Tet Offensive and counterinsurgency wars

Richard Falk writes at Al Jazeera English on The Tet Offensive's parallels to Afghanistan 08/23/2011.

One of the fundamental myths of our current military interventionism is that the military actually won the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive of 1968 represented yet another glorious victory for our invincible generals. And the only reason that North Vietnam eventually won the war was that the gutless politicians and dirty hippies cut off funds to our brave allies and let the Commies win. There are more sophisticated versions. But they come to the same thing.

We can at least hope that time will eventually wear away even the most deeply-rooted historical analogies. But "time" needs all the help it can get in this case. As Falk points out, the tale is superficially true. In military terms, both the North Vietnamese and the Americans saw it rightly as a victory for the US-South Vietnam side. The purpose of the Tet Offensive was to promote a popular uprising in the South which did not occur.

But it wrecked the political support for the war in the United States, something neither the US nor the North Vietnamese had intended or anticipated. Why? Because our magnificent generals and the Johnson Administration had been telling the American public over and over and over that everything was going wonderfully in the war. Falk:

But what made these US casualties so important was not the loss of life. What made these death so deeply disturbing was their unsettling impact on both backers and opponents of the war in Washington, the backers because their belief that victory was at hand was shattered and the critics because the lies emanating from Washington had been finally exposed.

If General Westmoreland was not deceived or lying, the American casualties sustained during the Tet Offensive could not have happened given the supposed decimation of the Vietnamese enemy. If these expectations of an imminent victory had not been discredited by the Tet Offensive, the dramatic event would have been coolly diagnosed as a desperate lost gamble by the Vietnamese, and rather than turning attention to an exit strategy would have led to an intensified effort to achieve total victory on behalf of the Vietnamese regime in Saigon that had welcomed the American intervention. [my emphasis]

There are two levels of important narrative here. One is the narrative of the loss of political support for the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Falk's description in that regard is sound. Obviously, it's an analysis and judgment on a set of facts.

The triumphalist narrative agrees on the basic series of events: technical military victory for the US side in the Tet Offensive, a decisive drop in political support for the war in US public opinion. But the triumphalist version blames it on the cowardice of the public and the Congress, who weren't worthy of the victorious generals. In this narrative, the fact that the generals destroyed their own credibility by lying to civilian officials and the public, and that the Johnson Administration wrecked its credibility in turn in the same way, is either conveniently ignored or somehow justified.

Falk's narrative just makes more historical sense. And he makes a plausible counterfactual speculation in saying that without the lies, for the general public "the dramatic event would have been coolly diagnosed as a desperate lost gamble by the Vietnamese and rather than turning attention to an exit strategy would have led to an intensified effort to achieve total victory on behalf of the Vietnamese regime in Saigon that had welcomed the American intervention."

The second level of narrative would assume this counterfactual and ask whether further support for the war would have been a good idea. And here the counterfactual starts to break down. Because the over-estimation of American power in that situation and the corresponding under-estimation of the nationalist potential of the Vietnamese Communists had always been part of the justification for escalation. President Kennedy had lost faith in those optimistic estimates in the months before he was killed. But Johnson was willing to accept them to the point of military and political catastrophe. If military and civilian officials had been telling the public the truth all along, public support for the war would almost surely have been far lower than it was at the beginning of 1968.

As a question of managing public opinion in the more technical sense, there was a better lesson to learn than the predominant one that the Pentagon took from that experience: that they had to be more effective in deceiving the public and managing the press.

And the current US counterinsurgency faith is based on the deeply flawed triumphalist narrative. As Falk explains:

To this day, counterinsurgency professionals in Washington think tanks and the Pentagon contend that the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. This distorted reading of history partly explains why US policymakers have failed (and refused) to learn the defining lesson of the Vietnam War: the virtual impossibility in the early 21st century of turning military superiority on the battlefield enjoyed by an intervening party into a favourable political outcome against an adversary that effectively occupies the commanding heights of national self-determination. That is, in this century, the symbols of legitimacy count in the end for more than drone technology and the weaponry of destruction.

