WHOSE OBJECTIVES IS HE TALING ABOUT (via Mike Daley)

War and Aftermath (Frederick W. Kagan, August 2003, Foreign Policy)

Why has the United States been so successful in recent wars and encountered so much difficulty in securing its political aims after the shooting stopped? The obstacles in the way of establishing stable polities in Kabul and Baghdad were always considerable. It was never likely that the road to peace and stability in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan would be short or smooth. The nature of the American military operations in both countries, however, multiplied those obstacles instead of reducing them and greatly increased the chance of failing to achieve the political objectives that motivated both wars.

The reason for this fact lies partly in the vision of war that President Bush and his administration brought into office and have implemented in the past two wars. This vision focuses on destroying the enemy's armed forces and his ability to command them and control them. It does not focus on the problem of achieving political objectives. The advocates of a "new American way of war," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Bush chief among them, have attempted to simplify war into a targeting drill. They see the enemy as a target set and believe that when all or most of the targets have been hit, he will inevitably surrender and American goals will be achieved.

War is not that simple, however. From the standpoint of establishing a good peace it matters a great deal how, exactly, one defeats the enemy and what the enemy‚s country looks like at the moment the bullets stop flying. The U.S. has developed and implemented a method of warfare that can produce stunning military victories but does not necessarily accomplish the political goals for which the war was fought.

If these two wars represented merely isolated cases or aberrations from the mainstream of military and political developments in the U.S., then the study of this problem would be of primarily academic interest. That is not the case. The entire thrust of the current program of military
transformation of the U.S. armed forces, on the contrary, aims at the implementation and perfection of this sort of target-set mentality. Unless
the direction and nature of military transformation change dramatically, the American public should expect to see in the future many more wars in which U.S. armed forces triumph but the American political vision fails. [...]

The most important problem with these visions of war is not anything within them, but the fact that they leave out the most important component of war ? that which distinguishes it from organized but senseless violence. Neither ncw nor "shock and awe" provides a reliable recipe for translating the destruction of the enemy's ability to continue to fight into the accomplishment of the political objectives of the conflict.

The decisive flaw in Mr. Kagan's reasoning is fairly easy to expose, and it is this: if the political objective of American war was to create stable democracies, we'd not leave a USSR in place for the fifty years of the Cold War, nor a Saddam Hussein in place for the twelve year cold phase of the Iraq War. In point of fact, we've demonstrated fairly little historical interest in how other nations are run, so long as they don't annoy us. When they do begin to annoy us, we've a tendency to briefly take cognizance, try to make them less annoying, and then ignore them again. It would be delightful if the people of Iraq--or what's left of it after Kurdistan shears off and the Sunni flee--decided to become a stable liberal democracy. But it's silly to imagine that an America that didn't even stay involved in Germany long enough to make sure that it met the criteria after WWI and which expended no effort to make sure that the Eastern half of Germany met it after WWII will now set as its national policy the creation of such a state in Baghdadistan. And it is nearly deranged to believe we'd set such a goal for Afghanistan, which has none of the characteristics of a state, let alone a stable one or a democracy. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 17, 2003 10:31 PM