On The Next War

Thomas P.M. Barnett argues that Bob Gates has begun to shift the Department of Defense's thinking on force structure and the likely form of America's enemies in the coming century. In particular, Gates poo-poos "next-war-itis", the idea that the armed forces should be organised and equipped for the next war with a great power (take your pick: China, Russia &c) saying "it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms".

Instead he notes that the U.S. is more likely to be challenged by enemies engaged in guerrilla warfare a la Iraq and Afghanistan:

Smaller, irregular forces – insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists – will find ways, as they always have, to frustrate and neutralize the advantages of larger, regular militaries. And even nation-states will try to exploit our perceived vulnerabilities in an asymmetric way, rather than play to our inherent strengths.

It is this threat that the U.S. needs to prepare itself, challenging that "major weapons program, in order to remain viable, will have to show some utility and relevance to the kind of irregular campaigns". He wants the forces to demonstrate how they can institutionalise guerrilla warfare drawing on the painful learning gained in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The counter-insurgency doctrine that General Petraeus co-developed has been and overwhelming success in Iraq. This isn't being achieved by fielding big ticket weapons systems: the F-22 or the Seawolf are impotent. In his masterpiece, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt argues that:

The mobilization of the industrial capacity of a nation is irrelevant to such threats; the fielding of vast tank armies and fleets of airplanes is as clumsy as a bear trying to fend off bees.

Success is being achieved by U.S. forces protecting Iraqi civilians from the Islamist guerrilla fighters AND getting involved in helping Iraqis rebuild sewage plants, schools, police stations. This is precisely the dual function of Leviathan and SysAdmin that TPM has been promoting over the last few years.

It will be hard for the defense establishment to resist the move away from big nation-state war to the smaller guerrilla market-state war given the exemplary successes U.S. forces have had in Iraq in wielding both the stick (Leviathan) and carrot (SysAdmin).

Comments

[moose]

uh oh... I can see a whopping big black swan in the making here..