Decisive Point Podcast

Critics of the Afghan war have claimed it was always unwinnable. This article argues the war was unwinnable the way it was fought and posits an alternative based on the Afghan way of war and the US approach to counterinsurgency in El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. Respecting the political and military dictates of strategy could have made America’s longest foreign war unnecessary and is a warning for the wars we will fight in the future.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/3/

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Todd Greentree, a former US Foreign Service officer who served as a political military officer in five conflicts, including El Salvador and Afghanistan. He’s a member of the Changing Character of War Center at Oxford University and teaches in the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Greentree is the author of “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021-2022 issue.

Welcome, Todd. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s talk about your article. Some people would argue the Afghan war was unwinnable. You assert it was unwinnable the way it was fought. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Todd Greentree

Thank you, Stephanie. Great to be here. The idea that it was unwinnable the way it was fought is really tied to the purpose, sort of the reason why I was writing it, which is not just about what went wrong in Afghanistan, what lessons can be derived about counterinsurgency. This is really an article about US strategic behavior. Afghanistan was my fifth war. And I like to write what I know. So really, the origin of the article is from my own story.

I got the idea that we were maybe not doing this right, sort of when I stepped off the helicopter at Bagram in 2008. My first war had been El Salvador in the early 1980s. And so everything I learned were all from guys who had been in Vietnam. There’s more about that in the article. For the next four years, though, I served with people who were…most of the people were from the 9/11 generation, and I was a political adviser to combat units out in the field and was super impressed with the astuteness that everybody was showing. So first, I was in Regional Command East, where General Mark Milley was the deputy commander for operations. But there was a problem with the entire effort in Afghanistan. We were on economy of force. But that economy of force was not being exercised for a strategic purpose, just to minimize the cost, because Iraq had sucked up all the attention and the bulk of the resources.

Then I moved to Regional Command South into Taliban home country, and they had been raging there since 2006. It took three years for the US to adapt. I came back to Kandahar in 2010, at the height of the surge, with the 10th Mountain Division. They were in command of Regional Command South. And this was the main effort at the height of the surge. It was a strong coalition team. They knew what to do, how to partner with the Afghan army. They took it seriously. They were serious about aligning political and military strategies, which was my part of this. The overall strategy of the US, by 2009, was coming into focus, we’d had Stan McChrystal’s math, the idea, here’s our most experienced Special Operations commander who had come to the realization, as had many of the SOF guys, that attrition generates more insurgents. This led to a shift in the understanding of focus on the population rather than exercising firepower.

General Petraeus, following McChrystal with Field Manual 3-24 and counterinsurgency doctrine and all of that. The problem was that when Obama announced the surge, he time-limited at the same time, which was a strategically incorrect thing to do because, for the Taliban, all they had to do was wait it out. And for them, jihad was forever.

But by 2011, when the surge was peaking and then over, that was 10 years into the war. It was just way too long to be fighting and to get it right.

My big point is that military operational excellence was essentially what we were exercising–a series of operations in a context of strategic incoherence. So, there was warfighting, but it was associated with this wildly ambitious nation-building that was very well-intentioned and made a lot of progress, but it was far too complex for the United States to sustain at that level. We certainly can’t blame the Afghans. In the end, I arrived at the same conclusion that Bob Komer did in 1973, when he, as the head of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, wrote this incredible paper called “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performance in Vietnam.”

That conclusion was: if you find yourself doing Big COIN, it’s too late.

Host

Let’s talk about accidental guerrillas and accidental counterinsurgents. How did this happen in relation to Afghanistan?

Greentree

Accidental Guerrillas was this great book that Dave Kilcullen wrote–one of his first books. And he had this idea that the Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban, were fighting us because we were in their space. My idea with accidental counterinsurgents is merely to hold up a mirror on that idea and say, “well, that’s right.”

And the only reason that we were fighting the Taliban was because they helped al-Qaeda, who got into our space by attacking us on 9/11. The strategic problem with this was that we confused the two. The Taliban were insurgents. They were not international terrorists. They didn’t like the Arabs in al-Qaeda very much, most of them. And they weren’t threatening the US in any way. So, in the end, we were hunting these extreme conservative Islamists, on their home ground, who were fighting jihad against us, the foreign troops who were in combat in the middle of their own people. So you had this incredible conflict, incredible clash, between two warrior cultures–one on their home ground and one on the sort of the “away team” that really didn’t understand this dynamic very well.

