The Trumpian Way of Battle

It should be no surprise that the Trump Administration is actively considering Erik D. Prince’s^[1] advice for Afghanistan. This is the inevitable result of 16 years of multiple, overlapping, and cascading strategic failures. When the U.S. national security system^[2] has been responsible for so many failures in such a short period, there are few reasons to trust their judgment, capabilities, or advice. Particularly when business acumen, defined entirely by net wealth, is the President’s primary measure of worthiness. After all, strategic failure and self-proclaimed business acumen are what helped propel Trump into the Oval Office in the first place. At present, neither Prince’s model nor any other suggestions offered have a chance of success. They are mere replications of already failed plans. If the President really wants to achieve victory in Afghanistan, he should make politics and governance the supreme understanding in war once again by making a civilian Afghanistan expert Viceroy—Prince’s one good idea—and giving them total unity of command over all forces in theater with the goal to obtain a peace treaty, write and enact a new Afghan constitution, and allow for a very small U.S. presence to mow the grass as needed.

There is a significant and disheartening irony that the uniformed individuals who initiated and operationalized the need to link U.S. operations and policy goals with the sociocultural nuances of a population are seriously debating this proposal, and doing so for a Presidency that has defined itself by ethnonationalistic aims above all else. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was one of the earliest adopters of what initially what was initially referred to as “culture-centric warfare.”^[5] In Tal Afar, then-Colonel H.R. McMaster trained his soldiers to understand the Iraqi population first, requiring language and culture training sessions, as well immersion into the history of Iraq itself.^[6] Even former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn once believed in refocusing the intelligence community on the “people of Afghanistan” over an enemy-centric view,^[7] though he has since disregarded it in favor of the Huntingtonian thesis.^[8]

The blind spot of what was then known as the “culture turn” was politics, and the act of putting politics in action—governance. How local and national politics impacted U.S. national objectives was never debated or institutionalized, let alone acknowledged, throughout the wars of 9/11. “Culture” was only seen as something to be leveraged. Understanding the local population is vital to any operation in any character of conflict, yet, for all the money spent on programs throughout these wars,^[9] little of the information made its ways to senior leaders,^[10] let alone influenced their decision-making.^[11]

The Taliban is winning precisely because of this pervasive, but traditional American inability to link ground truth to policy goals.^[12] They are winning not because they have outfought the U.S. or its allies, or even the Afghan military; they are winning because they have out-governed everyone.^[13] That was their competitive strategy, and it worked because the Afghan Constitution was improperly designed and misapplied to the realities of Afghanistan itself.^[14] The Government of Afghanistan then went out of its way to make it unworthy of fighting for, exacerbating every conceivable problem many times over. Strategic failure was inevitable.

The supremacy of politics in war and how politics is executed remains a black void in American strategic thinking and practice.^[15] In both the Bush^[16] and Obama^[17] Administrations—not just the Presidents themselves, but their entire national security teams—ignored ground truths across multiple missions and wars, preferring their own ideological prisms instead. Even after witnessing the consequences of both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, Obama made the same mistake in Libya.^[18] Under Trump, McMaster^[19] and Mattis^[20] are actively ignoring their own advice, while anti-strategic^[21] advisors retain positions of influence. The supremacy of politics in war was never learned from Vietnam,^[22] and clearly will not be learned from the wars of 9/11 either.

The fractured, siloed, and self-referential character of the U.S. national security system is well-known and analyzed.^[23] It is the fundamental source of all discontent on US strategy-making, and yet, not a single thing has been done to end it. 16 years of multiple, overlapping, and cascading strategic failures have led to exactly 0 reforms. In Afghanistan, this system ignored the political aspects of the war, imposed its various masks of war and siloed all actions and information,^[24] all the while paying little attention the effectiveness of operations.^[25] This is why one of Prince’s ideas has merit: the creation of a Viceroy. A viceroy position in Afghanistan would go a long way to solve many of these problems inherent in the system for a temporary, geographically-defined mission.

The utility of super-empowered ambassadors,^[26] viceroys,^[27] and proconsul^[28] is well established. It is appropriate here because, if done correctly, would put policy and politics back into the center for all strategic decision-making in Afghanistan. The reasons why are shown in the failures of the semi-proconsul position of L. Paul Bremer in Iraq. Bremer incapable of wrangling the various agencies and Departments together. He lacked ground-truth level knowledge on the country and the region more generally, the position was ill-planned and initiated without foresight, and lacked genuine command and control power over all the forces in the area of operation. These pitfalls must be avoided.

The military has repeatedly failed throughout the wars of 9/11, and why we are in the current predicament. The only thing worse than naming a general to such a position would be naming a character like Prince. A Viceroy should be an Afghan policy and politics expert who speaks at least one of the major national language’s and has spent multiple years in theater both on the ground in the provinces and at the national headquarters. They should have complete unity of command over all forces that cross the Afghan border. Central Command, any functional command, and even the intelligence community must defer to the Viceroy’s command and control. The days of Special Operations Forces taking out a target that the intelligence community was working with to attack a State Department-trained local leader must end. Similarly, to avoid similar problems across borders, and because of the closeness of the issues involved, the Ambassador of Pakistan should be made the Viceroy's deputy, and given similar command and control powers.

Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to do everything differently, off the books, less media attention, and fewer moral scruples. Therefore guaranteeing everyone involved makes a quick buck regardless of the costs, consequences, or effectiveness, and done in a way that leaves him blameless: It is the Trumpian Way of Battle. Both Prince’s idea and anything currently being cooked up by the Blob,^[29] the Pentagon,^[30] or Congress^[31] will fail because they ignore the causes of our contemporary failures, the drivers of the Taliban’s success, and the lack of a functional and cognitive ability of the U.S. to win wars in general anymore.

If the Trump Administration is interested in squeaking out even a modest victory—something the President^[32] is very insistent on—command should be given to someone who “gets” Afghan politics and can adapt on the ground without interference from the Oval Office while putting the military back into its well-defined box. As for the definition of victory: the Viceroy should be sent into theater with the goal to: 1) obtain a peace treaty with the Taliban that includes them in the Afghan political order and denies sanctuary to terror groups; 2) institute a brand new, highly-federated Afghan Constitution that executes this new political order; and 3) an agreement to keep a very small US presence in country to continue to mow the grass of any terror group that threatens the US, its allies, and its interests, keep the Afghan Government functioning, and keep any group in Afghanistan that threatens this new political order in check. From here, we can start a new strategy built on helping to make the Afghan Government worth fighting for that can begin to out-govern everyone else.

Michael C. Davies currently works for an international law firm. He previously worked at the U.S. National Defense University in Washington, DC where he wrote three books (one is forthcoming) on the lessons of the wars of 9/11. He is one of the progenitors of the Human Domain doctrinal concept.

Notes: 

[1] Erik D. Prince, “The MacArthur Model for Afghanistan,” The Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2017..

[2] Christopher J. Lamb and Megan Franco, “National-Level Coordination and Implementation: How System Attributes Trumped Leadership,” Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War..

[3] Josh Rogin, “Inside Erik Prince’s Secret Proposal to Outsource the War in Afghanistan,” The Washington Post, August 9, 2017..

[4] Mark Landler and James Risen, “Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals,” The New York Times, July 25, 2017.

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[5] Robert H. Scales, Jr. “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings 130, no. 10 (October 2004)..

[6] George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2006..

[7] Michael T. Flynn, Matt Pottinger, and Paul D. Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan..

[8] Michael T. Flynn, “How About Winning Our Nation’s Wars Instead of Just Participating in Them?,” Military Review..

[9] Michael C. Davies, “Institutional Failure: USA Today and the Human Terrain System,” Small Wars Journal, March 2, 2016..

[10] Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael C. Davies, and Theodore T. Pikulsky, Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare..

[11] Paul Joseph, “Soft” Counterinsurgency: Human Terrain Teams and the US Military Strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan..

[12] Sean Illing, “America’s Former Envoy to Afghanistan says the War Can’t Be Won,” Vox, August 1, 2017.

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[13] Antonio Giustozzi, The Army of Afghanistan: A Political History of a Fragile Institution..

[14] Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History..

[15] Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory..

[16] Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, The Exile: The Flight of Osama bin Laden..

[17] Emma Sky, “How Obama Abandoned Democracy in Iraq,” Politico, April 7, 2015..

[18] Allie Malloy, “Obama Admits Worst Mistake of his Presidency,” CNN, April 11, 2016..

[19] Christopher Holshek, “America’s Foreign Engagement Gap,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2017..

[20] Interview with James Mattis, “Full Transcript: Defense Secretary James Mattis’ Interview with The Islander,” The Islander, June 2017..

[21] Matt Shuham, “Gorka: ‘Simply Nonsensical’ for Tillerson to Discuss ‘Military Matters’,” Talking Points Memo, August 10, 2017..

[22] Kevin M. Boylan, Losing Bihn Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969-1971..

[23] James R. Locher, II, “Forging a New Shield,” The American Interest, January 1, 2009..

[24] Todd Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performance and the Institutional Dimension of Strategy in Afghanistan,” Journal of Strategic Studies..

[25] Stephen Biddle, Julia Macdonald, and Ryan Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff: The Military Effectiveness of Security Force Assistance,” Journal of Strategic Studies..

[26] Christopher J. Lamb and Edward Marks, Chief of Mission Authority as a Model of National Security Integration..

[27] Derek S. Reverson, America’s Viceroy’s: The Military and U.S. Foreign Policy..

[28] Carnes Lord, Pronconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today..

[29] Michele Flournoy and Richard Fontaine, “The Afghan War is Not Lost,” The National Interest, July 11, 2017..

[30] Robert Cassidy, “To ‘Win’ in Afghanistan, Devise a Strategy and Do Not Quit,” Real Clear Defense, August 8, 2017..

[31] John S. McCain, McCain Calls for a New Strategy for Afghanistan, August 10, 2017..

[32] Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Meeting with the National Governors Assocation,” The White House, February 27, 2017..