Why America isn't winning its wars

When Michael Vickers was making his name as the Central Intelligence Agency operative depicted in "Charlie Wilson's War" - running a covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan through the jihadis - it was by no means a war of decision by committee.
It was the bold and resourceful work of a maverick.
The wisdom of that approach remains controversial - it vanquished the Soviets but planted the seeds for modern terrorism. Yet this week, Vickers, a former undersecretary for intelligence, told lawmakers that the qualities that guided him in Afghanistan have been in too-short supply in America's recent war fighting. Put bluntly, American efforts to respond to the security challenges of today simply aren't working.
"We are not postured as a [Defence] department, intellectually or organisationally, for these highly asymmetric and largely unconventional long-term challenges," Vickers said in congressional testimony. "We are winning battles and campaigns, but not our wars."
Vickers is not alone in his belief that America's security infrastructure needs to rethink deeply how it makes decisions. The criticisms from top defence and intelligence officials go far beyond typical partisan complaints against the Obama administration. Instead, they lay the blame on the Pentagon and CIA themselves, arguing that those organisations are consistently failing to come up with new and innovative ideas to present to the president, resulting in a lack of strategy.
"We seem flummoxed by and self-deterred in our response to Russian indirect and direct aggression," added Vickers, who stepped down from his job earlier this year. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, "although it's certainly not from a lack of trying, we are far from having a strategy that can bring stability."
These are, of course, enormously complicated decisions. And part of the caution stems from the desire to avoid unintended consequences that could come back to hurt the United States even more - as the support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s has, many say.
But there is a growing sense among some officials that the debate about the Daesh, for example, has become "overly focused" on boots on the ground, because top Pentagon leaders are not thinking in "broader and more diverse strategic terms," said retired Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, former special assistant to the president for national security affairs and a former Navy SEAL, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, at which Vickers also testified.
To fix this, the Pentagon must change the way it does business, argued former undersecretary of defence for policy Michele Flournoy, who is often named as a likely contender to become the first female secretary of defence if Hillary Clinton is elected.
Making good decisions requires, in no small part, being decisive. Yet the most "pernicious" practice within the building today is "the tyranny of consensus that has come to dominate the Pentagon," she said.
Congress launched a major reform of the Pentagon 30 years ago, known as Goldwater-Nichols, in the wake of the Vietnam War. The goal was to fix a Pentagon recommendation-making process that had grown so bad that its military advice was "generally irrelevant, normally unread, and almost always disregarded," as James Schlesinger, secretary of defence from 1973 to 1975, put it at the time.
He cited former defence secretary Robert Gates's take on the matter: "When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements since Vietnam, our record has been perfect: We have never once gotten it right."
The need for change today was one of the rare points that seemed to have bipartisan consensus this week.
Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted that within the Pentagon, "Innovative ideas that challenge the status quo rarely seem to survive the staffing process as they make their long journey to senior, civilian, and military leaders."
Instead, the result seems to be "watered down" thinking "that is acceptable to all relevant stakeholders precisely because it is threatening to none of them."
Michael Rubin worked in the Pentagon during the Iraq War.
"It's very easy to blame presidents and say the buck should stop with the president, but I do believe what we've seen for the past 20-something years has been the ossification of the decision-making process," he says.
He recalls frequent policy discussions in the early days of the Iraq insurgency that routinely devolved into semantics. "Whenever you have people start arguing over terminology - whether they should be called anti-Iraq forces, or terrorists - that ultimately becomes a distraction," says Dr. Rubin, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
In the Brent Scowcroft era under George H.W. Bush, Flournoy recalled an organisation "with a very clear understanding of what their role is, which is strategy, policy, honest broker, and options development for the president."
The key may be getting a key group of players together, says Rubin.
He recalls the run-up to the Iraq War, when he was the Pentagon's country director for Iran and Iraq. "What we felt was, if they would just get us a place in Crystal City [near the Pentagon] where we could all work together," they could speed the decision-making progress.
This might include people from the Pentagon, State Department, Treasury, and CIA all troubleshooting in one place. "What we don't have is anything to allow people working on a common problem to actually work together," he says.
"Let's treat the people working on these problems as a unit which can be 100 people working together," he says. "They can hash things out, and then someone in NSC can make a decision - and bring it to the president if they can't."
The Christian Science Monitor