The End of Military History
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Washington has failed to learn from Israel’s mistakes that the Western way of war finished, argues American Conservative contributing editor Andrew Bacevich in this essay courtesy of TomDispatch.com.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”
Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.
For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.
Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs — the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.
Grand Illusions
That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war’s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers — thanks to war, now great in name only — that faith disappeared altogether.
Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, “peace” was a codeword. The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations — not yet intimate allies — stood apart from the rest of the Western world.
So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. “Peace through strength” easily enough becomes “peace through war.” Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.
A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated — even eclipsed — the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.
For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.
On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel — disregarding Washington’s objections — set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet “facts on the ground” created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.
In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.
During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.
Stuck
No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel’s near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.
So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren’t intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.
Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West’s gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.
And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the IDF’s glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars — unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.
Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat — a “demographic bomb,” Benjamin Netanyahu called it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.
Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF’s experience. Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington’s efforts to transform (or “liberate”) the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to “shock and awe,” Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:
“We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace… Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority.”
The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: “decision superiority.” At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.
Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.
Winless
If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it’s this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today’s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel’s “demographic bomb” — a “fiscal bomb.” Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.
By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning — at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.
As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to “protect the people,” consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.
A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, “military solutions” do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, “we can’t kill our way out of” the fix we’re in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.
The Unasked Question
What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?
In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.
With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.
It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of “dollar diplomacy.”
The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk? Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame them?
In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel’s demographic or geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.
And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General Petraeus’s appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.
Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What’s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn’t actually work?
Washington’s refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, has just been published. Copyright 2010 Andrew Bacevich.
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I’m not sure the goal of our presence in the Middle East is pacification per se. Our problems in maintaining order and control have to be weighed against the means we are willing to consider and the necessity of our actual goal. Obviously terrorism cannot be deterred except with extremely violent means (and not always then), but if our goal is simply to ensure that no other regional power (China, Russia) is able to dominate the Middle Eastern oil supply, then we must be prepared to accept a certain level of terrorism and social instability. I’m not sure we understand fully what losing control of this region would mean for our access to cheap gasoline and thus its impact on our economy; coming home may be as expensive as trying to stay indefinitely, and it’s understandable that our elites are terrified of the prospect.
A big difference between our policy and Israel’s is that we are not prepared to claim the land itself though we rule it, which allows us to avoid to a certain extent the charge of imperialism as well as the task of removing populations that shelter resistance fighters to reservations and/or camps. We don’t do this, mostly for moral reasons or, if you like, reasons of public squeamishness–post-civil rights-era America is not prepared to become an apartheid power, at least not openly. Israel’s policy, in contrast, resembles ours in the 19th century concerning the Indian tribes, with the exception that the Indians are growing more numerous and the cowboys and settlers are growing fewer.
As Bacevich indicates, this particular song is coming to an end one way or another, most likely through our inability to finance our military through deficit spending. I sometimes think our real strategy is to try to use up all the oil in the region as quickly as possible so as to leave as little possible for the Asian powers who are all gasoline-starved. The calamity would be if we left too early, and thus created a power vacuum for China, Russia, or India to fill; with China’s industrial capacity, for them to have control of the petroleum supply would ensure their dominance of the entire world economy. Can we be sure that the People’s Liberation Army would stay home in that event, or wouldn’t we begin to see the same third-world creep that the Soviets embarked on during the Cold War? We might maintain our territorial integrity due to the threat of nuclear weapons use, but we’re not going to initiate a holocaust to protect, say, Tibet. As we grow poorer and they richer, our alliances will become increasingly inoperative. So, maybe we should try to stay at least long enough to make sure nobody else can come in; I, for one, am not convinced that it is act of charity to leave the region just to let noted humanitarian powers like China to have the run of the place at the world’s expense.
Assuming that policing the middle east does in fact secure us cheaper oil (and I’m not convinced it does), what good is it to save $1 per gallon, if in the end it costs us $2 per gallon (in the form of deficit spending) for the priviledge?
@CDK
Good analysis from a realist’s perspective. If we totally vacated the Middle East, certainly something would fill the vacuum we leave behind, but its hard to speculate whether China would replace our role there in the exact same capacity, or if there might emerge some more complex, multi-polar paradigm.
