Preparing For The 'Next War' Posted by The Editors

This post is by NSN Intern Jennifer Lickteig

There has long been a heated debate within the defense community about whether the current obsession with counterinsurgency is preparing the United States for future military engagements.  For instance, in Tom Rick’s Inbox for the Washington Post this weekend, a Marine Major General Larry Taylor highlighted the importance of being prepared for the “country’s next war” and the danger of making assumptions as to what type of war it will be:

“We had better damn well have the capability to fight the guerrilla and the nation-state, regardless of which of these is more or less likely.”

Considering the plans to send thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan within the next year, it seems almost certainly our next war is the one we have been neglecting for the past seven years. And while we still have yet to see the full terms of the administration’s strategy (Karen DeYoung’s piece in the Washington Post this morning, gave some hints, but also begs additional questions,) there does seem to be a strong consensus behind a set of counterinsurgency principles - a “hearts and minds” approach, summed up with the phrase “you’ve gotta live with the people to protect the people.” While Gen. Taylor is right that our military needs to prepare for all manner of conflicts, we should also first and foremost be prepared for the conflicts we are currently fighting.

The military’s development of its counter-insurgency skills through its adoption of more culturally-sensitive policies on tribal engagement and the deployment of human terrain teams (HTTs) are positive steps that not only apply to the type of warfare the U.S. is facing in Afghanistan but are likely relevant for conflicts that we will face in the future.  More importantly, these principles recognize that in instances when the U.S. is involved in counterinsurgency operations, the military is necessary, but not the only solution.  By institutionalizing the knowledge gained from these conflicts, we can hopefully avoid having to painfully relearn these lessons in another future guerrilla conflict. After all, part of the reason the U.S. has become less prepared for a conventional conflict is that we were woefully unprepared for conflicts of the low intensity variety. 

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Jennifer,
The war the US is currently fighting in Afghanistan is not a counterinsurgency, it is the extension of an insurgency (overthrowing a government) against the remnants of the government that the US has overthrown, and now even the government that the US installed seems to be on the discard list. Therefore this is a dumb war with its main effects, as in most wars, being the deaths, injury and incarceration of a lot of innocent people.

The objective of the Afghanistan war, according to the US, is . . .what? Catch OBL? Prevent A. from being a training ground for any future nineteen guys with box-cutters? How stupid do they think we are? Actually the goal is US control of central Asia, which dates at least from Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

"THE GRAND CHESSBOARD - American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997. "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power." Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics.
continued --->

[Don Bacon]

Now traditional army and Marine officers aren't happy with the current US preoccupation on invading and occupying largely defenseless countries. The have been trained in the traditional military disciplines which involve infantry, calvary (armor) and artillery fighting on great battlefields and they don't like to see their little empires (and budgets) suddenly declared irrelevant. (This goes double for the air force and navy.)An artilleryman in today's army has been called 'dead man walking' because the maneuver, emplacement and use of artillery batteries is becoming a dying art of war. That's what that is all about. These characters would rather be engaged in battle with a sturdy adversary like Russia or China, than building hearts and minds in one of the poorest countries on earth, an objective that already has been proven costly, useless and senseless in Vietnam.

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