Zenpundit (Mark Safranski) has a blog post up (The Post-COIN era is here) that's worth reading, despite it's somewhat hyperbolic claim up front that--apparently--we just dodged the bullet of a host of half-baked interventions around the globe--led by those hawkish Dems no less ("COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist "crusades"in Third world quagmires."). I left a lengthy comment (I confess I screwed up the spacing of sentences) questioning Mark's use of this--by my standards--rather specious strawman (leveraging a vigorous bit of name-calling by Andrew Bacevich that suggested the development of a COIN capacity automatically condemns the US to the irresistible pursuit of a "host" of crazy interventions around the planet). Beyond that one sticking point, the rest of Mark's post consists of his usually sharp contextualizing.
Two larger points I wanted to share with you all, triggered by Mark's post (meaning things I would suggest you bear in mind):
1) Remember the larger distinction between the operating force (out there in the regional commands) and the institutional force back home (which trains up and equips the operating force). The "ascendancy" of COIN as the reinstatement of long-discarded tactics and operations has occurred overwhelmingly in the operating force. Why? Simply the compelling need created by insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There has been no real ascendancy of COIN within the institutional force, where advocates like John Nagl have argued long and hard for more appropriate training and force structure. While the training has come, as had the doctrine (the two are deeply linked), no serious observer would subscribe to the notion that US military force structure has been subverted to the small-wars orientation. Gates has calmly and intelligently carved out a space for that type of discrete warrior, claiming, with some accuracy I believe, that his budget last year devoted a mere 10% to small wars, a still sizable 50% purely to the big wars orientation, and that 40% could be considered swing assets. In sum, Gates estimates his Pentagon devotes one out of every 10 dollars to seriously focused COIN-like capabilities--hardly an ascendancy in the one realm that truly matters (acquisitions and all associated activities). What is true is that the force as a whole is undergoing certain generalized budget pressures (the return of deficit worries) and certain operational pressures, but you have to remember also that operations abroad come out of supplementals from Congress, not part of the annual DoD budget (while some borrowing from Peter to pay Paul occurs, it's not decisive and purely opportunistic, like funding small procurement out of Operations & Maintenance). So while assumptions that the current deficit fears will hurt the Pentagon's bottom line are correct, assuming any immediate scaling back of the effort in Af-Pak is another matter, for there you will find Republicans who will resist shortchanging the troops in the field even as players on both sides will continue struggling with the notion of what constitutes a reasonable effort on our part--especially in relation to allies (a subject upon which I weigh in frequently).
2) There is a natural frequency/load rate associated with U.S. military interventions abroad, something I explored in PNM. Generally, there is a combined capacity on the part of the regional commands to be able to put troops in countries and do things. Pick a generic level of effort, like 20k troops engaged in security ops and humanitarian assistance and training of local militaries (which, in sum, is very COIN-like). If you add up the combined capabilities of the regional commands, you can come up with a general sense of how many such ops they could collectively mount and maintain at any one time. For purposes of discussion, let's say it's a dozen such sized ops, with Pacom owning several, Eucom a few, Centcom probably the most, etc. If we're in Iraq and that's using up seven such units of capability (an out-of-my-ass estimate), and Af-Pak eats up four more, then, at any one time, we can mount something small on the side (like 10k troops in Haiti right now) and not much else, meaning, once the system hits near-capacity, there's no logical discussing of additional units of effort. That's been true for a long time, really since the Cold War's end, when our frequency of contingency ops inside the Gap took off in both absolute frequency and length of operations (a subject I explore at length in PNM). After 9/11 triggered the two big interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military's capacity became largely consumed by those two situations, my point being, even to the extent that COIN became ascendant after the 2006 midterm election, it could not trigger some invade-the-world-one-failed-state-at-a-time capacity, simply by dint of Iraq's and Afghanistan's significant hold on our interventionary assets. As I argued in my latter two books, these decisions constituted a strategic lockdown, which Bush-Cheney seriously respected (they intervened really nowhere else to any serious degree) and which Obama-Biden have studiously sought to reduce. To the extent that Obama is successful, things like Haiti become far more realistic, meaning less system-stressing for the military, understanding that the force is mightily exhausted by the high tempo of operations across the last eight years (my seven-years-of-"plenty"-being-followed-by-seven-years-of-"lean" argument from GP). But my underlying point is this: shifting to more COIN capacity and awareness across the operating force means we should be able, over time, to utilize our general interventionary capacity more intelligently, more in concert with locals and allies, and more cost efficiently than what we did in the 1990s--i.e., taking a great-power-war square-peg force and shoving it into round-hole contingencies. But even as we make this shift, triggered by the pain of Iraq and Afghanistan and codified nicely by Gates, we won't really revolutionize our interventionary capacity, which will always have certain limits of political attention span, budget, and load-bearing capacity among the combatant commands. So the notion that developing COIN capacity will allow us to invade any country at any time to our heart's delight is specious (Bacevich's argument). The general load capacities will remain unchanged, meaning the U.S. will continue doing in the future what it's done in the past: dealing, on an annual basis, with a single-digit number of interventions, which will tend to the low side so long as scenarios like Iraq and Af-Pak gobble up resources and which can only rise to the high single digits (like much of the 1990s) when everything is small in size (a month's effort here, three weeks there, 70 days here, and so on).
So, more generally, COIN's ascendancy, for what it's worth, alters the tactical and operation dynamics of our military's Leviathan/SysAdmin relationship with the world (making it more efficient because now we have a tool for the right sort of jobs that tend to predominate), but it does not change the larger strategy, which remains: 1) for the Leviathan to continue presenting such high barriers-to-entry to the competitive space called "great power war" that nobody really threatens the system-wide ban on such wars that is now deep into its seventh decade; and 2) for the SysAdmin to tend to the Gap's worst outbreaks of instability at a load-bearing rate that's "feasible"--an always contentious subject but more so since 9/11 (remembering also that much of the SysAdmin's work does not constitute interventions but merely represents the day-to-day security shaping stuff of mil training, "presence," etc.). As I have consistently stated, I think the regeneration of COIN capacity within our military is a great thing, but I don't see that reinstatement of capabilities as an "era" that either comes or goes. Rather, it should and will become an enduring tool that affords us better efforts in managing this world through security assets--a truly grand strategic impulse that I do not see fading any time soon (and thank God for that).
One more crucial contextualizing argument: As much as we like to pretend that America runs both the world and globalization, our decades-long success in enabling and defending the latter (mostly in an existential sense, meaning we simply encourage system stability due to our Leviathan's existence) ended any notion of that somewhere 15-20 years ago, when the private-sector's pursuit of globalized nets and platforms and products went into hypergear. So understand that the globalization is now far larger than just what the U.S. says or does, thus the sheer idiocy of claiming America's "imperialist" pursuit of global domination (a chimera of "goal" that we purposefully self-liquidated by encouraging globalization's expansion--meaning this "big frog" purposefully enlargened the West's "little pond" so as to reduce his dominant status--a counterintuitive (to some) goal that Zakaria now labels a "post-American world") . Much like my description of the SysAdmin function, globalization is far more private-sector driven than public-sector driven, and it's far more the rest of the world than just the U.S., so hypothesizing that COIN enables a grand strategy that wasn't already there (and is now into its seventh decade) is incorrect. COIN's rise merely brings the military more in synch with the international global "market" of instability, which is neither vast nor insurmountable, so long as we avoid the usual hyperbole and fear-mongering (my WPR column yesterday).
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:53PM 
