Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [84]
The ultimate aim was not primarily to dismantle or defeat an insurgency, but to “foster effective governance” in an environment where governance was notably absent. “Legitimacy is the main objective,” the manual declared.18 Yet legitimacy is a notoriously slippery concept, difficult to define, much less measure. To designate the creation of legitimacy as a primary wartime goal is equivalent to designating the pursuit of wealth as a primary goal in life. In effect, you have embarked upon an infinitely expansible enterprise. When is a government sufficiently legitimate? When is a tycoon sufficiently rich? Who decides? According to what criteria? The endpoint of such a venture is necessarily arbitrary, subject to redefinition, and revocable.
Furthermore, the promotion of legitimacy is not a sphere in which the officer corps can claim unique or even notable competency. In a counterinsurgency, military expertise becomes one skill set among many that have to be mobilized, deployed, and integrated. FM 3-24 concedes as much, emphasizing that COIN is a collaborative undertaking involving not simply military forces but a wide range of other government agencies, along with private contractors, international entities like the United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations that may or may not even share U.S. policy objectives.
Why senior military officers should preside over such enterprise is by no means clear. When it comes to enhancing “host nation” capacity, functionaries drawn from entirely different professional backgrounds might have as much or more to offer than four-star generals unschooled in law enforcement, economic development, or institution building.19 When it comes to providing for “the people’s well-being,” a successful big-city mayor, police chief, or director of social services is likely to possess experience more relevant than that accrued over the course of a career devoted to soldiering.
In sum, an officer corps that accepts FM 3-24 as its guide has abandoned war as its principal raison d’être. In doing so, it forfeits any claim to singularity. Rather than exercising exclusive control over a specific, clearly distinguishable realm of human activity, the army becomes but one institution among many attempting to temper the world’s most grievous political and economic failures. Having dispensed with the pursuit of victory, such an army devotes itself to social work with guns. As with such work undertaken in places like Los Angeles or Chicago, the social work inherent in FM 3-24’s call for a “global strategic response” to the problem of global insurgency promises to be a project literally without end.
For the U.S. military, war among peoples—not really war but something more akin to imperial policing combined with the systematic distribution of alms—now became de rigueur. Here is Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, Petraeus’s successor at Fort Leavenworth, holding forth on the military future with all the confidence and certainty of the senior officers who, just years earlier, had touted the wonders of shock and awe.
The future is not one of major battles and engagements fought by armies on battlefields devoid of population; instead, the course of conflict will be decided by forces operating among the people of the world. Here, the margin of victory will be measured in far different terms from the wars of our past. The allegiance, trust, and confidence of populations will be the final arbiters of success.20
The entire military reform project of the post-Vietnam era—indeed of the entire era since Hiroshima—had sought to restore the concept of war as an instrument of decision and the exclusive purview of soldiers. The proponents of counterinsurgency effectively declared that effort a failure.