This US and NATO learning disability has led directly to subsequent failed interventions, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Military superiority succumbs over time to the strong historical tides of the past seven decades favouring the forces aligned with the politics of self-determination. Among other explanations for this conclusion that cuts against the grain of political realism is this: the intervening side gets tired of an unresolved struggle long before fatigue sets in for the side defending national territory. An Afghan aphorism expresses this insight: "You've got the watches, we've got the time." Since 1945, nationalist endurance consistently outlasts and outwits geopolitical endurance, and by so doing eventually offsets the asymmetries of military capabilities. [my emphasis in bold]

Realistically, it's probably too early to declare the Libya intervention failed. But from all appearances, it's a long way from over.

Tags: richard falk, lessons of vietnam, vietnam war

Review of Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts

Vietnam in Iaq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts, edited by John Dumbrell and David Ryan, has a publication date of 2007. But the 11 essays in this collection predate the announcement of The Surge. But there is real value to looking at contemporary commentary on the Iraq War. Because just as with the Vietnam War, later claims of new perspectives and revisionist history on the war in general can be checked against publications like this.

As the title indicates, the book explores the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. One striking thing about both is both involved nation-building and counter-insurgency efforts for which the military were not prepared. Overestimation of American power in those particular situation was a particular problem in the initiation of both wars. Sadly, even with the lessons of the Tonkin Gulf incident and other situations in front of them, the Congress of 2002-3 was just as deferential to Presidential claims, though the falsehoods involved with the Cheney-Bush buildup to the Iraq War make the Tonkin Gulf claims look almost honest. At least there actually were enemy boats in the water in the Tonkin Gulf! A contrast to the non-existence of the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" and the equally non-existent operational ties between Saddam and Al Qa'ida.

Trevor McCrisken of the University of Warwick (UK) has an essay on "No More Vietnams: Iraq and the analogy conundrum" that reminds us that making foreign policy by analogy can be a very perilous business, common as it is. The "Munich analogy" as it has been simplified to near-meaningless in the American political vocabulary has become especially treacherous. McCrisken calls attention a very meaningful lesson from the Vietnam War now there to be relearned from Iraq (and, in 2009, from the escalating "AfPak" War):

If there is an ultimate lesson of the Iraq War it is that it reiterates one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War: there are limits to the power of the United States, particularly in terms of the utility of the use of force.

This is a criticism that both military planners and civilian officials need to take very seriously. Not all of them will.

David Ryan Of University College, Ireland, explores a related problem in "'Vietnam', Victory Culture and Iraq: Struggling with lessons, constraints and credibility from Saigon to Falluja". But Ryan is far too impressed with the underlying assumptions of the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, better known as the Powell Doctrine, that aimed at setting prudent conditions for American military intervention. He doesn't seem to grasp that, in practice, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine was largely a justification for the Pentagon to focus its training, equipment and planning on fighting the Soviet Union - even after the USSR no longer existed - and avoiding future counterinsurgency wars. Worse, he seems to buy the assumption that American public opinion is the great weakness of American military might, and that the Powell Doctrine assumption of short, quick wars is still basically the solution to that perceived problem. He at least notices some of its weaknesses, such as the fact that in the "shock and awe" approach at the beginning of the Iraq War, "US tactics and use of overwhelming force on the ground and from the air was counterproductive." If the goal involves the complete conquest and reconstruction of a country, the military strategy has to take that fully into account.

Marilyn Young concludes her essay, "The Vietnam Laugh Track", with an observation about the idea that ending a war short of total victory somehow dishonors the dead:

A final thought: in Iraq, as in Vietnam, many people are convinced that only victory gives meaning to the (American) lives lost. To stop fighting short of victory is to render meaningless the deaths and maiming suffered thus far. More deaths, more grievous wounds are required to one end only: the making meaningful of the deaths and wounding already suffered. After the war, William Ehrhart asked a Vietnamese general what he thought of the Americans as warriors. After politely praising their bravery, the general named what he saw as their military shortcomings: fixed positions, dependency on air support, and ignorance of the country. 'Would it have mattered if we had done things differently?' Ehrhart asked. No, the general replied, 'Probably not. History was not on your side. We were fighting for our homeland. What were you fighting for?' Ehrhart answered, 'Nothing that really mattered'. George Swiers, returning directly from the battlefield to San Francisco in 1970, remembered how he had 'set out to speak to his Fellow Americans. To share with them his hideous secrets, to tell them what went on daily in their names'. For a short time, the message Swiers and other veterans like him brought home to America, aka the Vietnam syndrome, served as a prophylactic against another Vietnam. In the decades that have passed since Swiers' return home, the hideous secrets have been forgotten, or worse, transformed into memories of virtue, sacrifice and service.'

