Between Fighting the Last War and Fighting a New One

Let’s start off this blog post with an example: During World War I, British and French analysts noticed that the German army was shrinking the size of its regiments on the Western Front, creating smaller groups of soldiers. The Allies took this as evidence that the Germans were losing and that the British and French were winning; their training taught them that the number of regiments and battalions were the most important indication of fighting strength. If the Germans were downsizing their Regiments, then they must have simply being trying to hide their weakness.

In reality, the Germans had made a leap in analyzing warfare. What was more important was the amount of firepower each group of soldiers had. Each of the smaller companies that they fielded were equipped with more machine guns, more artillery, and more firepower available than any of their counterparts on the other side of no man’s land. Those small companies were more deadly than any other armed force in history. The British and French were “fighting the last war,” which means that they were ignoring leaps in technology and tactics and were instead focusing on what was successful and important in the last major European War. The United States, and other major military powers, have run into a similar problem that the Allies did in 1915: we are using outdated classifications and techniques to fight wars where those measurements and tactics are no longer needed.

Joshua Goldstein is right when he tells us that the major armies of the world are no longer fighting. The age of two countries declaring war and then deploying hundreds of tanks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers against each other is likely extinct. The closest any nation has come to this since World War II was the Gulf War, which, with the  extreme lack of parity between the coalition forces and Iraq, was scarcely even a war at all. 

The problem is that the United States military is built to fight precisely this kind of extinct war. For all of our technological advancements, our concept of warfare is still tanks rolling across a border, of boots on the ground engaging another nation with its own tanks and its own boots. The US Armed Forces is still very very good at this type of warfare-- one need only look at the rapid defeats of the Iraqi army in both Gulf Wars to see that the United States can outclass virtually any other nation’s military.

Issues arise, however, when the US military is forced to engage combatants that aren’t a nation. We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for over ten years; operations are finally drawing down in Iraq after eight years of fighting. We’ve been fighting in the Middle East longer than we fought Nazi Germany. Why is it that the most powerful armed force in history is having difficulty defeating groups of non state militants?

The United States (and the militaries of most states) are having difficulty waging effective wars because they are applying solutions of symmetrical warfare to the problems of asymmetrical war. States don’t have the tools to fight a loosely organized militant resistance group.

Just like the German Soldiers in World War I, the ability to apply deadly force has been personalized further. One suicide bomber can kill 30 or 40 people with a home made bomb made out of nails and fertilizer. The ability for a single person to kill has never been easier. Combatants don’t need a tank to destroy an American vehicle; now they can plant a mine or a makeshift bomb on the side of the road, detonate it while a convoy passes by, and then shuffle away. There are no divisions to engage or positions to capture, no enemy formations to direct our tanks at. 

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been an especially painful learning experience for the United States military. I think we are finally beginning to change our expectations and our strategies to reflect the shifting face of war. In the past years we’ve refocused our resources on special forces and intelligence. Our endgame in Afghanistan is no longer about defeating the Taliban’s foot soldiers but finding and capturing or killing their leaders. Drone Warfare has been steadily increasing the pressure on the Taliban over the past 4 years, wreaking havoc on their chain of command. Our military is evolving to a force that can fight both symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. The increased importance of C.I.A. was apparent when the then Secretary of Defence General David Petraeus and the Director of the C.I.A. Leon Panetta swapped positions. One of the main rationales for the position change was that Leon Panetta could bring his expertise from the C.I.A. and implement it in the U.S. Armed Forces as a whole. 

When the United States entered Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, we were every bit as misguided as the British and French generals who flat out ignored that artillery, not individual soldiers, had become the key weapons of war. The shift that the American military has encountered over the past decade is an even more radical one, a shift from the massive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries to the smaller, but just as dangerous conflicts of the 21st century. The United States is trying to equip itself with the tools to deal with 21st century warfare, but we need to hurry up.  The US has been fighting “the last war” since the 1940’s; and we have some catching up to do.