The American Way of War
Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency
by Jeffrey Record
Executive Summary
The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, embarrassing setbacks in Lebanon and Somalia, and continuing political and military difficulties in Afghanistan and especially Iraq underscore the limits of America’s hard-won conventional military supremacy. That supremacy has not delivered decisive success against nonstate enemies practicing protracted irregular warfare; on the contrary, America’s conventional supremacy and approach to war – especially its paramount reliance on firepower and technology – are often counterproductive.
The problem is rooted in American political and military culture. Americans are frustrated with limited wars, particularly counterinsurgent wars, which are highly political in nature. And Americans are averse to risking American lives when vital national interests are not at stake. Expecting that America’s conventional military superiority can deliver quick, cheap, and decisive success, Americans are surprised and politically demoralized when confronted by Vietnam- and Iraq-like quagmires.
The Pentagon’s aversion (the Marine Corps excepted) to counterinsurgency is deeply rooted in the American way of warfare. Since the early 1940s, the Army has trained, equipped, and organized for large-scale conventional operations against like adversaries, and it has traditionally employed conventional military operations even against irregular enemies.
Barring profound change in America’s political and military culture, the United States runs a significant risk of failure when it enters small wars of choice, and great power intervention in small wars is almost always a matter of choice. Most such wars, moreover, do not engage core U.S. security interests other than placing the limits of American military power on embarrassing display. Indeed, the very act of intervention in small wars risks gratuitous damage to America’s military reputation.
The United States should abstain from intervention in such wars, except in those rare cases when military intervention is essential to protecting or advancing U.S. national security.
Extracts from report
Simply put, the U.S. is not very good at defeating enemies who do not fight like we do, enemies who avoid our strengths while exploiting our weaknesses.
Apolitical: “Americans are wont to regard war and peace as sharply distinctive conditions. The U.S. military has a long history of waging war for the goal of victory, paying scant regard to the consequences of the course of its operations for the character of the peace that will follow.”
Astrategic: “Strategy is, or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy. When Americans wage war as a largely autonomous activity, leaving worry about peace and its politics to some later day, the strategy bridge has broken down.”
Ahistorical: “America is a future-oriented, still somewhat ‘new’ country, one that has a founding ideology of faith in, and hope for, and commitment to, human betterment. It is only to be expected, therefore, that Americans should be less than highly respectful of what they might otherwise allow history to teach them.”
Problem-Solving, Optimistic: “The American way in war is not easily discouraged or deflected once it is exercised with serious intent to succeed. . . . The problem-solving faith, the penchant for the ‘engineering fix,’ has the inevitable consequence of leading U.S. policy, including its use of armed force, to attempt the impossible.”
Culturally Ignorant: Americans are not inclined “to be respectful of the beliefs, habits, and behaviors of other cultures . . .the American way of war has suffered from the self-inflicted damage caused by a failure to understand the enemy of the day.”
Technologically Dependent: “America is the land of technological marvels and of extraordinary technology dependency. . . .American soldiers say that the human beings matter most, but in practice the American way of war, past, present, and prospectively future, is quintessentially and uniquely technologically dependent.”
Firepower Focused: “It has long been the American way in warfare to send metal in harm’s way in place of vulnerable flesh. . . .Needless to say, perhaps, a devotion to firepower, while highly desirable in itself, cannot help but encourage the U.S. armed forces to rely on it even when other modes of military behavior would be more suitable. In irregular conflicts in particular, . . .resorting to firepower solutions readily becomes self-defeating.”
Large-Scale: “Poor societies are obliged to wage war frugally. They have no choice other than to attempt to fight smarter than rich enemies. The United States has been blessed with wealth in all its forms. Inevitably, the U.S. armed forces, once mobilized and equipped, have fought a rich person’s war. They could hardly do otherwise.”
Profoundly Regular: “Few, if any, armies have been equally competent in the conduct of regular and irregular warfare. . . .As institutions, however, the U.S. armed forces have not been friendly either to irregular warfare or to those in its ranks who were would-be practitioners and advocates of what was regarded as the sideshow of insurgency. American soldiers . . . have always been prepared nearly exclusively for ‘real war,’ which is to say combat against a tolerably symmetrical, regular enemy.”
Impatient: “Americans have approached warfare as a regrettable occasional evil that has to be concluded as decisively and rapidly as possible.”
Logistically Excellent: “Americans at war have been exceptionally able logisticians. With a continental-size interior and an effectively insular geographic location, such ability has been mandatory if the country was to wage war at all, let alone wage it effectively. . . . A large logistical footprint . . . requires a great deal of guarding, helps isolate American troops from local people and their culture, and generally tends to grow.”
Sensitivity to Casualties: “In common with the Roman Empire, the American guardian of world order is much averse to suffering a high rate of military casualties. . . . Both superstates had and have armies that are small, too small in the opinion of many, relative to their responsibilities. Moreover, well-trained professional soldiers, volunteers all, are expensive to raise, train, and retain, and are difficult to replace.” American society, it is said, “has become so sensitive to casualties that the domestic context for U.S. military action is no longer tolerant of bloody adventures in muscular imperial governance.
Read the whole report here (PDF): http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa577.pdf
