Through the summer, U.S. soldiers continued to die at Iraqi hands, as did a large U.N. mission and various Iraqis. What sort of victory did the United States win the previous spring? Is the new kind of war, which had seemed so dazzlingly successful at that time, seriously flawed? Moreover, has the George W. Bush administration erred badly in associating Iraq with the global war on terror?
The answers to these questions will shape U.S. forces over the coming decade. If it turns out that a military victory such as that achieved in the spring of 2003 does not equate to the actual destruction of a regime, then U.S. military power might be less relevant than we imagine. Conversely, if the current Iraqi problems are transitory, then all the current experience means is that we need patience in dealing with the aftermath of war.
One feature of the Iraqi problem ought to seem familiar to naval historians. Iraq is attracting numerous jihadists and members of al Qaeda who see Iraq as the most important current battleground. That often is presented as a disastrous consequence of U.S. policy. The larger U.S. policy, however, is to hunt down exactly those individuals who are now being attracted to Iraq. It is the one place in the Arab world where large numbers of U.S. troops can operate fairly freely and in which a large segment of the population (Kurds and Shiites) is likely to be inhospitable to them. Isn't that reminiscent of the convoy strategy of the past, in its offensive aspect (a way to bring submarines to the hunters, rather than the other way around)? It also is similar to the way in which the strike fleet envisaged under the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s was expected to draw out Soviet sea-denial units to fight a decisive battle in the Norwegian Sea.
Given what has been said, it seems unlikely that this outcome was expected or desired. The hope has been that the mere existence of a stable and free Iraq would transform the rest of the Middle East in a positive way. The elimination of the Saddam Hussein regime also would, it was hoped, drastically reduce support for the terrorism now rife on Israeli borders. These hopes still seem quite reasonable. They also explain why those who do not want any sort of open society in the area regard our operation in Iraq as unacceptable. That this is not mere fantasy is demonstrated by a book, now circulating in the Arab world, by a recently killed senior member of al Qaeda, Yussuf al-Ayyeri (also known as Abu Mohammed). He argues that the only acceptable objective is to maintain the purest form of the Muslim faith, and that the modern democratic secular state is its deadly enemy. Creating a democracy in Iraq would be a disaster, in this view, because people would prefer it to the form of Islam al Qaeda espouses.
The implication is that any true adherent of al Qaeda will see the destruction of a secular democracy in Iraq as even more important than killing Americans at home. Reading a summary of al-Ayyeri's book, one is struck by its fear that exactly what we are promoting (democracy and prosperity for the people of the Middle East) will have exactly the effects we seek; for example, making people too interested in their welfare to continue to offer their lives for al Qaeda in the jihad it proclaims. This point can be made another way: in places such as Afghanistan, al Qaeda and its friends were the only sources of material wealth, so they attracted adherents. Poverty was their friend and the basis for their power. Prosperity would be ruinous. It seems that, during the Cold War, the Soviet Communist Party had much the same point of view, though it was espousing a different kind of faith.
Thus, the fight in Iraq was worthwhile, and it remains worthwhile. One measure of its validity is the scale of opposition. Conversely, many of those fighting us are exactly the individuals we have been trying to catch. As long as they are fighting in Iraq, they are not trying to seize airliners.
The argument that proving that bad acts bring ultimate consequences even for Middle Eastern regimes also still is valid. Since 11 September 2001, a great deal has been written about the claimed complicity either of the Saudi regime or of very prominent Saudis in the attack on the United States, the argument being that the Wahabi ideology at the heart of the regime is so fundamentally antiWestern that it serves as the basis of terrorism. Whether or not that is true, it is unlikely that the United States plans to conquer Saudi Arabia in retaliation. The resolve demonstrated in Iraq, however, leaves those in power wondering. It probably is fairest to say that in the past they supported al Qaeda because they were fearful mainly of an implicit internal threat. The effect of Iraq is to demonstrate that there also is an external threat, presented by the United States, and that the rulers must deal with both. That tends to temper the threat presented by al Qaeda.