In any case, there’s a very good argument to be made that the true price of a gallon of gas has been externalized and hidden for far too long. We don’t need a carbon tax when we can simply eliminate the indirect subsidies that suppress the end-user price…of course a tax maintains the current regime and increases their revenues, as opposed to eliminating the subsidy of military hegemony which would create game changing political and economic upheaval.
Our extrication from the oil protection business would gore a lot of powerful oxen (which is why it’ll never happen voluntarily), but who has pity for those who have profited from this immense corporatist project at our expense? This macro arrangement between the various complexes of American govt, intl. corporations and intl. politics is an artificially created state of affairs that only truly benefit the very few and as CDK mentions, we’re quickly burning through the resources necessary to prop it up.
I’d much prefer to live in a world where the price of gas reflected it’s true cost, lighting a fire under innovation into more sustainable energy, and a mass redirection of all the dollars currently sucked into the black hole of our military industrial complex toward more productive, infrastructural and entrepreneurial investments here at home. Too bad it will take national insolvency and radical, perhaps very disruptive reform to get us there, if we get there at all.
“Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath.”
And what would have been had Israel not succumbed? Would there have still been an Israel left?It seems to me that Israel is a nuclear power that will choose to survive by any means necessary which makes sense given as you write “Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable. ”
As for The USA you write that “Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.”
That seems 100% true.
The real issue is that due to moral development in the West, it is no longer acceptable to conduct wars in the classical, profitable way… to seize resources and oppress, enslave, or eliminate the indigenous population of the conquered area. Were it so, our military would be more than adequate to conduct it successfully in all situations that do not involve other major nuclear powers. What is unfortunate is that we have yet to collectively figure out that, minus the acquisition of treasure in some form to compensate for the blood and treasure spent to acquire it, war is inherently unprofitable. Engaging in it for abstractions or in a fit of pique is a losing proposition, as the Orbit gum commercial so eloquently states, ‘no matter what.’ Britain ‘won’ both World Wars but lost resources and territory in the process, and ironically had nothing to gain from either. The French lost both in a similar fashion. Russia lost the first but won the second due to acquiring territory, resources, and captive markets. The US won the first, gaining little, but won the second gaining much, including global markets and a technological advantage. Only Japan and Germany in the second had the classical approach, and would have ‘won’ had they prevailed militarily, because they were prepared to, in Pulp Fiction style, to ‘go medieval.’ Were any of the current major nuclear powers to become somehow desperate enough to follow that path, war would again be practical.
Winning or Losing a war is not the issue. Either way the Military-Industrial Complex wins. Defense contractors get lots of contracts. The CIA and the intelligence agencies get their funding, and a justification for their existence.
That’s the real game in America: War for war’s sake.
See Van Creveld and William Lind on Fourth Generation Warfare.
An interesting peace, though I think like Fukuyama’s, there’s fair criticism about its interpretation of the present period being an endgame and not just an interlude.
The reality is that the “Western way of war” is extremely effective against other major states, and rather than being a “so what” question, it is integral to explaining why most Western liberal states have given up on trying to maintain their own military establishments and potential rivals have tread so quietly with theirs. US military dominance is strong enough that our allies don’t need to re-arm and our rivals want to be very cautious when they build up.
Military superiority does translate into political advantage – but US political goals have far outstripped what is reasonable. For much of recent Western military history, imposing your will against the enemy meant defeating their military (often not dismantling it) and thwarting their strategic designs, and forgoing wholescale social engineering. The advent of total war in the Napoleonic age, its refinement in WWI and gruesome culmination in WWII allowed for total defeat and total victory, in which the enemy social system was obliterated and reconstituted in our image. Of course, the abilities of states and peoples to impose total victory have waxed and waned with developments in guerilla warfare. But even as the ability of partisans and insurgents to resist total defeat has grown, the willingness of Western states to pay the financial and moral costs of total war has diminished, though their appetite for total victory has increased, since we now seek to recreate societies with entirely different historical and cultural experiences as Western, “modern” liberal states.
