The failure of light-footprint intervention to provide long-term stability

Today the RAND Corporation released Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge co-written by a team of researchers. The paper is pretty good on discussing the current security, economic, and political situation and challenges in Libya. However, the paper's discourse on the security situation, specifically through a "light-footprint strategy", has helped me get my brain around an issue I've been struggling to wrap my grey matter around because I don't think it addresses the nature of the conflict that lead to today's situation. To be exact (and with caveats not discussed here):

Light- to no-footprint intervention in support of rebel forces is not a long-term solution for stability.

The U.S. and other NATO involvement in Libya was essentially the provision of air support (with notable exceptions of on-the-ground SOF teams). There are a number of reasons for this approach, much of which is centered around domestic Western politics. But the provision of close and strategic air support to a motley crew of disparate and competitive armed groups is only asking for a disaster. Yes, this method helped bring about the end of the much despised Qaddafi regime, but it is certainly not helping bring about a lasting peace and stability. Much like our initial efforts in Afghanistan, failing to provide the forces necessary in the aftermath of the destruction of a regime creates an environment conducive to warlord-ism and the promise of many years of conflict.

Since the 1990s at least, conflict studies have proven time and again the value of well executed DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) and SSR (security sector reform) programs. Our failure to begin this in earnest in 2002 (or really up to at least 2005!) in Afghanistan and our failure to do it now in Libya is exacerbating the security situation where the internationally-recognized government has very limited control over its own territory. Did we expect that these militias, that we supported with weapons (in some cases) and effective air support, to simply integrate themselves into the state or to return to their peaceful lives in the interest of democracy and human rights? Our planning for both Libya and Afghanistan suggest that we did expect that even if it sounds profoundly stupid when stated this directly. But without adequate intervention forces (military, police, civil) on the ground to provide security and to direct and lead DDR and SSR efforts, your only other option is to hope that DDR and SSR happen on their own. Which, as near as I can tell, has never happened.

The purpose of this short post is not to lobby for boots on the ground in Libya, but on the contrary to caution those out there who think that we can simply help these rebel groups with air power. For example: here. If our actions in Libya did create a gratitude account with the Libyan people, great. But that does not translate to those warlords that wield power through their militias as often their fight will be with other militias as they strive for greater influence. Without boots on the ground, we are unlikely to be able to stop these violent struggles for power if we can't be there to broker the peace and help move it along.

As much as military analysts bemoan the general public's lack of understanding of the effort and violence of a no-fly zone, the longer peace is much harder to accomplish without large numbers of troops on the ground to provide stability after the regime falls. If we are not willing to put troops on the ground before or after our service as a rebel-force air force, then we should seriously contemplate refraining from intervening in the first place. Or at a minimum, not be surprised when our actions do not provide the stability for which we had hoped.  That is where I have issue with the RAND paper: it discusses the light-footprint as a problem in developing long-term stability, but it does not discuss the real nature of our initial intervention and how we have not yet succeeded in using it to accomplish long-term foreign policy objectives. Instead of looking merely at Libya today, we need to understand that this has not worked yet in accomplishing anything other than short-term objectives: removing the guys we don't like. We need to understand that this approach is the minimal-interventionist version of the Bush administration's failure to provide a Phase IV plan for Iraq. It has the exact same consequences and is based on the same weak planning assumptions. Just keep that in mind as debate about intervening in Syria continues and we consider possible courses of action.

Afghanistan strategy three-fer

I haven't been writing much on anything other than veterans issues lately and for good reason. This has been the result of my increasing interest in the problems facing veterans and the policies that attempt to address those problems. But this increasing interest also coincides with an interesting turn in dialogue on conflict these past few months where writing has generally dug existing positional trenches deeper instead of progressing the conversation, such as with Syria.

That said, with the official end of the surge in Afghanistan last week, a few interesting pieces about that war were published in the past week that you should be aware of. I'll add some commentary at the end of this post, but these three are interesting in that they all address significant flaws with our strategy in Afghanistan from different perspectives.

Frances Brown: The U.S. Surge and Afghan Local Governance
This USIP report (linked to by Josh Foust) is an excellent and erudite review of our local governance efforts in Afghanistan since 2009. Importantly, this review is analyzed through the context of the strategy put forth by the Obama administration in late 2009 which elucidated as its goal "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." Brown, who has extensive experience in-country, goes on to quote the "Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan" which states that to "promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government" is essential to the strategy of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda. More on that later, but even if were to assume that this is the case we screwed up implementation of the governance plan.

I've written before about the importance of assumptions during planning. Brown lays out three assumptions that were, in her words, unrealistic with regard to local governance:

1. Governance and development timelines would mirror security progress;
2. Bottom-up progress would be reinforced by top-down progress; and
3. "Lack of government" as the problem to be addressed.

She picks each of these assumptions apart point by point to the extent that you wonder how it's possible anyone created these assumptions in the first place. The hints of derision throughout the paper also makes it quite readable (I especially recommend the paragraph on Marjah on page 6 as an example). Brown ends the paper with three recommendations:

• Exert leverage to impact select systemic, rather than tactical-level, problems.
• In a resource-constrained era, prioritize assistance to a few key efforts.
• All the usual Afghanistan governance recommendations still apply. 

There are plenty of details beneath the lists. If you're curious as to why our local governance efforts haven't worked in Afghanistan, I highly recommend you read this paper in its entirety. 

Jonathan Rue: Auditing the US surge in Afghanistan

Rue, who hangs his hat at Gunpowder & Lead, had this piece published in The Guardian. Rue is an exceptional military analyst and always worth reading - especially for a Marine (I kid!). After discussing events over the past couple of weeks, of note the attack on Camp Bastion, he states that it's difficult to measure success in Afghanistan. On one hand, U.S. forces have achieved gains at the tactical level. On the other hand, those gains haven't affected our strategic ends. This is the same problem we faced when we left Iraq: superiority on the battlefield was ineffectual towards our goals. As Rue notes towards the end of his piece, this is the same problem we had in Vietnam as well. He doesn't talk much about why this is the case (it is the Guardian after all), but his quoting of SECDEF Panetta is indicative of a government that still does not understand insurgency or counterinsurgency even after 10 years of war:

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta claimed the latest attacks were merely the "last gasp" of a weakend Taliban. If the aforementioned actions are the hallmark of a dying insurgency, I'd hate to think what actions characterize on on the ascendency.

Indeed. Rue is also right that maybe the best news about the surge of troops is that it's over and they're now home. 

COL Gian Gentile: War: Sometimes there is a substitute for victory

In the Jerusalem Post, Gentile picks apart the famous (at least to West Pointers) MacAurthur quote: "There is no substitute for victory." He notes that sometimes "winning" wars isn't worth the cost required to do so. Gentile is well known for his anti-counterinsurgency (of the nation-building sort) writing and he uses this piece to take a swipe at the current strategy. He notes, much as Brown and Rue have, that while trying to defeat a decentralized terrorist organization the United States has set as its goal the building of a nation-state in Afghanistan, an approach that has not worked thus far. He says:

Today in Afghanistan the effect of the American military's embrace of and belief in the efficacy of armed nation building, with its never ending stream of statements of progress, has obscured the vast amount of blood and treasure invested in a military methodology that has not produced results. Yet still we hear the calls to try harder, stay a bit longer, and keep the faith that it will all turn out right, because in war there is, as they say, no substitute for victory.

I think those calls are becoming few and far between at this point in the war. We have a plan of sorts to withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming years and I doubt that anything will derail that plan. Gentile focuses too much on the military ways that our generals have decided. In his oft-repeated attacks on armed nation building, he seems to focus in on this aspect of strategy formulation and not on the political determinations of ends and means. If we were to take the President's statement of ends literally (disrupt, dismantle, defeat al Qaeda), we could probably declare the war over and probably could have years ago (Gentile does say this). 

Gentile is right in calling out military leadership for not correctly aligning ends-ways-means, but he gives the political leadership a pass for not controlling the military more effectively and exercising their constitutional and precedential prerogative. Is that not the lesson learned of the famous MacAurthur vs Truman conflict he uses to set his argument? Nits aside, Gentile has valid points that speak loudly on the failure of our strategy. 

Strategy, strategy, strategy

The recurring theme of these three works is that the United States has had a serious strategy problem in Afghanistan. We haven't aligned ends, ways and means and the assumptions we've used for that analysis was off to begin with. This is not how great powers plan for success, which becomes infinitely more difficult if we can't even define what success means. Policy-makers who should define ends and means have not done so. Military strategists and leadership have chosen ways that certainly do not align with the ends that have been stated and have not likely used the means available as effectively as possible. 

Another important theme throughout is the equivalence of tactical and strategic success, a trap the United States has been prone to since at least Vietnam. I've argued here before that all strategies are in part a summation of tactics used to achieve strategic ends. But the "in part" is essential to understanding the connection between strategy and tactics. Tactical gains and successes do not create strategic successes and gains on their own. There are other variables that when added to tactical gains creates strategic success and we haven't yet identified what those are (and logically haven't figured out how to address them). A lesson seemingly lost in Afghanistan. 

Anyway, go read these three excellent pieces by three very smart people about a ridiculously hard problem. It's definitely worth your time. 

