US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation From Vietnam to Iraq (review)

The history of the U.S. Army after Vietnam is slowly taking shape. In the usual way, novels and memoirs led the way, closely followed by journalistic first drafts. Operational studies and biographies took longer to appear. Now, several disciplines have contributed to a widening body of monographs and specialist literature. The fog of the past is slowly lifting; scholars can at least see part of the horizon and some of the main roads leading toward it.

Throughout, however, an abiding question has punctuated this literature. We know well enough where this subject begins, but where does it end? Before the War in Iraq, the First Gulf War seemed to frame the subject. Seen in this way, the Army's story was one of a triumph over defeat. Now, however, it is impossible to see this story except through the lens of the present war, and the story immediately seems more problematic, not quite so simple, not quite so satisfying.

The scholar who eventually undertakes to write a comprehensive history of the Army after Vietnam will face a complex problem in contemporary history. Any such history will necessarily address the international environment in which the U.S. formed its strategies, an environment that was completely overturned by the end of the Cold War and saw the resumption of expeditionary warfare. But that will be the easy part, one that is already well documented by statesmen, analysts, and military professionals. A much more difficult task will be to penetrate the competing layers of the national security bureaucracy, the ever more powerful defense industry, and, not least, the vast and diverse subculture of the Army itself.

Richard Lock-Pullan's US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation is a contribution to this broader history of the post-Vietnam Army. He is particularly interested in how the Army responded to its defeat in Vietnam and in what effect this response worked on the United States's strategic policies and operations. Drawing on a wide array of official, professional, and academic literature, Lock-Pullan attempts to analyse the intersections between the Army's reforms in the 1970s and '80s and the United States's gradual return to the employment of military force as a tool of national policy.

Lock-Pullan's analysis is not a happy one. Other writers have depicted the Army's doctrinal reforms after the war as a renaissance in American military thought, one whose efficacy was proved by its performance in the First Gulf War. To Lock-Pullan, however, these reforms were less the result of a cold-blooded look at the Army's shortcomings in Vietnam than a means of rebuilding a wrecked institution, and in the process reorienting the United States' "strategic culture" along the lines of military orthodoxy. This redefinition—codified in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine—ultimately had the effect of confining the scope of military options open to succeeding administrations. If at first the Army's reforms derived from the new "strategic culture" after the war, in the end, they "operationalised" strategy itself, turning Clausewitz on his head, so that policy was a continuation of operations by other means. In practice, the overturning of American strategy meant that the Army had to confront unorthodox operations in the 1980s and '90s without a functional doctrine. An Army that had convinced itself that its operations were doctrinally based learned in Somalia, Rwanda, and Kosovo that it had no reply to the demands now being made upon it. As a consequence, the Army's primacy in military operations was threatened by an Air Force that promised quick, surgical, and final decisions. The Army's response in the years following the First Gulf War was to redesign itself as a transformed, high-technology force, a redesign that did little to address its professional and doctrinal shortcomings.

Seen in this light, the Army's conduct of the War in Iraq becomes merely the...