This book has examined post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in detail and provided a brief overview of the Vietnam War. The most obvious implication for the scholarship is the extent to which it is possible to generalize beyond these cases. This book has highlighted the limitations of viewing war termination as an interval between armed conflict and a peace agreement. By bringing the issue into the realm of strategy where it belongs, a wide array of opportunities opens for further research. I will use the three identified problem areas to frame the implications.
Examine if the presumption of decisive military victory heightens the risk of quagmires. The decisive victory presumption was a problem for the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Cursory review of other cases suggests the problem is representative of a wider number of cases. The Soviets fell into the decisive victory trap in Afghanistan from 1979–1989, too. In 2011, the Obama administration demanded an end to the Assad regime and set a so-called red line regarding the use of chemical munitions against Syrian rebels. When Assad did so anyway, the United States backed down but later put a limited contingent of troops on the ground to fight ISIS and curb Iranian influence. As of early 2021, Assad seems highly likely to remain in power while the influence of Iran and Russia in Syria appears to be as strong as ever. A NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 ousted dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi but set the stage for a bloody civil war that still rages in 2021.
Not all interventions turn out poorly, of course. On the positive side of the ledger, the British response to Sierra Leone was mostly successful. NATO used various coercive measures to bring warring parties in Bosnia to the 1996 Dayton Accords and then deployed peacekeeping forces afterward. The threat of NATO military escalation convinced Serbia in 1999 to accede to Kosovo’s secession. Do interventions that aim for negotiated settlements have a better track record than those seeking decisive victory?
Applying the three major war termination problem areas to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the French wars in Indo-China and Algeria could reveal the extent of these patterns beyond the United States. Analyzing the successful intervention in the Philippines in the early 1900s could illustrate the extent to which the growth in post–World War II national security bureaucracies has undermined America’s ability to wage irregular war. Likewise, a comparison with the British intervention in Sierra Leone could reveal whether the United Kingdom has a better handle on these challenges than the United States.
Code outcomes by war termination method. Longitudinal studies produced by RAND tend to code conflict in zero-sum results.1 More nuanced coding that presented variable-sums classified by war termination method might reveal the extent to which an intervening power protected its interests despite the host nation’s government losing or winning. A negotiated outcome in the current Afghanistan war, for instance, will likely require more substantial Afghan government concessions to the Taliban than the reverse—a government loss. A credible commitment by the Taliban that prevented al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups from using Afghan soil to plan and execute large-scale terror attacks would achieve America’s principal war aim while preventing the violent overthrow of the Afghan government. This outcome would be successful for the United States, albeit far bloodier and more expensive than had the Bush administration accepted the Taliban’s surrender offer in 2001.
Conversely, the United States succeeded in preventing ISIS from overthrowing the Iraqi government. Still, Iranian influence is far more significant in 2021 than in Saddam’s Iraq. Meanwhile, Iran’s influence in Syria appears to have strengthened. The rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war, which resulted in destabilizing refugee flows to Europe, were byproducts of America’s 2003 intervention in Iraq. The refugee crisis strengthened right-wing parties in many European countries and provided opportunities for Russia to undermine NATO’s cohesion. There are limits to coding variable-sum outcomes.
Scholarship on counterinsurgency should distinguish more effectively between doctrine and strategy. Critics tend to conflate doctrine and strategy in claiming that counterinsurgency does not work.2 As this book has outlined, current US doctrine presumes that the host nation’s government acts in the best interests of its citizens and that its officials are selfless public servants. These unrealistic characterizations can create blind spots that undermine effective strategy and coordination. This doctrine needs an overhaul.
Similarly, a counterinsurgency strategy is no more one-size-fits-all than is a conventional war strategy. Counterinsurgency does not presume large-scale interventions. An approach that places the political or diplomatic instrument as the top priority is likely to require fewer troops than a decisive victory. A small military footprint, however, does not necessarily mean that other agencies assume a higher priority. Foreign internal defense missions or partner capacity-building missions that rely on military advisors to help host nations fight an insurgency can suffer from an absence of strategy. Such efforts can damage the external power’s credibility if people believe it provides weapons and training to predatory governments. Most countries that receive the highest levels of US security force assistance fare poorly on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Several have populations that view the United States unfavorably.3 The causal direction of such unfavorability merits analysis.
