Military Strategy after 9/11

I want you to comment on this dilemma. You've laid out what the military can do with the technology, with new training for its soldiers, with new understanding of the command structure as a mobile, lean-mean force that goes in and deals with a rogue or a failed state, and so on. But the other side of this is what we do after we've gone in and won the battle. Here we get into American values, and the way we mobilize support is by saying, "We're going to remake these places. We're going to turn them into democracies."

There is this tension [between] the battlefield military adopting the ideas you're putting here, adopting the technology, it's a go. But on the other hand, the problem of the long haul, the nation-building. I'm not here talking about what the soldiers can do; what I'm talking about is a long-term American commitment to the difficult task that is involved, and staying there for the long term to do what we might do.

I think you have to view American involvement in small wars as a great power divided into two periods: the pre-9/11 and the post-9/11. One of the things I find interesting in writing my second book -- I wrote the first one before 9/11 book cover ...

The Iraq War.

That's it, yes, The Iraq War. What I noticed was a tectonic shift in the attitudes of Americans about sticking with it, tenacity. There are many reasons for it. Even if there is no strategic connection, say, between 9/11 and some other conflict, the minds of Americans today view foreign involvements as directly connected to their own welfare, whereas in Vietnam they didn't; it was truly a foreign war against an unknown enemy. Today, partially thanks to the information revolution and the availability of combat scenes from the theater, the American people feel a closer connection to other regions of the world, and they have about them a sense that this affects their daily lives. And so that certainly increases social resolve to press on.

Now, having said that, clearly, over time, if progress isn't made and the society that we're trying to remake isn't remade, or, God forbid, collapses, then of course, attitudes will change. But I was more struck with the patience of the American people after the invasion of Iraq, not so much with the dissent that I see. I attribute that to 9/11. If we had tried to do this in 1973, it would have been a completely different thing -- probably not have done it in the first place. But the American people are starting to become more and more focused internationally, not so much because they're interested in other cultures, but [because] they're interested in their own welfare, and they see the connection between the two.

[Barnes] You were speaking of reform, you said about thirty years ago we had one set of reforms that came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and now are on the cutting edge for the next set of reforms. It's very funny: in American history as a whole (and you've probably noticed this) our military reforms come about once every generation.

Once a generation.

[Barnes] About every thirty years. And you can take this back certainly as far as the War of 1812. And the War of 1812 doesn't do so badly with respect to the American Revolution.

You could argue that the army's mobility revolution occurred with the atom bomb, that suddenly the army woke up and said, "We can't have this huge beached whale, we have to start the process of being maneuver-oriented." That came a generation before, and it started again, and we're starting this next generational shift. You could say that with the end of the era of machine warfare, with the last of the great armored battles over, it's time to think in terms of a general of information warfare, where your principal advantage is your ability to know the enemy. That's why, to my mind, this cultural transformation is so important. If we're just going in with a sledgehammer, if we're going to bludgeon the enemy, then this sense of cultural sensitivity probably isn't important. I mean, we didn't know a lot about German culture when we rolled across the plains of Northern France and Germany; we were there to crush Nazism. But now it's a war fought with rapiers, not sledgehammers, and so you do need this subtle sense of the cultural aspects of warfare in order to be able to wield your power with great discretion and great discrimination, surgically.

Again, America has no challenge in striking a target with great precision. It does have a challenge in striking the right target at the right time to the right end. That's why this whole process of cultural transformation is so important.

[Barnes] It should be cheaper, too.

Absolutely. And shorter ...

[Barnes] So in other words, 23 percent, the army's share of the Pentagon's budget every year for -- how long has it been now? -- for a generation at least, we don't have to increase that at all. No?

You have to ask yourself whose doing the heavy lifting here.

[Barnes] Well, the army is doing the heavy lifting ...

Of course, they are ... well, the army and the marine corps. But in you believe in the old three-to-one rotation scheme, where you need three units in order to keep one forward-deployed, and we're in this forward-deploy scheme, because we're in a war, not a battle, right now, the price tag is twenty brigades -- two in Korea, two in Afghanistan, sixteen in Iraq. That means the requirement is for sixty brigades -- three and one. The army has only thirty-three. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that you can't do that for very long.

Now, the ships have gone home, the aircraft are back in their hangers in the United States, but the same very small thin red line is over there doing these sorts of things. So you ask, is the army overstretched? Well, of course, it is. The math alone dictates thearmy is overstretched. Do you need to do something to fix it? Absolutely. You either need to change your ins or you need to increase [the force]. You know: change your appetite for intervention, or increase the size of the force, or get someone else to do it for you. Those are your three options.

[Barnes] What are we going to do?

I think a little of all three. First of all, the United States over the decades ahead is going to have to do a better job of defining our national interests. We have to do a better job of defining where America's security perimeter exists: What's important? What's not important? There's an old army saying that goes back many years, and it goes like this: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate. It's economy of force and mass, the two principles that are most operative in this war. You have to take risk, and ignore certain regions of the world that don't threaten the vital interests of the United States, and concentrate on those who do. That's the first thing.

Second, other people need to help us out. Every great power that was the world superpower at one time or another fought with allies through coalitions. Oftentimes, they were pickup teams, but still, no nation can police the world on its own.

The other thing is, frankly, we're going to have to readjust our military forces to better reflect the realities of the world today. Much of our military is nothing more than a Cold War leftover. But we're not fighting the Russians anymore; we're fighting a different type of war. We optimized the military to fight a huge mass army for a short period of time. Now, we have to fight a diffuse enemy over a long period of time. So, focusing on the enemy and his capabilities won't work anymore. We have to be able to maintain an army that has legs, and is able to stretch itself into the future. And, oh, by the way, do it without breaking the bank.

One final question, requiring a brief answer, and that is, how would you advise students to prepare for the future if they see the military in their career, either as a soldier or as a strategist?

War is a thinking man's game. The intellectual is to the physical as three is to one. The surest way to be successful in this business is to study your profession. By that, I don't mean to cram for exams. I mean long-term reflective study on your profession. Visit the laboratory. If you're a physicist you go to the laboratory to refine your theories. If you're a soldier you go to the library to refine your theories. Study your profession and understand second- and third order effects of what you're about to do, so when you finally go out to practice it you're not learning to fight by fighting, you've already fought this battle 10,000 times in your mind, and you'll be better at it.

Bob, on that note for the future, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to visit our program as you're giving the Nimitz Lecture on campus. And thank you very much, Tom, for joining us today.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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