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Cover Story: Military - The Unintended Revolution
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Eight years ago, George W. Bush campaigned for president promising to transform the American military. The Clinton administration had overcommitted the armed forces to peacekeeping in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, Bush declared, and those missions had rendered two of the Army's 10 divisions "not ready for duty." As president, Bush pledged, he would gradually pull out of the Balkans and avoid further foreign entanglements: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building," he said during an October 2000 debate. Instead, Bush promised in a September 1999 speech at South Carolina's Citadel military academy, he would not only accelerate weapons programs that had been delayed or trimmed by the Clinton administration but also "skip a generation of technology" by investing in revolutionary leaps ahead.
Today, instead of radical new weapons, the Army is investing in up-armored Humvees and mine-resistant trucks. The Air Force has grounded nearly half of its F-15 fighters after one of the 25-year-old airplanes broke apart in flight, and the replacement F-22 program has been cut, by the Bush administration, from 381 planes to 183. And where 13,000 troops were engaged in peacekeeping in the Balkans in 1999, 150,000 troops are fighting to impose peace in Iraq. On military procurement, the Bush administration has been the Clinton administration, take 2. On nation building, Bush has been Bill Clinton, times 10.
The American military has changed since 1999, but not in the way that candidate Bush envisaged. As with many presidents before him -- think of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 or Lyndon Johnson in 1968 -- Bush's legacy is being shaped less by the policies he outlined as a candidate than by the unintended consequences of his reactions to unforeseen events. What Bush intended as short, sharp, high-tech offensives have dragged on as a manpower-intensive "long war." And while ambitious, expensive, top-down arms programs are hit with delays and cuts -- transformational satellite communications, space-based radar, the littoral combat ship, the F-22 fighter, the Army's Future Combat System -- real innovation in both technology and tactics is percolating up from ad hoc initiatives by junior officers in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The big transformation initiatives are being deep-sixed, one by one," said Loren Thompson, the Lexington Institute's chief operating officer and a consultant to major defense contractors. "Most of the 'transformation' has been in the human dimension rather than in the technology."
As president, Bush has won historic increases in military spending -- not a surprising achievement for a president in wartime. "In very rough terms, the budget in 2000 was about $300 billion, and there were no major military operations," said Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The budget today, exclusive of major military operations, is about $500 billion." Afghanistan and Iraq are additional expenses covered by supplemental appropriations; in fact, the supplementals are so expansive, Kosiak said, that "if anything, the war-related funding is helping to subsidize stuff within the base budget at this point." Yet with all these resources, Kosiak went on, "there hasn't been that much 'transformation.' What we are buying today is pretty much an extension of what we were trying to buy during the Clinton administration."
As a candidate, Bush had aspired to something more than bigger budgets. His imagination had been captured by a bipartisan group of visionaries calling for a "revolution in military affairs." The basic theory of the RMA (to use the inevitable Pentagon shorthand) was that, just as the chariot, iron, and the internal-combustion engine had each revolutionized war-making in past centuries, so too would the microchip in the 21st. At their most grandiose, the revolutionaries spoke of laying bare enemy weak points with long-range sensors -- "lifting the fog of war," as a leading proponent, Navy Adm. William Owens, titled his 2001 book -- to allow small, swift U.S. forces to dissect much larger opponents with precision strikes. The initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to prove the point. Then, of course, both countries erupted in intractable insurgencies.
One of the leading intellectuals of the military revolution, retired Army Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich (now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments), had warned as early as 1992 that potential enemies, seeing the futility of a head-on fight with superior U.S. forces, would resort to guerrilla warfare, augmenting ancient tactics with cheap modern technology. "But at the time, I didn't see, quite frankly, the extent to which this empowered guerrilla would materialize so soon," Krepinevich told National Journal. "An Internet-linked global franchise like Al Qaeda was not something I foresaw."
