The Trouble with Budgeting for a Counter-Insurgency (You just might get what they're asking for )

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The Defense Budget Pentagon Chief Gates outlined yesterday is an invitation to not only buy into his 'irregular war' and counterinsurgency strategy that he's sold President Obama in his decision to escalate U.S. military force in Afghanistan__ it's also a sizable down payment on, and a significant shift to a foreign policy approach for a future of warfare which may well be unique only to the occupations he's busy managing today.

In crafting a budget strategy aimed at feathering and enhancing our military's capabilities in attacking and suppressing populations across sovereign borders, the Pentagon is auguring for a future of more of the same self-perpetuating militarism which has been determined (by intelligence agencies and other observers) to have effectively fueled and fostered more resistant violence than our forces have been able to neutralize or eliminate.

Moreover, this budget policy which is geared toward enabling counter-insurgencies is a dangerous extension of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive military engagement which assumes that the offensive application of early force is prudent and appropriate to defend against intelligence-driven threats to our national security. In shifting resources away from the prospect of defending against a state-initiated or rouge attack to a paranoid defense against ghosts and remnants of resistance to our very military presence and activity abroad, the U.S. is threatening to permanently transform into the military aggressor our forces posture to defend against.

Bottom line (observations from yseterday) . . . Gates wants the means and resources to continue to prosecute the type of militarism he's invested two presidents in with the dual-occupations and the inherent counter-insurgency necessary to secure the military prizes.

While the budget certainly represents a shift away from many outdated and unproven technologies and weapon systems, it is, nonetheless, a ridiculous collection of goodies for the next-generation of self-perpetuating aggression abroad which is presented as a prudent response to 'threats' from rouge individuals spouting propaganda from the mountains of Pakistan, a dubious threat from Iran, and the militarized resistance to our opportunistic occupations.

Much of the expenditures are intended to support the continuing military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; in Iraq to shore-up the stalemate there, in Afghanistan to escalate the military mission to a state of sustained dominance until the Afghans can assume the intimidation with their own forces. All of that also assumes that continuing with the escalation in Afghanistan and the delayed withdrawal in Iraq is a fault-proof proposition which deserves the effort and expense.


first, an assessment of the budget from 'The Washington Independent':

posted by Spencer Ackerman

Beginning with last year’s National Defense Strategy issued by the Pentagon, Gates has frequently criticized the Defense Department for being insufficiently supportive of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring to fund and pursue favored defense programs developed before the outbreak of the wars rather than be responsive to the emergent needs of the wars themselves. A speech Gates gave at the National Defense University last year said the Pentagon’s prudential focus on anticipating future conflict risked overlooking current conflict. “We must not be so preoccupied with preparing for future conventional and strategic conflicts that we neglect to provide, both short-term and long-term, all the capabilities necessary to fight and win conflicts such as we are in today,” Gates said last year.

The budget proposal follows the National Defense Strategy, Work observed, especially as it presumes for the near-term that the U.S. did not face a threat of conventional conflict from a rival state, one of the strategy’s foundational presumptions . . .

Accordingly, Gates shifted the budget request to allow for institutionalized support for irregular warfare — a key goal of the generation of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners who have emerged from Iraq and Afghanistan. Support for programs desired by counterinsurgents, such as training and mentoring partner militaries in counterinsurgency, have been funded through ad-hoc budgeting during the two wars, but Gates heralded an end to that practice. “Our contemporary wartime needs must receive steady long-term funding and a bureaucratic constituency similar to conventional modernization programs,” he said. Training partner militaries, for instance, will be part of a $500 million effort to “boost global partnership capacity efforts.”

John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security and a longtime advocate of an institutional capability within the Army for training foreign militiaries, praised Gates’ move. “The most important military component of the Long War against radical extremism may not be the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our friends to fight against our common enemies,” Nagl said. This budget takes significant steps in the direction of helping our friends defeat the internal threats to their stability that also threaten us.”

