Posted By Judah Grunstein 02 Sep 2010
This is a good point by Galrahn at Information Dissemination, on the disconnect between trends in European military reform and trends in U.S. strategic thinking:
We will have to wait and see what Germany ultimately decides to do, but
in reading military reform arguments from various nations across Europe,
including Russia, the 21st century army models of expeditionary forces
most often include discussions regarding amphibious lift capacity and
numbers of medium and heavy lift helicopters. In other words, the
capabilities that most mimic the U.S. Marines are more desired by the rest
of the world than the capabilities of a large standing army.
It
is a noteworthy contrast of strategic thinking how in the U.S., we seem to
have this in complete reverse as we debate what the U.S. Marines will be
in the future while speaking of the enormous challenges towards
recapitalizing the Army in DoD budget discussions. With Iraq combat
operations now over, it is time to keep an eye on what narrative emerges
in Washington.
At a time when many are rightly asking what we've learned from Iraq, it's important to contrast that with what our main defense partners have learned from Afghanistan. European defense planners are clearly concerned by their lack of expeditionary capacity. Having available troops might not have affected their ultimate refusal to send more of them to Afghanistan. But they would have preferred to say no by choice, not simply because they don't have the ability to say yes.
At the same time, they have become even more convinced of the importance of the political component of any intervention, and in particular, the need for an exit strategy before entering the field. The EUFOR Chad mission is a case in point: The mission's end date was written into its deployment authorization and was -- to most observers' surprise -- respected. Along these lines, another indicator to watch, both for decision-makers and public opinion, will be the EU participation in the UNIFIL mission in southern Lebanon, should that ever become a hot zone.
It's too early to tell what Washington policymakers have learned from the Iraq war. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate from the Obama administration's time-limited escalation in Afghanistan, for instance, to conclude that we have learned nothing, as Michael Cohen and Andrew Bacevich have done. But in terms of defense thinking, we might be risking a role reversal in the division of labor between the U.S. and its European allies, whereby their militaries become more apt at short-term expeditionary interventions and ours more geared toward long-term stabilization operations. In other words, they would become the peacemakers, and us the peacekeepers.
It's far from a certainty that things will play out this way in Europe. Such an expeditionary capacity is in pretty sharp opposition to the European mindset regarding power projection. And I suspect, like Andrew Exum, that even if the U.S. does end up with a boot-heavy, COIN-focused Army, it would go largely unused for the 10 years to come. But that just represents a waste of resources, and another case of "last-war-itis," on both sides of the Atlantic.