Back in 2015 and again in April 2016, I commented on what I consider to be a fairly consistent litany of failures in American strategic leadership since, about 1960. Just this month I saw a new article (almost a synopsis of his recent book) in Foreign Affairs by George Packer about noted (notorious to some) American diplomat “Richard Holbrooke and the Decline of American Power.”
One paragraph caught my eye:
We prefer our wars quick and decisive, concluding with a surrender ceremony, and we like firepower more than we want to admit, while counterinsurgency requires supreme restraint. Its apostles in Vietnam used to say, “The best weapon for killing is a knife. If you can’t use a knife, then a gun. The worst weapon is airpower.” Counterinsurgency is, according to the experts, 80 percent political. We spend our time on American charts and plans and tasks, as if the solution to another country’s internal conflict is to get our own bureaucracy right. And maybe we don’t take the politics of other people seriously. It comes down to the power of our belief in ourselves. If we are good — and are we not good? — then we won’t need to force other people to do what we want. They will know us by our deeds, and they will want for themselves what we want for them.
There is, I fear, a lot of truth in that little paragraph and I am also worried that the American fascination (mainly the Pentagon’s fascination) with process and organization has spread to Canberra, London, Ottawa, Wellington and even Berlin. The notion is that if we can just get our organizations and procedures right then everything will fall into line. We have forgotten that while good, sound organizations and sensible, simple, robust procedure do matter, they need to be in service to a sound strategic aim (a vision, if you like) and, sometimes, ad hoc organizations and “off-the-wall” procedures work best in new situations, whether counter-insurgency or all-out war against a peer.
Ted Campbell, “Following the blind leader (3)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-05-21.
June 23, 2019
QotD: The American way of war
Comments Off on QotD: The American way of war
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
