This Week at War, No. 11

Plan for two wars? Or plan for endless war?

U.S. defense contractors and members of Congress are nervously waiting for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s final decisions on the Pentagon’s next budget. According to a recent piece in the Boston Globe, Gates intends to terminate several high-profile Air Force and Navy programs. Members of Congress representing defense workers who might be laid off will not be pleased.

Ideally, the Pentagon’s budget should implement the Defense Department’s larger strategic vision. The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is the Pentagon’s process for thoroughly reassessing that larger strategic vision. Michle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, will lead this year’s QDR. It will be a chance for the Obama administration and Gates to refashion the Defense Department’s strategies and redirect money in the years ahead to execute those strategies.

Past QDRs were designed around a two-war assumption. That assumption stated that the U.S. military must maintain sufficient forces to rapidly prevail in two nearly simultaneous regional wars. Part of that assumption was that these wars would be relatively brief, high-intensity engagements, similar to Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The open-ended, manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have invalidated the two-war planning assumption. While the United States copes with those ongoing commitments, Pentagon planners must consider whether the two-war planning assumption is relevant for the future.

One notion that the next QDR might do well to emphasize is that there are no longer alternating periods of peace and war. Instead, the QDR should admit to a persistent presence of conflict, at varying levels of intensity and in a variety of forms. The last QDR, issued in 2006, introduced this concept when it discussed steady state and surge levels of activity for homeland defense, irregular warfare, and conventional warfare.

Second, even though the requirements of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bypassed the two-war planning assumption, this does not mean that Pentagon planners no longer need to prepare for that scenario. Unfortunately, it is difficult to see how under present circumstances U.S. ground forces could respond to such a contingency.

Just as with the surge of five additional brigades to Iraq in 2007, the surge level of activity described in the 2006 QDR is expected to be a temporary and unsustainable utilization of resources. Yet by the standard described by the 2006 QDR, U.S. forces are operating at a surge level, and will for several more years at least.

Thus, a key goal of the next QDR and follow-on defense planning should be to come up with ways of achieving U.S. national security objectives while transitioning from an unsustainable surge level of activity to a sustainable steady-state level. Will this be possible? Flournoy and Gates will have to answer that question.

How to cope with bad generals

What can the army do if it finds itself plagued with bad generals? The obvious answer is to not create them in the first place. But this is a facile response; the U.S. Army doesn’t intentionally promote lackluster colonels. Organizations only find out after the fact that previously capable people have been boosted into positions for which they are not suited.

Writing at Small Wars Journal, Lt. Col. Louis A. DiMarco (U.S. Army, ret.), an assistant professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, thinks that the way to insure against bad generals is to train better staff officers to cover for them:

The U.S., and all modern militaries, should not need inspired generalship to win wars. A general staff is designed to mitigate the impact of generals who are less than geniuses.

He continues:

The [Prussian] general staff system did not replace the need for generals. Rather, it replaced the need for individual genius with corporate institutional genius. It provided a system that augmented and added to the strengths of good generals; and, most importantly, it ensured that the army succeeded despite mediocre or poor generalship.

DiMarco argues for an expansion of the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies to train an elite corps of midcareer staff officers. He asserts that during the surge in Iraq in 2007, Gen. David Petraeus created an ad hoc version of this staff when he handpicked a council of colonels to advise him on counterinsurgency tactics. What General Petraeus had to improvise, DiMarco seeks to institutionalize.

If DiMarco’s elite corps of Army staff officers had been in place in 2001, would it have made much difference in the course of history? DiMarco seems to be asking quite a bit from such midlevel staff officers. In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, could such an elite staff have overcome questionable grand strategy, deeply dysfunctional indigenous societies, meddlesome and duplicitous neighbors, and occasionally feckless allies?

Better generals, better staff officers, better soldiers, and better weapons are all good things from an army’s point of view. But some wars are just very difficult to fight regardless of the quality of the resources available. This is something policymakers need to remember.