The U.S. Army is slated to publish a new operations manual this month that equates achieving success in stability operations with winning offensive and defensive battles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/washington/08strategy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The new Army manual is in line with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' vision for military transformation. In a speech delivered last November at Kansas State University,
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1199
Secretary Gates stressed the need to balance military force with political and economic resources in order to "integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad." Gates added that the experience of recent years, as well as his decades of public service, had reaffirmed the wisdom of "strengthening our capacity to use 'soft' power and for better integrating it with 'hard' power."
The emphasis of the new doctrine and the Secretary's speech on promoting economic development, good governance, and winning popular support in conflict regions represents a departure from the perspective of his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Secretary Rumsfeld believed that advances in military technologies -- especially information processing -- and superior military tactics would allow the U.S. armed forces to overwhelm opponents, obviating the need for lengthy military occupations. As a result, U.S. military planners have tended to treat counterinsurgencies and post-conflict stabilization missions as lesser cases when determining where to allocate personnel and dollars.
The new Army operations manual reflects the lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq, where U.S. troops have encountered considerable difficulty translating initial battlefield victories into an enduring political success. In December 2006, the Army and Marine Corps released a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The document stressed the importance of integrating offensive, defensive, and stability missions and winning "the hearts and minds" of the nations in conflict by understanding local peoples' language and culture.
http://www.army.mil/-news/2006/12/15/1005-army-marine-corps-unveil-counterinsurgency-field-manual/
The forthcoming Army operations manual provides higher-level guidance than the counterinsurgency manual. Its purpose is to shape the content of more narrowly focused doctrinal statements as well as specific Army policies and programs. It was last revised in 2001.
The long-term impact of the recent doctrinal innovations remains uncertain. The limited durability of the Army's past efforts to stress nation-building and counterinsurgency, while de-emphasizing the importance of winning conventional wars, does not bode well [emphasis added].
During the Vietnam War, the Army's initial failure to defeat the Viet Cong insurgency compelled field commanders to adopt new tactics that focused on pacification through civic action, economic development, and other non-kinetic operations. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Army was waging a very successful campaign under the rubric of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program. CORDS effectively integrated several U.S. military and civilian programs in pursuit of U.S. counterinsurgency, nation-building, and governmental capacity building efforts in South Vietnam.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/milreviewmarch2.pdf
After the Vietnam War, however, the Army gradually lost interest in counterinsurgency missions and, following Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981, readily reverted to buying weapons and developing doctrine to defeat the Soviet military in conventional battles.
In addition, the Army has yet to fully incorporate the new focus on nation-building into its personnel practices and weapons acquisition programs. Longstanding differences persist between the operational Army (which deploys in the field) and the institutional Army (which buys weapons and manages personnel). Whereas the officers and soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq now perceive the importance of political and economic institution-building, Army planners and programmers in the Pentagon have traditionally failed to promote civil affairs specialists and foreign affairs officers to the highest ranks. In addition, Army leadership continues to reaffirm its commitment to the Future Combat System. This network of high-tech weapons systems, which will rely heavily on U.S. information dominance that so far has been difficult to achieve in Afghanistan and Iraq, better reflects the Rumsfeld vision than that of his successor [emphasis added].
In their first public comments on the new doctrine, Gary Kolbe, an army spokesman, stressed that the Army still aims to achieve "full spectrum" dominance in all types of conflicts, ranging from large-scale conventional actions to counterinsurgency operations to humanitarian missions. But if every mission remains a declared priority, than in practice none is. Army leaders will be able to cite the doctrine to justify every program and mission as contributing to some band of the spectrum.
Even if the Army leadership is able to elevate the importance of nation building within its ranks, the willingness of the rest of the U.S. defense establishment to undertake a comprehensive restructuring program aimed at undertaking non-combat operations better is doubtful [emphasis added]. The U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are engaged in a comprehensive debate over 21st-century U.S. defense priorities. Underpinning the arguments over doctrine is an often bitter struggle among the services for roles and missions as well as the resources needed to conduct them.
The heads of both the Air Force and the Navy recognize that their relative influence and funding would suffer in a defense environment focused on winning the next insurgency. At the same time as the Army was revealing its new operations doctrine, the Air Force released a new strategic plan which cautioned that the United States had to plan to counter "ascendant powers" even while improving its response to the recently prominent threats of terrorism and insurgencies.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-airforce8feb08,1,4484383.story
The Air Force's F-22s are optimal for defeating advanced Chinese and Russian warplanes and air defenses, not for helping promote good governance and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, Navy admirals continue to express alarm at China's acquisition of advanced "area-denial weapons" such as conventional submarines, advanced destroyers, and anti-ship missiles. These weapons could pose a serious threat to any U.S. Navy ships that attempted to defend Taiwan from an attack.
Although some members of Congress berate the U.S. military for its seemingly half-hearted commitment to transformation, their colleagues continue to redirect funding towards buying more major weapons systems rather than language training and area studies. Often with the tacit support of military allies, congressional leaders have been pressuring the Department of Defense to buy more F-22s, transport aircraft, nuclear submarines, and amphibious ships than requested by the Bush administration.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=1&docID=news-000002667624
Secretary Gates will leave office in under a year, removing the most influential proponent of military reforms. His successor may make reorienting the focus of the military toward stability operations a priority, but might chose to emphasize other issues. No matter what his or her priorities, the next secretary of defense will require some time to take charge of the Pentagon.
Perhaps the most serious threat to the Army's transformation plans are that they do not address the main problem identified by Gates and others concerned about improving the conduct of U.S. foreign and defense policies: the perennial underfunding of U.S. civilian government agencies, especially the State Department [emphasis added]. Despite its massive capabilities and earnest desires, the Army by itself cannot establish functioning governments and prosperous economies in the countries its defeats and occupies. The assistance of these civilian agencies, as well as their foreign counterparts, is essential for converting the Army's battlefield victories into a war-winning strategy.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review contributing editor.
