The US Military Is Winning. No, Really, It Is! A Simple Equation Proves That
the US Armed Forces Have Triumphed in the War on Terror
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
06 September 18
In 2010, H.R. McMaster wasn't the former national security advisor to
you-know-who but a brigadier general and senior adviser to General David
Petraeus, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. At that
time, he came up with a striking name for America's twenty-first-century
wars in the Greater Middle East, then a mere nine years old. In a report
titled, "Operating Concept, 2016-2028," looking into the Army's future, he
dubbed them our "wars of exhaustion." No general has been quite so grimly
honest again, though three years later, in May 2013, Charlie Savage and
Peter Baker of the New York Times reported that, when it came to the war on
terror, "a Pentagon official suggested last week that the current conflict
could continue for 10 to 20 years," which at least sounded exhausting.
Three years later, in June 2016, Army General Joseph Votel, then head of the
U.S. military's Central Command overseeing those conflicts, spoke of
Washington's war on terror as a "protracted, protracted fight," adding, in
response to a question, "I don't know if it's a 'forever war'; define
forever." The next year, the general whom McMaster had been advising back in
2010, now retired (having also pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge for
mishandling classified material), offered his own version of that phrase in
reference to Afghanistan. He told the PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff:
"This is a generational struggle. This is not something that is going to be
won in a few years. We're not going to take a hill, plant a flag, go home to
a victory parade. And we need to be there for the long haul, but in a way
that is, again, sustainable."
Exhausting, protracted, generational, maybe even forever-ish, and without a
victory parade in sight. As it happened, in 2018, the Washington Post's Greg
Jaffe reported that another descriptive phrase had come into use at the
Pentagon. "These days," he wrote, "senior officers talk about 'infinite
war.'" As Air Force General Mike Holmes explained it, "It's not losing. It's
staying in the game... and pursuing your objectives."
I hope that, almost 17 years later, the staying-in-the-game nature of
America's twenty-first-century wars is clear to all of you. If not, let me
call on TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That
Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, to consider just what to make of
this country's never-ending wars and the parade that General Petraeus
couldn't imagine but our president can.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It's going to come up again later.
But let's begin with another number entirely: 145,000 -- as in, 145,000
uniformed soldiers striding down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue. That's
the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the
United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar legions of
rifle-toting troops did the same after World War I ended with the defeat of
Germany and its allies in 1918. And Sherman tanks rolling through the urban
canyons of midtown Manhattan? That followed the triumph over the Axis in
1945. That's what winning used to look like in America -- star-spangled,
soldier-clogged streets and victory parades.
Enthralled by a martial Bastille Day celebration while visiting French
President Emmanuel Macron in Paris in July 2017, President Trump called for
just such a parade in Washington. After its estimated cost reportedly
ballooned from $10 million to as much as $92 million, the American Legion
weighed in. That veterans association, which boasts 2.4 million members,
issued an August statement suggesting that the planned parade should be put
on hold "until such time as we can celebrate victory in the War on Terrorism
and bring our military home." Soon after, the president announced that he
had canceled the parade and blamed local Washington officials for driving up
the costs (even though he was evidently never briefed by the Pentagon on
what its price tag might be).
The American Legion focused on the fiscal irresponsibility of Trump's
proposed march, but its postponement should have raised an even more
significant question: What would "victory" in the war on terror even look
like? What, in fact, constitutes an American military victory in the world
today? Would it in any way resemble the end of the Civil War, or of the war
to end all wars, or of the war that made that moniker obsolete? And here's
another question: Is victory a necessary prerequisite for a military parade?
The easiest of those questions to resolve is the last one and the American
Legion should already know the answer. Members of that veterans group played
key roles in a mammoth "We Support Our Boys in Vietnam" parade in New York
City in 1967 and in a 1973 parade in that same city honoring veterans of
that war. Then, 10 years after the last U.S. troops snuck out of South
Vietnam -- abandoning their allies and scrambling aboard helicopters as
Saigon fell -- the Big Apple would host yet another parade honoring Vietnam
veterans, reportedly the largest such celebration in the city's history. So,
quite obviously, winning a war isn't a prerequisite for a winning parade.
And that's only one of many lessons the disastrous American War in Vietnam
still offers us. More salient perhaps are those that highlight the limits of
military might and destructive force on this planet or that focus on the
ability of North Vietnam, a "little fourth-rate" country -- to quote Henry
Kissinger, the national security advisor of that moment -- to best a
superpower that had previously (with much assistance) defeated Nazi Germany
and Imperial Japan at the same time. The Vietnam War -- and Kissinger --
provide a useful lens through which to examine the remaining questions about
victory and what it means today, but more on that later.
