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March 20, 2006
Warfighting and Defense Secretarying
Rusty Shackelford thinks it's time to fire Donald Rumsfeld. I think Shackelford is wrong, based primarily on not understanding the job of SecDef, as far as I can tell. It is not the job of the Secretary of Defense to fight wars, nor even to determine the strategy. It is the job of the SecDef to assist the President in setting goals and conditions (grand strategy, if you will), and to assist the warfighters in determining strategy. It is mostly, though, the SecDef's job to make sure that the warfighters have what they need to successfully prosecute wars to attain the goals set by the President. That's why he spends so much time with the Congress and the political generals.
Now it's truly the case that we've made errors in Iraq. Some are obvious now, and some are not. Many of the most controversial decisions (such as disbanding the Iraqi army we had just defeated) will not really be clear in their effect until some time has passed, and arguments can be made either that they were brilliant or terrible or somewhere in between with somewhat equal credibility. History will validate or condemn these decisions; they are too arguable to be used as justifications for immediate correctives now. But merely making errors is a bad reason to fire someone: were the errors demonstrably fatal to our cause, and are they things that few others would have done given the same information? Were they honest mistakes or incompetence? It's very difficult for us to judge from where we sit.
But the real problem is that the US does not know how to fight the wars we're in now, and will be in for the next several decades, any more than the military of 1949 knew how to fight the Cold War and the various proxy fights that would come up as ancillaries to the Cold War. Are we to modify or destroy the idea of Westphalian states, or to act as gatekeepers to which states can claim the associated rights? Are we going to use proxies to fight for us or to fight on our own or to form coalitions; to create empires as the British did (but without the colonialism) or to admit captured territories as US territories and possibly eventually as states or to destroy and withdraw; to rebuild the cultures of our defeated enemies or to only remove the leaders; to intervene wherever threatened or more broadly or more narrowly than that; to integrate war and nation-building or to unleash the full fury of our destructive power upon our enemies; to engage or to withdraw from the world, even to the point of giving up our will to project power short of direct attack against the US itself?
These are not small questions, and we don't yet have the answers. Until we do, until we have decided what we want to do to make the world more pleasant to live in from our point of view, it will be impossible to tell if Rumsfeld's approach was wrong or right. And thus it would be a mistake to fire Rumsfeld for the reasons Shackelford gives.
UPDATE: I should point out, by the way, that what these wars look like is actually what war always looked like before industrialization: little or no differentiation between combatant and non-combatant, fighting amongst the civilians being fought over, and no definable front lines/rear areas. The real question, then, is whether a modern, liberal state can fight a liberal war against a barbarian (literally) enemy: can we fight clean in this kind of war and have any expectation of victory. I think that we are learning in Iraq that we can, and that it is hard and takes a long time. It would be faster to kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out, and my fear is that if we don't maintain our patience and resolve, we'll start doing exactly that. Good for our warriors and our security; bad for our souls.
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