Some Scattered Observations on a Never-Ending Debate

Coming off of Gunslinger's look at "old tanker syndrome," I'd like to make several points about the COIN vs. COINtra fracas.

To sum up my argument, there is a lack of historical precedent for the stereotype of an Army that suffers from making a direct choice to drink chai instead of driving tanks. There is a problem of causation in pinning COIN as the major reason an Army fails, for historical, technical, and political reasons. And if we are really afraid of losing conventionally, the fact that there has been little thought about conventional wars of the future that takes into account conventional warfare since 1945 is rather troubling.

First, it is hard to think of any militaries who suffered conventionally from being too COIN-focused. What about the British and French in World War I, you might ask? Well, of all of the flaws of both armies prior to 1914, a single-minded focus on irregular warfighting was not one of them. It is difficult to think of any major works of military history offhand that make the argument that imperial warfighting led to their problems. Rigidity, bad operational doctrine, training, poor strategy, etc, you can all make those critiques with varying degrees of accuracy. But even though those nations had colonial possessions to police and conquer, they never lost track of Europe's centrality as the prime political and military center of gravity.

The Israelis in 2006? Another oversimplification, for two reasons. First, the fact that Tel Aviv focused so much time and energy on irregular warfare stemmed from the not-too-insignificant problem of an Palestinian terrorist movement that killed 1,000 Israelis (approx 42,000 as a portion of America's population). Israeli irregular warfare focus was not a result of officers itching to quote Lawrence, sip chai, and pay CERP money--they did so to defend their population against terrorists and insurgents whose idea of a fair fight was to blow up Sbarro outlets. Second, there was also the complicating factor of new doctrines that had not been received very well and an RMA-inspired ground structure and a muddled strategy. Lastly, as I've commented before, the Israelis did not do as badly as popularly observed and Hezbollah's position was more precarious than believed.

The United States in World War I had some difficulty moving from punitive expeditions and Indian warfare to large-unit positional operations, especially because of an outdated prewar doctrine that neglected combined arms. But it is difficult to characterize the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) as a complete failure, especially as it adapted (like every other WWI major army) to the conditions of industrial warfare by the end of the conflict. The AEF experience also piggybacked into the doctrinal revisions of the next twenty years. Moreover, the political context of American history in the 19th century is not one that was conducive to creating a European-style army that could compete on the Continent. American performance even in conventional wars (The Mexican War and the Civil War) was nothing Europeans found particularly inspiring---which is why few European military observers (save the Russian Army which liked the Civil War cavalry raids) paid too much attention to American campaigns.

The fact that the Israeli, Imperial British and French, and pre-war American armed forces focused on irregular warfare at all was because irregular forces threatened national security interests---whether it was basic population security (America and Israeli) from the depredations of irregulars or the colonial control (Britain and France) in a time when colonies were pawns in a massive great game. Armed forces exist to do what politicians tell them. In neither the British and French cases were colonial service a major factor in their military difficulties. In the American and Israeli cases, one can make more of a plausible argument---but in doing so would have to take an ahistorical view of the respective political contexts. Moreover, American and Israeli difficulties did not stem in an overriding fashion from love of COIN--especially since modern COIN doctrine as practiced by the US Army did not exist in 1914 and was not something that the Israelis followed in 2006.

So to sum it up, the idea that US capabilities are dying and that it will be difficult to upshift into major combat operations because of COIN does not really have any readily identifiable historical precursors--in large part because the current situation is exceptional and because the rhetoric this fear stems from is overly simplistic. There is, of course, the perennial problem of leaders not giving the armed forces the money or attention they need, growing complacent, or just being plain unprepared (Korea, WWI, Kasserine Pass, etc), but that's another argument entirely.

The technical details of this debate have been discussed over and over. But the debate does not take into account the fact that the US, in some ways, has not fought a competent conventional adversary since Korea. Iraq barely counted during the first Gulf War and essentially self-destructed in the second. So it is natural that in peacetime or simply in an violent era in which necessary data is difficult to draw from that crucial skills might lag. As Gulliver pointed out in the linked Ink Spots post, without a compelling threat it's also difficult to gin up the resources for major 1980s-style training as well.

We have heard a lot about the threat of conventional operations. But the shape of those conventional operations in future warfare matters a lot to how we prepare for them. If future warfare is Chinese submarines playing Catch-A-Carrier in the Pacific, ground doctrine does not matter. Moreover, the next conventional war will be far different from the last three major wars the United States has fought (WWII, Korea, and the Gulf War) and look more like the conventional wars in the Third World (Yom Kippur, Iran-Iraq, Pakistani-Indian Wars, China's incursion in Vietnam, etc). For all of the hysteria about the US losing a conventional war, we are not seeing a great depth of thought about what kind of conventional war we will fight.

