Unqualified Offerings

The two articles everyone has to read now are the much-discussed Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. essay from Foreign Affairs, “How to Win in Iraq,” and Jason Vest’s new article, “Willful Ignorance: How the Pentagon sent the army to Iraq without a counterinsurgency doctrine,” from the most recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Right quick, I rate the Vest article as far more valuable if less “constructive,” and I find the light it shines (inferentially) on Krepinevich distinctly unflattering.

Of Krepinevich summarily, reading it made me think of two things. Really, three. The first is the old roleplaying game cliché of “quickly and quietly.” As in, “We move quickly and quietly down the corridor,” a classic example of play groups trying to have it both ways at once, bluffing the gamemaster into accepting that they can achieve both sides of what is really a tradeoff between values at the same time. The clearest example of “quickly and quietly” in Krepinevich is when he says that, oil-spot strategy notwithstanding, US and Iraqi armed forces should also continue with sweeps beyond secured territory to keep insurgents from enjoying the leisure to organize themselves. Since his thesis statement is that “Winning will require a new approach to counterinsurgency, one that focuses on providing security to Iraqis rather than hunting down insurgents,” and he argues that hunting down insurgents has been distracting the US from providing loyalty-winning development to secured areas, this seems like a cheat.

The other bit is something that I remember from an old Sandbaggers episode, but that surely predates it: “If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.” This pops up throughout the article, where Krepinevich argues that if we had this, and that, we could have this and that.

Finally, to the extent that chastened hawks accept Krepinevich’s recommendations, they are conceding a great deal. Because those sweeps notwithstanding, the “oil spot strategy” is essentially the counterinsurgency version of taking and holding ever greater amounts of territory. The necessary corollary to that is that there is (considerable) territory we don’t control now. Such territory is functionally insurgent territory. But “the insurgents haven’t been able to control any territory” has been a staple of “good news” rhetoric since Spring 2004. (In Summer and Fall 2003 Good News Rhetoric held that there was no insurgency.)

So some of the ham that would let us have ham and eggs is a leadership that has any serious interest in rethinking their own claims and decisions to this point. I think said leadership is demonstrably too halal in this regard for us to get our ham and eggs.

I actually think the Krepinevich article is a target-rich environment for one of those interlineated microscopic critiques people like to do. Meanwhile, the Vest article is quite good, but a counsel of despair. From it one can only conclude that the dominant culture of the Army (and probably not just ours) resists any serious focus on counterinsurgency warfare because it’s just no goddam fun for Army careerists. However, the section on the typology of insurgencies is good, genuinely new information for most of us laypeople. (It certainly was to me.)

(Links via Brad Plumer.)