This Week at War: Losing Faith
My Foreign Policy column discusses the strategic implications of this week's massacre in Panjwai, Afghanistan.
Policymakers in Washington may be as tense as the U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan as they await the reaction to a nighttime shooting rampage on March 11 in Panjwai, near Kandahar, that left 16 Afghan civilians dead. The alleged shooter, a 38-year-old U.S. Army staff sergeant with three previous tours of duty in Iraq, has been flown to Kuwait, presumably to await a court martial.
This shocking crime follows last month's accidental burning of Qurans at a U.S. base in Afghanistan, an incident that resulted in nearly two weeks of riots and the murder of six U.S. trainers at the hands of their Afghan students. That followed the release of a video showing a group of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.
In 1999, Gen. Charles Krulak, then Marine Corps commandant, coined the term "strategic corporal." Krulak was referring to modern conflict in a media age, where much responsibility is heaped on young and relatively inexperienced troops, who make decisions with far-reaching strategic consequences. In a 2007 monograph, Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap catalogued controversies like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and civilian deaths in Haditha that plagued the U.S. counterinsurgency mission in Iraq. Dunlap asserted that such incidents are inevitable when U.S. ground forces are on prolonged expeditions, a contention that has similarly played out in Afghanistan.
U.S. policymakers will now assess whether the Panjwai rampage will have any impact on their long-established timetable to gradually shift responsibility for security to the Afghan government over the next two years. Pentagon officials will wonder whether the recent incidents are a leading indicator of wider morale and discipline problems within the Army. Finally, strategists will ponder whether the massacre is one more example of the kinds of unavoidable strategic disasters that are bound to occur during prolonged stabilization campaigns, and that thus call into the question the very future of such missions.
The so-far subdued reaction to the murders by the Afghan population is a stark contrast from the prolonged rioting that occurred after last month's Quran-burning incident. To the extent that this contrast is a surprise, it only illustrates the vast cultural divide between Afghanistan and the United States and may explain why the U.S. strategy to stabilize the country has been so troubled.
But even if most Afghans are showing a muted response, President Hamid Karzai apparently is not. In a meeting in Kabul on March 14 with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Karzai demanded that NATO troops immediately pull out of rural areas, leaving local Afghan forces to protect villages in the countryside. He also demanded that NATO turn over security responsibility to Afghan forces in 2013, a year earlier than currently planned.
Karzai used the Panjwai killings as an opportunity to make his demands to Panetta. But even without such a pretext, Karzai may have presented the same request. The Panjwai murders are just the latest in a long string of similar grievances Karzai has expressed to U.S. officials. For years, Karzai has complained about NATO's use of air power, U.S. Special Operations nighttime raids against Taliban suspects, and U.S. efforts to build up local security forces that bypass Karzai's central government in Kabul. In this sense, the Panjwai killings by themselves are of minor strategic importance. They are a marginal subtraction from the already poor relationship between the U.S. and Afghan governments.
Is the rampage a leading indicator of morale and discipline problems inside the Army? Retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a Vietnam combat veteran and a former commandant of the Army War College, argues in a Washington Post op-ed that U.S. ground forces have been understaffed and overused during the past decade. While not excusing the staff sergeant's alleged rampage, Scales asserts that the last decade's wars have fallen too heavily on the shoulders of a relatively few career infantrymen in the Army and Marine Corps, many of whom are now "emotionally exhausted and drained." If stress caused the staff sergeant to snap, Scales believes he can trace that stress back to a political decision to keep the Army smaller than it needs to be.
Michael Yon, a war correspondent and former Army Green Beret, believes the Army in Afghanistan faces a "discipline collapse," an unwelcome observation that last August prompted the Army to remove Yon from an embedded reporting assignment. According to Yon, many soldiers in Afghanistan have lost confidence in the military's strategy. With Afghan soldiers occasionally turning their guns on their allies, Yon has predicted a violent lack of restraint from a few now-cynical U.S. troops.
Scales's recommendation is to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps in order to increase the time infantrymen have between deployments. This notion goes exactly counter to the Obama administration's latest defense budget, which will cut the Army and Marine Corps by about 82,000 troops over the next five years. The Obama administration's answer to Scales is that it ended the war in Iraq and is pulling out of Afghanistan as fast as it prudently can. Returning the troops to their U.S. bases should be the best solution to combat stress.
