By April Labaro

Best Defense bureau of Afghan political affairs

What exactly is Afghanistan transitioning to in 2014? This question is central in the ongoing (and going) debate about "Afghanistan 2014," which has given everyone involved a case of "'transition fatigue," according to Professor Ali J. Jalali.

Jalali, a former interior minister of Afghanistan, gave a lecture recently at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies about his personal assessment of the upcoming transition in Afghanistan. When it comes down to it, he believes that the best that anyone can hope for is the survival of the regime.

To ensure that outcome, Jalali outlined three key areas that should be addressed during the transition:

• The first is the state of security post-withdrawal. Jalali emphasized the importance of ensuring that the Afghan army has the capacity to provide security after all international forces have left and warned that the number of tanks and arms left behind does not mean greater security.

• The second point, one just touched on, was the economy. The main worry here, he said, is that around half of the workforce is currently in the service sector and most of these jobs will be lost when international organizations leave. But Jalali remained optimistic, saying the projects to be put in place over the next two years, specifically in the mining industry and railroad construction, will create more jobs over time.

• Lastly, but most importantly, is the regime's ability to demonstrate its political will. The election being viewed as fair and free is, above all, the biggest factor in ensuring the survival of the regime. But is Afghanistan ready for a fair and free election? In addition to addressing challenges with technical and logistical readiness, Jalali said he believes that the most important step towards demonstrating political will is the establishment of both a strong and independent election commission and a process for dealing with complaints. Legislation on election rules and the establishment of an office to handle complaints must be passed before the commission can even begin to implement its operation plans for the upcoming election.

Jalali summed up his points by concluding that "the snapshots are bad, but the video is different." In other words, this transition through 2014 and beyond is fragile and riddled with serious doubt and potential breaking points. But with a strong national agenda and the regime's publicly confirmed political will, it is possible for Afghanistan to hold a free and fair election and transition to a stable and secure state. Time seems to be on the side of the government for now, but we can't afford to forget that, as Jalali put it, if the Afghan people don't win, everyone will lose.

By Gian Gentile

Best Defense guest respondent

A few comments in response to A.A. Cohen's summary and evaluation of the debate between John Nagl and I at Grinnell College in April. First, I appreciate Cohen taking the time to publish his comments, even though I disagree with much of what he says.

Cohen, in his summary of the debate, assumes -- wrongly, as my forthcoming book (Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency, July 2013) will argue based on primary evidence -- that there was a significant operational shift between the surge and what came before, and more importantly, that there were significant differences in the generalship of Casey and Petraeus. Cohen offers up the stock critique of Casey that suggests Casey was drawing down and heading for the door in Iraq by the end of 2006. Not true, and the primary evidence -- for example, documents of strategic planning and guidance by Casey -- shows that he was asking for additional brigades and that he saw a significant American presence in Iraq well through 2008 and beyond. Casey fully realized in early 2007 that before transition could resume, the Iraqi people needed to be "protected" and the violence produced by the sectarian civil war had to be checked. And for Casey, U.S. forces would continue to play a key role in checking the violence and in "protecting" the Iraqi people. Before Cohen rushes to judgment on this matter I would ask of him that he at least has a look at my book when it comes out in July, and then base his assessment on the argument that I make in it and the evidence that I marshal to support it. Unfortunately, the stock critique of Casey ultimately rests on faulty assumptions.

Cohen seems to suggest in his summary of the debate that I argued against maintaining the "capability" to do counterinsurgency operations in the future. I have never said or suggested that the U.S. Army should not have the "capability" to do counterinsurgency operations. What I have argued is that the most important capability the U.S. Army needs is to do combined, all-arms operations within a joint force, and this should be its priority. If the U.S. Army can perform the essential function of all-arms fighting, then it can easily shift in the direction to do counterinsurgency. But by building an army in the opposite way and having one that is optimized for COIN, then shifting to high end operations becomes much more difficult and costly in blood and treasure. Remember what Matthew Ridgway said after the Korean War: "the primary purpose of an army [is] to be ready to fight effectively at all times..."

In the concluding paragraph of Cohen's piece, he posits this about my arguments and the future of counterinsurgency:

...history indicates that engaging in counterinsurgency warfare is seldom a predetermined choice.

Oh no, good strategy is buried in the ground and dead with this kind of straight-jacketed thinking. Cohen dooms us to fight counterinsurgency wars in the future simply because they have been fought in the past, and even if good strategy says it makes no sense to fight them. Nagl, in the debate and in other published pieces, likes to proffer the term "unsatisfying wars" to describe counterinsurgency warfare. But I ask, if Augustine was right that the object of war is to produce a "glorious peace," and if a "satisfying" war does that (e.g., the United States in World War II or the American Civil War), then why would a state fight a war in the first place if it is "unsatisfying"? Isn't starting an "unsatisfying war" or continuing one with huge amounts of blood and treasure strategic incompetence of the first order?

The thinking of John Nagl and A.A. Cohen is reflective of military institutions that fight wars and become so enamored with operational frameworks that they cannot see their way to a higher position of strategy, and then objectively critique whether or not the type of operations employed by strategy are worth the investment spent to achieve policy aims. Instead, the best logic that Nagl and Cohen can offer is that these wars are "unsatisfying" and therefore we are forced to walk this "predetermined" path to fight them. So the tutoring that a "naysayer" like me receives is to get over it and accept the notion that the strategic "choice" has already been made.