NATO was not in Iraq! WaPo edition (Updated-2)

Annie Gowen reporting in the Washington Post today on the clash between protesters and police at the NATO summit in Chicago:

Mark Stach, 40, a veteran from Dixon, Ill., filled his canteen as he readied for the march to return the NATO war-on-terror medal he received while serving in Iraq in the Army National Guard in 2004 and 2005.

I talked about this last week. NATO did not have any operational role in the war in Iraq. NATO did not issue a single medal for Iraq (again, maybe except outside of the very small role they had in the military academy at Camp Rustamiyah). As far I as I can tell, NATO has no war on terror. Ergo, an Army National Guard vet who served in Iraq could not possibly have a "NATO war-on-terror medal" to return. It's one thing for an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune to make such nonsensical statements. It's another thing entirely for the Washington Post to report such a thing as fact in a news story.

These veterans are using their status as such to influence policy. It's a shame they apparently know squat about the conflicts they are protesting that they don't know where the medals they are making such a big deal about are from or who even awarded them. It's a bigger shame that news agencies are eating this crap hook, line, and sinker without doing due diligence to even superficially analyze if these veterans have an inkling about anything, other than war really, really sucks.

Washington Post: if even you can't figure out that NATO had no significant role in Iraq, that NATO does not have a war on terror campaign, and that NATO could not possibly issue medals for a war it isn't waging for combat duty in a country it isn't operational, then we're all screwed. Do your job. Report the news, check the facts. And if people are doing or saying something stupid, then call them out for it. Otherwise, it seems you know FA more about this than these numbskulls playing you for the attention you're giving them.

UPDATE: I have seen comments elsewhere about the NATO Training Mission - Iraq and that maybe this guy and the other were part of that. First, it was a tiny mission. I can't pull the exact numbers right now because NATO's website is down, but it was a very small mission and if there were any Americans as part of it, it wasn't more than a handful. ]

Second, and pay attention here, Army Regulation 600-8-22, the Army's awards Bible, does not authorize the NATO Medal for service in Iraq. Because the award is for having served under direct command or operational control of in direct service of the listed NATO operations. Iraq isn't one of those. No U.S. servicemember should have a NATO Medal for service in Iraq, even if they worked for NTM-I at Camp Rustamiyah.

UPDATE 2: If you click the link to the article you can see that the line quoted above has changed and now says that Stach is going to return a U.S. medal for his service. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Thank you Ms. Gowen and editors for making the correction. And you're welcome America for the victory of truth I have won for you today.

Center for National Policy recommends changes to NATO's Afghanistan strategy

Scott Bates and Ryan Evans from the Center for National Policy (CNP) have authored a recommendation for a change in strategy for Afghanistan that is more than worth a read. The paper's  (titled NATO Strategy in Afghanistan: A New Way Forward) main recommendations are:

• Continue transition plans to place Afghan Government and Security Forces in the lead across the country by April 2013, but ensure that transition takes on more substance than it has so far.
• Dissolve ISAF and place CFSOCC-A in charge of the military mission by April 2013 and reduce the force in country to approximately 30,000 troops (6-8K of which would be from partner nations).
• Full transition of governance and development efforts in Afghanistan to the United Nations by April 2013.
• Enduring material and political support from the United States and NATO allies to the Afghan state in order to ensure sufficient stability around Kabul, the north, and the west and prevent transnational terrorist networks from operating from Afghanistan.

The details behind the hows and whys of these recommendations are in the paper and you should read them. There are a number of things I really like about this strategy. First that it looks at Afghanistan through a strategic lens. Bates and Evans aren't bogged down in the operational arguments that are usually discussed (check out the third paragraph of page 5). They use ends-ways-means to analyze how NATO and the United States should move forward: align policy ends with strategic ends, then align ways and means. Second, I think their troop-to-task is about spot on for what we need to keep in Afghanistan in 2013. Any more would be a waste of precious U.S. assets. Any less would be a wasted mission doomed to failure. 

Please go read this paper, especially those of you who work in the defense and strategy worlds. While some may disagree with their assumptions, this is an excellent way to propose and think through strategy. Having done so initially and repeatedly throughout our mission in Afghanistan, maybe we would know what we want out of the war and how to get there. Alas. I also happen to endorse Bates' and Evans' recommendations as they are and think that this is the path to meeting our goals in Afghanistan.  

A rant on the substitution of "veteran" for expertise

"I would love to give my medals directly to a NATO official," said Broseus, 28. "I don't feel like I earned them in a just manner. I felt I was more of an occupier In Iraq than anything else, and I want them to know how that feels."

So was Iraq veteran Greg Broseus quoted by Dawn Turner Trice in the Chicago Tribune. Yes, you read that correctly. An Iraq veteran who is opposed to military interventions wishes to protest against the war in Afghanistan by returning his medals earned in Iraq to a NATO official.

This post is not about returning medals as a form of anti-war protest or protesters, veterans even, against the war. I may not chose the same courses of action, but have at it. As a veteran, I served ostensibly to defend the rights of our citizens to generally do as they please. This post is about veterans and the media.

Broseus, the focal point of the Trice's column, was a HMMWV gunner in 2005 from the Ohio National Guard. I think it's safe to assume that Broseus was a Specialist or Sergeant in such a position, give or take a rank. It's not that I expect every Spec-4 in the Army to know the theater campaign plan and all of the key players of that plan, but how does a soldier not know who he works for? How does he not know that NATO was entirely uninvolved with warfighting in Iraq?* These are things you might want to double-check before doing an interview on your protest.

Mr. Broseus, you can't return medals to someone who didn't give them to you in the first place. I get that you're upset at being activated (let's not touch the subject of duty today...) and that you oppose war.  But for heaven's sake, make your protest meaningful. Because most vets who read that piece are going to think you're an idiot for "returning" your medals to NATO when it was the U.S. Army that awarded them to you in the first place and that NATO was never in a position to award you medals for Iraq. If you want to return them in protest, do it smartly or the quality of your protest is cheapened. Because as things stand right now, I thank you for your service but I don't think you have the knowledge base to comment on national security policy in a way that should be influential based on your status as a veteran.

I understand this is a lengthy rant on a minor incident, but it was a minor incident that was indicative of something that's been bothering me for a while.  I am tired of veterans using their veteran status to give validity to their pet causes when this status does not in actuality provide that validity. This is true for both anti- and pro-war types or any number of other issues surround the military. Your opinions are your opinions and they may be shaped by your experience as a veteran. How could serving not shape your opinions on the world?

But we have to understand that there is no uniform veteran experience or thought process. A former HMMWV gunner has every right to comment on whether we go to or remain at war.  However, unless s/he adequately frames his pro/anti-war argument in a way that shows how his HMMWV gunning enlightened his thinking, then I put his opinion in the same category as the general public's and measure it by the quality of the reasoning. This problem is not limited to lower-enlisted veterans and is in fact more egregiously perpetrated by former officers. Generals who specialize in logistics have lots of standing to opine on logistics. But I really don't want to hear you talk about strategy or operations. Stay in your lane. Wearing a uniform once does not give you the standing to talk about all topics military. Nor does your rank.

The vast preponderance of the blame for this sorry column rests with the columnist. I think Mr. Broseus feels very strongly about his opinion that seems to have been significantly shaped by his experience as a HMMWV gunner. I hope that his protest helps him deal with his experiences. But Trice should know better than to flaunt Broseus' veteran-ness as a reason to give his anti-war stance and ability to classify the war in Afghanistan as "occupation" any validity because he is a veteran. Shame on you and your newspaper for not at least commenting on it.

The bottom line to this is that our news sources should be more responsible in how they use and sell veteran commentary to ensure that when adding the gravitas of "veteran" to said commentary it is appropriately used. I don't have much faith of this occurring. So maybe the answer is that veterans should only comment on things as veterans if their military experience gave them special and expert opinion on the topic. Of course, that's not going to happen either, is it? It's up to you, readers, to understand the font of expertise and the quality of argument and reasoning. Good luck.

*Yes, I am aware that NATO has been funding and manning slots at the Iraq military school at Camp Rustamiyah. But that's not warfighting.

Let's just be up front with each other: this is a really long rant about strategy

PRE-CLAIMER: Seriously, just don't even try. tl;dr

I've been thinking quite a lot about Jason's post from Monday night, though I feel reasonably confident that I still don't understand it completely. I've decided to carry the conversation forward with a post of my own rather than simply taking it up the subject in the comment thread, both because I'm hoping (in vain?) it will spur me to return to posting and because it gives me the opportunity to get into a couple of loosely-related ideas I've been kicking around for some time now.

Having read through Jason's post three or four times, I'm still trying to put my finger on just what exactly the problem is that he describes. I take it that he basically agrees with Mark Safranski, whose diagnosis seems reasonably straightforward to me. Here's how I read it: in a democratic society, decision-makers will often select policy options that are reflective of an approval-seeking need to do something—to signal a certain position or preference to a domestic audience rather than to accomplish a considered aim and effect a new reality. This can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the simple reason that the decision-maker's calculus is largely indifferent to outcomes: his incentive structure rewards superficially correct action more than it does substantively beneficial results.

If this isn't what Mark meant to say, then I'll stand corrected. But if it is, then I agree with him.

