This is good. I've argued we need to institutionalize this knowledge so we don't lose it after the wars are over. Getting generals who won these wars will keep the knowledge base intact. As Fred Kaplan writes about the list:
Any officer looking at the names on this panel—and the ones I've listed aren't the only ones—would very clearly get the message: The Cold War is over, and so, finally, is the Cold War Army.
This is all well and good. But as we promote these officers are we really doing it on the assumption that conventional war is obsolete?
Most of today's Army generals rose through the ranks during the Cold War as armor, infantry, or artillery officers who were trained to fight large-scale, head-to-head battles against enemies of comparable strength—for instance, the Soviet army as its tanks plowed across the East-West German border.
The problem, as many junior officers have been writing over the last few years, is that this sort of training has little relevance for the wars of today and, likely, tomorrow—the "asymmetric wars" and counterinsurgency campaigns that the U.S. military has actually been fighting for the last 20 years in Bosnia, Panama, Haiti, and Somalia, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So perhaps I'm right to worry about the slighting of conventional warfare.
So let's look at the conventional side since 1988.
The 1989 invasion of Panama was a conventional, albeit complex, assault that overthrew the Panamanian government. This was no counterinsurgency.
Desert Storm was conventional war pure and simple.
Somalia shortly thereafter was an armed mission to get food aid into the country. After the UN took over as a peacekeeping mission, we tried targeted raids on warlord leaders but did not wage a counterinsurgency campaign.
The 1994 Haiti mission followed an agreement by the junta to step down and we merely babysat until a UN force went in to replace us. Again, hardly counter-insurgency.
The 1995 Bosnia mission was an aerial attack campaign paired with a mostly Croatian conventional offensive planned and organized by American military contractors. The entry of US forces to enforce the peace deal after was a peacekeeping mission and not counter-insurgency. Throw in Kosovo in 1999 as another conventional air campaign, but much bigger this time.
Likewise, there was no fighting Serb resistance after we led NATO forces into Kosovo.
Sure, Iraq since 2003 and Afghanistan since 2002 have been counter-insurgencies, but that was after a brilliant conventional assault in the case of Iraq in 2003, that knocked off the Saddam regime. As for Afghanistan, sure, it was different in that small numbers of special forces and spies directed our air power in 2001, but it was in support of what were conventional by local standards light infantry forces that actually advanced on the Taliban military units and drove them out of the cities.
So all we really should be saying is that we no longer plan to fight on the defensive against numerically superior foes who have masses of material to throw at us in a conventional assault.
Conventional warfare is not dead, just an enemy's ability to threaten us with invasion and defeat in NATO and increasingly in South Korea.
I'm not even going to mention the asymmetrical thing. All that means is that a force that cannot match an enemy in one category tries to cope with their own advantages. This is simply a fancy label stating a fact of war, as far as I'm concerned: maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, exploit enemy weaknesses and avoid enemy strengths. What competent commander doesn't try to do that in any war?
So retain and promote the COIN masters, by all means. This is a good thing:
The charge that the Army will automatically revert to the study of "tank armies on the plains of central somewhere" is too facile. The direction of professional study and leader development will have more to do with two simple things: the first will be shape of the next challenge—will it be another insurgency, a nuclear-rattling Russia aggressing against its southern former substates, a post-Olympics challenge to the United States over Taiwan? Second, and arguably most important, will be the promotion lists. The last list was touted as demonstrating the influence of the "Petreaus school." If subsequent lists repeat that phenomenon, heavy maneuver advocates, while rightly reminding us that theirs is an essential skill for an Expeditionary Army whose destination and foe remain unidentified, will lose their previous dominance. Promotion lists have been the most effective tool available to establish and maintain professional direction in the past and will most certainly work in the future.
But don't assume conventional warfare is dead just because we need to accept that the Cold War military is not needed. We still need armor, infantry, and artillery officers schooled in maneuver warfare. If we assume we don't need these officers to fight conventional battle, we'll lose a conventional war--or face a Kasserine Pass defeat before we recover.
And then we'll recall articles like Kaplan's as we lament how we prepared to fight the last war.
