Forging the Future of American Security with a Total Force Strategy

An intense debate now rages concerning whether the Army should be preparing and organizing to conduct more ambiguous, irregular operations or focus on maintaining its well honed edge in high-intensity warfare. The terms of the debate are clearly affected by the fact that United States is currently embroiled in perilous counterinsurgency and other irregular operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should the Army recalibrate itself to wage counterinsurgency and other irregular operations more effectively, or does it need to keep doing what it does best with an eye to future conventional warfare? Given the impossibility of accurately predicting the character of future conflict, it is necessary for the Army to strike a balance between the extremes. But for the Army to effectively implement a policy of “balance,” it must be prepared to dramatically change the way it organizes itself and drop its opposition to specializing its forces for irregular and conventional warfare, respectively. The approach that the Army should take should be based upon a Total Force construct. By utilizing the entire Total Force portfolio, it should be possible to better optimize the mix of ground units prepared for conventional war, irregular war or peace operations to avoid a mis-match between national security strategy and military force. In this manner, it may be possible to stake our claim on the hard won lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet hedge against the unknowable future.     

A New Concept of the Citizen-Soldier

The military manpower demands created by U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are causing extraordinary strains on recruitment, and the desirable size of the U.S. armed forces has become a topic of national concern. One key issue is the balance between active-duty forces and the reserve components, citizen-soldiers who face numerous service-related issues that the active-duty forces do not and who have their own unique sociology. We cannot continue to rely on the reserves for missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but must look to the use of short-term active-duty enlistments, drawn from recent college graduates, to perform duties currently being performed by reservists and even active-duty personnel.     

How Many Lives Do the Taliban Have?

After having participated in the civil war and later ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, the current Taliban have a third life as insurgents against the Afghan government and its foreign supporters. Their aim is to return to power and establish an Islamic system. Pakistani shelter and support, guerrilla warfare, and terrorist tactics allowed the Neo-Taliban to extend their influence, particularly to the south and east of Afghanistan. They used the weakness of the Hamid Karzai regime to set up shadow governments. Since even the coalition forces have abandoned the aim of defeating them, the Taliban are guaranteed survival after foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Due to the different interests of the main stakeholders—the Afghan government, the Taliban, the United States, and Pakistan—it is unlikely that the conflict will end by negotiations any time soon. Thus, the civil war will continue. When the Taliban try to extend their reach beyond rural areas and into non-Pashtun districts, they will meet tough resistance. Therefore, it is likely that the fragmentation of Afghanistan will persist and that the Taliban will not return as rulers of a united Afghanistan.     

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.     

Force Size for the Post-Westphalian World

The quality of the U.S. military has improved steadily since the end of the Cold War, but technological and managerial advancements cannot compensate for the inadequate size of the American armed forces. The post–Cold War years saw a shift from the Westphalian, state-ordered world to one where Western states are at war with transnational, substate terrorist groups. This requires adjustments in the American military establishment. Improvements in quality must be matched by an increase in quantity in order to meet U.S. security needs. As interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven, a minimalist force may be sufficient to win a war, but where nation-building is required, it will find it difficult to win the peace.     

Humanitarian Intervention After Iraq: Legal Ideals vs. Military Realities

The theory of humanitarian intervention has received new attention since the humanitarian crises of the 1990s and the United States’ becoming the world's sole superpower. The actual practice of humanitarian intervention, however, has declined. It is difficult to forge the political will for it when the countries composing the global organizations that could provide the political legitimacy disagree on an intervention, and with so few countries—mainly the United States and Great Britain—capable of providing the required expeditionary forces. Moreover, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have diminished the United States’ political will, military capability, and diplomatic credibility to conduct future humanitarian interventions. In particular, those wars precluded its intervention in the current genocide in Darfur. Regional bodies such as the African Union may be the only entities that can, with aid and training, undertake effective interventions.     

Grand Strategy of ‘Restrainment’

With the end of the Cold War, the subsequent global war on terror, the global economic recession, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one would think that the United States would have formulated a grand strategy for dealing with these problems. This, however, is not the case. This article advances a grand strategy of “restrainment,” as a guiding concept for our approach to international politics. It builds from the principle that U.S. policy must seek to restrain—individually and collectively—those forces, ideas, and movements in international politics that create instability, crises, and war.     

Reputation and U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq

The need to demonstrate America's resolve is a major argument among those who oppose a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. According to this argument, a quick exit from Iraq would be a major blow to U.S. credibility and embolden the forces of radical Islam in their war against the United States. This article assesses this “reputational” argument and concludes that evidence from radical Islamists’ pronouncements gives the argument significant and unprecedented forcefulness. These pronouncements unmistakably call into question the United States’ resoluteness by pointing to America's past withdrawals from theaters of war and declare Iraq as the central front, raising the reputational stake of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq considerably. The potency of the reputational argument is also unprecedented when it is compared to its similar formulation during the Vietnam War, when it was vague and short of supporting evidence. The reputational argument may play an important rationale in maintaining a substantial level of American forces in Iraq for years to come.     

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.     

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.     

