¿Qué pasa cuando un ejército se queda sin enemigos?

La conocida sentencia de Sun-Tsu recomienda que todo comandante militar conozca a su enemigo como a sí mismo. ¿Qué sucede cuando éste desaparece? ¿Debe en consonancia mudar su propia naturaleza?

Over the Horizon: U.S. Army Must Define Role in a Future With No Enemies

El US Army en Bagdad.

By Robert Farley | 28 Sep 2011

What future does the United States Army face? During eight years of operations in Iraq and 10 years in Afghanistan, the Army has shifted from being a force focused on high-intensity conventional operations to one more comfortable fighting a dispersed enemy intermingled with the population. However, operations are winding down in Iraq, and an endpoint seems to be nearing in Afghanistan. Armed with the collective experience developed in the War on Terror, how will the Army move forward to face new challenges and threats? The answers involve political and military considerations that may contradict each other.

The fact that the Army lacks a clear opponent to define itself against complicates its ability to make a case for its future role. The Navy and the Air Force may face difficulties explaining their roles to a skeptical public, and they may also have problems developing a cooperative doctrinal framework, AirSea Battle, for potential hostilities with China. Nevertheless, they both seem to have an identifiable mission against a peer competitor opponent. Moreover, they both potentially have a big-picture story to tell about the role that they play in the world. The Navy acts as the guarantor of world maritime trade and American prosperity, while the global reach and global power of the Air Force serve as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers worldwide.

The Army faces a more difficult problem, because for the moment it's hard to find an enemy for it to fight. South Korean military superiority over North Korea continues to grow. While Poland and the Baltic states worry about Moscow, few think that the Russian army will threaten NATO in the near or medium term. At the same time, there appears to be little will in Washington to make a ground commitment to defending Georgia from Russian attack. Similarly, few have an appetite today for any potential invasion and occupation on the scale of Iraq. The only operations conceivable in the near future that would require both maneuver and counterinsurgency warfare involve the conquest and occupation of Iran and North Korea. Neither seems to be in the cards, and as noted, the burden of defeating and occupying North Korea would probably fall to the South Koreans.

The Army is left with the discordant goals of maintaining its capacity to conduct high-intensity maneuver warfare alongside large scale counterinsurgency operations, at a time when no one seems to have any interest in fighting either kinds of war. To manage the problem of having no specific threat, the Army has adopted what amounts to a capabilities-based approach to doctrine. The term "Full Spectrum Operations" (FSO) rejects the idea of a clear distinction between conventional and counterinsurgency combat, instead linking high-intensity maneuver warfare and "Revolution in Military Affairs" thinking with COIN concepts such as population protection, support and relief. However, FSO runs the risk of becoming so all-encompassing that it loses all meaning.

So with no Soviet Union, no clear role in war against China and a skeptical public, what is the Army to do? From a doctrinal point of view, embracing uncertainty seems the right way to go. While no specific threat looms as large as a sea-air conflict with China over Taiwan, a host of smaller threats could potentially require the use of conventional and unconventional Army capabilities. Achieving full combat spectrum dominance is a reasonable response to such an uncertain threat environment. Collapses of the Mexican or Pakistani states may not be particularly likely, but both present a big enough problem that they could conceivably require the use of the Army to either kick in doors or manage the aftermath of conflict.

The problem with a capabilities-based approach, however, is political. Especially with the potential for cuts in the defense budget, explaining the need for military capabilities in terms of unlikely "what if" scenarios is less compelling to civilians than pointing to clear, understandable threats. To be sure, attacking the Army is politically difficult in the current climate in Washington. Along with the Marine Corps, the Army has borne the brunt of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, with consequent impact on its personnel and equipment. Reducing its strength relative to the other two services would be perceived as shortchanging its sacrifice. Moreover, the Army carried out a wide-ranging and impressive doctrinal shift during wartime, reorienting itself toward counterinsurgency.

However, the memory of Iraq and Afghanistan won't remain politically potent forever, and evaluation of the "COIN turn" in Army doctrine may change over time. Ten years from now, the Navy and the Air Force will be able to explain before Congress their need to expand capabilities in the Pacific because of the ever-growing threat posed by the People's Liberation Army Navy and the People's Liberation Army Air Force. If the Army still relies on the memory of ambiguous outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may find itself increasingly on the losing end of procurement battles. While pursuing a doctrine that emphasizes flexibility and capability across the combat spectrum may make sense from a military point of view, such an approach could hamstring the Army in political competition against the other two services.

The short-term future for Army doctrine appears reasonably clear: distilling the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan while remaining capable at missions of both high and low intensity. In the longer term, the absence of a clear threat may present a messaging problem. An even-larger problem lies with the structure of the U.S. military establishment itself, which remains a relic of the 1947 National Security Act. Creating three independent military services and tying procurement to the ability of each service to craft a case for its specialization risks placing bureaucratic and political interests ahead of grand strategic considerations.

This isn't to say that the Army should hope for a collapse of Mexico or a new war between Iran and Iraq in order to maintain its relevance. But it does mean that the Army has to think about developing a compelling narrative about the role it plays in maintaining American safety and security at a time when it might not have much to do.