Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Robert Gates and the "Forgotten" Lessons.

Gates says in his book that the military services continued after Vietnam to plan for wars that would never be fought. It might be argued that when you do so and are ready to fight a worst case scenario then you have a capability that can be tailored to less demanding situations. In facing the challenges that existed in Central Europe after Vietnam we were able to show the Soviets that even in conventional war there was a growing probability that we could win. Their involvement in the quagmire of Afghanistan and the growing strength of the NATO Alliance contributed to their defeat in the cold war and breakup of the Warsaw Pact. The ease with which we defeated a top third world power in Iraq showed further our awesome capability in fighting a conventional war. So the military argument that if we could successfully defeat a conventional threat we could deal with a subset has some validity.

However what we were to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates pointed out, was that the military had forgotten how to fight an insurgency. He’s wrong. He assumes incorrectly that we ever learned in Vietnam how to wage an effective counter insurgency. What was institutionalized after the Vietnam conflict were tactics that were never viable to begin with and led only to needless causalities. In essence the military drove on roads and walked around the country in gaggles inviting death and injury. These are the tactics that were institutionalized, and repeated to our everlasting shame. Roads in an undeveloped country are less than one percent of the total geography and yet we insisted on driving over them. This made our Army easy targets for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that took such a horrific toll on our forces. If you were to look at statistics from the end of the Vietnam Conflict you would see that it was these same IEDs that were killing and wounding our troops. So to say we had forgotten how to wage a counterinsurgency is a stretch. We never "broke the code" to begin with.

The approach that Gates and DOD took in dealing with IEDs was upgrading the capability of vehicles to protect their occupants in the event of a detonation. Some additional progress was made in technologies to target those who emplaced them but this was more cosmetic than real. The ultimate solution for vehicles was to find ways to quit using the roads and highways. Never in a million years you say…? Never say never.

In watching the news the ground operations look almost identical to what we did in Vietnam. The pacification effort was to show a US presence in the rural areas. Units walked around looking for trouble. It was trouble our enemies would provide in sniper fire, ambushes, and most deadly of all, IEDs. “BRING IT ON” our tactics proclaimed and in Vietnam, and the Middle East that is exactly what our enemy’s did. As we wind down our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we need to take a close look at lessons learned, see what worked and think deeply about the differences between conventional and unconventional war.

If the goal is to pacify an urban or rural area the first step must be to make the enemy move to some other geographical location, preferably far removed from the one they occupy. Once they are out of the picture and the population is relieved of the terror influence, then nation building can begin. Having an armed force walking mindlessly about is idiotic unless there is an underlying reason for doing so. "Showing the Flag," does not in itself qualify as a "Compelling Reason."

I hesitate to say more for fear that in this day and age there are those out there who might be getting ideas I wouldn’t want shared. Be advised however, there is plenty we could have done that was not. It goes back to properly Defining the Problem and constraint equations that nudge "Best" out of the solution box.