I
want to thank Admiral Arthur Cebrowski and his team at the Defense
Department's Office of Force Transformation for inviting me to
participate in this workshop on the role of culture in
transformation. Too
often, discussions on transforming military capabilities focus on
the role of technology.
MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray
rightly conclude in their book, The Dynamics of Military
Revolution, 1300-2050, that from a historical perspective, adopting
new technologies alone does not account for dramatic change. Achieving enduring
competitive military advantages through transformation also
requires the intellectual capacity to conceptualize employing force
differently than in the pastand that may require changing
aspects of military culture.
The
premise of my remarks is that missions, strategy, education, and
organization can be instruments for changing military culture,
which, in turn, can provide new and unprecedented capabilities. I
want to argue that DOD culture does need to be changed with regard
to one mission in particular: the military's capacity to conduct
post-conflict operations. Traditionally, the United States plans
and executes these tasks inefficiently, jeopardizing the strategic
gains achieved through battle.
Defining Strategic Requirements
The
military's role in warfighting is unquestioned, but its
responsibilities in peace operations are both controversial and
poorly understood. Though there are no universally agreed upon
terms to describe them, military peace operations can be divided
into three types of actions: peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict activities. Of these,
arguably, post-conflict missions (as opposed to nation-building) are the only
essential and perhaps appropriate task for U.S. forces.
Post-conflict activities are an integral
part of any military campaign in which U.S. forces are required to
seize territory, either to free an occupied country, as was the
case during the liberation of Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, or
to dispose of an enemy regime, as during the post-war occupations
of Germany and Japan. Such missions are not "optional" operations;
they are an integral part of any military campaign.
In
addition, the initial stages of any occupation have to be primarily
a military-led effort. Only the occupation forces can provide the
security and logistics needed to get the job done and offer a focal
point for the unity of effort required to make the troubled
transition from war to peace.
While this is an inevitable task for the
U.S. military in any conflict, American troops rarely excel at this
mission. Recent operations in Iraq, for example, do not appear to
have been well organized or effectively implemented.
I
would argue that this reflects the military's traditional approach
to post-conflict missions, which have always been ad hoc and
haphazard. The capacity to conduct post-conflict operations is one
area where the military remains significantly deficient and the
reasons for this are as much cultural as they are material.
Among the traditions, experiences,
preconceptions, and routine practices that determine how the armed
forces conduct post-conflict operations, the most powerful force
shaping the services' thinking is a "tradition of forgetting." The
services, particularly the Army, have a long record of conducting
various kinds of peace missions. Traditionally, however, the armed
forces concentrate on warfighting and eschew the challenges of
dealing with the
battlefield after the battle.
The
Army's experience and knowledge in peace operations is a case in
point. They have never been incorporated into mainstream military
thinking in any major, systematic way. For example, the official
report on the U.S. participation in the occupation of the Rhineland
after World War I noted that, "despite the precedents of military
governments in Mexico, California, the Southern States, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Panama, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, the
lesson seemingly has not been learned."
After World War I, the tradition of
forgetting continued. As the United States prepared to enter World
War II, the military discovered it had virtually no capacity to
manage the areas it would likely have to occupy. The Army did not
even a have a field manual on the subject before 1940. In fact, one
of the planners' first acts was to root out the report on lessons
learned from the Rhineland occupation.
After the Second World War, the Pentagon
largely forgot about the problem and continued to reinvent
solutions each time it faced a new peace operation. This tradition
has changed little to the present day.
Other aspects of the military's
traditional approach appear to have detrimental affects as well.
When American forces do undertake peace missions, they try, as much
as possible, to make them mirror traditional military activities.
Such an approach can result in the misapplication of resources,
inappropriate tasks and goals, and ineffective operations.
In
addition, the armed forces largely eschew integrated joint,
interagency, and coalition operations, as well as ignoring the role
of non-governmental agencies. The result is that most operations
lack cohesion, flexibility, and responsiveness.
Changing a Military
If
we agree that the military is poorly prepared to conduct
missions--and that these are important tasks to get right--how can
we insure that the armed forces are more ready to conduct these
operations in the future?
I
would argue that the obstacles to conducting post-conflict missions
more effectively are largely cultural in origin. Therefore,
changing military culture with respect to post-conflict operations
could well require a set of initiatives that cut across the
services' education, career professional development patterns, and
organization. These innovations might include the following.
- The skills needed to conduct effective
post-conflict tasks require "soft power"--not only the capacity to
understand other nations and cultures, but also the ability to work
in a joint, interagency, and multinational environment. These are
sophisticated leader and staff proficiencies, required at many
levels of command.
In the present military education system,
however, much of the edification relevant to building these
attributes is provided at the war colleges to a relatively elite
group being groomed for senior leader and joint duty positions.
This model is wrong on two counts.
First, I think these skills are needed by
most leaders and staffs in both the active and reserve
components, not
just an elite group within the profession.
Second, this education comes too late in
an officer's career. Virtually every other career field provides
"graduate level" education to members in their mid-20s to 30s. Only
the military delays advanced education until its leaders are in
their mid-40s.
- The armed services also need special
schools specifically designed to teach the operational concepts and
practices relevant to post-conflict missions. The services already
have advanced schools (such as the Marine Corps' School for
Advanced Warfighting) for instructing in the operational arts at
their staff colleges. These courses train the military's finest
planners. The curriculum in these courses should be expanded to
include post-conflict missions.
- The combatant commands should be reorganized to include
interagency staffs with specific responsibility for developing
post-conflict contingency plans in the same manner as current
operational staffs plan for warfighting contingencies. In the event of war,
the post-conflict interagency group can be attached to the
operation's joint force commander to provide the nucleus of an
occupation staff.
In addition, the joint force command
should include a general-officer deputy commander who would oversee
the work of the planning group and assume command of the occupation
force after the conflict. These staffs and command positions could
provide a series of operational assignments for the career
development of a cadre of officers especially skilled in
post-conflict duties.
- The military should also retain force
training and force structure packages appropriate to post-conflict
tasks. There are three ways to obtain commands suitable to
post-conflict missions: (1) training and equipping allies to
perform these duties, (2) retraining and reorganizing U.S. combat
troops for the task, and (3) maintaining special U.S. post-conflict
forces.
I would argue that, as a great power, the
United States needs all three of these options to provide the
flexibility that will enable the nation to adapt to different
strategic situations which might require different levels of
commitments from U.S. forces. Special post-conflict units could be
assembled from existing National Guard and Reserve units including
security, medical, engineer, and public affairs commands. Since
many of the responsibilities involved in post-war duties are
similar in many ways to missions that might be required of homeland
security units, these forces could perform double duty, having
utility both overseas and at home.
The Consequences of Cultural Change
The
21st century has not seen the last of war. Regardless of the
outcome of the current operations in Iraq, the United States will
no doubt again be called upon to conduct post-conflict tasks in the
future.
There is at least one clear lesson from
the current experience, a powerful reminder that these operations
are complex and difficult: If the United States wishes to meet
future challenges more effectively, it will have to address the
cultural impediments to providing the right kind of military
capabilities. Innovations in education, operational practices, and
organization could provide the impetus for developing an
appropriate post-conflict force for the next occupation.
James J.
Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National
Security and Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom
Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage
Foundation. These remarks were prepared for a symposium,
"Introducing Innovation and Risk: Implications of Transforming the
Culture of DOD," held by the Office of Force Transformation, U.S.
Department of Defense, at the Institute for Defense Analyses in
Arlington, Virginia.