▲ 324 points
back
268 comments
Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, but almost always also a fight to maintain spheres of influence. This was certainly true for the Vietnam war, where above all a communist Indonesia had to be avoided, but also obviously for any conflict in the Middle east.
What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
You've hit on it in a nutshell, I think.
The entire War on Terror is predicated upon the idea that a) we must ferret out and neutralize threats before they manifest and b) we must occupy regions which may generate threats.
Those two policies directly manifest in the development of advanced surveillance and techniques of oppression. Even more sickeningly, there is no way of proving it wrong: if something bad happens, the answer is to increase efforts; and if nothing bad happens, the answer is not to cutback the defenses that presumably prevented that nothing.
We're doomed.
You aren't quite hitting the nail on the head. It's not about funneling money into the economy, it's about manipulating the systems of governance to make theft of public resources and money tenable. It's the same reason that we have predictable "unpredictable" "bubbles" in the economy and it is why we start wards who's sole purpose is justification to steal public money for private gains. In many ways, there is even a disincentive to winning a war or military conflict at all. Imagine if we had responded to the 9/11 attacks in a smart manner; it would have cost maybe upper double digit millions of dollars to apprehend or kill OBL, but going into Afghanistan like buffoon cost us no less than $1,000,000,000,000.00 in direct expenditures and probably about another trillion in opportunity cost and indirect costs.
THAT's the name of the game. Stealing public money to enrich private individuals. As long as there is an incentive to manipulate America into blowing our money and efforts on military boondoggles, we will do exactly that.
> Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy
It's funneling trillions of dollars into military contractors.
"Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy,"
This is called military Keynesianism. It's how you can sell Keynesian economics in conservative societies that oppose anything resembling "social" spending. Since it's somehow not wasteful or "socialist" to funnel unlimited stimulus money through the defense budget, that's where it gets funneled.
The catch is that you have to have a war somewhere to keep justifying it.
The economy means different things to different people. The black economy is part of the economy but I would not want to funnel trillions of dollars into it. Similarly the arms trade is part of the economy but I wouldn't want to funnel a trillion dollars into it every year.
For my money the century of mechanised was has been about taking money out of the economy and into the arms-trade. This shows up as GDP and is therefore a good thing but it is at the expense of things like schools and hospitals. Government borrowing has been at record levels during the 'terror' years, government spending on weapons has been at an all time high. The money gets borrowed from the banks that the politicians know so well. It is a virtuous cycle for them but not us even if that is what they say.
I would argue that the entire point is to destabilize regions. Its a technique that all superpowers have used in the past, and continue to use today. The point is not "to win".
Not to worry. With how things are going in Ukraine, we'll have a great war in Europe again before you know it, with a "real" enemy (Russia). (And we have all that anti-terror stuff to prevent any broad and effective anti-war movement developing... both on the NATO side and on the Russian side). With any "luck" it'll be like when monarchies went to war in the middle ages. Invest in DynCorp International and Academi (nee Blackwater) now.
One desert night on a Marine base outside Basra, I chatted with an Egyptian interpreter hired by the US military. Knowing that Cairene Arabic is vastly different from that of Southern Iraq, I asked him if he had any trouble understanding the local dialect. He shook his head. “I have no idea what they are saying. I have a much easier time understanding you.” His English was excellent, which is presumably why he got the job, but his comprehension of Basrawi Arabic was almost nonexistent. But Marine officers, who inevitably spoke no Arabic, depended on him to explain what the locals were trying to tell them. Since the interpreter just made up what he thought his bosses wanted to hear, the Marines were operating with negative intelligence.
As good a synopsis of the last 60 years of this country's foreign policy, as any.
The "don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language" point is particularly telling. When the post-9/11 wars started, I thought one of the highest priorities would be to get combat units to a point where they didn't need external interpreters for the regions they were going to be operating in. An interpreter is a massively dangerous potential point of failure -- he could be incompetent, as the article suggests, or worse, he could be actively conspiring with the enemy to tip them off about your movements, feed you misleading info and make you look bad to the locals. If you can't speak at least the rudiments of the language yourself, you have no way of knowing. But after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, American combat units appear to be just as dependent on external interpreters as they were going in.
I suspect part of the reason for this that the article doesn't touch on is the idea of the rotation. Combat units don't see themselves as being stationed in Iraq "for the duration," but as units that happen to be in Iraq today but could be in Afghanistan tomorrow and Korea the day after that. What's the benefit of learning Pashto today if you're leaving Afghanistan in three months and may never rotate back there again?