Obama's new defense guidance specifically states that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations (italics in original)." That may be a relief to both Scales's overstressed infantrymen and Yon's soldier-cynics who have seemingly lost confidence in the counterinsurgency strategy passed down from their leaders.
However, as the ink dries on the defense budget, the situation in Syria continues to spiral out of control. In extremis, the need to secure Syria's large stockpiles of chemical munitions may provide yet another stressful and prolonged mission for U.S. ground forces. Nathan Freier, a retired Army officer and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warns that large-scale disorder, most often caused by state collapse, will continue to cause unavoidable challenges to U.S. interests that will require significant U.S. ground forces to fix. Obama's defense policy specifically assumes away such scenarios.
The Obama administration and air power advocates may point to last year's operation in Libya as an alternative and less risky approach to the potential problems Freier describes. The United States and its allies provided the air power while indigenous rebels, aided by special forces and clandestine service officers, provided the ground forces. This combination was apparently enough to secure Libya's chemical weapons and man-portable surface-to-air missiles, while avoiding the "strategic corporal" risk that attaches itself to any large and prolonged U.S. ground force deployment.
Pentagon strategists must plan for cases — like Syria — that will be more difficult than Libya was. That will mean accepting the likelihood of another large-scale ground mission. And with such a mission comes the unwelcome probability of "strategic corporal" moments that could put the mission at risk. With incidents like Abu Ghraib, the Quran burnings, and Panjwai in mind, planners will look for ways to either avoid or minimize the odds. But as long as humans and weapons are mixed together, the odds will always be there.
That’s a good article Robert, one of your best. I do not disagree with any of your positions on these issues but do have some thoughts on several.
I strongly doubt it was much of a surprise to anyone who is vaguely familiar with the culture. Both reactions were perfectly predictable. Many muslims will virtually ignore their own religious precepts on an almost daily basis but woe betide the ferenghi who tries or even quite inadvertently does that. When death is a constant, a few more make little difference. All easily known, if the two reactions were a surprise it is an indicator that we have no business there.
Not really but I have little doubt those that place protecting the institution above mission and people will undoubtedly say it is and take steps that make everyone suffer…
The General has been around long enough to know two things; that smallness due to political decisions is the way it’s always been — unlikely to change. He also knows to beat the drum for more spaces, protecting the institution.
What if we scaled missions to reduced troop strength and avoided dumb commitment that overstretch the force for no strategic value?
Why? Why should that be a US mission? And “someone has to do it” is not a good answer, nor is “no one else is capable.” Both are bad answers and untrue to boot (speaking of which I notice Max Boot is already at it for Syria…).
I disagreed with his article, still do. The ‘requirement’ for significant US ground forces is budget and Flag Officer strength driven, it is not a real strategic imperative, far from it.
Your final paragraph states the common wisdom on the topic:
I generally disagree with most things written by Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap. However, when he cataloged controversies like the Abu Gharaib scandal and the Haditha incident and asserted that such incidents are inevitable when U.S. ground forces are on prolonged expeditions he was right on the money. Such missions are very occasionally necessary — not one since World War II has been a necessity, they have all been undertaken even though not strategically sound or really necessary and they have done us no favors — and we need to train for them while doing our best to avoid committing the GPF to such endeavors; they will never do them well nor should they. Dunlap is correct, such operations will always produce incidents that are quite harmful to our long term interests and will destroy lives and careers for no net benefit to the US. The strategic implication of the homicides in Panjwai is, simply, that they need not have happened had we been intelligently pursuing a strategic aim instead of floundering unnecessarily in the muck because we didn’t know what else to do and we were ill equipped for and afraid to take other action.
We should consider the “large-scale disorders” scenerio offered by Nathan Frier from a somewhat different perspective, to wit: from the perspective of the goals and objectives of the United States.
