On Sunday 18 January, barely a day before Paul Bremer was due to meet Kofi Annan to seek greater United Nations involvement in the transition to Iraqi self-rule, a pick-up truck carrying half a ton of explosives and artillery shells exploded at the central entrance to the US headquarters in Baghdad. The bomb killed more than twenty Iraqis and overseas contractors, and injured over sixty.
The timing was precise, in two senses: it was a direct reminder to the UN secretary-general that the United States cannot control security within Iraq, and it emphasised the depth of an insurgency that has now claimed 500 US lives and six times that number of serious injuries, and has killed and injured far more Iraqis.
One result of the insurgency in Iraq, especially when coupled with long-term military involvement in Afghanistan, is that US forces are facing serious overstretch. As analysed in last weeks column in this series, the fact that the great majority of active service divisions in the US army are now committed to international deployments means that there are few reserves left for other crises. The result is that major questions are arising over the future direction of US military strategy.
Taming the jungle
The problem of overstretch has provoked military and political responses in the United States. The tour of duty of army reservists has been extended, to the extent that such part-time soldiers can be required to spend more than a year on duty in Iraq, and a new stop-loss order that prevents regular troops resigning from active duty while they are deployed overseas.
The direct political impact in Washington includes the effort by the Pentagon to secure a very modest increase of 2,400 in troop levels in the 2004 Defence Authorisation Act. Some in Congress want a much greater expansion. The Tauscher Bill, currently under consideration in the House of Representatives, would add 40,000 to the army, 28,700 to the air force and 15,000 to the marines. (Defense News,12 January 2004 ). This overall increase of 83,700 can be compared with the entire strength of the British army, namely 114,000.
Behind these measures lies a deep division within US defence circles, one that has been greatly exacerbated by the militarys experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. On one side are the civilian defence ideologues, led by Donald Rumsfeld, who envisage a military future of relatively small forces armed with very advanced, do-anything weapons that can operate from a distance and coerce enemies into almost any course of action.
On the other side are many in the military itself, along with some independent analysts, who argue that Afghanistan and Iraq are already showing that foreign and security policy cannot be conducted by remote control. In the real world of asymmetric warfare and paramilitary opponents, the attempt to mould the world into a New American Century by bombing from afar will more likely produce a response that drags US forces into on the ground involvements that are messy, costly and of indeterminate duration.
This entire controversy relates to some much longer-term trends that have shaped US forces since the end of the cold war. In the early 1990s, Bill Clintons first CIA director, James Woolsey, characterised the post-cold war world by saying that the United States had slain the dragon but now lived in a jungle full of poisonous snakes. George W. Bush expressed a similar thought in inimitable fashion in a campaign speech four years ago:
it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who the they were. It was us versus them and we knew exactly who them was. Today were not so sure who the they are but we know theyre there.
Taming the jungle and fighting them involved a dual approach: substantial cuts in the massive US forces of the cold war era, coupled with a greater emphasis on rapid deployment, long-range strike, special forces and counter-insurgency support. Behind it lay a belief that technological superiority can provide an edge against just about any enemy. If, the logic went, you are capable of targeting any building in an entire country with highly accurate cruise missiles, and if the military of that country have no way of destroying such missiles - surely that kind of capability will ensure almost total political control?
There was also an economic aspect to a strategy built around a reliance on such military strikes. In its attacks on Serbia and in the disputed territory of Kosovo from March-June 1999, Nato strike aircraft found it very difficult to identify the well-protected and dispersed Serbian military forces, so the campaign was gradually refocused against the infrastructure of the Serbian economy. By attacking power plants, factories, refineries, transmission lines, roads, railways, bridges and tunnels, the Nato forces inflicted some $60 billion of damage on the Serbian economy (Economist Intelligence Unit, 21 August 1999). This reduced an already weakened economy to even further dilapidation and helped create the circumstances which led to the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic the following year.
Lessons in flexibility
The logic of this post-cold war thinking, as practiced today by those of Donald Rumsfelds persuasion, is that the realities on the ground are proving to be very resistant. US forces are thoroughly mired in costly and difficult counter-guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no end in sight in either country. Indeed, even the long-term aim of maintaining a client state in Iraq is now beginning to be questioned, to the extent that the US appears more ready to permit, with UN assistance, the early emergence of a limited democracy.
Again, the military and political dimensions are linked. The current problems faced by the US in these two theatres are leading to a substantial rethink of military strategy itself. What happened in the 1990s was little more than a series of revisions of pre-existing cold war doctrine. What is now beginning to be undertaken is a complete review of doctrine, one that starts from scratch and pays serious attention to the many flaws in US military strategy revealed by current conflicts. (Defense News, 22 December 2003)
This review is being conducted under the leadership of US Joint Forces Command; a series of Joint Operating Concept papers has been developed to try and make sense of the unpredictable and volatile environment. One paper (leaked to Defense News) employed classic military-speak to convey the problem:
Enemies are not doctrinally template-able, with fixed alliances and obvious political goals. The broad outlines of the result of the review can be anticipated. US forces must become hugely more adaptable, and the different branches of the armed forces will have to act in much closer cooperation with the intelligence agencies. Furthermore, much greater authority has to be delegated to local commanders, since the sheer unpredictability of paramilitary and guerrilla forces means that standard operating procedures simply do not apply.
The problem for the US military is that in theory such developments may be very seductive, indeed obvious - but they still do not relate to the real world. The militarys more sophisticated analysts are beginning to recognise that control from a long distance using overwhelming force does not work if your opponents do not operate according to the same strategies. Even a much more flexible application of military doctrine will not work if the doctrine is, at root, faulty.
This is because the opposing forces can adapt their own strategies to your changing posture, learning on the ground in swift response to the changes you introduce.
This has happened repeatedly in Iraq in recent months. For example, the insurgents have directed much of their recent efforts not to attacking heavily-armed and adaptable American military patrols, but to Iraqis considered to be collaborating, as well as key aspects of the economy.
They have been particularly astute in their targeting of energy supplies. A pipeline may be blown up but it will then be left completely alone for the days or weeks that it takes to repair the damage. As soon as it is operating again, another section of the same pipeline is destroyed. The cumulative effect is not to bring Iraq to its economic knees but to make life difficult for most ordinary Iraqis, in the expectation that blame will reside with the Americans and their Coalition Provisional Authority.
Insurgents have blown up electricity pylons, but disruption has been limited and repairs can be undertaken quite quickly. Those same insurgents almost certainly have the capacity to wreck the countrys power system, either by attacking one or two of the few power stations currently operating or, more likely, by attacking the more vulnerable switching stations. They have not done so on any scale, most likely because they are waiting for the combination of the hot summer weather and the installation of an Iraqi administration in July, when the impact would be much greater.
A failure of imagination
What is true in Iraq may prove true on a wider scale. Thus, George W. Bushs war on terror is likely to entail changes in the US military posture, within the context of rapidly increasing defence budgets. But the paramilitary response may be even less military than in the past. Instead, it could employ a whole range of asymmetric actions against which even the most flexible military forces are inappropriate.
The problem for the Bush administration is that neither in Iraq nor in its wider war is it able to grasp the need to go beyond the immediate conflicts and to address the broader issues - most importantly why and how al-Qaida and its associates are able to gather and maintain such widespread support.
The cold war was sustained, in part, by an implicit belief that the issues at stake could best be understood and managed by military confrontation. It lasted over forty years. It is not unfeasible that Bushs war on terror will have a similar timescale.