But here's the part where I get confused: even if civilian policymakers are prone to this sort of error (and I agree that they are), and even if, as Jason writes, "our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process" (and I agree that it is)... I still don't understand how or why those two conditions should be causally related. Let me put it this way: the fact that our campaign planning in Afghanistan is process-focused seems to me largely disconnected from the fact that our politicians care more about doing right-looking things than right-ending things, because campaign plans and operational concepts aren't the purview of those politicians.

I'm willing to concede that the line between civilian and military reponsibilities in strategy formation and the associated operational planning is a blurry and unstable one, and that what I've laid out as the normative standard isn't always the way things play out in reality. You certainly shouldn't take anything I've written above as an exculpatory argument for our elected officials. But more on this a bit later.

As for our man Carl: Jason's choice of Clausewitz quote is simultaneously interesting and surprising to me. Committed students of the sage will recognize it from perhaps the most remarked-upon pages of On War: Book Eight, Chapter 6B. (If it were an episode of "Friends," they'd call it The One With the Politics By Other Means.) The language Jason excerpted is from the 19th-century Graham translation; just for the purpose of clarity, let's look at the somewhat more fluent Paret/Howard version:

In making use of war, policy evades all rigorous conclusions proceeding from the nature of war, bothers little about ultimate possibilities, and concerns itself only with immediate probabilities. Although this introduces a high degree of uncertainty into the whole business, turning it into a kind of game, each government is confident that it can outdo its opponent in skill and acumen. (606)

This is a pretty difficult passage (especially as I present it here, mostly out of context) but I take it to mean that governments are little interested in ruminations on war's escalatory momentum in the direction of its absolute form, but rather in how violence may be used to achieve concrete political goals. But the paradoxical reality is that addition of violence to politics – violence that is fueled in part by hatred and enmity, violence that is fundamental to war's nature and sets it off as distinct from all other human activity – actually re-shapes the character of the political contest. War's essential violence pressures the political contest to take on the character of a duel or a sporting event; without the harness of policy, war risks becoming a self-contained competition conducted according to its own rules, one where victory is not the mere accomplishment of political objectives but rather a revision of the relationship between the two competitors such that the victor is free to enact his preferences.

The "high degree of uncertainty" that Clausewitz concedes is introduced "into the whole business" is produced by divergence between the things we do in war and the things they are meant to achieve. In limited war, our actions are conceived as violent but discrete and purposive acts of policy, while as war moves toward its absolute form our actions are increasingly divorced from discrete political objectives short of the destruction of our enemy. To put it simply, shit gets crazy in war.

But "policy converts the overwhelmingly destructive element of war into a mere instrument," Clausewitz continues.

It changes the terrible battle-sword that a man needs both hands and his entire strength to wield, and with which he strikes home once and no more, into a light, handy rapier—sometimes just a foil for the exchange of thrusts, feints and parries. (606)

Of course, for the military instrument to be used effectively, its employment must be strategic—that is to say, it must be reasoned.

In the Kings of War post that Jason referenced, Kenneth Payne talks about what behavioral economists and psychologists call "choice-supportive bias"—our tendency to feel a preference more strongly after we've made a choice in its favor than we did when considering the whole range of options. (Payne incorrectly labels this as the "endowment effect," which describes a different cognitive bias – our tendency to value more highly those things that we already possess and stand to lose than those things we might gain – that's closely related to loss-aversion, but that small error is not germane to his point.)

Preferences are not revealed by choices, so much as created by them. That's particularly true if the choice we make is emotionally engaging, as war is—passionately so, ofttimes.

I feel a bit like a broken record, but Clausewitz talked about this, too: war's violent nature and appeal to primal hatred and enmity give it a tendency to escalate toward the absolute, to break free of its harness to policy, to unbalance "the remarkable trinity" that ensures it is purposive and endows it with meaning.

What I take from Payne's brief post is that modern discoveries in behavioral psychology and neuroscience are highlighting just exactly how difficult it is for individuals to behave "rationally," which has a complicating effect on strategy—the method we use to plan and undertake purposive action to achieve our goals. I very much agree with this, but I suppose it's worth including a reminder that while the science may be new, the behaviors that it observes and seeks to explain are not. Strategy has always been complicated by our flawed rationality; it's only now that we're beginning to achieve a more granular understanding of the biases impacting it than the somewhat more homespun generalizations Clausewitz offered on the subject.

That said, I very much disagree with what seems to be Payne's prescription: that we should give up on efforts at "balancing ends ways and means, or even discerning them," and instead conceive of strategy as a sort of elevated form of reactive planning.

Instead it's perhaps better to think about strategy in its less 'grand strategic' sense—and instead to conceptualise it as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies. Stop trying to anticipate the future so much, because, as Philip Tetlock has shown, we are rather bad at it.

Stipulated! But this form of "strategy" is an exercise in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, conceding initiative to our enemies and foregoing even the possibility of imposing our own preferences on the environment. Strategic thinking will not always be effective, even when the inputs are perceived correctly. But it beats the alternative, doesn't it? And how does Payne's model escape the very same pitfalls of bounded rationality? Even if we "conceptualise [strategy] as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies," are we not dogged by the same cognitive biases and flawed rationality that impinge on our ability to plan over the longer term?

The problem of modern strategy isn't that we make so many miscalculations—that's to be expected, and it's the very reason that strategy formation and adaptive planning are meant to be iterative processes. The main issue is that the so-called "strategy bridge" is still absent: we are failing to adequately specify – even to ourselves! – how successful operations will create the political effects we seek. When we pretend to do so, we speak in buzzwords, cliches, and generalities.

This is a failing on both sides of the political-military divide. Our elected leaders are responsible for ensuring that we undertake wars that have meaning—wars that can plausibly achieve the objectives set out in policy. And our uniformed leaders must ensure that those meaningful wars are executed sensibly, in a manner that maps military action to intended effect—whether that's the wholesale destruction of the enemy, conquering and holding a sliver of territory, deterring an adversarial regime, or whatever. I feel like I say this a lot, but this is the essence of strategy: developing a theory of victory, a reasonable concept of how the actions you take with the resources at your disposal can combine to achieve the objectives you seek.

The "strategy bridge" is the causal, conceptual link between the accomplishment of military objectives and the creation of political effects, something that is all too often missing in today's strategic thought. We fill that chasm only with bromides, wishful thinking, and specious "plans," then wonder why no one can walk across.

I suppose this is where I come to my issue with Jason's post, which I understand to be saying that the main problem with our strategy in Afghanistan is a failure to recognize that we've met our initial objectives.

We're still fighting a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though they're no longer there because the policy has not adapted. So the military has experimented with various ways (as the means have been dominated by policy-makers) to achieve ends that have effectively been achieved. But we can't say that we've won because there is still so much violence in Afghanistan, so we toil longer and talk about 'winning'—and yet the original policy's ends still have not changed.

The policy objective in Afghanistan is, and presumably always has been, the one the president identified at the completion of the Af-Pak strategy review in March of 2009: "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." He further articulated the component parts of that overall objective several months later in the West Point speech announcing the escalation:

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take the lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

Looking at those intermediate objectives and at the overall policy goal, isn't it obvious that the crippling and fundamental issue has nothing to do with a failure to revise ends in line with progress and change in conditions and everything to do with the government's determination to pursue political aims that were almost certainly unachievable and inaccessible to military action?

The problem in Afghanistan isn't strategy—it's policy. (The more I think about it, the more Jason seems to agree.)

Even if U.S. military operations over, say, a five-year period actually did achieve what the president hoped to – if al-Qaeda were effectively denied a safe haven in Afghanistan for so long as U.S. forces actively operated there; if the Taliban were held off or even decisively defeated over that time period; and if the GIRoA and ANSF were made capable and effective in the maintenance of the country's own internal security – there simply wasn't any plausible explanation presented for how the creation of those conditions would conclusively produce the end states we desired: al-Qaeda's disruption, dismantling, and defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the prevention of its return to either country in the future.

The only conceivable justification for our continued refusal to do this is that winning just isn't all that important to us. And so we've come full-circle back to what Mark Safranski wrote: "the net result becomes burning money and soldiers' lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." As long as we're doing something, maybe something good will happen. The same logic animates a great deal of the anti-authoritarian interventionist sentiment we've seen in recent months, but that's a whole separate conversation.

I read a paper recently with the extremely lede-burying title, "The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam," by Jonathan Caverley. The thesis can be boiled down to this: those who argue that the military lost Vietnam through the application of flawed doctrine generally fail to recognize that the adoption of militarily sub-optimal courses of action was in fact a result of a rational policy determination by the country's political leadership.

Caverley oversimplifies quite a bit in his assumptions about optimal strategy, but the basic idea is that because the average voter cared far less about the financial cost of war than about the human cost (including not only casualties, but the possible expansion of the draft, etc.), politicians were incentivized to "substitute capital for labor"; i.e. to fight a technology-intensive style of war that was sensitive to the electorate's preference for limiting human costs, even while it was more expensive and less militarily effective. In short, politicians cared less about losing the war than they did about doing what the average voter seemed to want. (Which is, of corse, sort of what democracy is about.) I have some significant problems with the paper and am not sure the conclusions are all that sturdy, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

It's even more interesting if you read it in tandem with Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," which is one of the most thought-provoking papers I've read in a really, really long time. Sullivan argues that the primary determinant of success for powerful states in small wars is the degree to which prewar expectations about the cost of victory match with reality: a state is most likely to pack up and quit when a war proves more difficult than expected. This often happens with limited wars because of the difficulty of accurately assessing the probability of victory (and associated casualties, duration, etc.) when accomplishment of war aims depends on concessions or lack of resolve on the part of the enemy rather than his wholesale defeat—in short, it's easier to predict how difficult it will be to destroy an army and conquer a state than to accurately project how many sorties are required to compel the enemy to make different political choices. I'm not doing the paper justice, and you ought to read it yourself.