Host

Let’s circle back for a minute to your comment about if you’re doing big COIN, it’s already too late. Was there really any other option? What were they going to do? Small COIN?

Greentree

In El Salvador, small COIN was the model because the Vietnam War had ended less than a decade earlier. So early 1980s. Saigon was evacuated in 1975, so there was no way that the US military or the American public would support involvement in major counterinsurgency. So there was a political imperative that limited the presence of US forces on the ground. But there was more to it than that.

It was also part of the policy to balance political and military strategy. They were in sync with each other. To take that lesson away, keep foreign troops–keep ourselves–out of direct conflict, out of direct combat. Focus on training, assisting, and advising.

And one way to put it is to change one word in Article 15, of the famous article by Thomas Edward Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, the article was titled “27 Articles,” and it was about supporting and fighting with the Arabs in World War I in 1917. Article 15, with one word change (changing Arabs to Afghans) reads, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Afghans do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them. Not to win it for them. Actually, also under the very odd conditions of Afghanistan, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is.”

I think that just applies 100% to what was going on in Afghanistan. To take that a step further, is, rather than taking the war over, we should have been doing all along what we were doing at the end, which was keeping the size of our forces small and focusing on training, assisting, and advising rather than combat itself.

The second part of this looking at options and alternatives, though, is equally if not more important. We should have listened to the Afghans. We often treated them and thought of them as our proxies, but we were fighting in their country. They weren’t proxies. They were really joint venture partners in which both sides, both participants, shared strengths and shared risks and shared costs. Just building on that, there’s a lot of blame to go around. That was a culminating point of victory. And we should have entered war termination with them, even while we continued counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda.

The reason I’m talking about this as an option, as an alternative, was because a new President Karzai, and his fellow Pashtuns and government, had a strategy that was in accord with the Afghan way of war. The Taliban were streaming in to recognize the new winner and swear fealty to President Karzai. The government side was ready to disperse them back to their communities in southern Afghanistan and separate out those leaders who led the Pakistan from the Taliban, but at the same time to bring Taliban representatives, who had sworn fealty and were willing to reconcile, and include them at the table at the Bonn conference, where the new government was being formed.

It was all thought out. The Afghans seemed to know what they were doing. They proposed this, and the Bush administration, principally Secretary defense, Rumsfeld said “no way, we’re not having anything to do with these Taliban people.”

And so we ended up taking over the war with our own set of Afghan warlords, conducting counterterrorist methods by hunting the Taliban, capturing them, killing them, sending them to Guantanamo, and searching around for combat to continue combat–conducting the American way of war. By bringing up this option, it suggests that it may have been possible for the Afghan war to have been entirely unnecessary.

Host

We packed a lot into a few short minutes. Thank you so much, Todd for doing this with me. I enjoyed all of it.

Greentree

Okay, my pleasure, Stephanie.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple podcast, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platforms.

Assessing threats to the air littoral, the airspace between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers, requires a paradigm change in American military thinking about verticality. This article explores the consequences of domain convergence, specifically for the Army and Air Force’s different concepts of control. It will assist US military and policy practitioners in conceptualizing the air littoral and in thinking more vertically about the air and land domains and the challenges of domain convergence.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/7/

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production, featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Maximillian K. Bremer and Dr. Kelly A. Grieco, authors of “Air Littoral: Another Look.” Colonel Bremer is the director of the Special Programs Division at Air Mobility Command. He is a 1997 distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he has an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an MAAS from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

Dr. Grieco is an assistant professor of military and security studies in the Department of International Security at the Air Command and Staff College. She received her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Max. Kelly. Thanks for joining me today. I’m really glad you’re here. Your research looks at air littoral, which is the space between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers, and how the US military thinks about its verticality. What has changed in recent decades that makes this a priority?

Colonel Maximilian K. Bremer

Well, Stephanie, first, thanks for having us on. And thanks to Parameters for publishing this paper. It’s really a privilege. So you’re asking what’s changed? Well, in a nutshell, democratization and technological advancement have led to increased access and persistence in the space that we’re calling the air littoral. Basically, more users with more technology are driving innovation both in the military and civilian realms. Changing the way that we access and persist in any domain will alter the way we contest that domain–the way we seek dominance. The air littoral, until recently, was mostly a realm of transit to and from the blue skies. Persistent access within the air littoral was just not tenable. But it is now, and that drives a change in how we utilize the domain. Before, we could think about airspace as layered flat maps, and now we have to understand the interaction vertically and persistently from the ground all the way to the edge of space.