As the last 11 years of American war in Afghanistan make clear, the United States has failed utterly at strategy since from the very start the core policy aim (as affirmed over and over again by U.S. presidents, cabinet members, and senior military officers) has been the destruction of al Qaeda. In order to achieve this very limited core policy aim, U.S. strategy has sought to employ a maximalist operational method of armed nation building, or in other words, counterinsurgency. The costs have been enormous for both the United States and Afghanistan, and the results are dubious at best. Has Afghanistan been an "unsatisfying" war for the United States? You bet, but I will be darned if I accept John Nagl's and A.A Cohen's premise that we are "predetermined" to fight more of them in the future simply because we have done so in the past.

Maybe we should when vital American interests dictate, but operational choice based on vital American interests and not predetermined operational action should be the hallmark of future American strategy. If we don't come off of this predetermined path as paved with signposts by Nagl and Cohen, Damascus is the next stop for American arms.

The author is a serving U.S. Army colonel. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

By A. A. Cohen

Best Defense intellectual pugilistics correspondent

Warrior-profs Gian Gentile and John Nagl, the two best-known heavyweight contenders in the national security debate surrounding irregular warfare, squared off a few weeks ago at Grinnell College in the wilds of Iowa on the merits of counterinsurgency and the future of Afghanistan.

The moderated 60-minute debate was kicked off with a three-word question: "Is COIN dead?"

In this corner, Gentile, who has for years passionately opposed the very notion that counterinsurgency worked in Iraq (the "Surge," along with Petraeusism, seem to be his two pet peeves), let alone in Afghanistan, fired at his rival from the position: "The idea that nation-building can be achieved at a reasonable cost of blood and treasure is dead." Translation: COIN is not feasible for America -- ergo, COIN is dead.

Gentile propped up his argument by attacking what he describes as the "COIN narrative" of the past decade, about which many "gripping tales" have been written, but without any of these amounting to true, objective, "good history." Gentile charged that there was no significant change in generalship or strategy between George Casey and David Petraeus in Iraq, and that the level of violence there was bound to drop when it did, regardless of the change of command and of the deployment of some 30,000 additional troops. Nagl parried by citing RAND and other research that concludes the contrary. Recall as well that General Casey was intent on drawing down U.S. forces, not surging them as Petraeus sought to do in order to establish a semblance of order and security prior to withdrawing from Iraq.

Nagl's first response to the moderator's question was an expected zinger: Counter-insurgency cannot be dead for as long as insurgency is alive and well. Obvious perhaps, but this full-body slam was a good reminder that shedding the capability would not make future needs for it disappear. Alas, what I wish he had mentioned, too, was that in this debate again, military doctrine was being deliberately confounded with matters of foreign policy. The United States has not conducted a nuclear (atomic) strike since Nagasaki, and the intention to strike again in such a fashion is absent, but the United States continues to maintain a nuclear capability and doctrine.

Gentile scored his few real points, I believe, on the issue that counterinsurgency operations on their own do not yield lasting strategic results. True, but those operations constitute an important piece of the puzzle. It is the role of statecraft to bring about stabilizing watersheds. And what Gentile may wish to acknowledge is that counterinsurgency operations, costly as they may be, will often be required to afford the time, the space, and the conditions that are needed to enable statecraft to run its course.

While Gentile and Nagl disagreed on many points of evidence, ultimately, their conclusions did not appear to be altogether different. Both contenders agreed that the invasion of Iraq was a strategic error, and that the price of a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign will rarely (Gentile: will never) justify the unsatisfying prize. Nagl takes the match on style and substance... and of course, because he cited Galula.

Gentile's obsession with naysaying is certainly understandable; we can all relate to his fear that should the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq go down in history as a victory, it will be tempting for our elected leaders and their advisors to wish to repeat similar adventures again. But the point is moot; history indicates that engaging in counterinsurgency warfare is seldom a predetermined choice.

(Watch the debate.)

A.A. Cohen served in Afghanistan. He is a senior infantry officer in the Canadian Army and the author of Galula: The Life and Writings of the French Officer who Defined the Art of Counterinsurgency.

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Handler Staff Sgt. Jonathan Cooper of the 455th Expeditionary Security Forces Group takes a break with his dog dog, Astra, after a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) patrol at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan on April 29, 2013. Over the past four months, the MWD team has swept more than 15,000 vehicles, mitigating all VBIED threats to the installation.

In other news, props to Handler Sgt. Phillip Mendoza and MWD Benga for taking first place in 2013 USAF Academy Iron Dog Competition in Colorado Springs last week.

Rebecca Frankel is away from her FP desk, working on a book about dogs and war.

When Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster offers a criticism of the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine, you know he's not just riding intellectual fashion. This is a guy who has done well both in conventional warfare (see 73 Easting) and counterinsurgency (see Tell Afar).

In a new publication by McKinsey and Company called McKinsey on Defense, McMaster tells Andrew Erdmann  that "our doctrine is still catching up" with how we need to fight. He explains:

We have the counterinsurgency manual, the stability operations manual, and the security-force assistance manual, but I don't think we have put the politics at the center of those manuals. So, for example, we assume in our doctrine that the challenges associated with developing indigenous security forces are mainly about building capacity, when, in fact, they're about trying to develop institutions that can survive and that will operate in a way that is at least congruent with our interests.

