One telling similarity between the the Wehrmacht and the US Military

“Center of Gravity versus Lines of Effort in COIN“, Herschel Smith, at the Captain’s Journal (3 March 2008) — An article well worth reading.  Thoroughly researched, Smith provides several powerful insights and provides an excellent operational and tactical perspective.

From a larger perspective this article shows how the 21st century US military is locked into a historically common trap.  No matter how good, it remains harnessed to US elites’ geopolitical thinking — poorly reasoned, emotional (ruled by hubris and fear).  Our military apparatus consistently provides professional, smooth execution of bad strategy.   We do the wrong thing, but brilliantly.  In this we have become like the WWI and WWII German military (aka loosely as the Wehrmacht), attempting to overcome foolish strategy with operational excellence.  In the seventh article of William Lind’s ”On War” series (12 March 2003), he presented on of his most incisive observations:

Between 1809 and 1945, the Prussian and, later, German armies developed what is often called maneuver warfare of Third Generation warfare. For the past quarter century, the U.S. military has been trying to adopt this German way of war, and failing.

… One of the reasons Germany lost both world wars was that she thought operational excellence would trump strategic failure. … America seems now to have taken this German error and extended it. The present American way of war assumes that superiority at the tactical (or perhaps merely technical) level, manifested in high technology, will overcome massive failures at the strategic and moral levels.

… It would be an historical oddity if the United States, having failed to copy the Germans in what they got right, instead duplicated what they got wrong. In view of the almost lighthearted military optimism that currently prevails in Washington, one cannot help remembering Marx’s comment about history occurring as tragedy, then repeating itself as farce.

America has fielded perhaps the best trained and equipped forces the world has even seen, to fight wars with borrowed funds, conducted with little balancing of costs vs. benefits, in pursuit of vague if not chimerical goals.

There is much worth considering in this article, but due to time pressure I will note just one small point.

No astute observer of the campaign in Iraq – especially in Anbar and subsequently in and around Baghdad during the security plan – seeing the high number of intelligence driven raids, heavy use of air power, and kinetic operations against foreign terrorists and indigenous insurgents, can claim that kinetic operations have taken on a secondary or tertiary role to anything.

This raises the same question as did our initial campaign in Afghanistan, supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban:  how much of our success comes from money, how much from our use of force?  In Afghanistan, our money bought much of the Northern Alliance’s support.  In Iraq, our funds have brought Sunni Arab tribes to our side (or at least, got them to stop attacking us).  What was the contribution of money vs. force?  This is an vital but difficult question to answer if we are to learn useful lessons from our success in the first phase of the Afghanistan War.  More importantly and revealingly, it is a question seldom asked — as it conflicts with the dominant victory narrative.

Hat tip to Zenpundit on this article.

Note that this post compares the German Wehrmacht and the US military in one technical aspect.  It does not make any wide comparison of these very different military structures, each embedded in radically different political regimes.

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