It seems that older concepts of conventional warfare predominate in public debate. The idea that the corps is the decisive unit, for example, was already outdated by the Gulf War, in which heavy divisions became operational building blocks in their own right. So by now everyone, even the most fervent chai-drinkers, have accepted that we will fight conventional wars in the future. What are they going to look like? What skills do we need for then? What conventional ideas from Air-Land Battle and the 1990s-early 2000s FM 100-5s do we need to change? Sven Ortmann, as usual, is one of the few who is using his deep knowledge of military history and his eye for future warfare to think about this, with an interesting blog on the "age of movement to contact."

Let's get away from the back and forth about COIN and COINtras and have a conversation about conventional operations. One, however, that must be grounded by post-World War II (non-Fulda Gap) conventional military history and a realistic projection of future adversaries and the tasks that armed forces will likely be ordered to complete in the post-COIN era.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=11811251]

I'd be curious to see statistics on this, but I would assume that the AEF would have consisted of newly-assigned draftees, who had less than a year in service before being sent to Europe. That might also explain the initial difficulties of fielding such a force.

[A.E.]

The doctrine for large-unit operations on the European scale simply also did not exist. Even the Civil War, the largest land conventional battle that America fought prior to World War I, was pitifully small by European standards.

Paddy Griffith also makes the argument in "Battle Tactics of the Civil War" that the Civil War was the last major Napoleonic war, but historians consider it a "modern" war (in the sense of World War I) because most troop commanders below the strategic-operational level were so hopelessly inept at tactical operations that American historians confused the tragic effects of mediocrity with new and changed conditions.

All of that being said, the AEF adapted to the conditions of European warfare by the end of its short time in Europe. Without intervention in Europe and the doctrinal change it spurred, we might have been totally unprepared for the even more dynamic combat twenty years later.

[Joseph Fouche]

The best argument I've heard that the Civil War was the first modern war was the sheer size of the armies. You had to be a real dolt to get your army destroyed in the Civil War. Lee kept trying fancy Napoleonic kung fu only to find that them there Yankees and their Army of the Potomac was too big to swallow. Even Burnside wasn't dumb enough to destroy the Army of the Potomac, though he gave his all trying to do so.

Grant was the only general to destroy an army during the Civil War and he managed to do it three times: Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Appomattox. The first two times he was blessed with Confederate commanders who managed to maneuver themselves into traps. At Appomattox, the Army of the Potomac may have finally been so much larger than the Army of Northern Virginia that it could just swallow it whole.

[A.E.]

The one thing that I think the Civil War was revolutionary for was the distributed campaigns, as James J. Schneider argues. The battle no longer was the centerpiece of the thing.

[YNSN]

The Royal Navy in the Age of Sail really had two Fleets and two doctrines. One Fleet designed for general fleet actions, and the other designed for single ship or small squadron actions. The Channel fleet generally kept to Europe and was comprised of their 4th through (scarce) 1st rates. The other squadron was comprised of mostly Frigates up to 6th and 5th rates. Generally these types of ships were used for commerce raiding and protection of their own commerce in their far off colonies.

More or less this arrangement was maintained up to Jutland, where the dreadnought and their insane tonnage and main battery caliber in addition to the advent of naval aviation changed the dynamics of war at sea.

However, it illustrates your point. That there needs to be two doctrines, and even to an extent two mindsets in the military towards the equipment and systems it buys.

[Phil Ridderhof]

I agree that the debate isn't necessarily COIN vs. conventional, but I do believe there is a case to be made that irregular experience did not support understanding the "science" of handling large formations to include logisitically supporting them as well as coordinating their maneuver over the greater time and distances required. This was a definite shortfall of US Generals entering into the Civil War, and in WWI (and even North Africa in WWII).
In COIN or other irregular ops, leaders never had to manage these types of large formations in the same manner and this type of competence was difficult to achieve outside of having to do it.

[YNSN]

Call this the Naive question of a squid:

Why go back to division/corps design for battle? Why not keep the operational focus at the brigade level? Being with the Army for the last year it's quite apparent that they haven't figured out this arrangement at all. Lofty words are often used for describing the operational level of war. But, in reality the 'operational art' is really more like making sausages.

However, much of the mess the Army is today is because they do not know how to give brigade sized units organic capabilities--their version of brigade plug-and-play doesn't work very well. Heaping another level of 'coordination' between units won't fix what is the real issue here.

I am a much bigger fan of the Marine way of war fighting. The Marine way of war, even on a continent, is very capable; and all bias as a member of the Navy and Marine Corps Combat Team aside, way more capable (pound for pound) than anything I've seen come from the Army.

[A.E.]

I think the question is also whether or not the meaning of a BDE's (or a overweighted BDE) combat power and efficiency has changed as well due to advances in weaponry and resources.

[writing jobs]

as you describe you need at least understand the moral component of this concept, as it is described above, and that really you lay in its meaning