The new ways of war

Keynote speech focuses on changing American military presence abroad

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After enjoying decades of unmatched technological capabilities, the U.S. now faces adversaries for whom the number of tanks and their strength isn’t significant. The way we go to war has to change to match these new ways of warfare, says Janine Davidson, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Now is the time to pause, examine the effects of U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and glean lessons that can be carried forward into how we go to war, and when and how to choose to engage in conflicts around the world.

“I think it’s a big question about the degree to which our nearly a decade endeavor to stop violent extremism around the world, whether it’s working or not,” Davidson says. “I think we need to take stock and see whether or not every time America decides to use force abroad, whether and how we’re going to make the situation better and whether or how we’re going to make the situation worse.”

Davidson, a University of Colorado Boulder alumna, started her career as a U.S. Air Force aircraft commander and senior pilot, flying combat support and humanitarian aid mobility missions. She also served in the Obama administration as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans from 2009 to 2012 and is author of the book Lifting the Fog of Peace: How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War.

“There’s a great debate among counter-terrorism experts about whether targeted killings are going to have a long-term positive effect on the threat of terrorism or whether it could potentially have a blowback effect,” Davidson says. “That’s an instance where there may be cases where the military isn’t going to help solve the problem.”

For her keynote speech for Veterans Speak, titled “Global Conflict and the Limits of U.S. Military Power,” she plans to begin from the familiar points of recent conflicts, including the setbacks Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, for a discussion on the way the U.S. military, like other western militaries, has been structured and has operated in the past and may need to operate in the future.

“I wanted to, with that sort of context, think through and talk about what’s happening in the world — what have potential adversaries learned about the American military and the way we operate, and what kinds of challenges we might face in the future, and then what that means for the American military. How we might adapt or change and, even more broadly, what that might mean for America’s role in the world and how we engage abroad,” Davidson says. “It’s sort of a taking a pause at lessons learned from the past and then looking to the future, because we’re not the only ones who have been learning lessons. Our adversaries and our allies have also been learning lessons and that changes that way that we operate and engage around the world.”

Basically, the world has learned not to try to take the U.S. on in a tank-ontank battle, she says, citing a comment from U.S. Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who says there are two ways to fight the U.S. military: asymmetric, and stupid.

“So what does asymmetric mean? It means other things that are a lot harder for our conventionally oriented military to deal with,” she says.

Look, for example, to the streets of Baghdad, she says.

“The American military was incredibly bogged down by very rudimentary roadside bomb explosive devices. They call them IEDs, improvised explosive devices — garage-made bombs — and all the technological superiority we had was not very useful for that kind of a fight,” Davidson says. “And if you look at the global trends from demographic shifts to megacities, it’s increasingly likely that conflict is going to happen in places like that where’s it’s a lot harder to have like a tank-on-tank battle, so that’s a challenge.”

Davidson, who frequently writes for the national securityfocused publication Defense One, wrote earlier this year about analyzing letters The New York Times obtained that were written from one Al Qaeda leader to another, offering some coaching and advice. She distilled their lessons into four points: “It’s okay to retreat and regroup; The larger battle is about competent governance to win over the population; Never underestimate the power of the media; No war — not even Al Qaeda’s — can be fought without money.”

Davidson notes that they’re clearly well-versed in “classic” counterinsurgency theory that would be familiar to Vietnam People’s Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp and Communist Chairman Mao Zedong. But they’ve also adapted those classic themes to modern times by incorporating the use of media and kidnappings — an easy fuel for needed income.

Knowing what terrorists say to one another also exposes just how much they know what the American military’s strengths are and the methods they’re developing to get around them.

Oddly, both terrorists and American military strategists are putting the same principles into practice.

“Counterinsurgency doctrine at its best — and it’s controversial — was about protecting the people, making the people feel safe, and then engaging the people to take responsibility for their security,” she says.

In the latest Iraq war, when General David Petraeus led the surge in 2006, the effort was to turn some of the violence that had been occuring in Iraq around.

“That was a big era where the American military rediscovered and relearned and rethought through what they call counterinsurgency doctrine, and a big element of Petraeus’ approach to counterinsurgency doctrine is to put the people first, to protect the people where they sleep. It’s population-centered warfare,” Davidson says. “If you kill more civilians or make more enemies than you are taking off the battlefield, then you’re actually not making the situation better. … 

“So what’s interesting when you see Al Qaeda saying the same thing. They say, ‘If we want to have a caliphate some day, we can’t go around alienating all of our people. We need to demonstrate to them that we can govern, that we can keep them safe.’ So they’re saying the same thing. And you see ISIS doing this, they’re going village to village, slowly, they’re running schools, collecting taxes, trying to govern and you see their Al Qaeda compatriots to the extent that they are connected, saying, ‘Listen, you could really screw up your gains if you over-reach here and you don’t treat the population well,’ which is one of the lessons that I think they took from their experience in Iraq. When Al Qaeda in Iraq came through, they were making a lot of gains in 2004, 2005, but then their sort of brutal rule in these villages turned the population against them. So ISIS is sort of trying, well, they’re being advised to try not to do that.”

It’s tough to know really what’s going on with the ongoing efforts of ISIS (also called ISIL and IS) because journalists aren’t on the ground there reporting on the conflict. Many of the reports are from ISIS through social media — which they’re also using as a tool in conflict.

“They launch like a wave of really scary social media saying that they’re coming, and people lay down their weapons and flee. That’s what happened when they came screaming through all those villages and towns in Iraq in the summer and the Iraqi military there lay down their weapons,” Davidson says. “Some of the Iraqi military might have been sympathetic to ISIS, but a lot of them felt like the fight was not going to go their way and part of it was this incredibly scary messaging that was coming out, like we’re coming, we’re coming. They used that very well as almost like the first round of ammunition.”

Of course, ISIS isn’t alone on the list of conflicts Americans have felt pressure to involve the military in. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea this year, which failed to create a level of animosity and conflict that would have triggered a conventional response from NATO, shows a similar evolving approach to warfare that, simply in the nature of its conflict, puts limits on how the U.S. can respond.

“Putin is exhibiting a lot of disruptive behavior in the global environment that our high-tech military, along with our allies’, is not necessarily the bestmade tool for,” Davidson says.

For the American public, she advises patience and an effort to understand this changing shape of war and what engaging in conflicts overseas means for that small percentage of the population who serve in the military.

“I think that what’s important for civilians to know is that there are no perfect answers to these kinds of conflicts,” Davidson says. “Like what’s happening in the Middle East right now, to the extent that America can even make a positive difference in that conflict, it won’t be a shortterm affair and it won’t be a purely military affair.

“We got very used to the sort of shock and awe mentality that … if we defeat the enemy’s military on the battlefield, then the political pieces will follow, but that isn’t really how the nature of conflict works. And so to the extent that America does get involved in these things, we have to have more patience. It’s not just going to be ‘What can you bomb to make this problem go away?’ In fact, we don’t want to do that. In order to do things where you protect civilians’ lives and do things that align with our values as Americans with respect to things like human rights, you have to be a lot more careful about the way you use force. And that means sometimes that it takes longer, or sometimes it means you don’t do it at all. And I think Americans can understand that, and that politicians can and should be having a more open conversation about that kind of thing, instead of saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, there’s less than 1 percent of Americans serving in the military. We’ll go kick some butt and we’ll come home and you’ll be safe.’ It doesn’t work like that. It’s messier than that.”

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com