The United States and its allies have adopted a two-pronged approach for achieving their strategic objectives for the 21st Century; these strategic objectives being: to transform (toward market-democracy) and fully incorporate (into the global economy) outlier states and societies. Herein, the two-pronged approach that the United States and its allies have employed is:
a. To work with friendly outlier state and societal governments (those who think like us) to (1) help modernize their states and societies along western lines and (2) to help overcome any resistance to this initiative — which can come from inside and/or outside such countries. Lacking such friendly outlier state and societal governments we will:
b. Work with friendly outlier state and society population groups (those who wish to rid themselves of these obstructing governments and begin the process of modernizing their state and society.)
The military forces of the United States and its allies have been, and will continue to be, utilized to help achieve our 21st Century strategic objectives noted above.
In the scenerio offered at item “a” above (population considered to be the problem; government thought to be the solution), the United States and its allies will help friendly governments build the military, police and intelligence capabilities these governments need to overcome resistance to modernization — which can come from both inside and/or outside the country.
In the scenerio offered at item “b” above (government considered to be the problem; population thought to be the solution), the military assistance offered by the United States and its allies will be designed to help overcome and/or overthrow these obstructing governments. What form this military assistance will take (to be decided on case-by-case basis?) is the only thing that has yet to be fully determined, carefully articulated and properly set out. (The COIN approach, however, appears to no longer be in favor.)
Everying else, however, as noted above, is pretty much understood, agreed upon and is already in-gear.
Thus, the question we must ask ourselves: Are not our significant efforts — to transform and incorporate outlier states and societies — are these such efforts not, in fact, the “root cause” of the “large-scale disorders” that we are now required to deal with?
The simple, nasty truth about winning a “counterinsurgency” is that the locals have to fear the good guys even more than they do the bad guys. That is the lesson that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales learned. His “rampage” was, from his point of view, a final act of loyalty to his fellow soldiers. He knew that what he was doing would leave his comrades in relative peace for the next few months because – for once – the locals would be worried that some other guy might just do the same thing if they looked at him cross-eyed. No one – least of all a general officer – will dare say this; but it is a truth that ought to be acknowledged. If you took a secret ballot tomorrow of all the soldiers in Bales’ unit, the Sheridan ticket would win by a landslide.
What fascinates me is the ease with which so many people are willing to spend money the United States does not have. What precisely is the U.S. interest in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria? To spend far more money than the country can ever possibly recover in the name of some mystical “security”? Our successful Generals/Presidents – Washington, Grant, Eisenhower – were mindful of how horribly expensive bureaucracies and military establishments are and always will be. They wanted as much tooth and as little tail as possible; and their sympathies were always with the common soldiers, not the people who were so far removed – either by distance or age – from the sharp end that they could afford to be extravagant in language and comfortable in their billets. Washington, Grant and Eisenhower would have court-martialed Sergeant Bales and hanged him in a matter of weeks; but they would not have maligned him. They would also not have indulged in any discussions of strategy that neither identified the names and unit sizes of the enemy nor described what victory would look like. They would also have sacked or demoted all the senior officers in command and replaced them with someone who had actually studied and agreed with what General Abrams did when he took over in Viet-Nam. If you can’t reduce the mission to something a 2nd grader can understand, you will lose the soldiers and then the voters – not because they are “stupid” but precisely because they are smart enough to recognize more than the usual level of B.S.
SSG Bales is a symptom of a larger problem we will face if the U.S. too rapidly discards its experienced land component force structure. Some U.S. ingratitude will lead to suicide, joblessness, domestic disturbance, and other acts of hopelessness. Other ex-Soldiers/Marines will harm other innocents. IMHO, SSG Bales PTSD resulting from four deployments, coupled with a night of drinking, many friend’s deaths/dismemberments, troubles at home, financial problems, and little hope for a future in his chosen field led to this all around tragedy for both his victims and himself. He enlisted following 9/11, yet in a about one more year he would be shown the door…after being thought good enough to lead troops in combat when they sent him to Afghanistan in December.
MG Scales had it right. Our overworked ground force will be downsized to the point where an initial surge is impossible. The Navy and USAF will cut means of deployment and resupply to the point that such an initial surge is impossible to fathom. The Army will damage its own cause by procuring a tank-size GCV that drinks tank-like quantities of fuel, further exacerbating the Army deployment/resupply challenge. The result will be future wars where the far fewer remaining light/medium ground Soldiers and Marines deploy repeatedly. Meanwhile, USAF Reaper operators will homestead near Las Vegas. Sailors will continue to show the flag abroad without actually experiencing close combat…unless SEALS, corpsmen, EOD, or PRT owners…essentially Soldiers/Marines in a different uniform.
