Re: West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate - the expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, schools and government — is dead

[wakalukong]

US policy in IRAQ and in Afghanistan is a Failure .


West Point taught US military NOTHING .




May 28, 9:29 pm, rst0 <rst0w...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fatehttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/world/at-west-point-asking-if-a-war...
> By ELISABETH BUMILLER
> Published: May 27, 2012 75 Comments
>
> WEST POINT, N.Y. — For two centuries, the United States Military
> Academy has produced generals for America’s wars, among them Ulysses
> S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton and David H. Petraeus. It is
> where President George W. Bush delivered what became known as his pre-
> emption speech, which sought to justify the invasion of Iraq, and
> where President Obama told the nation he was sending an additional
> 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan.
>
> Now at another critical moment in American military history, the
> faculty here on the commanding bend in the Hudson River is deep in its
> own existential debate. Narrowly, the argument is whether the
> counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan — the troop-
> heavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the
> locals by building roads, schools and government — is dead.
>
> Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade
> in two wars.
>
> “Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s
> military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in
> Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not
> worth the effort. In my view.”
>
> Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one
> side of the divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J.
> Meese, the head of the academy’s influential social sciences
> department and a top adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul
> when General Petraeus commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> “Nobody should ever underestimate the costs and the risks involved
> with counterinsurgency, but neither should you take that off the
> table,” Colonel Meese said, also in an interview last week.
> Counterinsurgency, he said, “was broadly successful in being able to
> have the Iraqis govern themselves.”
>
> The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as
> a whole as the United States withdraws without clear victory from
> Afghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On
> the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, the defense secretary,
> Leon E. Panetta, called the Taliban “resilient” after 10 and a half
> years of war.)
>
> But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics —
> more than 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan
> and more than $1 trillion spent — hit home. On Saturday, 1,032 cadets
> graduated as second lieutenants, sent off in a commencement speech by
> Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with the promise that they are “the
> key to whatever challenges the world has in store.”
>
> Many of them are apprehensive about what they will find in Afghanistan
> — the news coming back from friends is often not good — but still hope
> to make it there before the war is largely over. “We’ve spent the past
> four years of our lives getting ready for this,” said Lt. Daniel
> Prial, who graduated Saturday and said he was drawn to West Point
> after his father survived as a firefighter in New York City on Sept.
> 11, 2001. “Ultimately you want to see that come to fruition.”
>
> At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upper
> reaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers
> on the West Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and
> challenging orthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book
> titled “Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency,”
> is chief among them.
>
> Colonel Gentile’s argument is that the United States pursued a narrow
> policy goal in Afghanistan — defeating Al Qaeda there and keeping it
> from using the country as a base — with what he called “a maximalist
> operational” approach. “Strategy should employ resources of a state to
> achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure
> spent,” he said.
>
> Counterinsurgency could ultimately work in Afghanistan, he said, if
> the United States were willing to stay there for generations. “I’m
> talking 70, 80, 90 years,” he said.
>
> Colonel Gentile, who has photographs in his office of five young
> soldiers in his battalion killed in the 2006 bloodshed in Baghdad,
> acknowledged that it was difficult to question the wars in the face of
> the losses.
>
> “But war ultimately is a political act, and I take comfort and pride
> that we as a military organization, myself as a commander of those
> soldiers who died, the others who were wounded and I think the
> American Army writ large, that we did our duty,” he said. “And there
> is honor in itself of doing your duty. I mean you could probably push
> back on me and say you’re still saying the war’s not worth it. But I’m
> a soldier, and I go where I’m told to go, and I do my duty as best I
> can.”
>
> Colonel Meese’s opposing argument is that warfare cannot be divorced
> from its political, economic and psychological dimensions — the view
> advanced in the bible of counterinsurgents, the U.S. Army/Marine Corps
> Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was revised under General Petraeus
> in 2006. Hailed as a new way of warfare (although drawing on
> counterinsurgencies fought by the United States in Vietnam in the
> 1960s and the Philippines from 1899 to 1902, among others), the manual
> promoted the protection of civilian populations, reconstruction and
> development aid.
>
> "Nobody should ever underestimate the costs and the risks involved
> with counterinsurgency, but neither should you take that off the
> table,” said Col. Michael J. Meese.
>
> “Warfare in a dangerous environment is ultimately a human endeavor,
> and engaging with the population is something that has to be done in
> order to try to influence their trajectory,” Colonel Meese said.
>
> In Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal so aggressively pushed the
> doctrine when he was the top commander there that troops complained
> they had to hold their firepower. General Petraeus issued guidelines
> that clarified that troops had the right to self-defense when he took
> over, but by then counterinsurgency had attracted powerful critics,
> chief among them Mr. Biden and veteran military officers who
> denigrated it as armed nation building.
>
> When Mr. Obama announced last June that he would withdraw by the end
> of this summer the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan —
> earlier than the military wanted or expected — the doctrine seemed to
> be on life support. General Petraeus has since become director of the
> Central Intelligence Agency, where his mission is covertly killing the
> enemy, not winning the people.
>
> Now, as American troops head home from Afghanistan, where the new
> strategy will be a narrow one of hunting insurgents, the arguments at
> West Point are playing out in war colleges, academic journals and
> books, and will be for decades. (The argument has barely begun over
> whether violence came down in Iraq in 2007 because of the American
> troop increase or the Anbar Awakening, when Sunni tribes turned
> against the insurgency.) To Col. Gregory A. Daddis, a West Point
> history professor, the debate is also about the role of the military
> as the war winds down. “We’re not really sure right now what the Army
> is for,” he said.
>
> To officers like Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, much of the debate presents
> a false either-or dilemma. General McMaster, who used
> counterinsurgency to secure the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 and
> returned recently from Kabul as head of a task force fighting
> corruption, said that without counterinsurgency, “There’s a tendency
> to use the application of military force as an end in itself.”
>
> To John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in Iraq,
> wrote a book about counterinsurgency and now teaches at the United
> States Naval Academy, American foreign policy should “ensure that we
> never have to do this again.”
>
> Does counterinsurgency work? “Yes,” he said. “Is it worth what you
> paid for it? That’s an entirely different question.”