The Wilson Quarterly: The Expeditionary Imperative
Author(s): John A. Nagl
Original Post: The Expeditionary Imperative
Type: Journal Article
Date: 01/20/2009
Winter 2009 - Georges Clemenceau, France’s indomitable prime minister during World War I, famously remarked that “war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.” He had reason to know: The fighting on the western front cost the lives of more than two million of his soldiers, exhausting the French nation for generations and ending in a peace that turned out to be only the prelude to an even more costly war.
If Clemenceau’s words were true a century ago, they are even more applicable today. Wars of this century are not fought by masses of people but, in British general Rupert Smith’s phrase, “among the peoples.” The counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are battles for the allegiance
of local populations, without whose support or at least compliance insurgents cannot survive. In our contemporary struggles, ideas and economic development are as important as heavy artillery was in Clemenceau’s time.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, demonstrated the enormous power our own technology could have when directed against us by a small group of people driven by a single powerful idea. Unfortunately, our response to that attack has focused disproportionately on military means, and these
have not been able to affect the underlying dynamics of this new and most serious kind of war. The rapid defeat of Sad-dam Hussein’s regime turned to ashes when misguided policy decisions threw gasoline on the embers of a nascent Sunni insurgency. America’s counterattack in Afghanistan, with its memorable images of bearded U.S. Special Forces soldiers on horseback calling in precision air strikes against the Taliban, seemed to show that our military could adapt to new realities. But while the Taliban quickly fell, Osama bin Laden escaped an undermanned Army cordon in the mountains
of Afghanistan, and a stubborn and strengthening insurgency there now stymies the best efforts of our national security establishment, which is in the midst of conducting at least three separate full-scale policy reviews to find a way out of another seemingly endless war.
Read the full article here.
Topic(s): Iraq, Terrorism & Irregular Warfare, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security Strategy
Project(s): Afghanistan, Future of the U.S. Military, The Iraq Inheritance, Civilian Capacity
People: Dr. John A. Nagl
