Operational Success: DOA

What are you fighting for?
It's not my security
--Broken English, Maryanne Faithfull

Why do something just for the sake of doing it to show face,
when it doesn't have any tactical value?
--Dogs and Ponies, "Gruntshit," The Sandbox (3/21/08)

But tactical victory did not translate
to operational success
--WWII Magazine, April/May 2008

"So?"
--VP Dick Cheney, on being told 2/3 of Americans
favor withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan
___________

The statement from WWII Magazine grabbed my attention. The German 11th Panzer on the Chir River in December '42 fought against the odds, defeating large enemy formations. But those successes were not translated into operational successes, as the Germans had lost the strategic ability to impose their will upon the enemy.

They are parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan, but of course, neither of the latter are actual theatre Army scenarios which see conventional forces arrayed for classic ground combat. Both countries are unconventional/guerrilla warfare (UW/GW) arenas and as such operational success will not be measured by conventional yardsticks such as destruction of enemy forces and the ability and will of the enemy to engage in meaningful operations.

In fact, simply defining who or what the enemy is can be a difficult task in both scenarios. Moreover, defining the mission seems even more difficult than defining the enemy, and a clearly-defined mission statement should be the first step in any military operation.

Regardless of the nature of a conflict -- whether conventional or UW -- the mission statement lays out what the engaged troops are expected to achieve. What does success entail -- does it smell like napalm in the morning, or will it be a quiet walk in the bazaar for visiting senators? Today's parallel with 1942 is the current inability to translate tactical successes into operational successes.

The difficulty is defining a mission that [1] entails destruction of al-Qaeda, [2] establishes functioning governments AND [3] instills democracy. That is a mish-mash. Such missions are not and can not be stated in a military manner. The destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the battlefield sounds easy ("mission accomplished"), but it doesn't translate so neatly into operational success.

You can kill the people fighting you, but you can not force them to love America or the phony puppet regimes established solely via our combat power. There is no meaningful military way to describe operational success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if you can't describe it, you can't achieve it. What one sees is the entire U.S. Army pissing up a rope.

Without a doubt, the U.S. Army is performing admirably at the Battalion and Company level. The Brigades and Divisions are performing their assigned missions. But to borrow Mr. Cheney's unfortunate interrogative--"So?"

Operational success accrues to theatre armies and echelons above corps (EAC). The captains are successfully fighting their Companies, so too Battalion, Brigade and Division Commanders. But how is that winning an unquantifiable, undefinable war lacking a clear definition of what success would entail?

The German 11th Armor defeated an entire Russian tank army, but Stalingrad was not relieved and everyone knows how it ended. In the U.S. involvements in Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. dominated the military equation yet there is today a North Korea and a united Communist Vietnam. Close to 100,000 Americans died for those illusions. Now 4,000 have died for the current fiction that these countries are essential struggles in the survival of the U.S.

If tactical successes can't be translated into operational opportunities, then these were all meaningless exercises in futility.