Redefining victory doesn't mean not winning

It appears that I may have made a bit of a bloomer with my last post on how DoD's coming age of austerity will redefine how we think about "victory". The catalyst of that post was an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter from this fall - and this is where I went off the rails a bit - that I complimented. I was and am aware that her piece was actually an argument for more military interventions for R2P or other such operations and that warfare as we've known it is dead based on the lessons observed since 2001. I could not disagree more and we'll talk about that in a just a minute. I approved of the piece because of the idea that we'll be looking to influence others with our military force, not decisively defeat and occupy other nations - I thought the idea of influence vice victory interesting and that we should expect to use limited means towards limited ends in the near future, but not for her reasons and not the interventions she suggests. Anyone who has read my writing here for the past two plus years should know I never buy into the "War and warfare have fundamentally changed!" bunk. The reality is that Dr. Slaughter's piece suggests just that, so I admit I oversold it. There are some good ideas in it though, that I don't think Dr. Slaughter necessarily intended, that lay the foundation for what I see as a flawed thesis. But we shouldn't throw out the good ideas because of the rest.

So what did I mean in my post? Sometimes others say what you mean better than yourself, so please go read Adam Elkus on There is No Substitute for Victory and Part II to that post as well as Dan Trombly at Slouching Towards Columbia. These are excellent posts on what victory actually means and contribute significantly towards this conversation. When I talked about redefining victory, I didn't intend to suggest that we will no longer look to decisively win whatever engagements we embark upon. That would be stupid - as Adam asks correctly, why use force if you don't intend to win? I intended this redefinition, in the next 10 to 15 years marked by limited resources, to show that we will most likely strive towards more limited military goals than we have in the past 10 years. That we'll have to move away from "winning" as a goal in itself and instead need to define what winning means very specifically in each operation or campaign. The former use of the term, such as a candidate or politician saying "We should give the generals what they need to win in Afghanistan" having no idea what the generals' concept of winning in Afghanistan actually is, is vapid and useless and all too prevalent.

This is what needs to stop - winning is not a political or policy objective in itself nor is it a military objective. Winning is what happens when the military succeeds in its operational objectives such as: destroy or defeat this force, protect these people, defend this place, whatever. Winning or victory is simply the military achieving its ends and we need to stop using these terms in lieu of describing what the hell we actually mean - at both the political, policy, strategic and tactical levels. So yes, our military should look to win whenever it's put on the field, no doubts about that but we should instead say what winning means.

The other side to my post was that we need to examine limited objectives for the limited use of military force in the next decade and a half (or so) based on scarce resources. We'll need the type of constrained ends exhibited during the Gulf War, not the ones used during the Iraq War. Scarcity should always drive the focused application of resources. We'll have to narrow the scope of our national security interests. We should hedge our expectations on what we can and want to achieve with military force. Where we may have once put lots of troops on the ground to achieve rather nebulous objectives we should look more to strategic raids and precision strikes for very specific results. We shouldn't be looking to fight and win wars, we should be looking to influence our adversaries with more moderated means. That will mean we need to really specify what our objectives are - what it means to win. I should stress that I foresee this being for a limited time only. The three major reasons we'll return to less limited ends:

1. A better economy means we have more revenue to spend on defense resources;
2. We become engaged in an existential conflict or limited conflict with a near-peer competitor; or
3. Some other conflict pops up that we can't possibly fathom at the moment during which we can't achieve or don't want to use limited objectives and need to escalate.

While we should see a change in what winning means (limited objectives), that change will be short-lived in the grand scheme of history. This does not mean a fundamental change to war - this will be a temporary blip in how we do business. This is where Slaughter and I disagree. At some point in the future we'll engage in a large-scale ground war and probably with convoluted and poorly expressed objectives; to think otherwise is pure fantasy. Until then we should think of (decisively!) influencing those we need to and not defeating them in the sense we've been thinking of these past 10 years. If you're reading this and thinking to yourself "no shit we're going to have less resources and will rely on more limited objectives," I urge you to think about the implications of this as we look to extricate ourselves out of Afghanistan and what "winning" is going to look like there in the midst of a U.S. defense drawdown. Winning there in 2014 is going to require some hyper-contortionism to ISAF's mission statement between now and then. So yeah, we're going to have to redefine victory.

