Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Newt Gingrich and editorial page editor of the Washington Times, has a new book out that, among other things, argues for reinstatement of the military draft.  Unlike liberals like Charlie Rangel or even centrist Phil Carter, he doesn’t do so on the basis of “fairness” or spreading the burden but rather on the sheer need for manpower.

John Hawkins interviews him. Here’s an excerpt:

Let me give you, to me, the biggest argument and that is the almost 4500 troops that have been killed in Iraq and more thousands than that that have been seriously injured. All of that came after we defeated the Republican Guard. Rumsfeld was correct that we only needed about 80,000 troops to knock off the Republican Guard. They were wrong to think that we could occupy that country with only those 80,000 or 100,000 troops. In Germany, after WW2, we flooded the zone. When the 80,000 elite forces finished their fighting, we needed to flood the zone with 300,000 or 400,000 ground occupying troops. Every village, every main intersection, every building guarded — the resistance would never have arisen. We would have saved 4000 lives if we’d had enough troops. We sacrificed lives.

[...]

This was a relatively small war. Now, what happens if the Jihadis overthrow the Pakistani government — a very unstable government. …They have nuclear weapons. If we want to stop the Jihadis from getting nuclear weapons, we’d have to go into Pakistan and try to stop that. We don’t have remotely the number of troops to do that.

Moreover, as the years unfold, according to the intelligence community — the day before I sent my manuscript to the printer — we’re likely to have resource wars over water and oil in the coming decades. China already has a lot of troops in Sudan guarding their oil fields right now.

So, I think it’s obvious that we can’t raise enough troops by the voluntary method. I’ve got a young son, a new 2nd Lieutenant in the Army — I’ve met his friends, …I’ve talked with the generals, and I know how wonderful the volunteer service is, but there just aren’t enough of them.

Blankley, with whom I’ve had conversations and genuinely like and respect, is almost certainly right that, if we need a radically larger force than we now have for some future contingency, we’re not going to be able to achieve it through the current system.  But a slightly plausible future emergency strikes me as a weak rationale for a definite present infringement on personal liberty and weakening of the morale of a military that he admits is superb.

Beyond that, the most manpower intensive missions are those like we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan: post-combat or combat-plus operations like COIN and SASO that require a large, continuing presence.  The scenarios he envisions would likely be met with massive aerial strikes, not infantrymen fighting door-to-door.

Photo: Sharing Miracles.

Michael J. Totten weighs in on the  Iraq War is Over and We Won argument and decides that, while he’s “reluctant” to answer that question in the affirmative, “The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. ”

[Michael] Yon is braver than the rest of us for declaring the war over, but it’s important to understand that there are no final battles in counterinsurgencies and it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact dates when wars like this end. The anti-Iraqi insurgency – a war-within-a-war – really is effectively over. As long as another such war-within-a-war doesn’t break out, Yon will appear more perceptive than the rest of us in hindsight when the currently low levels of violence finally do taper off into relative insignificance.

The problem, which I noted in my post on the subject, is that, given the possibility that the Mahdi Army could end its ceasefire at any moment or another spectucular event could reignite sectarian fighting (Totten notes that there have been zero such fatalities since April), there’s no way to distinguish a lull from closure.  He observes that NATO has not fully secured Kosovo nine years after the end of major combat operations there, and that conflicts in Lebanon, Algeria, and Palestine have an on again, off again nature that’s almost wholly unpredictable.

What most of us still think of as “war” in Iraq is, at this point, a rough and unfinished peacekeeping mission. Whether it is officially over or not, it has certainly been downgraded to something else, and it’s about time more analysts and observers are willing to say so.

The problems with that are manifold.  While there’s relative peace at the moment, there has been no cessation of hostilities.  Terrorist attacks continue, obviously.  More importantly, it’s not even clear who the parties are who would have the ability to negotiate and sign an armistice.  It simply doesn’t feel like a peacekeeping mission.  Until we’ve got a better handle on Muqtada al-Sadr and company, it’s just too early  to break out the blue berets.

Moreover, we haven’t achieved our mission.   Once Saddam’s regime was toppled and it was clear that his WMD program was more notional than real, the tangible goals of the war were achieved.  We’ve remained in the last four plus years, and took the lion’s share of our casualties, fighting for something more abstract and elusive: a stable democracy capable of governing a unified Iraq without our assistance.

Security is a precondition for that goal, which was the impetus behind the Surge.  But, thus far, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that the Maliki government has built much sectarian consensus.   Elections are scheduled for October 1st that could conceivably be a major step in that direction but, alas, they can’t even agree on the rules for said election.  Of course, there’s only so much that the United States can do to move that process along.  Horses, water, and all that.  There’s even less that the United States military can do.

If  the primary purpose of American combat troops at this stage is simply continuing to give the Iraqi politicians breathing room to build consensus, then Totten’s right: it is mostly a stability and security operation at this point more than a traditional counterinsurgency.

Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said this yesterday:

“I won’t go so far as to say that progress in Iraq from a military perspective has reached a tipping point or is reversible — it has not, and it is not,” Mullen told a Pentagon press conference.  “But security is unquestionably and remarkably better. Indeed, if these trends continue I expect to be able early this fall to recommend to the secretary and the president further troop reductions,” he said.