Differentiate levels of war in counterinsurgency. Most scholarship tends toward the tactical level with a heavy emphasis on the military.4 Such works discuss the importance of political legitimacy and economic support alongside the need to conduct military operations against insurgents, but they rarely examine the dynamic interaction of these factors and how they affect the prospects of success. The tactical level is relatively easy to define as local and the strategic level as national, but what constitutes the operational level of war? How do counterinsurgents organize campaigns? The US military made some limited efforts to do this by coordinating military efforts in various “belts” around Baghdad. They also tried to focus military forces first in southern Afghanistan and then shift them to eastern Afghanistan—a campaign that ran out of time due to the drawdown.5
However, if irregular war requires the proper integration of political, diplomatic, economic, and military efforts, then campaigns at subnational levels should do so. The geographic shifting of security forces or the transfer of security responsibilities from foreign counterinsurgent to host nation forces seems inadequate conceptually and practically. Similar questions apply to the strategic level of war. Insufficient understanding of these levels may be leading senior leaders to obsess about tactics instead of setting their sights higher. Tactical victories in irregular warfare do not necessarily create a successful campaign. A series of successful campaigns might not add up to strategic success.
The challenges are complex. Factors such as governance, institutional integrity, and insurgent sanctuary, for instance, might have nonlinear effects on strategic outcomes. Successful tactical and operational efforts can have a limited and temporary impact if critical factors at the strategic level are problematic.
Examine the impact of modern bureaucracies on waging irregular war. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow show how bureaucratic frictions affected decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis.6 Robert Komer discussed this problem in Vietnam.7 Bureaucratic silos in Afghanistan and Iraq created seams and fault lines that damaged the prospects of success and undermined the US government’s ability to learn and adapt. Management scholars have discussed the chronic problem of organizational silos in business, and their efforts could be useful for reducing silos’ impact on the conduct of war.
Military and management literature discuss micromanagement and over-centralization. The advance of information technology could be making micromanagement from national capitals more likely, especially as the leadership requirements at the strategic and operational levels remain opaque. A systemic study of these issues could identify ways to adapt national security structures to twenty-first-century realities.8
Manage patron-client challenges. The patron-client issues discussed in this book can help political scientists build upon the principal-agent theory in national security issues. The latter, introduced in chapter 8, addresses how dissimilarities in incentives between principal and agent can affect behaviors. Differences in strategy and sociocultural context between supporting country (patron) and supported country (client) can add complexity. Subtle differences can create friction. The United States wanted to win quickly and leave Afghanistan and Iraq. Host nation elites in both conflicts, however, manipulated American forces and resources to consolidate their grip on power, which pushed aggrieved citizens to the insurgencies and prolonged the war. The Iraqi government promoted the view that Sunni Arab insurgents loyal to tribal sheiks were the same as AQI and Ba’athists. The Afghan government played on western presumptions that the Taliban and al Qaeda were the same to convince the United States to destroy the Taliban, thus eliminating a rival political group.
Similarly, the Afghan government’s insistence that the Taliban were Pakistan-controlled terrorists who needed to be killed or induced to defect conflicted with the post-2009 US assessment that the Taliban were an insurgent group who could support negotiations. The disconnect between Washington and Kabul undermined the 2010–2012 talks. Ironically, the negotiating position of the United States and the Afghan government was much more robust in 2011 and 2012, when US and Afghan officials in Kabul resisted talks, than in 2019, when the Trump administration committed to them. Strategic empathy and the effects of misaligned strategies between patron and client need more study.9
Assess the factors that make transition a realistic outcome. Systemic patron-client problems raise questions about the efficacy of the crossover point concept in counterinsurgency. This idea underpinned how the United States tried to limit its commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, and Vietnam.10 Security forces tend to reflect the political nature of the host nation. Kleptocratic governments, for instance, are likely to ensure their security forces participate in self-enrichment, which creates perverse incentives that erode readiness. Rather than linear growth in performance, as the US military tends to assume, local troops tend to hit a glass ceiling or even degrade as their size increases. Increased resources do not create symmetrical outcomes. Perhaps no amount of external support can enable a toxic host nation to reach the crossover point.
The impacts of sociocultural and historical context on the development of host nation security forces have been underappreciated. For instance, in Afghanistan, the US military was mirror imaging when designing the Afghan National Army. The use of western-style tactics, personnel, logistics, and command and control systems often grated against the capabilities and norms of their Afghan counterparts. Western systems, based on well-educated soldiers at the junior enlisted levels, were being fitted onto a nascent Afghan force that was mostly illiterate and led by people who expected highly centralized control and discouraged initiative and risk-taking. The result has been a high degree of dependency on western forces even after 15 years of capacity-building.11 Studies of what kinds of tactical, logistical, and command and control systems work better for developing world militaries could advance our understanding of patron-client problems and address them.
