The fall of Kabul will make the United States less willing to use military power to achieve national goals and, at the same time, make the use of decisive and overwhelming military force more necessary when the U.S. does decide to act. For years, America used her military scorecard in World War II as “credit” with our allies and adversaries. The positioning of a small American military force in some corner of the world provided deterrence at a fraction of the cost of placing a large enough force to actually win a decisive engagement or a campaign. We can all think of innumerable examples where America “held the fort” in a variety of strategically valuable locales while in reality planning to fight no more than two — I mean one and a half or maybe even just one — actual conflicts at any given time. America was and is securing key terrain “on margin”.
Kabul was a margin call. From now on, America may well be obliged to “pay cash”, viz., deploy combat capable formations of sufficient size to engage and win if we want anyone to take us seriously. A token “speedbump” force or a promise of “over the horizon” support — which is the majority of what the U.S. military now does — isn’t going to reassure any friends or deter any adversaries. At least not anyone who is paying attention.
Our adversaries will be emboldened. It is not so much that America’s military reputation has been irretrievably damaged, but the lessons that the Vietnamese, the Hmong, and now the Afghans have learned so painfully cannot fail to be appreciated by us or by the wider world. It appears that America (not the military, but America herself) has lost her stomach for a real fight. Americans taught the world the same lesson about the British Empire during the Revolutionary War (although Britain recovered enough to build her “second empire”), it would be foolish to fail to now see ourselves through that particular historical prism.
Garri Benjamin Hendell, “The Day After Kabul”, The Angry Staff Officer, 2021-11-02.
February 16, 2022
QotD: The fall of Kabul was “a margin call”
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