Americans, the late Gloria Emerson wrote, have 'always been a people who dropped the past and then could not remember where it had been put'. This time, they've put it in Iraq. [my emphasis]

Tags: iraq war, lessons of iraq, lessons of vietnam, vietnam in iraq, vietnam war

Review of Making War, Thinking History by Jeffrey Record

I posted back in October about Jeffrey Record's fresh and challenging analysis of the appeasement policies of Britain and France in the 1930s toward Germany. In Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002), he looks at how American foreign policy and military managers applied the "lessons of Munich" and the "lessons of Vietnam" to the decisions they faced.

Although its publication date is 2002, the text makes no mention of 9/11, and he just refers to George W. Bush as Bill Clinton's successor in the Presidency. So it was almost nostalgic to get a glimpse back at the state of the debates on the use of force in foreign policy from the immediate pre-9/11 perspective.

In those days, discussion over the use of force were dominated by the advocates on the one hand of the Powell Doctrine, a semi-isolationist, semi-militarist notion popular among "realist" Republicans and much of the officer corps, and on the other hand the kind of cautious but assertive liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

The historical and analytical narratives built around the various lessons of "Munich", i.e., the appeasement of Hitler and its unfortunate outcome, and those of the Vietnam War aren't going away. But they clearly will now share the stage with the "lessons of Iraq", which are not in the early stages of being hashed out.

Record's book is a reminder of the ways that History can inform decisionmakers' understanding of current situations as well as limit and distort. In recent years, the road to the Iraq War was paved with Second World War analogies. For the neoconservatives, it has been said, it is always 1938 and the West is always on the verge of selling out Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Bush's favorite historian Victor Davis Hanson is the world master of the hack Second World War analogy. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is one of the main figures in the rightwing Israeli Likud Party whose philosophy has so heavily influenced the neocons, actually said just this past week, "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany." (Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany; Ahmadinejad is preparing another Holocaust by Peter Hirschberg Ha'aretz 11/14/06)

Record shows that the "Munich" analogy was poorly applied in the Vietnam War and in Kosovo. Jeffrey Record is no Victor Davis Hanson, so when he examines how well the Munich analogy fits to a given conflict, he's not simply applying some propaganda label. He argues on a variety of grounds that the Vietnam War was a bad policy choice for the US, arguments which he explains at greater length in The Wrong War: Why We Lost Vietnam (1998).

The reason that the Munich analogy as applied to Vietnam by successive administrations was so misleading was that it encouraged a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict. We now know that the split between the Soviet and Chinese leaders was becoming pronounced in the late 1950s. But in the years leading up to Lyndon Johnson's decision to have American forces assume a direct role in the Vietnam fighting in 1965, the USSR and China were widely understood in America as a fully cooperating Communist bloc. To American policymakers, North Vietnamese and NLF (Viet Cong) attacks in South Vietnam represented international aggression by an expansive force. And "Munich" had taught them that such aggression had to be stopped, or it would spread further and further.

In fact, the conflict in Vietnam was primarily a civil war among Vietnamese, no matter how much outside powers may have intervened on both sides. Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese Communist Party were heavily nationalistic - though certainly also serious about Communist doctrine. Their territorial ambitions were largely confined to the need to control all of Vietnam and to dominate the other Indochinese nations of Laos and Cambodia.

The "Munich" assumption also led American policymakers to ignore the very long-standing relationship between Vietnam and China, in which Vietnam repeatedly strove over centuries to maintain independence from China. A more careful and informed look might have led them to question whether North Vietnam was fighting on behalf of Chinese expansionism.

