In 1995, NATO forces, led by the U.S. Army, conducted a large-scale armed intervention into Bosnia in order to enforce the Dayton peace accord. The hoped for "end state" was an ethnically and politically-reconciled Bosnia, managing its own affairs. 14 years later the country is still under international supervision.
We should pause for a moment and consider what effect the U.S. experience in Bosnia had on policymaking and war management this decade. The seeming ease with which the U.S. and NATO appeared to pacify Bosnia (after the previous disastrous mismanagement by the UN) led policymakers, analysts, and military officers into complacency and overconfidence when they contemplated armed interventions at the beginning of this decade. Generals may or may not prepare to fight the last war, but policymakers clearly make their decisions based on the last experience, whether relevant or not.
When considering military policy, the U.S. political system places enormous weight on the most recent experience. In 1991 it was very difficult to get the U.S. Congress to pass a war resolution to liberate Kuwait. Memories of the Vietnam War's casualties and the discredited Gulf of Tonkin resolution haunted the Congress. The Senate narrowly approved the war only after the UN Security Council gave its approval. In October 2002, recalling the quick and easy victory in 1991, Congress approved another war against Iraq with hardly a debate.
Stung by the "Blackhawk Down" fiasco in Somalia, President Clinton mightily resisted U.S. intervention in Bosnia's civil war. Based on lessons learned from Somalia, he reasoned that U.S. intervention in a civil war would benefit one side, creating an armed opponent of the other side. Possessing savage combatants, sympathetic and fearful populations, abundant weaponry, a history of insurgency, and rough terrain, the former Yugoslavia seemed an excellent location for "guerilla warfare."
At the time (1996-1999), I feared U.S. military forces in the Balkans would receive the treatment they would later receive in Iraq and Afghanistan. What were policymakers, analysts, and military officers to conclude when the U.S. suffered nary a combat death in the Balkans? The ease of the Balkan pacification no doubt influenced Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, a book which provided important cover, and comfort, for policymakers.
U.S. Army colonels and generals in Iraq in 2003-2004 were company and field grade officers in the Balkans. In Bosnia and Kosovo they recalled that the arrest, by targeted raid, of a few troublemakers seemed to be enough to prevent an insurgency. In the winter of 2003-2004, they must have concluded that similar such nighttime raids in Iraq would also solve any incipient problems.
So what are today's lessons? First, a surge worked for Iraq, so it must be the prescription for Afghanistan. I'll leave it to others to discuss the differences between the two wars, a topic which will no doubt get much more airing in the weeks ahead.
Second, how will policymakers and lawmakers now assess the risks of large-scale armed interventions, whether for humanitarian, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, stabilization, or any other reasons? They will naturally have a much more cautious view than they did after the Balkans operations. As a consequence, there will be more reliance in the period ahead on Phase Zero security force assistance, wars by proxy, and tactical and strategic raiding. Since I find much merit in these approaches, I will be pleased with this outcome, should it occur.
But the theme of this post is humility and that applies equally to me. If recent sour experiences have ruled out a long list of elective military operations using general purpose forces, what risks does that create? If we can't figure out the answers now, we will experience them eventually.
Comments
I agree fully with this post in that it points out the dangers of trying to "learn lessons" at the operational and strategic levels. What we get is what you point out, oversimplified understanding or selective memory about what happened, why certain approaches worked or didnt worked, etc. What we lose is the recognition of the unique complexity of each situation. We start to operate by analogy. I recommend "Analogies at War" by Yuen Foong Khong (1992) as a good read on how analogies of previous conflicts were (mis)-applied to decisionmaking in Vietnam. Analogies make us emphasize similarities and not the differences.
We cannot "learn lessons" from previous campaigns in terms of "this worked here, so it should work there." What we can do is educate ourselves to recognize all of the complex factors and relationships and possibly pick up on some patterns of cause and effect. Even this is dangerous--you cant lift any single factor out of a campaign, such as the operational design and resource increase associated with the "Surge" in Iraq, and award it credit without factoring the specific situation on the ground and the unique political-military climate within which it operated. We are still arguing about exactly why the Japanese surrendered in WWII (was it the A-bomb, or the Russians?). The idea we can have any clarity on the Balkans, much less Iraq is absurd.
This is where doctrine can be dangerous itself. Ive always been puzzled at the charges that the US military was only prepared for high end conventional operations in 2001-2003. My memory of the 1990s includes significant development of "Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW)". I think this post highlights that it might not be that we didnt think enough about "stability" operations, but that we mislabeled Iraq and Afghanistan and thus carried in the wrong assumptions. If we thought the Balkans, then we thought "Peace Operations", not COIN.
I wont argue for or against "population-based COIN," as contained in FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, but I will assert that its validity in any specific campaign rests, to a great degree, on correctly identifying the conflict as an insurgency. If we pursue every irregular conflict as an insurgency, then we will run the risk of applying the wrong doctrine.