A Matter Of Strategy, Not Tactics

Back in school I did a good deal of research on the interplay between civilian and military leadership.  It’s an extremely important topic that’s often overlooked.  When the power in this relationship shifts too much to one side, we get pretty disastrous consequences.  In certain cases the military has been able to essentially control the formation of international policy and the strategies used to implement it because of a weak civilian leadership.  Think Vietnam where the military ran amok while the White House had no real strategy to win a war that was unwinnable.  The military will quickly fill that power vacuum every chance it gets, and often to disastrous consequences.  On the flip side we point to the first 4+ years in Iraq where a cowboy civilian leadership in the White House pushed aside the military brass in effect running its own war.  Generals opposed to both the overall strategy and its implementation were pushed aside, silenced, or even fired for their views.  That worked out pretty well didn’t it?  With either a weak military or civilian command we often see poor decisions made, very similar to what is taking place now in Afghanistan.

Michael Hastings wrote a great piece in Rolling Stone Magazine last week regarding General Stanley McChrystal, the (former) top commander in Afghanistan.  If you haven’t yet read it, please do so because I will not rehash it here.  What makes this a great piece of journalism is two fold.  First, Hastings rarely infuses his own bias upon a very heated subject, he reports what he heard and saw.  Hilarious how Rolling Stone does better journalism than the The New York Times these days, frankly I’m not surprised.  Second, Hastings gets the inside scoop, and I mean inside, he gets quotes that you would never expect to hear which provide real insight into what’s taking place within McChrystal’s circle and between the top military and civilian leadership.

Now you can spend all the time you want reading peer reviewed journals, which I do, but nothing can substitute for getting the word directly from the men (and women) who call the shots on the ground or in the situation room, nothing.  You can read a million and one think tank briefings and policy papers, it doesn’t matter, it’s all just research, the real decision making process when it comes to matters of international relations and war is a messy thing that is very similar to the market, in the sense that actors are not always rational, emotion often clouds judgement, and winning (making money) is not always the top priority.

So let’s just get this part out of the way first, on Thursday President Obama fired four star general Stanley McChrystal (technically he resigned) removing him from command of the war in Afghanistan.  McChrystal’s predecesor, General David McKiernan, was also fired by President Obama in the middle of the war.  That was the first time a commanding general had been fired by a president during active combat in over 50 years, the last was general Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.  Now Obama has not one, but two firings of an Afghan war commander under his belt.  We will come back to this later.

Should McChrystal have been fired?  Technically yes, his and his unit’s words in the article constitute insubordination, pretty straight forward.  But the reality is that four star generals are in a sense politicians in their own right, they must play the political game because at that level reputations are on the line, and I don’t mean personally, I mean history book style.  A four star general has a lot more to worry about than just his troops, he is both the tool that implements strategy, and often has a say at the table in the strategy chosen.  It is extremely important that when he does not agree with the chosen strategy he make his views clear in order that we don’t end up with the civilian leadership running us down a path which the military is not equip for or confident in.  We saw in the run up to the Iraq war, certain generals speak out in this manner, and consequently silenced or demoted, a terrible thing.  This led to a narrow range of views, and in the end, the chosen strategy, largely by the civilian leadership, failed miserably.

The civilian leadership does not have a handle on the chosen strategy in Afghanistan, and consequently, the military has taken over in that department.  Why don’t they have a good handle, well for two reasons.  First, this administration inherited the war and the last thing they want is to be the one that ended it on bad terms.  The United States of America doesn’t like to lose wars, we see what happens when we do.  In the case of Vietnam it ushered in an era of non intervention and an unwillingness by our government to use force, as well as a weakened corps of generals.  President Obama isn’t willing to fold this hand, no matter how bad it is.

Second, the president is not a strong leader.  I’m not saying anything else about him, I’m specifically saying that he has shown time and again that he is not a strong leader.  The article lays this out when Hastings says Obama was literally scared and intimidated when meeting the top military brass in the tank for the first time.  I’m not surprised, the man is a great speaker, he’s an incredibly smart guy, he understands how to cobble together disparate voices and hear all sides of a situation, but the one thing he is not is a leader.  And when it comes to making foreign policy, you need a leader.  This of course does not excuse President Bush of being a complete retard as people hailed him a leader for his no nonsense committed approach, no, he was just a gunslinger, big difference.

