The Small War warriors

Thomas P. M. Barnett:

When Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling recently published "A Failure of Generalship" in the Armed Forces Journal, a tipping point was reached in the long-brewing fight between the U.S. military's "big war" and "small wars" factions.

The big-war crowd wants to write off Iraq as an aberration, preferring instead to focus on conventional war with rising powers like China. The small-wars faction envisions a future in which messy insurgencies are the norm.

Yingling's small-wars faction points accusingly to a generation of senior officers who should have logically foreseen the emergence of such intra-national warfare as the primary threat to global stability in the post-Cold War era. All the signs were there, including a plethora of U.S. military interventions across the 1990s.

For our military to be unprepared for counter-insurgency operations going into Iraq, argues Yingling, is a profound failure of leadership. That we're still struggling to master such techniques years into our occupation is even worse. The colonel forcefully condemns the don't-rock-the-boat mentality of senior flag officers, and here is where the blame game grows immensely more diffuse.

The U.S. military emerged from Vietnam decades ago with a firm desire to avoid counter-insurgency operations and nation building. America's historic preference in war has always been for the complete annihilation of our enemies: We come; we kill; we leave.

To that end, counter-insurgency operations were subsequently reduced to a niche skill, ghettoized within Special Operations Command along with much of the civilian affairs expertise.

Our larger strategic rationale was ultimately codified in the Powell Doctrine: If America were to intervene anywhere, it would be with overwhelming force for very limited objectives. The American public has no patience for long fights, it was decided.

The Powell Doctrine utterly failed us in the post-Cold War era: We went into Iraq only to return to Iraq, we "stabilized" Haiti only to return - yet again - to Haiti; we intervened in Somalia only to return there last January.

But the Powell Doctrine did accomplish this: Our military continued to buy and train for big war while ignoring the inevitability of small ones, thus earning Yingling's righteous condemnation.

...

Yingling's real argument was with the "small foot print" small war generals led by Abizaid who believed that too many troops in Iraq would lead the Iraqis into too much reliance on US forces, as opposed to the "large foot print" generals like Petraeus who believed that you needed to provide security to defeat the insurgency and give the Iraqis a chance to succeed. At this point it looks like Petraeus has the better argument, but may lack the time granted to Abizaid's small foot print strategy. Barnett does have a point on the Powell doctrine's weaknesses. If we do not figure out a way to win these small war engagements, we are going to be facing a lot more of them or retreating to fortress America to fight one here.