Tragically, the chaos of Iraq created the strategic vacuum that allowed Osama bin Laden’s small terrorist organization to morph into larger and more deadly terrorist surrogates and franchises, to include Al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, as well as many others spawned from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Hindu Kush.
THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR
The first year of successful combat by special operating forces in concert with the Afghan Northern Alliance showcased what U.S. Soldiers can do if they give up on big-machine warfare and practice the art of war among the people. Speed, shock, and surprise combined to break the back of the Taliban. I recall a particularly poignant moment in the early months when my television showed images of Special Forces Soldiers wrapped in native Talib shawls and leggings, mounted on horseback, calling in precision fires from B-52 bombers making “lazy eights” in the skies high above. It was a moment when those of us who had been calling for exactly such an imaginative melding of unconventional and high-tech warfare felt vindicated.
Sadly, the moment passed. A defeated Taliban retreated into Pakistan to fight another day. The Taliban, like all of our successful enemies in the past, knew that American patience in war was lacking. It was just a momentary failure for Afghan insurgents whose ancestors had been evicting enemies for 2,300 years. In time, patience and cunning replaced active resistance. Within a year of victory, the Bush administration had decided to fight two wars, with priority given to the one in Iraq, creating another strategic vacuum, which would be filled by a resurgent Taliban . . . and yet another war fought against an adaptive enemy, a war that is with us still.
ISRAEL AND LEBANON THE SECOND TIME: 2006
Contemporary history teaches about the firepower addiction of a Western-style military, unused to fighting against adaptive enemies. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the first air force officer to be appointed head of the Israeli Defense Forces, said upon assuming his duties in 2005 that he believed the American experience in Kosovo demonstrated that a carefully planned, orchestrated, and technologically precise air campaign could collapse Hezbollah’s ability to threaten Israel.
Halutz fell prey to the same demons that were at that very moment confounding his American friends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hezbollah’s demons appeared most decisively in the small village of Bint Jbiel, just over the Israeli-Lebanon border and nearby in the defile of Wadi Saluki. There Hezbollah fighters ambushed and destroyed a battalion’s worth of Israel’s blitzkrieg-era heavy tanks. The parallel disasters of Bint Jbiel and Wadi Saluki became laboratories for teaching how a well-trained insurgent force—exhaustively drilled, carefully dug in, camouflaged, and armed with the first-rate, Soviet-era precision antitank weaponry—could utterly devastate a modern, technologically superior Cold War force, even if that force commanded the air absolutely. These battles strongly suggest that older-generation portable antitank and antiaircraft weapons in the hands of diabolically skilled infantry fighting what theorists now term “hybrid warfare” can win against heavy, mechanized forces if they meld just enough technology with an irregular force whose members are willing to fight to the death.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Non-Western militaries are increasingly internalizing the lessons of wars against technologically superior enemies. Recent works on the operational and tactical problems of fighting Western-style militaries suggest clear warnings. First, non-Western enemies understand Western military vulnerabilities: aversion to casualties and collateral damage, sensitivity to domestic and world opinion, and lack of commitment to conflicts of durations measured in years rather than months. They also perceive that Americans in particular retain a style of war focused on the single offensive dimension of a firepower battle. Moreover, they are already considering how to target Western vulnerabilities while capitalizing on their intrinsic advantages: time, will, and the inherent power of the defensive. Borrowing from Mao and Giap, future enemies have learned the value of time and patience. From their perspective, swift success is not essential to victory.
Future enemies have also realized the advantage of interfering with an intruder’s intention to end a conflict quickly and at minimum cost. Moreover, non-Western armies have learned to limit the effect and duration of air campaigns by dispersing not only their forces but their telecommunications, logistics, and transportation infrastructures. They also understand that sophisticated air defenses—whose effectiveness depends on airfields, surface-to-air missile sites, and vulnerable command-and-control nodes—have become liabilities more than assets and must be dispersed, hidden, or eliminated.
Once the ground conflict begins, enemies must, they understand, use superior mass to offset the lethal firepower and precision technology of Western armies. They will capitalize on the positional advantages of the defensive in or near their own territory. As they gain confidence, they will search for opportunities to mass sufficient force to achieve local successes. As in the Kosovo air campaign, they will seek to frustrate Western ground forces with just enough modern weaponry to extend the campaign indefinitely. A few precision cruise missiles against major logistic bases will add to the casualty rates that Western militaries must explain to their citizens. The object will not be decisive victory but stalemate. A prolonged stalemate will erode Western political support for the conflict.
As non-Western militaries develop concepts for defeating the U.S.’s firepower-centered method of war, the character and composition of their forces are changing. The Cold War impulse to clone Western force structures is disappearing. Foreign militaries are taking on their own identities. The mountains of metal, consisting of expensive yet often second-rate land, sea, and air machines that serve as lucrative targets are rapidly vanishing. In particular, non-Western armies are becoming lighter.
Evidence of this trend can be found on the shopping lists of emerging militaries. Instead of sophisticated aircraft and blue-water navies, most are pursuing cheap weapons of mass destruction and the methods of delivering them. Acquisition of sea and land mines, as well as distributed air-defense weapons, suggest that the intent of these militaries is to keep potential enemies at bay. Most expenditures and attention go to land forces, because in nondemocratic states armies provide political legitimacy. They are also useful instruments for waging regional wars of aggression, and they are sure means for suppressing internal dissent and thwarting troublesome outsiders.
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So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.
—President Barack Obama
The least successful enterprise in Washington, D.C., is the one that places bets on the nature and character of tomorrow’s wars. The industry remains enormously influential and well financed, because everyone in Washington knows that bad bets cost lives and waste trillions. As our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the services, defense industries, and their supporting think tanks, along with Congress, academia, and the media, continue the search for a new and imaginative view of wars to come. Virtually without exception, they get it wrong—and only in Washington are bad bets rewarded rather than punished.
The future-gazing industry grew apace with the emerging dominance of the United States military after World War II. Since then, two generations of failed future-gazers have made the term “intelligence failure” a hyphenated word. Perhaps at no time in our history has a single governmental function been so singularly (and rightfully) vilified. From 9/11 to the appearance of the Sunni insurgency in 2003, to the more recent return of the Taliban and the profoundly disturbing and unexpected arrival of ISIS, our intelligence agencies have left a sorrowful trail of missed guesses and informational black holes. In fairness to current political leaders, our poor record in forecasting threats has a long and uninterrupted provenance that has led to tragic strategic surprises. Korea caught Truman completely by surprise and unprepared for war. Kennedy and Johnson would never have gone to war in Vietnam had they suspected that the price would be sixty thousand dead. Saddam’s surprise invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was an intelligence meltdown of the first order.