McMaster also says that, "We need leaders who have physical and moral courage on the battlefield, of course, but also the courage to speak their minds and offer respectful and candid feedback to their superiors. Our leaders can't feel compelled to tell their bosses what they want to hear."

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

I came across a series of photos of Wilbur, a U.S. Marine Special Operations dog, taken over the last few weeks in Afghanistan by Marine Corps photographer Sgt. Pete Thibodeau. The collection of images follows Wilbur through Helmand Province -- working security, encountering livestock, playing fetch in front of an idle Humvee, and watching a group of children, his ears pricked in earnest attention.

Today's post title (and the use of the word "adventures") isn't intended to be flippant -- Wilbur is a Special Ops dog, which means his job is especially taxing and dangerous. But Thibodeau's photos show the non-violent side of combat-zone living from Wilbur's point of view with its own kind of wonder and whimsy -- a view worth seeing.

More photos of Wilbur are after the fold but first a couple of War-Dog Announcements:

60 Minutes will be airing a segment on MWDs this Sunday, April 21, called "Sniffing Out Bombs." The show sent a correspondent out to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, home to the nation's premier pre-deployment course run by the USMC and Gunnery Sgt. Kristopher Reed Knight and his crew of experienced handlers. (I spent two weeks there last year.) Longtime readers of this column are likely to see the faces of those written about here on the CBS news show this week.

For DC locals (and supporters near and far): The Third Annual Annapolis 5K Run & Dog Walk is raising funds for America's VetDogs -- an organization that "provides service and assistance dogs, free of charge, to disabled veterans." The run will kick off at 9 am this Sunday at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis, Maryland. Looks like early registration has closed but walk-ups are welcome, as are dogs -- leashed, of course. 

Read on

Ugh.

Maj. Charles Wagenblast, a military intelligence reservist, brought home this story from Afghanistan about an Afghan colonel:

One of the colonels that we both knew had been accused of raping a chai boy, badly. They all have chai boys, it's not some perverted thing, it's just what they do. Women are for juma. The only time you interact with your wife is on Friday, the rest of the time it's chai boys. He had been raping this chai boy, which is normal, but he had hurt him really bad. That caused the medical people to get involved and other forces. So he's there in front of the judge, who is an imam. It's religion mixed with law, the whole code of law would fit in a pamphlet and then there's the Koran there on top of it. Anyway, his defense was, "Honestly, who hasn't raped a chai boy? Ha ha ha." And the judge goes, "You're right. Case dismissed."

By Kyle Teamey

Best Defense department of COIN rehabilitation

1. Regime change IS nation building.

Whether the intention is to stop ethnic cleansing or to affect a change in policy by a rogue nation-state, the result of regime change is the same -- a long period of rebuilding. In a multi-ethnic state with no history of democracy, a period of violent turmoil should be expected after a regime is toppled. It must either be managed directly by the United States (Iraq and Afghanistan) or groups supported by the United States and allies (Libya).

2. A minimal U.S. footprint is the preferred way to do COIN...when feasible.

An overlooked writer on the subject of counterinsurgency (COIN) is Thomas Mockaitis. He took some very good lessons from the United Kingdom's 20th century experiences in COIN and summed them to three best practices that marked successful campaigns: minimal force, civil-military cooperation, and tactical flexibility. The minimal force part of that equation is critical. It often means minimizing the use of third party forces because of the high probability that the third party adds to the conflict simply by being present. An additional benefit of minimal use of force is minimizing the costs to the United States in blood and treasure for a given conflict. Recent efforts in Colombia, Yemen, Somalia, El Salvador, and the Philippines where the U.S. supported COIN and counterterror efforts with few or no U.S. troops are instructive. Minimal use of U.S. forces has been relatively successful and low cost. That said, we really did not give ourselves an option for a small footprint approach in Iraq. There was no other organization to step into the post-Saddam power vacuum and leaving a total disaster in a strategically important part of the world was not an option. See #1 above.

3. Small U.S. footprint or large, the principles of COIN are the same.

Regardless of who is doing the COIN campaign or how the United States is supporting the campaign -- foreign aid, foreign internal defense, advisors, boots on the ground, etc -- the rules are the same. Best practices are best practices no matter who utilizes them. We are constrained by law and social norms to something that looks like population-centric COIN whether we do it ourselves or support a third party. The government has to be legitimate, the people have to be protected, there must be unity of effort amongst the counterinsurgents, intelligence must drive operations, there must be unity of effort amongst civil and military authorities, and the insurgents must be exposed to security forces. The argument that we should "just kill all the insurgents" is noise. Due to aforementioned law and social norms, killing bad guys requires separating them from the populace, which doesn't happen if the government is not legitimate, the people are not protected, etc. It should also be noted that killing bad guys is one of the most important parts of population-centric COIN. The argument that population-centric COIN only means "hearts and minds" where everyone sits around drinking tea and singing together is a strawman. Depending on conditions on the ground commanders may weight their efforts more towards the use of force or more towards stability operations, but there will always be an element of violence, or the threat of violence, in population-centric COIN.