The "lessons of Vietnam" didn't supplant the Munich analogy but were added to them as paradigms for policymakers. Soviet actions in various parts of the world were misinterpreted by conservatives and many liberals as well through the prism of "Munich" as they understood it. Record argues that there is reason to think that the US defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam encouraged Soviet adventurism in Third World countries. Yet he also argues:

But at this point analogies with the 1930s in Europe quickly turn sour. Soviet gains in the Third World in the 1970s and early 1980s were gains along the Cold War's periphery. They did not affect the central balance of military power between the United States and the Soviet Union; on the contrary, those gains quickly turned out to be liabilities. In contrast, Hitler's successes in the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia undermined the European balance of power and sped the planet to another world war. To equate, as [Michael] Lind did in Vietnam: The Necessary War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to say nothing of Soviet "triumphs" in places like Ethiopia and Guinea-Bissau, with Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia is to dismiss the critical distinction that George Kennan made ... between the center and the periphery. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a strategic dead end in very much the same way that intervention in the Vietnam War proved to be for the United States. Indeed, both interventions reflected not only an overvaluation of the Third World's strategic importance as a whole but also a failure to make key distinctions of importance within the Third World. For the United States, who runs Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Guinea-Bissau is simply not as important a question as who runs Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Mexico. Strategically, "dominoes" come in different weights and sizes, and the fall of one here may not matter compared with the fall of one there.

Record traces the evolution of the "lessons of Vietnam". There was the Nixon Doctrine, which "essentially recognized the limits of American power and called for greater selectivity in picking fights".

The administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and also the hawkish Ronald Reagan were constrained by public and Congressional reluctance to become involved in "another Vietnam".

Reagan's intervention in Lebanon of 1982-84 presented the contending perspectives that largely dominated use-of-force discussion until the 9/11 attacks in 2001. On the one hand, Secretary of State George Schultz pushed for stationing troops in Lebanon, then torn by civil war, as a tool of diplomacy. The diplomacy in this case being to restrain Israel's intervention into Lebanon. (Times have changed!) Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger believed that military forces would be used "only for a major war", in Record's words. In fact, as Lou Cannon wrote in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991), "the cause in Lebanon, unlike Vietnam, had never been supported by the president's generals or by his secretary of defense".

On October 23, 1983, a suicide truck bomber struck a Marine barracks, killing 241 US Marines. As Cannon describes it:

The terrorist bombing that killed the 241 Marines did, in fact, drive the United States from Lebanon, although it would take three and one-half months for events and advisers to persuade Reagan to agree to the withdrawal plan. The withdrawal was steadfastly opposed by Shultz, who continued to believe that U.S. diplomatic interests required the United States to remain in Lebanon. "We are in Lebanon because the outcome in Lebanon will affect our position in the whole Middle East," Shultz testified to Congress on October 24. "To ask why Lebanon is important is to ask why the whole Middle East is important—because the answer is the same."

Weinberger would never see it that way. He thought that Lebanon was hopeless and that the Marines had no useful purpose there. "I've never seen Cap look as sad as he did after the Marines were killed," said Colin Powell. Recalling the NSC debate of the previous Tuesday, Weinberger told Powell, "I wished I had been more persuasive with the president."

Record describes the outcome this way:

The intervention began with the best of humanitarian intentions, but slowly and inexorably the U.S. military was drawn directly into the strife, provoking deadly retaliation by those opposed to the American presence. Lebanon seemed to validate the Vietnam analogy, and it clearly contributed to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's determination to speak out on the issues of when and how force should be used.

The Reagan Doctrine stressed the need to counter Soviet expansionism in the Third World (the Munich analogy at work) without direct US military involvement (the lessons of Vietnam).

In 1984, Weinberger in a speech called "The Uses of Military Power" elaborated a conservative doctrine on use of force that was first known as the Weinberger Doctrine. Colin Powell became such a champion of it that it later came to be called the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, and eventually just the Powell Doctrine. Drawing heavily on the lessons the officer corps took from the Vietnam War, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine is a major element in the criticism of the Iraq War that we see coming from retired generals and, more quietly, from the current officer corps.

Weinberger laid out what he called six "tests" for using US military power (test #2 refers to the lessons of appeasing Hitler):

(1) First, the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies. That emphatically does not mean that we should declare beforehand, as we did with Korea in 1950, that a particular area is outside our strategic perimeter.

(2) Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all. Of course if the particular situation requires only limited force to win our objectives, then we should not hesitate to commit forces sized accordingly. When Hitler broke treaties and remilitarized the Rhineland, small combat forces then could perhaps have prevented the holocaust of World War II.

