Ending the Neverending War
Ending the Neverending War – Reviewed by John Nagl, Azure
The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror
by Dexter Filkins
Knopf, 2008, 368 pages
Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq
by Linda Robinson
Public Affairs, 2008, 416 pages
The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2008, 512 pages
When the insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the United States Army was caught unprepared. Until then, it had been designed, trained, and equipped to win conventional wars, and was without doubt peerless in that arena. But it was not ready for an enemy who understood that it had no hope of defeating the United States on a conventional battlefield, and therefore chose to wage war against it from the shadows.
Yet over the five years that followed, in one of history’s most remarkable examples of adaptation under fire, the United States Army learned to conduct a surprisingly successful counterinsurgency campaign. Three new books, each by a prominent journalist, tell the story of that dramatic change, two from on the ground in Iraq and one from the corridors of Washington. Viewing the conflict from their different perspectives provides important insights into a war that America was losing badly only two years ago, and now looks to have turned around. It also suggests something about how America is likely to fight the war in Afghanistan under President Obama, and offers broader lessons about the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century…
Read more of the reviews at Azure.
The War in Iraq – Peter Mansoor, Azure
I enjoyed reading John Nagl’s excellent review (Ending the Neverending War,” AZURE 35, Winter 2009) of three books that tell the story of the debacle and re-birth of American strategy in the Iraq war. It is a cautionary tale for any number of nations in the twenty-first century, Israel included. Nagl mentions that the U.S. Army was thoroughly unprepared for counterinsurgency warfare in 2003, but since the reasons for that lapse fell outside the purview of the books he was reviewing, he doesn’t state why. Simply put, the United States military has a love affair with technology and, during the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, developed concepts that substituted technological prowess for strategic relevance. The future American way of war, according to certain defense intellectuals, was summed up in the phrase Rapid Decisive Operations,” otherwise known as shock and awe.” Using sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms, American forces would be able to find and distinguish all relevant targets on the battlefield and then, using precision-guided munitions, destroy them. Wars would be quick and relatively bloodless.
What the proponents of this approach failed to realize is that military operations are neither rapid nor decisive unless they lead to a more enduring peace. In this regard, the United States was guilty of trying to replace strategy with tactical and operational concepts that had marginal relevance to the kinds of wars that the nation would face after 9/11. We were guilty of becoming the Germans of the twenty-first century—a nation that used brilliant tactical and operational concepts but lost two world wars on account of strategic incompetence…
More at Azure.