Were we to define political advantage in more conventional realist terms, such as protecting core national interests and security, US military dominance is as politically advantageous as ever. We have a clear advantage over all rivals or potential combinations, and have so far deterred a direct military challenge to the current international order. Given the historical norm, this is a pretty big advantage. We just need to stop this fantasy that dedication to social engineering and fundamentally altering the political interests and structures of everyone we fight are sensible ends for our military power.
*an interesting piece, sorry.
As for the Israelis, the problem is again not so much that military force cannot produce political advantage, but that the Israelis have tried to use it to press their advantage over Arab states, when information operations are more important as “weapons of the weak” for states and groups unwilling to launch a direct military challenge.
This essay fails to take into account that, at the same time this supposed downfall of the relevance of military power was occurring, the United States was moving its military focus away from warfighting to “nation building.” This latter notion is the heart of the problem. Military superiority remains not only relevant, but critical to geopolitical power. But we cannot turn the army into the peace corps. As just a small example, our enemies abroad know the restrictions under which the average G.I. suffers, and they exploit those niceties. The notion that you have to file a report whenever you discharge your weapon while on patrol in a war is an example of the problem. We need to eliminate the asymmetry. If they are using mosques and schools to hide weapons and promulgate inflammatory ideas, put a stop to both without fear of encumbering religion. We are self-limiting our own well-practiced ability to unleash hell upon our enemies through our adoption of post-deconstructionist, relativist, identity-based social ethics. When we occupied Germany after WWII, we imposed our will without fear of offending anyone. If they used churches in post-war Germany to hide stores of weapons; if priests were preaching Nazi ideology and telling the local populace that getting rid of the occupying Americans/Brits/French was their God-given obligation, you can bet we would have put a stop to that. But alas, political correctness reaches even the military. One more point: the amount of money we have spent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, while substantial, is pocket-change-when compared to how much we spend servicing national debt and in entitlement spending..
The true “change” in warfare after 1945 was the United Nations. Prior to the end of World War II military doctrine was to batter the enemy into surrender. Only an enemy thoroughly beaten would then submit to the will of the victors. But the rules of war have changed. You can no longer batter your enemy through carpet bombing or fire bombing cities. You can no longer decimate their infrastructure and drive their populations out. These are now labeled as “war crimes”. How can you force a population to submit when you can’t target that population? As barbarous as it is, it works, and until it returns all wars will fail to meet their objectives.
Those wishing for the good old days when the US as an occupying force could dismantle the enemy and substitute the culture with one of their choosing can kiss those days gone forever.
There are so many factors driving this:
first is the democratization of the tools of violence. Just like everyone can vote and collectively affect the outcome of an election, now even a small band of people that are angry with a big military power can strike it or its interests spread all over the world.
secondly the world is getting far more homogenized than it used to be and if you attack an enemy you’re almost sure there’s the enemy’s cousin legally working within the more vulnerable areas of your system
3rdly the the reason to fight with big guns have been eliminated. A small band of “illerate rag heads” is what’s causing such a big problem for a mighty nation like the US. They have no big targets, they have no infrastructure that can be disrupted in a manner that paralyzes them forever.
If modern moral strictures (or if you prefer, public squeamishness) coupled with the ever important public relations and information management aspect of modern warfare, is going to prevent great powers from going “old school” and do what is necessary to submit the enemy…then I hope we don’t pine for the Good Old Days but rather temper our willingness to dive head first into these new, more frustrating modern wars unless it is absolutely necessary for our self defense.
Our politicians and opinion makers are still clinging to WWII language and framing to describe our current conflicts around the globe. It’s a pathetic disconnect symptomatic of our docile consumer culture, oblivious to our imperial privileges, confused and frightened by the signs of paradigmatic corrosion and impending collapse.
[...] The End of Military History — Andrew J. Bacevich, American Conservative [...]
Bacevich’s fails to understand some of the key lessons of military history. Is the play nice approach to Iraq 1 & 2 (or Gaul 1 via Julius Caesar) a real victory when it leaves most of the army alive and free to sink into the local insurgency groups? Or is the WWII japenese or german model (or Gaul 2 via Julius Caesar) the more apt lesson as to what real victory entails? Real victory requires a civilian population utterly tired of death and destruction applied to them via land, air & sea. A civilian population that is homeless and hungry has more pressing concerns than trying to oppose naked force.
