Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [87]
The principal beneficiaries of the postsurge shift in civil-military relations were senior field commanders. Self-styled warfighters now became figures to reckon with, their influence extending well beyond mere operational matters. In Washington, their views carried great weight. For the foreseeable future, therefore, politicians presuming to trust their own judgment over that of whoever happened to be commanding U.S. forces in Baghdad or Kabul did so at considerable risk.
Second, the surge became the occasion when the officer corps kicked its own Vietnam syndrome. A determination to avoid protracted conflict had been a core conviction for the generation of officers who had served in Vietnam. According to Gen. Colin Powell, the best-known member of that generation, wars should occur infrequently. For Powell the supreme value was not warfighting but preparedness: A force holding itself ready to fight would deter others, thereby reducing the actual prevalence of war. When conflict did occur, Powell favored the employment of overwhelming force to end the fighting quickly and achieve decisive results.
The generation of officers represented by Petraeus now reached different conclusions. They came to view war as commonplace, a quasi-permanent aspect of everyday reality. Moreover, their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan persuaded them to see armed conflict as an open-ended enterprise. To be a soldier was either to be serving in a war zone or to be recently returned—in which case preparations for the next combat deployment were already under way or soon would be. Wars no longer ended. At best, they subsided, a semblance of order replacing disorder and a semblance of stability displacing instability—with even this limited achievement requiring many years of struggle.
Generals Schwarzkopf and Franks had enjoyed their brief star turns because each had seemingly demonstrated an ability to deliver definitive (and relatively cheap) battlefield victory. When events exposed those victories as specious, each general’s reputation suffered a sharp reverse. En route to achieving even greater celebrity, General Petraeus had abandoned the very pretense that combat might yield quick and decisive outcomes. The use of violence to impose one’s will on the enemy no longer described the central activity for which soldiers prepared themselves. Instead of winning battles, they now sought to pacify populations.
Third, the surge reduced the significance of time as a constraint in the planning and conduct of war. Counterinsurgency demands enormous patience. “COIN campaigns are often long and difficult,” as FM 3-24 put it. “Progress can be hard to measure.”26
From his study of Vietnam, Petraeus had concluded that the American public and their elected representatives do not possess great stores of patience. In implementing the surge, he set out to change that. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he remarked during the course of a television interview several weeks after taking over as commander in Iraq. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock.”27
The surge achieved that and more. Remarkably, the Washington clock stopped altogether. In Iraq, even after Petraeus had reaped his own “mission accomplished” rewards, war continued, but the American people and their elected representatives—among them