Winning in war occurs when the concerned side, in this case the United States, achieves its policy aims. There are many paths to achieving policy aims, to paraphrase Clausewitz, and not all of them require zero-sum decisive military victory. The reflexive pursuit of the latter can undermine the prospects of success while increasing the costs in blood, treasure, and time. Large-scale US military interventions into irregular conflicts have consistently failed to achieve American goals in the expected amount of time and cost. If America wants to start winning again, the US national security establishment needs to address the chronic problems I have highlighted in this book.
A chronic problem exists when three elements are present: your actual results deviate from expected results; you do not know the cause of the deviation; and fixing the deviation is important.
I hold out hope that the US government and the American national security establishment care enough to fix the deviation. None of the presidential candidates in the 2020 election had a national security reform agenda. It seems that thought leaders are either wishing away the problem or (more likely) consumed by the four apocalyptic horses: the COVID pandemic, economic shutdowns, cultural upheaval, and a divisive 2020 presidential election.
In the expectation that the US government wants to avoid systemic errors, here are my observations and recommendations.
This book has uncovered systemic policy and strategy shortfalls by successive administrations. The United States has tended to produce unrealistic intervention strategies that presume decisive military victory and thus rely excessively on military force to deliver political aims. Many scholars have rightly pointed out that US aims can sometimes overreach. In the case of Afghanistan, US core aims focused on preventing the country from once again becoming a terror safe haven. That aim was not unrealistic, but the assumption that a decisive victory against the Taliban was necessary to achieve it was misguided.
Similarly, in Vietnam and Iraq, the core aims were not necessarily far-fetched, only the presumption that decisive victory was necessary. Consideration of alternative war termination outcomes might have enabled US administrations to seize upon early negotiating opportunities and to take host nation legitimacy challenges more seriously.
Unfortunately, the policy and strategy processes neglected alternative war termination outcomes, resulting in strategic blind spots. Lieutenant General Terry A. Wolff, the Joint Staff’s former plans and policy chief, noted that the United States “has no organized way of thinking about war termination.”1 Clausewitz’s advice—do not take the first step before considering the last—should inform the development and evaluation of strategic options.
The critical factors framework outlined in this book could be a useful way to consider war termination outcomes, particularly by showing when decisive victory is impossible. Insurgencies that have durable internal support and external sanctuary tend not to suffer decisive defeats. Host nation governments that cannot retake and retain contested and insurgent-controlled areas tend not to win decisive military victories. Strategies that aim for decisive victory under one of these conditions have a high probability of failure and creating quagmires. “You need to decide what outcome is most realistic,” McChrystal reflected, “not just what is most desirable.”2
If the United States aims to rescue a troubled ally or partner, like in South Vietnam, it should have compelling reasons to believe that the intervention can reverse negative critical factors—and can succeed when interventions under similar conditions for different conflicts have failed. If there is a regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, the strategy should focus on preventing the contrary critical factors from emerging. Options that include war termination outcomes can discipline the policy process, reduce group-think, and improve alignment. America’s recent experience in these interventions should also produce a greater degree of realism in affecting the internal dynamics of foreign countries.
If the critical factors suggest that outright military victory is unlikely, the United States is probably better off aiming for a negotiated settlement early, enforcing strict conditionality for issues such as governance, political inclusion, and anticorruption, or not intervening at all. As each case study has shown, the United States pays penalties in public support as interventions drag on. Once the United States decides to withdraw, the bargaining becomes asymmetric and undermines negotiations or transition. America’s leverage is likely to be much higher (both on the insurgency and the host government) before intervention than once it is fully committed. Diplomatic-centric strategies and political-centric strategies that aim for negotiated outcomes that meet US interests could reduce the probability of quagmires.
First and foremost, this framework needs to help American political and military leaders understand the differences between waging and fighting a war. Waging war requires the integration of national power—political, diplomatic, economic, and military, among others—so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In Colin Gray’s formulation, there is no war without warfare—or warfighting—but there is more to war than combat.
By conflating war and warfare, the United States has undermined its ability to integrate other elements of national power. The military instrument predominates, and the others support. This practice has reduced the options available to each president and heightened the likelihood of quagmire.
To be sure, there are immense bureaucratic challenges toward such a framework. Diplomats may resist doctrine as constraining. The military has manuals covering tactical and operational levels of war, but nothing that qualifies as strategic doctrine. Still, a broadly framed national security policy that has presidential backing can provide a common language without being overly restrictive. This policy and strategy framework should address the following, at a minimum:
Authoritative terms and concepts for waging war, so officials can coordinate with precision and reduce the false cognates that impede communication and increase tensions. US military doctrine is not sufficient because its terms and concepts are mostly tactical. The US military’s Joint Doctrine, for instance, lacks strategic definitions for words such as defeat, destroy, and degrade—terms which US presidents have used to describe their intentions.3
Different assumptions about defeat, the term McChrystal used when describing the ISAF mission to Obama, confused the president’s civilian advisors. They saw it as an effort to coerce the president into approving a troop surge. Obama assigned the military the mission to “degrade” the Taliban, which is a term with no doctrinal definition. This ambiguity inhibited Obama’s ability to govern the military and enabled the latter to do business-as-usual.