LTC Tom Cooper has a guest coumn at Tom Ricks’ Foreign Policy blog where he described an author’s story about how SAC forces dealt with its A2/AD challenge during the Cold War getting airborne in well under 30 minutes.
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/14/15_minutes_a_look_at_the_cold_war_days_when_sac_dominated_the_us_military
CSAR (more Soldiers in different uniforms) and MEDEVAC units get airborne in 6-10 minutes. F-15 jocks did it in minutes on Zulu alert in Europe during the Cold War. Forward-deployed Soldiers could get to their armored vehicles and bunkers in similar timeframes. Why, is this along with BMD not a viable response to A2AD for forward deployed forces? China will not launch a Pearl Harbor missile attack against multiple trading partners out of the blue. If it does, it will experience a crippling follow-on response. It also would face the daunting challenge of crossing the Taiwan Straits and subsequently retaining any South or East China Sea gains. Imagine the simultaneous challenges of holding Taiwan or South China Sea islands against insurgents/SOF/airborne/air attacks/air assaults/amphibious forces while its resupply/surface/subs are sunk, aircraft are shot down, and missiles deplete.
What is it about the unlikely Taiwan PACOM scenario (3rd string behind Korea and alliance with allies in priority) that is deemed worthy of diverting massive military resources to Naval and Airpower at the expense of 80,000 future hand grenades tossed back into society as unwanted has-beens? If we want to retreat all our forces to Guam, Australia, and the U.S., more Naval and USAF aviators could be in the National Guard to exploit their combat hours and airline experience at a fraction of the expense of an active airmen. Seems like an air guardsmen would welcome a “vacation” to Guam or Australia for a 6-month tour. Operating Reapers from a nearby Guard base is another no-brainer, while active duty Army Gray Eagle operators deploy with the BCTs and division elements they support at about the same expense as the Guard officer Reaper pilot.
If we will spend a fortune on VA benefits, and welcome back troops at airports, why can’t we let our combat heroes spend the rest of their career training future warfighters on what they already experienced? Is it that much more expensive to let an E-6 stay to a 15 year retirement? We have means testing on the amount you pay at military daycares. Why can’t our annual $60K military LTC retirees pick-up a larger share of their retirement medical care to allow combat veteran E-5s/E-6s to continue their military career to a 15 year retirement?
I couldn’t find any unifying logic in this article. Who exactly is losing faith, and in what? What I did see in this article were a number of quotes from individuals using the most recent crime (far from the only one) in Afghanistan to justify pet agendas, or worse to say, “I told you so.”
It is probable when you send U.S. troops (or troops from any other nation) to a foreign land with a foreign culture that some of the soldiers will commit crimes. These troops are often unworldly and view these foreigners as less than human, that is just the way it is. To claim as Yon and Dunlap did that this was predictable is like saying the stock market will go up and it will it go down. Eventually both predictions will be correct. Yon is probably right that frustrations are increasing in the ranks, but frustations don’t cause 99.9% of the force to become murderers.
While I’m not necessarily opposed to Scale’s argument about the need for more land forces. He is probably correct IF we are going to continue to pursue nation building and stability operations as part of our national strategy, but again that appears to have little to do with the reason that this crime happened. Dunlap’s arguments as usual are irrational and nothing more a promotion for air power, as though collateral damage from bombs dropped the sky are somehow superior than a man on the ground engaging in close in combat at a personal level. He fails to explain how those targets would be identified without the man on the ground, and clearly misses the strategic impact of commiting troops to the fight. We have Marines on Okinawa and their presence demonstrates our commitment to defending the region, but occassionally a bad actor marine will commit a henious crime on Okinawa. It creates a stir, there are a few calls to move them off island, but overall people realize the greater good they provide at the strategic level. Flying a jet above Okinawa wouldn’t provide the same effect, and that applies to the ground forces in Europe during the Cold War. Even in Libya air power enabled, but ground forces were decisive.