The problem is that most "wars" the US has been involved in across the recent decades weren't conventional wars, even when the US was treating them as if they were.
The ongoing "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (which miraculously have been "ended" unilaterally by the US many times over) aren't wars. They're garrisons.
Even ISIS (ISIL?) isn't a conventional enemy, despite having tanks. These aren't nation states and those aren't, for the most part, soldiers.
The reason the "War on Terror" is still treated as a war is that there is no reason not to. The article explains that quite nicely.
I think many of the points raise are very valid areas of improvement, for example: "Learn the Language"; Others are products of politician reality: "Fear of Casualties".
But I think the premise: "the World’s Biggest Military Keeps Losing Wars", is wrong.
1. Conventional forces have trouble wining asymmetrical conflicts unless they are allowed to wage total war (which is usually precluded by modern political/moral concerns). Nothing new here- the Romans had experience with this.
1.A Note the single "win" on the list of post-Korea conflicts was the first Gulf War, a conventional conflict.
1.B It is arguable that the U.S. is actually better than most other conventional militaries at asymmetrical warfare: http://www.warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-sol..., however that may just be a product of being better at conventional warfare improving overall fitness.
2. "Winning" define this? Winning means very different things in total war vs. occupation/garrison/nation building actions. While its fair to say the U.S. lost Vietnam, I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies... Military action is just a way of attempting to physically impose political will- If a nation's military helps the leaders reach their goals, it won.
Article is much better than I thought it would be. Money quote is last sentence: "The most fundamental reason America’s huge military can’t win wars is that it doesn’t need to." He's exactly right.
This is a pretty shallow analysis.
Bill Lind has done some deep thinking on why the US military can't win modern wars (tldr: the armed forces are a graft system, not a war system; no one has figured out how to fight non-state and semi-state wars without going full roman burn-and-crucify.)
I highly recommend his articles and books, particularly to people on the left who might be initially put off by his social conservatism.
The answer is that we have been goaded into seeing our military as a tool rather than an necessary and reluctant engagement for self defense, by an enemy more heinous, pernicious, and destructive than any enemy our country will ever face. The enemy within and in our midst, the military services cabal that does not care whether American wins or looses, as long as we are engaged in or agitating and preparing for war and the money flows.
If anyone had any interest in preventing our warmongering, they would look at changing the incentive structure that surges towards war and death and killing and supporting despotic foreign dictators and shelters horrible people who do horrible things in our own country. As long as we want to condemn foreigners while giving immunity to degenerate f!@#-ups like Rumsfeld and the whole Bush administration, there is nothing more that can be done. They should have all been thrown alive in a grinder and turned into pig feed for the high treason of deliberately and knowingly lying to America and the world and starting wars that killed Americans for no reason. We are a hollow farce if we can't apply the same Nuremberg Trial precedent to our own leaders.
GWYNNE DYER: 1 April 2008
Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas. What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?
They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’s long love affair with guns, explaining why Texans were killing Arab soldiers. They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic.
Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all.
If you don't understand, it's dangerous to convince yourself you do.
"Before Korea, America never lost a war."
Really? I feel like there's a decent case for the War of 1812 (the USA attempted to seize Canada and failed).
It won both Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Both governments were overthrown, pretty quickly too which was their original goal. With Afghanistan they had a secondary goal to find Bin Laden they achieved that goal too.
hat then happened was what is commonly known as peacekeeping. They then got hammered by what is commonly known as terrorist using guerrilla warfare. Even then, not like they lost.
I'm all up for bashing America, but let's not bash them for not carpet bombing a bunch of civilians.
There's a difference between winning the war and winning the peace.
In Iraq, we won the war hands-down. We went in to effect regime change and bring Saddam to justice. We did exactly that. We toppled Saddam's regime, established a new one in its place, and then captured and executed the man himself.
However, we lost the peace badly. We failed to anticipate the rebels, the influx of al-Qaeda, the sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS, etc.
The author makes some very good points.
The British were able to control vast swaths of the world with minimal military power. They fought smart.
I remember watching Restrepo and other similar documentaries. I come from a tribal culture too; and there were several instances where I could clearly see how the Americans were making a mistake in their dealing with the locals. Those people have been living and dying by their tribal codes for millennia, and "democracy" and "freedom" means nothing to them.
Minor nitpick: it was GHW Bush who committed US troops to Somalia, just as he was leaving office, in December 1992; a nice welcoming present for Clinton.
