An article in the Armed Forces Journal by a LTC Yingling, A failure in generalship, has been getting a lot of attention the past few days. I would quarrel with the overall impression shared by many that it is unusual for a Lieutenant Colonel to question the senior leadership of the Army in an official publication. In my twenty years in the Army, I found it to be a much more open, even democratic, institution than the typical private enterprise. But I really quarrel with the idea that Yingling's critique is at all a view of the war that progressives should endorse.
LTC Yingling's explanation for our failure in Iraq, that our armed forces are insufficiently prepared for counter-insurgency warfare, is not at all new, and definitely not anti-war. The problem isn't that we're insufficiently expert at "counter-insurgency". The problem is that Counter-Insurgency is no more a real art or science at which anyone could be expert, than is Astrology or Creationism.
No doubt you can put down popular movements by killing enough people, or making them refugees, to terrorize the remainder into submission. But that process already has a name, "genocide". And genocide doesn't require any particular skill on the part of those who carry it out that would qualify it as a field of expertise. "Counter-Insurgency" is just a euphemism for a genocidal willingness to make war on a people, rather than the enemy armed forces that are the only legitimate objects of a just war.
Of course there are points of overlap between "counter-insurgency" and the professional skills needed in actual legitimate warfare. The people who are the victims of a counterinsurgency have to be offering some armed resistance, or there would be no conflict. Fighting that armed resistance requires a subset of individual soldier skills, and even some small-unit tactics. But there is no evidence that the Army was unprepared for these legitimate soldier skill and tactical components of "counter-insurgency" in either Iraq or Vietnam. On the contrary, our troops consistently outfought even the well-trained NVA, and even in situations where our massive advantage in supporting fires was irrelevant, if not downright counter-productive.
The only part of what our troops are being asked to do in Iraq that the generals did not prepare them for is the outright genocide part. And that's a good thing, an incredibly important, far more important than tactical skills, good thing. What those Marines did in Haditha, and what the Abu Ghraib guards did, is what a successful "counter-insurgency" would look like. Thank God Haditha and Abu Ghraib are still treated as criminal aberrations, and not adopted as policy.
The real failure in Iraq and Vietnam is that we sent our highly professional soldiers and Marines out to do a job whose internal logic requires thugs and war criminals for its execution. There's plenty of blame for that to go around, and doubtless the generals deserve their share. But that share would consist only of the extent to which they winked at the procedures of Haditha and Abu Ghraib. We have civilian control of the military in this country, and the generals were not free to refuse a mission that was not clearly criminal at its inception. They were not free to override the political and diplomatic judgement of their political masters that we would be greeted with candy and flowers by the Iraqi people, and assert instead as a basis for their planning that we would face an insurgency in which their soldiers and Marines would be called on to do criminal things in order to "win".
Our failure in Iraq was and is political. The Founders did not live in a world in which there seemed any possibility that our country would become the new Great Britain. But we have since become the thing that victimized us in the 18th Century, a hyperpower that is in a position to even contemplate the mad project of invading and occupying other countries in order to impose on them governments favorable to our interests. In this evolved situation, we need to evolve new constitutional limitations on the use of armed forces that will foreclose the possibility of them ever being required to participate in "counter-insurgency". We have a Posse Comitatus Act, somewhat eroded by recent enactments that ought to be repealed, that wisely sharply limits the use of our armed forces against our own people. This law was designed to protect both our people and our military, and the same need to prevent the corruption of our military applies to its use in the rest of the world. We need, a law first, then an amendment when that can be achieved, that extends the prohibition on the use of our troops for police work to foreign countries, as well as our own.