Gates cautioned against reading the budget submission as a triumph of irregular warfare over conventional capabilities, arguing that it “crudely” provides “about 10 percent for irregular warfare, about 50 percent for traditional, strategic and conventional conflict, and about 40 percent dual-purpose capabilities.” His goal was not to see irregular warfare replace conventional warfare in defense budgeting, but rather to give the “irregular-war constituency” a “seat at the table for the first time when it comes to the base budget.”


from Democracy Arsenal: http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2009/04/the-trouble-with-counterinsurgency-redux.html

Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the excellent Abu Muqawama blog, my new friend Andrew Exum has responded to my post of a few days ago about the trouble with counter-insurgency. He says that my argument "ends up ignoring the great many of us who never want to fight another counter-insurgency campaign again but still think it's a damn good idea to have the doctrine and best practices handy."

I'm sorry, but I simply don't buy this argument and I think it minimizes the deleterious impact that a focus on COIN could have, not just for the US military, but for US foreign policy, writ large.

Look, if COIN-dinastas don't want to fight counter-insurgencies and there is growing evidence that both in the US and overseas this sort of military doctrine is simply not politically viable, why then were COIN advocates pushing for a rather fulsome and ambitious counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan? This wasn't a case of having "best practices handy" it was a case of advocating for what Exum calls a doctrine and making it the strategic foundation for our continued involvement in Afghanistan. Andrew says that my problem is with policy not military doctrine; and to some extent he is correct - I want our civilian leadership to fundamentally reassess the threats we are facing and think about how our military should be repositioned in order to most effectively confront these challenges. But as I'm sure Andrew knows, if you're not careful military doctrine can quickly evolve into a national security policy.

Quite wisely, President Obama rejected a full-throttled counter-insurgency policy in his Afghanistan review, but you have still advocates like Michele Flournoy at DoD arguing that the President's plan is "very much a counterinsurgency approach" so I hardly think this debate is over. I worry if in 18-24 months when we are reassessing our Afghanistan policy that the COIN-dinastas will try again to convince the President that we need to use our military to turn Afghanistan into something close to a stable and democratic state. Quite simply, those of us who think that COIN is a bad idea should not be sitting back and trusting that COIN-dinastas really don't want to fight counter-insurgencies and so thus it ain't going to happen.

And when you have folks like John Nagl (King of the COIN-dinastas) arguing that the security challenges of the 21st century require that our military be able to “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies" well that suggests an entire transformation in how our military is trained and the doctrine that underpins future operations. It seems worth noting as well that Nagl and many other COIN advocates believe we are fighting a Long War with extremists. I don't. And I definitely think the best means of confronting this security challenge is not our regular Army, but instead a confluence of law enforcement, diplomacy, long-term development, foreign assistance and low-intensity military operations. Where I get most concerned is the belief by COIN fans that the military should be at the end of the spear.

This may be where the greatest danger lies in embedding counter-insurgency doctrine in military planning - the militarization of American foreign policy . . .

Transcript of Gates announcement of his budget yesterday: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123904207376593845.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[BeFree]

1. 534 billion

Can we really afford that? That's like spending $10 to defend ourselves from each and every man, woman and child in the whole world. Or $20. Whatever. Not only can we not afford it, it's insane!

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4. military

. . .too big to fail? :shrug:

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. "..war is a continuation of politics by other means." Clauswitz

You'd think that the geniuses in D.C. would try other means instead of resorting to the least efficient, and in the case of Afghanistan, the most counterproductive means of war as the first response.

But, bogeymen and flagwaving are ever more popular. And, now, politically correct for the "liberals".

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3. same bunch of Vietnam-era hawks still around and in place

. . . in the leadership ranks at the Pentagon__ many of them still busting to prove their theory of the invincibility of our forces; if we only had the will to bring it on and keep it on.

The rhetoric has indeed shifted among Obama's holdovers to acknowledge the limits of their forces (perhaps born out of their recent experience), but they're really still true believers at heart.

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5. .