‘Non-lethal’ weapons and the occupation of Iraq: technology,ethics and law

The occupation of Iraq is a challenging task for the United States (US) military, which is considering resort to options other than lethal force as a possible just response. From the outset, the notion that a weapon can be deemed ‘non-lethal’ is problematic. Some weapons intended to leave their target alive often have lethal consequences and other weapons intended to have lethal effects often do not kill their target. This article explores ethical and legal challenges that arise from the potential use by US forces in Iraq of two classes of so-called ‘non-lethal’ weapons: incapacitating chemical agents and dazzling laser devices. Such challenges are highly relevant to questions about the role of Just War theory in the context of modern warfare. In particular, they beg the question whether the use of non-lethal weapons supports or subverts the jus in bello requirement that war be waged in a discriminate and proportionate fashion.     

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.     

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.     

奥巴马政府的阿富汗反恐战略

鉴于美国深陷伊拉克战争泥潭、阿富汗安全形势不断恶化,美国总统奥巴马于2009年3月正式宣布实施新的反恐战略。该战略旨在通过战略重心东移,集中资源在阿富汗实施反叛乱战略,以达到从根本上铲除基地组织及其庇护力量的目的,并兼有塑造地缘政治优势的考虑。虽然奥巴马政府运用多种手段运作这一战略,但面对阿富汗及其邻近地区局势的复杂性以及美国国内的各种制约因素,其前景并不乐观。     

Separatists and Spoilers: The UAE’s Way of Proxy Warfare

This article examines the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE’s) involvement in proxy warfare in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. The UAE’s security posture in these volatile regions has evolved remarkably over the last two decades and set the Emirates apart from many of its rivals, peers, and neighbors, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Most countries have intervened in conflicts in order to affect politics in the center, either by backing pro-government militias or center-seeking rebel groups. The UAE, in contrast, has constructed a portfolio of proxy relationships mostly with separatist groups. Such groups operate in far flung peripheral territories of countries like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. They do not seek to seize the state, but to break away from it. This approach to proxy warfare has granted the UAE unique negative control at relatively little cost. Through its proxy networks, the UAE can impede adversaries from consolidating control across the Indian Ocean littoral and maintain influence in the key maritime passages to Europe and Asia.     

Indonesian state responses to September 11, the Bali bombings and the war in Iraq: Sowing the seeds for an accommodationist Islamic framework?

This paper takes as its starting point the commonalities and differences in Indonesian Muslim responses to September 11, the Bali bombings and the war in Iraq. Empirical evidence suggests that Muslim leaders from all Islamic groups, whether 'moderate' or 'radical', in varying tones condemned the terrorist attacks of September 11. Likewise, a majority of Muslims from mass organizations and political parties condemned the US and coalition attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, so it is now impossible for Indonesian Muslims to conceptualize September 11 in isolation from events in the Islamic world. This paper first attempts to consider Indonesian Muslim perceptions of terrorism and second suggests that since September 11 enhanced solidarity among Muslims is changing the contours of Indonesian nationalism, and third suggests that the ideological basis of the post-independence Indonesian state is beginning to lose its credibility in the eyes of many Muslims and may in time be replaced by an accommodationist format more acceptable to its santri adherents. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Donald E. Weatherbee, section co-editor Rasmus Gjedssø Bertelsen and the journal's anonymous reviewers, who provided sound advice (which I was not always wise enough to follow).     

Development and political legitimacy: the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan

Development's policies are based on a set of premises: state‐building, state of law, democratisation, accountability and privatisation. The idea is that the Western concept of democracy could be implemented through the development of a ‘civil society’ of the building from scratch of new institutions. Such a model works when there is political will from the local political authorities and the society to adopt such a model (as was the case in Poland and Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Union). But in any case a policy of development should be based on political legitimacy. In Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, political legitimacy means abiding with nationalism, Islam and local political culture (often based on clan‐ism and networks). In Iraq, the US policy has deliberately ignored the issue of legitimacy. In Afghanistan, because the US intervention was not part of a great design, it relied more on local constraints and thus has been more effective, or at least, less disruptive. The issue is not opposing a Western model of democracy to a national authoritarian political culture, but to root democracy into the local political culture. If not the policy of strengthening civil society, through political and military pressure as well as NGO's, has a disruptive effect and may lead to a conservative, nationalist and religious backlash.     

奥巴马政府对外战略调整:评估与展望

奥巴马入主白宫一年来,美国对外战略迅速进入调整期。为摆脱布什时期的战略困境而寻求在伊拉克、阿富汗脱身的战略选择;由强硬转为软硬兼施对待"失败国家"和"潜在对手";战略重心东移;缓和美俄因俄格战争导致的紧张关系;加强多边主义在外交与战略行动的运用。美国对外战略调整已经显现出不同于布什时期"美国领导世界"的内涵,在恢复西方社会对美国的好感和信心方面取得一定的成效。随着这种调整的深化,未来伊朗、巴基斯坦局势有可能取代阿富汗成为美国的首要关注。对中国依然实行结构性矛盾的政策,售台武器、西藏问题、贸易保护主义有可能成为中美关系陷入低谷的三大因素。