The Rise of Gulf War Paradigm 2.0

The adage that “it is always easier to fight the last war” is one that readily can be applied to the United States and its armed forces for not predicting the scale and type of operations encountered in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This article argues that the lack of preparation in the post-invasion phases arose from an institutional attachment to a preferred paradigm of warfare, as exemplified by the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This paradigm, though, has been substantially resurrected and re-configured to suit the fighting preferences of the American armed forces in its protracted encounters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from re-orienting its organization and mindset to meet the challenges of so-called counterinsurgency campaigns, as much current advocacy maintains, the military has reverted to the form of warfare it knows best.     

The Future of War and American Military Strategy

The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.     

We Always Fight the Last War? Prior Experiences in Counterinsurgency and Conventional Warfare and War Outcomes

Does previous experience with conventional warfare harm a military fighting an insurgency? Or, conversely, does prior experience with a counterinsurgency lower a military’s likelihood for winning a conventional interstate war? Whereas firepower, maneuver, and associated tactics are essential for conventional warfare, counterinsurgency requires restrictions on firepower and effective policing in order to “win hearts and minds.” These competing requirements for military preparedness for conventional warfare and counterinsurgency have been extensively debated. However, the consequences of fighting counterinsurgency on a state’s readiness for fighting conventional wars (and vice versa) have been unexplored. We examine the relationship between past experiences with one type of conflict and war outcomes of the other type of conflict through a quantitative analysis of all wars that ended between 1838 and 2005. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that past experiences with either counterinsurgency or conventional warfare have little association with future success in war, conventional or not.     

British and American military operations in the Battle of Helmand, 2006–2011

In summer 2006, elements of the British Army were deployed to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. The US Army followed with a surge in 2009 and 2010. The British and American military forces attempted to construct a counterinsurgency (COIN) approach to win the war in Helmand from 2006 until 2011, but the operational approach implemented was most often that of conventional warfighting. The inability to successfully implement COIN owed not to a lack of will, but rather to short tours, mission command, a lack of available resources, the particular situation on the ground in Helmand and the propensity of the Taliban to launch major conventional operations during much of the period in question.     

The Soldier, The State, and The Clash of Civilizations: The Legacy of Samuel Huntington

The major military challenge that the United States faces today is the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is engaged in a grueling counterinsurgency campaign against the Islamist movement known as the Taliban, which is based among Pashtun tribes in Southeastern Afghanistan and Northwestern Pakistan, who have never been permanently subdued by a foreign military force. This challenge comes in the wake of that other grueling counterinsurgency war that the U.S. military has had to conduct in Iraq, where its chief adversary was the Islamist movement known as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the challenge in Afghanistan comes on what could be the eve of an impending military challenge, perhaps even a war, with Iran, as that Islamist state relentlessly moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons. In its entire history of two- and-a-quarter centuries, the United States has never been engaged in an unbroken succession of three wars, in three different countries. Together, the U.S. wars with or within Islamist countries add up to what is a “long war,” indeed.     

Understanding the Taliban and Insurgency in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is in danger of capsizing in a perfect storm of insurgency that mimics operations and tactics witnessed in Iraq. This article assesses this insurgency and the re-emergent Taliban. The common view of the Taliban as simply a radical Afghan Islamist movement is overly simple, for that organization has been able to build on tribal kinship networks and a charismatic mullah phenomenon to mobilize a critical and dynamic rural base of support. This support, buttressed by Talib reinforcements from Pakistan's border areas, is enough to frustrate the U.S.-led Coalition's counterinsurgency strategy. At the operational level, the Taliban is fighting a classic “war of the flea,” while the Coalition continues to fight the war largely according to the Taliban “game plan.” This is resulting in its losing the war in Afghanistan one Pashtun village at a time.     

Complex Irregular Warfare: The Next Revolution in Military Affairs

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Washington was embarking on a defense transformation emphasizing missile defense, space assets, precision weaponry, and information technology. This transformation proved irrelevant to the national security threats we now face, with the emergence of nontraditional adversaries pursuing “complex irregular warfare.” U.S. forces will have to assume a much more expeditionary character to successfully deal with Islamists’ complex irregular warfare. The March 2005 U.S. National Defense Strategy provides a balance to the longstanding American military emphasis on major-theater war, but it remains to be seen whether the military's new interest in operations other than conventional, major-combat operations will last or if it will diminish as soon as a new peer competitor rises, allowing the Pentagon to return to its more familiar paradigm.     

‘Phase IV’ Operations in the War on Terror: Comparing Iraq and Afghanistan

This article identifies the obstacles and prospects of implementing President Obama's surge strategy in Afghanistan by examining four issues: (1) the origins and implementation of the Iraq surge policy; (2) U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan; (3) a comparative examination of Afghan and Iraqi tribal insurgent structures; and (4) suggestions for a counter insurgency policy more in sync with regional social and tribal structures.     

