[We need an entirely different approach to national security.]
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WHAT—IF ANYTHING—WILL US MILITARY LEARN FROM PUTIN’S DISASTROUS
UKRAINE INVASION?  
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Andrew Bacevich
September 13, 2022
Tom Dispatch
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_ We need an entirely different approach to national security. _

Ukrainian servicemen take part in the joint Rapid Trident military
exercises with the United States and other NATO countries near Lviv on
September 24, 2021. , Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images

 

IN WASHINGTON, WIDE AGREEMENT exists that the Russian army's
performance in the Kremlin's ongoing Ukraine "special military
operation
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ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why?
The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military,
appears all but self-evident. Vladimir Putin's Russia has stubbornly
insisted on ignoring the principles, practices, and methods identified
as necessary for success in war and perfected in this century by the
armed forces of the United States. Put simply, by refusing to do
things the American way, the Russians are failing badly against a far
weaker foe.

Granted, American analysts—especially the retired military officers
who opine on national news shows—concede that other factors have
contributed to Russia's sorry predicament. Yes, heroic Ukrainian
resistance, reminiscent of the Winter War of 1939-1940 when Finland
tenaciously defended itself against the Soviet Union's more powerful
military, caught the Russians by surprise. Expectations that
Ukrainians would stand by while the invaders swept across their
country proved wildly misplaced. In addition, comprehensive economic
sanctions imposed by the West in response to the invasion have
complicated the Russian war effort. By no means least of all, the
flood
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of modern weaponry provided by the United States and its allies—God
bless the military-industrial-congressional complex—have appreciably
enhanced Ukrainian fighting power.

Still, in the view of American military figures, all of those factors
take a backseat to Russia's manifest inability (or refusal) to grasp
the basic prerequisites of modern warfare. The fact that Western
observers possess a limited understanding of how that country's
military leadership functions makes it all the easier to render such
definitive judgments. It's like speculating about Donald Trump's
innermost convictions. Since nobody really knows, any forcefully
expressed opinion acquires at least passing credibility.

The prevailing self-referential American explanation
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for Russian military ineptitude emphasizes at least four key points:

* First, the Russians don't understand jointness, the military
doctrine that provides for the seamless integration of ground, air,
and maritime operations, not only on Planet Earth but in cyberspace
and outer space;

* Second, Russia's land forces haven't adhered to the principles of
combined arms warfare, first perfected by the Germans in World War II,
that emphasizes the close tactical collaboration of tanks, infantry,
and artillery;

* Third, Russia's longstanding tradition of top-down leadership
inhibits flexibility at the front, leaving junior officers and
noncommissioned officers to relay orders from on high without
demonstrating any capacity to, or instinct for, exercising initiative
on their own;

* Finally, the Russians appear to lack even the most rudimentary
understanding of battlefield logistics—the mechanisms that provide a
steady and reliable supply of the fuel, food, munitions, medical
support, and spare parts needed to sustain a campaign.

Implicit in this critique, voiced by self-proclaimed American experts,
is the suggestion that, if the Russian army had paid more attention to
how U.S. forces deal with such matters, they would have fared better
in Ukraine. That they don't—and perhaps can't—comes as good news
for Russia's enemies, of course. By implication, Russian military
ineptitude obliquely affirms the military mastery of the United
States. We define the standard of excellence to which others can only
aspire.

REDUCING WAR TO A FORMULA

All of which begs a larger question the national security
establishment remains steadfastly oblivious to: If jointness, combined
arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics hold the
keys to victory, why haven't American forces—supposedly possessing
such qualities in abundance—been able to win their own equivalents
of the Ukraine War? After all, Russia has only been stuck in Ukraine
for six months, while the U.S. was stuck in Afghanistan for 20 years
and still has troops
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in Iraq almost two decades after its disastrous invasion of that
country.

To rephrase the question: Why does explaining the Russian
underperformance in Ukraine attract so much smug commentary here,
while American military underperformance gets written off?

Perhaps written off is too harsh. After all, when the U.S. military
fails to meet expectations, there are always some who will hasten to
point the finger at civilian leaders for screwing up. Certainly, this
was the case with the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from
Afghanistan in August 2021. Critics were quick to pin the blame
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on President Biden for that debacle, while the commanders who had
presided over the war there for those 20 years escaped largely
unscathed. Indeed, some of those former commanders like retired
general and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, aka "King David
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were eagerly sought after
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by the media as Kabul fell.

So, if the U.S. military performance since the Global War on Terror
was launched more than two decades ago rates as, to put it politely, a
disappointment—and that would be my view—it might be tempting to
lay responsibility at the feet of the four presidents, eight
secretaries of defense (including two former four-star generals), and
the various deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant
secretaries, and ambassadors who designed and implemented American
policy in those years. In essence, this becomes an argument for
sustained generational incompetence.

There's a flipside to that argument, however. It would tag the parade
of generals who presided over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and
lesser conflicts like those in Libya, Somalia, and Syria) as uniformly
not up to the job—another argument for generational incompetence.
Members of the once-dominant Petraeus fan club might cite him as a
notable exception. Yet, with the passage of time, King David's
achievements as general-in-chief first in Baghdad and then in Kabul
have lost much of their luster. The late "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf
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Tommy Franks [[link removed]], their own
"victories" diminished by subsequent events, might sympathize.

Allow me to suggest another explanation, however, for the performance
gap that afflicts the twenty-first-century U.S. military
establishment. The real problem hasn't been arrogant, ill-informed
civilians or generals who lack the right stuff or suffer from bad
luck. It's the way Americans, especially those wielding influence in
national security circles, including journalists, think tankers,
lobbyists, corporate officials in the military-industrial complex, and
members of Congress, have come to think of war as an attractive,
affordable means of solving problems.

