War and the Art of Governance

Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory

Nadia Schadlow

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164116
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Success in war ultimately depends on the consolidation of political order. Nadia Schadlow argues that the steps needed to consolidate a new political order are not separate from war. They are instead an essential component of war and victory.

The challenge of governance operations did not start with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Army's involvement in the political and economic reconstruction of states has been central to all its armed conflicts from large-scale conventional wars to so-called irregular or counterinsurgency wars. Yet, US policymakers and military leaders have failed to institutionalize lessons on how to consolidate combat gains into desired political outcomes. War and the Art of Governance examines fifteen historical cases of US Army military interventions, from the Mexican War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Improving future outcomes will require US policymakers and military leaders to accept that plans, timelines, and resources must be shaped to reflect this reality before they intervene in a conflict, not after things go wrong.

Schadlow provides clear lessons for students and scholars of security studies and military history, as well as for policymakers and the military personnel who will be involved in the next foreign intervention.

ONE

AMERICAN DENIAL SYNDROME

FAILING TO LEARN FROM THE PAST

HISTORICALLY, the United States has gone to war with the implicit or explicit assumption that the desired end state should favor US regional or strategic interests. US forces have fought against the armies of opposing states, as well as against less well-organized irregular military forces. In all armed conflicts except those in which political objectives were narrowly constructed, the US Army has served as the critical operational link in shaping transitions from a militarily defeated regime to one more compatible with US interests. A common feature in all of the conventional wars fought by the United States has been the army’s leading role in the establishment of political and economic order in states or territories in which it has fought.¹ Although the US Marine Corps has also played a key role in developing thinking about small wars and executing limited expeditionary operations, the larger size of the army means that it is the only service capable of decisively acquiring, holding, and stabilizing territory and operating in sufficient scale for ample duration to provide a foundation for a transition to the reestablishment of political order. American political and military leaders have consistently avoided institutionalizing and preparing for the military and political activities that are associated with the restoration of order during and following combat operations.

Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few if any official or unofficial military histories paid much attention to the army’s conduct of these kinds of operations.² Military governance, a term stemming from World War II, was “not sufficiently military to fit into the military history genre and too military to be treated as general history.”³ The absence of a sustained discussion of governance operations in official and unofficial army histories reflected the prevailing view that such operations were separate and distinct from the prosecution of war as a whole.⁴ Many of the problems related to the reconstruction efforts in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan demonstrated the consequences of this denial of governance operations as integral to war and, thus, of the need to prepare for and set aside resources for them. As the United States went into Iraq, the prevailing view among top civilian leaders—such as the national security adviser—was that the US forces would defeat the Iraqi army and that the “institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces.” The top civilian official in Iraq at the time, Jay Garner, later admitted that he had not anticipated the need to take on the physical and political reconstruction of Iraq.⁵ This denial of operational challenges and requirements of achieving a desired political end state was not new but, rather, was a prevalent feature of America’s approach to war.

There are several plausible explanations for this denial. They are rooted in history, and many endure today. One explanation relates to concerns about the appropriate role of the military in a democratic society and maintains that it is dangerous to give the military governing authority—even if abroad. Since military government is so overtly a political activity, states committed in principle to civilian control of the military are reluctant to place officers in charge of local governments.⁶ Influential Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington observed that “liberalism does not understand and is hostile to military institutions and the military function.”⁷ Although most of the army’s experiences with governance operations have occurred outside the United States, the creation of an army capable of accomplishing these governance missions (albeit abroad) may have worried those who thought that such forces could be used at home as well.⁸

Civilian and military leaders have been unwilling to assign the army a lead role in governance operations owing to such reservations. During the Mexican-American War, Gen. Winfield Scott observed that the American authorities were “evidently alarmed at the proposition to establish martial law, even in a foreign country, occupied by American troops.”⁹ As that war ended, General Scott hesitated to get involved in the debate about “annexation v. occupation” since it was “impertinent as a soldier to inquire about such things.”¹⁰ In the aftermath of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson expressed deep concern about the army’s role in the political reconstruction of the South, fearing that such power in the hands of the army was in “palpable conflict” with the Constitution and a formula for “absolute despotism.”¹¹ At the turn of the century, Secretary of War Elihu Root observed that the American soldier’s experience as a self-governing American citizen could inform and shape his ability to conduct varied tasks in the interests of American foreign policy.¹² Contemporary scholars have observed that the resistance to the idea of military officers “governing” in any capacity—even abroad—is rooted in the ambivalent relationship Americans have had toward their military.¹³

