Win Without a Win

Its the kind of thing that might be more appro­pri­ate to post on, say, a Sunday so you can read it with a mug of cof­fee and some time to think. But I didnt want this one to grow stale.

Though its a sub­scriber site, DT has a line on a few ana­lyt­i­cal pieces from the pri­vate intel­li­gence firm, Stratfor. They can be a bit in the weeds at times, but this one is a big chunk of food for thought as it attempts to answer the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of why the United States seems to get itself in con­flicts that end in stalemate.

The mud­dled result of the war in Iraq may not have been such a sur­prise after all, and, in some twisted way, may serve Americas over­all pur­pose in the global war on ter­ror­ism though unin­ten­tion­ally Stratfor says.

Excerpts of the intel analy­sis follow:

In con­sid­er­ing the sit­u­a­tion, our atten­tion is drawn to a strange para­dox that has been man­i­fest in American for­eign pol­icy since World War II. On the one hand, the United States has con­sis­tently encoun­tered strate­gic stale­mate or defeat in par­tic­u­lar politico-​​military oper­a­tions. At those times, the out­comes have appeared to be dis­ap­point­ing if not cat­a­strophic. Yet, over the same period of time, U.S. global power, on the whole, has surged. In spite of stale­mate and defeat dur­ing the Cold War, the United States was more in 2000 than it had been in 1950

Put some­what dif­fer­ently, there is the lib­eral view that the Soviet Union was not defeated by the United States in the Cold War, but that it col­lapsed itself, and the mil­i­tary con­flicts of the Cold War were unnec­es­sary. There is the con­ser­v­a­tive view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of a fun­da­men­tal flaw in the American char­ac­ter — an unwill­ing­ness to bear the bur­den of war — and that this flaw ulti­mately will prove dis­as­trous for the United States. Finally, there is the non-​​ideological, non-​​political view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of defeats and stale­mates because these wars were never as impor­tant as either the lib­er­als or con­ser­v­a­tives made them out to be, how­ever nec­es­sary they might have been seen to be at the time

If we apply these analy­ses to Iraq, three schools of thought emerge. The first says that the Iraq war is unnec­es­sary and even harm­ful in the con­text of the U.S.-jihadist con­fronta­tion — and that, regard­less of out­come, it should not be fought. The sec­ond says that the war is essen­tial — and that, while defeat or stale­mate in this con­flict per­haps would not be cat­a­strophic to the United States, there is a pos­si­bil­ity that it would be cat­a­strophic. And at any rate, this argu­ment con­tin­ues, the United States’ ongo­ing inabil­ity to impose its will in con­flicts of this class ulti­mately will destroy it. Finally, there is the view that Iraq is sim­ply a small piece of a big­ger war and that the out­come of this par­tic­u­lar con­flict will not be deci­sive, although the war might be nec­es­sary. The heated rhetoric sur­round­ing the Iraq con­flict stems from the tra­di­tional American inabil­ity to hold things in perspective

Even in cases where the enemy was engaged fully, the United States lim­ited its com­mit­ment of resources. In Vietnam, for exam­ple, the defeat of North Vietnam and regime change were explic­itly ruled out. The United States had as its explicit goal a stale­mate, in which both South and North Vietnam sur­vived as inde­pen­dent states. In Korea, the United States shifted to a stale­mate strat­egy after the Chinese inter­ven­tion. So too in Cuba after the Cuban mis­sile cri­sis; and in Iran, the United States accepted defeat in an appar­ently crit­i­cal arena with­out attempt­ing a major inter­ven­tion. In each instance, the mark of U.S. inter­ven­tion was lim­ited expo­sure — even at the cost of stale­mate or defeat

In other words, the United States con­sis­tently has entered into con­flicts in which its level of com­mit­ment was extremely lim­ited, in which either vic­tory was not the strate­gic goal or the mis­sion even­tu­ally was rede­fined to accept stale­mate, and in which even defeat was deemed prefer­able to a level of effort that might avert it. Public dis­cus­sion on all sides was apoplec­tic both dur­ing these con­flicts and after­ward, yet American global power was not mate­ri­ally affected in the long run…

This appears to make no sense until we intro­duce a mil­i­tary con­cept into the analy­sis: the spoil­ing attack. The spoil­ing attack is an offen­sive oper­a­tion; how­ever, its goal is not to defeat the enemy but to dis­rupt enemy offen­sives — to, in effect, pre­vent a defeat by the enemy. The suc­cess of the spoil­ing attack is not mea­sured in term of enemy capit­u­la­tion, but the degree to which it has fore­stalled suc­cess­ful enemy operations

The inva­sion four years ago has led to the Sunnis and Shia turn­ing against each other in direct con­flict. Therefore, it could be argued that just as the United States won the Cold War by exploit­ing the Sino-​​Soviet split and ally­ing with Mao Zedong, so too the path to defeat­ing the jihadists is not a main attack, but a spoil­ing attack that turns Sunnis and Shia against each other. This was cer­tainly not the intent of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in plan­ning the 2003 inva­sion; it has become, nev­er­the­less, an unin­tended and sig­nif­i­cant outcome

Moreover, it is far from clear whether U.S. pol­i­cy­mak­ers through his­tory have been aware of this dimen­sion in their oper­a­tions. In con­sid­er­ing Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran, it is never clear that the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson/​Nixon or Carter/​Reagan admin­is­tra­tions pur­posely set out to imple­ment a spoil­ing attack. The fog of polit­i­cal rhetoric and the bureau­cra­tized nature of the U.S. for­eign pol­icy appa­ra­tus make it dif­fi­cult to speak of U.S. “strat­egy” as such. Every deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary of something-​​or-​​other con­fuses his lit­tle piece of things with the whole, and the American cul­ture demo­nizes and dei­fies with­out clarifying

However, there is a deep struc­ture in U.S. for­eign pol­icy that becomes vis­i­ble. The incon­gruities of stale­mate and defeat on the one side and grow­ing U.S. power on the other must be rec­on­ciled. The lib­eral and con­ser­v­a­tive argu­ments explain things only par­tially. But the idea that the United States rarely fights to win can be explained. It is not because of a lack of moral fiber, as con­ser­v­a­tives would argue; nor a ran­dom and need­less bel­liger­ence, as lib­er­als would argue. Rather, it is the appli­ca­tion of the prin­ci­ple of spoil­ing oper­a­tions — using lim­ited resources not in order to defeat the enemy but to dis­rupt and con­fuse enemy operations

I know its heavy read­ing for a Monday morn­ing, but its worth con­sid­er­ing as the Iraq war grinds on with­out any clear momen­tum toward vic­tory or even success.

(Gouge: CM)

– Christian

March 26th, 2007 | Strategery | 240811 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2007/03/26/win-without-a-win/Win+Without+a+Win2007-03-26+12%3A06%3A31Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.