(3) Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. And we should know precisely how our forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. And we should have and send the forces needed to do just that. As Clausewitz wrote, "no one starts a war - or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it."

War may be different today than in Clausewitz's time, but the need for well-defined objectives and a consistent strategy is still essential. If we determine that a combat mission has become necessary for our vital national interests, then we must send forces capable to do the job -- and not assign a combat mission to a force configured for peacekeeping.

(4) Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed - their size, composition and disposition - must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then so must our combat requirements. We must continuously keep as a beacon light before us the basic questions: "is this conflict in our national interest?" "Does our national interest require us to fight, to use force of arms?" If the answers are "yes", then we must win. If the answers are "no," then we should not be in combat.

(5) Fifth, before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. This support cannot be achieved unless we are candid in making clear the threats we face; the support cannot be sustained without continuing and close consultation. We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war overseas or, as in the case of Vietnam, in effect asking our troops not to win, but just to be there.

(6) Finally, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort.

In today's situation, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine's stress on restraint, prudence and planning sounds very appealing in contrast to the Cheney-Bush administration's faith-based recklessness. But the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine has its problems. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously pointed out the central problem during the internal discussions about intervening militarily in Bosnia-Hezogovina, which then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell strenuously opposed. In a moment of frustration she asked Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military you are always talking about if we can't use it?"

The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine assumes that the US should maintain the capability to bring overwhelming force to bear in foreign interventions. Yet the six "tests" call for intervening only in a situation where the US will be able to predict and control virtually every aspect of the fighting. And it assumes that peacekeeping, much less protracted "nation-building', are not part of the US military's job.

Albright put her finger on a central contradiction in the doctrine. If you set the bar for military action so high that the conditions will never be met, why do you need such a large, expensive, high-tech military establishment? Conversely, just having the capability available creates a mighty temptation, human being being subject as we are to the allure of power, to start using the capability. One could argue that's what happened in the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, although as Record points out, there were real NATO interests involved there. But when the neocons and nationalists of the Cheney-Bush administration took control of the military establishment, they saw the capabilities and ignored the restraint, prudence and planning parts. Only sissies worry about that stuff, right?

The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine also assumes the lesson that the officer corps took from the Vietnam War on how to deal with guerrilla wars in the future, i.e., don't get involved in them. The military wanted to limit its job to fighting conventional wars. Even though Powell himself was cautious about immediate intervention to push Iraq out of Kuwait after Saddam's 1990 invasion, the Gulf War seemed to prove the validity of the doctrine. Andrew Bacevich explains in American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002):

[W]hen the Bush administration responded to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait by dispatching U.S. troops to the Arabian Peninsula, key officials went out of their way to show that there would be no repetition of the errors that had led to disaster in Vietnam. There would be no micromanagement, no political meddling, no half-measures, and no quagmire. In that sense, the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 became a test case for the Weinberger Doctrine. Senior civilians, beginning with President Bush, and senior military officers, led by Powell, made a concerted effort to portray Desert Shield and Desert Storm as military campaigns designed and conducted with Weinberger's admonitions in mind.

That the war ended in military victory, cheaply and quickly won, seemingly validated Weinberger's approach. As principal steward of that approach and chief military architect of victory, Powell himself acquired enormous additional standing with the public and the press, so much so that in the media the Weinberger Doctrine was promptly eclipsed by a nearly identical Powell Doctrine. That Powell's own frequently expressed convictions—above all a belief in overwhelming force employed decisively on behalf of vital interests—would henceforth constitute "the American way of war" seemed all but self-evident.

Although the interventions of the Clinton administration - Somalia (initiated by Old Man Bush but extended by Clinton), Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and military strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Sudan - departed from the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, Clinton's administration never established a doctrinal alternative that fit with their own brand of Wilsonian liberal internationalism. As Bacevich observes:

Viewed in isolation, the U.S. military response to each of these wildly disparate situations suggested an administration flying by the seat of its pants, relying on improvisation rather than principle. That perception was not entirely without merit. If by its actions the Clinton administration showed that it had discarded the Weinberger-Powell guidelines for using force, neither the president nor any of his chief lieutenants made any apparent effort to articulate a replacement. There was no particular speech or authoritative document promulgating an official Clinton doctrine.