ISAF Accentuating the Positive - To its Own Detriment

You know what depresses me? That after all of these years, chock full of debate and writing on counterinsurgency, that a guy with operational experience and as a media adviser to ISAF's Counterinsurgency Advisory & Assistance Team can be as wrong on counterinsurgency as this. Wow. It is a cheer-leading piece with poor understanding of counterinsurgency, the use of output metrics, and just really bad argumentation. McLaughlin is hardly the first to write such a post or make such statements, but he has me wondering why ISAF personnel and supporters keep doing this? How can they be so distant from reality and logic?

This topic relates to a post I had written a while ago on why senior military leaders have a propensity to infringe on civilian leaderships' roles and responsibilities. That is: a can-do attitude. But looking at the past as the author of the above-linked post did requires more than a can-do attitude. It requires an odd analysis of what has happened and what is happening to look at that data and say "hell yeah, we're going to be just fine." The only way I can explain it (and of course I may not be at all, but I'm sure as hell going to try) is that ISAF has adopted positive psychology in lieu of a strategy.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this relatively new field of psychology (and I'm only tangentially aware of it, not being a psychologist and all), it focuses on an individual's strengths and virtues to increase resiliency and functioning. The Army has embraced this theory in its counter-PTSD programs, so it isn't that much of a stretch to think that it has pervaded other aspects of the war effort. Begun at the University of Pennsylvania by Marty Seligman, positive psychology has patients just look at the good things (according to the website above, positive emotions, traits, and institutions) but makes no mention of any negative emotions, traits or institutions.

McLaughlin's piece is a great big positive psychology stream of consciousness. Look at all of the great stuff we've done! We've killed lots of bad guys! We've trained lots of Afghan security forces! They get together in front of an American's camera and talk about how much they want to change Afghanistan for better! Kabul is rebuilding itself! Canals! Progress! The future! Indeed, the Sun itself is rising on Afghanistan. This might work very well for soldiers to combat PTSD symptoms, but it's a shit way for a theater command headquarters to think about anything.

Military history is replete with stories of commanders and forces that did not understand their own weaknesses, when it is as important to understand weaknesses as much as strengths. I understand that it's hard for ISAF to look at its own weaknesses; especially as its greatest weakness - the inability to bring about a political solution to the war - is essentially out of its hands. Let's face it, without significant changes to the underpinning conditions (economic, political, geo-political, etc), ISAF can't stabilize Afghanistan on its own, if stability in the Western sense is possible at all.

If you think that last statement is correct - and I would guess that most serious analysts do think it's correct - then one can understand why ISAF has a positive psychological view of what it's doing. And I don't mean approve of this view, just understand. One hundred thousand troops are sent to a war they can't win (or at least have a marginally thin chance of it) - how do you keep the morale up? How do commanders substantiate the futility of what they're doing (futility in a strategic sense - not in the small actually positive things that do occur in Afghanistan)? The accentuate the positive. They look at the great things they've done, what is great about their organization and their values. The U.S. military did this in Iraq, too, in the dark days. It was hard to stomach, but one had to focus on something to substantiate why one was putting his or her life on the line for dubious and nearly impossible to reach objectives. So yeah, I get it - I understand why this is positive psychological worldview is pervasive at ISAF.

The biggest problem is that this positive outlook compounds the problems on the ground. It's one thing to accentuate the positive and it's another to ignore your problems. If you're in a nearly-to-totally hopeless situation (again, at the strategic level) on the ground, ignoring your problems leads to more problems. For example, it leads to horrible planning assumptions that we've seen and dissected at great length. It leads to counterproductive operations - such as razing villages or building roads for their own sake. It leads to plans and operations that focus on positive tactical gains that can be listed as successes at the cost of long-term, strategic success (this was the topic of a paper I wrote a few months ago that I'm waiting to be published soon.).

So ISAF - I get you're doing some great things - that may or may not be great in the bigger picture. But until you start telling me how things are going badly and what that means and how you're addressing it, your positive view of the war isn't helping anyone and is most likely hurting and killing more people than it's helping. Get a better sense of your problems, of your organization, and what you're doing and start talking about that. Dump this positive psychology stuff in conducting wars and embrace reality instead.