4. War hasn't changed: Good tactics don't matter if you are operationally or strategically inept.

We proved this in spades in Iraq, where some units did things well, others poorly, and there was initially no over-arching planning or coordination for the post-regime era. We did pretty much everything wrong from 2003 to 2007 and got lucky it didn't go worse than it did. Get good generals who know what they are doing. Fire those who don't. Sounds simple but it ain't.

5. If you want to defeat an insurgency, don't let the insurgents have a safe haven.

Pakistani tribal areas, Fallujah in 2004, other "no go" areas in Iraq in 2004-6, the FARC zone in Colombia, FARC camps in Ecuador and Venezuela, etc. Nothing good comes of allowing a safe haven for insurgents. Ever. If we are serious about defeating an insurgency, we should never allow any safe havens. If national goals are limited to keeping the insurgency down to a dull roar or killing some terrorists, then a safe haven may be tolerable.

6. Rotate troops effectively or it will be a "Groundhog Day" war.

U.S. troops fighting overseas need time to rest, relax, and be with their loved ones. In short, they need to regularly rotate out of theater. Unfortunately, this creates a major dilemma when using U.S. troops to conduct long-term COIN operations. As in the movie "Groundhog Day," every rotation can effectively create a new beginning to the same war. New relationships must be (re)forged between the host nation and the incoming U.S. personnel for operations to be effective. The identity and modus operandi of insurgent groups and leaders must be (re)learned. The learning curve is very steep, and by the time the troops know their "neighborhood" it is time to go home -- Groundhog Day all over again. There are ways to mitigate the deleterious effects of troop rotations, for instance, through the use of information technology or by rotating units to the same locations in theater, but they cannot be avoided altogether.

7. COIN lessons from Iraq have been misapplied in Afghanistan.

The tactics borrowed from Iraq for use in Afghanistan have generally been effective. Applying a lot of flexibility to account for the vast differences between the theaters, many of the tactics seem to work pretty well at the brigade and below. Unfortunately, the operational and strategic lessons from Iraq and prior conflicts have not been as well applied. In the absence of a legitimate government, population-centric COIN does not work. If insurgents have a large sanctuary where they can rest and refit, COIN has a high probability of failing. If there is not unity of effort amongst civil and military authorities, COIN has a high probability of failing. All of these are problems in the Afghan theater. The government is, at best, tolerated. Pakistan provides a massive refuge with endless border crossings. The leadership of Afghanistan has an often rocky relationship with that of the United States and attacks on U.S. troops by Afghan troops are commonplace. Under these conditions, the best tactics cannot succeed in defeating the insurgency. Add to these factors an inordinately large number of theater commanders over the course of the campaign -- five in just the last five years -- and it is clear the U.S. goal of defeating the Taliban did not align with practical realities. See #3, 4, 5, and 6 above. It seems we ignored first principles in Afghanistan and just hoped good tactics would win the day. Not a good approach. It is understandable strategic leaders might judge it is too costly to do population-centric COIN in the Af/Pak region "correctly," and that dealing with the Pakistani tribal areas directly is infeasible. Under such circumstances, we should be honest with ourselves that we cannot defeat the insurgency outright, align goals with what is possible, and field a force that makes sense for the more limited goals.

8. Detainee operations are much too important to be left to amateurs.

We have completely messed this up since 9/11. Our tactics in dealing with detainees have had such undesired effects as alienating allies, angering large portions of the U.S. electorate, alienating portions of the local population in countries where we operate, and reinvigorating Iraq's insurgency with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. We also conducted detainee operations poorly for long periods of time. Initially large numbers of people in Iraq were rounded up and sent to detention facilities for no good reason. Later in the conflict we released a very large percentage of insurgents within 6-18 months of capture...often because the capturing unit had rotated back to their home station. See #6 above. Insurgents came back from prison better connected and with greater street cred. It was like a nightmarish National Training Center rotation where the bad guys get a re-key and our troops get shot or blown up by now better-trained insurgents. I thought Catch-22 was funny until living it! Our poor detainee tactics in the time after 9/11 had very negative operational and strategic impacts. If we ever do COIN again using U.S. forces, it is imperative we get this right. To borrow from David Galula, "Under the best circumstances, the police action cannot fail to have negative aspects for both the population and the counterinsurgent living with it...these reasons demand the operation be conducted by professionals..." -David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.

9. Democracy and governance start from the bottom.

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority made a huge mistake by disallowing local and regional elections until there was a national constitution in place. We created a power vacuum that could only be filled by traditional leaders (sheikhs and imams), insurgents, and coalition forces. During the years it took to get a national government in place, we should have been encouraging local elections to build experience with democracy, form political parties, and create locally legitimate governance. Rule by the people has to be built from the bottom up. The U.S. experience is instructive. The presence of functioning state and local government allowed national leaders the time to hash out a constitution. It took our founders about 12 years to get a constitution written and approved... and that was with two tries because the first attempt failed. We expected the Iraqis and Afghans to get it done in a year or two and create an effective system of governance though they have no experience in democracy, no political parties, traditional leaders or U.S. troops trying to fill the role of local government, and a raging insurgency that leaves a large portion of their population disenfranchised? That's nuts!

