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8 INNOVATION OR INERTIA The danger is not that modernization will be sacrificed to fund asymmetric capabilities, but rather that in the future we will again neglect the latter. —Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, announcing the release of the 2008 National Defense Strategy, July 31, 2008 The U.S. military’s prosecution of counterinsurgency in Iraq intensified a polemic within DoD as to how far the learning of counterinsurgency should be allowed to proceed, whether the armed services’ traditional capabilities were eroding, and whether a return to conventional priorities was now needed. The debate of how to balance old priorities with new ones is necessary and important. In this case what was too often missing from the debate was any real sense of how much—or how little—had in fact changed since the onset of the reorientation. Any comprehensive attempt to make such an assessment would have uncovered the strong continuity that marked DoD policy in several important respects. Indeed, far from singularly devoted to the topics of counterinsurgency and stability operations, the U.S. military remained, even during the heights of the surge in Iraq, an institution oriented predominantly toward major combat operations and unwilling to upset entrenched priorities and spending patterns. Whether through resistance or inertia, the continuity expressed itself in several ways, but most forcefully in DoD’s decisions over its budget and force structures —areas that reveal, to a large degree, the roles and missions for which the military is primarily configured. These findings contextualize the growing calls by those generals and senior officers seeking a swift return to conventional priorities. Given the strictly limited nature of the reorientation to date, these sentiments seem to echo a familiar tendency in the U.S. military to consider anything that detracts from conventional war-fighting capabilities as eroding the force’s readiness, however defined. Readiness to conduct a stability operation or a 141 counterinsurgency campaign was no doubt deemed important, but it was not to encroach on the military’s traditional resource allocation. INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS The struggle to overcome established norms and priorities within the Pentagon was documented in an internal DoD report on the implementation of the SSTR directive, intended, it should be recalled, to ensure that the U.S. military treat stability operations on the same level of importance as major combat operations.1 Titled the Interim Progress Report on DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, the report laid out the areas where progress was being seen and those where resistance or inertia had prevented change. While lauding “DoD components” for their “great progress in meeting the exigencies of ongoing stability operations”—in particular with regard to doctrine, training, education, and experimentation—the report also noted a fundamental resistance to the deep-rooted changes necessary to make stability operations a core competence of DoD.2 Overall, progress in implementing the directive was characterized as “uneven , ad hoc, and incomplete.”3 More specifically,“shortcomings” were “conspicuous in such areas as overall stability operations capacity, planning, intelligence, and information sharing—despite best efforts by various pioneering and innovative individuals.”4 The intelligence picture of the U.S. military had not, according to the report, adapted to the demands of stability operations, and the military was therefore lacking the means with which to assess and understand the so-called human terrain—foreign civilian populations, systems, and structures. Other issues flagged were more fundamental to the military, relating to the structure and sizing of the force and the defense planning scenarios required to determine those variables.5 The September 2006 report gave the impression of a reorientation that was proceeding apace where no real reallocation of resources was necessary or where driven by the right individuals, but that the need to learn stability operations had not taken root within DoD as a whole. It explained that although the value of stability operations had been “absorbed throughout the Defense Department over the last several years at the conceptual level, the Department and the larger U.S. government still spend inadequate effort on population-centered stability operations designed to create conditions inhospitable to the enemy.”6 In that sense, the report provided another valuable insight into the important distinction between learning and the appearance of learning. Some of the downbeat assessments in the OSD report reappeared in an October 2007 brief issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examining the U.S. government’s planning and capabilities for fu142 Chapter 8 [18.222...

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