War termination outcomes. Any official national security language must include war termination outcomes. As this book has established, a strategy does not need to presume a decisive victory. In many cases, a decisive victory is unnecessary, and pursuing it could be counterproductive. Most wars do not end that way, either.4 Providing for outcomes broader than decisive victory can help policy- and strategy-makers develop a more realistic array of options and greater clarity on their opportunities and pitfalls.
The president and national security advisor should demand integrated policy and strategy options rather than military-centric ones. A persistent problem for the United States has been the inadequate consideration of the political and diplomatic dimensions of national power. These elements tend to be more important than the military in creating a favorable and durable outcome. Turning first to the military for options wrong-foots the conversation and sets the policy on an unsupportable foundation. The president should, instead, direct the national security adviser to develop alternatives based on war termination outcomes.
The focus on military-centric options could stem from the assumption that military objectives deliver political results. As Clausewitz noted, “The political object—the original motive for the war—will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort required.”5 In this spirit, Colin S. Gray contended that “Strategy is, or should be, a purpose-built bridge linking military power to political goals.”6
That view is too limited, which Gray would later recognize.7 Military objectives are unlikely to deliver political results during irregular war interventions because the most critical issues tend to center on political legitimacy rather than force-on-force battles. Basing your policy and strategy on the presumption that the military effort will determine questions of political legitimacy is a fundamental flaw.
The US military’s definition of strategy, “A prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives,” is a step in the right direction.8 The rest of the government has not caught up. When only the military provides options, these more critical elements are left out because they have no authority or professional competencies to integrate them. The result is military-centric options that have a very low probability of success cheered on by nonmilitary efforts as supporting functions.
As seen in the Afghanistan case study, a former senior Obama administration official noted with frustration that the military presented options only in terms of troop and associated risk levels. Because the military, like every other agency, wants to remain in its (bureaucratic) lane, it has no authority for developing anything other than military options. For this problem to have escaped senior members of the Obama administration is disconcerting. The administration never asked for approaches in which diplomacy or strengthening of the Afghan state was the main effort. War, as Georges Clemenceau remarked, is too important to be left to the military.9
The US government has experienced specific yet preventable errors that have undermined sound decision-making. Recognizing the persistence of these errors should enable the US government to take steps to reduce their influence. In particular, senior officials on the National Security Staff, such as the national security adviser, deputies, and senior directors, should be attuned to these decision-making errors and play the role of the honest broker to prevent the mistakes from undermining the decision-making processes. They should pay particular attention to these three cognitive biases:
Confirmation Bias has been the most consistent problem. With no interagency headquarters in the field responsible for coordinating US efforts, the NSC ends up running the war, and every agency grades its own homework. This combination has created incentives to place excessive emphasis on favorable data points while ignoring disconfirming evidence. In each case study, the US administrations damaged their credibility by claiming progress as the situation deteriorated. This problem undermined support for the wars and impeded the updating process needed to make sound policy and strategy decisions.
In-silo metrics create confusion because the intelligence and policy communities tend to assess the direction of the war using very different variables. The intelligence community considered enemy strength and capabilities (and sometimes host nation governance) as growing problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Defense and State departments, on the other hand, often used their metrics (numbers of enemy killed, civil servants trained, roads and schools built, etc.) to portray intelligence community assessments as “too negative.” Such apples-to-oranges comparisons strengthen status quo bias.
Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion. These two decision-making challenges may be more difficult to tackle. The US national security decision-making system is largely consensus-based. The scope and scale of problems the United States faces across the globe are overwhelming. It is only natural that different agencies have different points on view on a particular matter. Ideally, the NSC staff frames disagreements for discussion, debate, and decision among the principals. This process, however, often requires more bandwidth than most administrations can afford to devote to all but the most pressing issues. The NSC staff thus tends to seek consensus rather than debate. This approach empowers the most obstinate and favors the status quo.
Adding to the challenge is the human tendency toward loss aversion. As the administration touts the gains of its policies, it becomes more likely to dig in its heels against any changes that could put those gains, however great or small, at risk. Addressing these challenges probably would require giving the NSC staff psychological distance from running the wars so that they can more objectively assess the state of the conflict and make policy adjustments that increase the probability of success.
America’s tendency to operate in bureaucratic silos undermines the prospects of success. No entity below the president has the authority and responsibility to direct and manage the full range of US government elements of national power deployed to a war zone. Bureaucratic silos impede coordination and induce NSC micromanagement. These practices erode the quality of assessments and decision-making, undermining America’s ability to modify losing strategies. In both conflicts addressed in this book, the United States attempted reductionist, milestone-centric methods to address the complex challenges of state-building and reform.
Competing personalities, parties, and interests create feedback loops that cause actors to adapt.10 US officials, focusing myopically on the milestones, failed to understand how super-empowered local elites were manipulating them for political advantage. These largely successful efforts damaged the legitimacy of the host governments in the eyes of the losers and those left out. The tendency to operate in bureaucratic silos created gaps that were repeatedly exploited by local elites and created situations in which efforts in one silo undermined efforts in others.