What the hell does any of this have to do with what we were talking about earlier?, you're wondering. Surely I've just gone off on some stream-of-consciousness rant, spilling all the lost blog posts of the last two months into one text box. Well, there's a little bit of that. But try this one on for size: what Sullivan's and Caverley's papers both show is that powerful states often engage in wars that are not particularly important either to the government or to the electorate, and that they often wage them ineffectively and quit early as a result. In other words, states quite literally waste lives, money, and materiel on impulsive trifles, undertakings designed to send a message or show hardness or keep a campaign promise or give the appearance of doing the right thing.

And all of these things are perfectly acceptable uses of military force, perfectly acceptable instrumentalizations of policy... if you can show how the means you've chosen have even the faintest hope of accomplishing those political ends! I'm not at all suggesting that violence should only be used to conquer territory, or to destroy the enemy—not at all. What I am suggesting is that we cease to use military force in an unconsidered fashion. This isn't even an argument for choosing the right wars, but for figuring out whether the things we can do in war have any hope of creating meaning from war. If not, then we really are wasting lives—and those of us who fancy ourselves strategists are wasting our own. It's our job to build the damned bridge.

P.S. I am completely in love with the Kelly-Brennan monograph (pdf) MK mentioned in his comment on Jason's post—I have been since I first read it. I had hoped to discuss it here, but let's be serious: you can't take any more of this right now.

Ends as wasting assets: time's negative effect on policy

One of the truly enjoyable aspects of blogging, at least in the form and community which we do here at Ink Spots, is the interaction this format enables with other bloggers. I've often found that our fellow journeymen can say what I'm trying to better or they provide a different perspective I haven't thought of. To wit, Mark Safranski hand his excellent two-part series on strategy and perspective (here and here) that were riffs on my post of the same subject. You should read them both, but I'm going to focus in on the second.

In his second post, Mark discusses perception and that in Afghanistan the people aren't merely audiences, but participants in the conflict. Further, that civilian leaders are more familiar with processes rather than results, the former of which which is less objective-driven than the latter. [One could argue against this, but any student of civilian-agency programmatic planning versus military planning would be able to demonstrate it rather easily.] Mark continues that "[t]his perspective, while perhaps a career advantage for a politician, is over the long haul ruinous for a country [...] as the net result becomes burning money and soldier's lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." If I had to describe our strategic meandering in Afghanistan (and in many other places), this would sum up my opinion rather well.

I believe that it is safe to assume that our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process, or in strategic parlance: ways. Our publicly released metrics of success focus on killing fewer civilians, creating more Afghan Army soldiers or policemen, aid money spent, kids going to school, etc. But these are not ends - they are means to ends, which I've already averred that we haven't effectively stated for our mission in Afghanistan. I would like to think that our desired ends made sense at some point, but they sure don't now.

Kenneth Payne at Kings of War wrote a post last week discussing strategy and time, a topic that Mark continued on to in the quoted post above. Payne makes the concise and insightful statement:

Strategy, I contend, is inherently about making judgments in time. We seek to use violence instrumentally to reach some desired future state. And we are guided by the past when we do. Strategy is temporal.

Bang on Kenneth. He goes on to observe that "the future we imagine we want might not actually be so pressing when we actually arrive there." Our desired ends down the road may not matter much to us once we get to the end of said road. Of course, they matter not a whit long before that.

One of the many challenges in developing strategy is in the interaction of policy and military plans. As the Grand Poobah of War himself said, "Policy in making use of War avoids all those rigorous conclusions which proceed from its nature; it troubles itself little about final possibilities, confining its attention to immediate probabilities." Policy concerns itself with the here and now and what the instrument of war can attain for it in the near term. Beyond that we get into the conundrum that Payne lays out for us. Further, the onset of a policy which employs war as a tool establishes desired ends according to the probabilities of the day, from which the military derives its plans. And then a divergence encroaches: process by its nature maintains the policy's original ends (possibly with some minor adjustments) while military operations must adapt to the enemy and the realities which it faces on the field. As subservient to the policy, the military thus applies ways and means, with input or allocation from the political class, to ends it cannot, should not, or cares not to attain if the mission continues for such a duration that the original ends become obsolete.

In my mind, this is part of where our strategy in Afghanistan has gone off the rails. We're still fighting a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though they're no longer there because the policy has not adapted. So the military has experimented with various ways (as the means have been dominated by policy-makers) to achieve ends that have effectively been achieved. But we can't say that we've won because there is still so much violence in Afghanistan, so we toil longer and talk about "winning" - and yet the original policy's ends still have not changed. Ends do decrease in their value as time goes on, which requires policy and process to adapt and redefine ends, which goes against the very nature of policy and process.

The drawdown that we'll see over the next few years will be the culmination of that original process-based policy. For 10 years the military has tried to adapt its ways and we've all witnessed the results - some good and a lot bad. This friction at the intersection of policy and military planning is not new and will not go away because this friction between the two are due to the inherent nature of each. And that friction increases as the mission continues over time. I'm not sure this is a lesson the need to change either policy or military planning or to ensure that we do not engage in long-term operations. But it's a problem that we need to recognize as we consider other policies.

Robert Bales is not the victim

This past weekend, DoD released the identify of the NCO accused of murdering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend. SSG Robert Bales, 38, assigned to 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry Regiment, 3d Stryker BCT, 2d Infantry Division of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington was flown to Fort Leavenworth within the past couple of days.

Which left major newspaper outlets tripping over each other to explain why it was everyone's fault except SSG Bales' (again, assuming he committed the murders based on his apparent confession) that 16 Afghan men, women, and children ended up dead. For example:

• "Afghan rampage suspect Robert Bales was a soldier strained by deployments" - Washington Post
• "At Home, Asking How 'Our Bobby' Became War Crime Suspect" - NY Times
• "Bales Faced Losing Houses as He Fought 6,700 Miles Away" - Bloomberg

I'm not going to pick on the NY Times article, although it was not free of the same sort of innuendo we're about to pick apart. It just was merely the least offensive of the three. So let's take a look at Robert Bales, victim of society, through the lens of the Washington Post and Bloomberg news.

1. "Years of overseas duty on a sergeant's salary had squeezed the family's resources to the breaking point" via the WaPo. Here you have an "he snapped because of financial troubles because he didn't get paid much as a sergeant" - which begins to take the onus of these crimes off of Bales' shoulders and places them on the American people for screwing down it's military.

Let's take a closer look at this. An E-6 Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army with over 10 years of service, living in the Joint Base Lewis-McChord area would receive per month: $3243 in base pay, $1650 in housing allowance (this is tax-free), and $348 in subsistence allowance (also tax-free). At $5241 per month, SSG Bales had a yearly income of roughly $62,890. The median income for the Tacoma, Washington area in 2010 was $48,673. That's right, SSG Bales made about $14,219 more than the median income for his area because he was a soldier. In fact, his deployments would have netted him more than $750 more per month with Family Separation Allowance, Imminent Danger Pay, and in not paying Federal income tax on his base pay. Deploying is financially good for soldiers, not disadvantageous. (For more on all of this, see Jimmy Sky's excellent post on military pay and benefits.)

This is a bit in the weeds, but if you're going to say that he was near a breaking point because of his pay you need to back it up. But you can't because it's a wrong statement. I don't doubt that Bales had financial problems, but if he did his financial troubles were because he made bad or unlucky choices that had nothing to do with the Army. So no, dear Washington Post, it wasn't his meager salary due to recurring deployments that caused him to do what he (allegedly) did - your statement is factually incorrect.

2. Not getting promoted caused him stress. All three stories mention Bales' not making Sergeant First Class on the 2011 promotion list and that they were all disappointed. I'm sure it sucks not making a promotion list, but you have to be realistic about these things. All three articles mention legal problems for Bales, including arrests or charges for DUI and hit-and-run (there seems to be some info missing about convictions, etc, so it's not clear what the final disposition of these cases were, but suffice to say something happened). Staff Sergeants do get promoted with that sort of baggage, but not often. And it's getting harder and harder as personnel cuts loom. Even a passing mention of it on any of these or related issues were on an NCOER, the odds are a promotion board would not promote him. So while that may be stressful for him and his family, it was not a promotion he was owed or was due to him. Promotions are earned and blemishes on record like those suggested by these stories prevent promotions. While an interesting data point in the "things that weighed on SSG Bales", chalk up not getting promoted caveated by "may have prevented this through his own actions."

3. Repeated deployments, PTSD, TBI, etc. This is the touchiest of all the topics covered by these three stories and generally speaking they did an okay job. All acknowledge that we don't know how much these three factors interact and what exactly they cause people to do. There are some undercurrents however that the Army failed to screen Bales out of his latest deployment. First and foremost, the Army generally does a poor job of screening for, diagnosing, and treating TBI and PTSD. If the current screening hasn't changed too much, it relies extensively on self reporting. So if Bales did want to redeploy, as friends of his say he expressed that he wanted to get back into the fight, then passing the screening is as easy as pie. The Army has to screen a lot people and there just isn't a cost-effective and effective test to manage this problem. Period. Not excusing the Army for this, but there isn't a viable solution as yet. If Bales wanted to deploy, no current screening mechanisms were going to stop him. But for a bigger picture, here are some numbers: between 1 and 2 million servicemembers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, well over 100,000 of them have deployed three or more times, and 300,000 to 600,000 are suffering from PTSD. So far only 1 person in that large population went out and killed 16 civilians.