Military theorists have long emphasized that by its very nature, war
is fluid, elusive, capricious, and permeated with chance and
uncertainty. Practitioners tend to respond by suggesting that, though
true, such descriptions are not helpful. They prefer to conceive of
war as essentially knowable, predictable, and eminently useful—the
Swiss Army knife of international politics.

Hence, the tendency, among both civilian and military officials in
Washington, not to mention journalists and policy intellectuals, to
reduce war to a phrase or formula (or better yet to a set of
acronyms), so that the entire subject can be summarized in a slick
30-minute slide presentation. That urge to simplify—to boil things
down to their essence—is anything but incidental. In Washington, the
avoidance of complexity and ambiguity facilitates marketing (that is,
shaking down Congress for money).

To cite one small example of this, consider a recent military document
entitled

"Army Readiness and Modernization in 2022," produced by propagandists
at the Association of the United States Army, purports to describe
where the U.S. Army is headed. It identifies "eight cross-functional
teams" meant to focus on "six priorities." If properly resourced and
vigorously pursued, these teams and priorities will ensure, it claims,
that "the army maintains all-domain overmatch against all adversaries
in future fights."

Set aside the uncomfortable fact that, when it counted last year in
Kabul, American forces demonstrated anything but all-domain overmatch.
Still, what the Army's leadership aims to do between now and 2035 is
create "a transformed multi-domain army" by fielding a plethora of new
systems, described in a blizzard of acronyms: ERCA, PrSM, LRHW, OMVF,
MPF, RCV, AMPV, FVL, FLRAA, FARA, BLADE, CROWS, MMHEL, and so on, more
or less ad infinitum.

Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the Army's plan, or
rather vision, for its future avoids the slightest mention of costs.
Nor does it consider potential complications—adversaries equipped
with nuclear weapons, for example—that might interfere with its
aspirations to all-domain overmatch.

Yet the document deserves our attention as an exquisite example of
Pentagon-think. It provides the Army's preferred answer to a question
of nearly existential importance—not "How can the Army help keep
Americans safe?" but "How can the Army maintain, and ideally increase,
its budget?"

Hidden inside that question is an implicit assumption that sustaining
even the pretense of keeping Americans safe requires a military of
global reach that maintains a massive global presence. Given the
spectacular findings of the James Webb Telescope
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in the Pentagon's lexicon. In the meantime, while maintaining perhaps
750 military bases
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continent except Antarctica, that military rejects out of hand the
proposition that defending Americans where they live—that is, within
the boundaries of the 50 states comprising the United States—can
suffice to define its overarching purpose.

And here we arrive at the crux of the matter: militarized globalism,
the Pentagon's preferred paradigm for basic policy, has become
increasingly unaffordable. With the passage of time, it's also become
beside the point. Americans simply don't have the wallet to satisfy
budgetary claims concocted in the Pentagon, especially those that
ignore the most elemental concerns we face, including disease
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drought
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fire
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floods
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and sea-level rise
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not to mention averting the potential collapse of our constitutional
order. All-domain overmatch is of doubtful relevance to such threats.

To provide for the safety and well-being of our republic, we don't
need further enhancements to jointness, combined arms tactics,
flexible leadership, and responsive logistics. Instead, we need an
entirely different approach to national security.

COME HOME, AMERICA, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Given the precarious state of American democracy, aptly described by
President Biden in his recent address
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most pressing priority is repairing the damage to our domestic
political fabric, not engaging in another round of "great power
competition" dreamed up by fevered minds in Washington. Put simply,
the Constitution is more important than the fate of Taiwan.

I apologize: I know that I have blasphemed. But the times suggest that
we weigh the pros and cons of blasphemy. With serious people publicly
warning about the possible approach of civil war
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and many of our far-too-well armed
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fellow citizens welcoming the prospect, perhaps the moment has come to
reconsider the taken-for-granted premises that have sustained U.S.
national security policy since the immediate aftermath of World War
II.

More blasphemy! Did I just advocate a policy of isolationism?

Heaven forfend! What I would settle for instead is a modicum of
modesty and prudence, along with a lively respect for (rather than
infatuation with) war.

Here is the unacknowledged bind in which the Pentagon has placed
itself—and the rest of us: by gearing up to fight (however
ineffectively) anywhere against any foe in any kind of conflict, it
finds itself prepared to fight nowhere in particular. Hence, the urge
to extemporize on the fly, as has been the pattern in every conflict
of ours since the Vietnam War. On occasion, things work out, as in the
long-forgotten, essentially meaningless 1983 invasion
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the Caribbean island of Grenada. More often than not, however, they
don't, no matter how vigorously our generals and our troops apply the
principles of jointness, combined arms, leadership, and logistics.

Americans spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out what
makes Vladimir Putin tick. I don't pretend to know, nor do I really
much care. I would say this, however: Putin's plunge into Ukraine
confirms that he learned nothing from the folly of post-9/11 U.S.
military policy.

Will we, in our turn, learn anything from Putin's folly? Don't count
on it.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

 

ANDREW J. BACEVICH
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the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
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relations at Boston University. Bacevich is the author of_
"America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
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editor of the book, "_The Short American Century
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several others, including: "_Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed
Their Soldiers and Their Country"
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Project);_ "Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War
[[link removed]]_" (2011); "_The New
American [[link removed]]_ Militarism: How
Americans Are Seduced by War" (2013), and "_The Long War: A New
History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II
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* Russian military strategy in Ukraine; US military strategy; US
domestic dangers;
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