January 19, 2007
Warblogging Department
Iraq: Why We Didn't Win When We Won
President Bush has offered his plan for Iraq, and in fielding criticism of it, Press Secretary Tony Snow has said anybody who didn't like Bush's plan should offer a better one. I'm planning to answer that challenge in a series of modest proposals. This is just background.
Jennifer the Feral Genius wrote in her blog:
...I can’t quite bring myself to believe we’re going to hit Iran. I’d never be able to defend this position in an actual debate, though, because my reasoning amounts to me waving my hands in the air and sputtering “We can’t! Our military's stretched as it is! We don't have the ability!" ...
It depends what we're trying to do. Do we need to conquer and rebuild Iran? Or do we just need to damage it a bit? Building an entire democratic nation is hard, but our military finds it pretty easy to hurt people and break things.
Military planners differentiate between control and denial. It's the difference between using an asset yourself and preventing your enemy from using it. For example, if your enemy has people and supplies crossing a bridge over a river, it may be enough to simply blow it up with a guided bomb from an aircraft, thus denying it to your enemy. But if you want to use the bridge yourself, you probably need to capture it with ground troops. Control is a lot more difficult than denial, and it's important not to confuse the two.
Arguably, that's been the problem with the war in Iraq. Denying control of Iraq to Saddam Hussein was easy. Controlling it ourselves...that's a lot harder.
(Al-Qaeda has the same problem. They have been able to deny us complete control of Iraq, but captured Al-Qaeda communications indicate they are frustrated by our ability to keep them from gaining control.)
As I understand it, the Cold War shaped the U.S. military to perform a role that was ultimately defensive in nature. We expected an attack on Europe from the Soviet Union, and our military goal was to thwart that attack. To do that, we were going to counterattack and destroy the military forces of the Soviet Union. This counterattack would almost certainly have involved an invasion of the Soviet Union, but our invasion was only for the purpose of stopping their invasion. We had no designs on Soviet land, people, or natural resources. Our goal was to stop the invasion, not take over the country. The U.S. military is designed to attack our enemies but not to conquer them.
By 1990, our military had evolved to to perform this role very well. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we counterattacked into Iraq and destroyed much of the Iraqi army in only a couple of months.
Note that when we re-invaded Iraq in 2003 we continued to use the terminology of defense. A "preemptive" attack is a counterattack that is launched to stop an enemy attack before it starts. During the Cold War, if we had seen the Soviet army massing for an invasion of Europe, we might have decided to preempt that attack by attacking first. In Iraq, our counterattack was nominally intended to preempt terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons.
By this time, our military had become even more effective at destroying enemy forces, and within three weeks the Iraqi army was destroyed or driven from the field of battle.
President Bush has taken a lot of abuse over the "Mission Accomplished" banner, but in many ways it was accurate. U.S. military forces exist in their current form for the purpose of destroying other nations' military forces, and by that standard, they had accomplished their mission.
Unfortunately, destroying the Iraqi army was not the only thing we had planned to do, but the U.S. military wasn't designed for nation building.
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