4. "He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over, and then literally overnight that changed." Apparently his lawyer said this and I can't believe Bloomberg didn't refute this. Even if some knucklehead said he would never deploy again, he was a healthy NCO in the U.S. Army. Guess what: you can't make - or believe - promises like that. It's not how the military works. Deployment orders suck and are super hard on families, but they are a reality of military life. Again, it wasn't as if the Army broke it's promise - it has no institutional ability to promise one healthy soldier it would never deploy him again.

This probably reads as nit-picking or sticking up for the Army, but it's not. Major news outlets are trying to find an angle and lens from which to view this guy and I get that. But all that's coming out are reasons why the Army is at fault for what happened - included some gross inaccuracies or outright lies, outlined here - and not SSG Bales. It seems there were a lot of factors that probably caused his state of mind that day - I can only guess that they include financial problems, TBI, PTSD, family stress, unhappiness with how his career was progressing - but most of those things fall on SSG Bales, not the Army. Could the Army have done some things differently? Undoubtedly - but stop blaming the Army for what this man did. Do your research, journalists, and stop making excuses for this guy. If the 16 dead were Americans, would we be doing this hand-wringing over why the Army screwed down the perpetrator? (I draw your attention to Fred Wellman's comments in that link.) Being a soldier is hard and while command has many responsibilities, commanders are not responsible for everything. Hundreds of thousands of troops have gone through what SSG Bales has gone through - or worse - and none of them shot 16 Afghan civilians.

This entire situation is sad - for the Army, for Bales and his family and his unit, and especially for the Afghans who lost loved ones. Let's keep perspective on that. And let's not take the easy way out and blame The Man for the actions of a man because it fits your narrative. That's not justice and it's irresponsible. Robert Bales is not the victim here - the victims are in Afghanistan.

Delicate strategic balancing: perception's role in formulating strategy

I, like nearly everyone, am saddened by yesterday's tragic murders in Afghanistan. The details are gruesome and as a father of young children, I react to the needless death of children viscerally. I'll hold off on any sort of analysis of this specific situation until investigation results are released. I'll also defer to others on what it portends for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and suggest must-read analysts Daveed Gartenstien-Ross and Carl Prine.

I suspect it would be helpful to use this incident and similarly bad events that recently occurred to take a look at the role of perspective and how it affects strategy from a broader perspective beyond Afghanistan. I endorse Carl and his fourth point that the deaths of 16 Afghans will not likely drive changes in domestic perspectives and subsequently will not drive changes to our strategy. Our current force generation system - an all volunteer force - allows the government to use force as a tool of policy without burdening the overwhelming majority of the nation's citizens which in turn negates the need to have the people's consent to wage and continue war. Barring a catastrophe such as Mogadishu in 1993, the bombings in Beirut in 1983, or Tet in 1968, domestic perspectives simply do not play a role in determining how the U.S. government uses force in the current era. Both the government and the citizens seem pretty content with this arrangement as it allows them to pursue whatever they wish to pursue with minimal burden.

That all said, incidents in Afghanistan these past few months have caused me to question the validity of strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign audiences*. This is not to negate the fact that foreign perspectives affect nearly every intervention in some way - there has been plenty of writing on this and believe it to be true. I firmly believe that reminding soldiers of this fact was possibly the only redeeming value of the counterinsurgency manual. To say nothing of this excellent work. But strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign populations are another matter altogether.

This is not to say that abusing detainees, offending the religious sensibilities of local populations, killing civilians through negligence or indifference, mutilating corpses, and willful murder are unimportant or that they should not or may not affect the execution of a strategic plan. Iraq came unglued after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and Iraqis had every right to be angry, causing them to rebuke U.S. efforts. And of course there were more screw-ups after this incident - the strategic knucklehead is pervasive and unpreventable after all. But in spite of all of that, the U.S. strategy there eventually met most of its goals (reasons for which include a whole bunch of luck, but good strategy leverages luck). While Afghanistan is obviously not monolithic and reactions will vary, every new incident is accompanied by analysis of how much it sets back our mission there, suggesting to me that we're nearing a cusp where winning the approval of the Afghan people will become the determining factor of our outcomes.

We have a whole suite of problems with our strategy in Afghanistan, foremost of which are a failure to state specific and achievable ends as well as a misalignment of ways and means to achieve the pitifully-described desired ends we have written down. But if our strategic success now depends upon selling to the Afghans that we mean well and that they are now more skeptical than not of us, well we have a very, very serious problem. Balancing the Say-Do equation is an imperative. However, if public perception is that mistakes and crimes committed by individual U.S. service members is indicative of U.S. policy or strategy, then public communications begins to drive strategy instead of the other way around.

Public communications and information operations to influence perceptions are ways, but the U.S. keeps falling into the trap of making perceptions ends in themselves. If our ends, ways, and means were better formed and aligned, I suspect that the "Do" side of the equation would be solid enough to negate the affects of mistakes. But this is not the situation in Afghanistan where continued programs of questionable efficacy, strategic drift with regard to ends (compare this and this for instance), and continued support for an illegitimate and ineffectual government abound. If ways and means are not succeeding (to what ends?!?) or are the wrong ways and means entirely then your strategy rests in total upon Afghan perception that you're making a difference instead of in part, which amplifies individual disasters such as we've seen of late. While it is unlikely that the United States will change course at this juncture, we need to start paying attention to this phenomenon now and avoid it in the future so we can avoid codifying perceptions as ends and put influencing them back where they belong: as ways. A successful strategy would go a long way to restoring this balance. Once again, maybe in the next war.

*I apologize for the awkward term and I just can't find the right one that doesn't sound trite. Here it means the people living in the country in which your forces are operating.

UPDATE: See the always insightful and on point Adam Elkus on this topic.

Police development: you're doing it wrong

I can't remember who tweeted a link to this excellent report on ANP development (speak up and be recognized!), but if you're interested in police development it is a must read. A product of the Peace Research Institute - Frankfort, the authors (Cornelius Friesendorf and Jorg Krempel) titled the work Militarized versus Civilian Policing: Problems of Reforming the Afghan National Police, looked at best practices in building a civilian police force and the German and US involvement in Afghanistan with the ANP.

The paper dives into a lot of the nitty-gritty of the ANP development program dating back to 2002 and it's worth a read. (I wish it had been translated when I wrote this paper that touched on some of these issues this past spring.) But I want to focus in on some of the conclusions and attempt to draw them into bigger thoughts beyond Afghanistan. They cite numerous issues of donors not effectively supporting the ANP development, recruiting problems, training problems, corruption problems, and so on and so forth. All important.

But what's important in this paper is that they look very closely at the intersection of police and military responsibilities and point how horribly wrong we've been delineating responsibilities between the ANA and ANP. Due to a number of factors - lack of a democratic policing tradition in the years running up to 2001, the use of military forces to train the nascent ANP, and operational needs - ISAF is building a paramilitary force not a police force. While the first of these factors can be overcome in my opinion (Kosovo provides a pretty example of making an adequate police force essentially from scratch), I think the latter two are catastrophic to police development programs if not done correctly. And we're not doing it correctly.

In brief, if a military force trains a police force, that police force is much more likely to look like a military force than a police force. Just as in Iraq, the ANP are formed into military structures (unless that's changed recently), they carry military-grade weapons (including RPGs on occasion), and they have little interest in the tedium of enforcing the law. Simply put, if you train your police with the military, you end up with police who can't police and are an under-trained and under-equipped military force. What you end up with is a force that exacerbates conflict instead of quelling it that primarily acts as a strong-arm of local factions or even national entities (such as in Iraq where the INP became the MoI's private Army). Historical studies have shown that military training of police forces nearly invariably result in this scenario and we need to stop doing it. Of course, that would require building capabilities and/or capacities in our civilian agencies such as ICITAP, OPDAT, USAID, or even INL. Something that seems unlikely given Congress's fetishization of military power over civilian power. Alas.

However, this pales in comparison to the operational necessities that drive police development away from policing and towards military operations. When conducting police development in countries embroiled in an intra-state war, priority is given to the operational needs to defeat the state's enemies, not to stemming crime. The U.S. and other donors have been building the ANP into a counterinsurgency force in their own right to "thicken the lines" as the old Iraq saw went. Community police simply wouldn't be able to defend themselves against any quasi-military insurgency. As they would be among the first targets of the insurgency, police being among the most visible realizations of a state's power, they would simply be slaughtered. This would then require precious military resources to be pulled from finding bad guys and instead guard the police. It's a lose-lose situation for any operational commander. So we've taken the middle path: forget policing and build a quasi-military police force. A force that, again, stinks at policing and stinks at military operations.

