Teaching Old Armies New Tricks

Americans are used to the notion that our military can pretty much pick up at any time, and fight any war, anywhere. It's enshrined in US military lore:

From the halls of Montezuma
to the shores of Tripoli,
we'll fight our country's battles
on the air or land or sea...

...says the Marine Corps anthem. It's a stirring bit of mythology - and, in the sense of national strategy, that's what it is. A myth.

Militaries just don't work like that. Not in the long term.

The ways of the military are pretty opaque to most people who aren't in the service. One of the most opaque facets of the military is the fact that it's a fairly simple beast; it has a fairly short attention span, in terms of being able to absorb new concepts, missions and doctrines.

The military is far from alone at this. Imagine, if you will, General Motors. They make cars; they've made 'em, as GM, for about half a century. They make cars very well - and they make 'em pretty much the same way they've made them for the last hundred years, really, conceptually; a huge, comprehensive supply chain conveys immense dumps of components and parts to a number of centralized factories. The factories put the cars together on big assembly lines, and ship them to a nationwide system of dealerships, which sell and service the products. The process repeats millions of times a year. Changing the process - as the big automakers had to back in the '80s, when Japanese and German cars began to cut huge swathes in the US market - involved immense, painful readjustment and billions of dollars in reinvestment.

And that's just an industry. Imagine doing that in government.

If you grew up like most Americans, learning what you know of military history and the institutions of defense from Alan Alda and Mike Farrell every Tuesday night on M.A.S.H., you probably think "war is war". And in any sense larger than TV drama, you'd be wrong.

Imagine General Motors being told, on about a year's notice, that it had to switch en masse from building cars in huge assembly lines with generations-old supply chains and distribution systems, and start building - remember, on a year's notice - solar-powered cars in plants distributed among the fifty states. Or imagine the Internal Revenue Service being required to toss out the current income tax system and have a National Sales Tax up and running. On three years' notice.

Absurd? Well, maybe. Sure - both institutions could do it, in theory, if they had to. And then they'd probably have to take an organizational deep breath.

Sure. And the US military has done it five times in the last 100 years.

1. In 1917, the US Army was still configured to defend a huge frontier against Indian tribes, bandito incursions and the odd pseudo-colonial skirmish. The Army numbered in the tens of thousands, relied on volunteers (what we call the National Guard, now) to take on any job that involved more than a few thousand men (the Spanish American war) and, like any frontier police force, was very short on things like modern artillery and machine guns. Almost literally overnight, it had to expand by a couple of orders of magnitude, absorb new technologies (tanks, airplanes, chemical warfare) and learn to fight effectively in the meatgrinder of the Western Front - the tactical polar opposite of the wars it had fought since the end of the Civil War. The Navy had to go from colonial police squadron to a battle fleet capable of mixing it up with the Germans, the second-mightiest of the day, as well as escorting convoys against submarines. And it did it within a matter of a year - with immense problems (we bought all of our tanks and combat aircraft, many of our machine guns and even infantry rifles and uniforms, from Britain and France).
2. In 1940, we had to shift from a colonial Army and a Navy that was designed to fight in the Pacific against Japan (the assumption had been that the British would carry the Atlantic - an assumption made when it wasnt' assumed the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans would be theatres of naval war for Britain, stretching the Royal Navy incredibly thin). The Army had to go, again, from a token force to several million men, again nearly overnight. Moreover, it had two missions; fighting the Germans in the compact, dense terrain of Western Europe, and again in the vaste wastes of the Pacific. Each theatre required different doctrine, training, equipment and logistics; Patton's mechanized armies had very little in common with MacArthur's amphibious light infantry, to say nothing of Nimitz' ultralight Marines. The Pacific Fleet was adapted to huge, slashing attacks with immense carrier task forces; the Atlantic Fleet focused on the mathematical, methodical pursuit of the U-Boot and the industrial transport of millions of men and their gear from the East Coast to the beaches of Normandy.
3. From there, the military had to adapt to the Cold War; a huge, industrialized, hypothetical operation in a nuclear, chemical and biological environment in the dense urban areas and wild mountains of Western Europe and Korea. The US, along with NATO, prepared to meet a vast tide of Warsaw Pact tanks and armored infantry, supported by thousands of pieces of artillery and thousands of aircraft; NATO's own fleets of tanks, anti-tank missile gunners, artillerymen and infantry scouted every hillock from the Inter-German Border to the Channel for places to stage ambushes and surprise counterattacks, hoping to make the Soviet attack bog down it its own wreckage before Europe fell. The Navy trained obsessively to fight the USSR's immense submarine fleet. We built our own huge fleets of anti-sub submarines and surface escorts; more important, the Navy's culture morphed into that of the Anti-Sub Warfare escort. Our navy was big enough to simultaneously absorb multiple cultures - the descendants of the Carrier warriors of WWII and the anti-sub (and submarine) operators each had their own niches in the fleet, depending on each other but never quite mingling. Smaller fleets - the British and Japanese, notably - morphed almost entirely into Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) operations. Smaller armies - Germany, Norway, the Netherlands - devoted all of their budget, training and operational thought to planning for the steel surge across the Iron Curtain that never came.
4. In the middle of that time, the US (and to some extent, the UK and France) had to swerve to deal with guerilla wars in the third world. Tactically and operationally, these sorts of wars were the polar opposite of the war all three nations were preparing for halfway around the world. France and the UK were able to keep the wars where they belonged, strategically - missions for their special forces and intelligence services. The US was politically unable to so contain Vietnam; it widened into a full-scale ground war that, nonetheless, was completely different than the one that had consumed most of the US effort for the previous twenty years.
5. At the end of the Cold War, the threat of the huge nuclear/armored fist slashing deep into the European heartland vanished. The main war threatening the US and Europe today is...well, the one we're fighting today, in the alleys and suqs of Iraq, the valleys of Afghanistan, the books of international banks and the customs gates at Twin Cities International.

