Misplaced Military Priorities

Obama’s the better candidate from the counterinsurgent perspective says King’s PhD student Andrew Exum in an article in the Guardian’s Comment is Free in which he also gives a shout out to another King’s PhD, David Ucko:

Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton both sit on a Senate armed services committee that has allowed grotesque spending abuses since 2000 (though McCain deserves credit for standing up to Boeing in the recent dispute over the contract for a new in-flight refuelling aircraft). A recent report from the Government Accountability Office announced: “95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295bn, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average.”

If the US takes counter-insurgency and irregular warfare seriously, it’s not shown in the defence budget. A recent paper by David Ucko argues that – almost seven years after 9/11 – defence spending priorities are still overwhelmingly weighted toward conventional, high-tech weapons systems that anticipate a future threat from China more than they do the very real and current threat posed by insurgent groups. (Even these weapons programmes assume that China, in a hypothetical war with the United States, would choose to fight symmetrically and conventionally.)

This is perhaps why senator Barack Obama is emerging as a surprise choice for many of the frustrated junior officers and enlisted soldiers who have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although McCain and Clinton boast an impressive number of generals and admirals who have signed on to advise their campaigns, more veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed to Obama’s campaign than to either the Clinton or McCain campaigns.

This is an excellent point. Despite all the talk of COIN in recent years in US defence circles it is still entirely possible that the United States will take from Iraq the same lesson it did from Vietnam. ‘Political wars’ are simply alien to its tradition and metier and so it should avoid them full stop. Such an argument is advanced in this troubling new book by Jeffrey Record Beating Goliath. The ‘political wars’ bit, incidentally, is from from Colonel John Paul Vann speaking in 1962, in the early days of the American involvement in Vietnam,  New York Times reporter David Halberstam (as recounted in William Prochnau’s superb book Once upon a Distant War:

This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. . . The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery. You have to know who you are killing.

I love that quote. You can’t fault the clarity of the message: political wars call for more than mere precision in the application of force they require discrimination and judiciousness (which sometimes means not using force at all) which means getting close ‘amongst the people’ which you don’t do from the cockpit of an F-22. But the fact that it was said nearly fifty years ago and yet still has not been learned is enormously frustrating.

The US military is like the world’s biggest supertanker. When it changes course it does so very, very slowly. Exum thinks that Obama is more likely than the others to set the helm, finally, in the appropriate direction. Me, I don’t want to mess in the US electoral political debate; I’m just happy that all of the three potential next presidents look pretty good–relative to GWB any of them would represent a sea change for the better. Still, Exum voices an apprehension which I share:

For many young veterans, this is a tough choice. Speaking personally, McCain has been my hero for as long as I care to remember. The way he speaks about creating a culture of national service – as well as his own military service – speaks to me and other veterans who, after the September 11 attacks, laboured in Iraq and Afghanistan while our countrymen were asked only to spend money at the local shopping mall.

He reckons, however, that Obama best represents the views of those who are on the ground actually trying to win the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe so. But what worries me about Obama is that shifting the course of the supertanker is going to take a hell of a lot of effort on the part of the new helmsman. Is he likely and able to do that? Or is it more likely he’d do what the administration of Clinton the First did: let the military keep to its own ways (in that case gay-hatin’) at the first sign of pushback while concentrating on his larger domesetic interests.