You Can’t Make Me
Phil Carter doesn’t seem to realize where his two-step critique of General Ricardo “Feikorpsfan” Sanchez goes wrong, or maybe he’s just not clear about it. To counter Sanchez’s dolschtosslegende of the Vietnam War, Carter argues
No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will. It’s true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I’ve read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn’t lose the Vietnam War because of any “stab in the back.” We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.
Which led to the following reaction from the “Powell generation”:
This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.
There are institutional factors at work beyond the skittishness of a Vietnam-chastened officer corps, like the lovely money to be made selling an army geegaws for “conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features.” But I’m content to accept the thesis, not original to Carter, that the post-Vietnam Army leadership attempted to minimize its counter-insurgency capability to avoid getting involved in counter-insurgencies. Then comes the confused or confusing part of Carter’s argument:
On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send “unprepared and improperly trained soldiers” into the “guerilla warfighting conditions” of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army’s lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.
The question is what “that deeply flawed view is.” I’m inclined to infer that Carter is arguing that it was somehow tragic and blameworthy that the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine-era army eschewed preparation for counter-insurgency warfare in hopes of dissuading policy-makers from launching new counter-insurgencies. In which case, Carter’s argument is daft. (If not, plenty of other people have made such an argument.) The Powell Generation had the right idea: stay the hell out of guerrilla wars.
It’s vanishingly unlikely that an overseas guerrilla war will ever be just, necessary and winnable for the United States. The odds are far more likely that: we will have no right to be there; we will have no need to be there; we will have no way to “win” short of mass slaughter and repopulation with more pliant residents. The US has not made Iraq a hellhole of death, disfigurement, displacement and corruption because it lacked a certain number of civil affairs brigades. These things happened because, as in Vietnam in the 1960s or the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century, we had no business being there, nothing approaching the savvy needed to operate effectively and nowhere near the motivation and expertise on things Iraqi that Iraqis themselves have.
The United States would be far better off, first, re-embracing the Powell doctrine and second, admitting just how unlikely it is that the United States will face a threat that would meet any reasonable just-war test in the foreseeable future. The US would then drastically shrink military spending and reduce its overseas military commitments. The worst thing that the US could do, for ourselves and others, is to add supposed counter-insurgency capability to the existing military, tempting it to more and greater folly.
Comment by TGGP —
May 12, 2008 @ 4:55 am
Sufficient firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people themselves, and the will of dead people does not matter. The fact that the U.S was not willing to do that is evidence that they should not have been fighting the war in the first place.
I had an uncle in the military around that time who actually wanted to be sent to Vietnam like his brother because he figured it would be safer. Apparently the military was extremely screwed up then.
Comment by abb1 —
May 12, 2008 @ 7:07 am
Silly. If the objective is not an imperial conquest, then it’s all obvious. If the objective is an imperial conquest, then it’s all wrong. Change the objective, change in the tactics will follow, naturally.
Comment by Nell —
May 12, 2008 @ 10:47 am
I agree, wholeheartedly. The Lancaster doctrine is: If we’re doing counterinsurgency, we’re somewhere we shouldn’t be.
For those who don’t follow the link above, I’d like to add that it’s a big, fat, often-repeated lie that the U.S. military did no counterinsurgency work between Viet Nam and the latest revision for Iraq. The U.S. government funded and the U.S. military advised in every detail the effort to crush the insurgency in El Salvador. Thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of CIA operatives were involved, in combat and interrogations (in which torture was routine), though the official lie was that troops were limited to 500 and were only “advisors”.
Comment by Nell —
May 12, 2008 @ 11:08 am
I haven’t read Sanchez’ book, and it makes me queasy to think about doing so. Is the ‘Freikorps fan’ jibe more than snark? (This is addressed not just to Jim but to anyone who’s followed Sanchez’ book toor.)
I think of Blackwater and its ilk as the all-too-real analogue to the “black armies” of 1920s-1930s Germany. And a lot of the stuff being said by commenters who claim to be current military creeps the hell out of me.
Comment by Richard Cownie —
May 12, 2008 @ 11:41 am
Yes yes yes! I agree 100%. If you’re doing counter-insurgency, you’re in the wrong place fighting the wrong war. And if the USA wants to influence foreigners, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Disney and Apple can do it – and make a profit – where the US military, at vast expense, usually can’t.
I’m thinking a $150B/year military – about twice the budget of anyone else – would be a reasonable target. And some of the savings could go to meet the goal (accepted by several European governments) of spending 0.7% of GDP in non-military foreign aid – preferably to really poor countries, i.e. not Israel and Egypt. That would be about $90-100B/year, instead of the current anemic $20B/year or so.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 12, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Excellent post.
The United States would be far better off, first, re-embracing the Powell doctrine
Agreed…but could we find a new, non-ironic name for it?
Comment by Ian —
May 12, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
Correct on all counts but one.
It’s not impossible that the US might end up in a just war scenario in the medium term future. A casus foederis can make a war just under the right circumstances. Helping a small, friendly, somewhat decent country defend itself against an aggressor can be just; the Korean war seems to have been well justified (with the exception of raising a threat to China plausible enough to draw them in).
Given the not entirely implausible danger of a China-Taiwan war or the resumption of the Korean war, it’s not a bad idea to do some preparation for such wars. You probably don’t need to spend 4% of your GDP to do that (5.5% counting Iraq/Afghanistan).
Comment by TGGP —
May 12, 2008 @ 6:39 pm
I don’t think the Freikorps were contractors. It also might be the case that Blackwater is less dangerous than your local SWAT team.
Comment by Nell —
May 13, 2008 @ 1:56 am
TGGP, the Freikorps were government-funded but unaccountable, just like the contractors.
But your point about SWAT teams is well taken. Given their relatively much smaller numbers relative to the general population than WWI or Viet Nam war vets, for that matter, I suppose that Iraq war vets are more likely to be absorbed into pre-existing paramilitary formations than hook up with each other to form new ones. So, yeah, into local SWAT teams and into private militaries.
Trackback by www.buzzflash.net —
May 13, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
Jim Henley: "Just-war" counterinsurgency?…
It’s vanishingly unlikely that an overseas guerrilla war will ever be just, necessary and winnable for the United States. The odds are far more likely that: we will have no right to be there; we will have no need to be there; we will have no way to &…
Comment by kid bitzer —
May 13, 2008 @ 8:41 pm
“Feikorpsfan”
uhh…do you want “Frei”s with that?
Comment by Avram —
May 14, 2008 @ 1:36 am
Richard, what do you think of Coca-Cola’s attempts to influence foreigners in Colombia?
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
May 15, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
Right.
Right right right.
Yeah. Exactly right.