With Memorial Day Weekend and the painful remembrances coming Monday, a recent essay on war and hubris merits consideration. Army Col. H. R. McMaster has published a brilliant essay in the online journal World Affairs, The Human Element: when Gadgetry Becomes Strategy (7 pages text). He argues that planners for the 2001 Afghan & 2003 Iraq Wars repeated "whiz kid" hubris in Vietnam: the presumption that modern technology could substitute for, rather than act as a complement to, traditional political, psychological and situational factors that historically determined how conflicts unfold, proceed and end. McMaster presents his case very well.
I would, however, offer three reservations for LFTC readers to judge after reading this must-read essay.
The Gulf War's Portent. McMaster does not discuss how the planners' belief that Iraqis would rise up alongside them and help dispatch Saddam was a prime factor. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqis rose up against Saddam (having been encouraged to do so by Bush 41) and seized 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces within days. But when America declined to destroy helicopters and armor that Saddam used to crush rebellion--in violation of his ceasefire promises--Saddam recovered and held on to power. Swayed by the Saudis, we saved Saddam. We still presumed that Iraqis would flock to our side upon commencing the March 2003 Iraq War, given that Saddam's rule since the Gulf War ended has hardly been a model of humane governance. That happened in some areas, but did not in many other locales.
An Afghan Portent. McMaster does not account for how we assumed the Afghanistan campaign--which looked largely successful in early 2003, if less so today--could be replicated in Iraq. After all, Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires, had gone astonishingly well in the early phases. despite our failure to capture the two top al-Qaeda leaders.
A Values Portent. McMaster fails to weigh fully how the West's humane values prevent use of force on a scale that could otherwise prevail against primitivist adversaries--the way, for example, Russia prevailed over rebels in Chechnya. While the 1979-1989 Russo-Afghan war is commonly called "Russia's Vietnam," Russia was winning the Afghan War until 1986, when we provided the Afghans with deadly Stinger surface-to-air missiles that neutralized Soviet Russia's deadly Hind helicopter gunship. We could have used firepower to completely vaporize huge areas of Afghanistan & Iraq, and won brutally and finally--albeit, with more worldwide political fallout. Our values, more than so-called world opinion, constrain us. They are, to be sure, quite honorable and worthy of respect, but they do hinder prosecution of war at a level of violence sufficient to defeat barbarians ready to inflict and endure massive casualties--far in excess of what modern Western societies can endure.
Bottom Line. Colonel McMaster has written an elegant, insightful essay, worth pondering, despite my comments above. He is right that modern technology--given values constraints Western power operate under, cannot win wars alone. Alas, should our enemies ever control comparably lethal technologies, we will discover that they just might succeed in winning wars, even for survival, simply because they lack ethical constraints. Thus, our values remain a virtue, to be sure, but with their virtue they carry a substantially elevated risk premium, as to the ability of civilized societies to confront and defeat barbarians.
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