Knife Fights Read online

  Humanitarian intervention to protect people from harm when vital U.S. national interests are not involved should be conducted only when there is an international coalition willing to intervene and a UN Security Council resolution in support of the operation—and even then only when there is a commitment to build a better peace in the wake of the war. Both the 2011 Libyan intervention and the planned but not implemented Syrian punishment strikes fail to rise to this standard, as does the 2003 invasion of Iraq; of recent American military operations, only the Afghan War is justified by this test.

  And yet the need for future large-scale counterinsurgency operations may arise again. The United States may again be attacked from a country that harbors terrorists, need to topple the government that supported them, and be determined to prevent that ground from again being used to attack the homeland. In that case, the options are unpalatable, but it is unlikely that the nation will choose the Roman technique of making a desert and calling it peace. We must, therefore, retain the ability to conduct counterinsurgency operations among the peoples, with all the requirements for cultural competence, linguistic skills, and organizational learning that that implies, even as we strive to avoid the messy, slow operations that have cost us so much over the past decade.

  Saint Augustine taught that the purpose of war is to build a better peace, but we have not built the capacity to create that better peace in the American national security establishment. The historical record reveals that the United States engages in ambiguous counterinsurgency and nation-building missions far more often than it faces full-scale war. Similar demands will only increase in a globalized world, where local problems increasingly do not stay local and where, as Secretary of Defense Gates once noted, “the most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland . . . are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.”1

  Trends such as the youth bulge and urbanization in underdeveloped states, as well as the proliferation of ever more lethal weaponry into more hands and the radicalization of individuals and small groups over the Internet, point to a future dominated by chaotic local insecurity and conflict rather than to confrontations between the armies and navies of nation-states. This future of persistent low-intensity conflict around the globe suggests that American interests are at risk not from enemies who are too strong, which was the case throughout the twentieth century (Germany in two world wars and then the Soviet Union during the Cold War), but from states that are too weak to control what happens inside their borders, with Pakistan as the most obvious and dangerous example.

  As a result, the U.S. military is more likely to be called upon to counter insurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, rebuild nations, and wage unconventional types of warfare than it is to fight mirror-image armed forces. We will not have the luxury of opting out of these missions because they do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war. Insurgency against governments has existed as long as men have governed others; the United States was itself born in the crucible of insurgency. The final tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan would occur if we again forget the many lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency over the past decade of war, and have to learn them yet again in some future war at the cost of many more American lives.

  Both state and nonstate enemies will seek more asymmetric ways to challenge the United States and its allies. America’s conventional military superiority, which remains substantial, will drive many of them to the same conclusion: when they fight America conventionally, they lose horribly in days or weeks. When they fight unconventionally, by employing guerrilla tactics, terrorism, and information operations, they have a better chance of success. It is unclear why even a powerful enemy would want to risk a costly head-to-head battlefield decision with the United States. As Gates has said, “Put simply, our enemies and potential adversaries—including nation states—have gone to school on us. They saw what America’s technology and firepower did to Saddam’s army in 1991 and again in 2003, and they’ve seen what [improvised explosive devices] are doing to the American military today.”2 When they decide to fight against us, they are much more likely to choose insurgency than to merely provide targets for our superior firepower by fighting conventionally.

  The developing strategic environment will find state and nonstate adversaries devising innovative strategies to counter American military power by exploiting widely available technology and weapons and integrating tactics from across the spectrum of conflict.

  The resulting conflicts will be protracted and will hinge on the affected populations’ perceptions of truth and legitimacy rather than on the outcome of tactical engagements on the battlefield. This is the kind of war we have struggled to understand in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and Egypt; it is the kind of war we are most likely to face in the future. The learning curve is not going to get any easier.

  Counterinsurgency campaigns are messy and slow. I thought I understood that idea when I first read it in T. E. Lawrence’s book in Oxford in 1996, but having the personal experience of fighting in a bitter counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq myself underlined just how grinding and exhausting they can be. The classic principles of counterinsurgency do work, but success in these wars is unsatisfying at best, and even then comes at a price higher than many would consider acceptable. The final calculation depends on how important are the national security objectives at stake. If they are vital, essential to the protection of the homeland or our national survival, then counterinsurgency may continue to be the least bad option available, and remembering the hard-earned lessons of counterinsurgency is a worthwhile insurance policy—like all insurance policies, one that we hope we will not have to call upon.

