This Week at War, No. 4

Groping for a strategy in Afghanistan

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified on Capitol Hill this week and the Obama administration’s intentions for Afghanistan became the focus of attention. In his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Gates declared the administration’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan to be, an Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for Al Qaeda, reject the rule of the Taliban, and support the legitimate government that they elected and in which they have a stake.

In his testimony, Secretary Gates also appeared to scale back America’s ambitions for the campaign when he said, If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.

As it proceeds with a build-up of American ground forces in Afghanistan, the administration continues to work out its plans for 2009 and beyond. The task before the Obama team is to determine what end-state is most likely to result in the strategic objectives Secretary Gates listed; what strategies, both military and non-military, have the best chance of achieving that end-state; and what resources are required to implement those strategies. With the clock ticking in 2009 and much consultation required among a long list of international partners, it would seem an immense task to get new strategies and forces in place before the next Afghan winter sets in.

Small Wars Journal’s blog collected this weeks’ commentary on Afghanistan, and some U.S. Army counterinsurgency veterans discussed in the comments (see also here) the strategic dilemmas posed by Afghanistan.

What does soft power actually do?

Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye, the leading proponent of the concept of soft power, defines the term as the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. But in an essay written for Small Wars Journal, Lt. Gen. Norman Seip of the U.S. Air Force heartily endorses the utility of soft power while at the same time rejecting Nye’s formulation of the concept.

General Seip (the commander of U.S. Air Force operations in Latin America) rejects the notion that an explicit attempt to employ soft power will have any meaningful effect. He asserts:

Contrary to popular belief, Soft Power cannot change hearts and minds – American policy and media coverage of these effects is far too pervasive to be forgotten. Personal relationships built during mil-to-mil or mil-to-civilian interactions can move individuals, but a soft power campaign itself will not stop an insurgency or change a nation’s sentiment towards America.

So how should a military planner use the concept of soft power? To General Seip, military employment of soft power encompasses a broad range of non-kinetic operations including training partnerships with foreign military forces, military exchange programs, the protection of other countries’ sovereignty, and humanitarian relief operations. General Seip asserts that, [a] sustained Soft Power campaign may do more to avert the next conflict than an arsenal of missiles or massing of troops. And thus, he concludes, Soft Power isn’t simply the mission of Civil Affairs or Public Affairs detachments; it’s a responsibility of all commanders and the second-order mission of every Soldier, Sailor, Airmen and Marine.

But can the military prepare for all of these missions?

General Seip argues sensibly enough that America’s military forces can prevent many conflicts from ever occurring by preparing for and engaging in a broad range of non-conventional, non-traditional, and non-kinetic military missions. But can over-worked U.S. forces reasonably add these missions to their long list of current requirements?

Secretary Gates has repeatedly called for balanced military forces capable of responding to high-intensity conventional threats, yet also able to successfully wage today’s small, irregular wars. Pile on counter-insurgency competency; counter-terror skills; training time spent with foreign partners; humanitarian relief operations; readiness for operations in jungles, deserts, mountains, the arctic, and from ship-to-shore, and one might wonder whether America’s general-purpose military forces have the time to gain the proficiency necessary to prevail against a wide variety of adversaries who will very likely be fighting with a home court advantage.

This week at Small Wars Journal witnessed a flurry of discussion on this problem. First, one serving U.S. Army officer noted that in 2001 the number of annual training days required to meet Army requirements at that time exceeded by 16 percent the actual number of training days available in a year. That was when the Army was more focused on high-intensity conventional threats and before counter-insurgency techniques took up much, if any, of the training schedule. If the Army had a hard time keeping up in what seems like the relatively simple world before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how will the military meet the additional requirements suggested by Secretary Gates and General Seip?

Are the military’s schools part of the solution, or part of the problem?

This observation accompanied a discussion among some U.S. Army captains concerning the relevance of the education they receive at military schools officers periodically attend to prepare them for higher responsibilities. Capt. Crispin Burke, currently serving in Iraq, noted that modern war requires him to be a pentathlete. But he noted that for the captain’s course from which he just graduated, pentathlete wasn’t on the syllabus.

Soldiers’ training schedules, the syllabi of military schools, and the weight given to preparing for conventional versus irregular warfare may seem like technical questions best left to experts within the uniformed military. But Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the Naval War College, explained this week that the composition and capabilities of America’s military forces constrain the options available to policymakers, not only in the present but also in the future. Owens noted how the Eisenhower administration’s decision to emphasize strategic nuclear forces at the expense of ground forces left the country unprepared for the adversaries it faced in Vietnam.

Owens calls for America’s civilian policymakers to get involved in the details of the Pentagon’s priorities, what contingencies it is preparing for, which priorities are at the top of the list, which are at the bottom, and whether the Pentagon’s programs actually support the stated priorities. Or, to paraphrase Clemenceau, preparing for war is too important to be left to the generals.

Previous issues:

This Week at War, No. 3 (Jan. 23, 2009)
This Week at War, No. 2 (Jan. 16, 2009)
This Week at War, No. 1 (Jan. 9, 2009)