Nothing pleases American military men more than being fed their own bullsh*t. “We’re the greatest,” “Greatest military in all of history,” “No one can beat us, no one can even fight us,” etc. This is what they tell each other, it is what they expect to hear from civilians, and, in Washington, it is what most office-holders, including presidents and secretaries of defense, believe. The effects are currently on display in the Persian Gulf.
The scoreboard tells a different story. In the Second World War, we beat the Japanese in the Pacific fair and square. But the Red Army won the war in Europe, fielding 500 divisions against Germany’s 350 and our 90 in both theaters. Since that victory, and the end of European culture that accompanied it, we have tied in Korea, lost in Vietnam, won glorious victories against Panama, Grenada, and Iraq (the first time), lost in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq (the second time), and are currently stalemated in the war with Iran. The latter, as of this writing, has descended into a siege where the usual question applies: who starves first, besieged or besieger? In this case the food is oil, but the question remains the same.
The larger issue that should dominate the defense debate in Washington, but is almost never heard, is why do we keep losing wars? It’s not that our enemies out-spend us. If you graphed the Taliban’s budget against ours, theirs would not be visible. The solution is not more money. More money for business as usual will make the problem worse. In my view, six things lie at the heart of our continued military failures.
The first is that we focus at the tactical level of war, which is the least powerful level. The strategic level is the most powerful, with the operational level (in the German sense) in between. A higher level trumps a lower, so all the tactical victories do us little good if we lose strategically, which we do. America’s greatest military theorist, Col. John Boyd, said, “When I was a young officer, I was told that if you have land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, you win. Well, in Vietnam we had all three, but we lost. So there is obviously more to it.” That something more is the art of strategy, an art that demands more than piling up targets destroyed in a game of king of the dunghill. Our military doesn’t get that.
Second, in our quest for victory through putting firepower on targets, the essence of the French, Second Generation way of war we still practice, we overestimate what air power can do. Years ago, when I cohosted a television show called Modern War, I had an unusually thoughtful Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Merrill McPeak, as my guest. The first thing he said was, “Historically, air power has over-promised and under-delivered.” As we see in the war with Iran, neither our armed forces nor our civilian leaders have learned that lesson. A frustrated President Johnson, stuck to the flypaper in Vietnam, complained to his generals, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.” It didn’t work then and it’s not working now.
A third reason we lose wars is that we put too much faith in technological superiority. The best history of the subject, Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War, argues that technical advantages have seldom won wars. Combat favors simple weapons, cheap enough to be bought in quantity, over such rococo masterpieces as the F-35. And technical marvels can often be countered simply. When we built the “McNamara Line” of high-tech sensors in Vietnam to catch North Vietnamese infiltrators, the NVA hung buckets of urine in trees to fox the sensors. In a DOD war game where I played Red, I countered the American army of robots by sending out women and kids armed with spray paint, tarps, and hammers, and kept cameras rolling. If the robots opened up on my “army,” the images would have gone all over the world and America would instantly have lost the war. The game ended with those girls and boys roasting goats on blind, overturned robots.
Fourth, the U.S. military is poor at planning. This may come as a surprise, because all our staff schools and war colleges teach is the planning process. But that’s the problem: The planning process is taught by rote, with the focus wholly on following the process, not the result. If, as is often the case, the plan is idiotic (we didn’t think Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz?), the planners can’t see that because all they know is that they followed the staff planning process. In a staff planning exercise several decades ago at Camp Pendleton, the plan had the 1st Marine Division stretched out for 40 miles along the North Korean east coast with the enemy holding highlands that in some places came down to within one kilometer of that coast. When I suggested this might be the worst military plan Ares ever saw, all the planners could do was go through the process again. Never having been taught to think militarily, it was all they knew. Not surprisingly, bad plans lose wars.
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Our vastly over-large staffs—whole cities for one division (in World War II, a German Panzer division staff had in theory 27 officers, in practice often fewer)—mean we cannot act and react quickly to unexpected threats and opportunities. Had we taken out Iran’s clerical and Revolutionary Guard leadership in January when the popular rebellion was in full swing, we might have brought the system down. By the time we did it, the public was cowed and the assassinations did little strategic good.
My sixth observation brings us back to where we began: The civilian decision-makers in Washington don’t see through the “We’re the greatest” BS the military puts out. So they get caught in wars they can’t end (and expected to be over with quickly). But there is another side to that cowpatty coin: They do not understand that the U.S. military needs deep-reaching military reform. Following the defeat in Vietnam, I was a prime mover of the Military Reform Movement of the 1980s. At one point we had a Congressional Military Reform Caucus that was bipartisan and included more than 100 members of Congress (though most were just along for the ride). We pushed for adopting German maneuver warfare instead of the French war of attrition; called for major changes in the military personnel system, including dropping “up or out” that compels the vice of careerism; keeping people in the same place to generate unit cohesion; mandating deep cuts in the number of officers above the company grades; and buying simpler, cheaper weapons in larger numbers. But the reformers were armed with ideas, while the defenders of business-as-usual deployed vast amounts of money. Guess which wins in Washington?
Pentagon, White House and Capitol Hill civilians who deal with the military would do well to remember an old story from the insurance industry. An insurance company’s board meeting heard nothing but glowing reports about the business’s operations, despite a falling profit margin. The board members beamed, with one exception. Finally, the old man, who had started life poor, working in the Garment District, spoke up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “bullsh*t is our most valuable material. It is what we sell our customers. It is what we tell our stockholders. It is what we use to blind our regulators. Let us not waste such a precious commodity on one another.”
