It's all in the implementation
and even the words are years too late.
The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.
Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.
It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.
But some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army’s military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine.
. . .
“The parts of the Army closest to the battlefield have adapted, including tactics and doctrine,” said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who wrote a widely circulated article criticizing how the generals fought the Iraq war. “However, the institutional Army, to include our organizational designs and our personnel system, is essentially the same as before 9/11.”
He added: “The most important tasks we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are building host-nation institutions, including security forces and governance. We need to attract the very best officers into these specialties to be successful at these tasks.”
The Pentagon has decades of institutional inertia built up that makes any kind of true doctrinal change a very slow process, if not outright impossible. And, as noted elsewhere in the article, the weapons systems being bought and being sought, don't match up to this mission in the slightest. Nor does a budget that despite five years of ground warfare still allocates 1/3 of its resources to both the Navy and Air Force and 1/3 to the Army.
For now, the manual is just paper. We'll see over the next decade or so whether or not they're really serious about it, and that's probably too late to save the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