Edited: It was pappy Bush, not Dubya. Thanks @theorique :)
Of course the bigger your military, the more likely you are to think the next engagement will be a walkover.
And because you think it will be easy, you are more likely to gamble on that marginal gain.
And because the gain is only marginal, you don't want to lose any troops.
And since you don't want to really bet those lives, it's harder to win.
I believe it all boils down to the facts revealed by the Millennium Challenge 2002, a massive battle exercise conducted by the US military. The exercise simulated a conflict between the US ('blue force') and a hypothetical middle-eastern nation ('red force').
During the exercises, the red leader (Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper) used asymmetric warfare strategies, designed to exploit weaknesses in US military doctrine. Rather than using radio and risking eavesdropping, orders were sent via motorcycle courier and signal lamps. Rather than squaring up along battlelines, the red team used hit-and-run attacks, including suicide bombings. After massive losses for the blue team, the exercise was reset and the red leader was ordered to follow a preordained script to ensure a blue victory. The exercise was deemed a complete success.
The US military learned absolutely nothing from this exercise, and continued to make exactly the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a doctrinal belief in the 'correct' way to win a war, and the notion that technological and logistical advantages can guarantee victory in any conflict. US military strategy is designed to justify procurement decisions post-hoc, rather than actually win wars. We invest heavily in eavesdropping infrastructure, therefore it is strategically invaluable. We have a fleet of multirole fighters, therefore air supremacy is a vital objective. There is an ideological drive to transform all warfare into the bloodless technological dispute of the cold war, regardless of reality.
To quote Lt. Gen. van Riper:
"My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science, tend towards sloganeering. There's very little intellectual content to what they say, and they use slogans in place of this intellectual content. It does a great disservice to the American military, the American defense establishment. 'Information dominance,' 'network-centric warfare,' 'focused logistics'—you could fill a book with all of these slogans.
What I see are slogans masquerading as ideas. In a sense, they make war more antiseptic. They make it more like a machine. They don't understand it's a terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business. So they can lead us the wrong way. They can cause people not to understand this terrible, terrible phenomenon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/immutable-nature-war.h...
I remember eating lunch on February 5th, 2005. We were at the Officer's Club at the Naval Academy. All the officers had assembled to hear a lecture by Admiral Crowe, one of our political science professors, better known from his time as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He forwent his prepared remarks to discuss current events, opening with "Perhaps we would all be better served watching CNN right now, to hear Colin Powell address the UN General Assembly. Unfortunately, I am afraid the machinery of war is to far gone for any of it to make a difference."
"I am afraid the machinery of war is to far gone for any of it to make a difference."
That sentence will ring in my ears for the rest of my life.
What is conveniently avoided is that Japan, Germany and South Korea are at (relative) peace and prosperous because of immense investment by the US. All three are still, technically, militarily occupied territory.
The wars were total wars, won at the cost of millions of lives and financial and industrial commitments that reshaped the culture of both nations, at enormous civilian costs especially on the losing side (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima...) and the territory kept at peace via millions of boots on the ground, enormous military effort (how much does Okinawa cost per annum?) and enormous financial spending, justified by Pax Americana being presumably worth more than its bill. In the case of WWI, not invading the losing power after breaking its will to fight resulted in a worse war a couple decades later.
Another unpalatable and often glossed over fact is that in both Germany and Japan, middle management was kept in power because the invading authority (such as MacArthur) realised that chaos would follow otherwise, and that in a statist, single-party state, all the talent would converge to the ruling party anyway.
Today's taxpayer does not want to pay for another Japan or Germany, and some people in Washington have sold him the unicorn of "instant happiness once the bad guy is removed with a few skilled operators and cool tech" (aka COIN), ignoring decades of history.
Either the American taxpayer needs to push for colonialism (call a spade a spade), or it needs to accept that furthering US interests will create side effects for locals. The latter is obviously a lot easier to stomach, especially with free speech allowing comfortable, safe civilians to complain loudly about how unfair it all is, so it has been the default position of successive administrations since Johnson. Option 3 is to accept the occasional bombing and attack on your civilians, in exchange for isolationism. The risk of that option is well described by the example of Chamberlain in the 1930s.
Here are a couple of clarifying notes to the essay:
1) the United States has not declared any wars. The last war we were in was in the 1940s, over 70 years ago. Since then we've done "police actions" "limited military engagements", and all sorts of other nonsense, but no wars.
