Having seen how the Powell Doctrine has influenced how the United States has thought about the use of military force since the end of the Vietnam War, and how the Doctrine has both influenced US policy and acted on occasion as a frustration for US policy makers seeking a more flexible attitude to the use of the massive military power that the US has at its disposal. Three overarching points come to mind. First the extraordinary longevity of the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate that led to it. Second the fact that although Colin Powell proved to be a very powerful spokesman for a particular set of ideas, these ideas were in no way personal to him, but rather reflected the broad consensus within the US military as to how and when the United States should resort to the use of military force. Third the fact that the various elements of the Powell Doctrine have such clear intellectual relationships to one another.
In order to understand both the longevity and the resilience of the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate behind it we must go back to the beginning of our story. The US experience of the Vietnam War had a profound effect both on the US armed forces and the US in general. As we’ve seen throughout this book every element of the Powell Doctrine can trace its origins back to the Vietnam War and as we’ve also seen the Powell Doctrine is not simply about the US military in isolation trying to find the lessons from the Vietnam War. It was also about the US armed forces trying to respond to changes in wider American society brought about by the war; this is particularly true of the element of the Powell Doctrine dealing with the need for public and Congressional support.
By any standard the US armed forces singularly failed to achieve anything resembling a victory in Vietnam and the United States as a whole comprehensively failed to achieve its objective of a non-communist Vietnam. But beyond that, as we’ve seen, the war also left the US army in a lamentable state, eaten alive by poor discipline, increasing drug use and a technological gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, that narrowed significantly during the Vietnam period. On top of this Vietnam proved to be one of the longest wars in American history. The length of the war ensured that entire generations of junior officers and NCOs had their formative experience of military life in South East Asia. Colin Powell and his contemporaries who chose to remain in military service after the end of Vietnam were faced therefore with the task of rebuilding the US armed forces both in a moral and a material sense and perhaps as crucially rebuilding the public’s faith in the US armed forces as the guardian not only of US interests but also of US values. It is hardly surprising therefore that a whole generation of officers would seek to avoid any future situation which might resemble Vietnam. The length of the war goes a long way to explaining the longevity of the Powell Doctrine. Put simply, the huge number of men who served in Vietnam guaranteed that it would be the dominant experience of several generations of high ranking US officers. Indeed the last generation of Vietnam veterans has only relatively recently retired.
If the length and the cost of the war in Vietnam go a long way to explaining the longevity of the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate associated with it, what is less obvious is why the thinking that led to the Powell Doctrine achieved such dominance and thinking in the US officer corps in the post-Vietnam period. After all, as we’ve seen, the ideas behind the Powell Doctrine are not without their controversies and the US military might have responded to the defeat in Vietnam in different ways.
Vietnam was a highly complex, highly ambiguous conflict in which to fight. As we’ve seen throughout this book the bias of the Powell Doctrine is towards conflicts which are not ambiguous, in which the enemy is clearly identifiable so as to allow overwhelming force to be brought to bear against them, in which national interests are clearly involved, in which the objectives of the United States are clearly understood, in which the people of the United States are engaged in and can clearly understand the nature and reasons for conflict and in which the US has a clear strategy for bringing the conflict to an end. If the Powell Doctrine stands for one thing above all else, it is clarity. Ultimately the single most powerful reason why there was such consensus behind the ideas that would form the Powell Doctrine within the US military is that they seemed like a set of ideas that would not only avoid the United States ever getting in to specific circumstances similar to Vietnam but would serve as a way of allowing the military to make sure that its civilian chain of command had been rigorous in its thinking as to why and how the United States should involve itself in any kind of conflict and to try and avoid what was seen as the loose thinking and easy assumptions that civilian policy makers were thought to have engaged in in the run up to military commitment in Vietnam.
If this book has made one significant contribution in the scholarship surrounding the Powell Doctrine it is this; that the phrase “Powell Doctrine” should not simply be taken as another way of saying the need for “overwhelming force.” As this book has demonstrated, overwhelming force is inarguably part of the Powell Doctrine, but it is not the whole. Rather the Powell Doctrine has a series of different elements that have an intellectual relationship to one another which taken together form not only a coherent body of thought, but a distinct view of the world and the place of the United States within the world. There is not space within this conclusion to examine all the intellectual relationships between the various elements of the Powell Doctrine and the body of the book has demonstrated a number of them. But the last thing to say about the interconnecting nature of the Powell Doctrine is that because of these linkages it is not possible to modify the Powell Doctrine without so fundamentally altering it as to make it something else entirely. Take out any one element of the Powell Doctrine and what we are left with is no longer the Powell Doctrine.
