War with No Plan

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“When will they ever learn? When will they ev-er learn?” Pete Seeger, “Where have all the flowers gone?” (early 1960s)

The last major war the US actually won was Gulf I. Colin Powell, then the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs, was in charge. He won the war in 42 days. So Gulf I was not just the most stunningly successful of all our major wars. It was by far the shortest, including our War of Independence (six years), our Civil War (less than four) and the two World Wars.

How did Powell win so quickly? With a plan, a good plan. His plan became known as the “Powell Doctrine.” It had three simple parts: (1) a clear and achievable objective; (2) overwhelming force; and (3) a clear exit strategy. In other words, you have a simple goal; you go in with overwhelming force; and, as soon as you achieve your goal you get the hell out.

To provide the overwhelming force, President G.H.W. Bush took months to assemble a coalition of 35 allies. General Powell took five months to transport half a million troops and their armor into the theater. But they never invaded Baghdad. They never deposed Saddam Hussein. They didn’t mess with the extraordinary internal complexities of Iraqi society—a chimera that the Brits had sewn together from three warring ethnics groups (Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds) for the precise purpose of making it ungovernable save by external force.

Instead, Powell stuck to his plan. He expelled Saddam’s invasion forces from the Kuwaiti oil fields that they had occupied, destroyed most of their invasion force and its armor, declared victory and went home.

The contrast with Vietnam and our two most recent major wars is beyond dismal. We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly twenty years and in Iraq for over eighteen. The comparative tally of lives lost and money spent so far goes as follows:

War’s Unintended Consequences
War	US Deaths	Enemy/Other Deaths	US Cost	Duration
Vietnam	58,200	3.35 million	843.6 billion 2019 dollars	21 years
Afghanistan	2,300	74,100	$978 billion	20 years*
Iraq	4,586	208,547 civilians	$1.922 trillion	18 years*
Gulf I	148	26,000	102 billion 2019 dollars	0.12 years

* So far

A glance at this table tells you all you need to know about making war without a plan. When the Taliban take over Afghanistan, as most observers now expect within two years, we will have chalked up our second unambiguous loss, after Vietnam. While Iraq is still a stalemate and may remain so for some time, it’s clear that our messing around inside Iraq has benefitted no one more than Iran and its proxies inside and outside Iraq.

So who’s at fault? Is it our Pentagon? our men and women warriors? I don’t think so. They have the best equipment, the highest technology, and the most meticulous education and training of any military in the world. And despite all the attempts to politicize them, they still salute and obey their civilian leaders, as our Constitution requires.

The problem lies with those leaders. In Iraq they made war based on inaccurate intelligence (and a fact-free belief) that Saddam had WMD. In Afghanistan they made war to keep that nation from becoming a launching pad for terrorism—a goal that President Obama and his team achieved, insofar as involved Osama bin Laden, with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. After bin Laden’s execution, the goal of our long occupation of Afghanistan became as murky as that of our invasion of Iraq.

Sure, when you are attacked or invaded, you may not have a choice of when and how to go to war. But the last time we were attacked by a recognizable nation-state was at Pearl Harbor. No nation-state today, including North Korea, is going to repeat that atrocity against a force with a huge and accurate nuclear arsenal and a fleet of nuclear submarines ready to deliver incineration to any enemy, virtually anywhere in the world, in fifteen minutes or less.

So what we face for the indefinite future is optional wars, like our now-two-longest ones, in which we chose when, how, and whether to fight. Whenever we have a choice, we ought to have a plan before proceeding. And as I have argued previously, our debacles in Vietnam and Iraq push for a plan in which the professionals in the Pentagon, not amateur pols, at least buy in fully before we move. In Iraq and Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, that never happened.

The sad truth is that our pols and our system learned nothing from our catastrophic loss in Vietnam. Our Army and Marines learned how better to fight insurgencies. But our pols learned precisely the wrong lesson: they thought that an “all-volunteer” military, staffed by troops with little opportunity for other work and therefore little political power, would be easier to manipulate for political purposes without popular blowback.

They were right about the weak blowback, but they were dead wrong about the “wisdom” of using military force without a good plan. They seem to have missed the central lesson of the now 42-year-old Islamic Revolution in Iran: the force of religion, namely Islam, seems to be the only thing capable of removing a dictator in Islamic nations. As a result, our leaders have caused or accelerated the metastasis of extremist Islam in Saudi Arabia (Al Qaeda), Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and significant parts of Africa (Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, etc.).

We may never again have another SecDef as wrongheaded and bullheaded as Robert S. McNamara or the late Donald Rumsfeld. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any future SecDef, like Rumsfeld, insisting on sending less than half the force to occupy an entire country that the most experienced generals recommended. But I hope we won’t ever again take that risk.

It seems to me that the waiver Congress had to pass to let General Lloyd J. Austin III become SecDef was counterproductive. In an age when wars will almost always be optional, we want to have experienced military leaders bringing a touch of realism and experience into the political cauldrons of the Situation Room and the Oval Office, not to mention the personal experience of combat. We just need safeguards to insure than no military leader is promised the SecDef position in advance for political reasons. And as for General Austin himself, I am overjoyed to have a distinguished Black general and combat veteran in ultimate charge of rooting out extremism and white supremacy from our military.

Our Pentagon has five sides. Three could state the three points of the Powell Doctrine, chiseled in stone, like the legend “Equal Justice under Law” over our Supreme Court. The fourth side could give credit to Colin Powell for pointing out that, when you have a choice to go to war, you ought to have a good plan. And the fifth side, facing the White House, should bear a stone inscription to the effect that “This Means You!!!”

We seem to have lost two wars unambiguously (Vietnam and Afghanistan) after going to war without a plan. A third (Iraq) is a stalemate with an uncertain and risky future. How many more such wars are we going to fight and lose or draw—with myriad unintended consequences—before we give the experts at planning, our own military, a bigger seat at the table?

The architects of our losing and least decisive wars were all, without exception, civilian pols with strong political visions but limited military experience and no effective plans for achieving their goals. Their wishful thinking about war on the cheap was not enough to go to war; it never will be. The leaders who made those blunders, not the ones who ended the debacles, should bear the blame.

Permalink to this post