I have no idea why this SSG decided to murder 16 Afghan civilians (if he even did, but I’ll assume for now he did). Why did other soldiers and marines murder Iraqi and Afghan civilians? Some them had less than one tour under their belt, so it wasn’t repeated tours. In all liklihood it was the confluence of several factors impacting his life that pushed him to this. All we really know is that a crime was commited.
Furthermore, at least from a strategic perspective, we seem to be making a bigger deal out of it than the Afghans. No doubt Yon is right, the Afghans will get their revenge and then the war will continue. Karsai will also exploit the incident, but Yon’s comments (see link to Yon’s post) about Karsai appear to be based on emotion more than reason. Yon implies that Karsai should appear to be puppet of the U.S. when these things happen instead of voicing opinions that reflect the frustration of his people. Not that Karzai is all that well loved now by his people, I still can’t see how apologizing to the U.S. for Afghan crimes would help him gain credibility (which in turn would help us with our current strategy, since we tied our success to his success).
I can definitely understand the frustration most of us feel when an Afghan soldier or police officer kills an ISAF member that is there to assist them. This is the essence of the problem. We are well intentioned, but perceived by those we’re attempting to help to be rude, arrogant, and less than helpful. That is also undertandable since we dismis civilian deaths in Afghanistan as collateral damage (year after year), we reenforce a government that is not popular, and yet that same government we claim to support believes (rightfully so in my view) that many of our actions undermines them. It comes back to the old argument that we don’t have a coherent strategy for winning at this time, and yes that leads to frustration, but it doesn’t lead to murder.
It also doesn’t mean that the recent dumb mistakes (Koran burning and the urination video on Utube) and the recent crimes (Kill Team and now the SSG) have led to loss of faith. The loss of faith was manifest in many ways before these events. Sadly, but understandably, incidents like these in any combat zone are more common than we like to admit, regardless of whether soldiers believe in the strategy or not. These innocents are irrelevant to losing faith, but they are very public topics that lead back to the discussion about the strategy in general.
We didn’t understand Afghanistan when we invaded, so it understandable that we would make mistakes based off bad assumptions, but what isn’t understandable is the continued promotion and support of an incoherent strategy. It shouldn’t be a matter of staying the course or losing, but a matter of adjusting the strategy to achieve an acceptable end. Right now it seems we’re focused on making the current strategy work, and if it doesn’t? We have the potential to better than this.
Couple of bits here really jumped out at me…
According to Yon, many soldiers in Afghanistan have lost confidence in the military’s strategy.
Of course they have. Why would anyone retain confidence in something that’s so obviously not working? The solution to that isn’t more money, more soldiers, and longer breaks between deployments, the solution is recognition that remaking Afghanistan in our image was never a feasible or appropriate goal in the first place. Just as tactics without a viable strategy are useless, strategy without a practical, concrete, achievable policy goal is useless. We shot ourselves in the foot the moment we decided that we have to “fix” Afghanistan. We reap what we sowed.
Nathan Freier, a retired Army officer and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warns that large-scale disorder, most often caused by state collapse, will continue to cause unavoidable challenges to U.S. interests that will require significant U.S. ground forces to fix. Obama’s defense policy specifically assumes away such scenarios.
This just seems wrong on multiple levels. None of our recent engagements were unavoidable, and none required major US deployments. None involved existential threats or monumentally significant interests. All were wars of choice, not necessity. Any imaginable deployment in Syria would be a matter of choice, not necessity. I see no point in claiming that we need to maintain enough force to support such choices, even if we can’t afford them… maybe we just need to make better choices, like not deluding ourselves into thinking major US deployments are going to “fix” these problems.
The idea that the Pentagon develops strategy and Congress budgets for it is backwards: Congress decides what’s affordable and the Pentagon develops strategy within those constraints. If we can’t afford these wars of choice and can’t afford to send massive military forces to “fix” faraway lands in which we’ve little real interest, we’ll just have to refrain from doing that. I don’t see how that leaves us any worse off.
If faith is blind, better to lose it and start over from a more open-eyed perspective.
Why? Why should that be a US mission? And “someone has to do it” is not a good answer, nor is “no one else is capable.” Both are bad answers and untrue to boot (speaking of which I notice Max Boot is already at it for Syria…).