Crusader Mentality

A Response to Andrew Bacevich

by Matthew E. Valkovic and Brian M. Burton

Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Numerous commentators in policy community, media, and academia have recently expounded upon the US Army's unusually public debate over the appropriate lessons to draw from the Iraq war to shape the institution for the future. Andrew Bacevich is the latest to lend his distinguished voice to the fray. While we greatly admire and respect Prof. Bacevich and his work, his essay in the October 2008 issue of The Atlantic presented a flawed analysis of this important issue that warrants a response.

Bacevich argues that the Army's perceived current focus on preparing for counterinsurgency has supplanted the Army's traditional conventional war-fighting doctrine and set the military on course for future Iraq-style conflicts that are "protracted, ambiguous, and continuous." On the first point, Bacevich presents Colonel Gian Gentile as a stand-in for his own views. Gentile's concern is that the Army's ability to perform conventional combat operations has seriously deteriorated because soldiers are not conducting training for the fundamentals of military conflict. Its soldiers have become "constabulary" forces charged with the protecting the local populations of failed states and re-building their communities, and in doing so have lost sight of their core mission of fighting and winning the nation's wars.

But even today, with counterinsurgency doctrine supposedly taking over as the Army's organizing principle, the organizational culture of the Army has not really changed. This is not to say that the Army has not learned counterinsurgency and, in addition, it is not to say certain functions of the Army (like the field artillery branch) have not suffered as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the Army today remains very much organized as a conventional force. Newly recruited soldiers, when they go through basic training and receive their advanced individual training are still taught their traditional military occupational specialty. The fire support specialists, formerly known as forward observers, still learn how to call for fire at Fort Sill. The Army school houses fundamentally teach the same things.

Bacevich and Gentile cite the National Training Center at Fort Irwin as a prime example in their lament about the degradation of the Army's combat skills. There's no doubt that conventional force-on-force training is no longer exclusively executed there, what has taken its place is not just counterinsurgency training, but a mix of both - termed "full spectrum operations." Units that rotate through NTC today have provided security to the local population one day and sent a company of mechanized infantry to destroy a platoon of Soviet look-alike BMP infantry fighting vehicles the next. Tank gunnery training and maneuver combat exercises still occupy much of a battalion's pre-deployment time.

The point is that Army, in the midst of waging two counterinsurgency campaigns, is still very much a force concerned with its conventional combat role. The balancing act is hard, but unavoidable. It has to prepare its soldiers to be effective in an irregular operating environment, while -- at the same time - attempting to maintain a high level of proficiency in conventional military missions and tasks. Given this situation, it is unclear what Gentile would propose as a solution. Would he prefer that the Army ignore the wars it is currently involved in to prepare for conventional wars that may or may not happen in the future?

Bacevich's second argument and his deeper fear is that, now that the Army is capable of conducting counterinsurgency and stability operations, the United States will continue to be bogged down in a costly and unnecessary path of interventionism with the pipe-dream purpose of saving the world. It is, Bacevich charges, an "affirmation" of the Long War launched recklessly in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by President Bush and the "Vulcans" in his war cabinet.

In the course of this critique, Bacevich (like Gentile) seeks to tear down the importance of counterinsurgency, as well as those who have advocated its development within the Army. He uncritically repeats Gentile's dubious assertion that General David Petraeus's successes in Iraq had more to do with buying off the enemy than a change in approach, as if cooptation of foes were not a well-established component of any counterinsurgency. He further conflates Petraeus's and John Nagl's advocacy for adapting the force for irregular warfare with an unquestioning acceptance of the Bush Administration's post 9/11 foreign policy goals. He tars them as "Crusaders" who are wedded to counterinsurgency as the solution to all foreign policy problems, rather than simply as part of a community of innovators who have helped devise more effective ways to prosecute the wars of today. When did striving to fight America's current wars better become the wrong thing to do?

Like Gentile, Bacevich offers much criticism but no alternative solution for America's current predicament. He says the United States must retain "strategic choice." We agree: maintaining a variety of capabilities, both military and civilian, to operate across a range of strategic environments is essential to preserve US national security. But what of Iraq and Afghanistan today? Is America supposed to simply turn its back on those countries and act like the past seven years never happened? Is the Army supposed to go back to preparing only for the conventional wars it wants to fight rather than the irregular ones it actually is fighting? We humbly submit that the answer is no.

Matthew E. Valkovic is a first lieutenant in the US Army currently deploying to Iraq. Brian M. Burton is a research assistant at the Center for a New American Security and a graduate student in Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or Department of the Army.