Formulating Victory and Implications for Policy

The national debate about the decisions to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that policymakers and scholars need more precise language and concepts to define victory in war. Without clear language for victory it is difficult for policymakers to describe what they seek to achieve from military intervention. This article discusses a framework for understanding victory and evaluates its implications for policymakers who decisions about whether to intervene with military force.     

The Bundeswehr and the Kunduz air strike 4 September 2009: Germany's post-heroic moment?

The article sets out to investigate Germany's involvement in the controversial 2009 Kunduz air strike in Afghanistan. Utilizing a theoretical framework derived from existing literature on postheroic warfare, it employs a detailed case study of this particular military engagement to highlight the operational, strategic, and cultural dimensions of Germany's operations in Afghanistan. Through an analysis of primary documents and field interviews, this paper concludes that German public opinion, politicians, soldiers and media reacted in ways that mirror closely theories of postheroic warfare. These included widespread condemnation of the air strike, increasing doubts about the Afghan mission, and emphasis on low-risk stand-off precision weapons, which paradoxically resulted in higher civilian casualties. Germans still have a long way to go to accept the brutal realities of military engagements that the Bundeswehr increasingly confronts during its expanded scope of post-cold war military operations.     

The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists

The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of both the debate over the war in Iraq and its implications for the future of U.S. foreign policy by examining the relationship between neoconservatism and realism. The article begins by establishing the connection between the tenets of neoconservatism and the arguments for war against Iraq. The primary focus is on the neoconservative Bush Doctrine that served as the primary justification for the Iraq War. Next, we turn to the arguments that realists put forth in their attempt to steer America away from the road to war. The realists, however, proved to be unsuccessful in their attempt to prevent war and in the final section we address the central question of the article; why did realism fail in the debate over Iraq?     

Numerous,Capable, and Well-Funded Rebels: Insurgent Military Effectiveness and Deadly Attacks in Afghanistan

Why do some of Afghanistan's provinces experience more deadly attacks on counterinsurgents than others? We argue that provinces with more militarily effective insurgents will be deadlier for the forces of the counterinsurgency. We posit that insurgent military effectiveness is an interactive function of the rebel group's size, the quality of its recruits, and the group's operational budget. More militarily effective insurgents should, in turn, produce more deadly violence against Coalition forces. We model this relationship at the provincial level in Afghanistan using negative binomial regressions. Ultimately, we find that in provinces where the insurgency is more militarily effective, deadly attacks against counterinsurgent forces occur more often. Based on this finding, we conclude with directions for future research and policy recommendations for both the current operations in Afghanistan and for future counterinsurgency campaigns.     

Defense Management Challenges for the Next American President

The next American president will face a daunting list of national security problems, including a serious defense budget crunch. The budget crisis will be deepened by the global financial crisis, a tapering of supplemental funding associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the steady growth of military healthcare and other personnel costs. After six years of rapid defense budget increases, the Pentagon has lost the practice of matching strategy and resources. The next president will need to manage risk among investments in irregular warfare, counterterrorism, balancing new super powers, countering weapons of mass destruction, and traditional warfare. He will also need to begin to build non-military “soft power” capabilities outside of the Pentagon.     

Security challenges and institutional responses: An Austrian perspective

Common wisdom is that NATO's future hinges solely on the outcome of the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan. While the state of Afghanistan will impact the future of the Alliance for better or for worse, it will not be the sole or even primary factor to influence the future of NATO. In many ways, Afghanistan has become an excuse for the Alliance to ignore some of the in-built problems of the organisation. The allies' inability to define clearly the nature of the Alliance and its core missions, a lack of capability and poor funding, topped off by exceedingly weak and troubled relations with other international organisations, particularly the European Union, all pose significant challenges that the alliance must address to remain relevant, coherent, and equipped to engage effectually in future operations.     

The Capability–Capacity Crunch: NATO's New Capacities for Intervention

Abstract

In September 2006 NATO's role in Afghanistan expanded to cover the whole of the country. With 32,000 troops under NATO command Stage 4 of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) represents an open-ended commitment to rebuilding a country long torn by war and instability. The Alliance's showpiece for advanced military transformation, the the NATO Response Force (NRF) represents a down payment on the future of transatlantic military co-operation. Taken together these two developments reflect the reality of NATO's new interventionism of an Alliance that bears little or no resemblance to that which won the Cold War. NATO today is an organisation designed for global reach and global effect, undertaking operations at their most robust. Unfortunately, the re-design of NATO's architecture has not been matched by a parallel development in Alliance military capabilities. NATO's big three, the US, Britain and France, have taken steps to improve their military capabilities. However, the transformation of NATO's other militaries has proved slow and uneven, leaving many members unable to fulfil any meaningful role. Thus, as NATO today plans for both robust advanced expeditionary warfare and stabilisation and reconstruction vital to mission success in complex crisis management environments a gap is emerging. Indeed, in an Alliance in which only the Americans can afford both military capability and capacity most NATO Europeans face a capability–capacity crunch, forced to make a choice between small, lethal and expensive professional military forces or larger, cheaper more ponderous stabilisation and reconstruction forces. This article explores the consequences of the crunch and the implications for NATO's current and future role as the Alliance struggles to find a balance between fighting power and staying power.     

