The Iraq counter-insurgency is forcing the Pentagon to question its military doctrine that requires forces to be able to fight two major wars at the same time, it was claimed on Tuesday.
A four-yearly review of United States military power is not due until early next year, but it is already clear that the strategy is under great strain from the Iraq war.
The length and ferocity of the insurgency has surprised the Pentagon. Two years after ”major combat operations” were declared over by US President George Bush, there are still 138 000 US troops in Iraq, costing $5-billion a month. Yet under US military doctrine it is not even defined as a war.
In theory, US forces should be able to fight two major wars and contain the insurgents, but the credibility of that claim is being stretched thin.
”What it reflects is how unprepared the US military was for a protracted insurgency in Iraq,” said Loren Thompson, a strategic analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington thinktank.
”A relatively small group of poorly equipped guerrillas is getting the United States to rethink its military posture … This type of conflict wasn’t supposed to happen with this duration and this intensity.”
Since the Cold War, and the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, Washington has set a benchmark for its armed forces, requiring them to be strong enough to fight two major wars simultaneously. Funding and troop levels have been set accordingly.
The September 11 attacks showed the US was facing an entirely new foe, so the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, adapted the goals.
From then on, the military would have to defend the homeland from terrorism, keep a presence capable of deterring conflict in four critical regions, fight and quickly win two major wars and win so decisively in one of them as to remove the enemy regime. The formula was called 1-4-2-1.
But with so many troops pinned down in Iraq, the conflict is draining US forces of the capacity to fight elsewhere.
”We have 1-4-2-1 now, and we are going to look at that,” Ryan Henry, Rumsfeld’s senior policy aide at the Pentagon, told the New York Times. He said if the review did produce a new strategy it might be ”something that doesn’t have any numbers at all”.
”What they’re doing is trying to get beyond the two-war posture,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon official and executive director of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The new approach is to fight four entirely different kinds of war at the same time: traditional large-scale combat; counter-insurgency; defending the US against attack (involving weapons of mass destruction); and ”disruptive” warfare.
The latter, he said, reflects concern over China, which is reportedly exploring asymmetric strategies, potentially allowing its forces to take on the US. The strategies involve information warfare, targeting US reliance on the internet, anti-satellite weapons and the precise use of ballistic and cruise missiles against large-scale targets such as airbases.
Rumsfeld sought to speed up the process of ”military transformation” from Cold War forces to more agile troops with advanced technology. The experience has reinforced the importance of mobility, but also taught that electronic gadgetry is of little use against suicide bombers.
”The debate is moving away from hi-tech weapons and futuristic technology and in the direction of counter-insurgency and country expertise,” Thompson said. The change would raise the importance of special forces, but would transform training for infantrymen, to emphasise language skills, military intelligence and familiarity with foreign cultures.
”One of reason we rely so much on reserves now is because those kind of skills had been relegated to the reserves in the cold war,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â