All of this has important implications for U.S. force structure. The supply of al Qaeda operatives is not infinite, but it is not likely to run out immediately. It would seem to follow that a U.S. security presence in Iraq is needed on a fairly long-term basis. The U.S. Army units currently in Iraq were designed to fight other large army units. They are well equipped for that, but not for collecting intelligence and hunting down terrorists. It seems likely that, over time, they will be able to hunt down the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime as well as the financial reserves used to sponsor continuing attacks on them. Iraqi borders are porous, however, and al Qaeda operatives probably will continue to filter through. Given an appropriate U.S. security posture inside Iraq, that would be a useful rather than a disastrous result. That might require, however, that the U.S. force in Iraq be reconfigured.
A numerous but lower-technology (or less lethal) army is better adapted to occupying large swathes of territory if it does not face a concentrated enemy. If the force needs less mechanized equipment, then support units are not needed, at least as supporters. They ought to be convertible to light combat troops suited to keeping the peace in Iraq. Conversely, it ought to be less expensive to add such units than to add heavily equipped ones. The Army naturally will resist any such moves because it will argue that it is most valuable as a heavy combat force, to destroy enemy armies. Yet, what happens after the enemy army has been broken? The assumption, which seems to have been almost universal in Washington before victory in Iraq, was that once the enemy had laid down arms, there would be little or no need for U.S. armed presence.
Yet, there is no historical precedent for such an assumption. The occupation of Germany often has been taken as the precedent for Iraq. Very substantial U.S. military forces had to be maintained in Germany for many years after 1945. One reason for the sheer strength of the force was to preclude the sort of armed resistance the Nazis tried to set up before their government collapsed. It also helped that the average German was painfully aware of the sort of firepower the Allies had wielded, not to mention very war-weary. Iraqis have had some of the same experiences, but not on nearly the same scale.
It also is relevant to note that occupation required a very different kind of army than the one that had achieved the victory. Later histories tended to deride the occupation force, the usual interpretation being that occupation had turned it so soft that it no longer was an army. That probably is unfair. Occupation was very different from combat; it demanded a different set of skills and capabilities. This difference caused real problems, because in the late 1940s the Army in Germany was both occupier and defender against a possible Soviet invasion. Although the invasion never came in Germany, the outbreak of war in Korea, and the initial failures by the Army brought from occupation duty in Japan, illustrated the problem.
No matter what sort of army we retain in Iraq, it cannot easily move anywhere else while it is doing its job there. If the job in Iraq is to deal with al Qaeda forces, then that job is so important that repositioning would be bad strategy.
We might require a transformation in which the mass of the Army often finds itself functioning as a stabilization and occupation force. Its operations might be considered the primary armed ones in the global war on terror. To carry out such operations, it would have to invest heavily in the sort of large-scale surveillance that can detect and trap terrorists. We ought also to be investing heavily in means of automatically translating both documents and speech, so that we quickly can gain intelligence. Much has been done in both areas over the past decades, but far more is needed. Some of the relevant technology also would be useful to the Department of Homeland Security, and presumably it and the Defense Department are working together in that direction.
In this transformation, the Marines would gain more of the land combat role. Their concept of operations would be to smash an enemy and then hand control to Army units. That might seem radical, but it is consistent with the idea that the Marines "smash in the door" and, remarkably, it also is consistent with U.S. policy in the 1950s, a time that has parallels with the present.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the Navy-Marine Corps team as the means of fighting whatever small wars broke out, thanks to their firepower and mobility. The Air Force was most important as a deterrent, to keep the Soviets from starting World War III. The Army was the valued presence force, both in Europe and in Korea, which maintained stability and promised that these countries would grow into prosperous allies. That was not a bad idea; it worked reasonably well. Obviously, this is not 1955, but perhaps the ideas of the past deserve another look.