Small Wars

4 May, 2007

Great powers often perform poorly in wars against weak enemies waging irregular warfare, the so-called guerrilla or “small” wars. America's defeat in Vietnam, the national humiliation in Lebanon and Somalia, and now the continuing problems in Iraq underscore the limits of U.S. conventional military superiority. Such “weak” enemies as we have faced in the last forty years generally have a greater will to win because they have a greater interest in the war's outcome. In Vietnam for example, the US waged a limited war while the North Vietnamese communists waged total war. The communists sacrificed the lives of 1,100,000 soldiers to win, whereas the United States gave up after losing 58,000 men. Irregular forces can employ superior strategies as well. In Vietnam, the communists fought against a politically impatient America, and a tactically inflexible US Army. They denied decisive targets to U.S. firepower and wore down America's will to fight. Our form of government also worked to the communists' advantage, considering that democracies have a quite limited tolerance for any war that the citizens do not regard as essential.

Another key factor in great power defeats in small wars is the insurgents’ access to foreign assistance, which can reduce or even eliminate the effect of material inferiority. External assistance may be the most common point that enables insurgent success, as few insurgencies win without it. French support clinched the American victory in the War of Independence, Soviet Bloc support allowed the North Vietnamese to continue fighting, and Iranian support may yet bring about American defeat in Iraq.

Americans are at a distinct disadvantage in wars against materially weaker enemies, because we tend to separate war and politics, normally seeing military victory as an end in itself, and because the higher levels of the U.S. military are strongly opposed to counterinsurgency warfare. The American way of war is, as British strategist Colin Gray observed, “apolitical, impatient, ahistorical, culturally ignorant, technology-infatuated, firepower-focused, profoundly conventional and sensitive to casualties. It is permeated by an unwillingness to accept the German war philosopher Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Political policy is the guiding factor after all, and war the instrument of that policy.

For most Americans, the only goal of warfare is military victory, which forbids allowing external political considerations to influence military operations. Yet military victory is a beginning, not an end, because the object of war is to ensure a better peace. Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages inattention to the challenges of converting a military victory into a following political victory. Insurgencies are, first and foremost, political struggles which cannot be won by military means alone. Pursuit of a purely military victory discourages planning for the second and by far most difficult half of war for a regime change (the “exit strategy”), and establishing the conditions for successful political reconstruction. Those who gave us the war in Iraq apparently (and rather naively) assumed that the politics of post-Saddam Iraq would somehow fall neatly into place once the Baathists were out of power. Perhaps they didn't want to think about the possibility of insurgent resistance, because they recognized the Pentagon's aversion to any counterinsurgency mission, an antipathy born of the lost war in Vietnam, and an obsession with America's post-Cold War conventional warfare supremacy.

The Pentagon that went to war in Iraq in 2003 expecting a short, cheap and politically decisive victory had long forgotten (if it had ever understood) the imperatives of successful counterinsurgency operations, which includes minimal use of force, primacy of political responses, integrated civil-military operations and separation of insurgents from the population. The result was a slow, excessively violent and politically empty response to the growing Iraqi insurgency. U.S. political/military actions in Iraq probably created more insurgents than it removed from the battlefield, and the American lack of a viable political policy may well have doomed the entire effort from the start, particularly so as the invasion force was far too small to secure more than a small part of the country after the Iraqi army was defeated.

America's military culture detests politically messy small wars. Counterinsurgency demands forbearance, personnel continuity, foreign language skills, cross-cultural understanding, historical knowledge, judicious force employment, and civil-military integration. None of these are virtues to the US military, or to the American approach to war. Americans view war as a suspension of politics and apparently think the politics will somehow sort themselves out once victory has been achieved. All of this raises the question: Why should the United States continue to enter wars it is not very good at winning (and for which sustained domestic political support is highly questionable)? A more realistic policy would be to abstain from small wars of choice, and place the protection of national interests ahead of moral crusades intended to export American political values. Such a policy would have spared the United States the agonies of Lebanon, Somalia, and now Iraq, all places where our national interests do not justify intervention.

Desert Storm could be politically justified, as the Iraqi military threat to mid-eastern oil supplies was a direct threat to the security and economic interests of both the United States and Europe. The current war in Iraq however is an entirely different situation. Saddam’s Iraq, like most other Arabic nations, was, either directly or indirectly, supporting Al-Qaeda. This however was a political problem that should have been approached through political rather than military means. If a bit of muscle was found to be needed, it could have been judiciously supplied by military Special Forces operatives rather than a full scale invasion. Instead, we found ourselves involved in a more or less conventional war, that we somehow managed to turn into a rather nasty and very expensive civil war through Republican political ineptitude! Now, to make matters even worse, we have a Democratic led Congress that apparently has no understanding of the threat posed to the western world by militant Islam, demanding an end to American involvement (basically yet another American surrender), no matter what the cost to American prestige, damage to our national policies, or the danger to our allies. Whatever happens next, the US has received a black eye that we’ll be a very long time recovering from.

Perhaps we really should “throw the scoundrels out”, as Politics as usual at Sodom-on-the-Potomac seem to be doing us a severe disservice.