This is an offhand synopsis and analysis of the paper I linked to, but it distills to the fundamental flaws of our attempts to build a police force in Afghanistan. Because of the myriad problems underlying our efforts and our militarization of the ANP (because of the two factors discussed here), we're failing Afghanistan by not fielding an effective police force now and virtually ensuring that the ANP cannot transition into a true police force. Friesendorf and Krempel put it much more eloquently, but that's the basis of their conclusion. Nice, huh?

So what do we do about it? Our boys from Frankfurt call for reforms to the program and to ensure that those in ISAF who are assisting in driving the ANP strategy are police experts and not military officers (they don't say it, but an MP is not a policeman, so no, not even an MP should be doing this). Concur entirely. I don't know what else we can do for the ANP at this point. But the lesson we need to draw from Afghanistan and Iraq is that in conflict countries maybe we shouldn't do police development at all until violence reaches levels where they can operate as police and not as soldiers. Police development in the early stages of the war should focus on the ministries responsible and a cadre of officers who are provided with long and intensive training who don't actually do any policing until a violence threshold is met. At that point, DDR programs could help staff the police force around this framework of cadre who can then instill a proper police culture throughout the force and train their policemen to be policemen. Instead of throwing billions of dollars at sub-par police who also are sub-par counterinsurgents as well as conflict drivers, maybe we shouldn't do any of that until the environment is safe enough for an actual community police force to operate.

Unlikely, but maybe in the next war.

Strategy is intelligent design and willful, intended action

I've recently become acquainted with a principle of constitutional law called the rational basis test. When a questionable law is subjected to legal challenge, it must first clear this very low hurdle: the court must be able to conceive of a plausible way in which the law's enactment could serve a legitimate interest of the government. The government isn't required to testify as to the legislature's purposes, and the law need not even be effective in serving the stated interest—it simply needs to be a plausible attempt. In short, the court must find that the government has behaved rationally; whether or not it has behaved intelligently is a separate – and for the purposes of the rational basis test, irrelevant – question. This strikes me as a good place to kick off a conversation about strategy and tactics.

Strategy is intelligent design: the reasoned application of available resources in a rational way, offering a plausible, logical path to the accomplishment of our goals. Clausewitz defined it narrowly as "the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war," but in the modern era its use has broadened to apply at nearly every level; "strategy" now essentially means something like the willful use of activity and resources to accomplish specified ends.

By this standard, strategy can be applied at all levels of war—not just the strategic. (Bear with me; I know this gets a little confusing.) One can have a generalized strategy for success in certain types of tactical engagement; this is frequently manifest as a set of procedures, the sort of thing that immediate action/battle drills are intended to perfect—performance of the required actions for tactical success. But to call this a "strategy" is a little misleading, if only because it obscures an important reality: at the tactical level, we're talking not about the reasoned, case-sensitive, tailored administration of resources and performance of planned actions to meet unique objectives, but a somewhat more mechanical application of accepted prodedures and best practices. This is the stuff of doctrine, which sets down a military organization's authoritative, collective view of how it conducts specific missions or types of operations. Doctrine's value is that it can be considered and codified in the abstract, as its tenets are presumed to be somewhat generalizable across a range of roughly similar conditions.

Moving up the levels of war, one can also have a strategy for operational or campaign success: how various tactical engagements will be combined to achieve campaign objectives. There is, of course, more art to this than at the tactical level simply because there is more uncertainty and more choice. No two tactical engagements are precisely the same, but it's much simpler to identify general "rules" for success when confronted with an L-shaped ambush than to prescribe methods for translating battlefield success into operational progress. No two campaigns are the same. It is at the operational level that strategy begins to take on the meaning with which we're familiar: a general idea of how we hope to use operational mobility and battle in phased, sequential actions to achieve goals within the broader framework of the war, while accepting the need for flexbility and adaptability in response to the enemy and war's fundamental unpredictability.

And then we come to the familiar strategic level of war, where campaigns are sequenced and combined to achieve the political objectives of the combatants. Here we see strategy from a slightly different angle: as the ways that the means of military action are applied to achieve the ends set out by policy. Let me explain this a little more.

The various levels of war are overlapping and nested within one another, and within the overarching framework of policy. Often the ends of the lower level serve as the means of the next-higher level: that is, tactical success is a means (to be combined with other means along various lines of effort) to achieve operational objectives, which are then used as means to be translated through operational art into strategic success. This means-ways-ends construct – reasoned activity conducted to produce conditions which are manipulated and exploited by yet more reasoned activity as we ascend the levels of war – is the very essence of strategy. Planning is strategy worked in reverse—beginning with a desired end, identifying objectives that will enable and facilitate this end, planning campaigns and operations to attain those objectives, and allocating resources, capabilities, and tactical actions in line with those plans. This construct can be extended even further into the development of capabilities: an armed force can have a strategy for manning, training, equipping, organizing, and so on to deliver the capabilities required for tactical, operational, and strategic success.

Effective tactical actions must be combined in rational ways to achieve operational ends.

Successful operations must be combined in rational ways to achieve campaign objectives.

Meaningful campaigns must contribute in rational ways to the satisfaction of strategic goals.

And the accomplishment of strategic goals should rationally lead to the enactment of policy's ends.

The fabric that holds all of this together is strategy. And it follows that strategy must always involve what we call a theory of victory: at every level, the actions we choose to take must form a plausible narrative that leads to the accomplishment of our objectives and enables the next element of the overarching plan. The strategist must continually ask himself not only to what end?, but how?

As I noted above, the so-called theory of victory is more empirical – almost mathematical – at the level of tactical action. My forces will do X, Y, and Z to produce effects A, B, and C. Operational-level doctrine, too, suggests a certain institutional confidence in an accepted way of doing business, how tactical actions can be combined to create successful campaigns. But it is at the strategic level that procedures and doctrine mostly lose their value, giving way to operational art and strategic theory. Just the same, the strategist must begin with a clear idea of how it is that he hopes to achieve his goals through directed action—a theory of victory.

To come to the point of all this: Jason wrote a post earlier this week in which he considered the validity of Gian Gentile's repeated claim that counterinsurgency as practiced in Iraq and Afghanistan is a "strategy of tactics." Carl is right to point out in the comments that the good colonel did not invent this construction, though there's a ring of sophistry to his claim that it "predates Gian Gentile by decades and has been bandied about by a Who's Who of strategic savants."

The phrase did indeed originate with Andrew Krepinevich, whose 1986 book The Army and Vietnam described Westmoreland's approach as a "strategy of tactics." This went hand-in-hand with the argument that the U.S. fought that war in line with the "Army concept"—a set idea of how war ought to be fought that springs not from strategic logic but rather organizational imperative: what the Army mans, organizes, and trains to do. LTC D.W. Beveridge paraphrased Krepinevich's argument (enormous pdf) in asserting that "the upshot of viewing the war in terms of the Army Concept was a preoccupation with 'grand tactics' rather than strategy, resulting in a perpetuation of the search and destroy operations imposed on the ARVN [South Vietnamense Army] during the earlier advisory period" (89).

This complaint is reflective of the flaws of the incrementalist approach in Vietnam: as the U.S. commitment increased and the correlation of forces (between U.S., ARVN, North Vietnamese Army, and VC/NLF) shifted, American commanders failed to re-assess the strategy being employed and consider a change in the role of U.S. forces. Westmoreland had been convinced that large NVA formations posed the greatest threat to South Vietnam, so he built a strategy focused on the use of American firepower and mobility to find, fix, and destroy them. In short, he misperceived the political nature of the war and suffered the consequences.
But Krepinevich's complaint about Westmoreland's "strategy of tactics" in Vietnam rings slightly hollow. A more accurate description would recognize that Westmoreland had a rational strategic plan and a sense for how American forces could be tactically employed to achieve it, but lacked a theory of victory: that is, he had no concept of how tactical action by U.S. forces could create strategic success because he permitted an essential element of his campaign plan – pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside, which was left to the ARVN – to exist outside his control. He seemed not even to recognize that the effective accomplishment of this mission was essential to strategic success. Westmoreland had too much strategy and not enough sense of how it would be accomplished. After the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, he had effective, proven tactics with which to destroy the NVA in the South but no concept for how those victories could be translated into political success.

The story with COIN (specifically in Afghanistan) is quite different: the campaign plan there has plenty of "theory of victory," but there's room to question whether or not it is plausible—that is, whether or not the tactics prescribed will actually produce the effects they're meant to. U.S. commanders have a clear idea of what they mean to accomplish and how, but there is far less certainty over whether the available tools are suited to this approach. It is plausible that the pacification of towns and villages, expanding territorial control in the countryside, reductions in violence, and increasingly effective Afghan governance and security forces will create an environment that is inhospitable to insurgents, one in which the enemy cannot sustain himself, and eliminate the possibility of extremist safe havens. This is a rational concept. The problem is that we're not sure our tactical actions can actually produce these effects—that is, we're not sure our resources, personnel, units, and capabilities can be combined along the lines of effort specified in doctrine to actually do the things that need to be done. This is the very opposite of Krepinevich's problem with Vietnam strategy.

As a peripheral but related note: it strikes me as very unlikely that Gentile adopted the "strategy of tactics" construction from Gray, whose use of the term is limited to approving references to Krepinevich. (The same is true, I think, of Owens.) In fact, the argument that Americans are or were ineffective counterinsurgents owing either to an unsuitable strategic or military culture (Gray) or misdirected doctrinal emphasis (Krepinevich) is one that Gentile rejects. He reads Brian Linn's The Echo of Battle as describing a "better way of American war" in the historical culture of the Army, one that is defined by "improvisation and practicality." (This has is apparently being thrown out, Gentile tells us, in favor of "the American Army's new way of war, otherwise called population-centric counterinsurgency.")