10. Maintain training and doctrine related to COIN.

We will do it again. We always say we won't and we always do. It's too costly in lives and dollars to not keep this in the doctrine. Don't make another generation get maimed unnecessarily.

Kyle Teamey is a major in the U.S. Army Reserves. He served on active duty with the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment and 1^st Infantry Division from 1998 to 2004. After leaving active duty, he served as a civilian counterinsurgency analyst from 2005-2006, co-authored the 2006 edition of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, and assisted DARPA in the development and fielding of the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR) from 2005 to 2009. He is currently the chief executive officer of a chemical technology company.

A woman who had too much to drink fell asleep on a train. Mark Scully, an official in the British Ministry of Defence, pretended to help her to a taxi but instead dragged her into some woods and assaulted her. He worked on reconstruction issues in southern Afghanistan in 2009-10, the Daily Mail reports.

[Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII.] 

Crist: One of the things as a federal employee who works on current Middle East issues, and having studied pretty extensively for a project on the Joint Staff the lead-up to decisions on Iraq, the thing that has struck me is that the lessons learned among policymakers from Iraq is there was a lot of thought given -- which was not the case in 2002 and 2003 -- given to second- and third- order effects of American action and what are the ramifications for this that we don't anticipate. Whether that can be sustained over the next generation or just each generation learns its lesson, institutionalizes it and [inaudible].

Dubik: The lesson-learned process and what people learn from our 10-year experience is important. There is a reasoned way to think through using force, there is a useful process in increasing the probability that you'll get it more right than wrong -- not that you'll ever get it absolutely right.

I fear that we are throwing out counterinsurgency because we are never doing that again. But we already did that once: It was post-Vietnam. Counterinsurgency is not a strategy; it's a way to deal with an insurgency, and if you face it again, it gives you a relatively decent structure to think through these things. It certainly shouldn't be a national strategy. It was never designed to do that.

Ricks: Another person who could not attend today, Kyle Teamey, who some of you may know, a terrifically smart young man, sent in this question: "Is there anyone at this table who thinks we will not do counterinsurgency again?"

For the record, I want to note that everybody agrees we will do counterinsurgency again.

Mudd: But we went in to do counterterrorism, and now all we talk about is counterinsurgency. So success on Sept. 12 would have been, "Is there going to be an attack against the United States?" and by 2003 that answer was no. And now we say success is: Should we have a third election? And my view would be, if the Taliban wins, I don't care as long as we have a residual capability to eliminate the target we went in to get.

I hate counterinsurgency, because it wasn't our threat. Just a quick asterisk: In parallel with these major wars we had intervention in places like Somalia and Yemen. There's been no tactical conversation here, and I think appropriately -- but especially with the new tactical capability-- we've been able to say, "Man, we are giving the president in some cases better options, but in some cases much tougher?" You want to go into Mali? You want to go against Boko Haram? I want to know why we are not talking about armed drones against cartels, which were a much bigger threat to this country than terrorism ever was or ever will be. But it is interesting that parallel subwars or campaigns is part of this war and what they mean about American intervention in the future that leads not only to things like increasing the capacity of the partner but also unilateral use of force against a target without ever having to put a boot on the ground fast.

Ricks: What do they tell you?

Mudd: That tells me that we are going to be into it because we are going to say there's a way to get out of this without putting big green on the ground.

Flournoy: I think that there probably will be some point in the future where we decide to help a government deal with its problem of insurgency, and that's the thing: It's not our insurgency. The question is: Can we come to some consensus on what's the right model? Is there a single right model for that, or is it really entirely case by case? To me, after the experience of the last decade or more, the El Salvador model looks a lot more attractive than the conventional occupation model of Iraq and Afghanistan, but is that just being falsely wedded to something? Can we generalize from these different experiences to say there is one approach that either is generally more effective or, from our own political culture, generally more acceptable and sustainable to the American people?

Ricks: I'm going to try and answer your question. I would say, yes, clearly: Light footprint, minimal American boots on the ground, leading from behind, helping host nation abilities, or even helping third parties like we've been helping the Colombians help the Mexicans on the drug war. These are the things that work; these are the things also that go to the issue of sustainability. I once was talking to Elliott Abrams, and I said I thought secretly more Americans had been killed in El Salvador than were killed in the 1991 Gulf War. He said, "Yeah, but I won my war."

Alford: You also have to design the force to support your strategy. You got to start thinking about the force.

Ricks: We have a force that's tactically magnificent, but is it relevant, Colonel Alford?

Alford: No, I don't think we are organized the way we should be right now for the future.

Ricks: How should we be better organized?

Alford: Well, I mean all the things you just talked about were what the U.S. Marines do from amphibious ships. We are balanced, we are flexible, we are adaptable, and we are forward deployed. We can go in and be out and not have to put a footprint on the ground for any significant period of time. And that's what we want.

I mean, I love the U.S. Army -- we have the best U.S. Army in the world, but in Kosovo when you take in 24 helicopters and it takes 6,000 troops to support those 24 helicopters, that's not the future.

Ricks: I need to go now to the Army generals who have been shaking their heads.

Dubik: We have a great Marine Corps for a reason, and I'm glad we have it. But we have a great Air Force, and Navy, and Army for a reason that we need also.

