10 October 2001
Peace is Hell
William Langewiesche has written an outstanding article for the paper version of the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Peace is Hell" that is well worth reading in its entirety (unfortunately, it's not available online). I'm reminded of the article by the various comments by Glenn Reynolds on troop deployment cycles, particularly those on Bosnia. Langewiesche examines the Bosnia deployment in great detail, and his subtitle is entirely telling: Why keeping a few thousand heavily armed, seriously bored soldiers in Bosnia strains the whole U.S. Army. It's well worth considering at a time when the U.S. may very well need all of the military force it can muster for NON-peacekeeping missions. Here are some excerpts:
The lieutenant was a willing soldier, but somewhat disillusioned. He had been trained as an infantryman to close with the enemy and fight, and instead now found himself doing the work of a street-corner diplomat. It was not just that he felt individually unsuited to the role; he said that the entire brigade, 3,500 strong, had lost its war-fighting ability and would require six months of retraining upon returning home. I was a bit skeptical about that claim, which is often made, but I also knew that it was not entirely without merit. These soldiers had already spent six months in specialized training before coming to Bosnia, during which they had been encouraged to unlearn the standard kill-or-die mentality, and had been allowed to neglect their traditional military skills. The most perishable of those skills did not consist of shooting guns but, rather, involved the complex organizational interactions necessary to coordinate large groups of embattled fighters. In Bosnia, the soldiers had indeed been forced to set much of that aside.
and
The 3rd ID [Infantry Division] paid a heavy price for its success. Last February, as the first and second rotations prepared to swap places, Skip Sharp was forced to downgrade the entire division to the Army's second-lowest rating for wartime readiness, effectively removing it from its traditional role: standing by to defend the nation. The downgrade is a temporary setback, likely to be overcome sometime in 2002, when the final peacekeeping mission in Kosovo is scheduled to end and the division will at last have time to retrain, and presumably to regain its armored battlefield skills. Meanwhile, for the professional warriors of the 3rd ID -- these guys who like to blow things up -- the downgrade is of course an unpleasant condition to endure, and no less painful for being self-imposed. For some of them, it is proof enough that America is already dangerously overextended.
Still, in more-immediate operational terms, it is possible to think about the division's mission in Bosnia not merely as a tribulation to be endured but also as a useful experience with the sort of ambiguous military involvements -- the operations other than war -- that the United States will probably continue to face. Of the many competent young officers I met in the filed, one said, "I grew up with a whole vision of Ronald Reagan, our military, the resurgence of American power in the world. That's kind of what drew me to the military. Then the wall came down, and now it's like 'Who's the enemy?'..."
Now that terrorists and the nations that harbor them have been declared the enemy, I can't help but wonder what the cost in time, effectiveness, and possibly even human lives will be as a result of training soldiers not to be soldiers for adventures like Bosnia.
In any case, go to your local newsstand, pick up the October 2001 Atlantic Monthly, and read the article.
[Posted @ 10:21 PM CST]