2) Yes, there's too much emphasis on the wrong things. But there's a huge problem here that the military is working through: what do you want your military to do, anyway? The general consensus is that we want these highly-sophisticated fighting units able to take a fight to other highly-sophisticated militaries, like the Russians or the Chinese. But guess what? That's not the fight we've had.
So we keep spending trillions of dollars for a military built to do one thing, and then we keep asking it to do something else. You might think the answer would be "Just re-factor!", but it's not. As it turns out, if you want B2 stealth bombers, you gotta have this huge industrial complex churning away for decades to get them. You can't just turn it off and on. If there's ever a fight requiring high-tech military versus high-tech military, all of that prep will pay off. If there isn't? It still might have been worth it -- having it in place could have prevented the fight. You don't know.
The real problem is that the Pentagon and various administrations are unable to have an honest discussion about the issues. There are too many lucrative contracts and jobs on the table. The risks are too great to boil down into slogans.
For now, my recommendation is to form a new branch of service dedicate solely to large numbers of low-tech groud-pounders who specialize in nation-building and international rescue/response. Whether we like it or not, that's what we keep ending up doing, and the existing services do not seem to be able to mentally make the trade between one bomber and, say, 100K peacekeepers. Plus the missions are vastly different.
I saw a frontline documentary on iraq called : losing iraq.
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=80017023&trkid=13752...
I gained a whole new prespective on the war
The military strategist Thomas Barnett has an interesting (and entertaining) TED talk where he described two different functions the US military needs to fulfill. It responds well to the criticisms presented in this article.
The first: the Leviathan force. This is the military as we know it. Go in an break stuff quickly and thoroughly. Staffed by slightly pissed off, gung-ho young Americans. We're already pretty good at this.
The second: the Systems Administrator. Go into a broken country (by us or otherwise) and 'wage peace'. Help build governments, keep peace, develop social services, etc. Staffed by older, more experienced individuals from a variety of fields who are not (primarily) front-line soldiers. We don't know how to do this.
Link:www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_peace
I wonder if the surge in military suicides has anything to do with their perception of the 'righteousness' of our warfare. It seems like it would be much harder for a soldier to feel good about what they were doing now as opposed to WWII for instance.
"War traditionally was mostly an excuse for plunder. In the modern world, Angell argued, armies slaughtered not prospective slaves but potential customers."
It would appear that many are joining ISIS precisely because they do like obtaining plunder and (sex) slaves.
The answer is at least partly related to the question he asks in the second paragraph: "how can America spend more on its military than all the other great powers combined and still be unable to impose its will on even moderately sized enemies?" What is "will" in a representative democracy? Even when the country is united with a strong plurality for action against some state, it doesn't extend to tolerating much bloodshed or internal discomfort. We may be the first post-modern nation that has simply become unwilling to project its power with the blood of its own citizens. I wonder what that might mean when the drone revolution really arrives?
That brings us to Ukraine, and Russia vs. US (again).
What is the global context to that? Where is the point there?
I know it started with the Eurasian Economic Union vs. the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement but from what I've heard the EEU is not really worth it and Belarus is not very sure about it anymore. Was that really enough to start the whole show? I mean, Putin can't get out of it now. He's too deep in his own propaganda. While the EU seems to want to get back to calmer times, Obama waits with the fuel tank around the corner reminding the EU and Putin of the fact from time to time. But...what is this supposed to be? A new Cold War show? Really...??
The problem with many of the conspiracy theories presented by other commenters on this thread is that they assume that the government (and by extension the overall military-industrial complex) is much, much more competent than it actually is.
We're not losing wars. We're winning them very quickly.
We're losing the aftermath -- policing and rebuilding foreign countries after we win the wars. That's a much more challenging problem, and we aren't good at that at all.
The will to win isn't politically viable. War is heavily scrutinized and almost entirely unpalatable (to say the least). Sure America may have the might, technology, and numbers, but their enemy lacks political constraint. Now they're faced with ISIL. Their decision makers obviously strive to make visible the least palatable aspects of war in the belief it will expand their sphere of influence.
America should re-think military strategy. Do they wish to 'win' wars with violence? Can they? Or perhaps cyber war, surveillance, and infrastructure--all soft forms of control--are the strategies of the future.
From my European perspective this article is almost stating the obvious, nothing controversial here. The only point is that conditions for victory ("winning the war") need to be clearly defined and they haven't.
