Summary: As we begin another cycle of wars, we owe it to ourselves and our soldiers to ask the big question: Why do the best soldiers in the world keep losing? Here is an answer, stark and contrarian – but supported by overwhelming evidence. Failure to learn to do better might have ugly consequences. (This revises and expands a post from 3 years ago.)
Contents
- Scoresheet for our Afghanistan War.
- Why do the best soldiers lose so often?
- Fallows: we are the problem, not them!
- Why we lose.
- Worse news: overconfidence
- Other answers, all missing the point.
- Conclusions
- For More Information.
(1) Scoresheet for our Afghanistan War.
“How America boosts the Afghan opium trade.“
By Andrew Cockburn in the April 2018 issue of Harper’s.
“The presidential candidate Donald Trump had repeatedly questioned the need for US forces to stay in the country. The military leadership felt otherwise, and once Trump was elected, they argued that he should send more troops and hang on for the long haul. This meant beating back efforts by Steve Bannon to hold Trump to his earlier isolationist instincts. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, reportedly even showed the president a Seventies-era photo of miniskirted women in Kabul {e.g., here} as indication that the Afghans were not beyond redemption.
“Ultimately, the generals carried all before them. Late in August, Trump announced, implausibly, that he had ‘studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle’ and concluded that the top brass should have the open-ended commitment they demanded.”
Cockburn opens on the latest chapter in the long sad tale of the US military’s incompetence in Afghanistan. He tells it well, as the tragedy it is. He ends on a dark but certainly correct note.
“General Nicholson has said that the strategy endorsed by Trump last summer puts our side ‘on a path to win’ in Afghanistan. He is at least the eighth senior American commander to pledge impending victory in those sixteen years of war. He will doubtless not be the last.”
I recommend reading it! Cockburn’s analysis raises an important question: why do our forces lose to poorly equipped, untrained foes despite our vast power?
(2) Fallows: Why do the best soldiers in the world keep losing?
James Fallows is one of the most perceptive journalists of my generation. When the Jan/Feb 2016 copy of The Atlantic arrived with his provocative title on the cover, I eagerly turned to it: “The Tragedy of the American Military.“ He clearly states the problem.
“Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. …Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war.
“Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion …Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned.”
Here is a simple but brutal statement of the truth from a 2016 article by Fred Reed.
“The military of Vietnam wasn’t very good at fighting, and neither is the military of today. GIs in Asia would assault a hill, usually of no importance, and, after three days, with the aid of helicopters, helo gunships, napalm, artillery, and fighter-bombers, would capture it. This would be called a triumph. The astute observed that if the Americans had to fight on equal terms, without overwhelming material superiority, they would last perhaps ten minutes.
“This is now a recognized pattern. Note that numerically superior and hugely armed American forces have been outfought for years by lightly armed Afghan goat herds. Since neither the wars nor the soldiers in them are of much importance, this doesn’t matter.”
(3) Fallows: we, the American people, are the problem!
So what causes this inability to win wars in the 6 decades since Korea? Much of Fallows’ article presents the critiques of the military reform community (largely ignored by the Pentagon). Then came the kicker, one of the most amazing non sequiturs I can recall. Fallows says it is our fault!
“Citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. Not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. The country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1% under fire in our name.
“America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. …We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops…
“The difference now, I contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy. At enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. But because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.”
That is bizarrely false, as explained in Are we chickenhawks and so bear the responsibility for our lost wars since 9/11? The American people, perhaps unwisely, trust our military leaders to conduct our wars. Leave it to the experts! But the question remains: why does our powerful army so often lose in our modern wars?
(4) Why we lose.
The finest non-technical answer is Fred Reed’s 11 reasons why we lose. Here is a brief excerpt. Read the fully essay!
“Note that the current military, an advanced version of the WWII force, is ready should the Imperial Japanese Navy return. It also has phenomenally advanced weaponry in the pipeline to take on a space-age enemy, perhaps from Mars, should one appear. It is only the present for which the US is not prepared.”
G I Wilson (Colonel, USMC, retired) has a more operationally useful answer: We consider the US military the finest soldiers in the world because we – and our generals – judge them by the criteria important to us. Not the criteria relevant to victory in war.