But I play golf with 13 clubs. And I like to solve problems with more than one conceptual framework. So I'm not at all satisfied with a conclusion of our last 10 years of war that "quote, unquote" this approach works. I think that that would be a dangerous way to come out of this war. For me, the lesson learned is come to a war with more than one conceptual framework. Because every war, while it may have some common elements, every war, as Clausewitz says, is a chameleon, admits to its own solution, and you have to think through that solution. So the light-footprint approach that you talked about works in many, many circumstances, but there are an equal number that it won't.

Ricks: So be adaptive is what you're saying?

Dubik: Intellectually adaptive.

Ricks: I've been reading another history of World War II recently which Churchill keeps on saying in ‘39, ‘40, ‘41 that this will not be a force-on-force war.

Dubik: [Laughs.] Yeah, well it ended up being that way.

And that gets to my comment about adaptability. It's not just intellectual adaptability but force adaptability. If you predict one future and you optimize your force for that future, you're either a hero or a goat. You're a hero if the future unfolds as you predict. You're a goat because you've got the country's reputation on something that now is not relevant. So in our force-structure decisions coming up necessarily as a result of the position we are in strategically and fiscally, maintaining as many options as we possibly can is an important way forward in an uncertain environment. It's organizationally important to have alternatives.

Ricks: Is it possible to maintain options in an era when I'm guessing defense budgets are going to go down 30 percent in the next few years?

Dubik: My own answer is yes. The number of options may be reduced, but you can still retain a good number of options if you are willing to break some rice bowls in terms of current organizational structures, active, guard, reserve in each of the components.

Mudd: A sand wedge is what you're saying.

Dubik: Yeah, I use a sand wedge.

Alford: One of the four words I used there was adaptable. You've got to have a number of tools in the box to cross the threat that we are going to face, which I believe is going to be a more hybrid, irregular, not a toe-to-toe threat. That's going to be the most prevalent, I believe.

Ricks: And the other head-shaking general?

Fastabend: I'd like to make two comments. Jim [Dubik] talked adequately about the need to have 13 clubs in the bag. I can't restrain myself from saying this now that I'm retired: You can't help but love the Marine Corps. They are simultaneously one of the greatest and most insecure institutions that I've ever encountered in my life.

(More to come, as the Army-Marine smackdown continues)

[Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, and V]

Glasser: Afghanistan is a very interesting question. Aside from the very early days of pushing the Taliban out, which obviously was a military operation, or the battle of Tora Bora or Shah-i-Kot, since then there have been military operations certainly, but how would we characterize in terms of as a war and then also what do we think of how the U.S. military presence there will be remembered as? Is it going be "we lost this war," or is it that it was a violent political conflict that lasted for more than a decade and was unresolved?

Ricks: I'd like to start by asking the historian and the Marine.

Crist: I agree with General Dubik. We backed into this. That is the fundamental problem, is the long-term strategy for a host of different reasons. I think we'll be remembered as in some cases of duplicating a lot of the problems we've made in our earlier wars, and then when we were faced with a crisis our natural inclination, particularly in the U.S. military, is to fall back on doctrine. We have a counterinsurgency doctrine -- if it worked in Iraq then it's going to work in Afghanistan. And so you just sort of take that and transplant it as if it's sort of a manual on how you're going to do that. And the problem with all these wars is that they are all dependent on the dynamics, and they're completely different. And so our response is a huge surge. Maybe it was the right or wrong answer. I tend to think that it really ultimately didn't solve much in Afghanistan, nothing like it did in Iraq, because the conditions were different.

Alford: First off, I think that we can look back in the future and say we succeeded. Not win but. . . . . Because I do believe that we've spent enough time there, and the transition we are getting ready to make is viable, I believe, from a partnered operational design to an advisory piece and really get out of the way and let them do it. I believe that their army -- in particular their army -- will be able to keep it stable enough for this new government to muddle its way through over the next few years. I think this third election -- a lot of people say the second election in a new democracy is the most important -- it's the third election here. And if it goes and people look at it as somewhat legitimate, then they have a real chance, because the Taliban are not going to come together as an army and take Kabul.

Ricks: Rajiv?

Chandrasekaran: I think this in my view is going to likely wind up as some form of barely satisfactory arrangement of sort of mildly unsatisfactory stalemate that will not be seen as having been anywhere near worth the cost in dollars, and in lives, and in limbs.

Look, I spent a lot of time in places where we surged troops over the last several years. There is discrete impact. I've seen districts where security has improved. It's incontrovertible. When you send in additional numbers of U.S. troops, good things generally follow -- but for a discrete period of time. We didn't achieve the sort of aggregate impact that we saw in Iraq. And we all know the reasons why. Ultimately, I step back and say it was not a wise expenditure of resources.

Stepping back even further, we fundamentally failed to grasp the politics of that country [Afghanistan]. Our solutions were simply not tailored to the environment. And ultimately I think in many parts of the country -- it's already happening -- things will essentially revert back to their natural order. And a natural order that may well in many parts of the country be simply good enough for us. But could we have gotten to that natural order without having spent as many hundreds of billions of dollars and as many years as it has taken us to get there?

