No-one has ever accused a bureaucracy of being nimble, or quick on the uptake. Most of us take this truth for granted, even if some don't mind it as much as others. It's just a fact of life. The DMV is a fantastic place to go to change your outlook on watching paint dry. And it never changes. You'd think that some bright, overly ambitious state employee might have a "eureka" moment and come up with a way to speed things up. But alas, no; the bureaucratic creature is the sloth of the human organizational kingdom. It doesn't adapt too well.
For some strange reason, there are some bureaucracies that get a pass in the minds of the American public. The U.S. military is the prime example; one great big unwieldy bureaucratic colossus that most people believe to be on the cutting edge. They expect the armed forces to act like a market organization that is free to seek out the best way to accomplish its goals and defeat the competition. Nothing could be further from the truth, even if the Army did find Saddam – with a little help from our Kurdish friends. They found him alone, delirious, and in a hole. That's not exactly a stupendous achievement, and it can't transform all the thickheadedness of the Pentagon's slow bleed in Iraq into brilliant strategery. But the most obvious question in all of this is studiously avoided by most people. Why, for all our supposed superiority, are American men dying off in Iraq while the resistance gets stronger? Why are we losing if we're such a superpower?
Now, call me crazy, but the whole idea of warfare includes the probability that in order to win, you might want to try doing something your enemy doesn't expect. Hannibal's Alpine march confounded the Romans; Stonewall Jackson caught Union forces playing cards at Chancellorsville; Mel Gibson's boys surprised the English cavalry with really sharp sticks . . . well, you get the picture. To do that, you have to first of all be willing to try something different; and you have to be willing to swallow some pride. If a military gets too attached to the way it does business as the only way to do things, it will sooner or later get spanked on the field of battle.
Now, the U.S. military today is obviously not the largest in the world, but that's sort of like saying the Atlantic isn't the biggest ocean. It's still really big, and consumes unimaginable amounts of money. And just because we've won most of the time, and we have better technology than other militaries, doesn't mean that our military technology is top-notch by any absolute standard. My forward observers in the mid-1990s were calling in artillery missions with computer equipment that made my first Atari look space-age. Little wonder that we almost never used them.
The same holds true with our military doctrine. Let's face it, it's hard to get a large object to move or change direction very quickly, and unfortunately, the warning signs have been there to see for some time that the very large American military machine is prone to doctrinal ruts. A quick review of some military history will show that the current quagmire in Iraq should come as no surprise.
World War II gave the Air Force (then the Army Air Corps) brass a chance to show their peers that they could be a real strategic player by engaging in a massive strategic bombing campaign. The Americans waltzed in to the European theater with a swagger, looking down their noses at the beleaguered Brits for suggesting that daytime bombing over Germany was not a good idea. Secure in our inherent superiority, thousands of courageous aircrews went on their way without so much as a fighter escort in daylight raids. The bombers' own mounted machine guns and formation flying was supposed to do the trick. Only after our rear ends got handed to us in the skies over Germany did the Air Force get serious about producing large numbers of long-range escort fighters to protect the bombers. How many men died because of stubborn lack of adaptability?
Army strategy in Vietnam was a vast refusal to recognize that the Vietnamese just weren't playing the game according to our rules. The idea was that if we just rolled in there with overwhelming firepower and conventional mechanized forces, the Vietcong would have to realize that they were supposed to either give up or lose. But the Vietnamese didn't feel like ceding terms to us, and fought by unconventional means. By not realizing that the jungles of Indochina were not the same as the plains of Europe, and subsequently failing to change strategy accordingly, the U.S. military was ultimately driven out.
Lest my brethren in my fellow branches think I'm sounding a little partisan here, it must be pointed out that the Marine Corps is not immune to bureaucratitis. On one particular NATO exercise in which I participated in Turkey, I witnessed it first-hand. In the large notional war game, I was the controller of the enemy artillery. Based on constraints of range, logistics, and terrain, my job was to do my best to rough up the NATO units with the forces at my disposal. I believed that we were actually trying to accomplish something there. Silly me. After my first barrage of long-range rockets took out the Marine advance guard of light armored vehicles, I was preparing my artillery to move when I was informed by the liaison officer that my entire unit of 12 rocket launcher trucks had just been wiped out. By one U.S. plane.
"You've got to be kidding me," was my first thought. Fortunately for me, unlike Austin Powers I have an inner monologue, and my actual words were something along the lines of: "Excuse me, sir?"
"An F-18 from the carrier just destroyed your two rocket batteries."
"One F-18, with maybe six bombs, launched from a carrier 300 miles away with no idea where I was, found my units and destroyed all 12 of them in less than 30 seconds, sir?"
That really did come out.
"That's right, lieutenant."
I knew at that point that nobody was interested in really being tested to see if the way they did things truly worked. No government entity is bound by the guidelines of profit and cost; they're bound by the dictums of conferences and symposiums, and by golly, the rest of the world better fall into step. What was important was the same thing that mattered to the people in charge of Exercise "Millennium Challenge" last summer: a PR image victory. A joint exercise that all claimed at the time had absolutely nothing to do with any possible invasion of Iraq, Millennium Challenge featured an opposing force which bore a striking resemblance to the Iraqi military. Of course, they stood no chance against the technological might of the U.S. Funny thing was, they didn't play by the rules again, and we got whipped.
The enemy force was commanded by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a very tough cookie. Gen. Van Riper's forte has never been being easy to get along with, but when he quit halfway through his stint as the enemy forces commander, it was definitely for a good reason. In an email to friends, he told of the same bureaucratic smugness that characterized the whole exercise. When his unorthodox tactics, such as guerilla warfare, human couriers and use of civilian vehicles and boats confounded the U.S. forces and left most of our fleet on the bottom of the harbor, the exercise was "re-cocked" – a military term essentially meaning do-over. “It was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to ensure a Blue [friendly forces] ‘win,’ ” Gen. Van Riper wrote. When he didn't hand over the desired pretty victory, everything was just started up from scratch again. You see, it's the enemy's responsibility to play fair.
Houston, we have a problem when that particular mindset becomes entrenched. Oh, we did fine when the Iraqis tried to stand and fight mano a mano. But the minute they just melted away and ceded the ground, things went to hell. Don't think for a moment that the Iraqis care one bit about the American press labeling them "terrorists" while they patiently pick off Americans one, two, or six at a time. They're just fine with losing the conventional battle; they will wait until we've had enough and we leave. The problem is, most Americans, and especially those in government, refuse to realize this. If we are fighting anything more than a group of desperate Saddam loyalists on their last gasp, all the righteous paradigms that the federal government has erected about this invasion are smashed. To justify the unjustifiable, bureaucrats have to bury the truth, hard as it is, in an avalanche of empty verbiage. This, however, means nothing to the average Iraqi who really doesn't like the American autocracy any more than the Ba'ath dictatorship. We're only foreigners with guns trying to tell him what to do in his own country. That makes us targets, and legitimate ones. If we're uncomfortable with this, we'd better not waste any more American blood for a phantom freedom.
When reality doesn't go along with our pre-conceived ideological notions of how the rest of the world works, and if we're not willing to recognize it, we are doomed to repeat the same blunders again and again. And the most difficult part of it will be watching each one come, blindly cheered by teary-eyed Americans who don't have a clue what their rulers are doing. God have mercy on America.
January 27, 2004