The troubling result was that US efforts tended to self-synchronize in damaging ways. Critical risks in Iraq and Afghanistan—predatory sectarianism and kleptocracy, bad governance, civilian harm, external support, and sanctuary, among others—materialized in these seams and fault lines. No US official had responsibility or was held accountable for addressing them.
Bridging silos will not solve significant structural problems in a war. Efforts to improve integration can indeed bring about different challenges, such as prolonging the policy process and creating disconnects between congressional appropriations and budget execution. Nonetheless, bridging bureaucratic silos can reduce policy and strategy errors and allow policymakers to address the structural challenges they face in war more effectively.
The United States can reduce chronic cognitive problems and silos by decentralizing authority. One way to do so is to replace senior military commands with a strategic headquarters led by a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed official.11 That person should have the authority and responsibility to direct and manage all deployed elements of US national power and be held accountable for success. This organization will also help the US government differentiate between policy (which the NSC should manage) and strategy (which the strategic headquarters should oversee).
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq was an attempt to integrate America’s nonlethal elements better, and it showed some success in that regard. It is important to emphasize that the military and intelligence were outside the CPA’s authority. Still, the CPA made significant errors, and no one was accountable for success.
A senior leader who has the authority to direct and manage all US government entities in theater is no panacea. The president may wish to have that leader report through the Secretary of Defense. Still, this change will reduce bureaucratic silos, improve the speed of decision-making, and provide someone the president can hold accountable for results.
The United States needs to develop ways to address chronic patron-client issues that emerge from corrupt and predatory host nation governments. As its legitimacy in the eyes of the local population becomes more tenuous, the regime’s dependency on the intervening power increases, creating entrapment. The vicious cycle of eroding legitimacy and increasing dependence undermines the prospects of success and heightens the danger that leaving will damage American security interests. I do not recall any interagency deliberations on these issues, except the quickly disproven hope that a withdrawal timeline would force the Afghan government to get serious about reform. I could find little discussion of such topics regarding Iraq or Vietnam either. Patron-client problems are not easy to disentangle, but the United States can take steps to limit the downsides.
First, develop a strategy with the host nation. The United States did not create a coordinated approach with the Afghan, Iraqi, or South Vietnamese governments. The United States should coordinate with the host nation in advance of intervention or immediately after a new government takes power so that the United States can gauge the prospects of the relationship and reduce misalignment. The strategy should address the critical factors framework and war termination.
Second, improve strategic empathy among US officials so that they are able to gauge host nation players’ motivations and goals, recognize that their goals and motivations may differ from those of the United States, and may indeed conflict with those of the United States in ways that will produce friction and noncooperation.
Third, boost conditionality on agreed benchmarks and associated incentives and penalties for political and economic reforms. These incentives should target institutional and individual levels. Recent studies show that improvements are more likely when the patron enforces compelling penalties than when only inducements and encouragement are used.12 Making smart choices on conditionality requires much more intensive monitoring of how the host nation uses US resources and capabilities, and greater political will to apply sanctions.
Fourth, address the pitfalls of developing host nation security forces. Host nation militaries do not exist in a political vacuum. The cases discussed in this book show some of the ways host nation politics affect the incentives of security officials. The United States and most western militaries take pride in the objective control relationship with their political leadership. In this relationship, military leaders stay out of politics and get a free hand in training and developing the armed forces. The military is professional. In most of the world, political leaders co-opt the military to ensure political support and muscle in times of domestic crisis. Subjective control occurs when military forces are primarily instruments of internal political power. US and western officials mirror imaged their professional viewpoints onto their host nation counterparts and were blind to the corruption. The perverse incentives eroded readiness and capacity faster than western officials could build them. Developing host nation security forces is a complex problem and needs to be addressed in the broader political and diplomatic context.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States tired of the war and signaled a desire to withdraw. This combination created bargaining asymmetries in which the United States, as the stronger party, saw its negotiating leverage diminish. The steps here can help reduce the risk of quagmires and encourage the United States to place a higher priority on political and diplomatic approaches to intractable national security problems. For these to be effective, American diplomats need to institutionalize a body of professional knowledge about wartime negotiations and conditionality. As of this writing, US State Department officials tell me that their department provides no professional curriculum or specialty on such matters.
The lack of expertise could be prolonging American wars. Afghanistan showed the consequences of ineffective coordination, misaligned interests, and information asymmetries as the United States first avoided possible negotiated outcomes and then rushed to failure in talks after 2010. Vietnam shows how the offer to suspend US military actions in exchange for discussions with the DRV may have prolonged the conflict. Similarly, the 2015 and 2016 efforts by the United States to arrange cease-fires in Syria in the absence of any confidence-building have serially failed, which may be adding to cynicism about US intentions and credibility.13 The US State Department should commission studies that create a body of expert knowledge on wartime negotiations and ways to use conditionality effectively. The interagency framework described here should include how the various elements of national power can support talks.
These recommendations will not turn unwinnable wars into winnable ones. Still, they will help the United States recognize the difference and avoid the preventable errors that turn the latter into the former.