The people who arguably did foresee it were the apostles of a rival theory, never embraced by either Clinton or Bush, known as "fourth-generation warfare." The "generation" referred to the steadily increasing chaos of modern war -- from the 18th century's rigid ranks of musketeers to the 20th century's tank and aircraft blitzkriegs deep behind enemy lines -- and predicted that the 21st century would see the dissolution of conventional armies and the rise of amorphous armed gangs, a new dark age accelerated by the Internet and globalization. "Fourth-generation warfare is about the decline and disappearance of the state," said William Lind, who helped coin the term in 1989. "It is not the kind of counterinsurgency we fought in Vietnam. It is a war of many different parties, shifting alliances, and ever-growing fragmentation" -- like Iraq, or Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups, today.
The 9/11 attacks, in which 19 terrorists bypassed the entire national security apparatus, seemed to prove the fourth-generation theorists' point. But Al Qaeda has been unable to replicate that success in the six years since, and conventional state forces have proved able to disrupt, if not decisively defeat, its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. "While some of the more enthusiastic fourth-generation people saw no utility to a big army, I always thought that part of counterinsurgency had to be a robust, general-purpose force," said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel who wrote a fourth generation treatise titled The Sling and the Stone. And those regular forces, Hammes added, have proved remarkably adaptable in recent years.
The bottom-up transformation being led by junior officers in Afghanistan and Iraq is in many ways a synthesis of the two rival theories: the fourth generation's emphasis on chaotic conflict between nonstate actors, and the revolution's emphasis on the value of the microchip. "We had a very good programmer who was my machine gunner and company clerk. I was from the IT field as well, so we built a database," said Morgan Mann, a Marine Corps Reserve major who served in Iraq in 2004-05. "We would get the full name, tribe, [digital] picture, and three-digit grid coordinate [GPS locator] of every male in a village. By the time we left, we had 20,000 names." The marines could look up suspected insurgents named by informants and dispatch patrols to bring them in, or verify whether individuals who were stopped at a checkpoint were locals or outsiders.
Mann's ad hoc combination of classic pavement-pounding counterinsurgency techniques and modern information technology is increasingly typical of U.S. operations. "There are some things the Army does now that we didn't do when I was younger," said Col. Martin Stanton, chief of "reconciliation" (among Iraqis) for the U.S. military's headquarters in Iraq. Young officers and sergeants use chat rooms, online forums, and e-mail to share personal lessons learned with those currently abroad and those preparing to go. Largely as a result, Stanton said, "the difference between us in 2003 and us now is nothing short of phenomenal. People's familiarity with the ground they're working on and the [local] people that they're working with is considerable. You have captains coming back to an area and saying, 'Oh, I remember you, sheik; remember me?' "
That depth of experience, of course, comes at a price: increasing exhaustion from repeated tours. The Army has set up a rotation scheme in which each brigade spends one year out of every three deployed abroad, essentially forever -- and so far, in practice, the ratio is more like 15 months deployed out of every 36. Still, the recruiting of troops and retention of those in the ranks remain surprisingly strong. The Army and Marine Corps recruited more privates in fiscal 2007 than they did in 2000 or 2001, and junior officers -- the generation leading the bottom-up revolution -- are opting to extend their contracts at higher rates than the 1990s average. But in some cases, the military is paying out huge bonuses to retain these troops. And there are troubling signs of compromises to keep the recruiting and retention numbers high, such as accepting more recruits with poor test scores or criminal records, and maintaining promotion rates so high that 98 percent of eligible Army lieutenants become captains and 97 percent of eligible captains become majors -- hardly a discriminating process. Across the board, all of the services are struggling to retain troops in high-demand specialties such as intelligence, medical care, and bomb dismantling. Although the canaries in the mine are hardly dying, some of them have developed alarming coughs.
So the armed forces are in a race between adaptation and exhaustion, between building up experienced troops and losing them. Which trend prevails depends on how long, and how large, a U.S. force must remain in Iraq. But that decision will soon be out of George Bush's hands. It will be up to whoever becomes president in January 2009.
"Do you take the risk of breaking the Army and Marine Corps in order to win this fight?" Hammes asked. "Or do you decide, the strain is too high and we've got to draw down -- and then to save the Army, you're destroying what you've gained [in Iraq]. And no one can tell you, if we stay, we'll win. There are no guarantees."