When the military senses that its civilian leadership is weak, this is what happens, they take on pet projects, like trying to do COIN in Afghanistan.  McChrystal went to Obama and asked for 50,000 more troops to implement these tactics the right way.  Obama couldn’t man up, so he gave him 40,000 and lied to the nation that we were preparing to pull out, soon.

The problem people is not the tactics associated with the COIN doctrine.  Counter insurgency and nation building work, in certain cases.  But the underlying atmosphere has to be supportive of this type of action, it can’t just be replicated anywhere and at any time.  This is where McChrystal misses the boat.  You can’t blame him though, he was put in a position where we were stuck in Afghanistan and he was trying to make the best of what he had, a shitty situation to deal with, a quagmire to put it bluntly.  No matter what he does there it’s going to fail.

The larger problem here is that we have no overall strategy to deal with the region, mostly because President Obama is a weak leader, and partially because there is no good strategy besides not being involved on a large military scale.  Instead of formulating a real strategy which takes into account the whole region, which is the only way we will be successful, President Obama, his foreign policy team, and his generals corps has decided to sit on the situation hoping that it will lay a golden egg.  Wake up call, there is no golden egg.

Back to President Obama for a second and the fact that he’s now fired two commanding generals in the same war.  Yes, McChrystal did something deserving of reprimand.  The bigger issue though is that the president seems to be passing the buck down the line time and again for his failure to formulate a strategy.  Each general he brings to the table will use different tactics on the ground, but without a regional strategy and commitment nothing will change.  Counter insurgency and nation building work, but they take efforts from a diverse group of actors across the board all striving for the same goal under the same overarching regional strategy.  We don’t have this by a long shot, something that McChrystal was trying to get across.

If you should take anything out of the Rolling Stone article it is this.  We have an extremely weak civilian leadership in both the White House and State Department.  No matter the tactics that General Patreus uses on the ground, he will fail without an all out push and commitment by our civilians.  Frankly, I have zero faith this will happen, and zero belief that our civilian leadership is willing to stay the 20+ years in Afghanistan and do what is needed in Pakistan in order to get us out of that region with a win.

Update 6/28/10: In the past few days an interesting idea has been bandied around throughout the media.  Some say that McChrystal’s actions undermined the counter insurgency strategy that he himself was trying to implement.  They say he did this by disparaging those civilian leaders who are so needed in the first place.  To this I say, bullshit.  McChrystal, although technically insubordinate, spoke truthfully about those civilian leaders who have failed so miserably at their jobs, for being incompetent, and frankly doing more harm to the operation than good.  Now, in terms of Vice President Biden, McChrystal was obviously wrong to use the language he did regarding the vice president, and I believe he is wrong as well for thinking that Joe doesn’t know a damn thing about what’s going on over there.  In my mind, the vice president may actually be the only one on that staff, save for Secretary of State Clinton, who can see the forest despite the trees.  Joe knows that this is an unwinnable war, one where the president is taking half measures and has no real strategy to deal with the region.  McChrystal is bashing Biden because his remarks don’t jive with the strategy he is trying to implement over there which requires one face from the civilian leadership the whole way through.  McChrystal knows that when Biden breaks ranks he is doing the operation a disservice.  McChrystal should not be reprimanded for brining to light the idiocy that is going on inside the civilian leadership, he should be commended for making us all aware of what’s going on.

But at the end of the day, none of it matters, because McChrystal was doomed to failure anyway.  Hopefully instead of bashing him, we can turn our attention to the incompetent civilian leadership which refuses to make decisions one way or the other.  Either go for the whole shabang or GTFO.

Oh and by the way, if you think McCain would have been any better, think again.  Just because you were a fighter pilot doesn’t mean you know jack shit about doing nation building in Afghanistan or formulating a regional policy that makes any sense.

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