In Which I Dispose of Another Defense-ism

"Rapidly changing global threat environment."  This phrase appears often in defense literature.  It's not accurate.  The global threat environment has changed only incrementally over the past two decades.  Many things have not changed.  Iran supporting Hezbollah.  Proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology.  North Korea.  Terrorists.  Low-intensity warfare.  Deterrence.  

 

The big changes since the 1990's are that Al Qaeda came to our attention, we established a huge presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, North Korea and Iran got closer to the bomb, and India and Pakistan went nuclear.  

The global threat environment is changing in long, broad trends, not in short little hops.  Usually references to "rapid change" in global security are used to explain the United States' slowness in adapting to 4th generation warfare.  Unfortunately, the cause of the mismatch between U.S. capabilities and global security requirements must be sought elsewhere.

MV-22 and Strategic Inertia

Spring Bored alerted me to an aspect of the MV-22 I hadn't considered: its tendency to start fires and melt carrier platforms when landing.  

http://springboarder.blogspot.com/2009/05/osprey-down-grassfire-edition.html

To me, the MV-22 is a symbol of the strategic inertia of the Marine Corps.  The Marines have a long history of innovation, a history far too rich and detailed to delve into here.  It ranges from the first use of close air support (grenades thrown from a biplane in Nicaragua), to the invention of the Combined Action Program in Vietnam, to the concepts of the three-block war and the strategic corporal in the 1990s.  The most important innovation of the Marine Corps, however, is probably their perfection of amphibious warfare during the years before World War II.  The concepts they perfected in the interwar years were used to win the war in the Pacific, and were taught to the Army for use on D-Day. 

The Marines are still innovative on the operational and tactical level, as amply demonstrated by the actions of junior officers and enlisted Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.  At the strategic level, however, they are not.  The Marines recently released two new papers, Amphibious Operations in the 21st Century, and Seabasing for the Range of Military Options.  The first calls ambitiously for the Marines to have an "intellectual renaissance" (so far so good) in "amphibious operations" (so close...and yet so far).  The document states that adaptation to counterinsurgency operations has been "successful" (great news, I guess we can go home now) and that the time has come to re-focus on the Marines' core mission, amphibious operations.  In particular, forced landings. 

A forced landing capability is paramount, it argues, because then most other operations in the littoral will be possible.  This sounds a lot like the "lesser included" argument used in the 1990s.  

The same document that calls for an intellectual renaissance makes the limits of this renaissance clear by making several platform-specific endorsements.  First, the MV-22 and EFV are critical to the future of amphibious warfare, not, interestingly, just because they are useful in forced landings, but because they are even more useful in "low-intensity" operations.  Second, the MRAP is not a part of the Marines' future, because it's too heavy to fit on amphibious ships.  And finally, the Navy should bring several battleships back on line, and should pay for them by giving up carrier groups.

It seems that the Marine Corps has already made up its mind.  It used to be that the Marine Corps valued men over machines.  As the saying went, the Army depends on its tanks, the Air Force its airplanes, the Navy its ships, but the Marine Corps depends on its people.  Their unseemly need to procure the MV-22 speaks otherwise.     

How Many Do We Need?

Has anyone done an actual analysis of how many troops are needed in Afghanistan?  My impression is that the majority of Afghanistan's population is not provided security by the coalition.  

I know for that for counterinsurgencies, a historically successful ratio of troops to population is around 1:20.  For Afghanistan, that would imply 500,000 troops.  We have a tiny fraction of that.  But that's just an extrapolation of history, it doesn't take into account the actual situation in Afghanistan.  Perhaps only part of the country needs a 1:20 ratio.  Maybe some parts will be fine with 1:100, or 1:1000.  I don't know.  

It should be possible for a military planner to map out the number of troops required to provide security for all of Afghanistan.  Someone should get on that.    

CNAS has published a report on Afghanistan: 

http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/ExumFickHumayun_TriageAfPak_June09.pdf

The part I was most interested in was the metrics of success.  Metrics are difficult to define in a counterinsurgency, since many of the factors contributing to success or failure are intangible.  In Vietnam, with signs of success elusive, enemy casualties ("body count") became the default metric.  Easy to measure, easy to exaggerate, and visceral, this metric is now infamous for its uselessness.  

Body count is now cropping up again in official reports, offered as a sign of success.  It's understandable - it's a simple, concrete metric for those struggling to understand a complex war.  The CNAS report cleverly flips this on its head, proposing Afghan civilian casualties (whether resulting from coalition or enemy action) as the chief metric of success.  This is just as simple and concrete as enemy casualties.  

The brilliance of this metric is that a full adoption would imply a significant operational change.  Among other changes, troops chasing Taliban fighters through uninhabited mountain ranges would be moved to populated areas.  

However, full adoption would also expose a massive capability gap.  To keep Taliban from assassinating civilians, friendly troops must be present wherever civilians are.  There just aren't enough troops to accomplish this.  

"Know Yourself and Seek Self Improvement"

There are two schools among the opposition to the COINdinistas.  The first is that counterinsurgency as a strategy does not work.  The strongest evidence for this is the 75% failure rate of post-1950 counterinsurgency campaigns.  

The other school of thought is that even if there is a hypothetically successful counterinsurgency strategy, the United States is not capable of executing it.  The evidence for this is the lack of U.S. capability in non-military areas.  As any counterinsurgency theorist knows, a counterinsurgency is 90% political and 10% military.  The U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, conversely, is 10% political and 90% military.  This is due to a combination of factors, but perhaps most prominent is the American culture of national security.  The American "Way of War" is biased toward the style of warfare that succeeded in World War II.

Eight years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the military is still making only incremental shifts toward a counterinsurgency capability.  The political portion of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus (Department of State, USAID, etc.) has not visibly adapted.  

To construct an effective foreign policy, we must know ourselves.  If our institutions cannot adapt to fight counterinsurgencies, then perhaps we should not be engaged in counterinsurgency.   

On Making It in the DC Policy World

"Making it" in the DC policy world is a lot like going to LA and trying to "make it" as an actor.  The city is filled with talented people, but the industry can only sustain a few superstars.  You're more likely to end up waiting tables and throwing scripts into producers' cars (i.e. working as an intern and sending your papers randomly hoping someone will publish them).  After a while, some just sell out and just start doing commercials (i.e. going to work for a big defense contractor on some giant boondoggle project).  Others are lucky enough to find steady work at think tanks or in government (i.e. sitcoms - good exposure, good pay, varying amounts of respect).  Yet others settle into academia (i.e. teach at acting school).  Those who really break out as movie stars (Cabinet members/National Security Advisors and the like) are few and far between.  To do it, takes luck, connections, and of course a boatload of actual skill.  You also need the energy and self-confidence to market your skill.               

LA has the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, DC has the Black Buildings of Broken Dreams.