“Little America” – Doug Ollivant’s View
07.04.2012 at 12:03am
SWJ friend Doug Ollivant takes a contrarian view of Rajiv Chanrasekaran’s new book, Little America; a view we here at SWJ don’t necessarily share. That said; he, in the same quarter as COL Gian Gentile, is a wise and experienced practitioner, researcher and deep thinker. The definitive history is yet to be written, if ever. As SWJ presents all views with anticipation that our community of interest and practice will aid in contributing to the historical works of the future we present Doug’s op-ed at Time’s Battleland blog as yet another piece of the Small Wars jigsaw puzzle. Please feel free to comment away (put up or shut up).
Doug’s piece was soundly logical.
I do foresee criticism from those who think that ‘hope’ or ‘want’ are a sound basis for attempting something.
I think Doug, correctly, is suggesting ‘pragmatism’ might be a better departure point.
In this respect he echoes some of Bacevich’s perspectives and is also in step with Gray’s recent piece.
Mr. Ollivant’s comments didn’t make a lot of sense to me. He doesn’t deny the litany of ineptitude and failure that seems to be Mr. Chanrasekaran’s book. Mr. Ollivant merely states that it doesn’t make any difference anyway. That is sort of like saying it doesn’t matter if your team can’t hit, has no pitching and nobody can catch or throw, it still would have lost. Maybe you should actually field a team that can do those basic things before deciding that it is impossible to ever win a ball game because “…what if the real lesson is one about the limits of American power”.
Mr. Ollivant’s comments are sort of an apology in and of themselves, to the effect that none of the institutions responsible for the failure and ineptitude are really at fault because the thing could never have been done anyway.
up front, I haven’t read the book yet so I don’t know if the conclusion is as simple as Ollivant says it is (these are the mistakes we made; knowing that, we can then be prepared to do better for the next time; in fact, we could have won if we were smarter in the first place).
If that’s the case, then the book definitely overreaches its reasoning and shows as much cognitive dissonance as COIN strategy and nation-building in Afghanistan to begin with. If this is the case, then Chandrasekaran’s book is already trying to provide a solid foundation for the “better war”-myth crowd to build upon. We would never have won Vietnam with all the ‘we could’ve done it better’ ideas (the ‘better war’ myth) and now we’re getting the same diatribe from a growing group of people about Afghanistan. This war as well as the other war would never have been ‘won’ – wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, wrong partners, wrong mission. We failed as soon as we started.
In that, I totally agree with Ollivant and Gentile, and would totally disagree with Chandrasekaran. But in the least, the book is important to show the level of hubris, poor planning, zero expectation management, and general asinine-ness of the US involvement in AFG. For that alone it should be read as a caution to the shills calling for expanded R2P or future nation-building efforts.
As always, my views are mine alone and not those of the ‘doubling-down for sunk costs in the face of all reason to prove point’ DoD or US Army.
LTC Kotkin
If the goal is/was (for whatever reason) to transform certain states and societies more along modern western lines, then surely this can be done.
Such a thing has been done in the past.
Whether such a thing — re: Afghanistan or any other state and society for that matter — is actually both necessary and prudent, who could and should do it, how it might actually be done, how long it might take to do it, what the costs might be: these are other questions.
So, before forming — or retaining — a force and capability to “do” these type of things (transform outlier states and societies more along modern western lines), the questions asked immediately above may need to be addressed (unbelievable as it may seem) maybe for the very first time.