Our troops look good: tall, strong, healthy, good teeth. Our troops wield weapons that Buck Rogers would envy, fighting small wars with almost unlimited supplies. We fight people most of whom are poorly educated, lightly trained, and wielding simple weapons. But we we still lose, as they fight on their land against infidel foreigners.
Our troops are better educated than our foes. Most enlisted men have high school degrees. Many NCOs have some college. Officers have undergraduate degrees; many have advanced degrees. But this does not appear to help.
Our officers write academic papers about military theory, but the Darwinian ratchet guarantees that our foes’ leaders understand 4th generation warfare. Our officers have MBAs but our foes ruthlessly employ the most brutally effective management methods via lethal trial and error. So they develop new methods faster, and so maintain an edge in performance. For more about this see this analysis by Wilson: The strengths of our 4GW foes; above all they learn faster.
Martin van Creveld’s Training of Officers: From Military Professionalism to Irrelevance
“Nowadays the medium and senior personnel of all modern armed forces undergo extensive school education. Nevertheless, even in today’s technological world the view that war is the best teacher of war still holds much truth. …
“Over the last 40 years in particular, professional militaries have suffered any number of defeats at the hands of guerrillas and other practitioners of low-intensity conflict – who do not in the ordinary course of things undergo staff- and war-college training but have instead the authentic daily experience of combat.”
Education is not the only advantage that fails to produce an advantage. Our soldiers have courage, but they fight people with literally suicidal bravery and determination. We Were Soldiers Once …and Young
War has its own calculus, which is not ours. The only relevant competitive advantage is an army’s ability to win in a specific time and place. Since Korea we seldom have that. We don’t have in Afghanistan.
(5) Now for the worse news
Overconfidence is an infection capable of destroying the strongest army, and ran like epidemic through our forces during the 9/11 wars (and perhaps still does today). For a stunning example, see this by one of the top intellects on our side — Australian army officer David Kilcullen. He published “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency“ in the May-June 2006 issue of Military Review. The advice was fantastic — when used by an insurgent. It was horrifically advice for our officers. Look at article #1.
“Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.”
It was vital for a company commander to know that the world expert on “his” district already lives there and probably was born there. An American officer on a 6-12 month rotation could not develop comparable knowledge about the area, especially in so foreign a culture. It might be difficult for some of them to develop such competence so quickly in Watts or Harlem.
Despite its obviously bad advice, Kilcullen’s article was a big hit – widely recommended reading for company commanders before deploying. No surprise that both Iraq and Afghanistan were costly failures. See my review for more from this fascinating vignette of our mad wars.
(6) Other answers, all missing the point.
There are a host of other answers to this question. “It’s the money” (incentives in the Military-Industrial-Complex). America’s foolish Grand Strategy. Our military is trained to fight “war” and 4GW is not war. Our general officers are incompetent. None of those grapple with the core issue.
Generals are spending the lives of their men (almost all men), plus vast fortunes from our national income, in failed wars. This is the equivalent of a football team touching a hot stove again and again. Why are our leaders (especially military leaders) indifferent to failure (e.g., the suffering and deaths of their troops)? Why do they not learn from defeat? That is the question.
This feels to me like doctors in 1800 wondering about syphilis. So many symptoms, all unrelated to each other. They speculated about a common cause, but could not find it. The Germ Theory of disease was first proven in 1808. The syphilis bacteria was found in 1905. This made possible research leading to effective treatment.
(7) Conclusion
So it has gone in most of our wars since Korea, except for Saddam’s mad conventional war with the US in the first Gulf War. I see nothing in the visible future that will change this. This is just a first look at this vital question, a question that as a nation we close our eyes to. But it is necessary to discover the answer. A belligerent nation with a military that loses wars is a hazardous combination.
Other posts in this series
- Why does the US field the best soldiers but lose so often?
- Why the US military keeps losing wars.
- Possible solutions, paths to a better future for the US military.
(8) For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about our military, especially these…
- Is victory impossible in modern wars? Or just not possible for us?
- Why we lose so many wars, and how we can win — a summary at Martin van Creveld’s website.
- A powerful new article shows why we lose so many wars: FAILure to learn.
- Reforming the US Army: can be done, must be done.
- So many scandals in the US military: signs of rot or reform?
- Overhauling The Officer Corps to build a military that can win wars.
- How officers adapt to life in the Pentagon: they choose the blue pill.
- A step to getting an effective military. We might need it soon.
Essential reading for those who would like a more effective military.
The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