  Long, hard, and slow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, there is at least one silver lining among the clouds for the American people at large. In the wake of Vietnam, the United States began its grand experiment of an all-volunteer military. And it was most certainly an experiment: no one could have expected that the system would hold together in a major war, and for two generations young men have been required to register with the Selective Service in case general conflict erupted. But after two such grinding, protracted wars over the past decade, the all-volunteer force has come through these crucibles of blood and fire with enormous distinction.

  Tempered by the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation of World War II fame helped defeat fascism on two continents and save civilization. As loudly as their contributions resound in history, two-thirds of them were drafted. This new greatest generation has fought longer if not harder than its grandparents did, and all have been volunteers.

  Visiting Todd Bryant’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery with artist Jesse Small, April 25, 2009.

  My own tank task force lost twenty-two fine young men during the Second Iraq War and earned well over one hundred Purple Hearts. The nation owes its volunteer service members a debt of gratitude it can never fully repay. But it can begin by ensuring that we care for those who have borne the battle, and for their spouses and their orphans, to paraphrase America’s greatest wartime president. The traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that are the signature wounds of these wars are invisible and hard to heal; as many as a fourth of those who fought in Iraq will suffer the ravages of these injuries for decades to come.

  It would devalue the sacrifices of the many who have suffered if we were not to read these lessons written in blood, if our politicians did not approach future interventions with greater humility, if our military did not prepare for all possible wars rather than only for the ones that it wants to fight. We must hope that from such peril and toil, this great young generation, tempered by war and hardened by what its members have seen and done, will build a better future for a wiser and chastened America that may yet learn from her mistakes.

  Epilogue

  Good-bye to All That

  I was happily working away in my office at the Center for a New American Se
curity one day in the summer of 2011 when I received a call from a friend at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He told me that the Naval Academy’s department of history was looking for its first Minerva professor and invited me to apply.

  The Minerva program was begun by Secretary of Defense Gates to help the Department of Defense understand the importance of different cultures to U.S. national security policy. I was a big fan of the initiative, which had placed professors in a number of military establishments. It was now the Navy’s turn, and I was intrigued by the offer to become a part of the Minerva program and the Naval Academy.

  The Naval Academy had been my initial point of attraction into military service. My father, a product of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps at Marquette, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had been impressed by the Annapolis graduates he met in the Navy and recommended the Naval Academy to me when I began considering college options. I ended up turning down my appointment to Annapolis in favor of West Point, which sang to me in a deeply resonant way, but I had always wondered how my life would have turned out if I had attended the Navy’s rather than the Army’s service academy.

  I knew Annapolis the least well of the three academies, having spent a semester at the Air Force Academy as a West Point junior. That had been a wonderful experience, as I had always wanted to attend a civilian college, and the notoriously unmilitary Air Force Academy (in the eyes of West Point and Annapolis students if not the nation at large) was the closest I’d gotten to a civilian college at that point. Still, even with the connection to my now-gone-a-decade father and my curiosity about a school I admired greatly but didn’t know well, I told my friend at Navy that I was enjoying Washington and my leadership role at CNAS and wasn’t going to apply for the Minerva chair.

  When I went home late that night after yet another Washington dinner, not having seen Jack awake for yet another day, I told Susi about the call. She went straight to the point: “John, your son is growing up. He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. Why don’t you call them back?”

  Another fairly dramatic life intervention in a very few words. Susi is nothing if not consistent; she wanted me to make choices that had me spending more time with our little family. After some hard soul-searching about what really matters in life, I decided to apply for the Minerva professorship at Annapolis. Receiving the appointment meant that I would have to step down from the presidency at CNAS.

  I began teaching in Navy’s history department in January 2012, exactly three years after being asked to replace Michèle as president and five years after the founding of CNAS. I taught a course to juniors and seniors on the history of modern counterinsurgency, not dissimilar to the one I’d taught one semester at Georgetown to students earning a master’s degree in strategic studies. (That was the same semester I was unexpectedly selected to become the president of CNAS; teaching a new course while learning how to run a think tank almost broke me.) The course used as texts Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare (the best book on insurgency), David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare (the best book on counterinsurgency), and Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian’s wonderful Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, along with the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

  I had expected teaching at Annapolis to be very similar to teaching at West Point and was surprised by how different the two institutions are. As I was pondering the comparison, a colleague pointed out the essential contrast. The Navy, he said, is a fundamentally conservative organization; its primary focus is keeping the water out of the ship. The Army is by comparison a bunch of liberals dedicated to social change; its purpose is to take land away from someone less deserving to give it to someone more deserving.