At the same time, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was warning against the militarization of foreign policy and stressing the need for civilian leadership under the State Department and moving the military to a support role.

So maybe, just maybe, we’re making the transition from Thomas Barnett’s Leviathan force to the SysAdmin force.  Time will tell whether we’ll need to switch back into kinetic mode.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Timothy Kingston

Joshua Keating reports on some interesting discussions at a high level foreign policy conference. Of particular interest is Anthony Cordesman’s contention that the term “counterinsurgency” ought to be abandoned altogether in favor of “armed nation-building” and his unconventional thinking on the way in which the operation in Iraq is impacting what is generally thought to be a more important one in Afghanistan.

If we can move forward in Iraq in ways that seem possible, we may be down to 10 brigrades by 2009. You can’t suddenly move those brigades to Afghanistan. They require retraining. They will have to be re-equipped and restructed to fight a different kind of war on different terrain, dealing with a different culture with different values.

I also have to say that while troops are important… far more important are the aid teams and advisory teams… rapid turnover of deployments in a country where personal relationships are even more important than they are in Iraq, the inability to take aid workers out into the field where they are really needed… The problem isn’t troop levels and it won’t be solved by moving out of Iraq.”

That’s right, I think. I’ve been arguing since the early 1990s that the issue isn’t the size of our force but its alignment. While we’ve made significant adjustments since then, we still have far too few of the kinds of troops (linguists, MPs, civil affairs, etc.) necessary for non-traditional military operations, whatever term is currently in vogue for them.

Interestingly, though, Josh also reports that “Major General Charles J. Dunlap of the U.S. Air Force, for instance, worried that an overemphasis on counterinsurgency was leading the U.S. to ignore the possibility of warfare with a ‘peer country.’” Dunlap, who interestingly is a lawyer (indeed, the #2 JAG) is also one of the military’s foremost thinkers on force structure and civil-military relations. Indeed, I was reading then-Colonel Dunlap’s classic Parameters think piece “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012” around the same time I started calling for more MPs and so forth.

I continue to believe that the rise of a “peer competitor” is incredibly unlikely. But people who have thought that have been wrong many times in the past, with severe consequence.

On the nomenclature issue, I both agree that “COIN” is too narrowly focused but think “armed nation building” is problematic. Stability and Support Operations (SASO) seems to cover the gamut nicely without the baggage. Then again, there’s something to having an oxymoron, “armed nation building,” to remind you that it’s generally a bad idea.

Don Rumsfeld spent six years leading a transformation of the United States military to fight modern conflicts. His successor, Bob Gates, is going light years beyond that. Peter Spiegel and Julian Barnes have the report.

Absorbing the lessons of a troubled war, U.S. military officials have begun an intense debate over proposals for a sweeping reorganization of the Army to address shortcomings that have plagued the force in Iraq and to abandon some war-fighting principles that have prevailed since the Cold War. On one side of the widening debate are officers who want many Army units to become specialized, so that entire units or even divisions are dedicated to training foreign militaries. On the other are those who believe that military units must remain generalists, able to do a wide range of skills well.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates is expected to weigh in today in a major address in which he will warn that the Army is unlikely to face a conventional war in the future and must reorganize to fight in unconventional conflicts. According to senior Pentagon officials who have been briefed on the speech, Gates will not take a hard position in the debate over training foreign militaries but is expected to emphasize that the task is important and could prevent future wars. His comments are expected to accelerate the debate within the Army about how best to prepare for the next phase of the Iraq war and for future conflicts.

Gates also will single out the need for changes in Army personnel policies to better recognize and reward young officers who show promise in less traditional areas, including those skilled in foreign languages and in advising foreign forces.

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The view of the Army in the current debate is radically different than under the previous Defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld advocated a smaller Army with faster, more technological units that did not participate in nation-building activities. Rumsfeld considered training foreign militaries to be the duty of small numbers of special operations forces, not conventional Army units.

[...]

Most officers believe the Army will need to focus on training other foreign militaries in years to come, both in Iraq and in other countries. Some officers, including one of the Army’s most prominent counterinsurgency theorists, believe a designated force of trainers, or “advisor corps,” is needed. But others, including Gates’ senior military advisor, oppose creating specialized units. They argue that a more effective strategy would be to ensure that all military leaders are able to train security forces.

[...]

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who oversees the Army schools and research institutes at Leavenworth, said the proposals would create a dedicated unit of trainers who could be assigned to each of the commanders of the worldwide regions. “The concept here is a very specific focus: They do not do direct action; they do not command and control combat forces; they are not a combat force,” Caldwell said. “Their mission is to do security-force assistance.”

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The leading advocate of establishing a stand-alone advisor corps within the Army is Lt. Col. John Nagl, a co-author of the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual who is considered a rising star within the service. In an article published in a policy journal in June, Nagl, who served as an operations officer in a battalion in Iraq three years ago, proposed a permanent force of 20,000 advisors. “It requires a different focus in training. It requires a different mind-set,” Nagl said in an interview. “Forces practicing advisory skills also need a particular way of looking at the world.”