A Bear in the Woods? Threat Framing and the Marketplace of Values

To many scholars, the Bush administration's ability to convince a majority of the public to favor war with Iraq represents a dangerous failure of the marketplace of ideas. A healthy marketplace, they argue, would have produced a more robust debate over the administration's justifications for war, revealing their weakness. In this paper I argue that these scholars have based their arguments on a poorly specified model of the marketplace of ideas and that Iraq does not represent a failure of the marketplace. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the strength of the marketplace lies not in its ability to move the nation toward truth via debate and deliberation, but in its tendency to divide the public into countervailing factions based on competing sets of values and competing frames of the issues at hand. I develop this argument first by elaborating a model of the “marketplace of values” and redefining threat inflation as a process of efforts to frame security issues for the public. I test my model first against public opinion data regarding American threat perceptions and then use it to explain the Bush administration's successes and failures in building and maintaining public support for the war in Iraq.     

Insurgents,accidental guerrillas and valley-ism: an oral history of oppositional US soldiers' attitudes toward the enemy in Afghanistan

In recent years Western policy towards Afghanistan has been marked by inconsistencies and errors. This article explores United States (US) soldiers' perceptions of the enemy in Afghanistan based on oral history interviews with dissenting combat soldiers who served in the Afghan theatre. By foregrounding soldiers' attitudes towards the enemy, this study includes marginalized voices, often overlooked, that challenge prevailing misconceptions. General David Petraeus, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, has argued that significant battlefield decisions are not reserved for generals alone. Petraeus' counterinsurgency programme promotes ‘strategic corporals’ whose decisions hold important consequences. If strategic corporals are involved in military decision-making, it follows that their interpretation of the conflict may also hold strategic implications for the researcher. Soldiers' views of war are not the final, authoritative verdict. However, this article suggests that these strategic corporals should be included in a complex matrix of interpretation to broaden US understanding of the enemy.     

The Heroes of COIN

The conventional wisdom holds that security in Iraq only improved after Gen. David Petraeus implemented a new counterinsurgency doctrine that stressed population security instead of aggressive operations against insurgent forces. This interpretation is strikingly similar to the historiography of the Huk Rebellion, the Malayan Emergency, and the Vietnam War. In each case observers criticized initial efforts as brutal and counterproductive, only to be rescued when enlightened new leaders arrived on the scene. This article challenges the familiar hero narrative, arguing that critics routinely exaggerate the importance of leadership changes because they view conflicts as experiments in counterinsurgency rather than exercises in state-building. Whereas counterinsurgency (COIN) theory emphasizes issues like public security and government legitimacy, theorists of state-building describe a bloody and protracted competition for power under conditions approaching anarchy. The upshot is that the “heroes” of late-stage COIN might actually depend on the earlier “villains” who did the dirty work of establishing political order and coercing the population into obedience.     

Managing Military Transformations: Agency,Culture, and the U.S. Carrier Revolution

The marketplace of ideas within a mature democracy such as the United States is supposed to fairly reliably vet foreign policies through open, wide-ranging debate. It is widely recognized that the U.S. marketplace of ideas failed during the 2002-03 debate over going to war in Iraq. Examinations of this market failure have emphasized executive powers and public fear after 9/11 as the main reasons threat inflation succeeded; I show neither explains this case. The majority opposition was silenced throughout early 2002 and ultimately defeated in a struggle over the Iraq War Resolution by pressures to be patriotic. I contend that this silencing patriotism should not be considered ordinary patriotism for a democracy as it is anti-democratic. I discuss how two critical norms of behavior which silence debate of national security policies and cause deference to the executive branch on war powers became established as part of the militarized political culture that took root in the United States during the Cold War. Thus these norms, enforced by what I term to be militarized patriotism left over from the Cold War, silenced debate over Iraq and led to the failure of the marketplace of ideas.     

The Big Problem of Small Allies: New Data and Theory on Defiant Local Counterinsurgency Partners in Afghanistan and Iraq

Alliance politics are critical yet understudied in counterinsurgency interventions. Despite the importance of local allies, traditional research on alliances fails to account for the challenges of managing in-country counterinsurgency security partners or explain variation among which types of policy requests from large intervening allies are likely to result in compliance or defiance by local partners. When did US intervening forces have leverage in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when was American influence limited? Utilizing thousands of US government documents to analyze over 250 US demands of allies in Kabul and Baghdad, this paper reexamines established variables in the literature on inter-alliance bargaining—namely allied interests and dependencies—to offer a new model describing the interaction of these variables in asymmetric counterinsurgency partnerships. The theory predicts when large allies are likely to influence local partners and when these intervening forces will likely fail to coerce them.