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monopoly of force, as governments normally do. Any military,
police, or paramilitary forces in the country are therefore controlled
by the government and are sufficiently loyal to it that they do not
present any threat to it now. They are exceedingly unlikely to be
stable and reliable allies in an effort to depose that government and
establish a new order from which its friends and supporters are
almost certain to be excluded. Whatever the wisdom of simply
disbanding the Iraqi army from the standpoint of fueling the insur-
gency, it was not a foolish decision for the reason that it deprived
the coalition of forces that could reliably have been used to main-
tain order. It could never have served that function, and neither
could the military or police of Iran or North Korea.8
If indigenous forces are to be used, therefore, they can only be
new formations developed after the end of major combat opera-
tions. U.S. strategy can be more or less sophisticated in allowing
members of the former military and police forces into the new
bodies, and the wisdom of such decisions will depend heavily on
specific circumstances. But the creation of usable military and
police units will rely on training by American and coalition troops
after the government has fallen.
Such training had long been a Special Forces task, but Iraq and
Afghanistan have both revealed that the scale of the requirement for
trainers is far beyond what the Special Forces can support. In the
future, all ground forces units must be prepared to serve as military
advisers and trainers to help ready indigenous forces to replace
them. Even with such a change in mission, the U.S. military will
find that it still takes considerable time to form new indigenous
forces. Months of training will be required even in the most opti-
mistic scenarios (those in which units are composed of former
police or military personnel with considerable training and reliable
loyalties, for example). There is simply a minimum period of time
42 OF MEN AND MATERIEL
required to form and train any military or police unit to basic
competence. Since the training mission will need the support of a
substantial number of U.S. and coalition forces if it is to proceed
rapidly, there will be a significant period in which many U.S. troops
and almost all indigenous forces are engaged not in maintaining
order or resisting budding insurgencies, but in training.9
If the United States sends inadequate numbers of ground troops
to begin with, this period will almost certainly result in the collapse
of civil order, the growth of criminality and violence, and the bur-
geoning of insurgent movements that aim to thwart the establish-
ment of a new order conducive to U.S. and coalition interests.10
As we have seen repeatedly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, it
is much more difficult for a nascent government to fight an insur-
gency that has been allowed to take root than it would have been
to prevent it from establishing itself to begin with. Politics abhors a
vacuum. If the new government is incapable of establishing secu-
rity, and American and coalition forces do not do so, then groups
opposed to the coalition s interests will step into the breach in the
guise of maintaining security themselves. Failure to establish and
maintain order from the moment the bullets stop flying in any
given area is an invitation to disorder and insurgency. Reliance on
indigenous forces to justify smaller-than-necessary U.S. troop levels
is likely to guarantee a repetition of the sorts of problems the United
States has encountered in Iraq.
Is it proposed, then, to prepare the U.S. Army to fight the last
war better? Yes, because the last war highlighted truths and prob-
lems that had been visible in many previous struggles. As we have
seen, the majority of America s wars have required the protracted
deployment of troops to secure the peace. Many have required the
establishment of indigenous forces to replace those that had been
shattered in the struggle or dissolved with the old regime. The
American military has encountered each repetition of this require-
ment as though it were a new problem, has done very little until the
past few years to develop meaningful doctrine, and has largely
wished that each such experience would be the last. It is time finally
to internalize this basic lesson about the nature of war termination
PROTRACTED WARS AND THE ARMY S FUTURE 43
and prepare the Army to fight the last war, a series of previous wars,
and many likely wars of the future.
Numbers Matter
The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army, both active and reserve,
will continue to be a critical determinant of America s ability to win [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]