Dr. Kelly A. Grieco

As Colonel Bremer suggests, what has changed is increased access and persistence to the air littoral. Russia in eastern Ukraine, for example, has been able to access the airspace and deny it to the Ukrainian Air Force mainly using not manned aircraft but a combination of air defense and electronic warfare systems. And they have then been able to exploit this airspace using multiple drones flying simultaneously at different altitudes over target areas to spot for artillery rockets.

This example illustrates two important changes in my mind. First, manned aircraft are no longer essential for accessing or exploiting the airspace, or at least parts of the airspace. And second, increasingly, both nonstate actors and strategic competitors will use small unarmed systems–things like drones, low flying missiles, and loitering munitions to gain persistent access to the air littoral and then exploit it.

Host

What is the working definition of air superiority? And where does the United States fall on this topic? Do we still rule the skies?

Grieco

No. At least not the same way we did 10 or even five years ago. In joint doctrine, air control exists on a spectrum based on the degree to which an adversary can interfere with friendly military operations. On that spectrum, air superiority refers to a level of air control in which friendly forces are able to operate at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.

Air supremacy goes even further than that. It refers to a degree of dominance in which the opposing force is incapable of even effective interference. And that’s anywhere in the entire theater of operations. I would argue, and many others, that based on those definitions, for the last 30 years, the United States has had air superiority, if not air supremacy in all its major conflicts. Today, however, that’s no longer a given and in fairness, both the Air Force and the Army have increasingly recognized this in recent years. To emphasize that point, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, has said on numerous occasions that air dominance is not an American birthright. But attempts to maintain or regain that air superiority have mainly centered on developing and acquiring sixth-generation fighters and bombers. So those aircraft that operate in the blue skies. As we point out in our article, this focus on the blue skies runs the risk of missing that adversaries are increasingly able to access the airspace between the ground and the blue skies, that is the air littoral.

Bremer

So to address this new reality, we have to recognize that air control exists in a volume rather than a flat bounded plane. In the past, control the air was won or lost in the blue skies. If you obtained air superiority over a theater of operations, it was generally imparted to control over all altitudes, but that assumption no longer holds. Control of the air littoral is rapidly decoupling from that of the blue skies, which means our concept of air control has to evolve. It must account for a third dimension—that of vertical space.

Critically, conceptualizing air control as a volume calls attention to key differences between the blue skies in the air littoral. Compared to blue skies, the air littoral is becoming much more highly dynamic, threat-intensive in a more important environment. In Iraq, as General Raymond Thomas noted, the adversary was able to operate, quote – right overhead and underneath our air superiority – unquote.

If the enemy is in the air above us, do we actually have air superiority?

Host

Here’s a quote from your article. Most worrying for the United States is the potential curtailing of the military’s ability to provide effective support to US, Allied, and partner ground forces from the skies above. Can you expand on US adversaries contesting control of the air littoral and your answer to it?

Bremer

In the US military, the services are aligned with the physical domains, the mediums through which they primarily operate. They’re charged with the duty to organize, train, and equip forces to be experts in and dominate those domains to the benefit of the joint force. Yet the fuzzy border between physical domains creates a seam. And this seam is where services contest with each other for authorities and funding. Our adversaries are watching, and they could potentially exploit that seam. What is the airspace? Who has responsibility for control of the airspace, and what does control mean? These are some fundamental challenges that the democratization of the air littoral creates. For example, you know, a bullet fired from an M-4 is traveling through the air. Is that in the airspace? What about a mortar that travels up to 1,500 feet and then comes back down? Or HIMARS? Or what about a small loitering drone that doesn’t go above 400 feet but sticks around for several hours?

GRIECO

And currently, the focus is really on counter-system ideas–counter UAS, counter mortar, counter cruise missiles, counter aircraft. But these all operate in the same physical realm and only vary by propulsion, systems speed, persistence, and range. And those characteristics, especially speed, persistence, and range are converging. And our adversaries are very aware of this and responding to these developments. And as they innovate their capabilities and operational concepts, the Air Force is increasingly at risk of failing in his primary job—winning in the air to allow the army to occupy and win the ground.

Host

How does vertical reciprocity play into this?

Grieco

The air littoral, like the maritime littoral, is fundamentally a trans domain environment. This requires vertical reciprocity between air and ground forces. It also means more interactions and interdependencies between the air and ground. And the Army, for example, plans to exploit this vertical space with joint all-domain operations, emphasizing presenting the enemy with multiple dilemmas. The Army has an emerging vision of simultaneously, both horizontally and vertically, enveloping the enemy. Of course, US adversaries also seek the same advantages.