  There was another difference, one I fully understood only after getting under way aboard a Virginia-class attack submarine a few months into my tenure at Navy. The Virginia-class boats are small, fast, quiet, and incredibly cramped; every cubic foot costs millions of dollars. This means not just that the crew sleeps among the torpedo racks, often hot bunking (sleeping in a rack that has recently held someone else who is now on shift), but that the crew is a little bit smaller than what is actually required to do all the work aboard ship. There is a lot of work to be done—monitoring the nuclear reactor, feeding the crew, piloting the boat, and fixing all the systems that make air and fresh water and that locate and target possible enemy ships. As a result, the small crew works hard, harder even on a peacetime training deployment than I have worked in the Army during all but the most intense periods of combat.

  I was sleeping in a small officers’ cabin with three bunk beds; the senior officer and guy with the best rack was the ship’s engineer. When I fell asleep at one in the morning, he was awake, worrying about a trace element that was present in the boat’s manufactured atmosphere; when I awoke four hours later, he was still working that problem. His diligence was appreciated, as he told me that a Chinese submarine had recently been lost because of a carbon monoxide leak, but he could have really used a backup so that he could sleep every once in a while.

  The pressing demands of sea duty became clear to me during those forty-eight hours under way; in fact, they were part of the reason my father had encouraged me to go to West Point rather than Navy. “The Navy,” he told me, “is on duty every day, around the world, whether we are at war or peace. The Army only works that hard when the country is at war. How often does that happen?” Only once in my first decade of Army service, as it turned out, but continuously in the decade that followed.

  The difference in Army and Navy service responsibilities inevitably affect their service academies. Even when the nation was at war, the Army sent young officers like Dan Kaufman and David Petraeus to graduate school and then to teach at West Point. Young soldier-scholars like them, recently returned from active Army service, comprised the majority of the faculty. The Navy, which is always short of officers to man its ships at sea, relies instead primarily on a cadre of tenured civilian faculty members to teach its officer candidates.

  There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. There is no doubt that the tenured civilians at Navy, all with Ph.D.s, had more knowledge of their subject matter to share with their students than did the young officers with master’s degrees doing most of the teaching at West Point. But the Army officers had an advantage as well; they were younger and better able to connect with their students. More important, they were full members of the military profession that their students aspired to join. In the classroom, West Point cadets may learn less history or math, but they learn more about being a serving military officer, and in many cases they are inspired by their officer teachers to follow similar career paths. I knew that I wanted to be an armored cavalryman because I so admired Dan Kaufman and Steve Daffron and Dave Clark; in them, I saw what I wanted to become. Few Naval Academy midshipmen want to grow up to be civilian professors, and in my eyes the mids lose something from the lack of young military role models in the classroom. The Navy also suffers because its most talented officers are too busy driving ships to spend time in graduate school and then teaching in the classroom themselves. Preparation for and then teaching Sosh was a formative influence in the careers of officers like Generals Petraeus and Peter Chiarelli, but too few Navy and Marine officers get the same opportunity to stretch themselves intellectually early in their careers, before their brains become less pliable in their forties.

  Teaching again after being out of the classroom for a few years was a joy. The midshipmen were wonderful students and inspirational in their dedication to national service, my colleagues interesting intellectual companions, and my family quite unused to seeing me at breakfast and dinner. Although the long commute to Annapolis from Alexandria kept me from engaging as fully in the life of the Naval Academy as I would have liked to have done, I did work with the program to mentor Rhodes, Marshall, and Truman scholarship candidates at Annapolis, as I had at West Point, and became close to several of these immen
sely talented and driven young people. The Rhodes scholarship had enriched my life to an extraordinary degree and continued to serve as a bridge to fully engaged young people, several of whom sat in on my classes and elevated the level of discussion there.

  I spent a lot of time talking with Navy scholarship candidates about their future plans and contemplated my own as well. I had always hoped to have three careers: one in the Army, one in Washington, and my last in academia, serving as a professor or perhaps as a college president. While at CNAS, someone had recommended me to an executive search firm as a candidate for an academic leadership job in Washington. I met with the recruiter, who told me that I wasn’t the right person for that particular job but was an interesting candidate for some college leadership positions; she told me that she’d be in touch.

  That call came just after my first semester at Navy, when she asked whether I was interested in applying for a college presidency. I agreed to apply, not expecting to do well in my first attempt, but got far enough in the process that I took Susi and Jack to the campus and community to take a look. As we were driving away, Susi made another fateful utterance: “Honey, I could do this for three years, but not for a decade.” Since the college was seeking a long-term president, I called the recruiter to withdraw my name from consideration.

  The recruiter was surprised. “John, tell me why.”

  “Not enough culture for my wife, not great schools for my son. This is a family move. Although I’d enjoy it, this move has to be one that is better for each of us, not just for me.”