Purchase and Promotion: A Military at War with Itself (Part I: The Army).
Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the American military to begin to think about 21st century warfare in a realistic way. Post-cold-war, the military gave lip service to the idea of reforming and rewriting how it fought wars, but actually continued down the same conventional path it had before. The Pentagon talked about transformation but rarely backed up that talk with effective action. The military might speak of the 21st century, but their focus in weapons acquisition and in promotion remained firmly locked in the 20th.
Thus, the Air Force continued to plan to buy the F-22 Raptor, whose sole real use was to fight Soviet fighter planes which no longer existed. The Navy continued to buy large aircraft carriers optimized for conventional warfare against the Russian Navy. The Army continued to fund the Future Combat Systems (FCS), a whole set of technologies designed to make the American soldier supreme on the networked battlefield. None of these, it should be noted, are particularly useful in an unconventional war. And they are all enormously expensive: the F-35 program and the FCS projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars when complete, and each aircraft carrier now carries a roughly $10 billion price tag.
Allied with that was promotion. The soldiers, sailors, and marines who made it to the rank of general and admirals reinforced the status quo. Promoted by the generals and admirals before them, they locked in the reluctance to change. Thus, to be promoted in the Army, it was much better to have come from the Armor branch than the Special Forces. The former excelled at conventional war, while the latter focused more on counterinsurgency. As one army officer said “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.”
In essence, through both purchase and promotion, the military locked itself into a conventional strategy, whatever was going on in Iraq. That continued in the early years of Iraq and Afghanistan. The most telling sign was the failure of Colonel H.R. McMaster to be promoted to brigadier general. McMaster had led an effective counterinsurgency campaign in Tal Afar in the early days of the Iraq War. He was widely seen as a protege of General David Petraeus. But he was passed over twice for promotion from Colonel to Brigadier General, a message that other Army officers received loud and clear: “When you turn down a guy like McMaster that sends a potent message to everybody down the chain…the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in rewarding agents of change.”
That it why the frequent publicity about General Petraeus and his emphasis on counterinsurgency in Iraq has been misleading. Though Petraeus is leading an effective counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, the issue of whether those lessons get incorporated into the military mindset remained open. The U.S. might withdraw from Iraq and (like Vietnam) never learn its lessons.
But then something interesting happened. The Pentagon appointed Petraeus to head the promotion board, essentially sending a message to the Army that the traditional ways were not acceptable. That led, at the beginning of this past summer, to the promotion of H.R. McMaster (and a number of other Colonels whose expertise was in counterinsurgency) to brigadier general.
Does this mean that the Army is turning whole-heartedly to counterinsurgency doctrine? No. Most of the current generals remain conventional soldiers at heart, and there are are voices arguing that the Army has gone too far towards counterinsurgency already. But it does signal a shift, within both the Army and civilian leadership, on the proper way to approach the lessons learned of Iraq and Afghanistan.