I would say he missed the biggest reason: Because we've changed the definition of "winning". It used to be that you just trounced the enemy army and didn't give a damn about what the country looked like afterwards. Go in, kill them till they surrender. This is true of pretty much every war before 1950.
Nowadays we're generally not fighting an established government but instead some form of guerrila force. There is no-one to declare a surrender, therefore the war will never really end.
The answer can be summarized in two words: asymmetric warfare. More accurately called symmetrized warfare, USG's policy of binding itself to different rules of engagement than its enemies, in such a way as to ensure that the two sides are closely matched, is a recipe for unending conflict. The political reasons for this policy are complicated, but the military reasons for the effects of the policy are straightforward.
I wonder what sort of correlation there really is between learning the enemies language and winning a war against them. This big army doesn't win wars because it holds itself back for political reasons. It is not that hard. You have to be 100% focused on total destruction. That is what created the modern Germany and Japan. This half-assed modern style of warfare is good for the arms industry I guess. For them a long war is better than a won war.
Very interesting article...a second corollary might be that we have become encumbered to the point where our enemies are running circles around us: http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20c...
I wouldn't really say that the second Iraq War was "lost", per se; it did meet its objective of eliminating the regime of a dictator, after all. It's the swarm of smaller-scale conflicts following it that the United States struggled with.
I agree with all the points presented, though. Very well put.
I completely disagree that any of these conflicts other than Vietnam, were lost. They were just inappropriate use of the military power, akin to the Soviet invasion to Afghanistan. Americans never had a big problem of defeating any enemy, problem was what to do next (and Iraq-91 was a victory for exactly that reason: they quickly withdrew and left defeated Saddam to deal with the mess, with Schwartskopf correctly stating that there is no interest for U.S. to 'run the country'). If you see 'victory' as 'Iraq (or Afghanistan) adopting a stable US-style democracy', which apparently was an intent, than this 'war' is not winnable, and there is nothing to blame military for in this fact.
Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage.
They overthrew Milosevic, Taliban, Hussein, Austin, Noriega, Bosch, Gaddafi, ... Fighting guerrilla wars is the problem. Firepower obviously doesn't help in guerrilla wars.
Maybe the goal is not to win. Maybe the goal is perpetual war.
We're losing wars because we're not fighting them.
In individual battles, the U.S. almost never loses. The raw military capability the U.S. possesses is staggering. It's so vast that in actual wars, the Army doesn't even do the bulk of actual fighting anymore, and massive garrison forces in Europe and Asia barely see a dip in total manpower. Special Forces and Marines go in to clear the way for big Army to come in and sit and patrol like an overamped police force.
The opening invasion of the first Gulf War was over in what, 5 weeks? This was a military power that Iran fought to a virtual standstill for almost a decade. People forget about this part, because the rest of the occupation was such a debacle. But when the U.S. military gets pointed at an objective, it will generally get the job done. The military on military loss exchange ratios are astonishing, like 150:1. In most of history, 4:1 or 5:1 is considered overwhelming. In the Korean war, it was about 4:1 for example. Vietnam was about 1:1
The problem is that the world has changed and the U.S. has changed. Achieving occupation no longer counts as "winning" and the U.S. no longer has the will to simply carpet bomb and shell an enemy to the point of complete annihilation.
The U.S. fights wars for precision and to minimize non-combat casualties.
Genghis Khan would simply raze a city to the ground and murder every man woman and child if he faced resistance. The U.S. orders Marines to go in for a door-to-door clearing operation and try real hard not to shoot too many innocents. And if that didn't work they'd just go and do it again.[1][2]
War is supposed to be terrible, and there are no "winners". Victory has always been the last to give up or run out of people to throw at the enemy's swords. By sanitizing the terribleness out of war, the U.S. has managed to ensure that it never "wins" anything in particular. It's turned war into large-scale police actions, which means it's regularized it. The U.S. hasn't fought a real war in ages. Everything else has been policing.
The U.S. doesn't really have many big enemies, it has rabble rousers and riff-raff on the edge of it's sphere of influence it needs to deal with -- rogue and failed states, non-state actors, whatever. Most of the world is America's town and it sends in police/soldiers to deal with the bad parts of town and "keep the peace"
In a normal town, nobody cares if the police "win", just so long as things are relatively safe for the good parts of town. Police are part of the infrastructure of successful nations. The U.S. military strives to be the global police infrastructure of a successful world.
The commander-in-chief has just been turned into chief-of-police of the biggest baddest police force in the world.