On "Serving a Nation at War"

Parameters, Autumn, 2004 by Harold Nelson, David A. Fastabend

To the Editor:

The Acting Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff properly note in the introduction to their article in your Summer edition, "All great changes in our Army have been accompanied by earnest dialogue and active debate at all levels." ("Serving a Nation at War: A Campaign Quality Army with Joint and Expeditionary Capabilities," by Les Brownlee and General Peter Schoomaker.) I'm sure their assessment of the strategic environment and the Army's role will engender an engaging and illuminating debate.

They begin with a quote from Clausewitz: It is essential to understand "the kind of war on which [we] are embarking." Many good words follow, such as asymmetric, non-state actors, adaptive advantage, war of ideas. The word I expected was long. They seem to understand that we are committed to extended deployments in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and they foresee deployments to many other potential hot areas, but I don't see the linkage between this policy insight and the strategy and operational capabilities they are advocating.

Since they state that "doctrine links theory, history, experimentation, and practice" and their article should have significant influence over emerging doctrine, I feel compelled to take issue with some of their uses of our history. First, I think they have an incomplete understanding of the Cold War and the Army that evolved during that 50-year period. Our Army did not simply sit in Europe preparing for a "symmetrical" conflict with the Warsaw Pact. Within that theater, we constantly looked for ways to transform advantages into accomplishments, and many of these had to do with building a strong alliance to replace ad hoc coalitions that had been a feature of our earlier experiences in warfighting on the continent. Those accomplishments are still important and relevant.

But there was an ideological dimension to the Cold War, and "Wars of National Liberation" were part of the other side's effort to introduce asymmetry. As a result, much of the Army was expeditionary during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, various joint headquarters planned and exercised expeditionary deployments involving multiple Army divisions. That activity diminished when the Army became involved in an extended expedition to Vietnam--an expedition that was not in a "developed theater with access to extensive host-nation infrastructure" (their characterization of the basis for the design of the Army's Cold War logistics structure). At the time, the Army may have been so shortsighted that its leaders could not see that they had to master the lessons of the asymmetrical war in Vietnam while continuing to focus on the challenges in Europe. In fact, they probably taught and practiced the "conventional war" doctrine at the expense of "unconventional war" learning. No one wanted a long war in Vietnam, but Army strategists were asking, "What else must we be able to do while we are doing this?" "What must we prepare to do when this is over?" I don't see much evidence of that kind of thinking in this article.

My reading of current defense budgets and the force posture of the Air Force and Navy lead me to believe those services are asking those questions and getting plenty of support for their answers. That picture may be erroneous, but to make the flat assertion, "The air-, sea-, or land-power debates are over," as these authors do, seems disingenuous. The Army may be signing up for "joint interdependence," but there don't seem to be too many other signatures on the bottom line when viewed from a resources perspective. I can't see the investments the Air Force and Navy are making to meet the tactical interdependence needs of an Army that must expect to fight for information in distant, austere theaters where the force must fight throughout the battlespace from the outset. These conditions I have just stated constitute the authors' "entirely different challenge--and the fundamental distinction of expeditionary operations." That sounds a lot like the expeditionary concept that justified the Marine Expeditionary Force with its vast array of organic capabilities rather than the expeditionary concepts of the 20th-century Army that saw itself having a larger role.

That larger role seems to be lost on the authors, who write, "The Army's preeminent challenge is to reconcile expeditionary agility and responsiveness with the staying power, durability, and adaptability to carry a conflict to a victorious conclusion no matter what form it eventually takes." That's a reconciliation that may be impossible, but it's not the preeminent challenge. The real challenge is to gain and maintain popular support--inside and outside the Army--for the long, costly effort that a durable, adaptable Army will make as it brings its staying power to bear until a victorious conclusion can be achieved. The Marine Corps--as a small expeditionary force on distant, austere islands in World War II--had to worry that the fleet would sail away. The Army has always had that worry, too, but it has the much bigger worry of losing a much broader form of support during the long fight. Placing so much emphasis on "expeditionary agility and responsiveness" doesn't help the Army face up to this much more fundamental problem.