Today Iraq gets all the headlines, but the problems the U.S. military faces are bigger than any single conflict. If U.S. troops left Iraq tomorrow, the military would still be wrongly structured for any kind of war it is likely to face. The fault lines in that structure would still generate inappropriate and dangerous tensions; success would still require superhuman efforts on the part of individual senior leaders to transcend their legally defined roles and think only about the welfare of the nation as a whole. Some would do so; most would not. The system would continue to creak and groan and tear under the pressure of unbalanced strains it was never designed to bear.
Iraq is a symptom of this disease, not the cause. Similar tensions occurred over Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, each with different people in the key positions. This is not a problem of personality dysfunction, and it is not a problem of ideology, although both have played important roles in recent failures. It is a problem of structure, of organization, and, more fundamentally, of the conception of what kinds of war we are likely to have to fight and how we will fight them.
Of all the scary war scenarios facing the U.S. over the coming decades, the one for which our military is currently structured--simultaneous attacks on all fronts, in all dimensions, by a unitary global enemy--is the least likely. A grinding, prolonged, land-forces-based struggle within one regional command, or possibly two, is the most likely. Debate over the wisdom of the Iraq War and our current approach to it has obscured this reality for too long. Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is time to adjust our military for the post-Cold War world. |