The problem with NATO is, they're still stuck firmly in #3. They have not had the impetus or need to move their defense-related thinking out of the 1980s, and they haven't. The German Bundeswehr is built around 12 divisions of heavy, mechanized Panzers and Panzergrenadiers (armed with some of the best tanks in the world, the Leopard II) - and no means of getting them out of Germany to fight. Which isn't a problem, that's what they were designed for, to defend Germany, not liberate Iran. But the fact is, each of NATO's armies is still designed for Scenario #3, above - fighting the Cold War. Each does it in their own way - the tank-heavy German, Belgian and Dutch armies, to the Norwegians with their focus on anti-tank guerilla warfare in the mountains, or the Danish focus on bogging down attacks in their myriad islands. But in no case have any of them, save the Brits, refocused on #5, the war we have today.

They've had no reason to! Leaving aside the myopic, short-sighted, corrupt reaction of the French and Germans to the War on Terror - their militaries have had no reason to change missions, and hence make the immense investments in doctrine, training, and equipment needed to really adapt to a new mission.

John Kerry relentlessly intones that he'll bring "our allies" into the war - meaning presumably any future operations, since he's apparently given up on Iraq.

Yesterday, NATO pledged to offer troops to help train the new Iraqi security services. It's about time. At the same time, Captain Ed notes a key fact about NATO:

We have over 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all of the NATO members have just 25,500 deployed anywhere ... and they're overextended. And the other dirty little secret is that the NATO countries lack the transport capabilities to get much more of their troops anywhere else in the world; they rely on the US for that. Simply put, outside of training, NATO involvement in Iraq or anywhere else only has political use. Militarily, involving NATO would be pointless.

Militarily, involving almost any military outside its home operating turf is pointless. The exceptions are the US, whose military is both huge and has fully integrated itself into Scenario #5, above; Britain, ditto; Australia, whose military shares most traits with the Brits, and whose military contributions are usually limited to special and light forces that can be easily transported by US and British assets; and whatever odds and ends of other militaries that can be hauled about the world by the US Air Force and Navy. It's worth noting that NATO Special Forces - which are by their nature light and very easy to move around the world - are another exception; German, Danish, Norwegian and Canadian special forces served in Afghanistan, and did a fine job. But they are an exception; no war can be entirely won by special forces, and they're a very expensive proposition for policing territory.

People like John Kerry and virtually every lefty blogger, by the way, ignore the massive effort it's taken for some of the nations involved with us in Iraq, the "coerced and bribed" Poles and Bulgarians and South Koreans and Japanese and others, to generate the involvement they've had. The Poles and other Eastern European nations' militaries really have only one mission at present - deter Russian aggression (which is unlikely, but history is a living thing in Eastern Europe). On the other hand, no nation in the world has a clearer mission than South Korea, whose troops have trained and equipped themselves for 50 years for exactly one mission, defense against the North. That they can send a long brigade of men to help in Iraq is little short of miraculous, operationally-speaking.

What's the point? Several, really:

• John Kerry can make all the (intentionally) vague blandishments about his diplomatic prowess he wants - but there really is no earthly way NATO will be able to send any significant, regular (as opposed to special forces) support to any military operations outside Europe anytime soon.
• By "Anytime soon", I mean until NATO's militaries spend the money and, more importantly, time and intellectual energy to consciously re-task their military from Cold War defenders into forces capable of fighting the war on terrorism outside their own borders, and until Europe and the UN decide to take the war on terror seriously (or not be actively complicit with the terrorists.
• That effort is neither simple nor trivial; it is, in fact, something that is frequently accompanied by massive social change.

Ask the next Kerry supporter you see about this. See what their answer is.

Posted by Mitch at September 24, 2004 05:35 AM | TrackBack