasn’t big enough and was not given enough money for the task(s) it was being asked to do under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. It is understandable that the military can be stretched for some period of time. Emergencies happen and the military has to respond. But to be stretched for almost two decades is a choice – a choice to not properly fund the military. And to continually ask the people in the military to do more than they should have to do because you don’t want to spend more money on defense is wrong.
“‘This is the first time since the Reagan era where the United States has been motivated to modernise its war-fighting architecture, its technologies,’ says Michael Griffin, the Pentagon’s technology chief. ‘The first time we’ve been forced to think about how we fight war.’”
That is not true. Our failures against the insurgency in Iraq from 2004 to 2006 forced us to rethink how to fight that kind of enemy. This is what David Petraeus and a number of other people did. They relearned how to fight an insurgency in the middle of an insurgency. And they had to relearn it because, as I mentioned above, we deliberately forgot what we learned in Vietnam.
“The second priority is ensuring that the armed forces not only have the arms they need, but also the training and readiness to use them in the sort of fighting they would face in eastern Europe and the western Pacific.”
Our military does need to be ready, and to have the necessary training and equipment, to fight in eastern Europe and the western Pacific. But we also need to be able to fight in other places, too. Because we don’t get to pick where we have to fight or what kind of war we have to fight. The enemy has a vote, too.
“Ryan McCarthy, undersecretary of the army, says that half his brigade combat teams – freed from what was an intense pace of deployments – are now at the highest level of readiness, up from a small fraction of that two years ago. Basic training is being increased from 14 to 22 weeks.”
If the Army’s readiness level was really that low, then that speaks poorly of the administration in office at that time. They could have increased the size of the Army and spent more on the Army to avoid this problem. Apparently, it wasn’t important to them.
“Soldiers who once practised dealing with terrorists’ roadside bombs now drill in dodging enemy air strikes or chemical weapons.”
Our military does need to practice dodging air strikes and chemical weapons. But they need to remember, and practice, counterinsurgency tactics, too. Because, as I said above, the enemy gets a vote when it comes to the kind of war we have to fight.
Also, as I mentioned, after Vietnam, the Army went back to preparing for “big wars,” like in Europe. And they did a great job getting themselves ready to fight that kind of war, as can be seen in the Gulf War of 1991. In fact, our forces did such a great job in the Gulf War that nobody since then has even tried to fight that kind of war against us. They have fought other kinds of wars, instead. Which means we can’t just go back to just preparing for “big wars” – because it is very unlikely our enemies are going to be stupid enough try to fight us that way.
“[Acting Defense Secretary Patrick] Shanahan urges sceptics to wait for the 2020 budget, which he has called ‘a masterpiece’. ‘What you’ll see in these budgets is a sizeable investment in these critical technologies and programmes, whether it’s autonomy, artificial intelligence, hypersonics, cyber.’”
Acting Secretary Shanahan sounds almost “Trumpian”1 when he calls the 2020 budget a “masterpiece.” It’s a defense budget for one year. That’s not a masterpiece; that’s an installment. Which is the point. The problems in our military aren’t going to be solved in one year or one budget. This is going to take a while – and a commitment over a period of years. The key to whether we are going to get to where we need to be, in terms of defense and military preparedness, is the people who are elected in 2020. What are they going to be willing to do?
I had two final comments, both of which I have already made, but which need to be reemphasized. First, we have to be ready to fight the war the enemy wants to fight – because we don’t get to decide. That means we have to prepare for not just the wars that we might prefer to fight and that we might be good at, but also the ones that are harder and that we don’t want to fight.
Second, there might be situations where we have to call upon our military to go all out. To deploy more often than they should have to. To go without enough training. But that is only in an emergency. It is not for a whole four year-administration – or longer. Because over four years, we can increase the size of our forces and increase our spending so we don’t ask more from our military than we have a right to ask. And if we aren’t willing to spend more, then we just have to do less. Because anything else isn’t fair to the men and women in our military.
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1 Needless to say, this is not a compliment.
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