Five myths about the Defense Strategic Guidance

Few forms of writing are consistently more satisfying than "five myths" pieces, so I'm going to use that format to respond to some of the mistaken but widely-drawn conclusions about the document released yesterday.

(Just kidding, Daveed. I hate listicles, too. But it was too easy!)

Myths 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: COIN is dead.

See yesterday in this space.

COIN isn't dead. The administration isn't going to foreclose any policy options through force-structure and budget decisions; it's simply willing to accept greater risk with regard to manpower-intensive, extended land operations than in the area of operational access, strike, and power projection. This is eminently reasonable.

Here's what the announcement about extended stabilization operations and force sizing really tells us: the president does not share his predecessor's view that invasion and subsequent pacification of potentially threatening states is the most cost-effective way to achieve our near-term national security objectives. He does not seem to view such operations as fundamental to the defense of American life, and he does not envision undertaking such an effort in the foreseeable future. Um, duh.

Wait, just because the president foolishly committed to an oversold counterinsurgency construct in Afghanistan – because he failed to show decisive leadership and was instead outmaneuvered by a condominium of disseminators, well-intended ignorants, and crazy-eyed jingoists; because he backed himself into a political corner by campaigning on escalation, then resignedly adopted a policy course he seemed to know was a mistake; because he chose an inappropriate method that jibed with the zeitgeist in order to achieve unrealistic or even unnecessary objectives in a war he desperately wants to end – all of that convinced you that global counterinsurgency had suddenly become a containment-esque pillar of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus?

This is a guy who made a speech almost ten years ago in which he announced "I don't oppose all wars ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war." (The "dumb war" in question was the preventive, purportedly transformative invasion of Iraq, which was still months away.) This guy is the president now. And you think it's news when his Defense Department issues guidance that essentially says "global counterinsurgency is not U.S. foreign policy"?

COIN isn't dead. It's a method. It's an operational concept. It's a tool in your kit. It's all of those cliches about the various things that the military can do when necessary, but it's not the hammer for every nail. The president has known that all along, and you should have too. We all should wish he'd had the balls to admit that he knew it in 2009, but here we are.

God forbid such a thing should happen, but imagine U.S. forces are employed for regime change in an unstable part of the world, one where heavily-armed and politically unpalatable states and factions are competing for influence and prepared to take advantage of a vacuum. Imagine that the regime being changed had pursued nuclear power, perhaps had some fissile material and a rudimentary weapons program. Imagine that the then-president is unwilling to leave the post-war stability of that country up to chance, that he determines it's necessary for American troops to hold ground and secure sensitive facilities, to pacify the country until both the U.S. government and the indigenous population can have a modicum of confidence in political transition, that he lacks the abiding faith of those who advocate capacity-building and the indirect approach.

Do you imagine, in this scenario, that the president will enact his preferences with Air-Sea Battle?

COIN isn't dead. COIN isn't even dying. It has merely ceased to be easily mistaken for the foreign policy of the United States.