As the number of combat troops in Iraq goes down, the demand for advisors will increase, Nagl expects. Under current plans, the Army’s strategy to expand by 65,000 soldiers would add new combat troops to traditional infantry brigades. However, some have argued that these new soldiers could be assigned to the advisory and training missions as well. “If we need advisory teams for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, it makes sense to build this force structure permanently,” Nagl said.

In his speech, Gates is expected to emphasize that such training missions could prevent future wars. The senior Pentagon official said Gates still believed the Army should continue training for conventional wars — skills that have begun to atrophy as it focuses on counterinsurgency missions in Iraq. But by emphasizing training and advisory missions, he appears to be aligning himself with reformers like Nagl. “We don’t want to do the fighting; we want our friends to do the fighting,” said Nagl, who trains military advisors at Ft. Riley, Kan. “And the better our training teams are, the more rapidly we increase the abilities of our friends and our allies.”

But the proposal has sparked disagreement. In an article in the current issue of the academic Army journal Military Review, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former day-to-day commander in Iraq who is now Gates’ military assistant, argued against the creation of a dedicated advisor corps.

[...]

“We simply don’t have the resources to divide the military into ‘combat’ and ’stability’ organizations,” he wrote. “Instead we must focus on developing full-spectrum capabilities across all organizations in the armed forces.”

The articles in question: Nagl’s “Institutionalizing Adaptation: It’s Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps” (Center for New American Security, June 2007) and Chiarelli’s “Learning From Our Modern Wars: The Imperatives of Preparing for a Dangerous Future” [PDF] (MR, September-October 2007).

This is a longstanding debate, dating at least to the early 1990s peacekeeping missions in Somalia and elsewhere. The most famous extension of this argument is Thomas Barnett’s proposal to create a Leviathan Force and a Systems Administration (SysAdmin) force in The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. T.X. Hammes seems to take the “train everybody” view in The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century.

My preference, dating back to my graduate school days, is something in between: A downsizing of the combat arms assets on active duty and a radical increase in the number of troops equipped for Stability and Support Operations (SASO): military police, special forces, psychological operations, Middle East linguists, and the like.

Regardless, though, we need to revamp the personnel system to reward taking the less glamorous assignments like advisor duty and teaching. Currently, these are viewed as career killers, or at least a path to retirement at lieutenant colonel. That Nagl is widely considered a rising star is an encouraging sign in that regard.

I have referred many times over the years to a 1992 Parameters piece written by then-Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” It was an instant classic and its lessons remain as important as ever.

I had presumed Dunlap had long since retired but he has been promoted to Major General and is the Air Force’s Deputy Judge Advocate General. I discovered this because he published a piece in yesterday’s Washington Times entitled, “Lawfare Amid Warfare,” arguing that we are giving our enemies an advantage by setting rules of engagement to protect civilians that go well beyond the requirements of international law.

Of course, it is not illegal to establish a policy of “zero tolerance” of civilian casualties even though the law does not require it. Doing so, however, creates unnecessary and often counterproductive results. Among other things, the unrealistic and unachievable expectations produced stimulate a sense of betrayal when such casualties occur, and — despite all efforts — they will always occur in war.

Moreover, foreclosing an attack simply because of civilians in the area may, ironically, condemn many more innocents to be victimized in a future rampage of gunfire, improvised explosive devices or suicide bombing by the terrorists that escape. Though excessive civilian losses must always be avoided, it may very well be more humane approach to kill bad guys when the opportunity presents itself even though some civilian losses may also occur.

Establishing a paradigm of “zero tolerance” for casualties may well come back to haunt us in yet another way. Specifically, it encourages the enemy to do exactly what we do not want them to do: surround themselves with innocent civilians so as to virtually immunize themselves from attack. It creates a sanctuary that the bad guys are not entitled to enjoy, and sends them exactly the wrong message.

He’s right, of course, that war requires making hard choices and that collateral damage may be the least bad option in many cases. At the same time, though, while correctly assessing the politics of failing to live up to unrealistic policies, he seems to ignore the politics of the alternative. The bottom line is that, whatever international law might allow, any innocent casualties in a counterinsurgency – counterterrorist – counterguerrilla – stability and security operation presents the enemy with a propaganda advantage.

Perhaps because he is an Air Force officer, it seems not to occur to General Dunlap that we can simultaneously “kill bad guys when the opportunity presents itself” and protect innocents by choosing a means of attack other than an air strike. Sending in a commando team can achieve both ends, owing to the more precise nature of that attack. Obviously, commandos are also more vulnerable than bomber pilots. But, as Michael Walzer and others have argued, soldiers have a duty to protect innocent lives even though it means accepting greater personal risks.

Air power, including missile strikes, are oftentimes much more effective than ground attacks. Certainly, countless thousand American soldiers and Marines lived to fight another day because of the invaluable contribution made by military aviation. That said, it has little application in COIN/SASO, where the target set is almost invariably tiny and surrounded by noncombatants.