Indeed, domestic concerns about the role of the military and about what it should, or should not, be doing have always shaped decisions about how to organize and train US forces. The Founding Fathers, debating America’s first Constitution, sought to separate politics from the military and to create barriers to the military’s acquisition of an overtly political role in American civic life. Their goal, for the most part, was the subordination of military to civil power. Opponents of a standing, regular army argued that a citizen-based militia was adequate to safeguard America and would also prevent the acquisition of too much power by one organized group. Alexander Hamilton described the tension between these two viewpoints: To be safer, he wrote, countries “become willing to run the risk of being less free.”¹⁴ Another member of the Continental Congress observed that “there was not a member in the federal Convention, who did not feel indignation at the prospect of a standing Army.” Thomas Jefferson argued that the defense of the United States would rest in a citizen-based military force and that civilian supremacy would be maintained by eliminating a professional and permanent military force.¹⁵ Eventually, the Constitution granted the federal government the right to raise a standing army for no more than two years.

A second reason for this denial syndrome is rooted in America’s ambivalence about “governing” others, which stems from its anticolonial legacy. During the Spanish-American War, US military and political leaders referred to governance operations as colonial matters.¹⁶ Although Secretary of War Root expressed great pride in American soldiers’ reconstruction efforts in “poor bleeding Cuba” and “devastated” Puerto Rico, he was also careful to placate critics and reassure them that no American army would “make itself a political agent” or a “Pretorian [sic] guard to set up a President or an emperor.”¹⁷ He worked to assuage political concerns about the army’s role in the Philippines by stating, “No one knew of the American Army seeking to make itself a political agent. . . . No one knew of the American army seeking to throw off that civil control of the military arm which our fathers inherited from England.”¹⁸ Similar concerns over soldiers serving as administrators continued through World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt and many in his administration shared the view that “military government was . . . a repulsive notion, associated with imperialism, dollar diplomacy and other aspects of our behavior we had abandoned.”¹⁹ President Harry Truman, following one of his first briefings on occupation plans, said that civil government was “no job for soldiers” and that the War Department should begin planning to turn over occupation responsibility to the State Department as soon as possible.²⁰ Later, in contemporary debates about “nation building,” some of these earlier concerns about colonialism reemerged—most famously during presidential candidate George W. Bush’s statement that US troops should not be used for “what’s called nation building.”

Related to these two characteristics of American denial syndrome is a third: the persistent belief that civilians could and should be taking the lead in undertaking governance operations during war. This view contributed to the lack of development of an institutionalized capacity for governance tasks in the army but never prevailed enough to succeed in creating an effective standing civilian capability within civilian agencies such as the State Department. This problem became especially apparent in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the creation in 2006 of a State Department office to grow a civilian capacity to undertake reconstruction tasks, continual funding problems, as well as organizational culture tensions, prevented a strong capability from emerging. Throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, US military and civilian leaders cited the need deploy or “uplift” more civilians to both theaters. Yet it was found that in addition to significant infrastructure and security costs, it cost the US government between about $410,000 and $570,000 to deploy one employee to Afghanistan for one year.²¹ And overall, US civilian employees to Afghanistan topped out at just over 1,000 by 2011. (It has been about 300 in 2009 and less in previous years.) Given that the State Department consistently struggled with requirements to send civilians to work on reconstruction and development projects, the United States tended to turn to military reservists to fill the gap. In 2009, when former secretary of defense Robert Gates expressed concern that the government would not “get the civilian surge into Afghanistan as quickly as we are getting troops into Afghanistan,” he asked the US Marines and other services for volunteers who had specific skills “who might serve as a bridge, getting them out of there quickly, and then...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 American Denial Syndrome: Failing to Learn from the Past
• 2 The Early Years: Improvisation
• 3 World War II: Building an Organization
• 4 The Cold War: Illusive Lessons
• 5 Afghanistan and Iraq: Lessons Ignored
• Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author