Another general has some advice

Wesley Clark has a long op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post that's well worth a read, The Next War 09/16/07. The most memorable passage is the one just posted as our quote of the day:

War is the last, last, last resort. It always brings tragedy and rarely brings glory.

Whatever else happens in the wake of the Iraq War fiasco, this cultural and (especially) political glorification of war that has become so prevalent needs to be seriously challenged.

It's appalling that we're at a place where it seems startling to see a national leader say something that that. Pitiful, really. It should be such a commonplace observation that people would hardly notice it.

But the neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist glorification of war and the preventive war doctrine that Cheney and Bush made official US strategic policy are strong rejections of that idea. It has often seemed during the Cheney years like the use of force and the threat of force are the only meaningful tools these people see in the foreign policy toolbox.

As Clark puts it in another memorable phrase speaking to that point:

How tragic it is to see old men who are unwilling to talk to potential adversaries but seem so ready to dispatch young people to fight and die.

Clark's article addresses his concerns about the threats of war against Iran. He lays out a similar military scenario to what others have described for the initial attack. And he continues, "But if its clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end." As he indicates and others like Pat Lang and Larry Johnson have explained at some length, it's likely to end badly for the United States.

Clark talks about how the military's emphasis on high-tech conventional war left them significantly unprepared to fight the kind of counterinsurgency wars they are now prosecuting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also notable, given the GOP's current orgy of general-worship, that Clark doesn't consider his fellow generals to be above criticism or devoid of meaningful responsibility. After the obligatory reference to the US military being the greatest fighting force in the history of the universe, he writes:

But shame on political leaders who would hide behind their top generals. It was hard not to catch a whiff of that during last week's hearings. The Constitution, however, is not ambivalent about where the responsibility for command lies - the president is the commander in chief.

Surely here is where some of the most salient lessons from recent wars lie: in forcing civilian leaders to shoulder their burdens of ultimate responsibility and in demanding that generals unflinchingly offer their toughest, most seasoned, advice. Gen. Tommy R. Franks embarked on the 2001 Afghanistan operation without a clear road map for success, or even a definition of what victory would look like. Somehow, that was good enough for him and his bosses. So Osama bin Laden slunk away, the Taliban was allowed to regroup, and Afghanistan is now mired deep in trouble and sinking fast. ...

At the same time, the United States' top generals must understand that their duty is to win, not just to get along. They must have the insight and character to demand the resources necessary to succeed - and have the guts to either obtain what they need or to resign. If they get their way and still don't emerge victorious, they must be replaced. That is the lot they accepted when they pinned on those four shiny silver stars. (my emphasis)

I would add a caution here that there is virtually no tradition in the US military of resigning in protest. And I'm not convinced it would be advisable to have one get started.

For generals to resign in protest over a war policy they disagreed with could well further the politicizing of the officer corps, which has already become a serious problem. (See Saviour-General Petraeus.) Under our Constitutional system, it's the responsibility of Congress, first and foremost, and the President to decide what wars to fight and what the parameters of those wars will be. Clearly, Presidents have often taken more of a lead than the Founders envisioned. (And under Dick Cheney's theory of unlimited Republican Presidential power, the only role for Congress is to appropriate whatever funds Our Republican Leader needs for whatever war policies His Majesty chooses to implement.)

But that's not the role of generals. Even in the case of a general faced with an illegal order - even Saviour-General Petraeus surprisingly told Congress last week that if he were ordered to attack Iran without Congressional authorization the first thing he would do is consult his attorney - it's a genuine question whether resignation would be the right course of action. All members of the military are required to disobey illegal orders. Is resignation the appropriate response for a general? It isn't a simple question.

I also have some reservations about the following piece in Clark's article:

One of the most important lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and Vietnam, for that matter - is that we need to safeguard our troops. The U.S. public is more likely to sour on a conflict when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure. So to keep up our staying power, our skill in hunting and killing our foes has to be matched by our care in concealing and protecting our troops. Three particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon. But these things are expensive for a military that has historically been enamored of big-ticket items such as fighter planes, ships and missiles. Many of us career officers understood these requirements after Vietnam, but we couldn't shift the Pentagon's priorities enough to save the lives of forces sent to Iraq years later. (my emphasis)

There's a complicated problem buried in what may sound like fairly straightforward ideas in that paragraph.

For one thing, I don't think it's empirically true that the American public is more likely to turn against a war "when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure". As the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, all wars are popular for the first 30 days. But the American public has shown itself able to distinguish between bloody but necessary wars (the Second World War) and far less bloody but strategically disastrous ones (the Iraq War).

Also, that notion that emphasizing force protection is critical to maintaining public support for the war is actually an argument used heavily by air power true believers, who argue for the emphasis on high-tech weaponry that Clark is arguing against here.

The short version is, air power advocates say that a war will be more popular for the US public if it relies heavily on air strikes and bombing, because lots of foreigners will get killed but fewer Americans. In practice, that leads to what we see in Iraq now that is going virtually unreported by the Establishment press: trying to fight urban guerrilla warfare with rockets fired from aircraft and 2,000-lb. bombs. (For more on this, see my posts of 04/13/07 and 06/08/07.)

Also along those lines, I also have reservations about Clark's proposal to shift relatively more funding toward the Army and Marines and away from the Air Force and its high-tech toys (he discreetly avoids mentioning the specific inter-service rivalries involved):

Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Just as our Congressional representatives have to get a lot more willing to take our generals' claims with a genuinely skeptical and sensibly critical attitude, they also need to come to grips with the crazy fact that the United States alone spends half or more of the money spent on the military in the entire world.

I am sympathetic to the concept that Clark advocates here. We do need more readiness to fight "small wars" and less continuing preparation to fight the Soviet Red Army pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany.

But military budgets should be driven by sensible foreign and military policy priorities. Are we going to plan to fight only conventional wars in the future, which is what happened after the Vietnam War? If so, then the President and the Congress need to realize that they don't have the forces prepared to go conquer and an Iraq and rule it for years. And that they will have to find other ways to deal with such perceived problems.

On the other hand, we all generally, and Congress in particular, need to face the fact that there is a certain "if we have it, we'll be tempted to use it" factor in military spending. Do we really want to plan and announce to the world that we're gearing our armed forces to take over other countries on a large scale like we are some aspiring 19th-century imperial power? And can we this time be a lot more realistic about how near-impossible that ground-up nation-building is, especially for the US acting unilaterally? To we really want to structure our military in a way that creates some incentive to try out the preparations in Iraq War-type conflicts?

And Congress needs to stop looking at military budgets as domestic job programs and "pork" for their home districts - far easier said than done, I know. But as Andrew Bacevich said a couple of years ago, if we set a goal of spending as much on the US military as the next 10 largest military-spending countries combined, we would still be making huge cuts in our military budget. I don't know what the "right" dollar amount is. Still, half of the entire world's military spending is just too dang much for the United States.

There's also the question of blatant boondoggles, like the Star Wars "missile defense" racket. That is just mainlining taxpayers' money into corporate treasuries with no real return in military effectiveness, while adding real additional risk to our strategic posture. If Congress wants a jobs program, fund a jobs program that does something useful instead!

The worst outcome on military spending would be a High Broderist "moderate" compromise, where the Army and its suppliers lobby for more spending on the Army, while the rest of the military budget stays intact or grows to "compensate" the other services and their suppliers for the additional emphasis on the Army, with no serious re-evaluation of overall military strategy.

A good start on changing overall strategy would be to drop the Cheney-Bush doctrine of preventive war, which anyhow is flat illegal under international law and disastrous in practice.

Tags: air power, military budget, military industrial complex, preventive war, wesley clark