For the moment, just remember: 4,000,000,029,057, Vietnam War, Kissinger.
Peace in Our Time... or Some Time... or No Time
Now, let's take a moment to consider the ur-conflict of the war on terror,
Afghanistan, where the U.S. began battling the Taliban in October 2001.
America's victory there came with lightning speed. The next year, President
George W. Bush announced that the group had been "defeated." In 2004, the
commander-in-chief reported that the Taliban was "no longer in existence."
Yet, somehow, they were. By 2011, General David Petraeus, then commander of
U.S. forces in Afghanistan, claimed that his troops had "reversed the
momentum of the Taliban." Two years later, then-commander General Joseph
Dunford spoke of "the inevitability of our success" there.
Last August, President Trump unveiled his "Strategy in Afghanistan and South
Asia." Its "core pillar" was "a shift from a time-based approach to one
based on conditions"; in other words, the "arbitrary timetables" for
withdrawal of the Obama years were out. "We will push onward to victory with
power in our hearts," President Trump decreed. "America's enemies must never
know our plans or believe they can wait us out."
The president also announced that he was putting that war squarely in the
hands of the military. "Micromanagement from Washington, D.C., does not win
battles," he announced. "They are won in the field drawing upon the judgment
and expertise of wartime commanders and frontline soldiers acting in real
time, with real authority, and with a clear mission to defeat the enemy."
The man given that authority was General John Nicholson who had, in fact,
been running the American war there since 2016. The general was jubilant and
within months agreed that the conflict had "turned the corner" (something,
by the way, that Obama-era Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta also claimed --
in 2012).
Today, almost 17 years after the war began, two years after Nicholson took
the reins, one year after Trump articulated his new plan, victory in any
traditional sense is nowhere in sight. Despite spending around $900 billion
in Afghanistan, as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction determined earlier this year, "between 2001 and 2017, U.S.
government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan
mostly failed." According to a July 30, 2018, report by that same inspector
general, the Taliban was by then contesting control of or controlled about
44% of that country, while Afghan government control and influence over
districts had declined by about 16% since Nicholson's predecessor, General
John Campbell, was in command.
And that was before, last month, the Taliban launched a large-scale attack
on a provincial capital, Ghazni, a strategically important city, and held it
for five days, while taking control of much of the province itself. Finally
driven from the city, the Taliban promptly overran a military base in
Baghlan Province during its withdrawal. And that was just one day after
taking another Afghan military base. In fact, for the previous two months,
the Taliban had overrun government checkpoints and outposts on a near-daily
basis. And keep in mind that the Taliban is now only a fraction of the
story. The U.S. set out to defeat it and al-Qaeda in 2001. Today, Washington
faces exponentially more terror groups in Afghanistan -- 21 in all,
including an imported franchise from the Iraq War front, ISIS, that grew
larger during Nicholson's tenure.
Given this seemingly dismal state of affairs, you might wonder what happened
to Nicholson. Was he cashiered? Fired, Apprentice-style? Quietly ushered out
of Afghanistan in disgrace? Hardly. Like the 15 U.S. commanders who preceded
him, the four-star general simply rotated out and, at his final press
conference from the war zone late last month, was nothing if not upbeat.
"I believe the South Asia Strategy is the right approach. And now we see
that approach delivering progress on reconciliation that we had not seen
previously," he announced. "We've also seen a clear progression in the
Taliban's public statements, from their 14 February letter to the American
people to the recent Eid al-Adha message, where [Taliban leader] Emir
Hibatullah acknowledged for the first time that negotiations will, quote,
'ensure an end to the war,' end quote."
In the event that you missed those statements from a chastened Taliban on
the threshold of begging for peace, let me quote from the opening of the
latter missive, issued late last month:
"This year Eid- al--Adha approaches us as our Jihadi struggle against the
American occupation is on the threshold of victory due to the help of Allah
Almighty. The infidel invading forces have lost all will of combat, their
strategy has failed, advanced technology and military equipment rendered
useless, [the] sedition and corruption--sowing group defeated, and the
arrogant American generals have been compelled to bow to the Jihadic
greatness of the Afghan nation."
And those conciliatory statements of peace and reconciliation touted by
Nicholson? The Taliban says that in order to end "this long war" the "lone
option is to end the occupation of Afghanistan and nothing more."