Develop a theory of wartime negotiations for irregular war. Every actor wants to negotiate at the highest possible leverage, but how well can one predict when that point might occur? As the cases discussed here have shown, unilateral efforts to start a peace process will likely fail (unless one side is capitulating). Diplomatic efforts that are episodic or aimed at early high-profile concessions, both American tendencies, could be increasing the failure rate. The diplomacy needed to end civil wars and insurgencies could be very different from that used in conventional wars. The former might need subtle, deliberately paced, and continuous efforts to be successful.
Examine patron-client challenges during wartime negotiations. In each case, the host nation government discouraged the United States from outreach and talks with the insurgency or preinsurgency opposition. This systemic pattern could be prolonging conflicts. Examining the outcomes of wars with early settlements could illuminate whether an external power tends to be better off negotiating up front—particularly before significant military intervention. Such a study could also determine if a country’s status as a superpower makes it more vulnerable to quagmires because its less powerful allies have limited influence.
More broadly, this book has implications for the future study of civil-military relations.
Clarify the political purpose of irregular war. Samuel Huntington, in The Soldier and the State, famously outlined the difference between subjective control of the military, in which civilian rulers co-opt the military, thereby reducing its professionalism, and objective control, in which military professionalism can thrive far removed from politics.12 In the latter model, while still under civilian control, the military enjoys a significant degree of professional autonomy in its unique field of expertise—the art and science of war. This principle of civilian control is unquestioned among senior officials in the United States and NATO countries. That autonomy, however, is not absolute. Statesmen must demand that military operations support political objectives. Eliot Cohen discusses how successful wartime leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion challenged and sometimes overrode the generals.13 Intervening powers, however, may have a more difficult time articulating a clear political purpose because the stakes for the intervening power are rarely, if ever, existential and may be indirect. Because political and diplomatic factors are so decisive for irregular wars, there might not exist any military objectives that could plausibly deliver policy outcomes.
Refine agency theory in civil-military relations. Peter Feaver uses the principal-agent method to challenge Huntington.14 He argues that the military operates under incentives like any other “agent” based on the levels of monitoring and expectations of punishment for shirking (not fully obeying civilian orders and guidance). In his view, uniformed officials have the right to provide advice in their field of specialized expertise, but not the right to question or circumvent even foolish orders from civilian leaders.15 This formulation reduces the role of the military to technicians who follow orders, even if obeying them has catastrophic consequences. This method tightens civilian control but removes the relationship’s moral and ethical dimensions.
These models are incomplete. Afghanistan and Iraq show examples of military leaders interpreting civilian guidance in ways that reinforce their existing views and practices, but that may have been at odds with the intentions of the president or secretary of defense. The Huntington model does not address this kind of problem. The Cohen model falls short as well: while he might expect civilian leaders to question more rigorously the military’s execution of guidance, an overloaded NSC in the highly centralized national security structure might not have the bandwidth to recognize subtle deviations. Agency theory might describe this as evidence of shirking. That characterization could be accurate in some instances, but such behavior could also be a product of cognitive bias by the military or false cognates used by political leaders. How can civilians properly control the military instrument when there is no official language and set of concepts that enable them to articulate objectives, develop sound strategies, and govern civil-military integration? In each case presented in this book, civil-military miscommunication damaged outcomes.
Differentiate the military’s role. More profoundly, scholars should question the military’s elevated position in wartime. Each case has illustrated how the military was necessary but not sufficient for success and showed that the political, diplomatic, and economic domains operated concurrently with the military, rather than sequentially (as is often the norm in conventional war). The conventional wisdom that the military possesses unique professional expertise in strategy is likely part of the reason that each president relied on them for options. The choices framed by Defense were inadequate because they emphasized only a single instrument of national power.
The scholarship on civil-military relations should thus differentiate the military’s role in war-waging versus combat. For the former, the military might be a co-equal partner with other elements of national power. The military’s professional expertise is more precisely in warfighting. Refining the military’s role in war-waging may put civil-military relations on a sounder footing and improve America’s ability to successfully develop and implement strategies that have a reasonable chance of success.