Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Andrew Exum

If there is but one article readers of this blog should take the time to read in the next few days, it is most certainly Matt Matthews’s interview with Israeli general Shimon Naveh on the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Since I wrote my study of Hezbollah’s performance during the 2006 war, almost immediately following the conflict, I have been deeply impressed by the efforts taken by the U.S. military to learn from the IDF’s successes and failures, even as lessons learned stream in from the U.S. military’s own conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This coming week, for example, the U.S. Army War College will host an event on the 2006 war and the new media that should be excellent. Matt Matthews, meanwhile, is hard at work on what is sure to be an instructive study of the war for the U.S. Army.

But first, Gen. Naveh. Aside from his refreshingly nuanced view of Hezbollah and some choice remarks for his fellow officers—he calls the then-chief of staff Gen. Dan Halutz “an idiot”—and says one brigade commander should have been executed for cowardice—Gen. Naveh indicts the whole IDF for not being prepared to fight the kind of war they found themselves fighting in July 2006:

Basically I think that the IDF was totally unprepared for this kind of operation, both conceptually, operationally and tactically—mainly conceptually and practically. The point is that the IDF fell in love with what it was doing with the Palestinians. In fact, it became addictive. When you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice. You can pretend that you fight the war and yet it’s not really a dangerous war. This kind of thing served as an instrument corrupting the IDF.

Herein lie important lessons for U.S. policy-makers and military professionals. Some will say the lesson in Israel’s 2006 war is that the U.S. military can go “soft” by spending too much time on counterinsurgency in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, forgetting the kind of combined arms skills that come in handy in major combat operations. This would seem to be the opinion of the current Commandant of the Marine Corps, among others. Counterinsurgency theorists would say this is ridiculous. John Nagl describes counterinsurgency as “graduate-level warfare,” and it follows that just as a PhD candidate in mathematics would not forget how to solve basic algebra equations, it is unlikely a junior officer in the U.S. Army will necessarily forget basic infantry battle drills while sipping tea with sheiks in Anbar Province. (And besides, until the U.S. military truly learns counterinsurgency, it is unlikely to “overlearn” counterinsurgency.)

It is true, though, that much of the blame for the IDF’s poor performance in the 2006 war must fall upon the IDF’s officer corps (and Israeli politicians for slashing the IDF’s training budget). Complacency is the enemy of any good military, and it certainly seems as if the IDF grew too accustomed to the kind of missions they performed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories after the 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon. In the same way, the U.S. military officer corps in Iraq and Afghanistan is perhaps the most combat-proven officer corps in our nation’s history. But operational commanders must work hard to ensure that the overall culture within the officer corps is not overrun by complacency. This is their job, as officers, commanders, and custodians of the nation’s military.

I believe the way in which the U.S. Army and Marine Corps rotate between Iraq and Afghanistan works against complacency. Having fought and led combat units in both environments, I can attest that the differing physical and cultural environments force officers to remain intellectually flexible and alert. That’s just one of the reasons why the Marine Corps’s proposal to make Afghanistan a solely Marine mission is such a bad one.

At the same time, the job of being a U.S. Army or Marine Corps officer just got, incredibly, even tougher. Not only must Marine Corps and Army units be proficient in counterinsurgency operations—the most likely combat environment for present and future conflicts—they must also be prepared to execute combined arms efforts as part of major combat operations along the lines of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and destruction of Iraq’s army. As difficult as this may be, I do not feel this is an unreasonable expectation of our officer corps. It is, after all, what the nation requires.