In June, the 17th American nominated to take command of the war, Lieutenant
General Scott Miller, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee
where Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) grilled him on what he would do differently in
order to bring the conflict to a conclusion. "I cannot guarantee you a
timeline or an end date," was Miller's confident reply.
Did the senators then send him packing? Hardly. He was, in fact, easily
confirmed and starts work this month. Nor is there any chance Congress will
use its power of the purse to end the war. The 2019 budget request for U.S.
operations in Afghanistan -- topping out at $46.3 billion -- will certainly
be approved.
#Winning
All of this seeming futility brings us back to the Vietnam War, Kissinger,
and that magic number, 4,000,000,029,057 -- as well as the question of what
an American military victory would look like today. It might surprise you,
but it turns out that winning wars is still possible and, perhaps even more
surprising, the U.S. military seems to be doing just that.
Let me explain.
In Vietnam, that military aimed to "out-guerrilla the guerrilla." It never
did and the United States suffered a crushing defeat. Henry Kissinger -- who
presided over the last years of that conflict as national security advisor
and then secretary of state -- provided his own concise take on one of the
core tenets of asymmetric warfare: "The conventional army loses if it does
not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose." Perhaps because that
eternally well-regarded but hapless statesman articulated it, that formula
was bound -- like so much else he touched -- to crash and burn.
In this century, the United States has found a way to turn Kissinger's
martial maxim on its head and so rewrite the axioms of armed conflict. This
redefinition can be proved by a simple equation:
0 + 1,000,000,000,000 + 17 +17 + 23,744 + 3,000,000,000,000 + 5 + 5,200 + 74
= 4,000,000,029,057
Expressed differently, the United States has not won a major conflict since
1945; has a trillion-dollar national security budget; has had 17 military
commanders in the last 17 years in Afghanistan, a country plagued by 23,744
"security incidents" (the most ever recorded) in 2017 alone; has spent
around $3 trillion, primarily on that war and the rest of the war on terror,
including the ongoing conflict in Iraq, which then-defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld swore, in 2002, would be over in only "five days or five weeks or
five months," but where approximately 5,000 U.S. troops remain today; and
yet 74% of the American people still express high confidence in the U.S.
military.
Let the math and the implications wash over you for a moment. Such a
calculus definitively disproves the notion that "the conventional army loses
if it does not win." It also helps answer the question of victory in the war
on terror. It turns out that the U.S. military, whose budget and influence
in Washington have only grown in these years, now wins simply by not losing
-- a multi-trillion-dollar conventional army held to the standards of
success once applied only to under-armed, under-funded guerilla groups.
Unlike in the Vietnam War years, three presidents and the Pentagon,
unbothered by fiscal constraints, substantive congressional opposition, or a
significant antiwar movement, have been effectively pursuing this strategy,
which requires nothing more than a steady supply of troops, contractors, and
other assorted camp followers; an endless parade of Senate-sanctioned
commanders; and an annual outlay of hundreds of billions of dollars. By
these standards, Donald Trump's open-ended, timetable-free "Strategy in
Afghanistan and South Asia" may prove to be the winningest war plan ever. As
he described it:
"From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies,
obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking
over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before
they emerge."
Think about that for a moment. Victory's definition begins with "attacking
our enemies" and ends with the prevention of possible terror attacks. Let me
reiterate: "victory" is defined as "attacking our enemies." Under President
Trump's strategy, it seems, every time the U.S. bombs or shells or shoots at
a member of one of those 20-plus terror groups in Afghanistan, the U.S. is
winning or, perhaps, has won. And this strategy is not specifically
Afghan-centric. It can easily be applied to American warzones in the Middle
East and Africa -- anywhere, really.
Decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has finally
solved the conundrum of how to "out-guerrilla the guerrilla." And it
couldn't have been simpler. You just adopt the same definition of victory.
As a result, a conventional army -- at least the U.S. military -- now loses
only if it stops fighting. So long as unaccountable commanders wage
benchmark-free wars without congressional constraint, the United States
simply cannot lose. You can't argue with the math. Call it the rule of
4,000,000,029,057.
That calculus and that sum also prove, quite clearly, that America's
beleaguered commander-in-chief has gotten a raw deal on his victory parade.
With apologies to the American Legion, the U.S. military is now -- under the
new rules of warfare -- triumphant and deserves the type of celebration
proposed by President Trump. After almost two decades of warfare, the armed
forces have lowered the bar for victory to the level of their enemy, the
Taliban. What was once the mark of failure for a conventional army is now
the benchmark for success. It's a remarkable feat and deserving, at the very
least, of furious flag-waving, ticker tape, and all the age-old trappings of
victory.
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