WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Is the United States inept at planning for war?
It is if we take it from Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow in military affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In a speech this week, Cordesman argued that from Vietnam to Iraq the United States has consistently failed to develop and implement coherent grand strategic goals in times of conflict, despite our successes on the battlefield.
Arguing that Bush administration's grand strategy for Iraq was "at best ridiculous," Cordesman noted that policymakers "failed to see the need for serious stability operations and nation building; they did not see the risk of insurgency; and they assumed that we were so right that our allies and the world would soon be forced to follow our lead."
In the war on terrorism, the United States' inability to understand the complexity of the forces at work also points to overarching policy failures, according Cordesman. We have been too slow to realize the broad religious, cultural, political, economic and demographic dimensions at play in the Middle East.
The problem, he said, is that while American military might is unrivaled, in times of war our most serious blunders "are problems in planning and executing conflict termination, and in using stability operations and nation-building to shape the desired grand strategic outcome."
In other words, the United States hastrouble when it comes to winning the peace.
The most recent failures of the neo-conservatives in Iraq follow a long tradition of flawed American strategies stretching back to the Korean War, Cordesman said.
The United States tends to focus too much attention on fighting and battles at the expense of looking at bigger picture -- the causes, consequences and political goals of conflict.
This problem shines through in American preoccupation with the pomp and circumstance of war at the expense of understanding the foundations of conflict, dooming liberals, moderates and conservatives alike to repeat the same policy mistakes.
Shelves of books have been written on military uniforms and equipment, too few exist on forces that drove people to war and the policies that helped end the conflicts.
Now instead of being liberators, American soldiers shoulder much of the blame from the Iraqi people for the instability in Iraq.
According to Cordesman, policymakers have forgotten Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz's famous axiom of treating war as a continuation of policy and diplomacy by other means.
Lacking a broad understanding of conflict, throughout the 20th century the U.S. has consistently failed to plan for the political struggle that begins once the war ends.
"It is all too clear," he said, "that the grand strategic goals of any given side in going to war have normally been based on a massive misestimation of what will happen once the war begins."
But this view might be questioned.
"Too much wishful thinking went into the Iraq postwar planning," Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told United Press International, "but it is not self evident that we are worse at planning for the peace."
While postwar strategies are poor, Mead argues that this is precisely because winning the peace is so difficult to do, not because there are problems with American strategic thinking.
"To whom are we being compared out there that are so brilliant?" Mead asked. "Britain was a disaster after 1945 and very few would think that their performance after World War I would be anything but lousy."
"Part of our problems in the developing world is because of the British and French colonialism," noted Michael E. O'Hanlon, senior fellow for Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Moreover, the United States got it right when it counted, many would argue.
For nearly half a century, the United States put most of its energy toward developing and implementing the successful strategies of deterrence and containment that led to the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union.
Many conflicts cited as American failures stood in the shadow of the Cold War and can been heralded as strategic successes when taking into account that the United States' primary goal was standing up to the Soviets.
Mead made the point that while planners may try to develop strategies for all phases of a conflict, that war by nature is messy and unpredictable.
Clausewitz referred to this fog of war as friction.
Circumstances on the ground often call for immediate action, leaving little time for peace planning. Goals and events in a crisis are always more fluid than expected given that information going into a conflict is usually spotty.
The more pressing point is the United States' questionable record at nation building.
Democratic and prosperous post-war Germany and Japan are often pointed to as examples of American know-how.
Yet, in countless cases -- the Philippines, Angola, Lebanon, Liberia and Somalia to name a few -- the United States was unable to create stable countries, let alone prosperous democracies.
However, O'Hanlon said this is an area the United States is improving in.
"I think that our military has the right skills for peacekeeping," he said. "We sometimes make policy mistakes, but it's not an inability to perform. It is important that we should not think that we are generally bad at this."