COL Gentile's fundamental inconsistency is here exposed: he rejects Krepinevich's critique while mirror-imaging it. He asserts that doctrinal bias and intellectual inertia have determined our strategic course in Iraq and Afghanistan while rejecting the very idea that our Vietnam strategy was shaped similarly. Gentile has cribbed Krepinevich's phrase while rejecting the very substance of what it means; this, he seems to be telling us, is actually a strategy of tactics. What Krepinevich was describing was a failure of strategy, but not the same kind!

I happen to share COL Gentile's conviction that both the Vietnam and Afghanistan (at least post-2002) wars were and are strategically senseless, which is part of the reason I'm so troubled by his insistence that the deus ex machina of "the American Army's new way of war, population-centric counterinsurgency" is what's responsible for our national foolishness. The strategy may be a poor one, and I think that it is. That's not because it lacks a theory of victory, though – i.e., because it's simply an assemblage of uncoordinated tactics – but because we aren't sure that the tactics are effective. If I developed a campaign plan to liberate Syria from the Asad regime by the destruction of its military through happy thoughts, text messages, and pictures of rainbows, the appropriate criticism would not be that I had employed a "strategy of tactics" but rather that my strategy was dependent on unproven and ineffective tactics. And don't get me wrong, COL Gentile levels this criticism at modern COIN doctrine, as well. "COIN doctrine directs an operational method based on uncertain causality and tactical actions of questionable effectiveness" may not roll off the tongue quite so easily, but it's much more accurate than this "COIN is a strategy of tactics" trope.

Understanding the kind of war on which we are embarked, etc.

The enemy in Afghanistan is resorting to IED attacks and other tactics that endanger civilians with increasing frequency, says the UN. That means we're winning, says LTG Scaparotti.

Spencer wrote about this yesterday; he was the one who asked the general how to square increasing civilian casualties with claims of coalition pogress. Here was Scaparotti's curious reply:

Their – you know, what little bit [civilian casualty numbers are] up – I would tell you that across the battlefield, when you look at Afghanistan, for instance, there is a freedom of action that [enemy forces] have, and it's particular places. But the freedom of action they show today is increasingly in IEDs and suicide bombing.  They don't have the capability to take us on directly.  In fact, they've changed their TTP because they're unable to do that with either us or the ANSF.  So I don't know that I would say it's an increase freedom of action.  I think it's actually reduced, and it's pushed them into a certain TTP, which isn't ideal. 

Now, in doing that, they've increased the use of suicide bombers, for instance.  And if I recall right – correctly – it was about – it went up about 80 percent. 

And those caused civilian casualties.  One in three of their IEDs -- or one in three of the civilians injured, Afghan civilians, were caused by, you know, enemy IEDs.   

So, you know, what I would focus on is the fact that you've got an enemy who has stated that he is concerned about the people, that he doesn't want to harm the people in his actions, and yet over these years you've seen a steady increase in that happening.  On the other hand, we work very, very hard to drive down the – you know, the civilian casualties.  It did go down 4 percent this year.  And we'll continue to try and drive that down as well.

So far as I can tell, this is an answer that is based wholly in an effort to support information operations objectives—that is, to communicate to the Afghan people that the enemy is a liar and does not care about their welfare. (I find it difficult to believe, though, that any significant portion of the Afghan populace is basing its judgment about whether to support the government or the insurgency on such pronouncements from ISAF.) I can't detect any operational logic in this statement.

Proponents of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan have consistently indicated that the level of civilian casualties inflicted by the enemy could serve as a useful metric for the performance of ISAF's mission. By their logic, the more effective coalition forces proved to be in keeping the enemy from killing civilians, the more likely those civilians would be to support the coalition's and the government's efforts to stamp out the insurgency. Even if protection of civilians is not an operational priority, there is an inescapable truth at the heart of this: if the enemy cannot operate, that constitutes some form of success.

LTG Scaparotti has turned this logic on its head by suggesting that the enemy's refusal to operate in ways that make him more prone to destruction by coalition forces constitutes progress for ISAF. This is exactly backwards. If coalition forces and the ANSF were proving capable of stanching IED attacks and suicide bombings, restricting the Taliban's opportunity and degrading his capability to terrorize individuals and plausibly challenge the government's claim to provide security to its people, then the enemy would be faced with a choice between two paths to continue his resistance: forego violence and enter the political process, or escalate violence and confront security forces directly. If the enemy cannot get at the people, he has to fight the army. That he chooses not to do so clearly demonstrates the very opposite of what LTG Scaparotti contends: the enemy is not desperate, he is not running out of options, he does not feel as though his freedom of action is reduced.

The general plainly recognizes this when he says that the enemy has been "pushed ... into a certain TTP, which isn't ideal." The enemy has adopted methods that render him less vulnerable to destruction by massed firepower, which isn't ideal. I completely agree.

Reliance on irregular tactics and terrorism allows the enemy to sustain his campaign against the Afghan government and its impermanent international enablers while reducing his exposure to their most effective weapons. It is inconceivable to me that there are people who still believe, at this late stage in the war, that the enemy's "refusal to come out and fight" constitutes success for the counterinsurgent.

The enemy doesn't need to fight us—he just needs to keep blowing people up.

Back to the future: time to renounce panaceas in Afghanistan

My friend Andrew Exum and two of his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security, retired LTG Dave Barno and Matthew Irvine, published a new paper this week calling for a shift in the primary emphasis of the Afghanistan war effort.

It is time for a change of mission in Afghanistan. U.S. and coalition forces must shift away from directly conducting counterinsurgency operations and toward a new mission of "security force assistance": advising and enabling Afghan forces to take the lead in the counterinsurgency fight.

This change, the authors suggest, is necessary to solidify security gains made by coalition forces in recent years and ensure the continued protection of Western interests after NATO forces leave the country. While the report marks an analytical step forward, environmental and institutional constraints are likely to blunt the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions if not block their enactment altogether. It's difficult to escape the conclusion that what passes for creativity in our contemporary efforts to "save the war" has in fact come as much too little, and far too late.

A simple rendering of the report's main argument goes as follows: of the several courses of action available to U.S. forces between now and their ultimate withdrawal date in 2014, the one most likely to produce lasting positive effects entails an immediate, aggressive, and committed effort to increase the capability of Afghan forces. The other alternatives are presented as unpalatable caricatures: 1) continued emphasis on coalition-led counterinsurgency operations through 2014, then sudden and complete cessation of combat activities by NATO forces and transition to predictably incompetent ANSF; 2) unilateral abandonment of the agreed-to drawdown timeline and indefinite continuation of the presently inconclusive western-led status quo; and 3) a rapid and immediate withdrawal of all coalition forces, leaving 2015 Afghanistan both bereft of capable security forces and denied the potential security gains from 36 more months of sustained NATO counterinsurgency operations. The authors assert that their preferred course "will protect long-term U.S. security interests without a never-ending commitment of immense U.S. resources":

[W]e believe that the most prudent option for U.S. policymakers is to adhere to the Lisbon framework for transition in Afghanistan and accelerate the change in mission. By doing so, the United States and its allies will have more time and resources to support the ANSF ahead of the coming transition in 2014, increasing their capabilities and providing vital support as they take ownership of the fight.

Considering they've characterized the other options as expensive, slow failure; very expensive, very slow failure; and inexpensive, rapid failure, I don't suppose we're left with much choice.

A great deal of hay has been made over the past 48 hours of the fact that Exum was a vociferous advocate for escalation back in 2009, when the president grudgingly accepted GEN McChrystal's proposal for a so-called "fully-resourced counterinsurgency campaign." His many critics imply that Andrew should be embarrassed, should show some shame, should prostrate himself before the we-knew-better masses and ritually cleanse his analytical sins. As they would have it, he is advocating in 2011 for a transition that would've been similarly effective two years ago, and which would've saved lives (and billions) to boot.

Bollocks. The war is not the same. Afghanistan is not the same. America is not the same. I was a critic of escalation in 2009; my views are unchanged with hindsight. It simply does not follow, however, that the historical fact of escalation is irrelevant to the operational and political context of today.

That said: this should've happened two years ago.

Announcing his decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, the president said that those forces would "increase our ability to train competent Afghan Security Forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans." The Army had started deploying specially augmented brigades to Afghanistan to focus on the train-advise-assist mission. When a brigade from the 82d Airborne was tapped as the first of these, CNAS honcho John Nagl told the Washington Post that compared to previous SFA efforts, "the change couldn't be more dramatic." So one might fairly wonder why Barno, Exum, Irvine, and even Nagl are now essentially telling us that what Afghanistan needs is a fully resourced security force assistance campaign.

They know the answer, of course: COIN advocates insisted the 2009 escalation would be accompanied by a renewed commitment to generating and training capable Afghan security forces, but it didn't happen; the "surge" in combat and stability operations instead starved those efforts of the personnel, resources, and command emphasis they needed to succeed in parallel. The authors have diagnosed the problem properly, though they don't clearly state this conclusion. Instead we get this:

Evidence suggests that some ANSF units are failing today because they commonly operate in the field without embedded, continuous coalition support. Despite the importance of the security force assistance mission, no senior U.S. headquarters, organization or senior commander is currently dedicated to advising Afghan forces. (One can only observe the way in which the initial training of Afghan forces improved after the appointment of a U.S. three-star general officer in 2009 to appreciate the effect organizational changes can have on priorities -- and results.)