Alford: If we had had the courage to make the shift four or five years ago? Absolutely. We took some of the most decentralized people in the entire world and imposed one of the most centralized constitutions on them. It's ludicrous that President Karzai appoints a district governor and a district police chief. I'm telling you, the people where I come from -- Rome, Georgia -- would rise up if the president appointed the county commissioner. It's crazy.

Chandrasekaran: Look, look, people criticize the United States for going around the world and imposing democracy, and I think to myself, well only if we shared with people the sort of democracy that made our country great. The Afghan Constitution on paper centralizes power like no other state -- I suppose like North Korea. I mean, it's crazy.

(More to come-first, about Syria and Libya)

By "An SF Vet"

Best Defense guest contributor

When SF moved there they fell in on a ton of unvetted ALP that the regular Army had "trained." Why was the regular Army standing up ALP, when they have no real understanding about how to properly vet and conduct unconventional warfare? Great question. Probably because a sorry officer made the poor decision to allow this to happen. 

So the ODA fell in on hundreds of these poorly-trained, unvetted Afghans. So, they did what they were told, set up a base out there, and began vetting these guys with the last month they had in country. Fast forward to another sorry officer that told the team to "Hurry up and vet these guys" so he could tell higher how great of a job they were doing. When they said they had only vetted, like, 40 percent, they were told that wasn't good enough, and the officer then padded the stats because in his exact words, "I can't tell a general we only vetted 40 percent."

I can't speak to everything that happened this past year, but this is the sort of thing that causes green on blue. The conventional Army has no business setting up ALP, but since that is the hot ticket these days, people only want to mass-produce them. The current team on the ground has done a lot of good things there, but it is hard (and dangerous) when you have leaders that allow this to happen.

Morals of the story:

1) Start giving higher the real story (I am talking to you, shitty, self-serving, careerist field grades).

2) The war isn't over yet for the guys on the ground, so support them and give them what they require to be successful.

3) Stop allowing conventional Army to do unconventional tasks.

[Here are Parts I, II, and III.]

Ricks: Michèle?

Flournoy: Two things, and especially because I think in Iraq, because the fundamental premise for the war was shown to be false, that should have triggered exactly the kind of discussion that: "Uh-oh, here we are. We've discovered there are no WMD, so what are we trying to do here, and what is our strategy and what are the risks and what are the tradeoffs and how much in resources are we willing to put in?" And then, the perverse effect is that it also affected Afghanistan because once the focus was on Iraq, Afghanistan really did become an economy-of-force effort for the first many years, which also takes the oxygen out of the fundamental strategic discussion.

Fastabend: I discovered this dilemma in Iraq. I wasn't in charge of strategy; I was in charge of operations. From the strategy guys, I would get the strategic conditions I was supposed to achieve: "Secure the borders of Iraq; end the violence. Our job is done. Make it happen." And no choices had been made, no options, nothing really was useful with respect to strategy.

Ricks: Shawn and Michèle, you both effectively held strategic positions. In fact, Shawn had the title, director of strategy for the American Empire.

Glasser: That's a capital "E"?

Ricks: Again and again we're coming back to original sin, fruit of the poisoned tree, and strategic confusion at the outset, where the system did not work, where the differences were not examined, and where assumptions were not examined either.

Brimley: Right, so I think we have a profound inability to make hard, clear strategic choices, but then I think that forces us to react, right? It forces us into a reactive posture. And for years I've heard the phrase, "Oh, Shawn, you know the enemy has a vote. The enemy has a vote." But we have a veto, right? And as we think about the years ahead, as we think about a constrained fiscal environment, we're going to have to make hard choices. And the enemy is going to try to lure us to do things that are not in our comparative advantage, so we're going to have to face up to the notion that we can veto that. We have a choice, and that's in how we prosecute these things. Those choices carry inherent levels of risk, but we should embrace that, not run from it.

Ricks: Michèle, why doesn't the system make hard choices?

Flournoy: Well, I can speak to what I experienced in the Obama administration. A lot of what we're talking about here happened in a much earlier period. I'm just guessing, I'm speculating, that part of why this initial fundamental strategic rethink didn't happen in Iraq is that, in the middle of [the war], you've gone in and you've broken the china, and now you have to say, "Whoops. The fundamental premise was wrong. Now what are we going to do?"

That's a very politically fraught thing for an administration to do when it's got tens of thousands of Americans in harm's way on the ground for a mission that was very controversial from the beginning. I think it would have been an extraordinary act of leadership for, whether it was the president or the national security advisor, you know, the team, to sort of say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is not what we thought it was. What are our interests? How do we clearly define a new set of objectives and make some choices about how we're going to prosecute this?"

Ricks: That explains Iraq, but does it explain Afghanistan?

Flournoy: In Afghanistan -- again, I wasn't there in the early days-- I think that we were very good at getting in, very poor at seeing the way out. And I think part of the reason why we migrated from the focus on al Qaeda to "What are we going to do about Afghanistan writ large?" is getting caught in the sense of: What is a sustainable outcome? If you take too narrow an approach, it's like taking your hand out of the water. Once you leave, you're right back in the exact same situation where you have a government that's providing safe haven and you're facing a threat again. And yet we never really resourced, fully resourced, a counterinsurgency strategy until very late in the game when Obama did the review. But that was like coming in the middle -- the symphony had been playing for a number of years. You're inheriting something and now trying to say, "Well, now, given the interests at stake, clearly define who is the enemy, who is not. What's the limited outcome we're going to try to achieve, and how do we go after that?" But it's a lot harder to do coming into the middle of an operation with a lot of history than it is to do it right from the beginning. And I think that we probably would have defined it differently had we had that opportunity to shape it from the beginning, but given where we were and what we inherited, I think, you know, we did the best we could.