Sadly such an approach means a huge amount of death and suffering for non-combatants. That brutal reality when practiced in the 40’s, was so effective in imprinting the populations of europe and japan with an aversion to war, that to this day, both areas are havens of peace. I would argue, we need to return to the total war model on the 40’s if we are serious about a real and lasting victory and forget the chimera of liberal “victory” where everyone holds hands and sings happy songs as schools and hospitals are built by US troops- history has proven the former works and the latter doesn’t.
A helpful article from a what I take to be a hardcore realist perspective but blessedly without the assumptions of the left/liberal orthodoxy. Like Andy above I found myself agreeing 100% with a lot, but was troubled by the basic idea of the end of military history as a premise. I have not read your full argument in your book but my initial reservation is that I think the recent military failures by Israel and US are part of a different kind of shift. First, I don’t think we have learned how to fight the kind war we find ourselves in because our technology has created a world of new possibilities that the ‘insurgent’ grasps well before established institutions. By the old rules, Linux should not exist never mind rival Microsoft in many ways any more than gangs of totalitarian religious fanatics should be able to flummox a superpower. Second the West – including Israel – is strangely somnolent in the face of a direct challenge to our civilization. By way of example, a lady friend of mine here in Western Australia decided to strike up a conversation with a burka clad fellow shopper recently. At one point the burka clad one said “You know we are going to win don’t you?” Indeed, if the West keeps tolerating the utterly intolerant we will be subjugated. Strangely, we have not yet begun to fight. I note that Australian and European populations are disarmed. Americans are not. Ah, the wisdom of the founders never ceases to amaze…… But to come back to your article it helped me to better recognize what a series of disasters we have had and that must be faced. However, I think you mistakenly minimize the importance of General Petraeus and the surge. For me, it is the one bright spot because it shows a way to defeat the Islamists. What happened, in my view, is that the Islamists showed their true colors and the Anbar Sunnis drove them out and are still doing their best to exterminate them in Iraq. Petraeus didn’t defeat al Quaida in Iraq but he was canny enough to work with the Anbar Sunnis and the real lesson is that only when the cost of tolerating Islamists within a Muslim society gets steep enough will Muslims turn against them and kill them. That is what I want and why I approve of what the Sri Lankans did – finally – to the Tamil Tigers. Curtis LeMay is supposed to have said “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.” In the case of real fanatics you have to kill a lot more – maybe all of them. As long as we appease and apologize and let them walk all over us they aren’t going to quit. It is not war that has passed into history – only our will to fight.
Military might makes security tight. Why even FDR (with Stalin’s urging) was willin’ to fire bomb civilians with Napalm. Now, we’re fighting with a dumbed down ladies’ club version of the Marquess of Kingsbury rules. So, we don’t fight wars, we just waste a lot of money & then cut & run. The whole world knows it. Our enemies’ war strategy is to turn our own media against the effort & wait us out. Read Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar
Very thoughtful article and surprisingly thoughtful responses. And while COL. Bacevich rightly points out some exceedingly common problems, I think he goes too far in stipulating that the “western way of war,” (which is in some ways a very unfortunate phrase) is forever passe’. The problems he points out are symptoms of the core US deficiency: an almost complete lack of political end state and strategic thought at the national command level.
In his examples of Madeline Albright’s incompetent comment regarding use of the military, and the Pentagon paragon who exalted “decision superiority,” he points out that at the policy and strategic levels, these people are only thinking in terms of tactics. Our problem has been that with the absence of even military strategic thinkers, the policies and “strategies” proposed are either/or. Either we are tracked, armored heavy forces, or we are jump-out-of-the-clouds-at-night ninja snake eaters. We have to be both. We distract ourselves with a single silver bullet solution and neglect that it has always been the “Big War to Solve Big Problems” that has always saved America’s ass. It is true that WWI caused more “pain than gain,” however it would have certainly been WWII in 1928 had Germany dominated Europe. WWII and the Cold War do not really need justification (also see “Civil War”). It is the small wars that we flub that give us “syndromes.”