Bremer

Yes, but bringing the air war close to the ground will also lay bare the differences in the army in the Air Force’s concept of control. Control of the land domain has traditionally been a function of the persistent occupation of territory. Armies, as Clausewitz said, can stand fast, as it were, rooted to the ground. In contrast, the Air Force concept of control in the air domain centers on responsive presence, not persistent occupation. Air Forces may occupy airspace for a time but it’s ephemeral. What it offers instead is a rapid but not necessarily persistent presence, the ability to quickly mass and deliver fires. The growing mission overlap will cause a clash of these air-centric and land-centric concepts of control. Closing this seam is critical to the future success of the joint force. The Air Force will need to address control the air literal from the blue skies just as the army will have to address it from the ground. Each service is going to have to support the other in this evolving trans domain environment.

Host

In conclusion, is it technology that’s going to be the answer here?

Bremer

No, I don’t think technology is going to be the answer, not in the general way that we use the term. The artifacts, the things that we create, are simply part of the environment. But the art and craft of understanding how to employ those things, which is the original Greek meaning of the term technology, that will play a significant role. The democratization and innovation that created access and persistence in the air littoral is also driving a significant maturation of the domain. We have to adapt to this new environment by understanding it differently–no longer as planar maps stacked one atop another statically, but rather as a fluid with temporal, vertical, and horizontal dimensions. Then we can apply technology, the craft of employing our tools, to the contestation and dominance of the air literal.

Grieco

I agree wholeheartedly. And I would just add that the answer is really doctrinal innovation. The technology is hardware, but doctrine is the software. It’s that application piece. And as we argue in our article, gaining a competitive advantage in the air littoral requires the joint force to develop a new conceptual framework, and it’s one that needs to be grounded in both horizontal and vertical spaces. And if we don’t, America might not just lose this technological advantage, but its operational edge.

Host

This has been great. It was very enlightening.

Grieco

Thank you for having us. And it was a pleasure to do this.

Bremer

Thanks, Stephanie.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple podcast, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platforms.

Racialized structural inequalities and related social biases in US society and replicated in the military hinder diversity and inclusion efforts necessary to maintain a ready force. Examining the history of Blacks in the military through a social science lens helps explain this challenge and reveals the military must both promote relationships that challenge power imbalances and assess the impact of cultural imperialism on standards and evaluations.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/7

The US military has a historical precedence for dealing with a pandemic while simultaneously conducting large-scale combat operations. Two twentieth-century examples assess the extent to which the military adapted operations following an influenza outbreak, and make clear military and civilian leaders must balance strategic objectives when facing threat multipliers such as COVID-19.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/5

The lessons of counterinsurgency have deeper implications for cyber conflict than previous research has identified. Two decades of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan provide insights into the cyber strategy of defending forward including treating major cybersecurity and technology companies as host-nation partners and focusing on winning the hearts and minds of global netizens.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/9

The DoD can exploit weaknesses in Chinese military attempts at political warfare, or “enemy disintegration,” most recently observed in PLA media on the subject of the pandemic. Targeted information efforts will signal the United States’ refusal to be intimidated, expose untruths in Chinese government messaging to its citizens, and reassure relevant third parties of US military resolve.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/3

The framework of Enduring Information Vigilance will help ally and partner governments deny advantages adversaries gain through their use of information operations in our new global perpetual information environment. This approach recognizes the persistent threat, unifies responses within and between governments, and resolves societal fissures toward a more global democratic information environment.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/4/

Technological revolutions affecting state power are either open or closed. The precursor to the digital age is not the twentieth century, with state-controlled programs yielding nuclear weapons, but the late nineteenth century, when tinkerers invented the radio, airplane, and high explosives—all crucial to subsequent wars. To avoid strategic surprise, the US government must take a broader view of how today’s open innovation is changing society, and adapt.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/8

The theory of social stigma provides a context for the subjective experience of African American servicemembers in World War II. Those experiences reveal the paradox the military faces when addressing racial discrimination. An examination of these experiences suggests only a collective response by African American servicemembers will solve this problem.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/6

US security force assistance missions to Arab partner states have had limited success, due in part to a tendency to impose American doctrine, which embodies American cultural values and norms, on Arab armed forces. Accordingly, US security force assistance missions should train Arab partners to fight in a manner better suited to their own cultural preferences and operational requirements.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss3/10