However, Bacevich goes on to say, "By the end of the 1990s, habits hardened into a de facto doctrine for how the United States would fulfill its self-assigned responsibilities as star-spangled global enforcer." This should be a strong reminder to war critics and advocates of restraint in the use of military force that habits of intervention in the service of liberal-internationalist policies make it easier for advocates of preventive war or misguided "realists" to intervene in less worthy causes.

It's painfully obvious that the Bush Doctrine of preventive war not only throws the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine out the window. The Iraq War has shown that it's not sustainable without drastically increasing military preparedness for guerrilla war, reinstating conscription (the draft) indefinitely, and continuing to disregard the structure of international law to which the US contributed so much to constructing. The economic and Constitutional dangers are also real in practice, though theoretically not so inevitable.

We might say that the Iraq War and the Bush Doctrine represent a collision of the lessons of "Munich" with the lessons of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam lessons became embodied in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine and the fixation of the military preparing nearly exclusively for conventional war, not counterinsurgency. The neocons are operating on a perpetual assumption that another "Munich" is at hand and must be avoided by attacking somebody.

There are limits to how much such developments can be understood in terms of historical lessons being applied. But it is true that American policymakers have used "Munich" as guidance on when it is necessary to go to war, and "Vietnam" as guidance on when to restrain from going to war.

Both will continue to be powerful influences on policy. And they also influence the debate over the "lessons of Iraq". Just this week on his first visit to Vietnam, Bush the Younger declared the lesson of Vietnam that should be carried over to the Iraq War is, "We'll succeed unless we quit". This is why it's important for opponents of the Iraq War to understand how pervasive the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine had become in the military and in Congress prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Many of the former generals and military analysts now criticizing the Iraq War are doing so from the implicit assumption of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine that the military should be concerned with conventional war and nuclear war, but not guerrilla war ("low-level conflict" in Pentagonese). Their goal is to return to a condition where the military establishment is lavishly funded and military contractors generously compensated, but without anything so messy as actually military operations being required.

What we really need at this point is a new orientation in military affairs - one different from the current tech-centric "revolution in military affairs (RMA)". On the one hand, most cases in which the US might be required to intervene militarily in the coming decades are likely to look far more like the current Iraq War and Afghanistan War than like the Gulf War of 1990 or Reagan's spectacular tirumph over the mighty military colossus of Grenada in 1983. So preparation for counterinsurgency and national-building are vital.

On the other hand, the US doesn't need to be looking for guerrilla wars to poke our noses into. Ultimately the only way to avoid that is to have responsibile people controlling the Presidency and Congress. But it's also important to remember that there's no institutional mechanism that can always prevent that. So there should be an emphasis on "right-sizing" our military so that i can be prepared to deal with likely threats but also to minimiz the temptation to the Dick Cheneys and Rummys of the world to undertake foolish military adventures.

Record's book also reminds us that it's important to look carefull at the historical experiences of war and not settle for the lazy assumptions that become ossified into the conventional wisdom. He concludes:

Whatever the utility of reasoning by historical analogy as a tool of policy formulation and implementation, it is clear that policy makers will continue to be influenced by past events and what they believe those events teach. It is also clear that presidents' knowledge of history varies widely, and that reasoning by historical analogy is but one of a host of factors at play in presidential decision making. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy were well read in history, whereas presidents Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush [the elder] displayed considerably less knowledge of history. Moreover, in analyzing a specific presidential use-of-force decision it is virtually impossible to determine the exact influence of reasoning by historical analogy in relation to such other factors as presidential personality, domestic political considerations, and the role of key advisers. Munich clearly weighed heavily on the minds of Truman in 1950, Johnson in 1965, and Bush in 1990, as didVietnam on the mind of Clinton in the 1990s. But all the evidence suggests that, for better or for worse, some thinking about history attends all significant presidential uses of force, especially those that invite war.

For more on the Weinberger-Powell doctrine, see the following articles made available at GlobalSecurity.org:

The Weinberger Doctrine In The Post-Cold War Era by Major Colin F. Mayo, USMC (1992)

Beyond The Weinberger Doctrine by Major Scott T. Campbell USMC (1995)

Tags: iraq war, jeffrey record, lessons of vietnam, making war thinking history, munich analogy, powell doctrine, weinberger doctrine