5/30/2014
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When President Obama addressed the graduating class at West Point on May 28, he was speaking to the future leadership of a military service that is having a hard time defining its place in national strategy. There was no need to dwell on that question for a dozen years after the 9-11 attacks — over two-thirds of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were soldiers — but now those wars are nearly ended, the White House is shifting its strategic focus to the Pacific, and the President says non-military options are the preferred way of dealing with security challenges. Ground forces will still have a role to play in this emerging landscape, but the political culture looks more favorably disposed to the light footprint and fleeting presence of the Marine Corps.
Army efforts to articulate a compelling vision of its future are hampered by two obstacles. First, many politicians and policymakers don’t want to know the truth about what the future may hold for the joint force. Just as Washington avoids talking about the inevitability of nuclear deterrence one day failing, so it doesn’t want to discuss the possibility that tomorrow’s worst nightmares might find sanctuary in the back alleys of Cairo or Karachi — where we will have to go and root them out. Second, the Army has an inferiority complex about talking to policy elites hailing from Harvard, so it tries to dress up military imperatives in pretentious jargon that undercuts their urgency.
Thus the Army message is a bit muddled, and as a result it is taking disproportionate cuts in Washington’s budget wars just as it took disproportionate casualties in overseas contingencies. Most of its major modernization initiatives for replacing Reagan-era combat systems have died, its active-duty force structure is shrinking fast, and Chief of Staff Ray Odierno recently told Congress his service is less ready to fight today than it was on the eve of 9-11. Clearly, the Army needs to do a better job of explaining what the consequences of demobilization might be. With that in mind, I’d like to offer a partial list of ways in which the Army is strategically unique — in other words, a compendium of essential missions that only the Army can perform in support of national strategy. If the Army is allowed to wither, these are the capabilities America will lose.
1. The ability to seize and secure extensive areas for indefinite periods. You can’t control a place by flying planes over it or shelling it from offshore. To secure land you have to put boots on the ground. And if it’s a lot of land that needs to be secured for a long time, only the U.S. Army has the requisite resources. This isn’t just about size — the Army is about five times the size of the Marine Corps when you count their respective reserve components — but also about skills and culture. A Marine officer returning from overseas deployment told me he wasn’t all that concerned about getting trucks with better protection against improvised explosive devices, because he figured his unit would be in and out of a country before IED’s became a problem. People in the Army don’t think like that.
2. The ability to sustain the rest of the joint force through continuous ground presence. Because the Army has the staying power to occupy vast tracts of territory over prolonged periods, it is postured to provide support for the other services that they cannot provide themselves. This support includes basing infrastructure, surface communications, logistical networks, force protection, liaison with civil authorities, and the full panoply of other services associated with an ongoing presence. Naval forces by definition are postured to operate from the sea and air forces often operate from remote locations, but when extended presence in some hostile place is required, the Army has the capacity to sustain the entire joint force.
There are some vital military missions that only the Army can perform effectively — like seizing and securing large areas for long periods. (Retrieved from Wikimedia)
3. The ability to conduct protracted counter-insurgency operations. Effective counter-insurgency operations typically require placing warfighters in the immediate vicinity of local populations to pacify villages, protect noncombatants, and gradually win “hearts and minds.” Such operations are unpopular with the U.S. electorate, but lacking the ability to successfully prosecute them is an invitation to our enemies to wage “asymmetric” warfare. The Marine Corps has many of the same skills the Army does for this kind of combat, but it often takes years to defeat irregular forces rooted in local culture, and a sizable campaign would inevitably degrade Marine performance of other missions. Soldiers are better suited to conducting such campaigns.
4. The ability to root out adversaries entrenched in large urban centers. Many developing nations are witnessing massive migrations of rural populations into cities, creating huge urban centers. It is inevitable that terrorists and insurgents will increasingly seek sanctuary in these sprawling built-up areas, just as they previously hid in jungles. The only way to defeat them is to go into the cities and root them out — without causing mass civilian casualties that might stoke support for their cause. Urban warfare is a labor-intensive, arduous activity for which the Army is far better suited than the other services. The Marine Corps acquitted itself well in the two battles of Fallujah, but that city’s population was barely 200,000 — a city like Karachi, with 13 million inhabitants, is simply beyond the capacity of any service other than the Army to occupy and control.
5. The ability to train foreign security forces in all facets of land warfare. The Obama Administration has from its inception placed emphasis on equipping overseas partners and allies with the means to provide for their own security, rather than depending on the U.S. For countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt and Nigeria, training is at least as important as getting the latest military technology. The Army has the most experience with doing such training, and because it is postured for operations across the full spectrum of conflict, it can tailor training to conditions that specific countries face. The Marine Corps is focused mainly on amphibious warfare and expeditionary operations, whereas most recipients of U.S. training are focused on internal defense and protection against aggressive neighbors.
6. The ability to support civil authorities in coping with disruptions. The Army is firmly rooted in the fifty states through the National Guard. As a result, it is often the first military service that is called on to help states and localities cope with major disruptions. Normally this involves the aftermath of natural disasters, but it can also mean dealing with civil disturbances such as the riots that occurred following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition to having a much bigger domestic footprint away from the coasts than the sea services, the types of equipment the Army operates and the kinds of skills it sustains for conducting land warfare are better suited to mounting large-scale civil support operations than those of the other services.
7. The ability to limit escalation by providing proportional military options. The Army isn’t responsible for nuclear forces the way the Air Force and Navy are, but it still plays an important role in global deterrence by providing proportional military options across the spectrum of conflict that reduce the pressure for escalation. For instance, if Russia’s recent aggression in Ukraine had led to threats against European NATO countries such as Poland, the U.S. had a wide array of conventional military options that it could have exercised without being forced to make the awful choice between use of nuclear weapons or local defeat. Like China, Russia is mainly a land power, so having a substantial land-warfare capability is crucial to dealing with potential provocations from Moscow without having to escalate to use of weapons of mass destruction — an intrinsically destabilizing action.
8. The ability to deter through forward presence that conveys resolve. America’s forward military presence sends a signal of resolve to potential aggressors, but some kinds of presence are more convincing than others. Aircraft overflights or warships sitting offshore just don’t convey the level of commitment that troops on the ground do. In the case of Korea, that visible commitment of ground forces has persisted for six decades. The Army is the only U.S. military service with sufficient manpower and resources to sustain such a commitment, and thus it plays a vital deterrent role in places like Northeast Asia. The relief of U.S. allies in Eastern Europe when relatively modest contingents of soldiers were dispatched to their countries during the Ukraine crisis speaks volumes about the deterrent effect of U.S. “boots on the ground.”
This is only a partial list of the kinds of roles and missions that the Army is uniquely well suited to perform. Air power, sea power, and amphibious warfare are vitally important facets of the joint force’s warfighting portfolio, but there are some things that only a big, well trained and equipped Army can do. It would be exceedingly irresponsible to let America’s Army lose its edge in the current fiscal and political environment. As Edward Gibbon observed of the Roman Legions in his monumental history of the ancient world’s greatest empire, “They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war.”
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