Another excerpt is more to the point: "Because U.S. units can execute counterinsurgency operations better and faster than their Afghan counterparts," the authors write, "they are continuing to do so despite the looming transition." Don't let the obfuscatory syntax fool you: individual units are not making this decision for themselves. ISAF has made a determination to focus on combat operations, to try make as much progress as quickly as possible, and then to transition to ANSF "lead" when the Lisbon deadline hits.

The authors can point to an improvement in initial training thanks to reorganization and re-prioritization, but that, too, came at a cost: by focusing on the rapid expansion of the ANSF to meet benchmarks on the "transition" timeline, the coalition tacitly accepted that the Afghan combat formations they stood up would be of inferior quality. The training and advisory effort became a sideshow, a supporting line of operation to the main effort of Western-led counterinsurgency: ISAF leadership knew that "showing progress in the training mission" would be essential to sustaining political support for the campaign, and that 350,000 mediocre troops brief better than 100,000 capable ones. Combine that with the reality that even exceptionally capable host-nation forces would still require the combat support provided by American enablers -- aviation, precision fires, communications, medical support, and so on -- and it's easy to see why quality and competence were sacrificed to rapid expansion. But let there be no doubt: that's what happened.

The paper's authors' bemoan the fact that the American military lacks "the institutional roots to support specialized combat advisor capabilities," as if this is the reason ISAF chose to emphasize initial training over embedded mentoring and assistance. Even if directed at general purpose forces (and ignoring SOF), it's a misleading and inaccurate suggestion: the Army and especially the Marine Corps may be resistant to specialization, but recent U.S. experience in Iraq forced the institutions to adapt. It is patently false that "neither service has devoted a portion of its U.S.-based force structure to training, organizing, equipping, or championing the delivery of dedicated advise and assist capabilities to Afghanistan." The Army dedicated U.S.-based force structure to training combat advisors in 2007; that function has been institutionalized and continues to this day. The 162nd Infantry Training Brigade (and before that, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division) has prepared individuals for deployment as part of Military Transition Teams and with dedicated advisory brigades (called Advise and Assist Brigades in Iraq and Modular Brigades Augmented for Security Force Assistance -- a tellingly short-lived designation -- in Afghanistan). Upon the transfer of SFA training mission (pdf) from Ft. Riley to Ft. Polk in 2009, the commander of its new home even remarked that the Army sought to avoid "let[ting] the good functions and training and art and science of this task atrophy and die out like we did after Vietnam -- the last time we made a concerted effort to train combat advisors." Much of this "art and science" was codified in doctrine with the Army's publication in May 2009 of FM 3-07.1 Security Force Assistance (pdf), an imperfect manual that nonetheless provided tactical guidance both to AABs and to individual combat advisors. This institutional commitment of more than two years ago looks very much like the one Barno, Exum, and Irvine would like the Army to make today.

The purported institutional shortcomings highlighted in the paper -- such as a failure to offer sufficient promotion and assignment incentives to encourage the most capable officers to volunteer for advisory roles -- were considered and addressed years ago, when the U.S. military first had this conversation with itself during the Iraq war. Most were discarded as unworkable or counterproductive, as was the transformational fantasy of a permanent advisor corps. (Consider the budget and force structure debate currently taking place in Washington, but imagine it's happening in a world where the Army's end-strength includes the equivalent of two-dozen infantry battalions dedicated solely to training and advising foreign military forces -- a task they're not even legally permitted to perform outside of war zones and other exceptional circumstances. Who do you think is first on the chopping block?) The Marine Corps has continued to provide capable personnel for MTTs, while the Army has supported the training and advisory mission through the creation and deployment of MB-SFAs.

This is not a service problem. This is a combatant command problem. It's not a matter of force generation, but force employment. When things went bad in the Arghandab River Valley as the president was finalizing plans for escalation, U.S. commanders threw 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment into the breach to replace Harry Tunnel's Stryker brigade and sustain counterinsurgency operations. Back to COIN for 2/508 -- one of the battalions of the 82d's SFA brigade, whose deployment for the train-advise-assist mission John Nagl had lauded mere months before.

Recognizing that a continuation of the status quo was unsustainable and unlikely to be effective, the U.S. faced very much the same set of questions in Afghanistan in 2009 as it had in Iraq in 2006. Was it still possible to accomplish American objectives? Could more troops or a new concept of operations improve the situation? Would precipitous transition to host-nation lead be too dangerous, risking the collapse of indigenous forces and jeopardizing U.S. interests? In 2006, a very serious and intelligent man wrote a memo for the president entitled "Transitioning to an Indirect Approach in Iraq" (pdf) in which he argued that success was still attainable if lead security responsibility were transferred to Iraqi forces. I want to share with you the meat of his argument, so I hope you'll forgive me quoting at length.

Given Iraq's unsettled politics, it is highly unlikely that American forces, even with growing Iraqi security force assistance, will be able to defeat the insurgency within the next 2-3 years. The current level of insurgency, moreover, is likely to be insensitive across a wide range of force levels. The assertion by many critics that more troops in 2003 could have nipped this insurgency in the bud or fundamentally altered its course are not credible. Likewise, increading the number of U.S. troops now is highly unlikely to be decisive. The insurgents will still control the initiative, and they can always temporarily decline to fight. Insufficient intelligence and continued strong support for the insurgency among the Sunni population will limit the strategic success of any near-term efforts. As long as the political grievances fueling the insurgency remain, the insurgency will remain.

Because of the direct approach's inability to produce decisive near-term results and its increasing cost, the longer we stay with it, the more we place our long-term goals in Iraq at risk. Continuing with this approach, moreover, does not play to American strengths. The insurgents and the states supporting them (i.e., Iran and Syria) retain the strategic initiative in Iraq, while we suffer from significantly reduced strategic freedom of action.

It is imperative that we accelerate our shift to an indirect approach, with Iraqis in the lead and Americans in support. Transitioning to an indirect approach will require that we begin and continue the drawdown of U.S. forces while the insurgency is still raging. It will require additional resources for Iraqi security forces. Most importantly, we must make our stated "main effort" our actual main effort.

Mike Vickers was not alone in his analysis, but the president disagreed. How much of the improvement in Iraq is attributable to his decision to escalate is and will continue to be a matter of debate. Perhaps the indirect approach, too, would have succeeded, but we can't know.

The same is now true in Afghanistan. The "change of mission" advocated by Barno, Exum, and Irvine might have been successful in 2009, with five years to take hold and show progress. (It seems unlikely to me, but I'm skeptical about our "strategy" and the no-safe-havens approach to antiterterrorism.) Or perhaps the course the president did choose for Iraq would have been similarly successful in Afghanistan had it been implemented with the "surge": a comprehensive foreign internal defense campaign that included elements of U.S.-led counterinsurgency and stability operations, SFA, and broad based nation assistance that cemented the authority of the legitimate civilian government and helped enable the exercise of that authority. (I doubt that, too, but it's a thought.) Instead what we got was a shadow of that, a mockery, an example of what happens when military leaders commit wholesale to a mission their government is too afraid to definitively refuse.

U.S. commanders are reaping what their predecessors have sown: giving short shrift to the essential enabling efforts that should have been a key part of their campaign plans, trying to "move the needle," show progress, and convince an indifferent public, an unimpressed president, and perhaps themselves that a war without a plausible strategic rationale is worth waging into infinity. SFA will not save us now. It is likely to be less effective than it would have been if comprehensively administered in 2009 by embedding advisors along with the troop surge, as this would've allowed the U.S.-ANA relationship to proceed along roughly the same path as the U.S.-IA relationship did before: first with U.S. units leading operations and owning battlespace, supported by host nation units with embedded American advisors; then partnered operations, where a more capable host nation unit with U.S. advisors owns its own battlespace and functions as part of a combined operation with U.S. forces; then eventually to host nation lead, where U.S. combat formations no longer operate independently and American advisors really live up to their name -- advising their foreign counterparts in independent operations as opposed to teaching and coaching them. This model may be followed to good effect in a few key districts, but reduced operational tempo with the beginning of the troop withdrawal makes it an unlikely template for the entire country.

Just the same: no matter how capable Afghan security forces may be today or in 2014 or in 2024, there will come a day where the western world forgets that it once seemed normal to spend billions of dollars sustaining an army in a place where a dead terrorist used to live. This day can perhaps be delayed, but it can't be avoided.

All of this may sound like I disagree with the paper's bottom line, but I don't. "By continuing to place its forces in the lead in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, the United States is ultimately working against its long-term security interests." This is almost certainly true. Look back at what Vickers wrote to the president five years ago: "Because of the direct approach's inability to produce decisive near-term results and its increasing cost, the longer we stay with it, the more we place our long-term goals in Iraq at risk." Combat operations in Afghanistan are costing a fortune, depleting our force, wearing out equipment, and reducing our strategic flexibility to little evident effect. Anything that constitutes a step away from that -- even if it's still expensive and unlikely to succeed -- is something I can get behind.