Ricks: Jim, it seems to me that what this conversation is saying is that there's something profoundly wrong at the civil-military interface, and your initial question speaks to this.

Dubik: The sense that I'm getting is we spend too much time worried about control and autonomy and less time talking about shared responsibility in strategic and operational decisions. The civil-military discourse is defined by civilian control of the military -- absolutely essential to it -- but all relationships are more complex than one formula can ever describe. So, while control and autonomy are part of the relationship, the shared responsibility is a huge part that doesn't seem to get as much play in the professional military education or in the development processes that are used for producing civilian strategists and leaders.

Ricks: This is an unfair question, but let me ask it anyway. If you could rewind us to Sept. 11, 2001, how should civil-military discourse have been conducted at that point?

Dubik: Well it certainly should have been centered around the fundamental questions, not of how, but of why and what.

But I'd like to kind of challenge the discussion a little bit, in the sense that we didn't have these analyses. When I went back and reviewed your books [gestures at Ricks], Woodward's books, Michael Gordon's book, your book [gestures at Chandrasekaran], I see a very similar pattern with respect to Iraq for sure. There are at least eight or nine major strategic reviews that clearly identified that what we were doing was not working. Yet we didn't make really a big shift until 2007. My bet is you could go through and find papers about Afghanistan that say the same thing, that until you [gestures to Flournoy] did the review in 2009, that there were plenty of evidence that what we were doing wasn't working, but we had no shift. Back to your original question. The first question was more about how and not enough about why and what, and then we couldn't adapt. It wasn't just in Afghanistan that we were treating it as an economy of force -- we were -- but it was an economy of thought. There wasn't the attention.

Flournoy: Because there's no bandwidth.

Dubik: Right.

Brimley: There's only so much bandwidth for policymakers, and what you see early in Afghanistan is all the planning power on the military and civilian side gets sucked into the Iraq problem. And it is sort of on autopilot: Things are going well; there's not a lot of thought that needs to be given to it.

Ricks: Bandwidth? When I go back and read the papers of George Marshall and other senior leaders in 1939, 1940, '41, they're dealing with much bigger problems, global issues, and they are making really hard choices, such as: Let the Philippines go, keep the sea lines of communication open to Australia--but win in Europe first. These are basic, fundamental things.

So I would argue with the bandwidth thing. What's clogging them up nowadays?

Crist: The initial question I raised was: Do commanders have to think? And I think it gets to what General Dubik said about getting focused on shooting the close-in target.

We don't think about the long-term ramifications of the actions and the strategy. In my view, the great failing of Tommy Franks, he never asked about that the assumptions were coming down about what this campaign would look like -- assumptions being facts in the campaign design. Those assumptions were never challenged. In many ways, as I describe in my book, there was no red team to look at, "OK, how is this going to impact Iran? Does it open opportunities for them, or does it have a deterrent effect?" And so I think that, having sat down with a number of top commanders and staff, that piece of it isn't done. It's almost discouraged because "that's the policymakers' realm, it's not ours."

Dubik: Well that's the civil-military issue. It's control and autonomy. So, at least on the military side, the bulk of the training is deductive training. You are given a mission, you are given an end state, you are tossed over the transom the strategy, and just. . . .

Ricks: When you're talking about shared responsibilities, it seems to me you're talking about trust. Trust is the essence of that shared responsibility -- the sense of a common future, that we trust each other, we'll be working on this. It seems to me you're saying there's a fundamental lack of trust in our civil-military system.

Mudd: Hold on. One interjection that relates to bandwidth is the difference between choices and questions. I think [back in 2001] we blew over the questions. You said it's not "how," which is what we did on Sept. 12; it's why and what. On Sept. 12, 2001, can you imagine asking the question: Is the Taliban really a threat? Today, 12 years later, I'd say, "Well clearly it's not a threat! In fact, they're going to be in the government!" But we blew through the question, which led to space, because you have to have space because the Taliban's a problem -- in retrospect, they weren't. So we made a choice, but we didn't know we had a choice.

I'll close by saying there's a bandwidth issue; part of this is the speed of decision-making in Washington. Can you imagine at the Washington Post, sitting back on Sept. 12 and saying, "Wait a minute; you sure the Taliban's a threat?" You would have been crushed. That, clearly, would have been a good question.

Ricks: I want to go to two things here. Dave Fastabend, you talk about the inability to make hard choices. How do we get the system to surface and make hard choices?

Fastabend: I think we need to relook at what we teach about strategy and train people about how these decisions are made. I think we should teach strategy much like the Harvard Business School teaches strategic decision-making in business, on a case-study basis. There's lots of good history out there where they could teach people what were, in essence, the choices people had in various situations. You [Ricks] very articulately described the ones Marshall had. Talk about what the options were, how they made the trades and came to it. But don't take people through these ridiculous exercises about define the ends you want and go see if someone can make a path to it.

(and more yet to come)