Center for a New American Security

My friend Issandr, who knows me well enough to know how easily I can be baited, sent along this silly article in MERIP on FM 3-07, Stability Operations.

There are so many ways in which this article is bollixed. Let's start with this peach of a sentence:

FM 3-07, Stability Operations signifies the success of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon and Bush-Cheney White House at legitimating a project that was anathema to many officers a decade prior.

Okay, I know that if you don't like something, it's always easy to link it to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith to convince others not to like it as well. I do it all the time myself. But anyone who has closely followed defense debates of the past seven years or read any of the many accounts of the run-up to the Iraq War understands that, if anything, the emergence of doctrine such as FM 3-24 and FM 3-07 represents an explicit rejection of the facile understanding of military power embraced by the neoconservatives. War ain't easy. It is, in fact, the realm of chance. The very fact that military force alone could not bring about quick victories in complex environments such as Iraq and Afghanistan necessitated doctrine such as FM 3-07 and FM 3-24. (The fact that our inter-agency was ill-prepared to support the military in such environments was another reason.)

Then there's the author's whole problem of taking operational doctrine and claiming it represents some tectonic shift in U.S. policy rather than the efforts of pragmatic military officers to find solutions to the aforementioned complex operating environments in which U.S. soldiers -- not to mention thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians -- are dying because our existing doctrine doesn't give operational and tactical commanders a clue as to how to address such environments.

The author of this article reminds me of the Bob Dylan song Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues in which the singer sees communists and the Red Menace everywhere -- even in the red stripes of the American flag.

If you are predisposed to see imperialism everywhere, you'll find plenty of it in the operational doctrine of the U.S. military. My advice to the author is to not stop at FM 3-07. Check out all our doctrine for conventional combat operations as well. All of it -- every word of every sentence -- is fundamentally about the application of military power in the service of political ends. If you see FM 3-07 as imperialist, you'll find lots more to fill articles in MERIP in the rest of the Reimer Library.

In spite of it all, the author raises a good question that has absolutely nothing to do with operational doctrine. Should the U.S. Army be doing stability operations in the first place? Well this is indeed a good question. But that's a question for the politicians, not the military. If the political decision-makers draft policy using the U.S. Army for imperialist ends, then the means also become imperialist. If the politicians use the U.S. Army to fight fascism, well, then I guess our doctrine reverts back to being heroic. And if the officers of the U.S. Army say that "we don't do windows" and refuse to author any doctrine for nation-building and security sector reform and then the politicians decide that oh yes you do, then who is being irresponsible? Both parties, perhaps, but certainly the officer corps. What the author of this article doesn't understand is that while military officers don't decide how the U.S. military is to be employed, they do have a responsibility to ensure junior officers and their units are prepared for any foreseeable contingency. Even nation-building.

This mirrors a problem I had with Andrew Bacevich's thought-provoking new book.Bacevich suggests that because our COIN doctrine is rooted in the writings of Galula and Trinquier -- who were fighting dirty imperialist wars at the time they wrote their books -- our own doctrine is also by necessity dirty and imperialist. Well, no. That just doesn't wash logically. Operational doctrine is just that -- operational. You could apply Galula to a UN-sanctioned peace-keeping mission in Haiti, and there wouldn't be anything dirty or imperialist about that. (Well, not much anyway.)

Bacevich, though, does a better job than the author of this MERIP piece -- who seems like an intelligent guy, even if completely out of his element here -- at asking the big questions. These questions -- how are we to use our military, what is to be the aim of U.S. policy abroad, etc. -- are political in nature. They boil down to decisions that need to be made by politicians and the electorate. The military, meanwhile, concentrates on the operational and the tactical. (As Richard Betts points out, contemporary military operations are so complex and demanding they often prevent military officers from being good thinkers at even the strategic level.) I think that Bacevich, in fact, has in my opinion made the most cogent critique of COIN -- much more coherent than the criticisms offered by our friend Gian Gentile or Charlie Dunlap, for example -- in large part by focusing on the political questions at stake. They are the ones that matter.

This MERIP piece is just another example, I'm afraid, of what happens when a political scientist tries to arrive at broad conclusions about the military without the necessary familiarity and study required to do so.

UPDATE: Dave Dilegge and Janine Davidson get involved here, and Spencer Ackerman contributes his two cents here.