Mr. Bacevich would do well to carefully read the comments to his article. The truth is, at any time, at any technology level, only overwhelming force focused on the enemy’s center of gravity (whether that is a capital, or a ruler, or a tribe, or whatever) can prove victorious in combat.
Our problem is not that we’re not well equipped, or well trained, or that we lack intelligence, or that we have the wrong organization chart. It’s all willpower. Do we have the will to fight? Do we have the will to kill the enemy in his homes? Do we have the will to keep burning the forest until the enemy gives up or dies? Lack that will and you get slow-motion disaster, which is nearly every war we’ve fought since Korea.
The tide turned in Iraq because we actually found the balls to send in two extra divisions and kill everything in the Baghdad city limits that wasn’t in view of a TV camera. Take that approach wherever you find the enemy and keep at it and eventually you’ll find the victory that you term as being so elusive.
Oh, and it helps not to care what they print in stuff like the NY Times and Le Monde.
[...] major military exercise. No More Western Way of War [...]
I’ll second that.
See Van Creveld and William Lind on Fourth Generation Warfare to understand why the “suberb military” is a piece of gold plated shit shovel.
But it is a suberb military if the goal is to expend an infinite amount of resources to achieve nothing.
[...] strategy by dptrombly Andrew Bacevich has a new piece out which argues we have reached “The End of Military History.” It is worth reading the piece in full, because it is provocative. Bacevich strips down the Western [...]
If we are to use are military it should be with the credo Carthago delenda est.
Worrying about cheap oil is a near sighted foolish excuse to fight wars. Ironically the tensions caused by our invasions have caused speculators to drive up oil prices anyways and inflation to pay for the wars will cause oil prices to skyrocket anyways.
What should be a more pressing concern is the collapse of this country due to the warfare/welfare state and totalitarian rule that will surely follow as a result. Sin (such as illegal wars) profit us nothing, so repent and serve the Lord instead.
In old time, soldier needed some food, little bit gunpowder and new clothes once in a while. Nowadays, it is lot more expensive. By the way, major power players in Afghanistan want to keep war forever. Remember what happened first time? Najibullah’ regime fell not with withdrawal of Soviets but when Soviet patronage money stopped dripping. However, as soon as Najibullah was killed, money stopped dripping from West, Pakistan and Arabs as well. Nowadays they are smarter. West pays lavishly protection money to Afghan warlords, Taliban get nice help as well and there is nobody to stop flourishing opium production. I am sorry, but if you are drug lord in Afghanistan, would you let either side decisively win?
In general, we fortunately live in time when ethnic cleansing and mass murders are not acceptable behavior for civilized countries. That explains best why winning war is so hard. However, West introduced that principle for own protection, to prevent revenge by desperate remnants of some decimated nation. It does not take much money and knowledge to release nerve gas in metro system of large town or release deadly biological weapons in wide area. As long as West keeps restraint, chances of such response are much lower.
No one whether a large military or a small guerrilla can fight a war for even a day without money. Cut the source of the money and both will go down. It is economy, stupid. Now coming to Afghanistan, as per United Nations drug report that country produces 96% of the world’s opiates with a western export value of well over one hundred billion dollars per anum. Kill the opium crops and you win the war. Keep the opium crops and you shall lose. Unlike most commentators here who do not know even simple facts, the war in Afghanistan is not an ideological one at all. The same Salafis were the darlings of the neoconservative grand daddy, Reagan. Osama was family friend of Bush and perhaps still is, as far as the families are concerned. As the author has said and the vast majority of commentators wish for the end result is either defeat or ethnic cleansing pretty much on the same footing as the Hitler’s. And contrary to the illusion of the commentators nothing constructive has been done in Afghanistan. Russians had done more of a nation building there in a year than Americans have done in 9. That is the truth. But my way is different. Eradicate the opium crops completely. And stop sending even a dollar of aid too on top of it. Instead send some corporations there to build cell phone assembly plants, juicer blender assembly plants, toy plants etc. and let the American business and technology do its wonder. Hire the men, stop telling their women what to wear. You will be amazed. Money is a very powerful tool. Specially if it is earned . Now tell me how many manufacturing, food processing plants US military has opened in Afghanistan in the past year? On top of that how much of the opium cropland which is feeding insurgency and lawlessness was destroyed by US military?