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Gates on Strategic Balance

Judah Grunstein | Bio | 04 Dec 2008

Defense Sec. Bob Gates gets the last word on yesterday's asymmetric blog war, in a Foreign Affairs essay that should put to rest any doubts about whether or not he should have stayed on at the Pentagon. The entire piece is too well-constructed to dissect, so I recommend just clicking through and reading it all.

But the operative word is balance, and as a reflection of how well the piece achieves that balance, all the concerns and criticisms that I cited yesterday are represented: the need to build capacity for the wars being fought balanced by the emphasis on conventional capacity already deeply embedded in the Pentagon's institutional culture; the need to maintain America's military power balanced by the limits of what that power can achieve; and perhaps most importantly, the need to solve today's doctrinal challenges balanced by the knowledge that there is never a clean or failsafe theoretical solution to the horrible reality -- to be avoided when possible -- that is war.

Two things, in particular, stood out, though. The first, and I think this has so far been neglected in the COIN vs. conventional debate, is the degree to which even the conventional wars (i.e. those against other nations) that the U.S. military might fight in the near future are likely to be asymmetric:

This recalls something that French Gen. Vincent Desportes pointed out in his book, "The Likely War" (which I reviewed for Small Wars Journal here, .pdf), namely that the very nature of victory in war is asymmetric, since victory essentially results from avoiding, undermining or surviving the enemy's strengths while exploiting its weaknesses. Gates' fallback option of striking from afar doesn't strike me as the most viable of solutions, since the Chinese strategic emphasis on theater denial is designed as an asymmetric deterrent to an American intervention in a potential war against Taiwan. So maybe some work needed there.

The second thing was this:
I think this gets to the heart of the "imperialist/colonialist" concerns that have been raised with regard to the doctrinal emphasis on stability operations. It's anachronistic to think of these occupations in the 19th century sense of imperial colonialism. But there is an element of colonialism to them, in the sense that they represent rearguard actions to impose the twin components of modernism and the Westphalian order on the last pockets of resistance to them around the globe.

Again, there's an element of social work, and an element of community development, to this kind of thinking: the geopolitical equivalent of rehabbing the burnt out shells in a run down neighborhood to get rid of the crack addicts that use them for shelter, thereby improving neighborhood safety. But there are two problems to this approach. The first is that the actual terrorists using the world's pockets of instability as threat vectors are, by and large, the products of modernism and themselves refugees from the Westphalian order, not the aggrieved, impoverished masses clamoring for entry into it.

The second is that it's already a questionable assertion that the impoverished masses are actually clamoring for entry into it. Many of them just want a decent life in the context of the traditional cultures they're used to. The institutions of governance we take for granted in our approach to building a nation are either distant or irrelevant, or both, to the day to day lives of the people we think they will be helping.

So the question is also, What can we do to improve people's lot outside of the context of the stability ops/security paradigm? That's the thought I've been trying to develop with regard to the Obama administration's approach to development and aid: Whether and how it ought to, and can, be integrated into a strategic vision.

Gates insists that we're unlikely to engage in nation building under fire following forced regime change anytime soon, while acknowledging that's not the only application for these capacities. Humanitarian interventions, peacekeeping missions and others come to mind. But I'm not convinced that the logic behind them actually applies to the real world, where meeting people's needs doesn't necessarily correlate with aligning them with American interests.