New Army Doctrine

The Army just released a new doctrine and it echoes the September 2002 National Security Strategy, which declared that "America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones." That NSS served to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were both very weak states when the US went to war with them.

The Washington Post, October 5 has the details on the latest strategic plan:

The Army on Monday will unveil an unprecedented doctrine that declares nation-building missions will probably become more important than conventional warfare and defines "fragile states" that breed crime, terrorism and religious and ethnic strife as the greatest threat to U.S. national security.

...Today, such fragile states, if neglected, will pose mounting risks for the United States, according to Lt. Col. Steve Leonard, the manual's lead author. Weak states "create vast ungoverned areas that are breeding grounds for the threats that we fear the most, criminal networks, international terrorists, ethnic strife, genocide," he said. "The argument against it is: Forget all that; you still have . . . near peer competitors who are on the verge of closing the superpower gap."

The Post ran this story on p. A16, but my local paper had it on the front page above the fold.

In the October 2008 Atlantic Monthly, historian Andrew Bacevich writes that the development of the so-called "Petraeus Doctrine" meant that the Army is again fighting the last war -- Iraq -- instead of the next one.

According to the emerging Petrae­us Doctrine, the Army (like it or not) is entering an era in which armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous—with the application of force becoming a lesser part of the soldier’s repertoire...Historically, expectations that the next war will resemble the last one have seldom served the military well.

Bacevich fears that civilians will not engage in a debate with the professional military, meaning that "the power of decision may well devolve by default upon soldiers."

The Post story certainly suggests that the debate has been resolved within the army:

The stability operations doctrine is an engine that will drive Army resources, organization and training for years to come, Caldwell said, and Army officials already have detailed plans to execute it. The operations directive underpinning the manual "elevated stability operations to a status equal to that of the offense and defense," the manual reads, describing the move as a "fundamental change in emphasis" for the Army...

"It's certainly going to shape how we will allocate resources and how we direct training," said Col. Mike Redmond, director of the Army's stability operations division, who is executing an action plan to implement the doctrine with 157 different initiatives, such as directing the Army's medical command to develop plans advising foreign health ministries.

However, Bacevich notes dissent from Gian Gentile, an Army Lt. Col.

Iraq bids to transform the entire force into a “dead army walking.” We who believe this to be the case may be in error on some counts. Preparing to fight the last war will not be one of them.

The Post also quotes Gentile:

"All we need to do is look at Russia and Georgia a few months ago. That suggests the description . . . of future war is too narrow," said Col. Gian P. Gentile, an Iraq war veteran with a doctorate in history who is a leading thinker in the Army camp opposed to the new doctrine.

"I don't think the Army should transform itself into a light-infantry-based constabulary force," Gentile said. Instead, he said, "the organizing principle for the U.S. Army should be the Army's capability to fight on all levels of war."

For a defense of the transformation, Bacevich recommends consulting John Nagl's book.

This is an ironic end to the Bush era, given what GWB said about nation-building in his 2000 debates with Al Gore.


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Did "the Surge" really fail?

Did the surge save Iraq? A lot of security and foreign policy experts have attempted to answer that question -- and they provide an assortment of answers.

A unique team of scholars from UCLA has published their latest research that directly challenges the standard political narrative about the effectiveness of "the surge" in Iraq:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

Professor Agnew, the president of the American Association of Geographers, the leading professional organization in geography, specifically targets claims made by General Petraeus (and his supproters) about the efficacy of the military strategy:

"The surge really seems to have been a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted," Agnew said...

In addition to casting doubt on the efficacy of the surge in general, the study calls into question the success of a specific strategy of the surge, namely separating neighborhoods of rival sectarian groups by erecting concrete blast walls between them. The differences in light signatures had already started to appear by the time American troops began erecting the walls under General David Petraeus's direction, the researchers found.

"The U.S. military was sealing off neighborhoods that were no longer really active ribbons of violence, largely because the Shiites were victorious in killing large numbers of Sunnis or driving them out of the city all together," Agnew said. "The large portion of the refugees from Iraq who went during this period to Jordan and Syria are from these neighborhoods."

Incidentally, data presented last fall by the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, headed by General James L. Jones, would seem to confirm the geographers' conclusions.

As I argued last year, the authors find that ethnic cleansing -- as well as internal displacement -- seems to explain the reduction in violence in Baghdad:

The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

Baghdad's decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.

By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found.

Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall, they report in "Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the U.S. Military 'Surge' Using Night Light Signatures."

"If the surge had truly 'worked,' we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."

Incidentally, the study authors apparently controlled for Baghdad's weak electrical power grid.


Hat tip: Mark Thoma.

Here's the academic citation for the Agnew article: Agnew J, Gillespie T W, Gonzalez J, Min B, 2008, "Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures" Environment and Planning A 40(10) 2285 – 2295


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Petraeus

I posted my initial thoughts about General Petraeus's testimony over at the Duck.

Locally, you might hear me on WFPL (89.3 FM) in the next day or so.

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