The debate surrounding the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate that led to it is part of a much wider debate about what the appropriate role for the world’s only superpower is or should be in international affairs. There is also a debate about what the proper constitutional balance of power ought to be between civilian policy makers and the military and indeed between the executive and the legislative, in what is as well as being a superpower, one of the world’s oldest constitutional democracies. Perhaps the greatest indication of the depth to which the ideas behind the Powell Doctrine have penetrated these debates is the fact that civilian policy makers, particularly in Congress, now invoke the Powell Doctrine without actually realizing that is what they are doing. For example Republican Senator Rand Paul’s rebuttal to President Obama’s call for military action in Syria:
The Reagan Doctrine grew out of his experience in the Middle East. Reagan’s defense secretary spelled out a systematic approach to our involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts. First, the American people must be supportive—overwhelmingly supportive—but most importantly our mission must be to win. There is no clearly defined mission in Syria, no clearly defined American interest.1
One cannot hope to find a more concise summation of the Powell Doctrine’s call for public support and clear objectives except the Republican Senator from Kentucky misattributes where these ideas come from. They are not the preserve of Ronald Reagan, but rather the collective property of the United States military and its experience of its war in Vietnam.
So what can the Powell Doctrine tell us about the contemporary security challenges that the United States faces? Three points stand out.
First, there is a limit to what military force alone can achieve. When we look at the Powell Doctrine stipulation for clear objectives and the Powell Doctrine stipulation that force should only be used in the “vital national interest,” what we see is a caution that force is not the answer to most problems and that military force used in a political vacuum is unlikely to be successful. It is also possible to interpret clear objectives as meaning militarily achievable objectives. As we’ve seen from our examination of US policy towards Vietnam and recent US policy towards Iraq and Afghanistan military force whilst indispensable cannot substitute for political will or civilian expertise when it comes to trying to build the institutions of a modern state in areas of the world which have been through deep political and sociological trauma and who possess weak or non-existent engagement with modernity.
Second, the US or any democracy should only take on military action that can command sustained public and thus political support. In an age dominated by volunteer armies the link between citizenry and service in the armed forces is no longer as clear as it once was. Nevertheless, the US armed forces are still reliant on the support of the majority of the civilian population, both in tangible and intangible ways. Most directly, the US citizen as tax payer still has to fund the US armed forces and the wars they undertake. In a more intangible sense, the soldier whose life is at stake in combat needs to feel that their sacrifice is not only appreciated but understood and supported. One of the reasons why morale in the US armed forces suffered so badly during the Vietnam War was the feeling particularly towards the end of that conflict that the sacrifice of the average GI was neither appreciated nor understood by the vast majority of the American people.
Third, if force is going to be used it should be used in such a way as to make sure that the US achieves what it sets out to achieve. Despite the fact that the US armed forces remain on paper the most formidable military force in the world today, it is also true that the ambiguous nature of what the US has achieved or failed to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan has damaged the US’s reputation both on a moral and in a practical sense. Morally because instances like the torture of Iraqi detainees or the death of civilians weakens not only the US’s image abroad but also causes the American people to question whether the United States is living up to the values it professes. In a practical sense, Iraq and Afghanistan have provided templates around which potential enemies of the US from the Horn of Africa through the Middle East can draw on both for inspiration and as a template of how to engage a conventionally stronger opponent. Therefore in the future when the US decides to use military force it is vital if it wishes to maintain its reputation as the world’s strongest military power that it prevail. We can see this most clearly in the Powell Doctrine’s call for overwhelming force and again in its call for clear objectives.
The Powell Doctrine was an attempt to make sure that the mistakes made in the Vietnam War were not made again. As such its lessons were of a time and a place and it is not reasonable to expect that the Powell Doctrine will endure unaltered as some kind of eternal guide post for military action. But as demonstrated throughout this book, the questions it asks about the nature and circumstances under which the US should use military force remain worth asking.
1 Sen. Rand Paul (2013) Response to President’s Speech on Military Action in Syria. [Online] Available at http://www.paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=959 [Accessed September 6, 2013].