Army puts new emphasis on stabilization

Michael Gordon:

The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.

Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.

It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.

But some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army’s military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine.

The manual describes the United States as facing an era of “persistent conflict” in which the American military will often operate among civilians in countries where local institutions are fragile and efforts to win over a wary population are vital.

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, began briefing lawmakers on the document on Thursday. In an interview, he called it a “blueprint to operate over the next 10 to 15 years.”

“Army doctrine now equally weights tasks dealing with the population — stability or civil support — with those related to offensive and defensive operations,” the manual states. “Winning battles and engagements is important but alone is not sufficient. Shaping the civil situation is just as important to success.”

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When the United States invaded Iraq, Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and many ranking military leaders spoke highly of the value of speed and high-technology military systems, arguing that they could enable a relatively small number of troops to rapidly defeat the United States’ adversaries. The mission of stabilizing Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was generally treated as a secondary concern, one that assumed that Iraq’s security forces would both cooperate and be effective.

The American military’s difficulty in securing Iraq has led to much soul-searching within the armed forces on how to prepare for future conflicts. Col. H. R. McMaster of the Army, who commanded the successful effort in 2005 to secure the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, asserts in a new article that an exaggerated faith in military technology and a corresponding undervaluation of political and military measures to secure the peace undermined American efforts in Iraq.

“Self-delusion about the character of future conflict weakened U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he wrote in Survival, a journal published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Colonel McMaster added in the article that the Army “is finding it difficult to cut completely loose from years of wrongheaded thinking,” noting that assumptions that high-technology systems will provide the American military with “dominant knowledge” of the battlefield has formed much of the justification for the Army program to build the Future Combat System.

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There is more.

The idea of the rapid advance predates Rumsfeld. It was proposed by John Boyd in his series of lectures on strategy in the 1980s. It works too. It keeps the enemy off balance and makes it more difficult for him to react. What was missing from the follow though in Iraq was sufficient force to manage the space they were dealing with. Another mistake made in the early days was a failure to impose martial law. Letting the Alley Babbas to run free led to a break down in discipline that led many to think they could resist US forces without consequences. They should have announce martial law as they swept into Baghdad and gradually eased up.

the new manual should be worthwhile for the next conflict. Gen. Caldwell appears to be a rising star in the Army. One of his previous assignments was as spokesman for Multi National Forces Iraq, where he worked on getting the media out of the hotel so they could look at some of the facts on the ground the military was seeing. Colonel McMaster is deserving of his first star for the work he has done in Iraq and elsewhere. He is a very smart guy and did a brilliant job at Tal Afar.